Why I Hate Everybody's Politics

Last year, I was quite the political firebreather. I had what I thought were good moral reasons for this -- namely, the idea that "all that it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." As I recently said to somebody (who initiated a political debate), as I took apart their arguments piece by piece, logically and I hope objectively: "so why does it fall to an itinerant musician to point this stuff out? Shouldn't our media be doing that?"

But I finally got to the point where I realized two things: one is that there's a law of diminishing returns with this stuff. And another is that, basically I had no constituency. People move in groups, people tend to congregate around ideas and belief systems that make them comfortable. And by speaking up, I wasn't building a following for certain ideas. I was pissing EVERYBODY off, one demographic at a time. And the basic fact is, those ideas are out there. People just decide whether or not they want to entertain them. When people are scared crapless, they don't usually sit down and think of how to get out of the situation they're in. They react. That might be the wrong move but...it's human nature. Whatcha gonna do?

But the biggest reason I shut up? Because I think nearly everybody -- everybody -- in this country is a sucker and a moron -- and that includes other people that think everybody in this country is a sucker and a moron. And that's not a way to win any friends. So why am I posting this blog? I dunno. Maybe I feel guilty for detaching from political discussions when I took a stand earlier. Since I don't plan to call attention to it, and since I haven't posted in ages, I expect no one will see it.

So if any of the following offends you -- well, duh. Of course the large percentage of you won't agree with me. But it's cool. I'm still a good guy and guess what! I don't have any power! All of you are free to mass in any way you like and you are far more likely to realize your own vision of the country than I ever will. And I will just have to deal with it. So I think you can take it. Don't get mad at ME. I'm just one dude shaking his fist at windmill.

Basically the country is separated into three groups. All of whom I think, as I said, are in their own way, sending us right down the tubes, though not in equal measures.

Conservatives -- Good God, where do I start? Did anyone watch the Republican debates last night? All of these people are falling all over themselves to out-crazy one another. If you saw these people walking down the street and talked to them for ten seconds, you would run. And yet these are the only people the right wing of our country can entertain as presidential candidates.

My dad was a conservative. Like, a real conservative, an intellectually consistent conservative, someone who wasn't hooked on dogma as a replacement for real thinking. I know the tenets of the philosophy. I was raised on them. I internalized the concepts of personal responsibility, the perils of the "nanny state" (there's a bogus euphemism for ya), the struggles businesses face with regulations and labor costs. I get it. Modern day conservatism has taken these concepts, slapped it together with religious fervor and a large dollop of fear, and made it into a crazy quilt of a religion that punishes severely for the slightest deviation from the Ten Commandments -- Thou Shalt Not Raise Taxes. Thou Shalt Blame Liberals For Everything. Thou Shalt Ignore Every Bit of Information That Does Not Come From a Conservative Because It Is Biased. Shall I go on?

Conservatism is not a political movement. It is a cult. There is a tautology of circular logic that prevents any doctrinaire conservative from reconsidering any portion of their beliefs. And unfortunately, this is the largest and most intractable minority voting block in our country, thanks in part to the vagaries of the Constitution. But I think what I loathe about conservatives most of all is their absolute inability to take any responsibility for any part of the problems that they whine about incessantly, even though you can draw a direct line from people and policies most of them support to the things they complain about.

Phew. OK, next!

Liberals -- people assume I am one because I take a liberal position in an argument more often than not. But that's just so someone can HEAR it...since liberals are the most demonized, and yet the most politically powerless (I can hear conservatives chuckling at this right now...hey bozos...YOU do not get define what a "liberal" is. People still get to choose their own labels in this country. A real "liberal" does not mean ANYONE TO THE LEFT OF YOU. The reason you do not know what a real liberal is is true lefties have been systematically excluded from having any real voice in anything that is said or debated...with the exception of a few crazies that get trumped up to the skies anytime someone on Fox wants to make an example of how nutty those socialists are).

