(Introductory note: This began as a social media status that got so long it should be an article, which got so long it needed to go into the book – most people aren’t interested in reading online articles longer than 1500 words or so. This is now an edited-down version of what will be that section of the book.)
There’s a long-standing observation about politics in the United States that we have no “true left” in our country.
This is demonstrably untrue; there are any number of individuals, events, situations, and entities proving otherwise every day, including your present author.
The underlying point of the observation – that the left we do have tends to be much closer to the center and less likely to resist or reject the prerogatives of capitalist power than in the rest of the world – has some merit. Unfortunately, that merit tends to be obscured by the gaping logical holes in the statement.
Also unfortunate is that while the observation has merit, there’s no chance of addressing it effectively head-on without first addressing the reasons it happens.
There is a much larger problem here that we seem to be refusing to see because it’s uncomfortable.
Not Looking For Harris’ Flaws
First I want to talk about Biden and Harris. I was against Biden dropping before he did it. When he did and endorsed Vice-President Harris my immediate response was “this is who we’ve got to beat Trump with, so let’s do it.”
My reasoning for this is simple: there’s absolutely nothing positive to be gained from opposing or even energetically criticizing her at this point. Of course Harris isn’t perfect or flawless, but she’s literally the only thing standing between us and absolute catastrophe – historical, global, catastrophe – in November.
I will not be so thirsty for traffic – or ersatz “street cred” among performative “leftists” – that I feed narratives to the GOP and the right wing by airing criticism here and now. The only purpose would be to draw attention to myself, and if my intentions were honorable and presented in good faith and I was successful in them by raising criticism of and opposition to Harris in public discourse, Trump would win the presidency.
Ergo, I won’t be doing that. She needs to win. There is nobody else and it’s years past when we should’ve been thinking about it if we’re going to lay credible and serious claim to thinking about it now.
Yet still, some of my friends and readers and supporters and colleagues on the left persist in discussing how Harris isn’t a true leftist and we must instead find a real progressive option and get behind them if we’re ever going to progress in this country.
All of those statements taken individually are true, but at the same time taken as an integrated part of reality they don’t change the basic equation. Harris must win this election. There is no other option.
Good Cop, It’s All Rigged, Blah Blah Blah
Is that frustrating to me? Yes. I’ve been saying – publicly – for decades, since I was in middle and high school in the Reagan 80’s, that if we continued allowing it to be okay for our presidential choices to be reduced to the worst idea imaginable versus the second-worst, eventually we would end up in exactly this situation.
Things could be much worse. There could have been a contested primary, or the DNC could have decided in some internal power struggle to go with a much worse candidate.
In circumstances where we’re lucky to have a viable opposing at all, we’re beyond fortunate to have Harris as that candidate whether I agree with her on everything or not. She’s good at her job, she’s proven already to be a great candidate who is extraordinarily popular, and in a matter of a few weeks she’s turned the entire mood of this country around.
That’s the thing that’s bugging me a ton right now about all these self-appointed experts and analysts and activists and pundits and thought leaders and influencers trying to find some way to generate traffic by criticizing Harris.
Harris and her campaign, from the minute Biden dropped out to the minute I’m writing this sentence, have done things about as perfectly as they possibly could be from a standpoint of both the merits of their positions and the results. They’ve not dropped a single ball one time nor even looked wobbly, and I’m not sure they’re going to.
Better Than Merely Lesser Evil
We’re in a very complex moment where a population that fundamentally craves stability and consistency has no stable and consistent direction to turn, and there are radical changes at hand that must be addressed and not resisted, because they benefit all of us in the end.
By the evidence to date Harris and her team are very much tuned in to all of these realities and are doing a masterful job of navigating them. That by itself is a display of leadership far superior to anything of which any Republican or most Democrats are capable.
The “official” voice in my head is thinking 300-ish electoral votes would be a good, solid finish.
The unofficial voice is increasingly convinced we could see a genuine landslide in Harris’ favor in November.
It all depends on whether we show up, which is why I’m not celebrating a lot of positive poll numbers. The only poll that matters, happens on election day, and we have to make absolutely certain the victory is so iron-clad and unambiguous that it’s simply not subject to credible challenge at any level.
Fortunately, we have a solid candidate to get behind and not just a “better than pure evil” placeholder or puppet.
Yet some persist in imposing ideological purity tests on Harris while utterly ignoring her opponent’s catastrophically evil flaws.
Right there is where that much larger problem that we’re not ready or willing to talk about has consequences, and it’s time we did the talking.
Ready for it? Here it goes:
True Left
Here is the reality of the “true left” in the United States of America in August, 2024.
First: A true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good if we’re no longer allowed to vote, or our system is retooled into a despotic facade of democratic process.
Second: This sort of ideological purity test is more often egotistical virtue signaling on the part of the speaker than it is any grounded and coherent objection worthy of the attention being asked of it.
Third: We tend to crap on true leftist options in this country.
How all that shakes out as a set of values when you filter it through a hundred or two hundred million voters doesn’t make us look very good in aggregate in terms of our national character and “who we really are.”
We’ve elected some real losers in this country and allowed plenty of others to hold power simply because we were high on our own flatulence and they kept feeding us raw vegetables.
I think until we take a hard look at that, a true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good, because the problem isn’t about a lack of truly leftist or progressive options.
It’s about our failure to live up to the world we say we want to live in.
It’s about our refusal to work genuinely to create that world to any extent beyond that which is convenient to our existing interests and privileges – and that includes social approval and the material benefits that come with it.
It’s about our willingness to be misled when it appeals to our egos, emotions, or sense of entitlement.
I know that’s not easy to hear or accept, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.
But this is the reality of our time, and we have to face it and address it because if we don’t, we’re just going to keep cycling through flirtations with autocracy until eventually one of them works and we spend a few hundred years with the human population largely impoverished and enslaved until we fight our way back to a more moral social structure.
We have to stop falling for appeals to our lesser impulses.
Baiting The Hook
That’s how they catch us, every time. “They” being the power class in any socioeconomic system and “us” being those not holding significant power. They appeal to our egos and our conviction that if we just “play ball” the right way, we too will be part of the ownership class, but we never really are. Not most of us. The things we think of as “ours,” the cars and homes and all of that stuff, they’re not really ours until we’re done making payments on them.
For most of us that day never comes.
Most of us, one way or the other, continue to both tolerate and fall for this con because we believe that by successfully participating in the con we’ve earned a share of the ill-gotten gains of the con.
Sometimes it even works. Sometimes people really do make out pretty well by being absolute bastards to other people and accruing wealth and power all their lives and dying wealthy and powerful. Not very often though; usually people who die wealthy were born that way.
They’re the ones who keep all this mess going, and they do it because the mess preserves their privileges. They don’t care about the long-term cost or the sustainability or whether someone else or thousand of other humans are being relentlessly exploited to ensure those privileges.
They encourage the rest of us to think in the same terms, making us all complicit and making it more difficult for us to change our own behavior due to feelings of guilt and shame when we look at ourselves honestly in the middle of the night.
A certain percentage of the population always seems susceptible to this notion that if they’re willing to turn a blind eye to exploitation, they’re allowed to reap the benefits of that exploitation with a clear conscience. So long as they’re not holding the whip, their hands are clean.
They con us into thinking like that, and we fall for it because we all want to be comfortable and have some power in our lives and the world around us, and we’re surrounded from birth by constant messaging that surrendering to the machine by becoming part of it is the only way to achieve that comfort and power.
They sell us on the idea that there’s no way out of the hole except by climbing over someone else at a disadvantage compared to us, they lead us to believe this is the only way to do things, and then use our guilt and shame over doing what we believe we must to survive, to keep us doing it when we realize we don’t have to.
They do it to preserve their power, and we let them do it because we believe that our cooperation will give us access to that power.
Until we fix THAT problem, all the true leftists in the world aren’t going to help.
Until we fix that problem we aren’t true leftists ourselves.
[This post was substantially rewritten on July 27, 2024]
A few folks have commented and messaged with questions about how FB’s engagement bonus program works. Here’s what little is known to me. None of this is any kind of special inside information, just observations that I’ve been able to at least somewhat validate.
Comment Quality
Comments with fewer than six words or so seem to be of less value.
Copy-paste and template comments are a complete waste of time, and certain phrases have become obviously abused in an attempt by sleazy shortcutters and game-riggers to screw the system. We’ve all seen those posts full of “COUNT ME IN” and “LET’S GO” comments. Not only a huge waste of time, but a huge message to FB that you’re gonna try to cheat the bonus program.
There are easy moderation tools page owners can use to block these messages from ever showing up in the first place. Use them.
I’ve seen pages that aren’t working to prevent/remove/discourage that kind of behavior get dropped from the program. Pages and accounts leaving those comments tend to get algo-suppressed and eventually banned as well, but the people doing it are a) stupid and b) have nine thousand other sockpuppets and bots running anyway so they don’t care.
Content
Quality, original content is the order of the day.
Regular repost content like the Wednesday “post your gig” autopost I’ve had running the last few weeks doesn’t get bonuses (but that’s fine, it’s a useful thing to do for working creative performers and builds the community) and tends to get suppressed by the algo as clickbait.
Not sure how other repost content like the articles I have rotating in the autoposter on a cycle anywhere from around 30 to 90 days is handled. As far as I can tell, substantive content that is reposted on a longer cycle, say 45 days or more, probably does better than stuff that’s reposted weekly or biweekly.
Clickbaiting tactics in general aren’t going to get far. “❤ for a, 🙂 for b” posts, for example, are seen as low-quality content fishing for traffic – I don’t recall the details of the source anymore, but that specific example appears in FB documentation as something that will be penalized by the system. It’s cheap, dumb traffic that’s mostly bots anyway and FB doesn’t want that so they don’t pay for it. (Note: they do want it just badly enough to allow a lot of the ‘bot and other fake activity to happen. It inflates their numbers and allows them to charge more for advertising.)
Their favorite content is about what you’d expect – original memes and status messages short enough to use a graphic background. They choke the hell out of anything that links offsite, but they do pay on it if it’s otherwise quality content e.g. a link to my latest Medium or JHUS article.
Click the image to get this meme in shareable size!
Reels and stories aren’t part of the current bonus program for me, although there are other ways to get paid for them that you may have access to. That’s not to say don’t bother using those tools. It’s still extremely beneficial to propagation and audience growth. It just doesn’t pay through the bonus program.
