GIve me your tired, ____, your huddled masses

First things first. I read the entirety of Emma Lazarus's sonnet, "The New Colossus," tattooed on the Statue of Liberty, whose famed line ("Give me your tired . . .") was all that most of us, myself include, had ever read. Here's the whole thing.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden shore!"

For my part, I don't deny having found myself a little teary-eyed, reading it aloud.

Anyway, I want to mention a quick thought about income inequality, which, as the NYT notes, is growing to near-Great Depression levels, in spite of a striking dearth public concern for that inequality. My question, though, is just what would we have to give up to do something substantive about it? Sure, there are many things that count as 'substantive,' but if we wanted to look at the current budget, what's an avenue that would pretty efficaciously start to close that gap?

In 2009, the United States spent $717 billion on the national defense, while the People's Republic of China, our nearest runner-up, spent $70.3 billion. Suppose the US cut $300 billion from the defense budget, allowing it to grow subsequently in whatever ways Congress would have it, and suppose the US reapportioned that $300 billion annually to endow households with (say) $100,000 interest-earning savings funds. First, we would nonetheless fivefold outspend our 'rivals' on defense. Second, since there are just over 100 million households in the US, endowing every single one of them with such a savings account would take just over a generation, 30-35 years.

Think it sounds crazy? Try third: in Norway, its national Government Pension Fund has saved nearly all of the oil wealth extracted from Norway's North Sea oil wells to produce savings of $89,000 not per household, but per man, woman, and child. And given Norway's low birthrate, and the projected 60% gains in that fund over the next three years, the individual savings amount will increase to $142,000. All of this? It took Norway just forty-five years. The college graduates at the start of the savings are now, today, benefiting.

Talk like that tends to put the talk of the 'profit motive' into perspective, doesn't it?

What's Wrong With Rap - Part I

Maybe there should be a question mark at then end of that headline - "What's Wrong With Rap?" - I don't know. But, maybe not. I'm not really sure, to be honest. But what I think I'm going to try to do here is describe my experience listening to rap this week, my reactions to it, and then offer some gestures at an interpretation for those reactions.

What's inspiring this post is a note last week from my compatriot on this site. He wrote it in response to my post about the ungrounded nature of many musical preferences, suggesting that part of the reason why people reject whole genres, whole artistic corpuses, is that there's just too much krappenmusik out there - by which I really, really hope he meant crepenmusik - too much crap to sort through. So, we listen to a little of this, a little of that, to find out which of this or that has too much crap as to be worth our time searching for the good stuff, and also which has enough good stuff that my search for the really good stuff will be enjoyable in spite of how hard I have to look for what's exceptionally good.

This description seems both reasonable and accurate to me. It's why I, myself, am not drawn to rap or to much pop music - because so much that one encounters is bad that the energy necessary to discover and cultivate an appreciation for what's good in the genre is just too high relative to what's required in other genres. And similarly, it's part of why I've fallen for opera, and why orchestral and symphonic music is so pleasurable - so little effort is required to find what's good.

But as reasonable as that account sounds, I think there's a fly in the ointment. The described process is one whereby we listen to the music according to how easy it is, in a given genre's or artist's massive set of artworks, to find what's good in that set. Such a process, however, seems like it would recommend, inevitably, our listening to what can broadly be described as Western Classical music. (Start with Bach, and start naming whichever 'composers' you know - their music is what I'm talking about.) It would make such a recommendation because it is so very easy to find good music in that genre, and further, the difference between the energy required to find the merely "good" music and the "excellent" music in this genre is almost negligible. We know which artists are great, we know, in general, which of their works are their best, and gaining access to that knowledge if you don't already have it takes almost no energy at all. And what's more, the genre supplies a near-endless number of good pieces - and a very large number of great pieces - such that one might listen only to Classical music for one's entire life and never find oneself bereft of something pleasurable.

Perhaps that overstates the case, but I think the point is clear. What then, might suffice to explain this phenomenon? There are several factors, I think.

• The genre is much older than contemporary genres, so it has had more time to establish its standards and for versions of those standards to be questioned.
  
