Accidental Historian

Happy Friday, Everybody!

Also, Just in case you're wondering, this is what I listened to immediately after hearing that bit of brilliance:



Sorry for any whiplash...

Group Dynamics, Part 4

I’ve been engaging in a bit of an experiment of late.  I’ve made it a goal to perceive absolutely everything at once.  What I do is take a walk.  Specifically, I take my usual lunchtime walk through the Loop in Chicago and I try to see everything all at once.  This requires a complete lack of actually looking at anything.

Try not looking at anything some time.  I dare you.  It takes an extreme amount of effort, since the human eye simply doesn’t not look at things.[1]  Oh, and try doing that while your eyes are open and you’re walking through a major metropolitan area during the lunch hour.

I actually got pretty good at it after a few tries.  I find that I sometimes actually drop into soft focus by accident.[2]  I notice things, though.  For one, I blink less.  Part of it is because it’s really hard to re-not-focus after blinking, but part of it is because the part of the brain required for blinking seems to kind of turn off.  For another, I notice how not smooth bipedal locomotion really is.  I think that when I focus on things I tend to automatically rule out the natural sway in my field of vision.  Fixing on a specific point will do that.  But when I stop focusing I become far more aware of the edges of my vision and the edges of my vision are constantly shifting.

The most interesting aspect of the whole thing, though, and why it matters that I’m doing it in the Loop, is that people are a constant source of potential distraction.  I’ve noticed that some people tend to grab my attention.  People who are wearing bright colors or that are behaving in a way that’s out of the norm seem to result in a sudden, unwelcome focus.[3]  Overall, though, it’s not actually necessary to look at people directly to figure out what’s going on.  This is true even for people who are walking directly at me.

I can figure out anything I need to know about a person by where they are in relation to me and their direction of travel.  I can, in fact, know nothing about another person save that necessary information about where they are and where they are going.  Once I figure that out, even with someone who is walking directly towards me, I can let them slide away and become part of the background.  I don’t need to know anything else about them: their clothes, their mood, even their gender.  It is, in short, possible to know a person only and entirely by their velocity.

I’ve developed, thanks to my odd little experiment, a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of human interaction.  It’s possible, in short, to know someone or to know where that person is going, but it’s not really possible to know both.  This is, ultimately, the least surprising revelation I’ve ever had about human nature.

Think about yourself for a moment.  Where were you five years ago?  Would the you of five years ago hear about where you are and say, “Yeah, I saw that coming?”  Does the you of now know exactly who the you of five years from now will be?  Can you answer “Yes” to those questions in relation to your friends, your spouse, your parents?

Some people are incredibly predictable.  Even predictable people can surprise you from time to time, though.  On many occasions the unpredictable moments are based on either an incomplete understanding of the other person or a lack of awareness of what that person is really thinking about at the time they do the unpredictable thing.

This last bit, of course, is because it’s impossible to actually perceive everything at once.  This goes beyond eyesight.  There are some things that simply can’t be seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt.  There are people who pop in and out of our perception, but who have been living their own lives in the interim.  We only see them for brief moments in time.  We can only perceive where they are or where they are going.  We  might be able to briefly modify their course, but all we’re doing is getting in the way or trying to get out of their way.

I’ve decided it’s profoundly weird to try to label people.  I’ve realized this because I don’t know how to label myself anymore.  I figured this out a month or two ago when discussions of religion caused me to refer to myself as, “Whatever it is I am these days.”  At first I thought it was because I was wimping out and trying to avoid allowing people to pin any particular label on me.  Then I realized that it was really because I don’t know what my religious views are anymore.

After that I realized that it’s profoundly weird to think that anyone knows what their religious views are.  There was a time in my life when it mattered deeply whether or not the person I was talking to had compatible religious views.  Now I find I can go for months without bothering to care about the religious views of a new companion.  In addition to that, I find that most people I’ve met in the last couple years seem to be able to go for long stretches without bothering to ask about my religious views.

What I’ve realized, ultimately, is that I grew up in a weird place where religious views were all that mattered.  It was like, say, being in a group where only people with brown hair could join.  If that’s your main criteria for group membership the first thing you’re going to do with anybody is look at their hair when you meet them and try to determine if they’re a brunette or not.  You’re then going to try to decide if that brown haired person over there is really a blonde with a bottle of hair dye.

It’s hard to leave a group like that and not look at the hair of the new people you meet.  It’s also hard to fathom that you might end up leaving the brown haired group and then meet a blond and a redhead who are really cool and just be able to get along with them because nobody really cares.

It’s all a matter of perception.  Is this person walking alongside me or is this person going to get in my way?  Is this person crossing my field of vision or overwhelming it?

That’s what matters.  We cannot know a person by anything but their velocity, after all.

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[1]Weirdly, I conceived of this idea while reading Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting…, which is about Robert Irwin’s attempt to take labels and figure out of art.  Since that point I’ve started re-reading Lawrence Weschler’s True to Life, which is David Hockney’s counter-argument.  Hockney makes the point in one of the earliest essays that comprise the book that the human eye is always darting around and focusing on different parts of the whole it is attempting to see.  I can tell you from direct experience that he’s absolutely right.