The very best thing you can do is share with your own additional comment. Sharing content without any commentary, or with a brief and non-descriptive comment like “me too,” is less effective than sharing with a substantial comment. A substantial comment is over six words and adds some kind of meaning or substance. Simply sharing a post without a comment may only generate a minimal amount of interest. Adding a simple emoji or a word like “TRUTH!” doesn’t significantly increase its impact. However, sharing the post with a meaningful comment like “this is really good information, you should check it out,” or “this resonates with me and is worth reading,” or even a detailed personal experience that relates to the content can greatly enhance its value and the algorithm’s response.
“Follow for follow” and “like for like” are bad and you shouldn’t. As convoluted as it may sound, FB really does believe they’re pushing for legitimate, “organic” engagement. L4L/F4F falls under what FB refers to as “coordinated inauthentic activity,” and enough of it won’t just get you demonetized, it’ll get you deleted eventually. There’s nothing wrong with creating communities of creators, but just liking every rando who likes you is probably going to do you more harm than good in the end. Social media sites that use algorithms, like Facebook, interpret that behavior as genuine interest and associates you with those interests and behaviors, and inevitably if you just like and follow everyone who likes and follows you, you’re going to be associated with clickbaiters, spammers, and worse in the algorithm.
Fundraising and mutual aid posts appear to be heavily penalized by the algorithm. It’s getting worse as more and more desperate people are forced to try to survive on crowdfunding, in the exact same way local police will start cracking down on vagrancy-related crimes as you start seeing more people on street corners with their hands out.
The only way to overcome that is to share it like you just discovered a new book of the Bible hand-lettered and signed by Jesus.
It deserves to be said out loud that this is not entirely FB’s fault; over the last couple of years every talentless half-wit with no marketable skills and their mom has decided they’re an “influencer” or “activist” and goes out trolling for cash (sidebar: this has substantially reduced income for those of us who are out here doing meaningful and substantive work and trying to survive, and driven some good people out of the space entirely), and FB actively works to identify and avoid rewarding/encouraging those bad actors. Note that I don’t claim they do this well, but it’s what they’re trying to do.
Obviously, stuff that would be problematic anyway like hate speech, disinformation, etc. is not rewarded by the bonus program and if you do much of it they’ll demonetize you and delete your accounts.
The Bigger Picture
Over the years a trillion get-rich-quick schemers and grifters have turned social media into a largely automated and mostly useless pile of garbage begging for cheap, easy attention. These are the sops you see slapping their t-shirt “designs” (a pithy cheap appeal to ego with variable fonts) on a picture of Keanu Reeves or Morgan Freeman or some other super-popular celebrity with a high level of public trust.
The schemers and get-rich-quick types have built up this industrial strength imitation of human engagement, and FB can’t sell advertising based on the number of ‘bots and sockpuppets that will see it.
They want “real human beings acting like real human beings.” Unfortunately, this puts us real human beings in a position of basically being forced to become unpaid (or paid, even, given this bonus program) Facebook employees whose job it is to keep the platform supplied with a steady stream of quality original content followed by a good solid engagement cycle of real human beings earnestly recommending, reacting to, and sharing that content.
They know they can’t sell ads to ‘bots and AI, so they’re stuck in this weird space: On one hand, they want those numbers. On the other hand, the more garbage traffic there is the fewer human users will engage with the platform at all. (The conversation is much deeper and runs far outside the scope of this article, but this is a core part of it.)
It’s also well worth keeping in mind that these same dynamics apply to other contexts as well. There’s not a special interest or identity group or hobby or celebrity or political label or opinion on a popular topic that doesn’t have seven million auto-pilot Facebook pages devoted to them, every one of them kicking out just the most vapid and ridiculous crap imaginable as they chase that easy money.
I caught one just now as I was taking a quick break and scrolling through FB on my phone, some person with the world’s most obnoxious British accent pretending to ask seriously if it’s true that all Americans have a personal shopping assistant who will help you brings your bags to your car. Of course it’s not true and they don’t believe it and probably made it up or it’s some family in-joke about some mistaken conclusion they drew when they were a little kid or something. But that’s not the point: the point is that’s garbage content intended to generate contentious, rude, ego-driven traffic that creates long arguments in the comment section, each one of which adds to the apparent popularity of the page.
It also exacerbates and amplifies our worst selves. This is where things get serious, because it’s the exact same tendencies that these types of pages play to and exploit, that are leveraged to spread sometimes catastrophically destructive disinformation on a broad scale. We saw this during Covid; we see it every day related to politics and much of the mainstream television news is now playing to those same tendencies in carefully calculated ways. So while the efforts of social media companies to control content quality is very much rooted in profit-seeking and capitalism, those efforts are also important to helping stem the tide of disinformation and misinformation. This is why if you share a lot of “fake news,” eventually it’s going to cost you.
Curated post from 2010, using the controversial anti-abortion ad aired during that year’s superbowl featuring Tim Tebow as a frame to discuss the larger abortion issue.
The debate over abortion in this country, and around the world, has raged since the first miscarriage. In the main, the debate has been characterized by an overabundance of emotive outbursts, handwringing, ad hominem attacks, and a paucity of facts, balance, and clear, rational thought.
One of the manifest expressions of the former list of attributes is the rise of hard-right “Christian” groups such as the American Family Association and Focus on the Family. As a part of their overall fundamentalist diet of exhortations to donate money, condemnation of everyone who “ain’t like us,” and rampant, cynical fear-mongering for profit, these “faith-based” organizations routinely seek out hot-button issues like gay marriage, free expression, and abortion with which to stir up their marks and generate donations.
The Super Bowl 2009 advertisement featuring football star Tim Tebow and his mom making vague statements about family has stirred up some debate, but for me it’s not about the abortion issue. The abortion issue is settled as far as I’m concerned; I don’t like them – and I know from the closest experience a man can that they’re not exactly a trip to the fun park – I wish they weren’t necessary, but until steps are taken to ensure that there is never a valid reason to terminate a pregnancy (steps that are currently well beyond the capability of our technology and our social evolution), they are. Since they are necessary, the solution is to reduce their necessity while also providing a safe and reliable means of abortion for women who need it. As need decreases, so will incidence. Period. There is no other logical solution to the “problem of abortion.” So that argument’s done.
My issues with the Tebow ad are not with his, his mother’s, or anyone else’s opinion about abortion. I want that made clear. Everyone’s entitled to hold an opinion, regardless of how ludicrous I think it is.
My issue is, first and foremost, with a group like FotF insinuating themselves into national discourse in the first place and secondarily with the stealthy way they’ve gone about it. Frankly, I’d have had less problem with the ad if Tebow and his mom just walked onscreen and said “This man almost didn’t exist because I seriously considered terminating my pregnancy with him. I’m glad I didn’t, and I believe you will feel the same way if you make the same choice. Thank you.” This heartwarming and light-hearted little diversion leads you to FotF’s website…where the indoctrination process begins. “Oh, look honey, they don’t like abortion! We don’t like abortion either! We should sign up for their mailing list!” And next thing you know FotF has a few hundred thousand more “members” that they can use to bully the media into covering them, and you as a member are suddenly being regaled with tales of doom and woe in which a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for mandatory gay marriage, mandatory gender education in first grade, the end of adoption agencies, nuclear war in the middle east, terrorist attacks in the US, a new Russian imperialism unchecked by a weakened and apathetic US military,[2023: and boy oh boy is that an entertaining read here in 2023, give that its premise is to predict the horrible, broken future of 2012 under the Obama presidency! It’s long and dull and enraging when you remember people actually think like that, but beyond that it’s hilarious. -jh] and all manner of other Terrible Things including a massive series of job openings when every good-thinking Christian quits their jobs and shuts down their business because they’re now being “forced” to act “against their morals” by (for instance) helping a gay couple adopt a child.
Focus’ tactics and methods are execrable and well-known. Any reasonably sentient mind can read the letter I linked to in the above paragraph and quickly note how often subtexts of pedophilia and homosexuality are both invoked and conflated. In paragraph after paragraph we are told that the evil liberals, “the gays,” the ACLU, and of course that old standby the Commies, are just waiting for President Barry to welcome them in the door and transform America into a nation of roving homosexual pedophiles, anti-religious violence, and a new pot-smoking effete bourgeoisie that revels in the sight of Evul.
Organizations like Focus on the Family are brutal and terrorizing manipulators of public ignorance. They rely on our inability to separate emotions from objective facts in order to push their dream of theocratic totalitarianism on the rest of us. “Dr.” James Dobson and his ilk, each and every one of them, wants to be Nehemiah Scudder when they grow up. This is the method behind their madness of the seemingly silly and naive attempts to influence education in this country; if we get ‘em while they’re young, they’re WAY easier to keep when they grow up. [2023: this isn’t just flowery prose; even as a firm atheist of some dozen years following decades of agnosticism, I still can’t – and never will – shake the brain-image of ‘God’ as an old white guy with a big white beard and flowing white hair. It was programmed into me before I could read, and I started reading when I was two. -jh]
I appreciate anyone standing up for what they believe in [2023: given what I’ve seen people standing up for since writing this article, I can no longer stand behind the statement. -jh], but I think anyone who chooses to do so has the duty to ensure that they are fully aware of the implications of who they’re standing with. I’m sorry, but if an organization like Focus on the Family came out hard in favor of anything I agreed with, I’d have to take a hard look at what I’m agreeing with.
I’d respectfully suggest that those of you who are applauding Tebow here, or who think that your “support” for this advertisement or for Focus on the Family is going to prevent ONE abortion in the world today, tomorrow, or ever, may want to reconsider who you’re hanging out with. Those groups are sick, endlessly focused on sexuality (and that often with a specific focus on children – EVERYTHING is a “threat” to “innocence” WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?! gimme money…[2023 and this con is also working better than ever, 13 years later. -jh]) and ultimately existing for the sole purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of the credulous, the frightened, the ignorant, the superstitious, and the confused…every one of whom are good people with kind hearts and the best of intentions, just like you.
Going in I want to be clear up front that I think most of us are exceptional and the majority of those are exceptional in some positive, constructive, beautiful, and powerful way.
There’s a back side to all of that, though, that has become particularly visible in the wake of the rise of “participation trophy” parents and the embarrassed children they blamed for their silliness. A lot of folks who frankly aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think strutting around being aggressively average, that sort of thing. Folks who like to throw how exceptional they are around in situations where it has little or no relevance in an attempt to exert their will on some unsuspecting maitre d’ who does not, indeed, know who you am.
Being “exceptional” means you’re an exception to some things.
