Reductio ad Zeitgeist

Wikipedia:

Zeitgeist (German pronunciation: [ˈtsaɪtɡaɪst] ( listen)) (from German Zeit- time and Geist- spirit) is "the spirit of the times" and/or "the spirit of the age." Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, and sociocultural direction or mood of an era (similar to the English word mainstream or trend).

The spirit of the 90s may be summed up in two pieces of pop culture: Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Fight Club.  Listen to that song and watch that movie and you can pretty much understand the entire decade in terms of fashion, attitude, prevailing mores, etc.

Now that the Noughties are just about over, it’s time to take stock, to think them through, and then reduce their rich and varied contributions to our American cultural heritage down to a song and a movie.

Song of the Decade

Geez, this song is responsible for about fifteen million mortal musical sins.  Seriously, the She Wants Chemical Fallout at the Disco to Mars brain trust has obliterated the musical palate of an entire generation trying to make just one song half as good as Mr. Brightside.  It’s all here, kids.  The self-absorbed, tortured, love-sick 28 yr. old adolescent bears all on top of throwback 80’s synth and a dance beat.  Catchy, cold, brooding: like Duran Duran and Peter Schilling grow up listening to Nirvana and Sunny Day Real Estate.  What really channels the Noughties, though, is the feeling, that, despite the deep emotional scars, Mr. Flowers will have no confrontation, no catharsis, no nothing.  It’s as if the last lyric of the song, “I never…” really ought to be extended to, “I never do a goshdarn thing to fix any of my problems!  Bartender?  Another Michelob Ultra, please; I have a feeling I’ll be here for a while.”

Great.  On to…

Movie of the Decade

And, in the movie department, thanks, Wes Anderson, not only for making #3 on my all-time favorite movie list, but also for getting Noughties alienation and family just right.  In Tenenbaums, the dysfunction so endlessly decried in 90s alt. rock has become a virtue.  Familial loyalty has become salvific, and, it is worth mentioning, “family” has been extended beyond in-laws to include friends, enemies, and even the guy who’s screwing your wife (who is sometimes all three at once).  And, in a prophetic coup de grace, Luke Wilson’s attempted suicide scene pre-figures not only the suicide attempt of his brother Owen, but also the successful suicide of Elliot Smith, whose song “Needle in the Hay” is playing in the background.  It’s like the 90s went on a cocaine binge, got lost in the middle of the city at 4:42 AM, and fell all over themselves.

You may leave your dissent (or your effusion, as is probably more likely) in the comments.

Fiddling

A Haitian orphan in the aftermath of the earthquake:

A bumper sticker I just saw on the road:

Fail.

Get your own awesome Adopt sticker here.  Seriously, the dogs of the world need your help.

Technorati Tags: Haiti,earthquake,adoption,dogs,pets

In which his trusty fiddle channels the soul of Kappa Alpha

Dude. That English major you set me up with totally freaked me out. She was all in to me "reading more" so she made me waste two hours reading the first chapter of this book Hooking Up. It was way more lame than I expected, but whatever. And no, before you ask, of course I'm not answering her texts because I am way over it. But that's not my point. This guy Wolfe's book was all sounding the alarm because the sexual revolution might be bad for women because he had learned about "hooking up." Kind of freaked me out, you know? I was like, is this the stuff these chicks are starting to read? And are they getting it? I mean, the book was 2001 so I figured it was probably too old for too many girls to be interested, but damn. See, Wolfe was predicting that hooking up might make women unhappy. Yeah, yeah, who cares, right? But still, better if they're not thinking about this stuff, you know?

Thank God the New York Times is on the case. They're all like, the problem isn't the death of time-honored traditions which have been evolutionarily tested over ten thousand years of human civilization. Hell no! It's math and economics:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent [of males making up the student body], there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

Can't beat the numbers! See, Tom Wolfe, you crotchety old hack, there's nothing these poor little biddies can do! Dude, the Times is so badass! Them and their friends, Bro, they're like a fleet of wingmen all flying in the name of science.

[T]here’s currently a buyer’s market in women who are up for just about anything with the right kind of cad.

Supply and demand, Wolfe, get a frickin' clue. It's like, oh boo hoo let's all have a pity party for these liberated nymphos who finally got everything their forbears dreamed about. These chicks are simply making the proper adjustments to changing market conditions. Natural selection! Survival of the fittest! The future is NOW and it is AWESOME, Bro!

So some yoked Alpha like our boy Skyler gets his pick of the litter no strings attached? I say do the evolution! Weepy emo-douchebag-Betas backed the wrong pony and, hey, it works out better for us anyway, because now she has a shoulder to cry on in the morning when Sky gotta skip class for a High Life and Boondock Saints with you and me at the House.

