Thursday, July 25, 2019

The Power of Doing Nothing

The 1980s were an interesting time to be learning to play rock guitar, specifically in the hard rock (or "hair metal") sub-genre. As the music itself began shedding the more jam-based cliches of the '70s bands, two budding superstars began coming to prominence:  Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen. When Rhoads was killed in a plane crash in 1982, with only two albums under his belt that featured exceptional, innovative playing, that cemented his status alongside Hendrix, a "what else might he have done" type of thing. Van Halen, of course, kept plugging away, and by 1985 was easily the most heralded player of his generation.

At the same time, the pedagogy changed dramatically, as tabulature became more standardized, and instructional magazines and books were everywhere. No longer did you have to sit around while your stoner cousin showed you the wrong chords to Stairway to Heaven, and tried to dope his way through a poor approximation of the solo. You could just read along and figure it out -- and after learning a couple dozen songs that way, would have enough ear training to do tabs on your own.

This quickly turned into some of the more adept students taking standard scales (major and harmonic minor, and their respective modes), graphing them in patterns across the fretboard and up and down the neck, and then "sequencing" them, much like you would find in the J.S. Bach violin partitas and sonatas, which he composed primarily as learning tools for his children.

I switched from bass to six-string in 1984, and by 1987 was neck-deep (pardon the bad pun) in these magazines and scale manuals. It was not unusual for me to call in sick to work, and spend the entire day with a stack of material, drilling and practicing relentlessly. The results paid off, and I was playing some pretty top-drawer stuff for the time. But more and more, it started to feel somewhat like a fourth-grader drilling on multiplication tables. You definitely learn the process and the theory, and can become wonderfully quick at it, but it doesn't take you very far in applying it.

So in 1989, King Crimson guitar wizard Robert Fripp comes along with a column in Guitar Player magazine, and it was notably without the requisite "here's how you play three-note-per-string Locrian mode patterns all the way up the neck" tabs. In fact, Fripp's first column culminated in the wonderfully gnomic advice to just sit there in a chair, without a guitar, and do nothing for thirty minutes or so, ignoring the involuntary thoughts and fidgets that will occur during that time.

Doing nothing, Fripp advised, can be very difficult. It's much harder than it seems.

Boy, was he ever right. Being a twenty-two-year-old galoot in a hick town with no concept of meditation or anything of that nature, this was beyond perplexing to me. And difficult. And it took a long time to get where I felt like I could see the benefit and the point of that advice.

But he was right.



And that's really my point in offering up the humble suggestion that we consider our engagement with a hopelessly rigged process that is geared only to benefit its donor class. "Doing nothing" in this context doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing, it means stepping back, taking a breath, thinking about our actions and interactions with the countless processes and entities in what we are accustomed to thinking of as the system.

Being "politically engaged" means knowing everything there is to know about the history, the players, the process, the procedures, the conventional wisdom and the spicy-hot counter-takes. Maybe you even canvass your neighborhoods for your preferred candidate come election time.

So how's all that been working out?

It means that instead of complaining yet again about how utterly useless a corporate chimp like Chunk Toad is when he whines about the "optics" of the latest round of Mueller's testimony, maybe it's time to ignore Chunk Toad altogether, and maybe to take a moment and share that with his sponsors. Maybe it has an effect on them and/or him, maybe not, since he is not really talking to you, anyway, unless you're a politician with something to sell, or a fellow hackcess journo wanting to be in the panel-show rotation.

Whether or not a boycott has any effect on Chunk Toad and his cohort of useless journo-hacks, it should be our goal to ensure that they no longer affect us. They are just careerist hacks spooning gutless conventional observations. That's all they've ever been. With this human centipede of an administration, it wouldn't even matter if the hacks suddenly stopped being hacks and began offering honest commentary, rather than cheap theater criticism and style points.

