Argentina's La Nación newspaper has as its US correspondent a brilliant man named Mario Diament, who writes a fascinating column about American happenings for his Latinamerican audience. Most recently, this article looked at the much-pondered question of why people do cruel things like exterminating Jews or, in this case, waterboarding terror suspects. His piece focuses on one man in particular, a certain Jay Scott Bybee, a Mormon priest and US judge who was one of the many who appended his signature to the document which gave the CIA executive permission to continue with their practises of extracting information through torture. Diament understands why people such as Bush or Cheney might have done such a thing for reasons of politics/evilness/not-knowing-what's-going-on, but he asks how Bybee, a man known for being humble, intelligent and generally pleasant and normal, could join their ranks. Below are the final paragraph's of Diament's article, followed by my rough translation:
Pero el misterio sigue siendo Bybee, quien corrió a ayudar a sus hijos con sus deberes y a lavar los platos el día de su confirmación, un experto en derecho constitucional y procedimiento civil, padre de 4 hijos, ex boy scout y misionero de la Iglesia mormona. En el panegírico publicado por la revista Meridian , se afirma: "Bybee cree que la sociedad funcionaría mejor si la gente demostrase una actitud de reconciliación en lugar de venganza".
En 1961, durante el proceso a Adolf Eichmann en Jerusalén, Hannah Arendt acuñó el concepto de "banalidad del mal" para sintetizar su percepción del acusado. Su tesis era que quienes cometen crímenes atroces, como Eichmann, responsable de gerenciar la "solución final" del problema judío en la Alemania nazi, no son habitualmente fanáticos enloquecidos, sino, más bien, individuos ordinarios, quienes simplemente aceptan las premisas del Estado y las cumplen con extrema eficiencia.
Al elaborar su memorándum, Bybee debe haber pensando, seguramente, que lo que se esperaba de él no era otra cosa que una interpretación legal, un ejercicio intelectual divorciado de su contenido y del efecto sobre sus posibles víctimas, en el que la tortura se vuelve una abstracción.
***
But the mystery of Bybee remains, who went to help his children with their homework and wash the dishes the day of his confirmation [to high office], an expert in constitutional rights and civil procedures, father of four children, ex-boyscout and missionary of the mormon church. In an appraisal published in the Meridian magazine, it is stated that "Bybee believes that society functions better if people show an attitude of reconciliation rather than revenge."
In 1961, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt coined the concept of the "banality of the evil" to create her portrate of the accused. Her theory was that those who committ atrocious crimes, like Eichmann, who was responsible for carrying out the "final solucion" of the Jewish problem in Nazi Germany, are not by nature mouth-frothing fanatics, but rather, normal people, who simply accept the edicts of the State and carry them out very efficiently.
To write his memorandum [justifying torture], Bybee must have thought, surely, that what was required of him was nothing more than a legal interpretation, an intellectual exercise divorced from its contents and the effect on its potential victims, in which torture becomes an abstraction.
***
Diament, the master journalist that he is, finishes his article here, and refrains from penning a concrete conclusion to be taken from these musings. The conclusion is, like those famous "rights", self-evident. Evil can happen when people do not feel directly responsible.
A famous psychological experiment was conducted in which volunteers were told to ask questions to actors who the volunteers thoughts were only other volunteers. For each question that was answered incorrectly, the volunteers had to electrocute the actor. Although no current was actually applied to the "subject", they nevertheless acted the symptoms of electrocution. To begin, a small current was "applied", and the actor gave a twitch. The current gradually got larger and larger, and the actor would manifest signs of extreme pain. The volunteer would ask not to continue, but the scientists monitoring the experiment would tell them that it was OK, they [the volunteers] were not responsible for anything that happened, all possible blame would be laid at the feet of the scientists. Most volunteers continued electrocuting their "subjects" until they appeared dead.
This phenomenon, this tucked-away, sinister little part of human nature only becomes real or dangerous when political and social systems contrive to create a situation in which the evil designs of a tiny number of high-ranking individuals need to be carried out by many hundreds of ordinary people in order to occur. Unfortunately, almost every social system in the world is formed in this way. As any sociologist will tell you, the phenomenon of people obeying orders is a direct product of society and the near-total control that it can exert over its members. Social forces are, in this way, often the undoing of the individual.
Of course, it is also self-evident that without society, the individual would be nothing. And if society did not demand fealty from the individual, then it would cease to be: each person would only act for himself, and nothing would join people in the common purpose that is the very essence of society, and the essence of what makes humankind prosperous. But this fealty need not bee unthinking. Just as it is important to feel a common bond with those around you, it is equally important that this bond does not overthrow the rational workings of your consciousness. You should not shirk your share in constructing a great civilisation, but if this construction involves doing harm to others, it makes much more sense to abandon your social ties.
