The tragedy of John McCain

Anybody who knows me even a little can probably vouch for my status and an unabashed liberal. I will pretty much automatically vote for whoever the Democrat is in any statewide or national election, although if I had my way we might actually get stuck with a President Kucinich.

But I actually feel a little bit sorry for John McCain.

It's not that he's waited so long for his chance and now appears to be on his way to defeat (although, by the way, let's not count our chickens before they hatch here, we still have to go vote for Obama tomorrow for him to win). It's that even if he does win, he's given himself over so thoroughly to the demons of Rove-style right wing politics.

The lesson that McCain took from George W. Bush's victories was apparently that playing to the base (and/or the lowest common denominator) wins, especially if you do so in the lowest, crudest, most misleading, and plainly insulting manner possible. Bush sunk McCain in the 2000 primaries with the most shamelessly sleazy campaign ever seen, and McCain, having absorbed this information, has been applying it to his 2008 campaign against Obama, robo-calls and all.

What he didn't realize was that Bush's victories in the general elections were by fractional margins (the national margin in 2004 was 2.4%, and of course he famously didn't even win the popular vote in 2000), against Democratic opponents far less organized and less convincing than Obama, in times less turbulent than now. So while Rove politics did edge out Kerry in 2004 (the Swift Boat controversy comes to mind, although that was not strictly from the Bush campaign), in 2008 the entire economy damn near collapsed, and McCain's campaign is still flailing about hoping that people are going to care about Obama's "involvement" with William Ayers that happened 7 years ago. Obama has clear, agreeable messages about tax reform and the economy, and McCain has Joe Biden's words taken out of context against images of rallies and soldiers in Arabic countries. Obama speaks for crowds of tens of thousands of people, and McCain acts as if Obama's massive popularity and eminent likability is somehow a negative trait.

It would be just another dirty campaign run by a Republican, except for the fact that McCain is actually NOT just another Republican. McCain's nauseating repetition of the word "maverick" is actually justified by his actions in the Senate. He has consistently stood up to his party, worked for smart bipartisan compromises, and shows a willingness to listen and learn that Bush would probably find foolish (this is a compliment). He's stubbornly resisted the extreme right wing of his party, taking moderate (and, dare I say, liberal) stances in the past on abortion, campaign finance, and immigration, among others. He's the one who publicly called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance." He was still pretty solidly conservative, but he was the type of conservative I could actually respect, even if I'd never vote for him.

And now here he is, at the tail end of a campaign marked by misleading statements and outright lies, fearmongering, anti-intellectualism, subtle racism, hypocrisy, and, of course, Sarah fucking Palin, the ultimate physical manifestation of ignorance, and for what? If McCain loses, he can't flip a switch and go back to the McCain who was in the Senate in 2000, pretending that he hasn't done what he's done and said what he's said for the past year and a half. If he wins, he's bound to the far right wing of the Republican party that will have put him there, which means no pro-choice Supreme court justices, no immigration reform, and no courting the Democrat-controlled Congress with the reasonable compromises that are his specialty. Win or lose, John McCain has sold his soul.

All of which is to say...

Vote Obama.

"hockey moms" are the new "NASCAR dads"

There's been a lot of talk lately about Sarah Palin, and I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about her by now, so I just have two quick questions about her that I don't think anybody else has asked so far, and then we can all move on to bigger and better things:

1. Is she related to the Monty Python guy?

2. How many moose has she fucked, and is this more or less than the average Alaskan?

Hopefully we can get this all cleared up, and she can resume her campaign against Barack Obama to become the next president.

I'm just not sure about the speech this guy MacCane gave last night. He sure did talk a lot about himself. I don't think it's going to benefit Sarah Palin very much in the polls.

Lucky Old Sun's got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day...

You know, I think among my friends, my undying devotion to/worship of Brian Wilson is well-known enough that they would probably joke, on the subject of Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun, which was released on CD today, that I probably heard it over a year ago. And in this case, that would almost be true, as the work was premiered as a whole by Brian and his band live in September 2007, and I had it shortly thereafter through the magic of internet distributed bootlegs.

I stopped in my favorite record store to buy it anyway today, of course, and, like with Smile (although in an altogether more low-key fashion), I avoided listening to the studio versions until I could pop in the CD and hear the whole thing all at once. Actually, I was only mildly excited to hear it, as I had decided based on the bootleg that That Lucky Old Sun was a pleasant but inconsequential bookend to Brian Wilson's life and career.