Same with the daily fret over whether Nancy Pelosi "knows what she's doing" or "has a plan" or whatever. Of course she knows what she's doing; of course she has a plan. It's just that the likelihood that those things don't jibe with the interests of the politically engaged are fairly high, and steadily increasing. It may even turn out that her interests and plans run at cross purposes with those of the so-called blue wave. So far that certainly seems to be the case.

It's also possible -- even likely -- that Pelosi is simply trying to (in her mind) optimize the time frame for the impeachment inquiry. Perfectly understandable, but that effort has to be coupled with an effective marketing strategy to reassure an increasingly restive base that something is being done. Punting it to next year's election is not an answer; your wave was comprised of people who expected something to be done now, and you promised to do as much.

Sometimes, doing nothing isn't such a great option. In the world of politics, this is largely contingent on one's power to do something; in other words, when you're one of the very few people who actually can do something, and you choose to do nothing....well, you become an accomplice.

Mueller, old man voice and all, was as clear as ever this time around:  illegalities have taken place, there is more than enough evidence of obstruction and collusion to show a clear breach of the law, and the temperament of this administration has been such that failure or reluctance to react will be seen as weakness, and invite further and deeper offenses. If Mueller sounded "old" or "tired" or whatever, maybe it's because he's sick of explaining this shit over and over and fucking over again, to the handful of people who are actually empowered to confront these people and hold them accountable. He understands that they really want him to do their job, and he's repulsed by that, as we all should be. These people don't have enough guts between them to flip someone off behind their back.

If you ever needed a more concise explanation of why people vote for Trump, there you go. He fights. I mean, he fights against anything and everything, stupid things and things he has no chance of winning, but he knows who his base hates, and he's happy to tell those people to go fuck themselves on behalf of the base.

Maybe a Democratic politician oughta try that fuck you approach just once, just to see how it feels, just to see how their base reacts, just to see how many more people might be energized.

If Nancy Pelosi put half as much energy into actually doing things that held a lawless administration accountable for its clear pattern of misdeeds, as she does into empty threats and rear-guard actions against her own party, we might get somewhere. And, as the saying goes, if your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle. For now, she seems interested in crawling along, generating paperwork that gets mocked and ignored, thinking ahead to the next election cycle, instead of addressing what she herself has characterized as an ongoing threat to constitutional governance.

Well, once again, if it's such an urgent threat, where is the sense of urgency? Set aside the prospect of impeaching Trump for a second -- he is being empowered by a skilled, lawless attorney general. Buried in the barrage this week was the fact that Barr took the House's contempt order and publicly wiped his ass with it, knowing full well that they won't do jack shit about it. They can impeach Barr, you know. They have simply chosen not to, because strategery.

There is some truth at this point that, as Pelosi's defenders have been claiming, that jumping into impeachment right now, in the middle of summer while people are vacationing and not paying attention, is not the best time. But part of that is her own fault; the report was released months ago, and they should have had a battle plan ready, as well as a contingency plan when their dozens of letters got laughed at.

But we are where we are now, heading into a six-week August recess. One hopes that Pelosi has delegated instructions to  her group that they should use this time constructively, to go to their districts and solicit feedback, and drum up momentum for what must take place now, if they are to have any hope of moving forward and maintaining any structural integrity as a functioning political party. There is never going to be a perfect or even good time for this sort of thing. That doesn't change the necessity of it. The investigations that the inquiry would necessitate will take some time; they don't want to start this process next summer when we're all balls-deep in the general election campaign, which Fatboy will do everything he can to ensure sucks all the oxygen away from everything else. So they need to move forward soon, like mid-September at the latest.

Otherwise, there is no point to them, the Democratic Party. Part of the problem is that all of the major players in this idiot Shakespeare riff are in their seventies or older. Pelosi is seventy-nine years old, and has been in office longer than AOC has been alive. Joe Biden was elected to the Senate when he was twenty-nine; per the requirement that senators be at least thirty years of age, Biden had to wait a few weeks for his thirtieth birthday in order to be sworn in. These people have never done anything else, and they don't know how to pass the torch to the newer generation of young, ambitious liberals, people who have no interest in the bromides of empty collegiality. They are looking forward to inheriting mountains of debt and a ruined planet, so maybe one can see why they have no interest in lectures about norms and decorum, things that only one side bothers with anyway.