That means you don’t get to throw a fit when you realize the world wasn’t made for you. I mean you can complain and get up and change it if you want, but just sitting around whining because you’re outside the mainstream and the world was made for those inside of it isn’t going to accomplish anything.
You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.
Stop trying to mainstream your exceptionality, that’s the exact opposite of being exceptional by definition.
Expect that the world is not made for you, and when that is more than a personal inconvenience and rises to the level of being symptomatic of a larger social ill, then by all means stand up and say something. Use whatever thing at which you’re exceptional to make the world around you a little better.
Being What You Are
Rise to it. Be exceptional. I don’t mean be exceptional by showing up every time there’s a flooded drainage ditch so you can show off your big truck, I mean show up to do the work without worrying about the reward.
That’s how we got baby changing stations in a few men’s bathrooms, finally (and how we got them at all to begin with). It’s also how we mitigated the worst of the AIDS crisis (but only after a whole lot of people died for no good reason). It’s how we’ve won incredible advances in civil rights and elected the first people in our nation’s history to the our two highest executive offices who weren’t white men, over the last fifteen years.
You can’t just sit around constantly complaining about how broken everything is and how it doesn’t work for you, when you’re also basking in the pleasures and privileges of being exceptional.
You have to bring solutions, you have to be able and willing to separate your own interests and your emotional attachment to them as your interests from whatever work you’re doing that may relate to those interests, you have to be willing to accept that you’re fallible and have probably been wrong at least once in your life that you’re still unaware of.
You have to accept that the price of being exceptional, by whatever laws of the universe you happen to believe in (or none at all, it’s still observable reality) is the obligation to apply your exceptions to the benefit of others. Failure to live up to this obligation tends to end poorly one way or another for those who do so. I’m an atheist; I don’t pretend to know why that is or assert some higher omniscient power who is carefully doling out punishments and rewards. I just observe that it is so.
“Noblesse Oblige”
It’s tough for most people out here right now. If you think of yourself as “exceptional” in some way, you’re getting some kind of break on that. A break you can use to help others alleviate their own pressure.
There’s an old joke/parable/aphorism about a guy who falls into a sinkhole maybe twenty, thirty feet deep, breaks his leg, and can’t get help from the priest or kindly old lady or doctor or millionaire walking by. Then some ragged hobo jumps down into the hole with him and says, “Listen, I’ve been here before; I know the way out. Follow me.”
That is your obligation as a person of exception. Noblesse oblige can be a pretty arrogant and toxic conceit, but it very much applies here if you are indeed somehow “exceptional,” and most of you are, somehow. (And not in any self-deprecating “yeah I exceptionally SUCK” kinda way either!)
If you’re exceptionally intelligent you owe it to the world to help them understand the things you do and they don’t…and you owe it to yourself to try to find a way to do it with tact so everyone doesn’t hate you for doing it. This was one of my blessings and curses; “gifted child.”
Gifted Child – A Digression
This is a conversation I don’t like having, so I’m going to say up front that people who brag about IQ scores and standardized test results are stupid and insecure. (That said, there’s a whole lot of internet trolling that amounts to “what makes you think you’re so smart?” “Well, years of exceptional results on various standardized aptitude tests.” “STOP BRAGGING!” You can’t beat stupid.)
When I talk about being a “gifted child,” as was the standard term at the time, I don’t mean I took a couple of watered down “AP” courses that don’t even rise to the level of standard-level classes forty years ago. I mean I was one of the kids in the 70s that psychologists and education specialists spent a lot of time being fascinated with and subjecting to an entertaining array of testing and observation as a young lad.
I don’t like going in to it because it’s almost impossible without sounding like you think you’re “better than,” and that’s rarely the case – certainly it isn’t with me. I was a godawful human being in a lot of ways for most of my teen years and early adulthood, into my early thirties, and being a “genius” has definitely brought more cost than benefit thus far – it’s probably a good thing for all of us I was only broken and not evil.
It’s really not a value or character judgement. Some folks have a knack for auto mechanics or agriculture; I have a knack for understanding things. Some people are taller than me, too, or shorter. You probably play better basketball than I do. It’s just not about “better,” and that’s part of the point of the article; we’re all exceptional somehow and most of us have something unique and wonderful to offer the world, without a bunch of ego-serving artifice like participation trophies.
One thing you eventually learn – and usually the hard way – when you’re in a position like that is that you can never, ever, ever count on being the “biggest one in the room,” no matter what the test scores say, and chances are in that room of ten thousand people there may only be one or two who have a greater capacity for learning, innately, than I do…but there are nine thousand nine hundred of them who are better and smarter than me about something.
So about little John Henry The Gifted Child Who Never Lived Up To His Potential: If you put stock in such things – and at the time they did, currently there’s a more nuanced understanding and some issues have been found with execution that tend to reinforce biases of economics and prejudice against girls as well as cultural, ethnic, and economic minorities – my “IQ” was around 150, give or take five or six points depending on which day of the week I took the test and what kind of mood I was in (and I took a whole bunch of ’em). That’s not an internet quiz result, that’s straight up Stanford-Binet & WAIS/WAIS-R & similar batteries and evaluations, administered by qualified professionals.
By way of comparison, average is around 100. The real “big brains” of history are estimated in the 200+ range – DaVinci, Newton, Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Einstein. You run down and find folks like Decartes and Michaelangelo around 180-ish, until you get down into my neighborhood (say 140-160) where you find folks like Ben Franklin, Paul Allen, Emerson, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, FDR, Napoleon. A little lower and you start finding people such as Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Washington and the like around 120-130.
Typically people start being referred to as ‘geniuses’ somewhere close to 130 or a bit higher.
In 1983 in 7th grade I pulled a 650 math and 710 verbal on the same SAT taken in the same room with several hundred high school juniors and seniors. According to the numbers that placed me in the top 0.02% of test results – and that’s the old school SAT with essays and page after page of Miller Analogies.
Put practically that means if you put me in a room with ten thousand people, statistically I’ll be one of the two “smartest” people in it (and the other will likely be DaVinci). There’s a reasonable probability that your UNIT tests and DATs and other more modern intelligence tests that started coming out in the 1990s were developed or refined in part using data that originated with me and certainly with some of the roughly 1.4 million human beings on this planet who could properly be said to be “like me” in this regard, and all the tests and observations we went through in the 70s and 80s.
School personnel wanted to jump me twice – in first grade they wanted to put me in fourth, and in 8th grade they wanted to make me a high school junior taking a couple of college courses on the side. My folks said no, using the excuse they didn’t want me to be socially maladjusted (hah!) but mostly because it was a lot of hassle and some money and they didn’t want to.
So yeah, if you’re from that time or were there and remember those feel good news stories you used to see like ‘Third Grader Earns Fifteenth Doctorate?’ That was almost me, except I was from a deeply dysfunctional home. There’s a ton of writing I want to do about that whole experience.
I’m not that obnoxious neckbeard who’s constantly jumping in to conversations with “well, actually…” and “not all men!” and the like.
I’m the person that guy thinks he is.
The “advanced placement” kids of the 90s and 2000s and now are basically dealing with the ideas developed around people like me fifty years ago, which were then extended outward and more toward the mainstream and neurotypical (or at least the perceived ideals therein) as yet another way to stratify and define kids before they’re old enough to even know they’re individuals. There’s an aspect of the whole “participation trophy” thing here, too, but again that’s not the kids’ fault.
That whole “common core math” thing? That’s a ham-handed attempt to teach people who aren’t walking around with a brain and a half how to math like people who are…written by people who aren’t and who don’t understand the internal thought processes that make things “normal” people struggle with seem so obvious to someone like me that we can barely break them down far enough to describe. (Like the reality that profit motive is always a conflict of interest and therefore probably shouldn’t be a part of socially critical infrastructure systems like health care and criminal justice…) I recognize the behavior it’s reaching for, it’s just not quite getting there because the people who designed aren’t the people who think that way – I am, that’s why I can see it.
Unfortunately, it’s not the people who think that way, who design the curriculum; it’s the people who study the people who think that way and then try to interpret, describe, and explain it without being able to actually think that way themselves. A bit like if I were explaining a Matisse – I’ve got words to describe it all day long, but I couldn’t recreate it on a bet.
If you’re exceptionally talented at some creative art, you owe it to the world to give them the beauty you’re capable of – or the pain – so they can find the places within themselves those feelings exist and explore them and utilize them and, when necessary, survive them.
Not only that you owe it to all those poor souls who feel the same tempests and trials and terrors you do but lack your exceptional skill at communicating it and sharing it; you let the lost souls of the world know they’re not alone.
If you’re exceptionally wealthy you owe it to the world who doesn’t have a lot of wealth to do what you can to help people out; nobody EARNS a billion dollars, ever – more to the point nobody EARNS their way to being that far outside the top of the bell curve economically. At best one skillfully manipulates one’s self into such a position without violating too many ethics too egregiously along the way if they’re lucky and even care to try and act ethically.
Why do you “owe” this? Because without other people doing the same for you – usually without any idea who you are or will be or even that you, as an individual, exist – you would not be here. There isn’t a man, woman, or child alive on this planet whose existence is not predicated on millions of other men, women, and children paving the way for them. Tell yourself otherwise if you choose; that just means you’re also an arrogant liar who’s capable of successfully lying to themselves.
Getting There
Most anyone reading this or likely to or even able to is exceptional in at least several different ways simply for that fact. You’re literate, you have access to a computer, etc.
If we really want to reach that shiny, peaceful, prosperous, progressive future that we’ve all dreamed about and hoped for and seen on the covers of the sci-fi novels, it is absolutely up to each and every one of us to be at our most exceptional to the greatest benefit of those around us at every possible turn.
Is it possible to get it right every time? Of course not. But you work toward it. You strive, you don’t write it off as an impossible dream, only one that won’t be reached immediately and may never be so completely, but you can’t let that stop you because by definition that’s what striving means, it’s taking on the risk – and sometimes the reality! – of failure, learning from it, picking yourself back up and moving forward having done your best to improve yourself for the experience – if by no other means than not making the same mistake again.
That’s how we get there.
I haven’t always been a good human being, and I’ve never pretended to have been. But that hasn’t stopped me from getting better. Not as in somehow “cured” but as in improving in the ways that are important to me, like not being the abusive jerk I was until I faced the reality that I was making choices and started striving to choose better when I was around thirty. Sometimes I’ve failed, sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve succeeded in ways that look like failures from the outside. Sometimes I’ve failed in ways that looked like successes. You keep moving, you keep trying, you keep breathing and doing your best.
We all need to be doing that, right now, together. We need to be supporting each other in the acknowledgement of each of our individual human fallibility and failure and loving each other in spite of and sometimes because of it.
