Revenge of the Turds

Via Megan:

I have nothing to add to this except to ask:  what strikes you as the salient difference between the TSA agents (especially the woman (I think) in the foreground), and their victim?  What do you think is really going on here?

Speak Now: an Album Review

Those of you with tween-aged daughters certainly know that Taylor Swift released her third album, Speak Now, on 25 October.  (Actually, considering that the album sold a cool million copies in the first week, everyone except you Martian cave dwellers probably knew this even without little girls to remind you, like, every day.)

Let me say at the outset of this review that it is a measure of my respect for Swift’s talents that I even notice this at all.  In fact, I couldn’t even name a single album released in the last decade.  As I listen to the music while writing this review, I will fully concede that Swift’s latest work retains for her the position of America’s sweetheart.

But.

I was disappointed.  Thematically, we’ve heard all these songs in Fearless.  Both albums divide easily into the I-love-my-boyfriend songs, the my-jerk-boyfriend-left-me songs, the I-left-my-jerk-boyfriend songs, and the my-boyfriend-to-be-is-dating-the-wrong-girl song.  Each album also has a triumph-over-adversity song:  “Change” in Fearless, “Long Live” in Speak Now.

This last was a comedown from its earlier counterpart. 

Long live the walls we crashed through
How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you
I was screaming long live all the magic we made
And bring on all the pretenders
One day we will be remembered

Nothing in the rest of the song provides any context, but the opening line is incoherent.  Why would we want the “walls that we crashed through” to “live long”?

There are a few bright spots.  A few of the songs explore old territory in a new way.  “Mine” was especially moving as she sings of a girl (in the first person) whose parents’ broken marriage colors her current relationship:

And I remember that fight, two-thirty AM
You said everything was slipping right out of our hands
I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street
Braced myself for the goodbye, cause that's all I've ever known
Then, you took me by surprise
You said, "I'll never leave you alone."

“Better than Revenge”, in its own category as a that-scheming-slut-stole-my-boyfriend-and-I’m-gonna-crush-her song, has this funny'-‘cause-it’s-true line:

Stealing other people's toys on the playground
Won't make you many friends
She should keep in mind,
She should keep in mind
There is nothing I do better than revenge, Ha

If Fearless left any gaps in its exploration of female narcissism, Speak Now plugs them.  But at some point, I really would like her to apply her talents to subjects that aren’t all about her.  So Taylor, if you really want to solidify your position as the premier songwriting talent of our generation . . . write us a new national anthem.  “The Star-spangled Banner” is so 1812.  

Reflections of an Underachiever

My father came to visit me last week.

I’ve always admired my father.  He is what we in this corner of the blogosphere would call a natural alpha*, although significantly, I didn’t really appreciate this fact until I was well into adulthood.  But I did know that he succeeded wildly at a high-risk profession and as an entrepreneur (and at everything he tried, in fact, except, unfortunately, investing).  I knew that he owned fine houses and expensive foreign cars.  And I knew that he was in charge.

In short, he was everything I expected to be when I grew up.

What I didn’t know was how different we were.

I began succeeding at school much earlier than my father had, as well I should have:  my father climbed up from working-class mill family origins, whereas I always enjoyed high parental expectations.  I excelled at academic subjects of which he had no understanding; ergo, I was smarter.  By high school I could run farther and faster than he could, and by college I could swim faster too; ergo, I was more physically attractive.  It was simple math.

But although my father is only slightly taller than I am, he is much larger.  Imagine, for a moment, Don Draper and Pete Campbell standing next to each other.  I’m Pete Campbell.  A taller, more athletic Pete Campbell perhaps, but still:  Pete Campbell.  It took me until quite recently to understand how that might matter.

Looking back on it, there were plenty of signs.  Inside my father’s stories of his youthful hijinks was the message that he had a gang of friends that did stuff together.  Inside his stories of high-stakes gambling at pool and cards on the rough side of town was the message that he faced dangerous situations with confidence.  Inside his stories of conflict at work was the message that he was the master of his situation.  His was the life of someone who expected to succeed.  It was not the life of someone who’s daily objective was to get through the day without getting beat on, or made an object of ridicule.

Much of this began to sink in around the time I got married.  My father got married at age 25 to a woman not yet 20.  I loved my mother, but growing up it never occurred to me to compare her to anybody else.  I knew she was pretty, but I never stopped to think about what that meant.  Looking back on it, I guess I would say that I unconsciously saw her as the baseline of attractiveness.  I wasn’t, at that point, sure if women were worth the aggravation of being married to one, but I assumed that if I ever did get married that it would be to a woman who resembled my mother in certain salient respects.

It wasn’t until I was engaged myself that this was brought home to me.   I remember attending a party with mother and watching her across the back lawn of the house when it struck me that my mother wasn’t merely pretty.  She was, in fact, strikingly beautiful in an uncommon way.  She does not – or pretends to not – see herself in this light, so I had few cues that this was the case.  She does see herself as disciplined about diet and exercise, perhaps, but even here she fails to appreciate how, in practice, this physicality is not often willed into being among women.

And I realized then that my own success with women would never equal my father’s; despite having four extra years to work with, I was marrying a woman 15 months older than I was.  Don’t misunderstand me:  I did not want to marry my mother.  Nor even did I want to marry someone like my mother.  Mrs. Φ excels in the domestic arts in a way that my mother, an accomplished musician, never bothered, and she has proved her loyalty through circumstances with which I would definitely not test my mother.  But I could nonetheless grasp the difference between the position my mother occupied in the status hierarchy – her SMV, as it were – and the position that my bride-to-be occupied, and what this said about my father’s position relative to my own.