Either way, the idea came up because of one book and now seems like an exercise in futility because of the other.  I’m totally okay with that.

[2]I call this “soft focus” based on, of all things, a character in an old sci-fi novel who was a forward scout for a military unit.  She would walk around not looking at anything and then suddenly recognize and focus in on a threat.  I always thought that was cool and would play around with trying to do it from time to time.  As such, it doesn’t surprise me that my little experiment was my immediate response to reading a book about Robert Irwin.

[3]Blondes.  I also tend to find myself looking at blondes.

Because I Hate You All

And, y'know, I'm lazy.



Okay, seriously, I got all of 25 seconds in before I had to stop.  And it really would have been, like, 21 seconds but I had to wait for the YouTube window to open and find the pause button there.

No, really, epic awful all over that.

So, here.  Consider this an apology.  A deeply confusing apology.



Roddy Woomble is so...not grizzled in that.  I don't know what to do with it.

Either way, I'm thinking I need to add "fan of Carly Rae Jepsen" to my immediate dating dealbreakers list.

Local H and the Disposable Album

It’s hard to write about music without sounding like a pretentious blowhard or an idiotic simpleton.  It’s weird, really.  I can read Lawrence Weschler’s discussions of visual art all day with the full understanding that discussions of things like human perception with Robert Irwin and David Hockney are, by their very nature, pretentious blowhard territory.  I don’t feel like a jackass for reading that, though.  I do, however, feel like a jackass when I read shit like this (which, really, pisses me off as much as anything because in the first paragraph he proves he knows fuck-all about what he's talking about by name-dropping Temple of the Dog as a super band.  Temple was only a superband in retrospect when a bunch of record executives were trying to make an extra buck off of the explosion of the Seattle sound and, specifically, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam).  But I highly doubt it would it be better if the guy just said, say, “New music good.  You listen.”[1]

Given that, let’s talk about music.

I’m a child of the ‘90s.  That means that I have a certain level of baggage when it comes to discussing albums.  One of the big problems now is that nobody is making albums anymore.  We’ve moved past the idea of albums to $.99 downloads on iTunes and shit.  This saddens me, as I remember the joy of cracking open a CD case, sticking it in the player, and discovering music on my old RCA boombox.  That’s why I still care about things like the album of the year.  It’s also, I suppose, why I listen mostly to independent music.  Mainstream music doesn’t really seem to give a shit about the craftsmanship of an album anymore.

I suppose, though, that, mainstream music hasn’t really ever cared.  The album as a thing was really only an artifact of that brief period from the ‘70s through the ‘90s when songs were four or five minutes long and the main technology was either a chunk of vinyl or a CD.  Even in the ‘50s and ‘60s I’m given to understand the primary way music was transmitted was through the 45, from which piece of technology we get the terms “single” and “B-Side.”

When I was growing up the single made no sense.  It cost pretty much the same amount of money to buy an album as it did to buy a single, especially since the single was usually some sort of crazy German import with three songs and who the fuck really cared about that sort of thing?[2]  So I spent my formative years buying albums pretty much exclusively.[3]  Those albums, for the record, are pretty much the expected ‘90s albums: Counting Crows, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Our Lady Peace, Candlebox, etc.  Of course, I also still have a whole bunch of CDs with exactly one good track designed to sneak a $15 disc into my pocket for a buck worth of good music.  I know disappointment, but I also know the joy of a good album.

The two big ones, though, are Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Local H’s Pack Up the Cats.  Those will always be albums 1 and 2 on my list of all-time greatest albums.  No questions can be asked, no quarter given.  I used to have a rule, in fact, that if I started playing one of those albums there was absolutely no way I could stop or pause before every last second of every song had played.  This is how one properly respects an album, after all.

As such, you’d think that I’d have been excited about the news that Local H was releasing a new album last Tuesday.  You’d especially think that since in 2008 I was there for two nights of the Seven Night Stand, mostly because I couldn’t afford more, and those specific nights were for Pack Up the Cats and the release of 12 Angry Months.  You might think that because I have enjoyed the hell out of Scott Lucas’s side project, Scott Lucas & the Married Men.

You’d be wrong.  See, I knew the exact wrong things about the new album, Hallelujah! I’m a Bum.  The first thing was that it was going to be political in nature.  The second was that Scott really wanted it to come out before the election because it’s an album about the politics we have right now, in 2012.[4]  I have to say that I’m all 2012 in politics-ed out.

Still, I got the new Local H album.  On Friday.  I skipped Tuesday’s release show, even though I love CD release shows.  I was at the 12 Angry Months CD release show.  I was at the Lovehammers’ Heavy Crown release show.  I’ll be at the Lovehammers’ CD release show in December.

The problem is that I’d gotten the standard press.  Scott Lucas had something to say and, according to him, it would piss off people on both sides of the red/blue divide.  I’m tired of being pissed off.  I mean, seriously.  I’m a politics wonk even though I don’t want to be most of the time and I’ve been pissed off since some time in 2010.  I believe that time was “November.”