I mean, this is like paradise! It's like we're all Solomon with fifty Shebas, you know? All I'm saying is look out, though. The market can turn on you like way fast. Housing bust, dude, check your six.

A group of ersatz alpha males seems to have garnered a disproportionate number of women, while the beta and gamma males, nice guys, guys who would make good husbands or boy friends, are left out of the game.

Naturally, they want to be in the game. They do not esteem themselves and are not esteemed by women for their good qualities, so they decide that they want to become pick-up artists.

Okay, I don't want you to stress out too much, Bro, and seriously, like any Secondhand Serenade-listening, Chardonnay-sipping, progressive choir boy could pwn us? I know, crazy, right? I'm just saying you gotta keep your edge. Own it, man. Own her. It's the only way to stay on top.

__________________________________________________
Check all the links for the various stories. Via Dr. Helen, Via Stuart Schneiderman

On theological job security, or, “You ask the impossible.”

The facts of the case:

(1) A Jewish prophet is tortured to death for blasphemy and sedition.

(2) This man’s followers claim he is the true Lord of the world and that his murder was somehow “for us.”

(3) They answer the question, “How do you know this?” with claims of personal experiences or trustworthy secondhand accounts of his having been “raised from the dead.”

Supposing we believe their story, how can we make sense of what is plainly lunacy?

Christian theology.

Never mind, I fixed it. With science!

 Why are my followers and post archives at the bottom of the page?

The facts of navel-gazing, or, Tyler Durden: 1 Solipsism: 0

There's another Nero's Fiddle Blog.  First post: 2005.  Last post: 2008.

There's also a Nerosfiddle.com, where there is one huge picture of wenches and nothing else.

Google is what makes us feel unoriginal and alienated in a sea of connectivity.  Just look what happens when you have a common name.

I think it was King Solomon who once said:

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. 

But the proof is in the Google image search.  Hi Tom!  Love your bright orange hair, your pasty Irish-German skin.  You must really stand out in a crowd.  What?  You’re left-handed too?  With hazel eyes?  I bet there’s no one in the whole world who is just like you.  And don’t stress it, by the time you’re oh, 25 or so, I bet your beard will finally fill in and those two hairs next to your left nipple will become a veritable forest.  Good luck with the razor-burn, though, that rash might just be here to stay.

Take that, Facebook Dopplegangers!

Saints of Doubt: Mark Salomon

Patron Saint of Pioneers

There is an old saying: “the pioneers take the arrows, the settlers take the land.”  Which is interesting because the best contemporary translation of Hebrews 12:1-2 goes like this:

¹ Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.*

Pioneers get killed, settlers enjoy the land.  Thanks, Jesus.  And thank you too, Mark Salomon, lead singer of the most awesomest God band ever.

All my theological life, I have been walking in Mark’s footsteps. 

A young fundamentalist, hot-headed, arguing for the faith, condemning all outsiders to the flames:

...watching you torture yourself 
and whoever else you can bring down 
with you... 
...a song took from our souls 
a home that is our own 
we're all born remembering 
but few of us will know" 
the tip of your tongue 
a memory in mind 
just outside of you... 
will you wake to find 
the rest you so clearly seek 
or painfully realize that it's lost 
forever? 
suffer.

Lost in guilt, desiring redemption:

with a sigh i greet the day/ i feel the morning on my face/ weary at the moment i awake/ even as i lie/ the thought returns to mind/ "welcome to the rest of your life"./ somewhere i've lost my way/ from saved to stray and failing/ in silence my spirit pleads,/ is the vision lost/ or has it been passed on?/ is there any use continuing?

Confused but confident:

But I think I know the way,/ I got a promise on the mind,/ and I'll be looking for what's mine/ Sovereign stillness whispers trust in me/ In just a little while/ They'll wish that they were silent/

Keep waiting,/ I'll be right on time/ Keep waiting,/ I'll be right on time

Betrayed by “brothers and sisters”:

The usual mourners attend/ eager to pay their last respects/ say what they usually say/ and hope today will somehow be different/ 'We welcome you into our fold/ We've been waiting/ Always have room for one more/ Will you be staying?'/

it's a time-honored tradition we hold/ we build up and then tear down our own/ now I know why I never come home/ I get tired of climbing up out of this hole

Abandoned by the church:

Your steady stream of throwaway words has flooded/ this already crowded room/ I've lost my taste for the race and the running/ there's nothing here to prove/ all I want/

want to know is what you're waiting for/

I'll flood the wreckage build a bridge into the next age and/ say goodbye and leave a cloud of dust behind

I could go on, but you got the idea four songs ago.  In a church culture that has selectively deleted the Psalms, Mark taught me that worship includes complaint, doubt, frustration, and fear.  He had already been to those places, committed them feverishly, passionately to disc; he had experienced it all, a journey out of fundamentalism and into the sundown motel.  Honestly, faithfully, never pulling punches, always telling the truth.