  
• There is an entire academic industry devoted to arguing about what should be culled and included in the Classical canon.
  
  
• A significant musical education (even if non-academic) has always been a necessary condition on producing Classical music that anyone would listen to. And so those composing in the genre must have been, on average, significantly more intelligent, more dedicated than what is necessary to produce music in contemporary genres that people will listen to.

These factors, I think, conspire to produce an easily accessible body of knowledge that accurately recommends great music, without our having to sift through very much bad music at all.

Anyway. What's the fly here? If the process by which we pick those genres we'll excise and those we'll embrace is the one that will most easily result in our having pleasurable listening experiences, then, as I said, it isn't obvious to me why Classical wouldn't be the most popular genre on offer. Except this: it isn't. Indeed, it may be the least popular genre in today's audial pantheon. The most popular genres are what can causally be called "pop," "rock," "rap," "hip-hop," and the like - genres all that have almost no established structure for delineating between the good and the bad, and so hardly any authoritative canon to speak of. (Well, maybe you can have both.) These are genres where one can spend countless hours sifting through schlock, and even then find little in the way of excellent music, or at least, relatively little compared to Classical - little, indeed, when compared even to opera or jazz. Given what seem like strong incentives against what have proven the most profitable genres, and those in favor of Classical, any interesting question arises: what gives?

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd guess something like this. While accurate and reasonable, my comrade's explanation of how we choose our music seems not to account for a pretty essential, yet antecedent, step: the inculcation of taste. The process Ross describes is reasonable entirely, if you aren't already biased against, say, Classical music, or biased in favor of this or that contemporary genre. Which is to say, it's reasonable entirely if you haven't been antecedently indoctrinated to one standard of taste or another. ("'Taste' tends to equal 'bias.' There's a controversial thesis, at least for the hipster-non-hipster out there.)

The key, though, is that the path of easiest listening resistance, while it may explain why we listen to what we listen to once our sense of taste is in some sense 'fixed', doesn't really explain how we come to have the fixed senses of taste that we have - if those senses be fixed at all, that is. Indeed, I think that the real question (and an open one, if you please) is this: in light of what seem like ceteris paribus reasons in favor of (say) Classical, what 'theory of taste formation' would explain the fact these reasons do not seem to be ones to which people are responsive?

[Okay, so we didn't get to the "Aaron listens to rap without opening a vein" part. Call that Part II of this series.]

Academe vs. Reality

I don't know if you've noticed this, but it seems there's some sort of disconnect between what goes on in the heads of academics and what is actually going on in the world. The latest instance to be added to this ignominious case-file is that of the MSM program here at Notre Dame. Just last year our directorship became a triümvirate with the addition of two new professors from parts Eastward. (We snagged 'em from the Ivy league. Somewhere in there is a G&S patter-aria to be written.) Anywho, these two came in with big plans for our sacred music program, the major 'improvement' to be made regarding which is the addition of many many more conductors. (Plans are for a sufficient number of student-conductors such that they can form their own choir to perform recitals. As it is, currently they rely on the goodwill of organists to supplement their choirs.) This is a colossal mistake. There are no church music jobs for conductors who are not also organists; with one exception, none of our present conductors is an organist. We have supervised church music placements, both on campus and in nearby churches, and the glut of conductors is threatening to overwhelm the available positions, which historically have been reserved for organists (y'know, the folks who can actually do the job). If this discourages organists from applying to the program, the problem will only be exacerbated. A Masters in Sacred Music from Notre Dame, at this rate, will become a vanity degree, for it certainly will not be useful for any extant jobs. None of this seems to bother the New Powers that Be.

This example, surely representative of all sorts of idiocy in college programs, raises several important questions. Chief among them is this: is a degree meant to be useful? I don't mean to say that a proper education is not a great boon to a mind, to a community, and to society as a whole. But can we, in good conscience, train students for jobs that aren't there? How many degrees in underwater basket-weaving shall we hand out before we realize that we've got enough baskets already?