Still, thanks to the magic of Amazon’s Cloud Player, I was able to buy Hallelujah! I’m a Bum and listen on Friday.  This was also my first experience with Cloud Player and, let me tell you, it's great but also not that great.  I mean, I’m sold on the whole idea of the Cloud Player.  I think it’s fantastic.  I’m also reasonably certain it’s not designed to use with albums, because, holy hell, Local H put out an album last Tuesday.

Hallelujah! I’m a Bum reminds me of nothing so much as Pack Up the Cats.  In fact, if we take Local H’s albums from As Good As Dead on we can tease out a few strings.

First of all, there’s a four-word theme.  As Good As Dead.  Pack Up the Cats.  Here Comes the Zoo.  Whatever Happened to PJ Soles?[5]  Hallelujah! I’m a Bum.  Even George Lassos the Moon with the Married Men follows the pattern.

Second, there’s the cyclical nature of things.  As Good As Dead starts with “Manifest Density Pt. 1” and ends with “Manifest Density Pt. 2.”  Here Comes the Zoo ends with a 20 minute coda that repeats every song on the album in some form.  Whatever Happened to PJ Soles? goes from “Where Are They Now?” to “Halcyon Days (Where Were You Then?).”  The very last guitar riff in 12 Angry Months is the same exact guitar riff that starts the album.  Hallelujah! I’m a Bum starts with “Waves” and ends with “Waves Again.”  The latter uses the same musical structure as the former.

“Waves” is, in fact, the thesis statement of the entire project. “We get set free in waves again/We’re saved again/But no one rises up/And no one wises up/We get set free in waves again/Jesus saves again/We get set free in waves/We get set free in waves.”  This is American politics.  It makes me sad.  I think Scott thinks I should be angry, but what the fuck can I do about it?

Really, Hallelujah! is a depressing album.  I don’t know any other way to describe it.  Part of the problem, I think, is that Scott really does want it to piss off both sides but he and I are in more-or-less complete agreement on everything.  The Republicans suck.  The Democrats won’t actually save us.  So what are we going to do about it?  Everyone is going to wait for salvation and won’t rise up.  That sucks.

As far as craftsmanship goes, though, Hallelujah! is amazing.  As I’ve said, it reminds me of nothing so much as Pack Up the Cats.  It also makes me hate Amazon’s Cloud Player even though I really, really like Amazon’s Cloud Player.

See, the problem is that Hallelujah! doesn’t so much have disparate tracks.  Everything blends.  When listening to the album in any format but the Cloud Player I have no idea when one song leads to another.  In the Cloud Player there’s this obvious gap between songs.  It’s really disconcerting and it takes away from the moment.

Either way, I’ve talked about Hallelujah! a lot.  I don’t feel like I’ve made any actual useful statements about it, though.  I’m okay with that…

No, seriously.  Here’s the thing: it’s a problematic album.  The main comparisons I want to use are Pack Up the Cats and 12 Angry Months, one of which is my second-favorite album of all time, the other of which is pretty much amazeballs.  I can’t feel that way about Hallelujah!, however.  It’s too much an artifact of this exact point in American history and, specifically, a specific opinion of American politics.

The album includes samples of Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney speeches.  The song “Here Comes ‘Ol Laptop” is a direct call-out of people who sit on their computers and attempt to be moderates engaging in false equivalencies.  It’s hard to talk about that sort of thing, though, as it’s only obvious in “Here Comes Ol’ Laptop,” “Look Who’s Walking on Four Legs Again,” “Limit Your Change,” “Feed a Fever,” and “Paddy Considine.”  That’s five of seventeen tracks.  But those five tracks pretty much inform the entire damn thing.

Also, too, this album is relentlessly Chicago.  It uses the automated announcements on the Blue Line more than anything else as atmospherics and interstitials.  For all I know that might be more distracting to someone who’s never ridden the L than a random bit of Sarah Palin saying something stupid.

Right now my big question is whether or not anything can stack up against Sons of Bill’s Sirens in 2012.  Hallelujah! I’m a Bum most certainly can.

This, however, is what creates my dilemma.  It might not be possible to be neutral on a moving Blue Line train, but it is possible to be ambivalent.  Hallelujah! is very much like Pack Up the Cats in that it's almost impossible to not listen to the entire album.  The lack of stopping points is both its great strength and weakness.  I can't actually pick a song I like best as of yet.  I can, however, say I like the flow.

Scott Lucas does something he's done many times in the past on this album: he splices in not-music to cut and separate.  In Pack Up the Cats he used answering machine messages and whistling.  In Here Comes the Zoo he used all kinds of ambient noises.  It worked to great effect in Pack Up the Cats because the not-music was on the same beat with and part of the actual songs.  It was actually somewhat distracting on Here Comes the Zoo, since the ambient noises replaced or uprooted the music.  With Hallelujah! he gets back to the Pack Up the Cats style, interspersing sounds of the Blue Line all over the place and even tossing in a conversation about the Chicago cold that links "Blue Line" to "Another February."

