Heartache With Hard Work

I’ve made the point before that when people complain about deficits they don’t really mean deficits. Obviously that’s not universally true, but in these moments when ‘deficits’ or ‘debt’ become significant political issues they are often simply a stand-in for concern about a bad economy.

This video (linked to in this Slate column) reminds me of one of the classic examples of this phenomenon. It’s from a town hall debate in the 1992 presidential campaign.

The woman asks how the debt affects each candidate personally. There is confusion. Of course the debt doesn’t affect them personally so how are they supposed to respond? It’s only resolved once you realize that she really just means the economy. How have the tough economic times affected you personally?

Even if you believe that the debt is a proximate cause of economic decline, that’s very different from treating them as synonymous. The conflation of the two is particularly disastrous in circumstances where short-term spending is the way out of recession.

I think our political discussions would be significantly improved if we didn’t take the surface-level account as the definitive truth and instead pressed just a little bit to see what lies underneath. For another example, see this post from Jonathan Bernstein asking for a bit more investigation of the apparently shocking fact that a majority of likely Republican primary voters are birthers.

How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us – R.E.M.

(from the strangely underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which is probably my second-favorite R.E.M. album)

Okay, so I’ll admit I got bored and stopped partway through, but this New Yorker piece on Scientology left me pretty underwhelmed.  I’ve seen a lot of people linking to it as if it were the definitive piece proving the craziness of Scientology.

I don’t see it.

I mean, sure, they’re crazy.  But they don’t seem all that far beyond the run-of-the-mill craziness of religion in general.  You have to accept a bunch of thing that seem irrational, but having faith is kind of the name of the game.  And they definitely have a bit of the feel of an insular group, unaware of social trends and set in their retrograde ways.  What else is new?

Paul Haggis got a lot out of them, and they got a lot of out him.  He changed his mind and became an apostate. So it goes:

The story is a sad one, told many times.
The story of my life in trying times.
Just add water, stir in lime.
How the west was won and where it got us.

And frankly, Haggis was at least able to create Due South while being a Scientologist, so it can’t be all bad.

Due South Theme

Sister Wife – Alex Winston

Strangely appealing, yet impossible to fully comprehend. The sort of song you want to listen to with some regularity, but definitely would not want to be stuck in a monogamous relationship with. Fittingly, the subject of the song is polygamy.

How to describe it? Well, she has one of those magical-forest-pixie voices that simultaneously tantalizes and perplexes. Musically, it’s fairly standard infectious indie-pop, with some big drums and an even bigger chorus.

In a slightly different vein–with handclaps!–here’s a great video of “Choice Notes,” her minor hit from last year, much improved for being stripped of the heavy weight of studio production:

Graph from: The Plum Line

Relative Surplus Value – The Weakerthans

It’s a pretty common lefty-blog feature to point out that the American public is totally incoherent when it comes to governmental spending. And with good cause! People generally state preferences that wildly contradict with no apparent awareness of this fact.

The general premise is that everyone wants to cut wasteful spending and reduce deficits. But when faced with a variety of specific questions about what to cut, clear majorities favor retaining spending on virtually everything. And even on those few things that majorities think should be cut, there are still very silly elements. One example is the report discussed here, which points out that foreign aid is one of the only things people want to cut. However:

In a World Public Opinion poll conducted last November, respondents guessed, on average, that foreign aid spending represented 27% of the federal budget. To trim spending, the same respondents suggested that, on average, foreign should make up a slimmer 13% of the total budget, surely delivering massive savings.

The problem? Foreign aid is actually a minuscule 1% of the total budget. Even eliminating it altogether would do little to balance the budget or reduce the deficit.

Right.

That is all totally fair, but I want to make two points that might help to at least reduce the confusion and maybe will redeem the American people at least a little bit.

First, I think it’s important to remember that when people complain about ‘deficits’ it very rarely means they actually care that much about deficits. What they don’t like is a bad economy. The thing is: the economy is unbelievably complicated. I study politics for a living and read a lot about the economy and still find myself completely lost when trying to go beyond the fairly basic stuff. For people who devote significantly less attention, it’s not at all surprising that they speak in a sort of shorthand. The one thing that was pretty commonly agreed upon in the 70s and 80s was that federal spending commitments had gotten out of control and contributed to the serious inflation problems that hit the country.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. But there’s enough truth there to pass the smell test. And it works at a gut level, too. When times are tough for individuals, the responsible thing to do is cut back on your spending. It’s just common sense that governments ought to be doing the same. And the money they’re using is taxpayer money! So it’s doubly offensive for them to be profligate while common people suffer!