Teachers and taxes

So, people've heard that states and the federal government (i.e. we) are facing what Very Serious People (VSP) say are very worrisome levels of budget deficit in the next few years, right? That means that we'll have some money that we'll have to find some way of paying back, and given the serious tones that VSP take in these discussions, we're left to conclude that these ways of paying back are going to start awfully soon. Fine. But let's look at how Republicans, the party of fiscal responsibility if ever there was one, have handled themselves so far.

First, in abstract. There's a budget deficit. You pay your bills by raising revenues or cutting expenses. But what does raising revenues entail? It entails raising taxes. But what, really, is a tax increase? It's the state garnishing your wages, with the functional effect of your having a decreased purchasing power.

Now, consider what Republicans are willing to do to state employees and teachers. They're willing to cut teacher pay, employee pensions - in essence, garnish their wages - with the effect of raising state revenues by decreasing cost of education and pension responsibilities. So, reducing teacher pay, eliminating pensions benefits, etc. is functionally a tax increase on those people - instead of on the wealthy. Which is to say, Republicans are willing to raise taxes on teachers and state pension recipients, and they aren't willing to raise them on people making over $250,000 per year.

I hate when people talk about class warfare or whatever, but this seems like such an obvious example of it to me, that I could just puke.

A Discerning Ear for Taste

In the last six months, I've cottoned to the varied expressions of musical arts in a way that I've never cottoned to them before. I've made opera a monthly excursion, and I make a point to read at least a few articles about the composer and libretto of the performance I'm attending (so far, for the curious: Verdi's "A Masked Ball", G&S's "The Mikado", and just two weeks ago Puccini's "Girl of the Golden West"). I bought a new, entry-level high-fi sound system (for the curious, Vienna Acoustic's Haydn monitors, a Marantz P8003 integrated solidstate, and some very-fine-indeed cable on loan from a benefactorial professor), with abuncha CDs from as many genres with which to acquaint myself. I now try to acquire electronic copies of scores for the performances that I listen to, in order that I can learn to read through the performance, much in the way that the composer wrote it and the conductor (and musicians, for that matter) read it.

In all, the experience has been, if not cheap, unadulteratedly wonderful. And doubly so for the fact that I cannot foresee its end. My life, in short, is happier. And that, because I have a deeper appreciation - which is simply to say, a more deeply moving experience - of music every time I listen.

Now, you'd be right if you guessed the following two things (though, it'd be odd if 'guess' accurately characterized how you came to believe them): first, I have what, at one time, could've been described as a relatively extensive musical education; second, I didn't listen to much music before now, apart from whatever was on the local public radio station. The first, I won't detail, except to say that I can read music and play more than a few (but far fewer than many) piano scales. The second, though, may require some explanation. I didn't listen to music as a child in no small part, I suppose, because when I was at the age when children come to want to listen constantly to music, my family just didn't have any on. So, I never knew what music my parents took to, until much older, and I had little acquaintance with any popular music until I was of an age to find it distasteful. Or rather, maybe a theory of popular music enjoyment has to begin at a time when one accepts unquestioningly the soundness of popular music as a form of artistic expression. This, I think it's obvious, never happened for me. Consequently, I never listened to popular music when I was young, and by the time I was in middle school and therefore old enough to begin enjoying the pop-y ballads and whatever was on the radio, I just didn't enjoy it.

All of this resulted in an odd, but interesting, feature of my musical outlook (or whatever): I don't have preferences. Or at least, I don't have genre-, instrument-, singer-, or whatever specific preferences - which is to say that I don't prefer things in any of the ways that I recognize a lot of other people as preferring music. A few examples. Out of hand, for example, I don't dislike rap. And I don't, out of hand, enjoy classic rock. I don't hate Cher, or Madonna, or Lady Gaga. Just as I don't love Dire Straits, the Beatles, or Willie Nelson. And it's this way for everything. Or, almost everything. There are some styles at the boundaries of what count as music that I find myself having an impossible time appreciating. Hardcore punk (or "Screamo" as it's aptly nicknamed) grates my audial sensibilities in a very unappealing way. It frightens me, for one. And how, as an expression of art, it differs from an expression of rage is almost never obvious. But that's a different post. My point here stands: even with Screamo, I think I could appreciate whatever is supposedly good in it, if someone would just point to what I'm not seeing.