This gives the album a definite weight of place and could, on some level, make it a definitive Chicago album.  Rattling trains, the bong-bong of the opening door, the stop announcement, the complaints about the cold are distinct and genuine moments of Chicago-ness.  When combined with the despair and determination of "Blue Line" and "Another February" they pretty much explain what it's like to mark time in Chicago, especially for those who are down on their luck and not getting any help.  That can exist as a proper political statement all on its own.

It's also a reminder that Scott Lucas is, undeniably, an artist.  Hallelujah! is a piece of musical craftsmanship and it's a definite step forward in those terms.  I don't compare it to Pack Up the Cats to say that Lucas is stuck in the same place he was 14 years ago so much as I do to point out that he works on a theme and everything he's been doing is a successively more realized interpretation of an idea or even an ideal of music.  It's really the same exercise he's been running through all the great Local H albums: a sort of anger and despair coupled with the gritty determination to see things through and the realization that everything just comes back around in the end.

As Good As Dead, Pack Up the Cats, and 12 Angry Months were intensely personal albums and that is what gave them their permanent universal appeal.  Hallelujah! I'm a Bum is an intensely political album.  That's really where it stumbles.  I can understand the addition of the Blue Line and the conversation with the bum.  It's the bit where all of the sudden Bill O'Reilly is telling me to shut up, Mitt Romney is reminding me that he likes being able to fire people, and Sarah Palin is wishing Ronald Reagan a happy birthday that get in the way and make this an album that will ultimately be an artifact of a very specific time.

That makes the album disposable.  Is it worth listening to now?  Absolutely.  Will it be worth listening to fourteen years from now?  Probably.  It will be weird to listen to once we've moved past the Tea Party's shenanigans and Sarah Palin's nothing but an occasional bar trivia question.  This, I suppose, is the problem of art.  Something that requires immediacy in both time and place can only be properly appreciated in that time and place.

It's sad, too.  Generally when I think of disposable music I think of bubble gum pop by a succession of interchangeable bottle blondes or newspaper advertisment boy bands.  I think of canned beats and dumbed-down lyrics.  I don't think of intensely crafted music made by someone who has been creating classic albums for nearly two decades.

But that's where I am with Hallelujah! I'm a Bum.  I love it.  I also don't really much care for it.  I think its almost fully realized ambitions absolutely blow its intent out of the water, but that intent will ultimately drag those ambitions right back down into the deep.

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[1]I was on record several years ago as saying I hated Chuck Klosterman.  I’ve been forced to totally re-think that stance, as I’ve realized he does a fantastically good job of writing about something that’s inherently difficult to write about without, y’know, being a jackass.  I actually like Klosterman these days.  It’s kinda weird.

[2]The internet, of course, has made that sort of thing not only accessible, but also desirable.

[3]Really, this is one of those weird places where I could go off on a random-ass tangent about tradition and technology and “this is why we do things.”  That weird interplay between LPs and EPs that carried over into CDs for no damn good reason is kind of interesting.  Albums are between 60 and 70 minutes because of that even though they could be, theoretically, infinitely long by now.

[4]Okay, I knew four things, the fourth being “Another February” was an awesome fucking song.

[5]This, of course, requires taking “PJ Soles” as a single word.  I’m okay with that.

Mondays. Ugh.

So...I was gonna have something posted at about 8 this morning.  But then I somehow managed to not get around to actually converting said post to a Typepad-esque format.  This is the third time I've managed to do that with the post in question.  As such, I'm guessing that I should just scrap said post, since it keeps getting bigger and more unmanageable and less worthwhile every time I do this.

Here, instead, is the important stuff that would have been in said post:









And here's some helpful advice on how not to do music:



There.  That was easy.

Argle Bargle!

So...one of the posts that got left on the cutting room hard drive was an increasingly long new music review that touched on all kinds of not-really-about-music things, as is the manner in which I do things.

I might have to revisit that one, though, as parts of it touched on Sons of Bill's Sirens and why it's amazing and why the questions it brings up aren't about 2012 but, for all intents and purposes, about whether it's going to end up as one of my all-time greatest albums.

That's all came before Tuesday's release of Local H's Hallelujah! I'm a Bum.  Now it's Friday afternoon and, all of the sudden, Sirens' privileged position for 2012 is in grave danger.  I mean, holy shit, you guys, Hallelujah! I'm a Bum is fucking amazeballs.

But does that mean that I think Sirens has now lost its luster as an all-time great album?  No.  Does that mean that I think Hallelujah! will supplant Pack Up the Cats and 12 Angry Months as my two favorite Local H albums?  Also, too, no.

So I really want to write about how I have to judge Hallelujah! and Sirens, but that requires the baseline conversation of the curious case of The Further Adventures of the Saw Doctors against Scott Lucas & the Married Men's George Lassos the Moon and the Lost Immigrants' Pasaporte.  For that matter, it's helpful to understand why I don't like Roger Clyne & the Peacemaker's Unida Cantina all that much and am fairly meh on the initial installment of the Lost Immigrants' An Americana Primer project but I find the latter refreshing and the former stagnant.

Ergo...dammit...

Be prepared for a couple of super random posts about music next week, is what I'm sayin'...

Enlightenment

So, I had a couple posts worked up to a nice frothy lather but decided they weren't going anywhere.  That's probably for the best, I think.