We’re all pretty exceptional, and the list of people whose only exceptions are negative is pretty short. We owe it to ourselves, each other, and…well, the entirety of what we know as “reality” to use those exceptions together to create the best reality we can.
The other option is having less than the best reality that we can…and why would we choose that?
How do you find ways to use the things about you that are exceptional to help other people?
Well, we’ve come to the last 24 hours or so of voting in the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall of Fame “fan vote,” and I thought I’d start expanding my territory, so to speak, into talking more often about things other than politics, by taking a look at this year’s Rock Hall vote – in part because it’s a pretty fascinating class and the decision-making was definitely not easy.
Prefatory Matters
Because it’s early days and in a context that will largely be new to many of my current audience, there are a couple things I should say up front:
More than anything else, fundamentally in my core I’m a musician. Have been for 45 years now. I don’t mean I’m a hobbyist or I played guitar for five minutes in a high school jazz band, either. Just putting that out there as a pre-emptive ward against the inevitable round of “what makes you think you know anything about any of this” comments from people who might not like what I said about their favorite artist.
I’m not entirely a fan of the whole idea of a “rock and roll hall of fame.” At its essence rock – and its progenitors in jazz and blues and all the way back – has always been about the very opposite of halls of fame and self-congratulatory flatulence. There are issues with the personalities who control the hall and the preponderance of their favorites alongside the glaring lack of some genuinely deserving artists who just never sucked up hard enough to Jann Wenner. Disappoints me about him; growing up in the 80’s RS was kind of my connection to the authenticity and earnestness of the hippie movements, and watching him calcify into just another institution is a bit painful. That said, it’s a well-known and widely popular way of recognizing people who are important in my life and in many of yours as well, so I’ll appreciate it for being that and not take it too seriously.
“But that’s not Rock and Roll!” Piss off and take your mother and the horse your gatekeeping ass rode in on with you. THAT’S rock and roll. Dick.
It was a tough ballot this year, which hasn’t always been the case.
My natural inclination based the roots of where and how I came up as a musician would’ve had me picking Iron Maiden over either Zevon or Lauper, but as much as I love Eddie I couldn’t step back and honestly say to myself that I thought Maiden were more important to the business or influential in the world of rock and roll than Lauper or Zevon. In both cases even though I’m not hugely a direct fan of them myself, I’d have to be entirely disconnected to not be aware of their impact among so many artists of whom I am a direct fan, aside from my appreciation for their work.
I feel like Maiden deserves the run, and I may have given them the nod in a different field, but even taking out Zevon and Lauper you’re still putting them against some serious weight, including the Spinners, Missy Elliot, and George Michael.
Without further ado, let’s proceed. I’ve arranged the article to be broken up in pages, this one and then one for each of the fourteen nominees. You can navigate using the menus at the top and bottom of each page as you go through, bit like an image gallery.
Kate Bush
Kate Bush, 1985 publicity photo.
As a matter of personal taste, Kate Bush never really resonated with me and I was only barely aware of her when she was truly contemporary. I’ve since become more aware of and familiar with her influence and work, and of course the recent resurgence in her popularity after her 80’s hit “Running Up That Hill” was used in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things in 2022.
As a matter of objective musical merit as best as such a thing can be determined, I think there’d be a strong argument for her nomination in a weaker field. I suspect the bump in her Q rating that came from the recent exposure in “Stranger Things” may well put her over the top for the nomination in the end, and if so I won’t be very mad about it.
Her work with synthesizers and heavy reliance on multimedia elements in her stage shows long before the word “multimedia” was coined, combined with her uncompromising commitment to maintaining control of her music, unquestionably make her a worthy nominee.
That her work was far more popular and recognized in her native Britain isn’t really relevant; her influence is undeniable as is the respect she’s earned from her peers. Without her you’re missing a big piece of everyone from Enya to Tori Amos to her fellow 2024 Fan Vote contender Cyndi Lauper, to say nothing of male acts like Spandau Ballet and more modern successors such as Lady Gaga. All of these and thousands more – Bjork, the B-52s, on and on – owe Kate Bush some part of their careers large or small. In terms of her “place” in music in terms of history and style, I’d say she’s probably the critical bridge between Yoko Ono and latter-day descendants like Bjork, along with the B52s.
To cap it all off, she holds the one key requirement I think is most critical for defining who we really see as our heroes and laureates: she’s always been herself, unapologetically, come what may, and there’s never been anything rock and roll was more about except maybe sex. (Don’t give me that look, the phrase literally started its life as a euphemism for sex.)
While she didn’t make my vote choices I think she’s a worthy contender. Enjoy her first single, Wuthering Heights.
A Tribe Called Quest
Another artist who I wasn’t super close to at the time, but have come to understand and respect their place in their context in the time since. Tribe were hugely influential and represent a great culmination/intersection of every facet of rock musically, and they helped establish and define and entire group of sub-genres within the rap/hip-hop world through their own work and the establishment of the Native Tongues Collective, a group of artists generally seen as intellectual, often very positive and uplifting, and wildly experimental in their sounds; other artists in the collective included De La Soul, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers, and Monie Love.
A Tribe Called Quest perform in 2009. Image courtesy Chalice L via Wikimedia under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License
From the bigger picture, ultimately they’re also fairly niche and I’m not entirely sure they’re rising above this pack to HOF level. Kind of the rap/hip-hip version of Iron Maiden in my mind, I guess, in terms of where I put them in the pantheon.
That said once again as with Kate Bush you absolutely must take into account the huge impact the band had on the overall sound. Most of the pop-hop stuff that’s hit in the last two decades can audibly trace back to these cats, including everything and everyone from PM Dawn to Pharrell Williams.
In spite of that, I don’t expect them to make a great showing this year but they should be nominated again, preferably directly instead of through the fan vote mechanism. Not only are they well deserving, I was somewhat surprised to find that a ton of the rap and hip-hop acts I was thinking “Tribe, but not…?” are in the hall already, which shows how much I’ve been paying attention. About the only folks I can think of who are eligible, fall within the broad scope of rap & hip-hop, and aren’t already in are Snoop/Death Row and KRS-One/Boogie Down Productions, so yeah. It’s fair time for Tribe, but I feel like they’re just fringe enough they’ll probably wait another 5-10 years before they get the nod in spite of that.
Iron Maiden
I was super tempted to vote for Iron Maiden out of sheer personal bias; my early musical career was filled with them. I was a long-haired white male rock/metal musician in the 80’s, of course I love Maiden. Covering “Run To The Hills” was an absolute requirement to prove you were a “real drummer” in my circle when I was about 14, 15 years old. Unfortunately for them and for my biases, that doesn’t rate them for HOF in this field. Maybe in another, but not this one. So let’s talk about objective merit.
As with our two previous contenders, the first thing that must be acknowledged is the immeasurable influence this band have had on their peers and successors. As one of the unholy trinity of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal along with Judas Priest and Motorhead, they can properly lay claim to the foundational slabs of every modern metal genre. The list of metal classics is ridiculous – Run To The Hills, The Trooper, Die With Your Boots On, Wasted Years, Two Minutes To Midnight, Number Of The Beast, Flight Of Icarus, Rime Of The Ancient Mariner are just the tip of the iceburg.
Another thing Maiden share with several of this year’s class of Fan Vote competitors is they tended to lay in heavy on the literary and historical references – more toward science fiction than the fantasy of Zeppelin or Yes, but no less literary for all of that. The Flight of Icarus, inspired by Roman myth; . While they only borrowed the title and not the themes of Heinlein’s science fiction classic “Stranger In A Strange Land,” they full out based entire songs on historical literary works from Coleridge (“The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”) to Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”), and ranging everywhere across the landscape from the obscurity of Ramsay Campbell and Cornelius Ryan to the now cliche Frank Herbert and Edgar Allan Poe references and, of course, the obligatory homage to one Aleister Crowley. And Umberto Eco, and Orson Scott Card, and the list is endless and we haven’t even talked about all the historical references.
Iron Maiden are unquestionably a great example of what Led Zeppelin’s frolics through Tolkien hath wrought on the metal landscape, but they’re also just great musicians. Drummer Nicko McBrain was one of the core go-to references for literally every rock drummer who came up in generally my time and context, and Steve Harris’ classic galloping triplet groove (which he doesn’t use as much as you think but is still an immediately recognizable staple of the sound of Iron Maiden) has worn the fingertips of many thousands of bass players aspirant to nubs. The classic-era twin guitar harmony attacks of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith are now joined by Janick Gers, who originally joined the band after Smith departed in 1990. All of this capped off for the majority of their careers by the unearthly voice of the returned Bruce Dickinson, a man not only well and truly ranked with Ronnie James Dio, Robert Plant, Rob Halford, and Chris Cornell as among the all-time legendary high vocals in rock history but so draped with esoteric hobbies from fencing to commercial airline piloting that on close examination he starts looking like one of those legendary historical characters like Nicolas Flamel. You could probably get a fun little conspiracy going that he’s the latest incarnation of the Comte de St. Germain.
In spite of all of this, in this class, they’re just not quite there enough to make the cut. While their impact within metal is unquestionable, they haven’t had such a big influence outside of “their lane” the way so many Hall of Fame artists have, and I also understand their enthusiastic appeal is, in the picture, pretty limited and niche. Plus there are already several NWOBHM bands in the hall.
In the end, this is another band I really feel should get an official, non-fan nomination and induction – and soon, while they can still perform! – in spite of their not quite making the cut on my fan ballot this year. Don’t hold your breath on this one.
Fun little make you feel old point: at the beginning of this video there’s a computer console from ‘the future’ showing a date in 2050. At the time of this writing, the time between this video’s release in 1987 and the present moment is about 36 years.
We’re nine years closer to the future this video depicts than we are to the past in which it was created. Let me grab a handful of Geritol while you enjoy some Wasted Years, and we’ll move on to our next artist…
Warren Zevon
Warren Zevon, 1978 publicity photo.
Here we come to the first of my five nominees, and the one that genuinely surprised me the most when I ended up going with him over George Michael, Iron Maiden, The Spinners, etc. The reason why is simply this: Zevon’s music but also the personality that informed it and the circle of musicians he was primarily part of – the Rolling Stone darlings of southern California in the 70’s, Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles and Jackson Browne and that whole circle of people – was a profound influence on all of those acts and hundreds more of similar type, and in being so holds primary responsibility for about a third of the music business in the 70s with resonating cascades still being felt today.
