Biden for President

According to the main-stream press, there are three (count 'em) candidates that you should pay attention to: Hillary Rodham Clinton (her husband was president), Barrack Obama (he's photogenic, non-white, and a political rock star), and John Edwards (former VP candidate with amazing hair). I don't know why these are the only three the press pays attention to, but there it is. And between them they have less than two full terms in the U.S. Senate and zero terms in the U.S. House. In addition to the Big Three, there are other, arguably stronger candidates who are generally being ignored. One of them has been a senator for 30 years and has an actual view about what our policy in Iraq should be (and, no, just saying "we should leave Iraq" doesn't count as a sensible policy, no matter what your polls show, senators Clinton and Obama). But maybe because he isn't raising money hand over fist, and he doesn't command rock-star status, Senator Joe Biden's sensible, experienced, and well-informed views go unnoticed by the Wolf Blitzer/Anderson Cooper crowds of cable news.

This isn't to say that he's not getting noticed. Salon.com has a helpful interview with him here. And columnist Mark Shields has also written about Senator Biden.

For those of you who give a damn about what happens to this country, I ask you to pay attention to what the senior senator from Delaware has to say. He might not be the most photogenic politician or have a cadre of pollsters telling him what to say. But if you care that our next president have significant experience in international and domestic affairs, a scholar's understanding of the Constitution, and a long-record of decency, please visit JoeBiden.com and have a look.

God speed, Joe.

Farewell to Fallwell

I think my reaction to the death of Jerry Falwell is atypical—at least given that I am a politically-liberal philosophy professor at a large state university. And in many ways I understand and even agree with the views of most of my colleagues. To those who only knew of him through his statements of social morality and political conservativism, he was a pompous ass, a poster child of arrogant intolerance. God knows he said things for which he should be ashamed (and I trust he now is). Again, if this is all I knew of him, I’d join in the chorus of condemnation.

But if you think that this all there was to Jerry Falwell you aren’t seeing the whole picture. By all accounts of people who really knew the man, Jerry Falwell did have a concern for the poor (even if his stress on preaching the gospel over meeting physical needs seems out of balance to many of us), for single, scared pregnant women, and for the souls of those he thought were bringing down divine judgment on our country. Even Al Sharpton, hardly a man given to saying nice things about conservatives and in particular those who initially resisted the civil rights movement, commented on Larry King's CNN show that he counted Jerry Falwell as a friend. Jerry would call Sharpton just to find out how his family was doing and to chat. Sharpton also commented that Falwell never failed to speak to and show concern for the "little guys" who served him food and whose existence is often ignored by those with equal celebrity. People who paint Falwell as a one dimensional conservative moral monster just don’t know what they are talking about. Like most of the rest of us, he was a man with contradictions. But I believe that the most straight-forward measure of the moral compass of a person is how he or she treats the persons in his or her life, and in particular the people who are in servant roles. Everything I’ve read about Falwell leads me to believe that he was at least my moral equal on this score, and likely my superior (since he walked on a more heady stage than I ever will). So I’ll cast no stone in his direction. Yes, I think he sometimes hurt the true cause of Christ as it relates to social/political agenda we should be pursuing. But his convictions were at least in part a result of the time and place in which he was raised. In judgment, we should be merciful--even to the judgmental. The bottom line is that if I were in need and had to appeal on a personal level to someone in the public eye, I rather suspect I couldn’t do better than to ask for the help of the Reverend Falwell.

May God have mercy on your soul, Jerry. May God have even more mercy on mine.

A Busy Time for a Music Fan

The first quarter of 2007 has seen the release of a rather remarkable number of good (or at least interesting) albums. Among those added to my collection (several only in MP3 form--thanks eMusic.com!) in the past three or four months are the following:

Bright Eyes: Cassadaga
Bright Eyes: Four Winds [EP]
Andy Palacio: Watina
Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
Patty Griffin: Children Running Through
Lucinda Williams: West
Norah Jones: Not Too Late
Neil Young: Live at Massey Hall 1971
Graham Parker: Don't Tell Columbus
Fountains of Wayne: Traffic and Weather
Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank [sic] (Surely they meant to call it: We Were Dead Even Before the Ship Sank)
Michael Penn: Palms & Runes, Tarot and Tea: A Michael Penn Collection
Michael Penn: Mr. Hollywood, Jr. 1947 (this is a remastered, re-release of his 2005 masterpiece)

