Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 959 Editor's Choice: 127
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Response to Chas
[Read the article: GOP kisses up to liberal Chafee]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And I had been so succinct until now, dammit!
Chas, your response is very well reasoned and written. You are even partly right and only part cynic, but there is no more room for cynicism; Sarcasm and bitterness, yes, but not cynicism. Sorry. You see, from all I've been able to gather (and it is nicely encapsulated in the title of The Federalist Papers which you mentioned), those "rich white guys" who started this crazy juggernaut rolling had no "corporate proxies" (unless you wanna go the "Freemasons control everything" route), and they were only well-educated enough and enlightened enough to develop this "camouflaged plutocracy" because of their position of privilige. A republic is not precisely a democracy but merely employs democracy, in a convoluted form (witness the hated Electoral College). Those original geniuses could not have foreseen the sort of corrupt and purulent military-industrial plutocracy that emerged from the sewer of feckless free-marketeering after World War II. We have allowed ourselves - no, we have actively bought ourselves - into the game we claim to hate, because those of us who are still marginally flush don't want to let go of any of our own ill-gotten gains. We are, indeed, our own worst enemy.
The founders did, I believe, intend to continue to live wealthy, agrarian lives, and to keep the reins of power out of the direct grasp of the agrarian rubes who didn't have what it would take to become competitive in the Brain Trust market - the intellectual marketplace which spawned our Republic. They knew what would happen, and did their best to design it out of the reach of the unwashed masses, for whom they had a remarkable affection nonetheless. (Now, if you like, you may call me a cynic).
The thing would have worked - and still can work - as it was concieved, but only if we are each willing and ready to accept our individual share of responsibility for things having got where they are today. The undoing of the Republic has happened in my lifetime. Half the fault lies with greed - ours, not theirs; the other half lies with the ignorance that allows us to believe we ever lived in a democracy - which is something that, barring the Federal structure, would be nothing more than a potential lynch mob.
I believe you're right that we're at the place you say we are. I do not believe The Federalist Papers prove this sorry state of affairs was the intent of the founders. I have to be FOR something in order to remain sane. I choose to continue to believe in the original blueprint and in the culpability of us rubes for having bought into the selling out of that blueprint.
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Godless Science!
[Read the article: "This Is Your Brain on Music"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Or is it? It is, at best, confusing science, as Levitin says first that the emotional connection to music that is current during our teen years (and therefore generational) is "no accident" and then says it is the result of "evolutionary design." This sounds suspiciously like a subversive reference to Intelligent Design - except of course that it all revolves (pardon the expression) around brain chemistry and neurological functions that take place in the cerebellum (talk about "Precious and Few"!). And the opioid receptors, too, not the cannaboid ones, as Patricia Schwarz points out. At least according to Levitin it does.
Now then: how does that explain my absolute aversion to the music of my full-blown (or perhaps that should be "fully blown" or "totally wasted") teen years, say 15,16, 17 and 18? Why were my friends and I desperately seeking oldies (from the mid-to-late 1950's) and older jazz and pop standards from the American songbook, as well as Ellington and Basie? Why were we so horrified by the popular music of 1960 - '63? Could it be because most of it SUCKED?
Yes, I suffered undue influence from my musical family and the friendship of guitarist John Fahey during my formative years. But not all my friends did. By the time I arrived in suburbia at age 14 Buddy Holly was dead and, coincidentally, pop music was being weaned from the respirator in favor of a morphine drip. It was only 1n 1964, when I was 19 (do the math) that popular music got a huge shot of adrenaline and began to morph onward into its next truly creative phase. And still we longed for the occasional fix of 50's R&R and R&B. Why? Were ALL our brains defective? Well I guess that's an attractive theory. But it doesn't explain the magical responses evoked now by songs I came to know and love in my late 20's and onward, either. Nick Drake, who was to be discovered by the music loving public some 25 years after his untimely death, moved me with his stark-yet-lovely music while he was still alive. It struck chords in me that hadn't been touched since I'd first heard the centerpiece from Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" as a small child; Ronnie Earle's "Skyman" took me back to childhood as well, in the late 90's. What the hell was going on in MY brain?
I appreciate Levitin's "...encyclopedic knowledge of popular music..." and his grasp of the physics of light and sound (especially where he explains the tree falling in the forest thing - thanks for putting that in black and white for my pysics-impaired friends). All this probably does make the book "delightful" (I haven't read it yet) but it doesn't account for my personal experience of music, and I have been referred to more than once as a "reptile", so the cerebellum probably does have its role in all this. But the overall notion of generational musical neurological imprinting doesn't ring true for me, at least where the teen years are concerned. There's something else going on, and I think it lies where psychology and neurology overlap and collide with...something else. I dare not put a word to it. Use your imagination.