What’s missing from that morality tale, of course, is that governments aren’t people. They don’t spend money to increase their own utility.* The money they’re spending is (at least in principle) going toward improving the social conditions of the whole country. And the task of a government in tough economic times is to serve as a counterweight to the individually rational decisions to reduce spending (and thus reduce liquidity). But that’s a complicated argument. And as long as things are bad people are unlikely to want to listen to it.

You’ll find that as economic conditions improve people’s worries about the deficit fade tremendously. That doesn’t really make sense unless you accept that, for many people, ‘I’m worried about deficits’ is a stand in for ‘fix the damn economy!’ There are genuine deficit hawks, of course, but they are nothing close to a majority. We can keep feigning astonishment at this phenomenon if we want. But it’s almost as silly as the people who claim to care so much about spending while refusing to cut any spending.

The second point pertains to the foreign aid example. It is, of course, an important point that people monumentally overestimate the amount of money we have going to foreign aid. And it’s worth pointing that out. But I often see people taking this example as evidence that the public would actually support more spending on foreign aid, or at least doesn’t ‘really’ want to cut foreign aid.

I think that misses the point. People are terrible TERRIBLE judges of absolute numbers. We are much better at relational assessments. That means that when people said they thought foreign aid should be 13 percent instead of 27 percent they didn’t really mean it should be 13 percent. They meant that we should cut foreign aid in half.

I bet that if you had said ‘let’s say foreign aid is 20 percent of the budget, how much ought it be?’ they would have said 10 percent. Or if you had said 10 percent they’d counter with 5 percent.

The point is not that we should listen to people and cut foreign aid spending in half. It’s just that we should take all these ‘public opinion’ surveys with about 27 grains of salt. They DO tell us things, but it’s often not the things that show up on the surface.

* Yes, yes, institutionalism tells us that governments do in fact take on personalities and interests that are detached from their representational origins.  And bureaucracies, in particular, as susceptible to path dependency and capture by particular interests that then work hard to sustain spending for wholly internal purposes.  This is all true, but is still a relatively minor subset of what we’re talking about.

All Die Young – Smith Westerns

It’s pretty easy to get into my good graces. While I have my occasional pretensions to being a musical sophisticate, when it all comes down you really just need to remember a couple simple things. 1) The Beatles are great. 2) You’re not as great as The Beatles so don’t shamelessly rip them off. 3) But if you can steal a little something, and give it some real spirit, you’ll go far.

“All Die Young” puts this 3-step plan to the test, and come through with flying colors. Sonically, it’s not really a Beatles knockoff so much as it’s an ELO knockoff. Big psych-drenched slide guitar movements, bombastic presentation, and a singer who is a dead ringer for Jeff Lynne. What’s not to like? But while the first half of the song is plenty good, the thing that really kicks it into the stratosphere is the final third, which totally rips off the coda of “Oh Yoko” but does it with sure assuredness and passion that you just can’t help but love it.

Smith Westerns used to be a fuzzy garage rock band, but they’ve got a label and cleaned up apparently. The record is called Dye It Blond.

World Tour (Weezy, Wale, Dre) – Brenton Duvall

I am woefully behind the times on some subjects.  In spite of the fact that I write a music blog (new media!) I have never fully understood what was going on with mixtapes and mashups and remixes and the like.  I also simply don’t pay enough attention to the whole milieu of this stuff to be able to figure out when something is a pure mashup, when new effects have been added, and when something is a collaborative work between an artist and a producer.

Add to that the fact that there are millions of these things floating out there now, most of them seemingly terrible, and it’s hard to know how to find the gems.

Fortunately, I read this post from Neon Gold about Brenton Duvall, which has given me at least one surefire winner to turn to. He’s got about 20 tracks available to listen to and download at the Potomac Boys Club page, and they are ALL really good.  You get Lil’ Wayne over “Sleepyhead,” Jay-Z over Jonsi, and some tracks from Young Prince produced by Duvall that provide an electro-dance inspired background with an almost jazzy feel, and some great emceeing.  It sounds young and exuberant and totally magical.

By far my favorite track right now, though, is “World Tour” which picks out the chorus of Wale’s “World Tour,” and supplements it with raps from Lil’ Wayne and Dre’s “Forget About Dre,” placing each of them against a shimmering, beautiful, insistent background of electronic  The resulting creation sounds totally distinct and organic – it’s almost impossible to picture these pieces in their original form.  The Dre part, in particular, is utterly different.  What came off as aggressive and petulant when backed by Eminem now sounds strangely humble, even hopeful.