So they shot him for it.

On the road, pastors rejected him because he wouldn’t preach (as if any one of his songs weren’t worth ten thousand sermons).  He was viewed with suspicion for doubting and revealing the scars he earned in church.  He and his band were consigned to the Christian music ghetto where they would never fit in (truthtellers rarely do).  And yet, the band plays on.

It sounds strange to say, but Mark Salomon is one of the top five most influential theologians in my life.  His is a faith of relentless heartbreak, private suffering, enduring commitment, and exuberant, irrational hope.

Which is, of course, the faith of the cross.  If he had a bumper sticker, it would read:

My boss was tortured to death for blasphemy and sedition.

Here’s to the Patron Saint of Pioneers:

*For a quick exegetical explanation for why this is a better translation, see this post.

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In which I indulge my darlings

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

I was writing a post on Mark Salomon and I began to digress into an exegesis of Hebrews 12:1-2, and I decided that this was one of my darlings, totally inappropriate for the Saints of Doubt post, but instead of killing it, I made it another post.

Pathetic.

Whatever.  If you’re interested, here’s a quick word study/exegetical remark on the passage that explains why I prefer “trailblazer” or “pioneer” to “author” or “founder.”

Older translations render ἀρχηγὸν as “author” or “founder,” but the word does literally mean “one who goes first down the path.”  And so the description makes more sense, because Hebrew 12 follows—you guessed it—Hebrews 11, which is a recitation of great heroes of the faith.  But if Jesus comes after guys like Enoch and Abraham, how can he be the “first one down the path” of faith?  Older translations “fix” the problem by inserting a less common meaning, namely, “author.”  Of course, that doesn’t really solve the problem, because how can Jesus be the “founder” of something that has been going on since ancient times?  The translation reflects a theological/historical bias.  Surely the author of Hebrews is musing on a new dispensation of faith, a new era, in which faith *for us* is different than faith *for them*.  To which I say nay.

The book of Hebrews is set in the context of “these last days", when God “has spoken to us by his son.”  Possibly meaning that post-Easter faith is somehow new, different, of changed content.  Another, better, possibility is that Jesus has shown us the first fulfillment of the promise of faith.  Meaning that Jesus’ faith was not qualitatively different from Abraham’s, but, rather than just dying in faith (as did all the faithful in Hebrews 11), Jesus “pioneers” the experience-of-coming-into-the-promise-of-faith.  This makes better sense of “the joy” of being “sat at the right hand” as well as the end of Hebrews 11 which reminds us that all those other guys died and that was it.  Nothing else.  They did many heroic deeds, suffered martyrs deaths, and stayed in the grave.  Jesus follows their example of death by torture, but “pioneers” the deepest fulfillment of faith, namely, the joy of glory and vindication.

For our purposes, Jesus’ “pioneering work” should be seen as a continuation of OT/Apocryphal faith—that is, the life of a martyr—with a certain knowledge of “what comes next” in these “last days”: resurrection, glory, and new life.

When I am king, tree-slayers will be first against the wall

*Update* I just noticed that the final version of the first paragraph doesn't make it clear that we are only talking about digital versions of new books specifically for the Kindle.  That's really important.  I mean, this post doesn't even make sense without that information.  Maybe I should be the first against the wall and you should be king.

Amazon had a bit of a kerfuffle with MacMillan over the weekend.  Amazon was upset at having to sell new hard cover books at $13 or $14 dollars instead of the usual $10, so they stopped selling books by MacMillan for one day in protest.

Now, the interesting part of this story is that Amazon was losing $3-$5 on every new MacMillan book they wanted to sell at $10.  Their business model reflected Jeff Bezos’ original Amazon.com model back in the late 90’s and early 00’s.  Amazon operated at a huge loss for its first five years, selling at prices well below other online book retailers.  The result?  Online sales became the way of the future and Amazon took a massive lead in the industry, earning $10.7 billion in 2006.

In the current row, Bezos is trying to do to eBooks what he did to paper books 15 years ago.  Undercut the iPad, make the Kindle brand the go to machine for eBooks, take a huge lead in the industry.  Great plan, right?  So why is MacMillan throwing a fit?