Also, too, I'd decided to make a half-assed closing to my Group Dynamics series, as I just kind of ran out of steam on the idea and wasn't expressing what I wanted to express in any sort of serious way.  It kept descending into polemics and the concrete, which was more-or-less the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.  I mean, yes, sometimes the concrete is necessary, but oftentimes the concrete gets in the way of the things that actually matter.

And so but anyway, I've finally (FINALLY!) gotten around to reading seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, Lawrence Weschler's luminous biography of Robert Irwin.  Irwin has focused his entire career on questions of perception and presence and removing the image from art in order to leave only the interaction between the art and the self.

As it happens, sometimes I find myself reading the exact right thing for the exact right moment in time.  Were I still a Christian I would call it providence.  These days, though, I just call it "convergence," that wonderful term of art given me by Lawrence Weschler himself.  Either way, I found myself trying to figure out if there was any way that I, as a writer, could make use of Robert Irwin's ideas and lessons.  I was confounded by the question, but did realize that he provided an answer of another sort to a different question, specifically the question of why I saw such great convergence between the Christianity I'd departed and the atheism from which I am beginning my departure.

Anyway, amongst its many brilliant lines, Weschler's book contains this quote from Robert Irwin:

After the Whitney, I might have just disappeared, and in a way that would have been nice.  But as it turns out, I couldn't.  And maybe it's for the same reason I've never been comfortable with the argument from certain spiritual quarters about enlightenment.  I don't doubt that those people devoted to Zen and yoga, the krishnas and all of them, do attain an altered state of consciousness, that they are in a different place, and in a sense a nicer place.  But this is not an enlightened world.  And the world always draws you back. [emphasis his]

To put it in a different way, it's easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain.

This brings me back to the old conversations we used to have on retreats and missions trips about "mountaintop experiences" and trying to bring those moments back to school and work and reality.

Somewhere in there, too, is Martin Buber and the I and Thou, the removal of the space between you and me for those transient, transcendent moments.

For a moment, though, we can unfocus, because in looking at we're really looking for.  Sometimes it's best to just perceive.

And in that moment I realized what I want to say about group dynamics.  Hopefully I'll be able to articulate it in a way that makes even a tiny modicum of sense.

Group Dynamics, Part 3

Groups have three general participation strategies.  They’re generally inclusive, generally exclusive, or, for lack of a better term, default.  There are different levels of grouping that may or may not change participation, but I think it’s pretty defensible to say that they all can be described in one of these three ways.

Default is probably the easiest and least worth discussing.  If you want a group of all people between the age of 20 and 30 you just need to find everyone born between this day in 1992 and 1973.  Someone born in 1985 can’t say, “Nope, I’m not part of that group,” or, “Fuck, no, those 1978 bastards don’t get to be part of this.  I guess they could, but it’s not going to work too well.  Default groupings are generally external and created by proximity.  We can talk about Illinoisans and how they’ll impact the Presidential election and the people who will vote in Illinois won’t be able to say, “Nope, you can’t talk about us like that.”[1]

So let’s talk about inclusive versus exclusive.  In broad strokes, I find that most groups are a balance of inclusivity and exclusivity, with exclusivity in general being more likely than inclusivity.  I’ve also found that the group’s reported level of inclusivity is generally overreported by its members, unless those members are part of the Westboro Baptist Church or a similar organization.

The problem here is that most groups are identity based.  Identity pretty much requires a demarcation between us and them, which requires a group to be exclusive.  In some cases this makes sense.  It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to start an LBGT Alliance group and have a bunch of people show up who only want to bash gay people, then invite them back the next week.  It also wouldn’t make much sense to start an Indian expatriates in Chicago group and then only have a bunch of Italians show up to trade pasta recipies.

Interest based groups can have this same problem.  You wouldn’t want to create a group of RPG players, then have a bunch of non-roleplayers show up and eat your Doritos for four hours while nobody pretends to be a motley crew of adventurers out to kill shit and take its gold while completely ignoring the larger purpose of the quest in search of ever more XP and ridiculously named killing sticks.  That would be silly.  But, by the same token, a non-gamer who shows up probably won’t be rejected if they seem interested in the whole enterprise.

The problem isn’t necessarily that some groups are exclusive.  Every group, by definition, has to exlude someone on some level.  The problem starts when exclusive groups think they’re inclusive.  For this, I shall talk about religion, specifically religion and atheism.  Stop me if you’re surprised.

Christianity as a whole imagines itself to be an inclusive thing.  The practitioners bring out John 3:16 or similar verses and talk about how god loves everybody and everybody is welcome.  That’s the whole message of evangelism.  “Come in, sit a spell,” they say, “Learn about how much god loves you.”

This is great in theory.  As long as you are of the Christian identity or thinking of becoming of the Christian identity they’ll let you hang out and ask questions and try to avoid firebombing your house.  If you’re a Muslim and intending to stubbornly refuse to stop being a Muslim, however, the story will change and change quickly.

This, in and of itself, is still a basically neutral thing.  Taken in a vacuum, the attitude of, “We’re Christians, so we want to be Christians together,” doesn’t really harm anyone.  The harm comes when people in that one exclusionary group begin expecting the members to make decisions on other aspects of their lives based on the same criteria.

