JHUS Staging

Tag: history

  • Why There Will Never Be A Successful “Third Party” In The US

    To date in human history, there have been precisely two ways in which a “third party” will rise to primacy over the existence of two “major parties.”

    The first is some variant of coup or war or insurrection.

    The second is when the more rightward of the two existing major parties continues driving to the right until it has become egregiously abusive of or hostile to the rights and liberties of the people they’re governing. Egregiously, you’ve got to push people past the breaking point and THEN wait for the stragglers to clue in to the point where you functionally only have ONE major party. That will inevitably be the party which has traditionally represented the leftward polarity. It will shift rightward over time in pursuit of preserving its power, losing sight of core principles one by one until a contingent within that party get fed up and start their own thing, splitting the one major party in two. (Sidebar: This process is sometimes referred to as the “Overton Window.” I eschew this terminology because a) it’s inaccurate, b) Overton was a rank plutocrat, c) the idea had been expressed long before he did it, and d) I’m not making more famous or adding credibility to some Mackinac Center oligarch whose reason for describing the window in the first place was to strategize how to move it rightward and normalize fascism without those being seduced into it being aware of their seduction.)

    The formerly right major party falls entirely into extremism and failure and internal power struggles, the formerly left major party slides into the more moderate right position the former other party started off occupying, and the new party rises to represent the left, becoming the new “second” party as the former right party declines into impotence and obsolescence.

    The last (and really only) time this has happened in the US was close to two hundred years ago when the Whigs lost their compass and devolved into internal bickering and contention over the question of slavery, and the Democrat-Republican party split in two with Dems on the right and Reps on the left (which frankly made no sense by the labeling; the right represents artistocracy and bourgeoisie which is republican i.e. government by elites, the left the proletariat which is democratic i.e. government by the people; this has been the case since the left-right nomenclature was coined hundreds of years ago) and eventually reversed polarity between the end of the Lincoln administration and WWI, with the polarity reversal finally completing in the “Dixiecrat” shift following WWII led by Strom Thurmond and representing the last holdouts of right-wing authoriarianism in the Democratic party at that time. Their primary complaints were FDR’s social programs which didn’t discriminate against people of color, and his antagonism toward racial discrimination as then exemplified by the “Jim Crow” laws of the south.

    That split finalized the polarity reversal in the parties that began slowly prior to WWI and ultimately culminated in Strom Thurmond trying to do exactly what I described above, but from the right – which will not and did not work. That split was the final act of the polarity shift and the Dems have represented the left – such as it is – ever since.

    (NB: I’ve somewhat flagged the idea that Mitt Romney switching parties would be one strong sign that this process is accelerating and the end of the GOP is in sight. He might not, but that would definitely be the two-minute warning. The center-right status quo contingent of the Dem party is right in line with his milquetoast, lukewarm, pro-capitalist politics. Truth is if the GOP hadn’t completely lost touch with reality Romney would likely be their best shot at unseating Biden, but at this point 3/4+ of the GOP hates Romney because he only sometimes bows down to the skidmark at the top of the party. There *might* be one or two other Republicans who might fit in there – and Liz Cheney won’t be one of them, all due appreciation to her integrity re: Jan 6 – but Romney’s the archetype.)

    It always happens that way, including the direction of ideological “flow” from left to right. The left wing party never slides off the edge of the spectrum into autocracy; they slide right until they’re the major right-wing party, and then start sliding off that end of the spectrum into rank autocracy as they try to preserve and increase power. Again, lacking some sort of hot conflict, that’s the only way a “third party” has ever risen to prominence over the two existing major parties in any system I’ve been able to find.

    There are a few “squishy” spots in there, and occasionally in multiparty systems like the UK you’ll see one of the two majors so entirely step on their johnsons that the people turn their backs and adhere to whichever party most closely aligns ideologically with the self-defeated, but a) that’s an extraordinary circumstance and b) even that scenario isn’t functionally different from what I described above, you just have a multiparty establishment from which to draw your rising left rather than the single left-wing party; basically you’ve just performed one step of the process in advance of the actual split.

    The alternative path tends to more or less follow the NSDAP template: being radically right-wing from the outset but pretending you’re a “socialist,” where “socialism” is defined as socialism for those cooperating with the group in power and waterless showers for everyone else. They will target that thirty-ish percent of the population that’s ALWAYS willing to sell everyone out to tyranny if they think it’ll benefit them, organize them, and then conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns to provide plausible deniability to those who can be convinced to join the baddies, usually through appeals to nationalist, religious, and/or racial supremacy, or personal greed through promises of increased affluence after the “other” is eliminated from society.

    Then they start trying to take over other countries until the rest of the world gets fed up and destroys them, at which point a new government is constituted and the cycle begins anew.

    (In the unlikely but not entirely impossible event Trump gets re-elected next year, that’s our future.)

    This means the cycle of politics will tend to roll over parties every 100 or 200 years (and we’re about due), through one or the other processes described above.

    Not once in the history of the democratic process has an external group constituting itself as a third party, containing no appreciable trace of either of the existing two major parties, ever successfully won more than a handful of minor elections, and never once have any of those minor parties grown in power to present a serious challenge to the two main parties at the national level, anywhere. It works the same way in any democratic system – democratic republics or pure democracy, first-past-the-post or proportional representation or even ranked choice. Minor parties will do better in minor elections under certain systems like ranked choice; never once has one risen from outside the establishment to supplant one of the two parties that existed when the third party came to life. The ONLY time that happens is when it happens as I described it above.

    In this country the most successful “outsider” candidates have always been either entirely party-independent or tagged themselves with a party label long after they’d risen to some level of power on their individual merits, e.g. Ross Perot’s Reform Party.

    I can’t find a single example in the history of democracy – and I spent four years of a polisci minor looking for one – all the way back to its earliest forms in ancient Greece and Rome, in which a new party showed up and slowly built power on its own by providing an alternative to the two existing majors until it successfully supplanted one of them, without a civil war being involved. It’s a nice theory, but it just. doesn’t. happen.