Anyway, I don't think it's so interesting that my musical tastes turned out this way - it seems natural, after all, given what I was working with. So, what has been interesting about all of this? Watching other people talk about their tastes, that's what's been interesting. As near as I can tell, most people have little room in their lives for music that doesn't come after whatever they like now. Which is an impolite way of passive-aggressively saying: lots, and lots, of people hate lots and lots of music for, as near as I can tell, absolutely no reason. "I just don't like how it sounds," is the most common declamation. What's odd about that reaction, though, is how unimpeachable its utterers take it to be. Really? I mean, saying that you don't a piece of music because you don't like how it sounds is just saying that you don't like piece of music because you don't like that piece of music. Which, for those keeping score out there, isn't a reason at all.

So, what gives? I mean, that this tautologous expression, and its variants, get treated as unimpeachable reasons for rejecting certain songs, certain genres, has to say something about the culture of music appreciation, doesn't it? My guess is that these sorts of phrases, aren't treated as reasons, per se, justifying why people don't like a certain song or whatever. Rather, when a person uses a phrase like, "I just don't like how it sounds" in what's normally the 'justification slot' in a critical conversation, what he's really doing is invoking a certain kind of critical etiquette. What kind? The kind that restricts the acceptable response from the questioner (the one who asked, "Why don't you like this song?") from further pressing the respondent for reasons justifying his distaste.

If this response really is just an invocation of etiquette, and how I've described it really is how the etiquette works, I think it would go a long way towards explaining why it appears that "I just don't like how it sounds" gets treated as an unimpeachable justification of distaste. To illustrate, suppose that that response really were an unimpeachable reason. How could the questioner reply to it? Well, he couldn't. After all: the reason is unimpeachable. Now, suppose, as I do, that "I don't like how it sounds" is just an invocation of a rule of etiquette that prevents the questioner from politely pressing the respondent any further. How might the questioner respond? If he wants to maintain polite conversation, as conversations about musical taste most usually are, the respondent can say nothing further - just as he can say nothing further in the case of the unimpeachable reason.

It's probably a lot harder to say just why we've developed this etiquette. My rough-and-ready stab is that most people who listen to music have biases that they don't want to investigate - genres, artists, what have you that they haven't really appreciatively listened to, and for no good reason. But being a biased consumer of anything is kind of embarrassing, and we develop etiquette for efficacious reasons - which include avoiding embarrassment. So, it's my guess that this sort of etiquette is a cover for an otherwise embarrassing bias. A bias which the etiquette allows us to treat in the same way that we treat those things we've listened to appreciatively and rejected.

I wonder, though, how common is this kind of experience with other people's musical preferences? My limited sense is that it's pretty common, because almost everyone listens to music and there's an intense social pressure (for reasons I have no clue about) to be able to say whether one likes or dislikes whatever he's listened to. But then, perhaps it's less common than I think - and indeed, more isolated that I've experienced. Thoughts?

I Could've Been an Assenisipian

Among Thomas Jefferson's unfortunately neglected ideas are a series of names he proposed for states to be founded in the then-Northwest Territories, which is to say, the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The New York Times discussed these names in an 1889 article. Especially relevant is the proposed name of the region that is now northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin: Assenisipia, after the Assenisipi (or, as it is known to the white man, the Rock River). Why, the name is positively pulchritudinous, if I do say so myself. I resolve to write the federal government to propose the breakup of the states of Illinois and Wisconsin so that Jefferson's original intention may be honored.

Moar Historical Attack Ads

So, this video is almost as funny as the Kant video below. Some of the names the Founders called one another. . . a more enterprising blogger might write a post comparing the characteristics that people in their time thought disqualified a candidate for election to those that disqualify candidates today. I, for one, don't retreat from the belief that a man raised by a half-squaw on hoe cakes has any place in the halls of American power.