Computer Scientist and writer Charlie Martin:

The key is the mainstream publishers’ worry that e-books will cannibalize the sales of physical books. Mainstream book publishers, along with mainstream music publishers and the legacy media newspapers, are actually primarily manufacturers. The costs of the content, in royalties to the authors, are only about 10 percent of the cover price of the book, and less than that for the record. It’s the costs of setting type or mastering, printing the books or pressing the disks, shipping, cataloging, and selling them that dominates the costs of publishing.
Now, along come e-books and readers, like the Kindle and the iPad. Suddenly the whole business of publishing has changed. You can sell a physical book or an e-book — but each copy of the e-book costs literally one one-millionth as much to produce.

MacMillan is trying to fight the rising tide.  Because it realizes that once we do away with paper entirely, “MacMillan” is just a quaint old name.  Digitalization is about to obliterate the profit margins of the entire publishing world.

In the world to come, book publishing will merely be the cost of (1) Finding the author, (2) Editing the work, (3) Proofing the work, and (4) Advertising.  That’s it.  You will be able to “Publish” your own work at virtually no cost whatsoever.  Really the only thing you’ll need a publisher for is to help make sure that your book sells; and MacMillan knows what we all know—advertising in the era of social networking is, like everything else, going DIY.

Twenty years from now, buying a book will probably be like buying an MP3; maybe popular authors will be able to charge a bit more than newbs and hacks, but the era of Big Publishing is over.
Which is actually good news for would-be academics.  Imagine all dusty tomes of scholarly research available for a couple bucks a pop. 

I might actually get readers.

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In which the mad emperor’s bow sounds a sour, populist note

You have probably seen this national debt graph somewhere:

 

After years of profligacy under Republican rule, President Obama and congressional Democrats have, shall we say, upped the ante in the debt department.

In response, a bunch of stupid idiots have participated in rallies called “Tea Parties” under the notion that we are “Taxed Enough Already.”  Here is a picture of some of them:

Now, politicians are falling all over themselves to promise “fiscal responsibility,” lest they be Scott Browned in mid-term elections.

While the politicians obviate about tax cuts and discretionary spending freezes, mayhap it is time for Wiggles, the fat pink elephant--who has been sitting quietly in the corner of the room since the Johnson administration--to have his say.  Were this mad fantasy to actually play out, I imagine Wiggles might address us in the following manner:

Dear Gentle Masters,

You must kill your darlings or they will kill you.  When first Wise Lyndon gave them to you as a present they were sweet and kind and small and full of promise.  The little darlings nestled up against you and made you feel as if you were a kinder sort for you, in your benevolence, nursed them at no great cost.  But darlings grow up.  And these particular darlings have turned into something more like lions and tigers and bears than housecats.  Please kill them now, or they will turn on you, and claw us all—even poor, poor Wiggles—to ribbons.

Yes, massive unfunded entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare especially) need to end.  By 2030 the ratio of payer to payee will be 3.4 to 1.  Literally every four US taxpayers will be responsible for the health care of one aging citizen.  That is the definition of unsustainable.  In California, unfunded pensions for state union workers are totally out of control with no viable plan in sight.

But we can’t just end these programs.  We can’t tell an entire generation of seniors to piss off and die.  We can’t just take the poor, retired fireman’s pension away.

There are, it seems, two options.

(1) Massively and permanently increase taxes.  Europe has a more or less working model for this.  By instituting a very steep graduated tax law, the rich can fund the life and death of the rest of us.  This would really be the dreaded socialism Americans seem to enjoy complaining loudly about.

(2) Gen Y deliberately self-immolates, paying for the entitlements of our forbears, but stopping the buck now.  We pay for the death of the baby boomers and the Xs, but also do the hard work of providing for our own eventual passing, permanently lowering the entitlement burden for subsequent generations.

Option (1) is the way of permanent class war and the end of the American experiment.  For a short period in history, human beings really found out what free men could do.  In every arena of human life amazing leaps took place; children grew up believing that literally anything was possible, that they might cure the incurable or become president or just pack up and fly to the moon, because America was a place where you were set free to cultivate all that God gave you to the best of your ability. 

With option (1) that fades necessarily.  Few will be willing to try great things because the costs will be too high.  Life will be mediocre and bourgeois for all except a small, elite cadre, born into wealth and power and destined to practice the soft tyranny of noblesse oblige.  Human life will be reduced to meanness, in every sense of the word.

Option (2) is what the Greatest Generation might have done.  It is the noble choice, available only to men and women of superior virtue, who would rather choose their serfdom than suffer the indignity of having failed to lay a foundation for their children’s prosperity.  Yes, option (2) doesn’t seem fast, easy, or fun enough for a generation of spoiled children, so I guess we’ll have to settle for option (1).

Or maybe we could just fiddle the days away, and not do anything at all.

Ah.  Now that sounds more like the generation I know and love.

Technorati Tags: millenials,debt,economy,gen y,baby boomers,entitlements,pensions,republicans,democrats,tea party