    People – even those who think of themselves as “liberal” – are generally change-averse to an extreme outside of conditions that are absolutely intolerable to the broad majority of the electorate. They – we – would rather sell out to fascism and pretend we don’t know that’s what we’re doing until long after the damage is done, at which point we’ll work to preserve their social standing and approval by pretending to have been merely stupid as opposed to deliberately evil, than risk a radical shift into unknown territory.

    The greens, the libertarians, etc? Useless, and none of them will ever gain more than token representation in minor offices.

    The most successful third party in the US, the Libertarians™, managed to become the only third party in US history to have presidential ballot access in all states in two cycles – a process that took 220 years, has never come within even plausible wildcard hope of winning, and they couldn’t pull it off a third time.

    The only member of the Libertarian™ Party to serve in federal elective office *at. all.* is Justin Amash, and he changed parties AFTER being elected so that doesn’t even count for the purposes of this discussion.

    No matter how nobly motivated or “right” they may be, you will never see a third party rise to power in this country from outside the existing political establishment without catastrophic conflict (and no, you seething edgelord, you do not want catastrophic conflict). It will not happen, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances that can’t be predicted and can’t be created intentionally

    It also won’t happen by some magical coalescence of “the big middle.” The big middle is moderate and leans conservative(*) by nature; hoping for that to drive serious change is like hoping you can stop that troublesome noise in your engine by turning up the radio. The most successful attempt in this direction was Ross Perot, whose “party” was a retcon anyway, created to support his presidential candidacy rather than being an existing entity he “joined” and represented. He got about 20% of the vote and 0 electorals.

    * In spite of broad misconception on this point, “conservative” is not and has never been synonymous with “right wing.” While things tend to play out that way over time, “conservatism” politically is simply a preference for maintaining the status quo over introducing radical change. “Liberalism” politically is a preference for radical change over maintaining the status quo. Conservatism is not inherently “right,” and liberalism is not inherently “left.” In spite of how wrong it sounds if you’re stuck in the “con=right lib=left” thinking, Donald Trump was a far more liberal president than Barack Obama because he had zero respect for the status quo and radically altered many aspects of our government, at least temporarily. That is right-wing liberalism, not “conservatism.”

    The ONLY third party electoral vote in US history was a faithless elector in the Republican party who voted for the Libertarian candidate in I think 1972, rather than the pledged vote for Nixon/Agnew.

    If there were a strong progressive running from the left as part of some party that currently doesn’t exist – the Greens have bad branding and unflattering history, the libertarians aren’t in the least bit progressive, and there’s literally no other party that’s even laughably contending – in the next election and Joe Biden passed away in mid-September leaving only Trump+whoever, Harris with no running mate or one that had to be VERY hastily integrated and publicized and sold to the electorate, and that strong progressive on the ticket, there’s a slim but non-zero chance the progressive outsider would win…but the safe bet is Trump would take it because unlike the left, the right wing in this country knows how to march in formation and not make waves. Which, incidentally, I find disgusting, odious, and an insult to everything meritorious about our entire system, but my feelings about it don’t change the reality.

    By and large people will tend to vote for a comfortable and certain tyranny than an unknown and uncertain freedom. They just convince themselves the tyrants will only hurt people they don’t like. It’s the mentality of one acclimated to their own enslavement: sure it sucks being someone’s property but at least you eat once in a while. No guarantee of that out on your own.

    (NB: That last part is why most of us refuse to quit bad jobs or demand better pay and working conditions, too. We don’t dare risk losing an iota of whatever petty comfort we have, even if holding on to it is literally killing us. Plutocracy always plays the same parlor tricks, they just file off the serial numbers and add or subtract a little chrome trim from the body panels so people who aren’t paying attention get fooled into thinking it’s a whole new ride.)

    In the upcoming election, as things stand right now, there’s not a chance in hell of Biden being seriously challenged from the left because we don’t want to risk going back to Trump – that conservatism I mentioned earlier. Sanders won’t run this time; he knows it’ll be a waste to try to primary Biden and will only serve to make people mad at him for trying. If you want real progress for the next four years, Biden is (somewhat unfortunately) your best bet. Say what you will about Biden, but it is to his immense credit (and our best hope) that he’s repeatedly proven movable on matters of considered principle. Not as many of them or as often as I think he should, but certainly more so than that whatever skidmark – probably Trump – who ends up running against him, or anyone likely to rise as a serious candidate in the next twelve months.

    Stein blew her cred pandering to antivaxers; Williamson occasionally says something powerful and brilliant but it’s generally a rare sighting in a flood of new-age pseudo-spiritualism and badly misunderstood concepts like karma appropriated from other cultures.

    No other remotely serious suggestion even exists at this point. The progressive wing in general – the justice dems and squad folks – aren’t politically stupid, they know trying to primary Biden this round will be political self-immolation. AOC, Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar? They know the GOP is tottering on the edge of implosion and four years from now will likely be a MUCH more auspicious set of circumstances for the progressive wing of the Dems to break off into their own thing, and then that party and the Dems will spend the next couple of cycles finishing the job of ending the GOP (possibly conceding a presidential election along the way).

    We will almost certainly have nothing but a string of center-right moderate status quo DNC presidents until that new progressive wing gets off the ground, settles their hierarchy, and rallies behind a presidential candidate of their own to present a genuine and serious left-wing challenge to entrenched capitalist-oligarch-plutocratic power.

    That is where your “third party” is coming from, not some fantasy of all the disaffected and disenfranchised voters in the country suddenly finding enough common ground to mount an effective, well-organized, and cohesive challenge to the two major parties.

    If you’re serious about wanting a real left wing in this country, this is the context in which you’ll need to create it, and that means a whole bunch of us need to be working with and reaching out to those progressive leaders because the power core already has an army of astroturfing profiteers and clickbaiters on their payroll, and millions of easily manipulated rubes think that is the “left” in this country.

    And right now, sad as it is to say, they’re right. It’s the only meaningful left we’ve got because the real left is split between being pumped full of bias confirmation clickbait by grifters and arguing with each other over bad, useless ideas like dreaming for a third party deus ex machina to get us out of this mess.

    When the grass roots refuse to grow, you get astroturf, and right now that’s the only grass of any serious relevance in this country. Let’s stop hanging on to old, useless fantasies and start getting seriously organized from a position of reason, pragmatism, and integrity.