Of these records, my strongest endorsement goes to the pair of Michael Penn albums. My goodness can the man write a pop song! Clever, word-play-rich lyrics embedded in beautiful and hooky melodies all delivered in a McCartney-esque voice. *Palms and Runes* is a retrospective done right: every track a gem, some new versions of old favorites (well, at least for those of us who know him as more than just "that guy who did the song about Romeo in black jeans") sequenced in a way that does more justice to sound and content than it does to chronology. *Mr. Hollywood, Jr, 1947* is Penn's ode to 1947. It's what a short-story writer would do if trying to capture a place at a time in a collection of independent, although thematically related stories. This is my favorite of all of Penn's records, mostly for it's thinner production and overall unity.

Neil Young's *Live at Massey Hall 1971* is also wonderful. Neil is solo and at the top of his vocal game. If you've ever thought of him as a good songwriter/guitarist whose voice is a drawback, you need to listen to this record. But then I've raved about this record on this blog before.

Other quick notes: I at least like all of these records, although some I've yet to fully absorb. Still, I'd say that the Graham Parker album is a bit disappointing (not nearly as good as 2004's *Your Country*), as are the Norah Jones and Fountains of Wayne records. (Keep in mind that I have high expectations of records by all these folks, so "disappointing" does not mean "bad.") I just don't really get Arcade Fire, the Bright Eyes album is a bit over-produced (do we really need to hear him bleat with an orchestral background?) as is Patty Griffin's (although she still owns the most amazing female voice in pop music). Still you could do a lot worse than support these artists and spend some quality time with some quality popular music.

The Boys of Spring

"While Scully danced over the airwaves/Scully surfed over the airwaves..."

Terry Taylor, "Bakersfield"


'Tis spring and a boy's thoughts turn to that which his nature compels him: the high heat, the roundhouse curve, the check swing, the gapper, and (let us not forget) the 6-4-3 double play. Baseball's back and every decent American feels renewed. April is a time for hope, when even the worst of teams is but a few games out of first place.

As always, my loyalties are torn. On the one hand, I've been a Cubs fan forever. And with the addition of Sweet Lou Pinella and Alfonso Soriano (who may well be the best pure athlete in baseball), this is a season that might turn out to be "the" year. But then again I live in Cardinals country and I fully understand why the people around me have a loyalty to the Redbirds. The Cards embody all that is good about baseball. The team is composed of smart trades, can't miss free agents, and homegrown talent the likes of which is not seen east of the Mississipi or west of the Ozark mountains. Or anywhere else in North America.

Despite my love of mid-America baseball, I have to admit that long-time Dodgers announcer Vin Scully is the Prince of the Airwaves. His silky voice and literate accounts of the goings-on on the field greatly out-distance my ability to describe.

Scully dances over the airwaves indeed. (Thank God for Mlb.com's audio subscription.)

The Sorry State of Public Discourse

In the interest of at least partial disclosure, I should note first of all that I'm a Democrat. I'm not, however, a yell0w-dog Democrat (that is, a Democrat who would vote for any candidate her party runs, even if it is a yellow dog). And I'm not the sort of party member who will back whatever any member of her party says in a debate with members of The Other Party. I'm a Democrat who isn't always towing the party line.

Now we've all had it with the talking heads on cable news shouting each other down. That is not the kind of public discourse that will lead to serious understanding, and (even more) found areas of agreement and compromise. We are also all tired of hearing politicians say what they think we want to hear, politicians who will say almost nothing that hasn't been market-tested in advance. We might differ as to which politicians provide the best example of this, but we agree that many are guilty. And we don't like it one bit.

So far so good. But there is another problem of public political discourse that is less obvious but also troubling. It's the decision to simply ignore the relevant, serious problems of one's position that are presented by one's political foes. While I'd like to be convinced that I'm wrong, I have to say that the most obvious recent examples of this come from the Demos. Exhibit #1: Reasonably (to my mind, anyway) the Democrats want to limit how long our troops stay in Iraq. It's been four long, costly years and there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that things will be better tomorrow, next month, or next year. But the President counters by saying that if we leave before Iraq is a stable democracy, then all hell will break loose. The country will likely become a Shiite theocracy that might well be run by extremists (think Taliban, only Shiite), and that will be a disaster for Iraq, the Middle East, and (ultimately) the U.S. What the President is saying here is not (to my ear) implausible. So I'd like to hear what the Democrats who want to push a time table for withdrawl have to say about it. What's that? I'm not hearing anything. What we get are lots of reasons why we've been in Iraq long enough (or even too long) and why the Iraqi's have to be responsible for their own security. But what do the Democrats say about what would happen if we leave on a certain date no matter what the country's condition is then? From what I can tell only Joe Biden takes this seriously (and he has a plan that doesn't involve withdrawl on a particular date).