This is why it is dangerous when people talk about (for example) feeling pride in their country. Love for one's countrymen is fine, but a such a pride is utterly irrational, and in my view the first step in the more harmful, but equally large-scale irrationality of, say, condoning torture for national security.
Saturday, 18 April 2009
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Johnny Foreigner
I'm really excited about this band I discovered the other day as the support act for Hundred Reasons. They're not really very close to the kind of thing that I would normally consider within the sphere of my music taste, but they have such an infectious sincerity and passion that I fell in love with them instantly. They strike me as an embodiment of everything that's good about the British music scene at the moment. The music is boundlessly creative and emotional, but there is an overpowering sense of realness and just-normal-people-doing-awesome-things-not-because-they're-awesome-but-because-it-comes-naturally. As an example of what I mean, read this bio in their own words:
hello this is the ongoing interactive story of johnny foreigner. there are 3 of us, we come from birmingham, we dont go out too much and we have a tendency to overcompensate. we write noisy pop songs for people what like the same bands as we do. last year we put out two 7" records on Laundrette Records. they both sold out and got played on the rah-dio and stuffs. we were pretty fucking proud. last summer we signed a proper record deal, with cone-tracts and everything, for Best Before Records. we recorded an eepee called arcs across the city at southern studios, it got mega good reviews from magazines we'd almost stopped buying and a lot more people started listening to us. we went to new york to make a proper album at the end of last year, it came out in spring and we had like, 4 months living in a van and peoples floors touring it round the country (with the occasional overseas holiday/show). we spent the summer alternately jetting around the world and vanning around the uk playing festivals. we just finished a yookay tour with some awesome other bands, if you weren't there you so missed out.. junior lost his ipod, alexei went crowdsurfing and kelly got totally bloody.
After that, there was a headline tour of the UK (again) with Dananananakroyd (yay) and then the end of 2008 saw us playing the biggest places we've ever played in support of the Futureheads, who are all amazing, and equally very, very tall. In 2009 - this year - we sat and wrote songs and songs and more songs. Then we did our first tour of Europe with Sky Larkin. That too was good. Show great. Repetition. Show amazing. Repetition. We like gigging. On 8th March we flew from Sweden to Heathrow, we then didnt leave Heathrow and got on another plane to NYC which is where we are right now recording ALBUM NUMBER TWO. You'll be hearing more about that real soon. After we're done we're playing more gigs with 100 Reasons and then... TBC. But obviously it will involve more gigs. Obviously...
Anyway, the plan is to keep playing shows and making records until we explode or run out of fingers. we're permanently achey but its still the best job we'll ever have..we do what we can...
Exactly.
Johnny Foreigner get exactly the right ratio of all the worrying things that make Britain so terrible, and the exciting things that make it so wonderful and inspiring. I am particularly struck by their lyrics to the song "Cranes and cranes and cranes and cranes": we make our own mythologies...if I had the guts I promise I would cut the power lines, tape the letterbox shut...I don't worry about these things, from one grey mess to another grey mess, distance knows a heavy heart less, every single night out...tear down our nightclubs, put up flats, burn down our pubs and put up flats...if I had the guts I promise I would.
I've actually been thinking quite a bit recently about how we live, and I think having guts is possibly much more important than I'd like it to be. What strikes me is that we are so uniform in the way we live. I don't mean that at all in a disparaging or accusatory way - it's just interesting and surprisingly uncommented on. Every alternative-leaning person in the western world, which is the vast majority actually, has heard the mantra of going against the flow, that we should be individuals and should live lives in our own way, not the way of everyone else. But what is assumed - always - is that the difference between being an individual and the ever-victimised "sheep" is a matter of details: trivia like clothes, eating habits and manners of speaking. Nobody even thinks about challenging major aspects of lives, like communication, walking or seeing things. When we talk about eccentric personalities that behave in apparently such outlandish fashion, nobody notices that in the vast majority of important manners of living, even such "individuals" are identical to everyone else.
What about the bubble boy who has such a weak immune system that he has been kept in a disinfected bubble from birth and can have contact with nothing because it would cause rapid death? Now that is a truly different manner of living. People talk of doing something crazy like...moving to a remote village somewhere and raising crops by themselves...wouldn't that be radical!? But you still walk, talk, use normal facial expressions, sleep in a lying down position probably on a soft surface under a roof, get up in the morning and eat and drink in the regular fashion in order to maintain your health. People consider themselves to be making a big statement by playing guitars, wearing colourful clothes, long hair and having sex with whomsoever they want. In the range of things, however, almost nobody has breached a tiny hairswidth of possibilities.