  • Thanks, America (2008)

    It’s still sinking in.

    I’m 38 years old.  I was born in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War.

    In my lifetime, my country has been led by:

    • A crook
    • An oaf
    • A man whose good intentions and peaceful nature rendered him too soft on foreign aggression and inept in the management of the economy
    • A bad actor who shut millions of people out of the process of government, refused to confront the most pressing domestic issues of his time, and created a culture of greed that we have yet to grow out of
    • A spy
    • A philanderer
    • Another oaf, this one with an unfortunate mandate provided by circumstance that has allowed him to abuse our military and destroy our standing in the world

    Yesterday, on November 4th, 2008, for the first time in my life…we elected a leader.  A man of courage, of vision, of honor, and of hope.  A man who has spoken his mind, stood his ground, and encouraged us all to reject the politics of hate and fear.

    A black man.

    Last night at 11 pm EST, The United States of America turned the page on nearly two hundred and fifty years of unrealized ideals and unfulfilled potential.  We the people have rejected hate, fear, and division.  We have rejected hypocrisy and greed and envy, and for the first time in our history, we have taken a major step toward living up to that precious founding assertion that all men are created equal.

    Even as recently as a year ago, it was inconceivable to me that a black man could be elected President.  I liked Obama, and I wanted him to win…but I didn’t think he could.  I didn’t think we were ready, as a country. to elect a black person to the Presidency.

    I am proud and honored to say today that I was wrong.

    I am sure that Barack Obama will make mistakes.  I am sure that he will do things I don’t agree with.  I am sure there will be controversy and conflict.

    But I am equally sure that never again can the world look at us and say ‘before you take the mote from our eye, remove the beam from your own.’

    The next four years will be tough.  You don’t need me to tell you what’s going on in the world, you’re well aware.  We have a lot of problems to solve, at home and abroad.  We have errors to correct, and we have some major repairs to make in our systems and processes.  We have a baddly tattered national psyche to heal – one that has never really been healthy in the first place – and we have some soul-searching to do.

    A week ago today I wrote, “…it’s not just time for them to change…it’s time for us to change.”

    Last night, in the most significant positive historical event of my lifetime, we began that change, and for the first time in my life I can say without hesitation or qualification:

    I am proud to be an American.

    I don’t want to get too wrapped up in navel-gazing.  There is work to be done, and it’s up to us to do it, working with our leaders instead of working in spite of them.  This is not the end of struggle, merely the end of the beginning of a long journey.

    But at long last, that journey has well and truly begun.

    Savor this moment, if Obama was your candidate.  If he wasn’t, consider that maybe you have bought in to ideals that are less than ideal, and maybe it’s time for all of us to look inside ourselves and see what could use some adjustment.  Rest assured that although I have great faith and confidence in President-Elect Obama, I will hold him to the same standard, if not a higher one, that I have held our previous leaders.  Don’t think that if you are a card-carrying Democrat or liberal, that your agenda just got a blank check, because it didn’t – I suspect that those lawmakers on the left who still cling to their outmoded methods and ideologies (lookin at you here, Pelosi) are in for a bit of a rude awakening, because we’re still trillions of dollars in debt and we still have major steps and sacrifices to make, and there is much to be corrected and abandoned as useless on all facets of the political spectrum.  For too long, the starry-eyed idealism of our social conscience has been either untempered by pragmatism, or defeated by cynicism.  

    Today, we begin to find the balance.

    The whole world is indeed watching, and in this one night America has taken a major step to not just reclaim the honor and respect we have sometimes enjoyed in the world…but perhaps, for the first time in our history, to make a strong case for deserving it.

    And now…now we have to get to work on maintaining it.  Each of us has our part to play in rebuilding and building up this nation.  Some of us may not know what that role is yet…but we each have one, and it is vital.  If you don’t know yet where you’re going or what you’re doing, then my best advice to you is to work now to get yourself in fighting shape so that when the call comes, you’re prepared to answer.

    Yes, America, we can.

    My congratulations and my thanks to everyone who has played a part in making this happen.  

    Now let’s get to work.

  • It’s Time To End Confederate Flag Worship

    Over the years much has been written in defense of waving and displaying the “Confederate Flag.” We’ll forego the silly pedantic arguments about what the “Stars and Bars” really flew over, and all that nonsense – it’s diversionary argumentation without relevant meaning to the core questions we’ll address here.

    Back in 2019, the city of Wake Forest, NC, had to cancel their annual Christmas parade because they intended to allow a float from a group called the Sons and Daughters Of The Confederacy. In response, several people indicated plans to protest and potentially even incite violence, so the city decided to cancel the parade.

    This generated all the hand-wringing outrage you might expect, and of course brought to the forefront this old, tired argument about southern pride and so forth.

    In the intervening period, we’ve had the violent coup attempt in Washington where multiple violent traitors paraded through the halls of Congress…carrying the Confederate flag. States have passed resolutions to stop flying it on government grounds, along with significant effort to remove statues of Confederate “heroes,” rename public facilities named in honor of traitors, and so forth.

    Naturally all of this has the “Southern Pride” and “Heritage Not Hate” contingent – who, let’s be clear, have never been anything but bad-faith goobers making arguments the know have no merit – to raising all manner of hew and cry declaiming these actions

    These arguments tend to break down into three key points: My family was involved and I have a right to be proud of my family; the soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their cause and deserve to be honored and respected for that; you’re trying to “erase history” by interfering with my celebration of the Confederacy.

    So let’s go ahead and address these one by one, shall we?

    Family Pride

    I understand the idea of family pride and heritage. Often these things are very positive; I’m quite proud of my family history on my dad’s side working against the Nazi’s in the Netherlands during WWII, for example

    In this case, the agrument simply doesn’t hold up, and I reject it.

    The Confederacy was a collective act of treason against the United States, an attempt at creating a breakaway republic predicated on the idea that owning other people was a negotiable and acceptable proposition, and they prosecuted a war to defend that position with all the costs that entails.

    Fortunately for conscience and decency in the world, they lost and the “state’s right” to decide that some human beings weren’t human was denied in this ostensibly free country once and for all, as it should have been from the outset.