Fred Clark’s been doing an amazing series on exactly this.  He’s of the mind that Christianity can be inclusive of homosexuals and welcome homosexuals as Christians.[2]  His is a long-winded and eloquent defense of the idea, so I’ll break it down to its basic components.

Evangelical Christians have, by and large, decided that everyone’s identity must come from their basic group identity, which can be summed up as, “We must interpret the Bible literally and at its face value.”  Their “literal” interpretation of the Bible, however, is anything but and it’s also based on choosing to only literally interpret the parts of the Bible that seem to condemn and/or regulate a very narrow range of human activity while totally ignoring or discarding wide swaths of the Bible that say other, inconvenient things about human activity.  Moreover, Evangelical Christians have decided that anyone whose identity does not come from this very narrow idea of what it means to be a worthwhile human being is not only wrong, but a terrible monster.

Fred Clark has chosen the same original base identity, but he’s chosen a far more inclusive idea of what it means to be a member of that group.  He’s chosen an even larger and more inclusive definition of what it means to be a worthwhile human being.  His entire argument, then, boils down to, “My identity isn’t defined by the haters and yours doesn’t have to be, either.”

This difference in self-definition is where groups tend to get in trouble.  There is no single set of values that every human has that leads to their interests or views on what is important.  Moreover, there is no set value where belief in Thing A leads inevitably to View B.  There is also absolutely no reason to believe that Belief B and dissimilar Belief C can’t actually result in two people coming to two separate but remarkably similar Conclusion Ds.

A lot of Christians get themselves into trouble through this exact type of mistake.  They think, basically, that everyone who joins the Christian movement does so out of a desire to find purity and avoid Hell.  In Evangelical Christianity the primary way to do that is to not be gay, not have extramarital sex, and also be a witness to Jesus.  Because this is important to them, they think that it necessarily follows that all Christians will agree with them and have the same views.  This also leads, nearly inevitably, into some crazy beliefs on the infallibility of the Bible and the evilness of learning about evolution and the actual size and age of the universe.

Since I grew up in exactly this sort of situation I am wary of any group that attempts to mimic these attitudes.  This brings me to Atheism+.  As is my custom.

Atheism+ is an exclusive group, but not in the way it thinks it is.  It thinks it’s excluding just the douchebags of the atheism movement[3], but what it’s actually doing is excluding everyone who doesn’t think exactly like its members do.  This is a key distinction, especially since I’m a person who thinks in ways that are largely similar to Atheism+.

Let me loop back around to explain.  I am remarkably similar to Evangelical Christians in several respects.  One of the big ones is the fact that I’ve never had gay sex and can’t imagine having gay sex now or at any point in the future.  If you consider not having gay sex to be a major component of Evangelical Christianity, then you could say I’m probably an Evangelical Christian.  Of course, I haven’t had gay sex because I’m not in to dudes, but I have absolutely no problem with dudes that are.  Still, the end result is that I haven’t had gay sex in exactly the same way that Evangelical Christians haven’t had gay sex.

My motivations are totally different and motivations matter a great deal.  The way I came to those conclusions also matter a great deal.  For me it’s a combination of fuzzy inclusiveness and general lack of a belief that it matters what other people do in the privacy of their own homes, hotel rooms, cars, or whatever.[4]

By the same token, my lack of dislike for gay people didn’t come from atheism.  I was already at the very least uninterested in worrying about the activities of gay people before I officially left the church.  Really, as I’ve said before, atheism didn’t create any of the opinions I currently possess.  I made my first steps over to the fuzzily inclusive side long before I decided to leave religion.

It’s a fine point, but it’s one that matters.  The introduction I got to Atheism+ was equal parts, “You should agree with us because it’s the right thing to do,” and, “You should agree with this because it’s the inevitable result of agreeing with this other thing.”

One of the things that’s probably the hardest in creating any group is realizing that not everyone cares as much as you do about the things you care about and won’t draw the same conclusions you will about them.  I am an atheist, but I’m not an Atheist, if that makes any sense.  It’s something I am because it’s the logical conclusion I drew from other observations and it seems more intellectually precise than saying I’m agnostic.  I’m more likely to say that I’m non-religious, however.  I’m far more likely to say I’m a writer, a storyteller, a historian, and a White Sox fan because those are the things about which I actually give a shit.

I’ve hung out around the atheism movement because there are people in the movement with whom I agree about things.  Overall I reject any arguments that atheism is a religion because I find those arguments fundamentally silly.  What I do find, though, is that atheism is an exclusive group and Atheism+ has a high risk of becoming a closed system.  If they want to create a cool kids club that’s fine, I won’t stop them.  What they need to realize is that telling me I’m an idiot for not wanting to be part of their cool kids club isn’t exactly a great way of winning me to their side.

And that’s the biggest problem of all.  If you’re creating a group you can be exclusive and worry about purity all day long.  If you want to have a movement you have to be inclusive.  No step in creating a movement should involve intentionally burning bridges with people who agree with you on better than 90% of the things you believe but who came to those beliefs through a different avenue.  That’s just bad planning.  It's also easily avoidable.  Step one: don't immediately dismiss me and tell me I'm stupid for not seeing the world in exactly the same way you do.