Sure, it takes very little thought to realise that trying to be truly radical in one's way of life will lead to a much less pleasant existence than sticking to the tried and tested means of living that humans have always utilised. We can't decide not to eat or sleep. We can't walk on our head. We live in uniform fashion for a good reason - the strict limits of physics. Even if we were able to be heedless of social pressure, our lives would all work in roughly the same way.
Still, I find it very difficult to concede that I should not try some form of experimentation and boundary pushing with my life. It just seems like something more should be possible. While my heart and my mind are more than content with the incredible range of inspiration to be found in human achievement, my soul yearns to be entirely different, to create something not good, but really really new. There is a part of me that is sickened by even this act of writing in such a normal way, with the conventional rules of spelling and grammar, and even with regular means of expression, as hundreds of writers have used before. Part of me wants to scrawl my messages in primal symbols, heedless of the fact that this would cease to be communication, and fulfill no aim at all. This part does not care about aims, and the normal way of doing something to achieve something else. This part of me rejects effect and cause as something unoriginal --- but even as it retreats into a firelit cave and howls at the storm - or whatever movements that are making the shadows on the walls - this part of me knows that even this desperate rejection of everything has itself been done before, that even it, which is desirous of nothing more than pure originality, is a creature of its inspiration, that it is incapable of not being in some tiny way a product of what it has previously experienced. It dies with the arrow of knowledge through its heart: the knowledge that originality seeps slowly through human history, it is not a thing that is instantly accessible to those who want to escape normal existence. The arrow was fired by another part of me, the part that embraces this system, that glories in inspiration and the slow, painstaking evolution of originality. It knows that what humanity eventually produces will be worth the wait - nay - will be better because of the wait.
---
Well we've come a long way from the raw lyrics of Johnny Foreigner, but the yearning for originality is still far from dead of course - it is immortal, and only grows stronger the longer it is frustrated, no matter how much I know that it is impossible.
I think that we should start with the small things, as identified by Johnny Foreigner. Can I even be original to the extent that people normally think originality requires? Do I even have the guts to live a marijuana-filled life on a Caribbean island somewhere? Or play folk music in tie-dye with friends called Starbeam and Lovesocks? Or give all my money to charity? Or cut the power lines and tape up the letterboxes? To be fair to me, I do have major disagreements with all these means of living, but still: do I have the guts to be even a little bit original? I want to be original in music making - but this requires no sacrifice at all. Every time, I simply take refuge in my inspirations, I live a elation-filled life and ignore the yearning which is defeated by cowardice - or is it actually that I don't want to be original? That I like my life, and really I am content? Now that I dare to think it, this makes a lot of sense. I do enjoy life. I don't want to change it that much. I have fair grounds for failing to be original.
The yearning seeps away into the horrific gaping chasm of anticlimax. But like a bad movie with a sequel, you never see it die.
hello this is the ongoing interactive story of johnny foreigner. there are 3 of us, we come from birmingham, we dont go out too much and we have a tendency to overcompensate. we write noisy pop songs for people what like the same bands as we do. last year we put out two 7" records on Laundrette Records. they both sold out and got played on the rah-dio and stuffs. we were pretty fucking proud. last summer we signed a proper record deal, with cone-tracts and everything, for Best Before Records. we recorded an eepee called arcs across the city at southern studios, it got mega good reviews from magazines we'd almost stopped buying and a lot more people started listening to us. we went to new york to make a proper album at the end of last year, it came out in spring and we had like, 4 months living in a van and peoples floors touring it round the country (with the occasional overseas holiday/show). we spent the summer alternately jetting around the world and vanning around the uk playing festivals. we just finished a yookay tour with some awesome other bands, if you weren't there you so missed out.. junior lost his ipod, alexei went crowdsurfing and kelly got totally bloody.
After that, there was a headline tour of the UK (again) with Dananananakroyd (yay) and then the end of 2008 saw us playing the biggest places we've ever played in support of the Futureheads, who are all amazing, and equally very, very tall. In 2009 - this year - we sat and wrote songs and songs and more songs. Then we did our first tour of Europe with Sky Larkin. That too was good. Show great. Repetition. Show amazing. Repetition. We like gigging. On 8th March we flew from Sweden to Heathrow, we then didnt leave Heathrow and got on another plane to NYC which is where we are right now recording ALBUM NUMBER TWO. You'll be hearing more about that real soon. After we're done we're playing more gigs with 100 Reasons and then... TBC. But obviously it will involve more gigs. Obviously...