Zevon is my “dark horse” pick for the year, as much for his own work as for the work he inspired among friends and fans from Glenn Frey and Don Henley to REM, his collaborations and songs written for others, and also for his status as a “musician’s musician” or “songwriter’s songwriter” along the lines of Leonard Cohen perhaps, or John Prine, or Randy Newman; an artist you recognize almost more for their influence than for their own work, one who turns up on the lips of the people in your music collection far more often than it does in your actual music collection. His style, too, falls in line with those artists and other contemporaries and colleagues like Prine, Newman, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen – the storyteller and troubadour and slightly-off-average-joe, particularly the way he can pull powerful and poignant moments out of the chaotic banality of day to day life with just a few words and the right chord.
Zevon had and still has a ton of respect from some of the heaviest hitters in the game both musically and “politically” within the business (RS has always been in the tank for him), and of all this year’s nominees I’d expect Zevon to have the best shot if Jann Wenner decides to exercise some kind of power and override the fan vote. No disrespect to Zevon – the mainstream has always sucked – but without a straight nomination I don’t see him getting in on a popular wave. There likely aren’t two hundred thousand people on this planet who could name a Warren Zevon song that isn’t “Werewolves of London,” and there probably aren’t half that many who could bring the tune of one to mind on demand. Not to say he didn’t deserve more mainstream accolades, but it is a popular vote after all.
Still so conflicted about this vote that I started writing this entry arguing against including Zevon before remembering I actually voted for him.
Sheryl Crow
I enjoy Sheryl Crow’s work, and frankly in researching her in more depth for this article I realize I haven’t given her enough credit on one hand, and on the other hand she’s also pretty much everything that “Rock and Roll” shouldn’t be in ways I wasn’t at all aware of (to her credit she wears them well), but in the end the result’s the same.
I was aware going in that she got her start as a very well regarded backup vocalist both live and in-studio (Michael f’n Jackson didn’t duet with amateurs!), but was not aware she’d shipped 50 million albums, nor of quite the range and scope of other artists who have worked with her, so I owe her an apology for that.
I also wasn’t aware of her very Privileged Suburban Middle American Cheerleader Girl™ history (my feelings about which in general principle need no telling to anyone who’s read my more political work), which historically tends to speak poorly to an artist’s authenticity.
In spite of my own biases that really have little to do with her music I don’t mean to put her down. By all accounts she’s an extremely decent and conscious person, clearly a consummate professional, and there’s objectively no question that she is a tremendously skilled and talented singer, musician, and songwriter.
Objectively, Crow is much more deeply appreciated by fellow musicians than by music fans, who will generally be familiar with her radio hits (“All I Wanna Do,” “If It Makes You Happy,” “Every Day Is A Winding Road,” and a pretty decent, mostly note-for-note cover of Bobbie Gentry’s classic “Ode to Billy Joe,” plus maybe her cover of G’n’R’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on the soundtrack of Adam Sandler hit “Big Daddy) but not much more. Her distinctive clear, high, smooth tone is as immediately recognizable as McCartney or Ozzy or her former boss Michael J, she puts asses in seats, and she delivers on stage.
In spite of that, though, frankly if it’s time to start inducting early 90’s female rock acts I think Alanis Morissette would be a better choice for authenticity and the personal embrace of the whole “attitude” of rock and roll (which ironically is exactly why she’ll likely never be inducted after walking off last year’s show, citing issues of gender discrimination as the key reason why). I’d love to see L7 get a nod; if you’re really going for the boundary pushers and mold-breakers without trying to get into straight gutter punk or obscure unknowns, Fiona Apple or Sinead O’Connor or P.J. Harvey or Liz Phair are all equally meritorious and were all rising or prominent around the same time. If you want to get serious about it let’s talk Wendy O. Williams.
Plus – and this is where the “music snob” in me really comes out – it’s very relevant to note that every one of the acts I mentioned are to some degree and in classic rock and roll style known for being “difficult.” This generally amounts to people (mostly men) being angry when their expectation of deference and privilege meets a pissed off twenty-four year old woman with tattoos and rage in her eyes who’s absolutely unimpressed with your suit and tie, knows what she wants, is going to get it, and doesn’t care whether you like it…or who decides to use your show to be among the very first people to publicly speak out about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy by ripping up a photo of a much-beloved Pope on live television, creating a huge controversy and effectively ending a very promising career as a pop singer, simply because you believe it’s the morally right thing to do.
THAT, to me, is rock and roll. More Johnny Cash with his middle finger front and center, less Pat Boone covering Little Richard, please and thank you. See Bill Hicks’ remarks on this point for my general feelings on the matter.
Crow on the other hand is just a little too inside baseball, a little too standard-issue, a little too go-along-to-get-along, for me to feel that gritty, rubber-meet-road je nais se quois that, for me, is fundamental to everything that rock and roll really is. Sorry. I really have no dislike for her (in fact I’ve toyed with the idea of covering “If It Makes You Happy” myself, and I’m sure she’d be great fun to just hang and jam with), but in the end I can’t get past the number one filter for me when considering female rock artists in the particular context of their being female, which was best expressed years ago by Crissy Hynde of the Pretenders: “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not “fuck me,” it’s “fuck you”!” Crow, in spite of being a fairly rare example of a female musician who wasn’t almost or exclusively marketed as a pair of boobs and a furtive aspiration amongst teenage boys, still feels like she falls just a hair too far on the side of “cool kids table” for the 15 year old raging little know it all who hated “poseurs” in me to put her over for this.
I fully recognize that’s likely exactly the reason she’ll get in (and also that it’s not entirely fair of me), if and when she ever does, but that brings us to the whole “really, a rock and roll hall of fame? what’s next, rock against drugs?” conversation and part of the premise of this article is we’re playing along with the core proposition that a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is a thing that should even be, and that as it is it’s more or less a fair representation of who musicians and fans think are the greatest rock artists of all time, and we’re not gonna go there this time because I’m trying to have fun with this…
The Spinners
Another very close call, and probably the most likely “sixth place” pick for me. For those unfamiliar, The Spinners were a vocal soul group in the 60’s through the early 80’s primarily (although a version of the group continues touring to this day), and represent the bridge between the past of doo-wop style harmony groups like the Drifters, the Platters and of Motown vocal groups such as The Supremes, The Four Tops, and The Temptations, and their successors like the Commodores, DeBarge, TLC, Boyz II Men, and even the boy bands from Backstreet to BTS.
I should make it clear that this isn’t merely because the group were influenced by those predecessors and then influenced others; they were part of those predecessors, their history actually beginning in 1954 but their greatest commercial success not happening for another two decades. While their sound became strongly associated with “Philly Soul,” the fact is they hailed from the Detroit suburb of Ferndale and had a pretty heavy disco tinge to their biggest, best-known songs, and ironically spent a big chunk of the first decade and a half of their careers at Motown.
After struggling independently for years and then not really finding great success in a decade at Motown (during which they were often sent to chaperone other artists rather than being used as artists themselves), The Spinners finally hit their groove in 1972 when they signed with Atlantic Records and started working with songwriter Thom Bell, and immediately struck gold with the surprise b-side hit single “I’ll Be Around,” which shot up to number 3 on the Billboard Charts in spite of the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be the song getting airplay – the intended a-side single, “How Could I Let You Get Away,” peaked at 77 – and the group exploded from there to become one of the best known, highest-selling, and truly representatives soul groups of the 1970.
The hits, as I said, exploded after they broke through, and the list is intimidating – “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love,” “One Of A Kind Love Affair,” “Then Came You” (with Dionne Warwick), their last big hits “Cupid” and “Working My Way Back To You” charting in 1980, but probably the song they’re best known for outside of genre fans is their 70’s semi-novelty hit “The Rubberband Man.”
The influence of this band is incalculable, with artists from Bowie and Elton John to Paul Stanley and Tom Morello and Chris Cornell mentioning them as influence and references within their own work. They’re every bit as endemic a part of the world and feelings of the 70’s as were the BeeGees or Styx or Peter Frampton, and they deserve recognition. Unfortunately they’re up against a tremendous class of competitors this year, and with the slate I had in front of me I couldn’t quite get there. If any one of the artists I voted for weren’t on the ballot, The Spinners would likely be my fifth pick…if for no other reason than my vivid memories of watching Wonder Woman and The Muppets do “Rubberband Man.” That’s cultural impact, kids.
Rage Against The Machine
Rage Against The Machine in 2007. Image courtesy Flickr user “Penner” via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Do I even need to explain this? If the only impact Rage Against The Machine had was mainstreaming rap-metal crossovers with their blistering debut album featuring all-time greats like “Killing In The Name Of…” and “Bombtrack,” they’d be well worthy of this accolade, but the fact is that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What Rage did was to define and energize an entirely new era of activism and speaking truth to power, in which the platitudes and calls for civility and decorum were firmly rejected with a rousing chorus of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Harnessing the power of the machine to destroy it while also hitting mainstream rock success with radio-friendly-ish stuff like “Guerilla Radio” and “Bulls On Parade,” Rage have used their platform to scream and aggressively demand social justice since their very first video for “Freedom” featured historical information related to imprisoned (and many say unquestionably framed) Chippewa activist Leonard Peltier and bold-faced on-screen calls for his release over a soundtrack of sneering, angry, and entirely well-founded criticisms of the so-called “freest nation on Earth.”
There’s probably not a standard-configuration rock band on the planet today that more successfully perpetuates and typifies the anti-corporate individualism of the hippie era. While it may be difficult to discern musically, thematically there’s a clear, bright connecting line leading directly from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through Buffalo Springfield and Ritchie Havens and CSNY directly to Rage, with a side trip through every Angry Young Man from Dee Snider to Chuck D along the way.
All of this, coming out of nowhere like a bullet in the head against a backdrop of lingering jingoism and nationalism related to the cold war, America’s emergence as the world’s “only superpower,” and the broadly popular Operation Desert Shield/Storm. At a time when much of the nation were as mindlessly patriotic as we’ve ever been, Rage stood up with a mirror and gave us no choice but to take a good hard look at ourselves.
That their fans have, over the years, included some incredibly right-wing figures who apparently had no idea what the lyrics were saying who later jumped up to express their disappointment at Rage “becoming political,” is just icing on the cake.
Unquestionably a vote for, and it should’ve happened the day they were eligible. “Freedom.” Yeah, right.