------------------------

[1]Complicating things, of course, is the problem that even when my address was in Texas I did not consider myself a Texan.  I considered myself a Chicagan living in Texas.  Further complicating that is the bit where I’ve never actually lived in the Chicago city limits.  That’s because I’ve made Chicago a part of my identity as well as a fact of my proximity.

[2]This is an important reciprocal relationship of inclusion.  Evangelical Christianity regularly tells homosexuals that they will be welcome in church as long as they stop being homosexual.  This is not inclusion, it’s exclusion.

[3]Who, really, could use some good excluding.  I mean, really, who wants to hang out with a douchebag?

[4]True story: I have now been in enough situations where I’ve seen two dudes kissing that I think either, “Oh, that’s adorable,” or, “Aight, whatever,” rather than, “Ew, that’s gross.”  I don’t know where that switchover occurred, but I do know that there was a point several years ago where squicked out was definitely the way I felt if I saw that.

You're Not Helping!

I actually feel the need to strongly disagree with Charlie Pierce on something.  Everybody write that down.

Apparently he's on the ground in Chicago, talkin' 'bout the strike.  He's also registered his bias in favor of organized labor overall and the CTU in specific.  It is here that I have a problem.  Well, specifically, it's in this piece, wherein he makes a gigantic strawman argument and also does a fine job of poisoning the well when discussing taxpayer reaction to the strike.

As an iconic collective political entity, they fall over and over again for privatization scams and then howl when the streetlights go out or the garbage gets picked up, or some executive in a for-profit prison winds up bribing a judge to send him more inmates. Or, conversely, they want high-quality public education that doesn't cost what they perceive to be too much,  as well as the right to vilify the people who provide it, whatever their salaries may be. This is the collective statement of the principle expressed often by people stopped for DUI who lecture the cop on "who it is that pays your salary." It is that attitude writ large.

That may be true, but it's really not a good idea when discussing labor strikes to confuse the average Chicago taxpayer with Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Ultimately, the teachers' salaries will come out of the taxpayers' pockets.  It will come in the form of raised property taxes, raised rents, and, potentially, lowered property values if enough people decide that they don't want to live in the city limits.

For some people that means less food on the table.  It's an obvious, objective measure.

And this isn't some abstraction, either.  The city of Chicago selling its parking meters to a private firm was supposed to be a cost-saving and income-growing method that -- as of the last time I looked -- failed on both counts.  That's the sort of case where the city and/or its taxpayers might have been snookered or fallen flat-assed on the ground.  Here it's a pretty straightforward case of highly paid public workers wanting more money and more concessions.  What they want might be objectively valid.  But what they want will also be objectively expensive.

This is where the dichotomy of the story of labor in America gets in the way.  Pro-labor folks want to talk about unions as if they're still fighting for the 40 hour work week in Packingtown.  Anti-labor folks want to talk about Jimmy Hoffa and corruption and entitled asshole workers.

There is a middle ground in all that, though, and to ignore it is to create convenient narratives that solve nothing.  The union is, after all, neither wholly good nor wholly corrupt.  It can be one or the other, but it's usually some combination of the two, in the manner of all things human.

The biggest problem with the union as an object, however, is that it eventually hits a point where its initial purpose isn't needed any longer.  Conditions improve, salaries go up, the plant owner is no longer allowed to wear his workers as shoes and walk around proclaiming he's the king of all the multiverse.  At that point the union purpose becomes self-perpetuation.  It is in this step where a union potentially becomes a villain, because it creates work rules designed to keep everyone employed and make sure they get paid well and promoted.

Two big grievances keep coming up from the union side that just make me laugh: teacher evaluations and administrator control of which laid-off teachers get to move to other schools if a school closes.  The big complaints are that teachers might lose their jobs, to which I say, "Yeah, so?"  They argue that it's impossible to quantify what value a teacher adds, but their solution to that seems to be to argue that teachers shouldn't have accountability whatsoever.  They also seem to think that they should have more say over what teachers work in a school than the principal.  I don't actually know this for a fact, but I'd be willing to bet that teacher rehires will be on something closer to the UAW's last in, first out policy than anything that's actually merit-based.

Unions, ultimately, are just a big bureaucracy.  The people in charge can decide they have their own agenda and I have little doubt that CTU President Karen Lewis has her own goals in mind.  She's up against Rahm Emanuel, who I have never said anything nice about.  So, basically, as I said yesterday, there are a lot of villains.  Since the city (which is in a massive budget hole and has already taxed the shit out of its residents, may I remind you) had already made some pretty hefty concessions before the whole thing started it also looks like a basically unnecessary strike that will ultimately do a bit more harm to the image of public-sector unions in the United States.

To imagine that the taxpayers are potentially a whiny bunch of entitled brats who just want their cake and to eat it too is foolhardy.  Not everyone complaining about the cost is a grandstanding pol or a greedy worker who might have to give up one latte a month to make up the difference.  Some of them are the baristas making those lattes or the guy in the hotdog suit handing out coupons on the corner.  For them an increase in taxes only makes life that much harder.  And Chicago has already increased taxes quite a bit.