Still related to the war in Iraq and withdrawl, there is the issue of to what extent telegraphing our pullout date to the enemy puts us in a bad military position. The Democrats, sure that the war was wrong to begin with and has been poorly managed (two points on which I am definitely in agreement), insist that we can't stay there forever and that we need to specify a date when we will pull out. While that is, in itself, not unreasonable, there is still the legitimate question about to what degree our announcing our date of departure might be a significant aid to our enemies. So far, I've heard no Democrat take this issue head on. Why is that? Why is it that the good concerns/objections of our political opponents aren't deemed worthy of response? From what I can tell the reason is that in our current political climate what matters is scoring points with voters/poll-respondents today and not with what is really in our long-term national interest. This is surely a deplorable state of affairs for anyone who cares about where our country is heading.

We should call upon our leaders to address the key objections to their policy views and to tell us why their position is correct even with their opponents best objections in mind.

Snarky Bubblegum

"I'm From Barcelona" by We're From Barcelona

Okay, I had planned to spend this morning working on my book and writing an insightful post on the sorry state of political discourse in the United States. But along the way I made the tactical error of turning off the classical music I had playing and popping Paste Magazine's latest sampler into my CD player instead. It's now an hour later and I've been to the band's website and MySpace page, and have found the above video to the song on YouTube. If this song and video don't brighten your day, you should seriously reconsider increasing the meds.

Stan Heath: A Nice Guy and a Winner

Leo Durocher once said that nice guys finish last. When I saw Stan Heath’s face on the local news tonight as I sat in the coffeehouse trying to do a bit of work before picking up my son from baseball practice, I knew I was seeing one more instance of Durocher’s Law in practice—or if not Durocher’s Law at least a corollary: In the dog-eat-dog world of big-time collegiate athletics, nice guys tend to get fired. See, until this morning, Stan Heath was the head coach of the men’s basketball team at the University of Arkansas. From a man long on anger and resentment (former coach Nolan Richardson), Heath inherited a team almost entirely bereft of talent. Five years later the UA has a men’s basketball team that has made the NCAA tournament two years running and has been represented by a man with deep pockets where integrity, professionalism, and Christian charity are concerned. I guess an extra win in March matters more.

Here’s to Stan Heath….an exceedingly fine human being and a damned good basketball coach.

A Perfect Pop Song: "A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell

Since my last post was (loosely) about pop songcraft, particularly as it was practiced in the early 70s, I thought I'd post a example of a perfect pop song and performance. It doesn't get any better than this.

The Art of the Popular Song

As a child of the late 60's and 70's, I have the art of the pop song in my blood. Well, let me amend that: I have an appreciation of a well-crafted pop song coursing through me. It's not that I can write or perform one, but I like to think I know (and like) one when I hear it. And I understand the term "pop" in a pretty broad sense--as in the "popular arts." So looking at today's musical landscape, "pop" doesn't refer only to whatever it is that is played on Top 40 radio, but rather to anything that doesn't strive to be a part of the classical arts in contemporary music. So "pop" as I mean it covers everything from rock to hip-hop to bubblegum to country to dance to jazz to anything else you might hear on non-classical music stations. For my money (and my money might well be colored significantly by my status as an old fogey), what matters primarily to a great pop song is the melody, the lyric, the vocal, and the performance. And if these are reasonably good standards, then there is no doubt that the newly released old Neil Young performance Live at Massey Hall 1971 counts as a great piece of popular music. These songs range from folk to rock to (kinda) theatrical even though Neil limits himself to voice/guitar and voice/piano in every case. In virtually every case, the melody haunts, the lyrics arrest, and the vocal pierces. It is a remarkable performance by an artist who has given us 40 years of quality work.

This is an album I can recommend to old coggers like myself and to my university students. If you like popular music (in the sense defined above), you'll find a lot to like here.