Soundgarden
Soundgarden performing at the Fox Theater in Oakland on 16 February 2013. Image courtesy Peter Hess via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
There simply is no one band more emblematic of the “grunge” sound than Soundgarden. Not to take anything away from their friends in Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Mudhoney, Tad, Eleven, and a host of others, mind you, but for folks of a certain generation and cultural context the word “Seattle” evokes mental imagery not of space needles and coffee but of soaring, unearthly howling vocals delivered over weird tunings and time signatures with a dark twist of fatalistic hope and appreciation of the most obscure types of beauty and power found in the most hopeless and helpless places.
I could, and have, and will, write reams just about singer Chris Cornell, but the entire band are absolute masters of their craft. (Personally I think Cornell should be in as a solo artist too.) Kim Thayil does things with the guitar that nobody but the Jimi/mys would ever understand, an absolute riff monster with zero limits or boundaries to the things he makes his instrument do. Drummer (and huge musical influence on yours truly) Matt Cameron is an absolute perfect rhythmic blend of influences from the obvious and expected Peart and Bonham touches to out-of-left-field funk, jazz, and just plain unclassifiable grooves and fills, and the way his tunes and mixes his drums with nearly no resonance or reverb but still manages to get them to thump as hard as anything Bonham ever did is beyond masterful and definitely changed the way I and many other rock drummers approach the instrument. Finally, longest-serving bassist Ben Shepherd holds down the fort at the bottom end with all the steady pound and drive that great anchors like Michael Anthony and Cliff Williams bring to Van Halen and ACDC, but also with the riffing capabilities of a McCartney or Entwhistle. Plus he’s huge fun to watch on stage.
The band taken as a whole is simply mind-boggling. Effortlessly intertwining influences from metal, jazz, soul, and funk with alternate guitar tunings and weird overlapping time signatures (check out the polyrhythmic base of “Mind Riot,” where the verses have the guitars and vocals in 4/4 with the drums in 3/3, coming back together on the “one” every twelve beats), they didn’t just make music but defined it for a generation, every inch of the way in spite of each member’s intense desire to simply make good music without particular regard for commercial success.
The band’s early breakthrough album BadMotorFinger is rock-solid grunge perfection; I’ve often said that “Searching With My Good Eye Closed” (included below) contains absolutely every element of every great rock-metal tune ever written, flawlessly executed from fade-in to fade-out, and probably represents the pinnacle of the form. Then their followup, Superunknown, with its massive hit “Black Hole Sun” brought psychedelia firmly into the computer age. There is simply no excuse for this band not having been in the hall from the moment they were eligible, and the fact that they largely eschew such honors and pageantry is just another argument in their favor. I’d have voted for them in all five slots if I could.
I would also go on about how great this band is forever, if I could, but instead of that I’ll let you enjoy this masterpiece. I dare you to get through it without at least nodding your head along to the groove. Get headphones, turn it up, and strap in: it simply does not get better.
George Michael
George Michael performing in Houston, Tx 1988.
Oh, George Michael, how the years have forced a re-evaluation of you. Back in the day when I was coming up, George was mostly the butt of jokes by anti-establishment comedians like Bill Hicks (who once proposed Michael’s first group Wham! as a possible future contender in the “Let’s Hunt And Kill…” TV game show, right after Billy Ray Cyrus and Rick Astley).
Over time, however, the combination of Michael’s pop appeal and a more matured and developed musical sense elevated him to among the best soul singers of the 90s. Breaking out as a solo act first with the upbeat radio-friendly “Faith,” Michael displayed a great range and depth in deeper cuts (which later rose to prominence), particularly ballads like “Father Figure” and the deeply bluesy “One More Try.”
Michael’s later-career struggles with drugs and fame, including dealing with his bisexuality in public after years of scurrilous speculation, unfortunately tended to overshadow his music in the press, but he quickly evolved into an “old hand” on arena pop stages, collaborating with the usual galaxy of stars (his 1993 collaboration with original artist Elton John on a cover of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” was well-received and very deservedly so) and occasionally stumbling over tabloid scandal until his unfortunate succumbing to what I call “lifestyle poisoning,” in this case an enlarged heart and fatty liver from years of drug and alcohol abuse, at age 53 in 2016.
Because of his association with pop music and the usual workings of that subsection of the business, folks tended to assume Michael was recording songs written by other songwriters but in fact he wrote most of his own material both in Wham! and as a solo artist, and was also a skilled instrumentalist who handled all of the keyboard, bass, and drums on his debut album himself.
Aside from the artistic merits of his talent, Michael was a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights and identity at a time when that was a hugely unpopular and even dangerous thing, choosing to stand and be who he was rather than concede to the pressures of bigotry and hate that dominated the mainstream…again, very much rock and roll by way of attitude, proof the man wasn’t just a performer playing a role.
With all that said, his career just wasn’t quite deep enough or with enough lasting influential impact on the art form as a whole for me to feel like he’s rising to the top two-thirds of this year’s class, so unfortunately I had to pass.
Cyndi Lauper
Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist and LGBT equality advocate and honorary chairperson Cyndi Lauper sings “True Colors” with two youth performers to close the National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day event on May 9, 2012. Five youth performers from across the country were honored at the event for their stories of enhanced resilience following traumatic experiences. Visit www.samhsa.gov/children for more information.
Our next contestant is another artist who was unfairly judged as shallow and transient because of her pop roots and appeal, but who has proved over time to be a consummate professional with a stunning depth of musical knowledge and dynamics. Cyndi Lauper may simultaneously be the most and least predictable entrant this year. From the moment she broke on the scene as a solo act with her 1983 album “She’s So Unusual” and it’s catchy pop feminist anthem “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” Lauper’s wildly colored hair, thrift-shop-tornado style of dress, and unflinching and uncompromising commitment to being her unique self immediately served as a beacon to disaffected and bored teenagers of the affluent early Reagan Eighties, which eventually led to her emergence as a key advocate against homophobia and for safe sex and research in the early days of the AIDS crisis. (Her cheeky, less mainstream anthem, “She Bop,” was infamously – allegedly, I don’t know that Lauper’s ever confirmed it herself -a narrative about masturbation only nominally hidden behind paper-thin euphemisms. It’s also a pretty nifty bit of early 80’s experimental synth-pop, deceptively simple-sounding; I’ve included it below for you to check for yourself.)
Those who wrote her off as just a flash in the pan pop gimmick were thrown a hard curve when Lauper’s popularity proved much more than transient and her talent and skill proved more than sufficient to the task of validating her positive public reception. Her sophomore album “True Colors” featured a title track of that rare stripe that genuinely earns the title of “instant classic.” (Having it drilled into our heads by a decade of Kodak commercials probably didn’t hurt either!) Over the years her work on everything from Broadway show tunes to jazz standards has continued to delight and amaze, and every step of the way she’s never stopped being her essential self, this “weird little chick from Ohzoan Pawk” with the high squeaky voice, doing her happy colorful best to bring a little fun and beauty into the world and being a wonderful human being by any definition.
As the frosting on the cake, she’s always been extremely vocal and active in her support and advocacy of marginalized groups including the LGBTQ community, abused kids, and more, and again is just one of those rare people that you almost never hear an unkind word about from her peers either publicly or in “green room” chatter.
A nomination well earned, and she’s got my vote.
Missy Elliott
Frankly this is probably my least favorite nominee of this year’s class. Not to say I don’t dig her stuff or hate on her in the least, I just feel like there are a lot of women who have done more, gone further, and helped paved the roads Ms. Elliott started walking in the 90’s who remain unrecognized, like Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, or even Salt-n-Pepa. Worthy of induction? Probably, in the big picture, but I think she’s got some folks to get in line behind.
That said she’s sold forty million albums, was instrumental in the highly influential Swing Mob collective, and brought Timbaland to the world. She’s legit and well due her props. I just think there are better potential nominees reflecting the vital role of female rappers who I’d rather see get the nod first.
Willie Nelson
Is there anyone in the western hemisphere who need to be told who Willie Nelson is or why he deserves to take his spot in the Rock Hall next to his colleagues like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee?
Willie Nelson and several friends with President Jimmy Carter, 1978. The woman to Nelson’s immediate right is fellow country music singer Jesse Colter.
Nelson would arguably be a reasonable inductee if his career had ended before his first album, having written the staples “Hello Walls” for Faron Young and “Crazy” for Patsy Cline before he was ever taken seriously as a performer by record labels, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the reasons Nelson has likely been overlooked by the Rock Hall for so long is likely that he’s often seen primarily as a country artist, in spite of the fact that critics have been observing that he’s far more than just that for fifty years, particularly after “Always On My Mind” became a hit for Elvis Presley. After hooking up with Waylon Jennings at the Opry in the mid-1960s Nelson embarked on his “outlaw country” journey, refining (or perhaps one would better say “unrefining,” a similar path taken by his contemporaries comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor around the same time in the mid to late 1960s) his image from blazer-and-tie standard-issue country artists of the early 60s to the rough-riding dusty laid-back rope-smoker we know and love today.
After making the first stab at a country-themed concept album in the mid-70s with “The Red-Headed Stranger,” Nelson’s next release “Stardust” featured a collection of jazz and blues standards including the title track and an extraordinarily well-received cover of “Georgia On my Mind.” Throughout this period, Nelson continued collaborating with Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and other artists, eventually joining those two and Johnny Cash in an extraordinarily successful quartet called The Highwaymen, with whom he’d spend about a decade from the mid-80s to mid-90s among other work.
Included in that “other work” was the creation in 1985 of Farm Aid. Inspired by the 1985 Live Aid concert to help with famine in Ethiopia, Nelson along with John Mellencamp and Neil Young, got together and staged the first Farm Aid concert in late 1985. While organizers initially believed a single show would be enough to get the job done, they admitted later that they had woefully underestimated the complexity and scope of challenges facing American family farmerss, and the show became an irregularly scheduled ongoing event, almost-but-not-quite-annually, and has now been staged thirty-four times in the last thirty-eight years, with the thirty-fifth announced but not yet scheduled for 2023 and set to feature Nelson, Young, and Mellencamp along with current Farm Aid directors Dave Matthews and Margo Price and further acts TBA later this year.
With hundreds of songwriting credits to his name spanning across seven decades and two centuries there are few artists alive or dead who have had a bigger impact on rock and roll, and to this day Nelson remains a fan and performer of rock, recording (as one example) a stellar cover of Pearl Jam’s hit “Just Breathe” with son Lukas in 2012 (included below).
It’s honestly ludicrous that Nelson wasn’t in the hall thirty years ago, and long past time that oversight was corrected. Happy to cast my vote for him.