Thoughts

So, I got distracted on Wednesday by a strange need to free up hard drive space on my laptop and watch the Palehose in their life and death struggle with the Orange Stripey Kittehs.  Still, I have some things on my mind.  So, in no particular order:

1.  Smash Mouth released a new album last week.  Seriously, you guys, Smash Mouth.

2.  Matchbox 20 also released a new album last week.  I actually own that, because it pretty much sounds like every other Matchbox 20 album.  Now that I think about it, that’s not really an advertisement.  Whatever.  Rob Thomas needs to feed his family or something, dammit.

3.  True story: the first concert I ever went to that I will proudly admit was Matchbox 20 at the Aragon Ballroom.  The last time I was at the Aragon Ballroom was to see Flogging Molly.  Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears opened.

4.  You might have heard that there’s a teachers’ strike in Chicago.  You might be thinking that I have something to say on the subject.  You’re probably wrong.  This is one of those stories where there basically aren’t any actual good guys and everyone is a villain on some level.  Rahm Emanuel is a dick.  The head of the CTU seems to be grandstanding in an attempt to score points off of Rahm Emanuel, who is a dick.  The teachers have some legitimate grievances about the quality of the CPS buildings and the classroom sizes, but they’re also pretty much the highest paid teachers in the country and they have the shortest school day in the country.  There’s a lot of whining about teacher evaluations that might lead to teachers getting fired because the teacher evaluations are arbitrary and pointless.  To that I say, “Ha!”  Again, “Ha!”

Seriously, every time my company starts talking about year-end goals and evaluations I go into a mental loop where I just think, “Is my resume up to date?”  It’s not that I’m worried about getting fired or anything.  I am, in fact, already in position to meet or exceed all my 2012 goals.  It’s just that the whole thing is a giant load of flaming bullshit.

Oh, and the city of Chicago is kinda-sorta broke and they have offered some pretty big monetary concessions, including a 16% raise spread across four years.  So, really, where is all the money for the raises and extra teachers and building upgrades supposed to come from?  I suppose they could raise taxes, but Chicago also has the highest taxes in the country at the moment.  This is not a good way to create fuzzy goodwill in the community.

Basically, the whole thing is making me happy I didn’t buy in the city.

5.  Speaking of, I’ve been keeping an informal survey of yard signs.  There are a grand total of 7 houses with Romney signs and 4 houses with Obama signs in the Wheaton city limits that I’ve seen.  Considering that this is Wheaton, I take that as a sign that there’s little enthusiasm for Mittens.  Also, I’ve seen three houses with yard signs for Peter Roskam, the Republican who’s pretty much guaranteed to win the House seat for Illinois District 6 (seriously, up until about five minutes ago I thought the Dems weren’t even putting anyone up against him.  Turns out I was wrong.  But the district primarily covers Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Barrington, Downers Grove, Hoffman Estates…and, fuck it, it’s been represented by a Republican since 1973.  True, that Republican was mostly Henry Hyde, but…well, my point stands).  The houses that have Roskam signs don’t seem to have Romney signs.  Also, Obama won the district by a pretty hefty margin in 2008.  Like, a double digit margin.

6.  So, there’s something that’s been wandering about through my mind off and on for the last couple years and I figure I might as well solicit some advice:

I’m 31 and single, last I checked.  One of the interesting things about being 31 and single is that there’s a not insignificant chunk of single women of roughly my age who are single mothers.  In the past that’s pretty much been an automatic deal breaker.

I don’t have anyone in particular in mind, so this is a purely academic inquiry, but should I be re-evaluating my stance?  On a functional level, I am fully capable of holding down a career, I’m a homeowner, and my dog has managed to not starve to death on my watch, so I know I’ve got most of the earmarks of maturity necessary to handle the situation.

Also, I’m basically surrounded by children these days.  It’s weird.  That’s basically why I’m trying to decide if I need to re-evaluate things.

7.  This is awesome.  In a sort of “I just threw up in my mouth” sort of way.

8.  This is not so awesome, mostly because it didn’t really have to happen.

Seriously, the whole Libya thing over the last 24 hours or so has been awful.  Specifically, though, the way it’s been hijacked into a conversation about Mitt Romney and Israel has been beyond terrible.  Romney or his handlers apparently decided that this was a chance to win a news cycle and came out with some of the dumbest, most tin-eared possible talking points.  So rather than talking about the fact that terrible things happened we got to talk about how Romney did a terrible job of responding.

Then a bunch of theories cropped up amongst the commentariat of the places I frequent on the internet that this whole thing was just ginned up by Romney and Bibi Netanyahu to try to discredit Obama in a false flag operation or something.  I lack the words to describe how indefensibly stupid I find those theories to be.  But this is one of those things where it pretty much illustrates that both the left and the right are fully capable of creating the dumbest possible conspiracy theories out of thin air and being annoying as fuck about it.

9.  Also, too, right now the Orange Stripey Kittehs are up 7-1 in the eighth.  I’m not happy.