Foundations – Kate Nash

There’s a lot of talk going round in the last day or two about a 1798 health care law that is vaguely like the individual mandate.  Ha ha! the liberal blogosphere cries, the Founders themselves believed in the Constitutionality of the mandate!

The only problem with this argument is that it’s complete bollocks.  For a couple reasons.  First, as Paul Waldman notes: “we can’t decide questions of contemporary policy by trying to figure out what Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would say about them. We don’t know for sure, and we can’t know for sure, any more than we can know whether Gouverneur Morris would have opted for an iPhone or an Android phone. We live in a world that is unimaginably different from the one they lived in, with our computing machines and horseless carriages and a million other social, political, and technological developments.”

The corollary to this point is that attacking the Tea Party constitutional theory on the details is a fool’s errand.  The proper route is to go after the theory of originalism and ‘strict constructionism’ itself.

Which leads to the second major problem with this argument: the ‘Founders’ don’t exist.  There are many people who sat in Philadelphia, there are many people who worked in the government in the early years.  They had a variety of opinions.  One set of them, the Federalists, believed in the expansive power of the national government.  Adams was of that group.  The Jeffersonian (or the Democratic-Republicans) emphatically disagreed.

Put it this way: you know what else was done in 1798?  The Alien and Sedition Acts.  Are there a lot of liberals who want to use the part of Adams’ theory of constitutionality that includes expulsion without cause or arrest people for complaining about the government?

You also might want to note that the Federalist position held very little power once Adams was gone.  They basically collapsed as a Party within a decade, as the Jeffersonians ran things until Jackson came along.

From a modern perspective, the Federalists sound a lot more attuned to our perspective but surely a historical perspective would note that the ‘big national government and expansive Commerce Clause power’ was a minority position in the early years of the Republic.

This all makes clear that debates about how to interpret the Constitution and its grant of powers is not a new one.  It has been going on right since the beginning.  Rather than valorizing some mythical sense of ‘the Founders’ it would be better to identify the strength of the argument made by a certain set of them, and the necessity of changing interpretive strategies as conditions have changed.  And also maybe noting that a lot of the ‘strict constructionist’ theories in the early days had a serious undertone of trying to limit the power of the national government so that it couldn’t interfere with slavery.

It’s fun to play gotcha with this 1798 bill, I guess, but it doesn’t really accomplish anything.  The individual mandate is constitutional because it is grounded in a large set of powers that have been granted to Congress over the past 200 years.  There is a plausible reading of the Constitution that would disallow it, but our historical perspective argues against choosing that interpretation.  That’s as good of an argument as you’re going to get. Fortunately, it’s plenty good enough.

Broken – Belly

Here’s a nice blast from the past.  I remember thinking Mallrats was just about the most hilarious movie of all time.  In retrospect, that might have been a bit of an overstatement.  Still, fun film, and great soundtrack.  Weezer, Sponge, Archers of Loaf, Silverchair.  1995 encapsulated.

This track is my favorite of the bunch.  Great little guitar riff that rich and inviting.  Some great lines (“The curve of her ass is unparalleled”).  It’s everything that was fun about music in the mid-90s, when ‘alternative’ still felt edgy enough to mean something, but the intense seriousness of it had faded a bit.  There was a nice revival of 60s-inspired straightforward pop songs channeled through the alternative-rock dynamic.  It produced a ton of songs like this one: just good plain fun.

Strange Powers – The Magnetic Fields

The Republicans, newly in control of the House, have decided to institute a complete reading of the Constitution today.  Beyond that, they’re now requiring all Congressional bills to include statements of constitutionality.  Effectively, when passing a law Congress must now state clearly the part of the Constitution from which it derives the authority to enact the changes.

This is easy to mock, for the obvious reasons: it’s purely symbolic, what about the stuff they don’t like (are they going to whisper when reading the 4th Amendment?), and so on.  Probably the most damning criticism is that this is not just symbolic, it’s obnoxiously symbolic insofar as it seems to be a snide claim that Republicans alone genuinely value the Constitution.  Which is irritating for another set of obvious reasons.  But in spite of all that, I’m completely in favor of this.

Maybe Republicans want to score a political point, but I think it will have little relevance on that front.  If it means anything, it will simply institute a (slightly) deeper engagement with its part to play in a broader Constitutional interpretive process. Yes, we have Marbury v. Madison, but even by the boldest theory of judicial review there is no reason to think that the other branches should completely shirk their responsibilities as agents of the constitutional order.