I’m not sure my father has reconciled himself to the fact that his son is, from his perspective, an underachiever.  He doesn’t know that my own adventure as the pointy-haired boss could be charitably characterized as mediocre.  He’s figured out that I’m not especially upwardly mobile with my lifelong employer, and that my houses don’t seem to be getting any bigger, but he doesn’t grasp that being a Company Man is about the extent of my realistic ambition.  He’s proud of the fact that I’ve worked my way to near completion on a PhD, but it’s also clear from his comments that he thinks, why hasn’t this kid struck out on his own?  Thought like a man who expects to succeed, rather than someone who tries to get through the day without getting beat on, or made an object of ridicule.

 

* Parenthetically, I should clarify here that my father has never indicated he is much motivated by sex.  On the contrary, his stories show him to be very much a straight arrow in this respect, straighter than me even, though he is not especially religious.  (This trait I inherited from my mother.)

Happy Thanksgiving

Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.

William Bradford

Ye Governor of Ye Colony

1623

PC Zombies

Episode 2 of AMC’s new series The Walking Dead provoked the expected eye-roll.  I mean, c’mon:  can’t we enjoy a zombie movie without being treated to the spectacle of a white southern racist hurling the N word?  In all the years I lived in the South, and as many times as I heard the N word, I never once witnessed a white person use it to address a black person.  Not.  Once.  And yet, I’m supposed to believe that among the six human survivors in Atlanta, one of them will use it against another in the middle of a zombie siege!!!

But that said, let me try to extract a worthwhile question out of this.  Come the zombie apocalypse, which social model will prevail:  a multi-cultural one?  Or a tribal one?

Deputy Rick, the series’ protagonist, opted for the first:  “There are only two races now,” he tells Merle-the-Racist, “the living and dead.”  Cornball as it sounds, I suspect something like this is probably true.  I understand that it is a commonplace among social historians that larger social groups (e.g. nations) are often forged in the fire of total war, and I’m pretty sure facing millions of the undead trying to eat our brains would motivate us to take our alliances where we can find them.  The result, I would guess, would not be multiculturalism, but rather a new culture alloyed from the remnants of the old ones.

But maybe not.  Perhaps the future would belong, not to our diverse band of survivors, but to ethnic mafias newly empowered by the collapse of the administrative state.  I’m thinking of something like MS-13 battling for territory and resources against, say, SAMCRO, and the zombies serving mainly as a nuisance that both sides must contain but otherwise ignore.

Does anybody have a strong opinion about this?

What’s a “Fixie”?

Christian Lander reported a while back that fixed gear bicycles are the rage among SWPLs.  The picture headlining his post appears to be of the standard diamond-frame bicycle.  I once saw one of these bicycles in an upper end bicycle shop listing for $900+.

Φ’s daily commute takes him through what this corner of the blogosphere would call a prole neighborhood.  Not, I hasten to say, an underclass neighborhood:  it’s racial composition is similar to Φ’s Lily-White Little Burg, and its median income is slightly higher than that of the state.  But that’s still some $30K less than Φ-ville, with houses priced proportionately.

One of the things I’ve seen often enough to notice is what appear to be older teenagers (i.e. 14 y.o.+) riding fixed-gear children’s bicycles that look obviously too small for them.

Why would they do this?  Even during the phase when Φ’s family was scrimping by, my parents still managed to spend $60 –$80 on a ten-speed for my 12th or 13th birthday.  That’s in 1981 dollars. Today, you can go to Wal-Mart and for less than $100 get bicycles with features that in the early 90's (when Φ last paid attention to this kind of thing) could cost thousands of dollars. (Note that those features were typically attached to alloy, aluminum, or titanium frames rather than steel frames, but still.)

Is riding a too-small BMX bike some kind of young prole version of the fixie movement?  Or are these young people really so poor that they can’t afford better?

[Back]scattered Thoughts

Megan is on a tear:

Dear Airline: I'm leaving you. But don't feel too bad. It's not you, it's me. Or rather, it's the TSA.

I'm not going to lie. It's come between us. If I have to let someone else see me naked in order to be with you--well, I'm just not that kinky.

Several things come to mind. First, if Megan objects to what airport security has become, well, she should have thought about that before cheerleading the immigration policies that allowed into our country hundreds of thousands* of Arabic Muslims while at the same time insisting that ethnic profiling at TSA checkpoints is immoral. She is now reaping what she sowed.

But given these constraints, it's hard to get upset about the backscatter scanners. On the contrary, if these ever provide sufficient resolution to replace the shoe-and-belt-removal and the unpack-the-baby-stroller aggravations we're presently enduring, then they'll be a welcome improvement. No, I don't like the diminished zone of expected privacy either, but I like getting killed by terrorists even less.

But a stranger will see us naked! To which I respond: they get what they pay for.** Seriously, the porn value of these images, judging from the TSA samples I've seen, is pretty limited, and in any case, if the prospect of getting seen naked motivates some of the travellers I've seen at airports to either (1) lose weight or (2) take the train, then . . . explain to me where the downside is?

Megan objects that the TSA has failed to make a public case for the extent to which the backscatter machines marginally improve airplane security, which is fair enough . . . but it's also kind of the point. By way of analogy, consider the intelligence community (with which I have a passing familiarity). The kinds of information we are able to collect and the ways we collect it (i.e. "Sources and Methods") receive the highest security classification handling our government has, and for good reason: to know the sources and methods is to know how they can be defeated. The same is likely true for backscatter images: exactly what they can tell airport security about what passengers are carrying on their persons would be exactly the kind of information that aspiring terrorists would want to know, and thus should remain closely held.

But I repeat: if you don't like these security arrangements (and I don't), then join me in calling for the expulsion of the aliens among us, or for profiling them.

* I don't know the exact number, except that it's too damn many.

** In my case, they get more. I look pretty good naked.