You want to fix this fucking country? Pass a mandatory retirement age across the board for all three branches of federal government. Nobody over seventy, in Congress, on the Supreme Court, in the White House. These people have fucked everything up royally, and they won't fucking go away and die already. And I don't wanna hear any "what about RBG" bullshit either; for every Ginsburg there's a dozen Bill Barrs and Rudy Giulianis. The sooner these codgers are all pushed out to pasture to watch Fox and Fiends and gum their mushed peas, the sooner we can get to the business of trying to save what's left of the planet.

Back when my only interest was being proficient at guitar playing, I generally ignored politics. I knew what was going on, but I didn't feel the need to root for anyone or get heavily into it. I felt that the gubmint was mostly run by inept and/or corrupt people who mostly wanted to make their benefactors wealthier. Not much has changed, except that now I vote, for some reason, mostly because it's slightly better than not having voted.

I can only imagine what someone half my age right now thinks, being constantly brow-beaten by bien pensant assholes endlessly grinding on them, pushing them to vote for this gaggle of preening douchebags who talk big and do very little. They talk grandly about "the art of the possible" and then pre-emptively declare everything worthwhile to be impossible.

It's not a matter of "both sides being the same" or any of that shit. Clearly they are completely different. The Republicans took something that was total bullshit -- Hillary Clinton's supposed complicity in the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi -- and turned it into a conspiracy theory on wheels, made it a campaign issue, conducted nine investigations into the incident, each one more preposterous and pointless than the last. All to keep their wingnut base in a perpetual lather.

They're still pissed about it -- Hillary Clinton showed up and testified in open session for eleven hours non-stop, Trey Gowdy couldn't make anything stick, and there are still plenty of idiots who still insist that the fix was in somehow.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have Trump dead to rights on obstruction and collusion, fifty percent of the general public supporting impeachment, and their own base screaming en masse at them to fucking do something already. Well, it's just never the right time, you see. You'll just have to be patient and be sure to vote next year, kids -- if you're still allowed to, if the precinct workers don't forget to have power cords for the voting machines, if the Serbian software actually counts your vote correctly. Then, regardless of the outcome, we'll just have to wait for 2022, and 2024, and so on.

So, since we peons have no power and no say anyway, maybe we disengage from this corrupt, ruined system that only works at the behest of the ultra-wealthy. Withdraw your participation in the fake-news industrial complex, a billion-dollar racket populated by panel-show hacks and weasel-faced consultants, whose only mission is to rile you up and sell you pharmaceuticals and insurance. Identify their sponsors and withhold your hard-earned cash by refusing to purchase their products, most of which you don't really want anyway.

Go down to the library that you pay for and check out a few books. Turn off the teevee. Relax. Listen to some music. Call an old friend you haven't talked to in a while. Stay aware and pay attention to the shenanigans, of course, but at arm's length. Realize that it all really is like pro sports -- games played by millionaires, on fields owned by billionaires, and whether you love or hate what they're doing, you have no ability to affect the outcome.

Don't worry, those lying cocksuckers will be waiting for you when and if you decide to vote. But come on. The days of ticket-splitters are long gone. You either support what's going on right now, or you are repelled by it. I'll never vote Republican again, at any level, that's an iron certainty.

The only variable now is whether I'll continue to vote Democratic. They seem to be doing everything they can to talk us out of it. They can't possibly be sincere when they wonder why most people don't bother to vote, when all they have to offer is empty promises and gutless pablum. Like I said earlier, there's a small glimmer of hope that they might use August wisely to build some momentum and finally set about doing what needs to be done. I really hope they do. But if they come back after Labor Day thumbing their collective dicks, doing nothing might end up being the best option.

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