    However, as we’re seeing play out once again perhaps as a direct result of our reluctance to address this issue head-on in the first place, the simple fact of the matter is you don’t celebrate traitors. There are no flags of the third reich flying in German. The people of Romania don’t celebrate the heritage of Ceaușescu. Lithuania does not celebrate the “heritage” of the Polish government who tried to overthrow them. Germans do not honor the “heritage” of the Beer Hall Putsch. The city of Milwaukee doesn’t have a “Jeffrey Dahmer Culinary Appreciation Day.” The state of Illinois has not named its high school mentoring program for boys after John Wayne Gacy.

    In my family there is a tragic incident in which a woman and her boyfriend murdered their four year old daughter in the early 1980s. If I were to apply the “family pride” argument, rather than taking punitive measures against her because she did a horrible, unforgivable thing that cause an innocent life to be lost…I would say let’s have a Christmas parade float for all the infanticide perpetrators! I mean, I know it’s not really cool and all, of course it used to happen more often but we’re a better people now, but she’s family so I have an emotional attachment and my ego’s involved. Not only that, although it’s less common than it used to be people say things like “If those kids don’t stop raising cain I’ll kill ’em” all the time, so it’s pretty clear some people – quite a few of them – are perfectly okay with the idea of murdering children. I bet if you’ve got kids you’ve said it yourself! “If they don’t stop that racket I’ll kill ’em!”

    So you’ll just be okay with that, right? Even though some of you may have lost children to violence yourselves and even the suggestion is so outrageous as to deserve nothing more than a punch in the mouth…I mean, let’s be civil. Don’t be rude. Don’t be impolite. Can’t we have some unity here? It’s the Christmas season, where’s your holiday spirit? Where’s that forgiveness and all-encompassing Christian love we like to talk about so much this time of year? Let the baby murderers in. Heck, Susan Smith gets out right before Thanksgiving in a couple years, maybe we can get her to be Marshall!

    Right. That’s how every single person who defends confederate flag worship sounds to anyone who was not born and raised in the south. The only people I’ve ever met outside the “Old South” who parrot the point of view on the confederacy I hear as the mainstream there (at least outside the major cities) are open white supremacists.

    Nobody else, outside of that region of the country where it’s taught as gospel, buys in to the romanticism and whitewashing that’s been brought to the history of the Confederacy since its fall. And yes, I’ve seen a fair part of it and talked to a whole lot of people in my time, including time spent in community non-profit work right there in Wake Forest, North Carolina not that many moons ago.

    So that addresses this whole “my daddy fought hard for the south and that was honorable” thing. The cause wasn’t honorable, nor was fighting for it. AT BEST many uneducated people motivated by a firm conviction that some human beings should rightly be considered property *believed* they were fighting for an honorable cause, and so one must allow a sort of grudging subjective “honor” to attach in the sense of following and fighting for your beliefs, but c’mon. The most honorable position in the Confederate military was serving as a patsy to oligarchs; at least in that role you could disingenuously plead ignorance, and that’s the best argument to be made. There’s no honor or glory in stupidity.

    That brings us to…

    The Valiant And Honorable Sacrifice

    Pol Pot’s soldiers fought valiantly for a cause. So did Stalin’s, and Hitler’s, and Tojo’s, and Minh’s, and Mao’s, and Mussolini’s, and bin Laden’s. Back in 2001 19 men from the middle east made a “valiantly and honorably” sacriviced their lives for the cause they believed was just and righteous.

    Sure, YOU might not think so, because they’re the Bad Guys, but THEY sure thought so. They died to prove it, didn’t they? Just like your great-grandpappy at Second Bull Run.

    Pictured: The ultimate participation trophy, symbol of losers since 1865 (far left of the image), shows up at another lost cause: the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the US Government by violent coup in Washington DC at the behest of President Donald Trump

    Fighting valiantly for a cause means less than nothing until you know what the cause is. If I die fighting valiantly for the cause of my asserted right to have sexual congress with ducks, I sure hope you don’t use that as a reason to give me a parade float and I would reasonably expect the ducks to be pretty angry if you did.

    I want to stress again that none of this is personal. There’s not some individual or group whose feelings I’m trying to hurt here. We’ve evolved now, that’s all. We don’t sacrifice virgins anymore either, and we don’t really have parade floats honoring The Great Virgin Sacrificers (sic) of History either.

    And history brings us to that last Great Pillar Of Confederate Apologia

    Erasing History

    This is frankly nothing but cheap gaslighting. Maniplative bad-faith argumentation constructed of the highest-quality bovine excreta.

    Erasing history is talking about “states’ rights” and leaving out what specific right was at issue – the right to own human beings based on the color of their skin.

    “Erasing history” is bandying about phrases like the “War of Northern Aggression,” which I was still hearing unironically when my daughter was attending a rural North Carolina high school, just about fifteen miles up the road from Wake Forest, in the oughts…and I was hearing it from her teachers.

    Erasing history what happens when you STILL get dirty looks in Granville County, NC if you ask an old-timer (or most of their descendants) about why Bob Teel and his boys never did time for killing Dickie Marrow.

    (Sidebar for those who don’t understand this reference: Dickie Marrow was a black veteran who was beaten and shot in Oxford, North Carolina (where my parents lived for the last twenty years or so of their lives) by two white bigots who claimed he said something untoward to a white woman. The white attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury at trial.

    In 1970.

    This event catalyzed the activist career of Benjamin Chavis, who eventually led a fifty-mile march from Oxford to Raleigh in protest. Chavis eventually became head of the NAACP, I believe.

    To this day, you’ll get the kind of look that will encourage you to be out of town by sunset if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions about this event. The book about the event, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (disclosure: affiliate link) is routinely stolen or vandalized at the Oxford, NC Public Library to this day.)

    THAT is “erasing history,” Orwell style.

    In the end, I’ve had and seen this basic conversation a million times. I’m not particularly passionate about it because honestly I think it’s a settled issue and anyone who continues to act as though there’s really anything to debate about it is likely kind of dull-witted, usually motivated by emotion and ego, and often motivated by uglier things – no accusation against you personally intended, of course, dear reader.