Anyway, the plan is to keep playing shows and making records until we explode or run out of fingers. we're permanently achey but its still the best job we'll ever have..we do what we can...
Exactly.
Johnny Foreigner get exactly the right ratio of all the worrying things that make Britain so terrible, and the exciting things that make it so wonderful and inspiring. I am particularly struck by their lyrics to the song "Cranes and cranes and cranes and cranes": we make our own mythologies...if I had the guts I promise I would cut the power lines, tape the letterbox shut...I don't worry about these things, from one grey mess to another grey mess, distance knows a heavy heart less, every single night out...tear down our nightclubs, put up flats, burn down our pubs and put up flats...if I had the guts I promise I would.
I've actually been thinking quite a bit recently about how we live, and I think having guts is possibly much more important than I'd like it to be. What strikes me is that we are so uniform in the way we live. I don't mean that at all in a disparaging or accusatory way - it's just interesting and surprisingly uncommented on. Every alternative-leaning person in the western world, which is the vast majority actually, has heard the mantra of going against the flow, that we should be individuals and should live lives in our own way, not the way of everyone else. But what is assumed - always - is that the difference between being an individual and the ever-victimised "sheep" is a matter of details: trivia like clothes, eating habits and manners of speaking. Nobody even thinks about challenging major aspects of lives, like communication, walking or seeing things. When we talk about eccentric personalities that behave in apparently such outlandish fashion, nobody notices that in the vast majority of important manners of living, even such "individuals" are identical to everyone else.
What about the bubble boy who has such a weak immune system that he has been kept in a disinfected bubble from birth and can have contact with nothing because it would cause rapid death? Now that is a truly different manner of living. People talk of doing something crazy like...moving to a remote village somewhere and raising crops by themselves...wouldn't that be radical!? But you still walk, talk, use normal facial expressions, sleep in a lying down position probably on a soft surface under a roof, get up in the morning and eat and drink in the regular fashion in order to maintain your health. People consider themselves to be making a big statement by playing guitars, wearing colourful clothes, long hair and having sex with whomsoever they want. In the range of things, however, almost nobody has breached a tiny hairswidth of possibilities.
Sure, it takes very little thought to realise that trying to be truly radical in one's way of life will lead to a much less pleasant existence than sticking to the tried and tested means of living that humans have always utilised. We can't decide not to eat or sleep. We can't walk on our head. We live in uniform fashion for a good reason - the strict limits of physics. Even if we were able to be heedless of social pressure, our lives would all work in roughly the same way.
Still, I find it very difficult to concede that I should not try some form of experimentation and boundary pushing with my life. It just seems like something more should be possible. While my heart and my mind are more than content with the incredible range of inspiration to be found in human achievement, my soul yearns to be entirely different, to create something not good, but really really new. There is a part of me that is sickened by even this act of writing in such a normal way, with the conventional rules of spelling and grammar, and even with regular means of expression, as hundreds of writers have used before. Part of me wants to scrawl my messages in primal symbols, heedless of the fact that this would cease to be communication, and fulfill no aim at all. This part does not care about aims, and the normal way of doing something to achieve something else. This part of me rejects effect and cause as something unoriginal --- but even as it retreats into a firelit cave and howls at the storm - or whatever movements that are making the shadows on the walls - this part of me knows that even this desperate rejection of everything has itself been done before, that even it, which is desirous of nothing more than pure originality, is a creature of its inspiration, that it is incapable of not being in some tiny way a product of what it has previously experienced. It dies with the arrow of knowledge through its heart: the knowledge that originality seeps slowly through human history, it is not a thing that is instantly accessible to those who want to escape normal existence. The arrow was fired by another part of me, the part that embraces this system, that glories in inspiration and the slow, painstaking evolution of originality. It knows that what humanity eventually produces will be worth the wait - nay - will be better because of the wait.
---
Well we've come a long way from the raw lyrics of Johnny Foreigner, but the yearning for originality is still far from dead of course - it is immortal, and only grows stronger the longer it is frustrated, no matter how much I know that it is impossible.
I think that we should start with the small things, as identified by Johnny Foreigner. Can I even be original to the extent that people normally think originality requires? Do I even have the guts to live a marijuana-filled life on a Caribbean island somewhere? Or play folk music in tie-dye with friends called Starbeam and Lovesocks? Or give all my money to charity? Or cut the power lines and tape up the letterboxes? To be fair to me, I do have major disagreements with all these means of living, but still: do I have the guts to be even a little bit original? I want to be original in music making - but this requires no sacrifice at all. Every time, I simply take refuge in my inspirations, I live a elation-filled life and ignore the yearning which is defeated by cowardice - or is it actually that I don't want to be original? That I like my life, and really I am content? Now that I dare to think it, this makes a lot of sense. I do enjoy life. I don't want to change it that much. I have fair grounds for failing to be original.