A country that demeans and ridicules what 25% of the population believes is in trouble. Yes, maybe a lot of lefties are nuts but guess what? Michelle Bachman is nuts too, and her face is plastered all over my computer screen. She gets to have her insane ideas listened to. Noam Chomsky (Who? Exactly?)? Not so much.

So why do I have the knife into liberals too, when I obviously have a great deal of sympathy for their plight? Simple. You look at the 2010 elections, how we got in this insane position. The Tea Party turned out en masse to put right wing dudes into office right? Wrong. The loonies got in because liberals stayed home. They were mad at Obama because of his messaging failures, because of his not pulling out of Afghanistan, because of not having a public option in the health care reform bill...etc., etc.

Those are all fair criticisms, up to a point. But dude, Obama is not God. He's got a whole bunch of people that are on his ass trying to take him down. Secondly, the fact that you projected him to be a liberal shining knight is not his fault. Most of the things he's done are exactly what he's campaigned on. I was there and I remember. And because you guys all sat on your hands and bitched about how disappointed you are, we got this bunch of loons. Thanks a lot, guys.

Yeah, it sucks that liberal ideas are not properly articulated in our media, and you guys are totally demonized. It sucks that lefties are out-messaged and that Obama hasn't been able to give you everything you want. But the fact remains there's still a lot more of Them than there are of You. And if you want a bigger seat at the table, you need to do what the right wing loonies -- who when I was a kid were a punch line, a total joke -- have been doing for 30 years. Get organized and start taking over, one school board at a time. Sitting around and whining because you got half a loaf from President Obama is not a good start to that goal.

Centrists -- Ah yes. That's most of us, right? We're not one of those crazy right wing wide eyes, and we're not one of the loonie left. WE'RE normal. You won't catch us taking a side, getting caught up in all this Washington nonsense. WE'RE the cool ones. WE'RE above it all. We know the whole thing is a scam, a joke.

I think I'm more pissed at the Centrists than anybody else. Because the Centrists smugly thing it has nothing to do with Them. They know it's all fucked up, and the only thing to do is wash your hands of it. It's all corrupt. It's all Those Politicians in Washington screwing everything up. Throw 'em all out. They are not listening to Us.

Except this fake notion of equality, "both sides do it", this bias towards not getting one's hand's dirty, is exactly the reason we have a situation now where one party is flawed and corrupt, and the other party is flat-out, batshit insane and may drive the country over the edge. Oh my, did I just say that? That must make me a LIBERAL! Must cover ears! La la la!

But that, if anyone has any ounce of perspective and looks at the situation fairly, is WHAT'S HAPPENING. And we've gotten to the point where no one in the media can actually just look at something and, even though they KNOW that's what's going on, they can't SAY it. And so the media just says "Democrats say this, and Republicans say that." And the disconnected masses watch it, and just see a mess they don't like. And walk away from it. And so in a situation where one side is just your normal gang of semi-corrupt fuck ups, and another side is completely trashing 100 years of political traditions, abusing the process and, of yeah, denying objective reality, and it's reported as being the same thing, guess which side triumphs? And guess whose fault it is? It's not the fault of the people doing the damage. They're getting away with it, why shouldn't they keep right on truckin'? After all, we're letting them. It's like saying "Johnny, you didn't take out the trash. Jimmy, you strangled the cat. You both go to bed without any supper." How is that going to work out, hmm?

50% of the country doesn't vote. We think that it doesn't matter, that our voices don't count. But think about it. If we REALLY didn't matter, why the enormous amount of money to obfuscate every issue, to keep us confused and disconnected and mad at each other? To get us so completely disgusted with the process that we just walk away from it, throw up our hands, say it doesn't matter, it ain't me?

Well, of course it's you. Who the heck is gonna listen to you, when you just shit on the people breaking things, and the people trying (however imperfectly) to fix things, equally? And you're not kicking down any money, or standing for anything, to boot?

In the end, here's what's going to happen: the country is going to be a place that none of us recognize. Hell, in many ways, it already is. Every single one of us is going to see it. And instead of being united in our unhappiness and coming together and thinking about a way to proceed that we can all live with, we're going to point fingers at each other, saying it's so and so's fault, fighting over smaller and smaller scraps, while the small cadre of people who engineered this entire shell game laugh at us and count their money. And who can blame them? They had an idea, they made a plan, and they followed through. The rest of us just fell for it.