Joy Division + New Order
This is where I’m going to get in trouble with people, because the truth is this band have never resonated with me, at all, even a little tiny bit. As far as I can tell their most significant contribution to Rock and Roll was that t-shirt. I mean no disrespect to the tragically departed Ian Curtis nor to the rest of the band, I’m sure they’re all competent and exceptional musicians to have the careers they’ve had. But I’ve never heard a song by them that made me want to hear it again or cover it, including “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and while it may relate more to the way my life has subjectively intersected with their fan base, they seem primarily to me an act whose success is predicated mostly on people who like to impress other people with how edgy and alternative they are by name-checking a 45 year old British punk band.
Good band? Sure, I’ve got nothing against them on that level, just not my style per se. But objectively, listening to their music and looking for the things that I believe make great rock and roll, I just can’t merit the suggestion they belong in the Rock Hall at all. There are dozens of acts more worthy (and I’m not even under consideration so again, I’m not trying to generally crap on them as an act), whose contributions were more clear, substantive, and resonant, and I just don’t feel like putting them in the hall representing the punk wing before bands like X, the Germs, Devo, Bad Brains, MC5, and Black Flag makes a whole lot of sense from a perspective of “what impact did this artist have on music?” The Germs alone ended up squeezing out bits of everything from the GoGo’s (Belinda Carlisle was an early bassist and huge advocate) to Foo Fighters (Germs guitarist Pat Smear famously launched a whole new career as the guitarist for Nirvana and the Foos), and I just don’t hear that much impact musically from JD+NO that to me would rate their inclusion in the Rock Hall over that pedigree among many others.
Even if you set the “punk” aside and focus on the “new wave” elements, there are tons of acts more deserving of a place in the Hall who don’t have one, including seminal influencers like Simple Minds, Brian Eno, Depeche Mode, INXS, the Psychedelic Furs, Madness or The Smiths, just off the top of my head.
Sorry if that hurts feelings but there you have it, I’m sure not all of you think Chris Cornell is the king of all rock either.
Again, I’m not saying the band sucks or even that the fact they don’t resonate with me personally is a meaningful criterion for exclusion. I honestly can’t really stand the Smiths and Morrissey either, never did a thing for me, but I can recognize their influence and talent objectively and wouldn’t object to their inclusion if Morrissey would stop being a drama queen and just play the songs that people love out of respect for the people who love them, that being literally the only reason they weren’t inducted on at least two different occasions (2008 and 2014 if I remember right).
Objectively from decades of listening to other musicians across all genres talk about who they’ve been influenced by there are at least two dozen bands who fit comfortably into this slot and merit it far more, and that means for me there’s a long, long list of folks I want to see in the Hall before I’m interested in voting for Joy Division, New Order, or both separately or together.
The White Stripes
Finally we come to our last entrant, the White Stripes. Of all the bands I didn’t vote for this year, this one made me feel worst. I really enjoy Jack White’s playing and the Stripes stuff. The guy’s got crazy tone for days, just an absolutely insane experimenter with his sounds and production tactices, and I have absolutely zero problem with the idea that the Stripes are a great band and that Jack White is absolutely on a level that it’s completely reasonable to film an entire movie that’s just him, Jimmy Page, and The Edge sitting around shredding and talking about music.
Also in White’s favor (and the band’s by extension) is his obvious depth and sincerity of his love for the art. His intense absorption of influences very much reminds me of watching how the playing of the big British blues guys were influenced by American blues and then turned it around and inside out and learned to find their own blues and bring it out the other side having taken nothing away from nor given any slight their influences. Definitely another of those “musician’s musician” types…
…and that’s part of the problem. In spite of moving some units, to most music fan’s White’s still best known for “Seven Nation Army” and I feel like that’s about it in the minds of most music fans who are aware of him at all. Their loss to be sure, but like I said before, it is a fan vote, and that means a popularity contest, and I just don’t see the Stripes making that cut. Additionally, I feel like in spite of his very forward-thinking approach to his work the broad mainstream impact, either directly through commercial success or indirectly through influence, just doesn’t rise yet to Hall Of Fame levels. If it was a musician’s or guitarist’s hall of fame I’d vote for him without hesitation, but this is a little different animal, and there’s more than just your talent and skill that have to be considered; how many people even know who you are is also important, as is what the average music fan has to say about where you fit in their head. Taking those less-musical points into consideration, and given the field at hand, I couldn’t quite make the stretch this time.
You may also notice that in spite of the nomination being for “The White Stripes,” my remarks have been almost exclusively about Jack White. That’s not because I have any disdain for Meg White nor think poorly of her in any way, I’m just not finding much in my head to say about her one way or the other. She’s a good, steady drummer, but that’s also all – not any huge innovations or weird experimentations with time signatures or cross-genre grooves or anything like that. She seems like good people and I feel almost as bad about not having more to say in her praise and defense as I do about not voting for the band in the first place.
All that said I still didn’t vote for them, but if it’s any consolation, I really do feel bad about it and am happy to apologize to Mr. White in person at any time. (Rumor is he owns a place within ten or fifteen miles of where I sit.)
In Conclusion…
That wraps it up for the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Fan Vote. I hope you’ve found it interesting and informative. Definitely looking forward to hearing what you all think in the comments and on social media. Who did you vote for? Why? What do you think of my votes and reasoning, do I have my tone-deaf head up my butt or should I be getting a phone call from Spin this week? Did you learn anything new, did anything I put out there maybe give you pause for thought? Tell us in the comments and let’s fight about it!
A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.
Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.
2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…
If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.
Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.
Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.
But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.
“C’mon now, who do you think you are? Hah! Bless your soul… You really think you’re in control?”
Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”
Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.
These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.
I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.
But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.
Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.
Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.
As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”
People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.
The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.
The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.
I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.
That’s pretty nuts.
Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.
Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.
The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.
The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.
Now ask yourself this question:
Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?
I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.
What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.
I have written pretty often over the years about conspiracies and conspiracy theorists and all that comes with them. (I know, bad form to not have hyperlinks, but as I write this I’m curating and don’t have anything at hand; I’m sure I’ll end up republishing something as I come across it going through my archives.)
There are some problems that I haven’t really talked about much, though, and that we don’t really talk about much, related to conspiracies and reality and abuses of power. On social media, a friend wrote:
“At what point will society treat conspiracy theorists for the mental illnesses they clearly have??”
This provoked a lot of thought, from multiple directions…and as usual, the direction my thoughts came from are a little different from any of the mainstream pro or con, and I thought it was worth discussing at length.
The first direction of my thought is that there are some issues with conspiracy theory that we don’t talk about enough. The biggest is that some events originally written off as conspiracy theory have proven true over the years: government mind-control programs; cover-ups of UFO encounters; poor black men given deadly diseases and left untreated for observation by the government without their knowledge or consent; the trading of arms to designated terrorist nations in exchange for hostages through a group of middlemen who were also in the middle of an ongoing coup attempt in central America…just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, right?
If we’re going to look down our nose and pooh-pooh conspiracy theorists – and quite often that’s the only reasonable response – we have to take a hard look at that reality. Otherwise, to whatever extent any of us knee-jerk a dismissive response to a conspiracy theory simply because it sounds implausible or violates our biases, we are vulnerable to manipulation, disinformation, and deceit – if in no other way than by omission.
So before we talk about how to apply our critical thinking skills to trying to get a handle on when something over the top might not be as far over as you think, let’s take a quick look at a few “wild conspiracy theories” that turned out to be anything but.
The Bad News
We all love to either laugh off a “crazy conspiracy theory” or dive right into it just to see how crazy it is, but sometimes it turns out things aren’t so crazy as they seemed on the surface. Here are a few prominent examples; I’ve included the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, and links, for each. All of the links should be live as well; as is the case with all wiki footnotes, they’ll link to a reference at the bottom of the main page, and you can go check it out yourself.
Project MKUltra – CIA doses people with LSD without their knowledge, and more fun. “Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of which were illegal.[1][2][3] Experiments on humans were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The project was organized through the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.[4] Other code names for drug-related experiments were Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke.[5][6]” (I’ve long had a low-key suspicion my dad was involved in this as a subject while a young Marine in the early 60’s, but he wouldn’t have said either way, if a) he was and b) he knew about it. He took his oaths pretty seriously.)
Then there’s the Tuskegee Experiment: “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male[1][2][3] (informally referred to as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male,” the “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” or the “Tuskegee Experiment”) was an ethically abusive study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).[4][5] The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. Although the African-American men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States, they were not.[6]” In short, they gave a bunch of black guys syphilis and let ’em run around with it for four decades, living their lives, and told them only that they were getting free government health care. Not only are the obvious problem obvious, but y’all wonder why poor black people don’t trust the government and medicaid. Literally sold these guys a story they were getting free health care from Uncle Sam, and not only used them as lab rats but sent them out into the world to infect others, all without knowing it. Our government did that.
These are all real things that really happened, and every one of them was dismissed for years as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory, something that simply could not be happening and no reasonable person would believe.
And yet…
But Wait, There’s More!
It goes on and on, right? You’ve got the Edith Wilson presidency, in which the wife of the President – who married him after he was elected as a widower, mind you – assumed the duties of his office without the slightest hint of or attempt at public consent or approval, after president Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke in October of 1919. Between then and January 1921, his wife – unelected, unannounced, unacknowledged, and with all the bravery and spirit and not a jot or tittle of legal or moral authority – assumed the duties of the presidency.
Say, have you heard about radium? GREAT for the skin!
Then there’s the cancer-causing properties of cigarettes. Most folks know that in the mid-20th century before official science linking lung cancer and tobacco use was established the tobacco industry did such insane things as hiring doctors to sell cigarettes. What many don’t know is that even into the late 1970’s – over a decade after the US Surgeon General had established the requirement of a health warning on all cigarette and cigar packaging – international tobacco companies conspired at the highest levels to minimize, hide, and obfuscate the health risks of smoking from the general public for the sake of maintaining their lucrative and addicted market share. I want to note here that I have distinct and reliable memories of some pretty questionable metrics around the “truth.org” anti-smoking ads that the tobacco companies were forced to create after the big class action settlement back in the ’90s. I’m having difficulty finding that information now, and it may be apocryphal, or the problem wasn’t as big as I remembered, or it was one of those jokes that got out of hand. (“Say, these anti-smoking commercials make me want a cig! Hahahah!” “Yeah hahahaha hey wait…”)
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident that started the Vietnam War is particularly interesting because of the way they used a legitimate incident to fabricate a second, more serious one that was then used as a premise to pursue military escalation, eventually leading to lots of dead kids, lots of rich military contractors, and lots of deformed Vietnamese babies (do not google “agent orange birth defects” if you’re not prepared to have nightmares. I’m not linking any relevant content; the hint is enough).