Robin West (among many others) has written very persuasively about the importance of Congress not completely ceding the task of constitutional judgment to the courts.  Her argument is that a Congress more attuned to this front will be more aware not only of the need to justify its bills but also might grasp some of its obligations to the broader project of equity and egalitarianism.  Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, for example, includes a broad grant of powers to Congress for the enforcement of the Privileges Or Immunities, Equal Protection, and Due Process Clauses.  Those powers have been curtailed over the years in part because Congress has simply made little effort to fight for them–or even grasp them.

Simple statements that declare constitutionality are not going to do anything by themselves, of course.  But it would be great if Congress recognized that constitutional interpretation is as much political as it is legal – and that a bold and forthright defense of its own power has every possibility of restructuring our understanding of the matters at stake.  Which is to say: if there is even the slightest chance that this change will invigorate Congressional debate about the extent of its own powers this is probably a good thing.  And if it’s merely symbolic, at least the ways that it’s positively symbolic militate against the negative ones.

We’ve all got our songs–the ones that we love and hold close to our hearts, but the rest of the world seems to be unaware of.  When we make mixtapes, we make sure to include them so that others might get a chance to hear what we love so much.

These can be from bands that we love, but they can also be one-offs from otherwise complete unknowns.  In some ways, this is even better.  Such songs are like single shining beacons that have fallen through time, only heard or remembered by a bare few.  Completely untethered from context or meaning.

What I’m hoping is that you, the reader, has one of these to recommend.  What is the one song that you think virtually no one else knows, but which is far too good to suffer such obscurity?  It needn’t be from a complete unknown–though hopefully some will be.  A random b-side or bootleg from a well-known band works.  An alternate take of a more widely known song.  Or the truly and completely random.  Post any recommendations in the comments!

Here are a few of my own (some that have been posted over the years, but which you might have missed):

Homesick – Aberdeen

Aberdeen were a twee pop band from the heyday of Sarah Records.  This song is pastoral, effortless, and sounds like floating on a cloud. It starts quietly and her voice drifts along, full of gentle longing, barely skimming the surface. But my absolute favorite moment is when all the sweet tension fractures and the music bursts out at the 4:07 mark. I’ve been in love with this song for years and really can’t get enough of it.  The singer, Beth Arzy, has since moved on to Trembling Blue Stars.

Acceleration 5000 – Blue Meanies

This is from Misfits of Ska, a compilation record that confirmed to my teenage ears that ska music had far more to offer than it ever got credit for in the popular imagination.  This is the kind of song that makes you put your foot on the gas pedal and drive 100 miles an hour

She Came On – Super Deluxe

Almost the prototype of the genre.  Super Deluxe were one of my favorite bands as a teenager growing up in the Northwest.  It seemed like the world was theirs, but somehow they just never quite caught fire. This song encapsulates them at their power-pop best.  It’s got one of the all-time best openings, as Blake sings “She came on…” in silence and then the guitars kick in, all jangly and full of life, as he continues “…like a storm from the blind side of a memory.”  It contains one of my all-time favorite lines: “I found myself wandering aimlessly, calling it freedom.”  One of the first posts I wrote on the blog was about Super Deluxe.

Broke My Eyes – DonkeyBoy

A beautiful mixture of electronica and New Wave bliss.  The moment at 1:23 just slays me.  Unfortunate band name, though.

Lights Out – Easyworld

Shimmery, light, with a fantastic guitar riff, some nice backing vocals, and an unbelievably catchy chorus. Electro-guitar pop at its very best.

Sometimes Wanna Die – Joydrop

Joydrop was one of those alt-rock bands who had a brief moment in the sun during the late 90s.  You might remember “Beautiful” – which was their semi-hit.  This isn’t an especially brilliant song.  It’s just…vivacious, and absolutely beautiful.  It’s always struck me as about as close to as good as this sort of straightforward alt-pop music could get.

Mighty K.C. – For Squirrels

A lament for Kurt Cobain, from a band who died themselves in a van accident soon after this was released.  One of the most touching and magical songs ever written about loss and death. It starts out dark and stormy, and about a one minute the morass solidifies into a desperate sense of anger and loss (“send me off the morgue I’m ready to be buried away in my bed…and I’m alone without the sun”).

But then, just when the crackling of his voice is almost unbearable, the loss is reappropriated into a sense of transcendent wonder (“by the grace of god go I into the great unknown”).The rest of the song teeters back and forth between these perspectives without any clear resolution yet still leaving you with a sense of fulfillment.