And I'm one of them. Because this blog aside, I have decided to keep my mouth shut.

Yay! Now I belong.

Flash Forward

I've always been one of those people that's had trouble living in the moment. I guess that's something everyone struggles with, but for someone whose life has been as rich in experiences and people as mine has been, I've found those moments surprisingly hard to hold on to and call back to mind, because I'm not sure I ever was fully inside them when they were happening.

While I was in the desert over the weekend, turning these thoughts over in my head before sleep, I had one of those flashes that changes the way you look at everything.

Everything around you, everyone you are with, everything that you are doing right now, one day will be gone, and you will wish you could be in this moment right now again.

Something about that idea shifted my whole environment into focus. We spend our lives thinking of contingencies that will protect us from loss, recoiling from love through fear, or perhaps embracing the wrong kind of love in a desperate play for security.

But it's futile. Everything in your life now will one day be gone. Either that, or you will. And at some point, on this side of the grave or the other, you will miss something about the place and time and people around you, right now.

Something about that thought put me, perhaps for the first time, squarely in the here and now. It made my hugs a little longer and tighter, and my breaths a little deeper. And sleep came easier.

National Unity Party

Watching the disheartening reaction to the events in Arizona, most of it sadly predictable except for the lengths people (some in particular) will go to to avoid introspection about the overall mental state of the U.S., and how just maybe we should stop subtly encouraging the lizard parts of our brain in our discourse, irrespective of party, I had a thought.

If we really, really want to get this country together, all we need to do is form a party whose platform is "everything is somebody else's fault. At no point can my own beliefs or politics be challenged or called into question. At no point should I be required to weigh two opposing ideas fairly and rationally."

We'd be singing kumbaya in no time.

Keep being 6, America.

Arizona

It's irrelevant where you stand politically. If I could predict what happened in Arizona yesterday...and a lot of us did, some time ago...anyone could.

People busy pointing fingers, or ducking them, miss the point. Of course the dude was a loon, and of course there have always been loons. Sarah Palin did not pull the trigger. What's different in this day and age is we live in an environment where extreme rhetoric is everywhere. It used to be condemned. Now it's encouraged, it's accepted, it's what we hear everywhere around us. We can't have sane conversations anymore about differences of belief or policy. Our responsibility lies where we elevate the crazy talk over the sane. We're all culpable for going along with it....our media, first and foremost.

We have become a nation of people nursing our own grievances, talking past one another, ignoring any information we don't like, and avoiding introspection at all costs. And our media has been right there, milking it all the way to the bank, ready to cater to the worst in all of us, giving us all plenty of ammunition for our own pet belief systems. And we're all dumb enough to buy into it.

Whose fault is this event? The shooter's of course (or, if you like, whoever didn't get the guy some help or the mental heath system or whatever axe you wish to grind). But has the country become a place that gives the most radical, unreasonable and unbalanced people a bigger platform than everybody else? And will that result in more unstable people being encouraged to get their loony rocks off?

You betcha. And as we deplore the decline in our discourse, we'll all be busy blaming that on someone else...whoever isn't "us." And be mortally offended when that finger gets cast in our own direction.

This is gonna work out great, America. Keep right on being 6.

Ooh Shiny!

I don't think I'm alone (and welcome back to the blog, btw) in wanting to have a certain amount of positive social energy in my life...people that I think are really attractive, sexy, who inspire me, give me new perspectives, who I relate to, make me feel good about my place in the world, and make me feel a little less alone. I think we all want and need that.

For me, I always look for people that are a little out of the box. Nothing against people with normal 9-to-5 lives, it's just not what stimulates me.

Lately though, I've started to draw a line in my head between people that really have a degree of depth and character that underlies the surface attractiveness, and people that are just very good at being attractive. For lack of a better word, I've been calling these latter folks "shiny" people.