    I’ve no deep interest in hating on people or whatever, this isn’t some “you dumb hicks” rant. I lived in NC for 15 years, met and continue to maintain deep friendship with and great respect for many fine people there. Some of them even maintain this confederate pride attitude, and I don’t fault them for it. I get it, my dad was a marine, I understand that pride.

    But it’s time to accept reality.

    Continuing to celebrate the Confederacy as though it were a noble cause, as though the “sacrifices” made in the name of keeping human beings enslaved were “valiant,” or as though there’s any reasonable basis for exalting and celebrating those who served the failed and unethical cause of slavery with their lives as though they’re heroes for doing it, just doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny anymore.

    Those people weren’t heroes for fighting on the side of the losing team.

    I’m sorry, they’re not.

    The cause of the confederacy was not noble, the fight was not valiant, and the fighters were not heroes. They were at best useful idiots, and at worst seething, treasonous, bigots willing to die for the “right” to treat other human beings as property.

    I was born in 1970 and grew up in a world where the Confederate flag was still honored and adored as a symbol of rebellion, of raging against the machine, of refusing to back down in the face of authoritarianism. Over time we’ve come to understand these arguments simply have no merit. The idea that “fighting for my country is noble and good even if what my country is doing is horrific and unconscionable” was much more prevalent then and you can see how this perspective took hold in the south after their defeat, but now?

    No.

    That’s the 19th century, man. This is the 21st.

    Blind fealty to a geography because your g’g’granpappy originally cleared the land, I can even understand.

    But loyalty to or pride in the cause and prosecution of the Confederate States and their open act of treason against the United States, just because you had family fighting on that side, and many of those fighting for “the lost cause” lost their lives?

    No.

    We think more clearly than that now, at least those of us who can separate our ethics from our egos. If I suggested you should allow a Nazi parade float because there may be post-WWII German immigrants whose ancestors “fought valiantly for their cause,” you’d likely never stop smacking me in the mouth, and rightly so.

    And that’s how pretty much everyone outside the south who isn’t part of some alt right movement feels about confederate parade floats.

    It’s time to burn those stars and bars and throw ’em in the trash like we should’ve in 1865, and have done with this ridiculous argument.

  • Why No Double Speed King?

    For my regular audience this article’s a bit of a departure from norm (and is probably the sort of thing I should’ve been doing more of when I was working at Musician’s Friend in the late 2010s!), but we’re going to take a look at a legendary bit of music equipment and its list of idiosyncrasies, and then explore the ultimate question: why has there never been a double Speed King pedal?

    For drummers that question will make sense and most of them will probably know the answer instinctively, but it’s an interesting set of observations, an interesting (and unsolved) engineering problem, and a fun bit of music history that I’m very well acquainted with as my first bass drum pedal was a Speed King, and I played it for about a decade as I was coming up. Very familiar with it, and it’s such a unique bit of work that its little tricks and trials tend to stay with you. (Note the navigation, it’s a multi-page article.)

    Bass Pedal Basics

    For our non-drummers reading, we’ll take it all the way down to the basics: bass drums in modern “trap” drum kits (i.e. what most people think of as a “drum set”) are played with a footpedal that uses a pulley-camshaft system to pull a mallet into contact with the head of the drum, and that’s all attached to a spring return to pull the mallet back when you lift your foot, with a great deal of variety available to the player depending on how they bring their foot down and other variables. A brief example:

    Trivia: I play my bass drums the same way…and I started playing when Lars was about fifteen (I was 8, 1978) so I didn’t get it from him. It’s just the way my foot fell naturally into playing, I never had lessons to “correct” the problem, and now it’s part of my playing style.

    So you see the basic mechanism. The pedal should be fairly obvious. Bass drum pedals come in a few different “drive” types. Most are either “chain drive,” like the ones Lars is playing, or less expensive pedals will come with a “belt drive,” which amounts to a leather strap. Either way, they’re connected on one end to a cam shaft on which the mallet is mounted, and on the other to a footboard at the toe end. Belt drive pedals will have a smooth cam and the belt will be bolted in to a mounting point on the cam; chain drive pedals will have geared cams, like on a bicycle gear (it’s the same type of chain as well). These will typically look a bit like the derailleur gears on a multi-speed bicycle. All of these little bits can be adjusted and modified to suit the players preferences in terms of how “stiff” or “responsive” or “quick” they want their pedal, how much force they want to strike with, and so forth.

    Camshaft and chain drive from a Ludwig Speed Flyer double bass pedal, on the secondary side. (This is one of those things that historically has been called a master-slave connection, with the “master” being the pedal that’s at the drum, and the “slave” being attached via a crossbar and played with the other foot from a distance. I think “primary” and “secondary” or “remote” are good options that avoid troublesome language there.) All images in this article courtesy Sweetwater.

    In the video above with Lars, he’s legit playing two bass drums, each with a single pedal. In 1968, a double pedal was invented, but they really didn’t start catching on until the time I was coming up in the late 70s and early 80s, most notably with the release of the DW 5002 pedal. (An uncomfortable sidebar: I’m a huge fan of DW’s gear but their constant claim to have “invented” the double-pedal simply isn’t legitimate. It had already been around for fifteen years when the 5002 came out. They made some major refinements to the design, including universal joint connections on the crossbar and repositioning to have one pedal center-on the drum and the other offset, as opposed to the true “first” double pedal, invented in 1968 and patented in 1971 by renowned drum innovator Don Sleishman from Australia.)

    There were many excellent reasons for this:

    • one less big, heavy bass drum you had to carry around
    • your drummer could fit on smaller stages and still have more room for things to hit
    • on a more “pro” level you only have to tune one (and tuning two to each other could be challenging!)
    • if you’re gigging live at the level where your kit’s mic’d you only need one bass drum mic rather than two, one soundboard channel rather than two, etc.

    It was a real game-changer, especially with the rise of what we were still calling heavy metal then – early Motley Crue and Metallica and Iron Maiden, Venom and Slayer, etc. brought the double-bass playing style to prominence as it never had been before.

    History of the Double Bass

    It’s worth pointing out that double-bass drumming by no means started with early thrash metal. There were many jazz drummers who used them even mid-century, for instance. While it’s certain there were others who experimented along the way, it’s generally taken as canon that the first “real” double-bass drum kit was designed by Louie Bellson in 1939, and he had a hard time even getting somebody to build one intentionally that way – Gretch finally did it.