The yearning seeps away into the horrific gaping chasm of anticlimax. But like a bad movie with a sequel, you never see it die.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Song idea #4
I'm currently rereading Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, probably my favourite book of all time. If I feel up to it, I might do a proper post on it some time. But I just came across this little chant, which I plan to plaigerise at some point as the lyrics to a song:
Hold fast
To the law
Of the last
Cold tome
Where the earth
Of the truck
Lies think
On the Page,
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on
Through the breath
Of the bone
Reborn
In a dawn
Of doom
Where blooms
The rose
For the winds
The Child
For the tomb
The thrush.
For the hush
Of song,
The corn
For the scythe
And the thorn
In wait
For the heart
Till the last
Of the first
Depart,
And the last
Of the past
Is dust
And the dust
Is lost.
Hold fast!
Hold fast
To the law
Of the last
Cold tome
Where the earth
Of the truck
Lies think
On the Page,
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on
Through the breath
Of the bone
Reborn
In a dawn
Of doom
Where blooms
The rose
For the winds
The Child
For the tomb
The thrush.
For the hush
Of song,
The corn
For the scythe
And the thorn
In wait
For the heart
Till the last
Of the first
Depart,
And the last
Of the past
Is dust
And the dust
Is lost.
Hold fast!
Song idea #3
I've been trying to put together an acoustic singer-songwriter type version of Pure Reason Revolution's latest blinder of a single, Deus Ex Machina. I'm justifying this venture not as an attempt to improve the song, but as an attempt to prove it's a love song. Like all PRR songs, DEM is very ambiguous in its lyrical musings - but I think the gist is about ( probably unfaithful) love coming out of nowhere and having disastrous consequences. The song is full of hate, full of bitterness and blame, but there's such a clear passion in it that comes full out in the last line "you'll always be my love". Despite all the damage, the love burns on. My version stays true to the dark feel, but it tries to make the passion a bit sweeter, and bring out the positive side of the very powerful love/hate relationship. It is also not very good.
Raul Juliá, saint and genius
It has long been my firm conviction that there has been no better actor-character pairing in history (apart from maybe Peter Sellers as Clouseau) than the legendary Raul Juliá playing Gomez Addams. I idolise the original 1991 Addams Family movie as one of the most superb comedy productions since the 60s: all the casting is fantastic, with faultless performances by the actors playing pretty much every member of the notorious Family, and some of the non-Family roles too. But the entire thing is stolen by Juliá. He was born to play Gomez.
So you can imagine how pleased I was, after some hardcore googling following another viewing, to find that not only has Raul produced one of the most sublime performances of any film ever, but is also a philanthropist of the first degree. Juliá campaigned constantly throughout his hopelessly too short life to end world hunger, a goal he charmingly believed would be achieved by the end of this century. He made his point by talking about some of the chilling, but obvious facts that I also think should be used more by activists: the fact that we have every technological and practical means of ending world hunger, for example. We only lack the will to end it. "When hunger ends in the planet, we don't know the joy that we'll experience" was one quote that particularly stuck with me. This man and I are clearly on the same wavelength.
Raul Juliá died tragically of cancer long before his time, in a career curtailment that makes Christopher Reeves' fate look like a happy ending. Long may his memory and ideas live, and many thanks for the inspiration.
For a look at the man and his ideas, watch this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3244182092757863346
For a bit a fun, watch my favourite Addams Family dance routine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOx99cZT9eY&feature=related
So you can imagine how pleased I was, after some hardcore googling following another viewing, to find that not only has Raul produced one of the most sublime performances of any film ever, but is also a philanthropist of the first degree. Juliá campaigned constantly throughout his hopelessly too short life to end world hunger, a goal he charmingly believed would be achieved by the end of this century. He made his point by talking about some of the chilling, but obvious facts that I also think should be used more by activists: the fact that we have every technological and practical means of ending world hunger, for example. We only lack the will to end it. "When hunger ends in the planet, we don't know the joy that we'll experience" was one quote that particularly stuck with me. This man and I are clearly on the same wavelength.
Raul Juliá died tragically of cancer long before his time, in a career curtailment that makes Christopher Reeves' fate look like a happy ending. Long may his memory and ideas live, and many thanks for the inspiration.
For a look at the man and his ideas, watch this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3244182092757863346
For a bit a fun, watch my favourite Addams Family dance routine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOx99cZT9eY&feature=related
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