This is kind of an abstract concept, so let me try out a pretty obvious example. You're at a party. There's a beautiful girl there. She's put together well, smiles, and is friendly. You have a nice conversation. Maybe you exchange phone numbers and go out another time. But it becomes obvious after awhile that though the person is attractive on the surface, to misparaphrase Gertrude Stein, there's really no "there" there. There wasn't really anything in between the two of you in the way of a connection, and in the end, the person winds up being a waste of time and resources (particularly if you picked up the tab for dinner, you cheap bastard).

The thing is, I find that if you think it through -- or at least if I do -- take a step back from the physical reality in front of you and draw in the whole of the person, you can often take a good guess at who is really going to be worth pursuing a relationship (I mean that in the elastic way, including friendships and things like that) with, and who isn't. Or, if you can't, that at least it's really good to withhold yourself a little bit until you get a better sense of the person.

This has been a really great thing to figure out for me. It's always so great for me to meet people that I think are intriguing that it's easy to go overboard and ascribe things to them that aren't really there. That's not fair to me, and it's also not fair to them...it doesn't allow people to be who they are and be appreciate for that. And you also wind up overlooking people that aren't as glittery on the surface, but have a lot more to offer as friends.

2011: GO WEST again

As a lot of you know, I've been thinking about the best ways to keep doing my own music in the current bizarre state of the music biz, where between the recession and downloading CD sales have dwindled down to nothing and the indie music community has been scattered into the tiniest fragments....and also now being a full-time musician, mostly working on other peoples' music, putting time into my own music can take money out of my own pocket.

I've been luckier than most -- I have a little following and three of my albums on Karma Frog actually turned a profit -- but it became obvious earlier this year that I couldn't keep doing things the way I had for ten years.

Part of what drove me to back-burner my own music was in 2009 I released an album called GO WEST. It was a 23-track double album with a continuous theme running through it. I thought then, and I still think, that it's the best work I've ever done, and perhaps will ever do. But it also became obvious that the album as a whole was just too much for a lot of people to take in -- if you weren't ready to dig in for the long haul, or accept the diversity of styles on it, it didn't seem to work for a lot of people. The ones that did get into it were the ones that had the time and patience to listen to it from beginning to end.

That said, even if the album as a whole was too big a pill to swallow, it contains some of the very best individual songs I ever wrote....a lot of them. And to me there's not much point in continuing to write songs if there's plenty of your best work that most people have never really heard.

So after a lot of thought, I've decided that in 2011 I have no plans to do any new writing other than what I'm asked to do for custom songs, the Standells, or whatever. What I want to do instead is refocus attention on the GO WEST album. I was so disheartened year ago by various things that I basically couldn't face promoting it, and I instead put out the HELLO CLEVELAND record as a white flag and pretty much gave up. I basically chickened out on GO WEST, and left the baby to drown. I've decided I can't move forward without first reaching back and fishing it out of the water.

Instead of beating my brains loose on the road, what I plan to do for GO WEST is put out a series of videos, highlighting the best songs on the album, one by one. What I hope is that people that might not have been able to get into the whole double album idea can get to know the album on a song-by-song basis and appreciate what's there. Since the album has a loose storyline, I think the songs will lend themselves really well to visuals.

The second video for the album, and the first in over a year, will debut later today. I am REALLY proud of how it came out. I hope you'll take the time to give it a look, and if you like it, to pass it on. And I hope over time, more and more of you will get to know GO WEST.

Oh...almost forgot. To encourage people to pick up this CD, I've dropped the price on my website for GO WEST to $9.99...and that includes postage. To order, just go to www.adammarsland.com/store.html. Amazon has it, too, and they have used copies going for pretty cheap.

I've got some down time this month and I'm hoping to be able to pick up a number of other threads I dropped a few months ago, including this blog and the bedroom session videos. I've just been so friggin' busy that until now I haven't had the spare creative energy to do this stuff. Thanks all for your patience.

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Almost ready to start this thing back up again...just give me...a few more hours...spare time....

Stand by, I have some good stories to tell...