    You can see Bellson here on the left in this 1968 clip from Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (Carson was actually a pretty decent jazz drummer as well, although I’m not aware that he ever did it for a living), and if you listen you can hear him start in on the double bass riffs about a minute and twenty seconds into this amazing drum duo piece with Bellson and the legendary Buddy Rich.

    Years later, Ed Shaugnessy became the Carson show’s backup bandleader; he also played double bass.

    As proto-metal started coming up in the late 60’s you saw folks like Ginger Baker from Cream start making them pretty popular (the outro to “White Room” is generally understood as the first really notable use of double bass in rock), and double bass drumming began breaking forward in rock into the 70s as Keith Moon from The Who, then Carmine Appice in the US (Vanilla Fudge), then folks like Tommy Aldridge from Black Oak Arkansas, Neil Peart from Rush, Chester Thompson (various) and Terry Bozzio (Frank Zappa) really started pushing the boundaries of what you could do with that extra drum.

    This brings us to my own beginnings as a drummer at age 8 in 1978. I started off more in what you’d likely call the “classic rock” space. At that age I was just barely old enough to have started developing my own musical tastes, and the day I started playing my favorite band was the Beach Boys. The person who started me – an older relative – did a lot of cover band work in bars, so early on I was exposed to a lot of things like Lynyrd Skynrd, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Steely Dan, Peter Frampton, Bay City Rollers, Badfinger, Hendrix, and so on.

    As a hard rock and metal drummer coming up then, I watched the double bass pedal quickly go from rare to requirement around…oh, I’ll say between 82 and 88 or so. In 1982 most double bass drummers were still using two drums, but it was definitely getting to the point where maybe 20 or 25% of the working players in bar and garage bands playing hard rock were using double bass. By 1988 probably 95% of rock drummers were playing double bass (or at least had one for looks!), and half of them were doing it on one drum.

    Today it’s a very rare drummer in rock who doesn’t at least have a double bass pedal they use to practice with, even if they never use it in performance…but it’s far more rare to see anyone short of a nationally known club-level act or nostalgia act with two bass drums.

    A double bass pedal as seen, more or less, from the drummer’s perspective.

    There are various ways to engineer the basic setup, but they all rely on the mechanics of that camshaft turning when you push down on the pedal, rotating the shaft around it’s center axis “forward.” As you can see in the above photo, the two pedals are connected via an adjustable linkage bar between them, with universal joints on each end that connect to the spindle of the camshafts. The primary pedal then has two mallets, and the camshaft will be designed with a bushing, or a split, or similar mechanism allowing the two mallets to be controlled independently, one with each pedal. So if I step down on the left pedal, the left mallet goes forward and the right stays still, and vice-versa. Magic! I’ve now turned my single bass drum into a double bass, without adding another drum!

    The Speed King

    The Speed King is a different setup altogether. This pedal is neither chain nor belt driven, but rather what’s called a “direct drive” mechanism where the chain or strap is replaced with a solid, inflexible linkage mounted between the pedal and the mallet mechanism.

    A whole different animal, this is.

    If you’re a little mechanically inclined – and it’s okay if you’re not! – you can imagine how this arrangement creates a much more precise and responsive playing situation. Especially for us old-school, self-taught, toe-down rockers, it’s an amazing tool.

    The Speed King has been used on thousands of your favorite songs and by nearly every notable drummer ever including Ringo Starr, Melvin Parker, Stevie Wonder, and the man who truly made them famous Led Zepplin’s John Bonham. Bonham’s playing style includes some mind-bending bass drum work that people swore he was using two feet for – legendarily he used to play a double-bass kit and got chewed out so often for playing double when he wasn’t, he chucked the second bass drum (long before Zep), but I don’t know if that’s true, just one of those stories you hear. True or not, the man was absolutely amazing with his right foot on that bass drum, and it wasn’t long before a whole lot of people decided the reason his feet were so quick was because of the pedal he was using…and I can tell you as a drummer who’s used them extensively that there is definitely merit to that argument and it’s no slight against Bonham to say so.

    In spite of the mechanical superiority of the SK, it does have some drawbacks that are inherent to the design, which has made them sort of a debatable legend in drumming. Personally, given a blank check, I’d rather play with two drums and two SKs than one drum and anything else…but with a blank check I’d be able to afford the extra maintenance and a kit that’s built to be tuned to itself!

    But…

    But. It’s worth pointing out that the linkage has been considerably beefed up over the years; the model I played, which was probably made in the mid-70s, the linkage bar between the pedal and camshaft was much thinner metal. It still didn’t bend, mind you, but it wasn’t as heavy as it is now, and basically just slipped over the crosspins on either end, being stiff enough to flex just a bit to get them on with a snap, but not enough to bend while playing.

    Problem is, over time with regular playing those rubbing parts start to wear and loosen up a bit. The bend spring that created the clips on each end would tend to lose their “closed” tension with repeated removals and re-attachments (easier to pack if it’s unhooked), and the movement of the pedal while playing has some impact too although these are REALLY well made and extremely durable. Unfortunately no matter how durable, occasionally you’re going to get a bit of rattling with all that metal-on-metal connection.

    Additionally – and this is what the SK is really legendary for in terms of why people look at ’em sideways – there are ball bearings in the mounting points of the camshaft at the top of the “legs,” very similar to what you’ll find in the axle of a bicycle wheel for instance. With time and being thrown around and dragged around the country for a few years, they can dry out…and they’ll start squeaking.

    There are classic, legendary tracks where you can actually hear the pedal squeaking on the recording. Some of those include “Come Go With Me” by the Del Vikings (where it’s so audible it sounds almost like a tambourine through contemporary playback equipment like a little record player or small radio), it’s picked up a bit on “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, Moby Grape’s first album, a ton of James Brown cuts with Melvin Parker and/or Jabo Starks…and again, legendarily, on probably half of Led Zeppelin’s recorded catalogue, most notably (to me) the studio version of “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “All My Love,” and “When The Levee Breaks.” Any drummer who does serious work with a speed king carries some kind of lubricating oil with them, because when it starts it will NOT stop until you do something.