Then there’s the abandoned – thank $DEITY – Operation Northwoods, in which the US government proposed launching “terrorist” attacks against itself and blaming Cuba as a precept for war against that country. Of course the one most of us are most familiar with, the Iran-Contra affair in which the United States Government sold military equipment to sanctioned and open US opponent/critic Iran to fund the radical right-ring insurgent Contras in Nicaragua. Some of that entanglement also provided the pathway for the CIA to fund – whether intentionally or not remains an open question – a significant portion of the incoming crack cocaine in the 1980s, the devastating effects of which are still being felt. Nearly every word of those two sentences is a federal crime. The most instrumental person in those crimes, Oliver North, is now a well-known TV talking head who often tells us what we should think about the military, government, and ethics.
Many poor black people had claimed for years the feds were in on the crack situation and were blown off as…well, crackpots. Turned out they were right. As were the hippies and black radicals of the sixties who were accused of paranoia and fantasy when they told people they were being infiltrated and even directed by outside elements, probably the government.
And that’s not even the biggest fish in the barrel…
The Mother Of All Bullshit
Then we come to what I think of as the Big Daddy of them all, probably because it’s significant in my lifetime: the whole process by which we first sold biological and chemical weapons, fabrication equipment (and I mean entire factories), and even satellite intelligence which they then used to bomb the Kurds…and we then spent two decades destabilizing the region and (again!) inflating the bank accounts of military contractors at the unnecessary cost of hundreds of thousands of lives innocent or otherwise.
Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld meet in 1983, shortly after Rumsfeld as US Special Envoy to Iraq under the Reagan Administration pressured the State Department to normalize relations with Iraq sufficient to allow the sale of chemical and biological weapon components. Source video.
This one really fascinates me because we literally had public congressional hearings about it in which we seriously dragged out the receipts for things we sold to Iraq like botulism, anthrax, and a host of other nasties. You have Donald Rumsfeld, who would later become Secretary of Defense, unilaterally lobbying to have Iraq removed from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring nations in the early 1980’s as a specical envoy on behalf of the Reagan Administration. This allowed MIC profiteers – who in what I’m sure is just a giant coincidence also happened to be among the largest contributors to the political campaigns of Reagan and his allies – to sell various fun bits of weaponry to Iraq under the ruse of being “dual-use,” for instance how you can use Anthrax bacteria for agricultural research. The missile fabrication and guidance systems as well as the military intelligence they used to deliver their research projects to the Kurds also had, I imagine, some just barely plausible “other” application.
Now keep in mind this is all happening while we’re also equipping the Iranians, who are at war with the Iraqis and between whom the Kurds are largely stuck, with the equipment to prosecute their war against Iraq. We literally sold the weapons to both sides bumping up against the Iran-Contra scandal mentioned earlier. And that’s not even where it gets craziest.
During the first Gulf War, there was a problem with veterans exhibiting various sorts of symptoms consistent with exposure to biological or chemical agents. There were big ol’ congressional hearings about it, which included a stunning parade of the receipts from our deals with Iraq, some of which continued even after the end of the first Gulf War.
This, we discovered in 1993 during the congressional investigation into what was called “Gulf War Syndrome.” Included in the final report (colloquially called “The Riegle Report” after US Sen. Donald T. Riegle, who chaired the investigation) was a list of nasty little bits of stuff that will curdle your blood if you read it – the very same stuff that we first “suspected” had been “discharged” during Gulf War I, and then we “just knew” that Iraq had, and had used to “gas their own people,” as the precept to the second.
How did we know? It’s like Bill Hicks said, and exactly like that: We looked at the receipts. We sold that stuff to him. That’s how we knew so bad that he had it. We sold it to him, taught him how to use it, taught him how to make more, handed him a big stack of information screaming “THERE’S THE KURDS RIGHT THERE DON’T GO DOING ANYTHING TO THOSE PEOPLE YOU HATE WITH THOSE DEADLY FARM RESEARCH PROJECTS WE GAVE YOU” and then he did and we said “how dare you gas your own people you bastard” and killed him.
Not the story you were probably taught in school, if you’re young enough for this to have been history for you and not ongoing reality.
So one of the genuine problems with conspiracy theories is sometimes they turn out to be legit, and this just feeds the crazier stuff, and you never get to the juicy center of anything until it’s too late.
Maybe…that’s not an accident?
Meta-Conspiracy
I want to be clear at the outset that I’m not asserting anything here, just making some observations. Let I have to deal with the comment section going “hur hur you think there’s a conspirserary.”
But, consider.
The Bigfoots and Loch Ness Monsters, the alien abductions and crop circles, the shadowy men on a shadowy planet lurking in the shadows doing shadowy things and who knows what shadowy evil lurks in their shadowy hearts why The Shadow knows…do you ever wonder how that stuff helps invalidate and discredit legitimate information, like some of the things we talked about earlier?
The truth is out there, and usually much less boring than you’d hoped…but not always.
Because when you lump “giving black people free syphilis” and “literally selling weapons to both sides of a war and illegally in both cases at that” in with the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil, it becomes pretty easy to dismiss that stuff, doesn’t it? People right now think the coronavirus is a conspiracy. Most people – especially most white people – don’t realize that whole “CIA created the crack epidemic” thing is legit and proven, and at least one journalist was probably murdered for proving it.
Is it reasonable to assert that there are people out there deliberately keeping us distracted with nonsense and goofiness to both discredit genuine and well-founded concerns about abuses of power and to occupy our minds and keep us distracted from the “real enemy?” Probably not; there’s no evidence of it except the results. And, as one of my heroes George Carlin pointed out, it doesn’t require a formal, organized, overt conspiracy for people of like interests, like backgrounds, like social connections, and so forth to come to similar conclusions about the best way to protect those interests at the expense of others.
But isn’t it kind of funny we still think of the FBI infiltrating student groups, alien butt probes, the burning of the Koresh compound, Bigfoot, the MOVE bombing, Batboy, and the murder of Fred Hampton all in the same kind of general basket?
More to the point, isn’t it kind of funny that we don’t notice this more, talk about it more? And that’s what brings us to the last part of this conversation
How Can You Know?
We’re left then with one fundamental and disturbing question: for any given bit of information, how can we know what the truth really is?
Fortunately, although education has suffered greatly in the US over the last forty years (and maybe that’s a conspiracy too!), we still have the tools at hand to somewhat reliably weed our way through some of this stuff. Here are a few points for you to consider when weighing the evidence on any given questionable proposition:
Is there objectively verifiable proof? – one way or the other, what are the facts as best as you can determine them?
Have you checked your biases? – the number one place you can stop a bad or baseless theory in its tracks is with you not repeating it. Ask yourself why you want to support or oppose a given proposition. That’s not to say having a bias is bad; everyone does, whether they’re aware of it and honest about it or not. The point isn’t to “make sure you don’t have a bias.” The point is to make sure you’re identifying your biases and factoring them honestly in your critical thinking processes, and that very much includes making sure you apply the same degree of skepticism and analysis to things you like hearing as you do to things you don’t.
“Follow the money.” – don’t necessarily take this literally, or even as just a basic metaphor. Consider who benefits and who gets hurt if you do or don’t believe something. Consider whether anyone – a group, individual, vested interest – is pressuring you to feel one way or the other about it. Understand what people’s interests are, and what your own are, so you can understand the potential motivations for disinformation
Don’t get distracted. – consider that in any given situation, what you’re seeing as the dominant narrative or focus may be taking attention away from something that actually deserves that level of attention and isn’t getting it.
Common sense – the aphorisms all apply: if it sounds too good to be true it probably is, be wary of appeals to irrelevant biases like sex appeal or national pride or identity in an ethic, sexual, gender, religious, age, or other demographic
Get the tools! – Especially if you’re under 40 or so in the US, you probably didn’t get all the tools you need for good, clear evaluation of information sources in high school, and maybe even in college if you didn’t take a lot of communication-related courses.
One of the very best contemporary tools I can recommend is Robert Cialdini’s “Influence.” You should see an affiliate link (meaning I get a little bit if you order through that link) near this paragraph to the 6th edition on Amazon; at the time of this writing that edition is planned for release in a few weeks – the first substantial update since 5e in 2008 – but it’s not yet on the market. The previous edition was an excellent book used as a text for a class I took on social persuasion and influence in 2012, and it’s really fascinating – and more than a little scary sometimes – not only how susceptible we can be to compliance-gaining tactics, but how that remains true even when we know better. Again, you end up at that mirror. Cialdini’s “Influence” is a widely known and applied set of tools in the world of advertisers, marketers, MBAs, behavioral psychologists, sociologists, and more, and when you understand those tools and how they’re applied, you can see them everywhere. Many of us don’t even know we’re doing it when we are.
There are many resources to help develop your critical thinking and analytical skills out there, but for a single-book, reasonably easy to read and understand, that will rattle your preconceptions and get you thinking hard about what you’re doing, I can’t recommend anything more highly.
Conclusion
In the end there can be no question that media and information literacy, including the ability to parse through multiple meta-layers of disinformation and misinformation, will be critical life skills. Not all “propaganda” has a malicious motive; not all causes relying on noble motivations have noble motives.
That last part starts getting, again, into the question of the ongoing real-time, high-speed, self-aware evolution of the species to which I frequently refer in my writing and shows. For most of our history we’ve habitually reduced key questions to binary propositions – yes or no, black or white, up or down.
For the last few hundred years we’ve set the stage through philosophy and other endeavors for the elevation, wholesale, of the nature of our thinking to encompass a more spectral, multi-dimensional approach that is more in tune with the way the universe really functions, including understanding ideas like “place” and “purpose” in more effective and meaningful ways. I believe the near future of the species includes coming to real terms with concepts like compromise – what sort of behavior outside the norm are we willing to tolerate from our heroes, for example? Compare and contrast the cases of Gary Glitter and Jimmy Page and ask why one man has a career, and the other doesn’t, and whether that’s ethically legitimate. Don’t forget to get Lori’s perspective on the question.
Difficult and thorny questions that have a chance of not really leaving us feeling great no matter which way we go. But that’s what we’ve been equipping ourselves to handle for the last umpteen decades with literature and art and poetry and philosophy and the considerations of the Questions of the Ages.
Now we go from studying all this philosophy to truly applying it, so hitch up your getalong and dig in, kids, because it’s going to be a bumpy, confusing, and sometimes scary ride, but when it’s over you’ll be coming out into a much brighter world.
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