Then I actually listened to the damn thing, and man, I forgot how much I really do love that man's music. A good handful of the songs are middling and forgettable, but every so often an amazing melody or harmony jumps out of the speakers, and it just floors me. And the songs that are really good are breathtaking, on par with anything he did 40 years ago.

Speaking of which, holy shit, "Can't Wait Too Long" is on the album! He's been sitting on that one for 41 years, actually.

Anyway, it is a pleasant bookend to Brian's career, but not inconsequential. The symbolic values are enormous, maybe even more than his final vanquishing of his Smile demons. With That Lucky Old Sun, Brian returns to his love of California, the only home he's ever known, invoking specific memories of his past with an agreeable nostalgia. Brian has conquered his demons, made peace with himself, and is finally learning to enjoy life. Not bad for a guy who probably should have been dead several decades ago.

At this point in his career, though, everything about Brian Wilson has a huge symbolic value. The references in the lyrics to "Summer '61" (when the Beach Boys formed), how Brian "turned out the lights" at age 25 (when the Smile debacle occurred), or had "a dream singing with my brothers in harmony" (a reference to his deceased brothers and former bandmates Carl and Dennis) would be typical lyrical oddities for any other artist, but out of the mouth of Brian Wilson, they're almost insider references, nods to the people paying attention who "get it."

But maybe I'm thinking too much. At it's simplest, That Lucky Old Sun is a fine example of sunny California pop from the man who invented the genre.

AMERRRRICA

If this isn't a sign that MCain has no chance this fall, I don't know what is. God that is incredibly confusing.

My favorite part of that article might actually be the phrase "while promoting his new movie 'Beer for My Horses'..."

keepin' the spirit alive

a mildly amusing momentary diversion

Click on "edit - paste" in your browser thing and be amazed at the weird non-sequitur of seeing the last stream of text that you copied with your computer without any context. Especially fun if you haven't used the feature for several days.

I just did it and got this: Neil Hamburger

fuck

You know, I have to admit, I think the new Coldplay album is pretty good.

Then again, I've always been partial to Coldplay. For a guy who is as much of a bullshit indie/elitist/hipster/asshole or whatever as I probably am to stick with them through an album as mind-numbingly boring as X & Y (christ, even the title is boring), and sit through a million irritating iPod commercials with Chris Martin doing his Bono/Jesus thing, and still run out to buy Viva la Viva or Death and All His Friends the first week it was out... well, I think that's some kind of devotion.

See, I know that the days of Parachutes are long over, and I'm never going to see them again in a place as small as the 9:30 Club (and I'm certainly not going to be ever to wait after a show and meet them again), but I think these four dorky British dudes still have some great potential. The first two times I saw them (before they started touring on increasingly mediocre material) were some of the most energetic and enthusiastic performances I've ever seen. I've never seen a band that seemed so genuinely amazed that a room full of people would ever be so into their music. I left those shows feeling almost as good as I did leaving Flaming Lips and Polyphonic Spree shows, and without the impressive spectacle of those two acts. Coldplay were never going to smash their instruments onstage after a show, but even if singing along with a room full of people as one voice to a song as pretty as "Yellow" sounds irredeemably lame, well, don't knock it until you've tried it.

The thing is, Coldplay eventually became a club act stuck playing in basketball arenas, where their contagious enthusiasm is muddled, and their music started playing the part as well, reaching for the stars but somehow always gazing down at the charmingly befuddled navel of Chris Martin, and all of those U2 comparisons seemed depressingly apt. The difference was that before U2 became bigger than Jesus, they were an angry group of punks (and Boy and War will always be great testaments to the glorious righteousness that was), whereas Coldplay have always been more reflective, even insecure.

All of which is to say that X & Y was a tedious mess, and deserved every negative word thrown at it. What makes Viva la Vida so interesting is that it is a de facto apology for its predecessor. Hiring Brian freaking Eno of all people to produce isn't going to make the U2 comparisons go away any time soon, but the new album is so engaging because it's the first time Coldplay have sounded unpredictable since A Rush of Blood to the Head followed the subdued Parachutes with the clamorous pounding of "Politik." There are abrupt mid-song shifts, songs that abruptly segue into the next song, sounds foreign to any previous incarnation of Coldplay, hip-hop beats combined with huge church organs, waves of trademark Eno-scapes. It's an album full of songs that sound like they were written by real human beings, and if that seems like a small compliment, it's not something that could be said of their last album. The "huge arena rock" sound hasn't gone away, but it's been incorporated into something interesting.

In short, it's engaging pop music, and often pretty damn gorgeous too. It's not exactly great, but there isn't a song on it that I find myself skipping, and it's at least a step in the right direction for the band, a sign that they might still have a masterpiece in them.