    There’s a break at about 1:10 where you can hear it quite clearly, even if you’re older like me and don’t have as much high end in your hearing range anymore. As I’m listening to it through my monitor speakers while writing this, I’m picking up other little bits and whistles of it, sometimes sounding almost like the finger-snaps, others little a bit of microphone feedback.

    It’s also worth noting that the body of the SK is made of cast metal, and occasionally metal casting creates an object that may have a minor flaw or weak spot in it that might never be noticed e.g. in a kitchen pan, but when you’re using it as a lever from which to beat on something really hard a few million times, they can break.

    One of the things that can break is the shaft that the mallet is mounted on. If you look at the photo above you’ll notice that there’s not a mechanical cam on a straight shaft as with other pedals. On the speed king, the entire shaft is cammed by being curved. That is the clue that brings us to our title question

    Why Can’t The Speed King Be Doubled?

    In short: it’s mechanically impossible to engineer a pedal with the features unique to the speed king that make it what it is, and still be able to manufacture it practically and with a level of reliability that is acceptable for commercial production.

    It would in theory be possible to run an extension arm between two pedals, which is half the problem. The other half, however kills it. The mallets have to be able to move independently of each other. In order to do that with a Speed King, the only real option would be to split the camshaft where the mallets are mounted, one for left and one for right.

    That would result in an extremely weak mounting point right where most of the impact force lands on the mechanism. You could likely compensate by going with a much heavier shaft or what have you, but to do that and still have a practical pedal that was durable and that you could manufacture at a sufficiently low cost to not have to charge more for the things than a good mid-range drum kit has, thus far, eluded the Ludwig company for about a century and a quarter now.

    As an engineering problem, with the single mallet setup you have all the impact stress going through the mallet rod into the mounting bar, which is a nice, solid piece of metal that’s taking the majority of pressure at the “top” of the arc in that bar (I’m sure I don’t have to explain the strength of arches to an engineer), the kinetic energy is dissipated more or less evenly across the piece from center.

    With a double mallet setup on a split shaft, the pressure is all at the “split” end of the shaft, and it’s not even reinforced. Not too hard to see that in this configuration the mount shafts would bend and/or break constantly. While in theory one can envision a sort of “M” design like the McDonalds logo, with a mallet at the top of each, I’m gonna go ahead and give the company that’s been making them for a hundred years credit for having already considered that and found it an inadequate solution for one reason or another, again probably relating to the practicality of manufacturing the thing without it costing a mint. Given that Ludwig does in fact have a double-pedal and it’s not based on the SK design tends to validate that theory.

    And that’s the story of what is probably the number one most famous bass drum pedal in history, and why it will almost certainly never been seen in a double-pedal configuration. Are you a drummer who’s used the Speed King pedal? What was your experience?

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

    The Gold Standard

    In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

    We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

    I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

    Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

    Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

    You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

    They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

    The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

    What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

    The Eurozone

    A Different Feather Of Fish

    The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

    “Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

    The Guardrails

    Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

    For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

    Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

    Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

    Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

    That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

    The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

    It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

    This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

    All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

    It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

    That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

    In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

  • Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jNt7ZGCW-o[/embedyt]

    The Problem

    Sweet’s “Fox On The Run.”  Perhaps the distilled essence of what we now call variously “glitter rock” or “glam rock” or “power pop.”

    Another great song that’s gonna get canceled as soon as the “woke” folk read the lyrics.  You can find ’em yourself if you want, but allow me to summarize:

    “[verse 1 & 2]Hi, I’m a rock star.  Yes, you’re a female indicating you want to have sex with me, or at least you’re a female in my general vicinity and that’s close enough because it’s 1974 and we still think “leaving the house” constitutes consent.  From a distance in the dark, you appeared to be a female of legal age to have sex (note well:  that’s not 18, this is a UK band from the 70’s; “underage” is 15 and under, not 17), but now that you’re up close you’re clearly too young and [chorus] you have to go.  [Verse 3 & 4]  Hi, it’s years later and I’m still a rock star.  You’re still a female and you are again indicating you want to have sex with me.  I remember you from when you were too young, but now you’re old enough and you’ve clearly been around a bit and had some fun…and I liked you better the other way, that is to say ‘innocent,’ that is to say ‘underage.’  [Chorus] Bye, Felicia.”

    So let’s take this one thing at a time.  First, I think it’s about time we had a clear, open, and straightforward conversation about sex in popular culture.  That conversation goes like this:

    FFS, people. POPULAR MUSIC IS ABOUT SEX. GETTING LAID. DOING NAUGHTY THINGS. BREAKING RULES. DOING THE NASTY. ROCKING. AND. ROLLING.  Even when it’s not, it is.

    I’m so, so, so, SOOOOOOOOOOO sick of living in a culture where we all pretend very loudly to hate sex on social media and in public, where we all act like nobody’s got any kinks or hangups, and absolutely every single person waited until they were a happily married adult before engaging in sexual congress for the purposes of procreation only, when we all know better and just don’t admit it.

    THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET MRS. GRUNDY MAKE THE RULES.

    Everybody lies about sex.

    It’s bullshit. Just another facet of that same old big picture where some old white guy goes ‘NO’ and we all go “hhhokay” and from now on that’s the rule and we all have to cooperate with it (or pretend to) on pain of shunning. BULLSHIT.

    You know what else? If you DON’T like sex THAT’S FINE TOO. You don’t HAVE to. Those of us who do might feel like maybe you’re missing out, but in the end it’s your business and nobody else’s.  There are WAY more than enough folks who are into it procreationally to cheerfully accommodate and fully staff a population of those who are into it more recreationally, or not at all!

    And guess what? As long as we’re not putting our hands on anyone who can’t give or hasn’t given informed consent for our hands to be on them, it’s FINE. It’s all FINE. And we nearly all do it. The very fact of something being forbidden or taboo or socially risky is commonly what tends to turn people on about it; I’m telling you, we’re not as different as we think we are and you’re probably not nearly as big a pervert as you think, relatively speaking.

    Feathers vs. Chickens

    With that in mind it’s not unreasonable to say every damned single one of us has SOME kind of kink. All a kink is, is something that you find sexually pleasurable that, generally speaking, falls outside the range of “strictly one man, one woman, missionary position, no funny talk or spank and tickle.”  Your kink might be oral once a year, that guy over there’s kink might be the only way he can really enjoy himself is with six Armenian jugglers.  Long as he can find six Armenian jugglers who consent, I fail to see any problem with that at all.

    That’s where the term “vanilla” as used in communities related to kink comes from – because some folks like vanilla ice cream, and some folks like rocky road or black cherry or mint chocolate chip.  Some folks might like them all on alternating days, or at the same time, and as long as the ice cream is cool with it, it’s all good.

    And some folks might not like ice cream at all and that’s cool too.

    Heck, your kink might be simply the wonderful feeling you get from being intimate with someone you love.  Destigmatize that word “kink” in your head a bit, it’ll do you good.

    We have seen incredible growth in our understanding of human dignity and interpersonal respect, in my lifetime.  Things I did in my twenties I wouldn’t do if I was twenty now, because back then we didn’t really know the less egregious stuff was as bad as it manifestly proved to be.  That’s good change – that’s GREAT if you are (or present as) female.

    But it sucks if you really are just a person who was part of the context of groupies and nobody’s checking ID’s at the afterparty and all that stuff, never set out to hurt anyone, never got pushy or shitty with someone when you got told no, didn’t take advantage of anyone when they were passed out or otherwise so incapacitated as to be unable to give meaningful consent, did your best to be respectful and decent, and twenty, thirty, thirty-five years later you’re supposed to feel like an asshole because you *should have* known in 1991 that when a woman walks up to you and offers you free drugs and sex after a gig, she’s probably got serious issues and may need immediate help.

    No, in 1991 the expected and entirely common response to that situation was “let’s party,” and frankly I think it’s well worth discussing it with the participants of the time on the “female side” of that conversation before we go assuming all or even most of them feel or in fact were abused, exploited, or assaulted.

    Kill Your Idols

    The simple reality is that not all our heroes are all we wish they were, and we’re coming to grips with that.  We haven’t yet developed a clear and consistent standard to retroactively apply – what Kevin Spacey did was a million miles away from what Al Franken did…but they both paid the same price, didn’t they?  Because Spacey was an active predator whose behavior wasn’t even acceptable under the morals of the time and place it happened, whereas Franken is guilty of incredibly tangential and minor involvement in a bit of ribald humor typical of its time and place, and has expressed regret and even self-loathing at the idea that he participated in anything that genuinely hurt anyone.  It was “all in fun,” and in that time and place there wasn’t anything abnormal or really even mildly offensive about it, as evidenced by the clear and unmitigated enthusiasm and fun being had by the woman Franken’s accused of sexually assaulting visible in the tape of the incident.

    I think these errors of scope and scale, the refined discernment that truly must become a part of this process of recursively examining our past in the every-increasing light of new knowledge and wisdom, will sort themselves out in time.

    I just hope we can remember how to enjoy an old pop song with a good hook – and this one’s on the same heap as “You’re Sixteen” and “Only Sixteen” and all of the other work, in many cases full of beauty and talent, that stands as an uncomfortable and inconvenient reminder of the reality that as recently as thirty years ago it was still socially acceptable enough for a thirty year man to write a song about having the hots for a minor to have it become a hit.

    There’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look, just like there’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look at Twain’s use of the n-word in his writing.

    Unintended Consequences

    There is something wrong with pretending that stuff never happened or even that it doesn’t still constitute aesthetically pleasing art of its type.  Not only all of the sort of liberal and sex-positive things I’ve already outlined, but there’s one more much more ominous facet to all of this sweeping under rugs of dirty little secrets:

    It gives cover to predators.

    It drives people who engage in “non-vanilla” but still entirely legal behavior further into the shadows, where it becomes harder for communities to self-police and social stigma makes it much more difficult to prosecute active sexual predators.  Victims of abuse are already afraid to come forward because they’re like to be kink shamed and maybe even arrested by police, especially in same-sex situations because bigotry.

    Making everyone who’s a little kinky feel like Ted Bundy doesn’t solve any problem and makes it much easier for the real Ted Bundys of the world to do their damage, and that’s the end result of all this pearl-clutching.  Making it impossible to talk about sex doesn’t protect anyone, or at least not from much or for long.

    So definitely, hold people responsible.  Let’s not have Gary Glitter raking in millions in royalties from US sports broadcasts after being convicted multiple times of active and predatory pedophilia.  Let’s not just keep on with the “boys will be boys” crap.

    But let’s also make sure we’re keeping a fair and reasoned perspective.  No matter how many enlightened individuals there are, there simply is no reason to fault a person in 1955 for accepting as normal that his wife wasn’t allowed to get credit without his permission, because it was normal back then.  Many of those present at the time fought and even died to help secure the rights and privileges we’re now trying to retroactively condemn them for not supporting.

    Credit Where It’s Due

    It is in fact the very considerations of that guy in 1955, Mr. Joe Slightly-More-Progressive-Than-Average, asking himself whether that normality was really fair that advanced the conversation far enough that you can look back at him in condescension now.  The same’s true of the stuff I’m talking about above; those of us who were “on the ground” so to speak were the ones who by and large explored and defined and brought to life these new ways of understanding, new boundaries, new rules of respectful communication.

    We fought, hard, not just in public rhetoric but in our own heads to resolve that cognitive dissonance between our norms and our values, and to adjust our behavior and make it acceptable.  Sure, not all of us were on board, and not everyone who’s 21 is free from bigotry and sexual aggression now, either, but we – particularly “us” as in people now called “generation X” as well as the hippie segment of the Boomers who preceded us – had to actually *discover* this stuff through trial and error, and genuinely wrestle with the dawning realization that some of our behavior wasn’t acceptable even if she DID say yes, and we needed to make some changes.

    So I don’t want to get into some dumb inter-generational argument, but try to keep all this in mind when you’re standing there, immersed since birth in the values that we made norms, and thinking about getting sanctimonious because we didn’t adhere perfectly to those values before they were even fully developed.  Trust me, your kids are gonna do the same to you, and in retrospect they’ll have just as much cause.