This is a post per­haps bet­ter left to my alter-ego, but there is an impor­tant musi­cal con­text, and sub­text, that I am com­pelled to address. I found this yes­ter­day, and unin­ten­tion­ally, and it has been pok­ing at my sense of aes­thet­ics and moral­ity every since, and after a night’s sleep I can’t let it go. So, it must be processed! That’s what blogs are for.

Let me state my biases up-front: I voted for Obama in the New York pri­mary, and would like to see him run against McCain because he beats McCain, while Clin­ton doesn’t. He beats McCain because of this:

Which Rod Dreher finds objec­tion­able. I must con­tinue to state my biases: Dreher is a mem­ber of that par­tic­u­lar socio-economic class of recent vin­tage, the pro­fes­sional igno­ra­mus & scold. I say this because he is paid to demon­strate his igno­rance and to scold peo­ple who believe, think and act dif­fer­ently than he does. The fact that he has writ­ten a book cements my opin­ion, since that book seeks to cre­ate a polit­i­cal demo­graphic, with Dreher at its head. In other words, it’s an attempt to cre­ate an arti­fi­cial mar­ket than sell to that mar­ket, and it fol­lows the for­mat of con­sumerist mar­ket research, defin­ing peo­ple by spe­cific niches based around what they buy, their life-styles, their single-issues. This type of think­ing reduces the idea of a human being down to the point of an entry in a rela­tional data­base and there­fore denies the exis­tence of the com­plex essence of human­ity, the soul. It is soul­less­ness in the absolute sense. I would add that it’s strange that some­one who claims “belief” in the reli­gious sense would act in a way that demon­strates they have no belief in the exis­tence of the soul, but then I’m long past the point of think­ing that self-identified “Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians” in Amer­ica believe in any­thing other than gain­ing and wield­ing mate­r­ial, author­i­tar­ian power.

So, I find Dreher’s claim that the Will.i.am video demon­strates a cult of per­son­al­ity around Obama to be pre­dictable in a mechan­i­cal sense, but there’s fur­ther mean­ing there I want to exam­ine — and bear with me, there’s more music con­tent to come. First of all, in the con­text of a can­di­date for his party’s nom­i­na­tion, and refer­ring to a piece of polit­i­cal pro­pa­ganda, the term has no mean. Unless the sub­ject actual is the leader of a nation, it’s just an ad hominem attack. It’s also an attack that has no bear­ing or effect when it comes to Dreher, since he has no crit­i­cism of the actual cult of per­son­al­ity built around the cur­rent pres­i­dent, from the spe­cific — com­man­der cod­piece — to the gen­eral — the idea that the pres­i­dent is now some kind of super­hero and the office requires some­one with suf­fi­cient “pow­ers” to “keep us safe.” He has no crit­i­cal, eth­i­cal or moral stand­ing to make the charge coherently.

It’s a lit­tle pathetic the way he strives to show off his learn­ing (“Stakhanovite”) by crit­i­ciz­ing a call to aban­don cyn­i­cism and igno­rance. This puts Dreher on the side of cyn­i­cism and igno­rance! Now, he clearly is cyn­i­cal and igno­rant, but most mem­bers of his pro­fes­sional class think it’s impor­tant never to actu­ally admit that. But he’s noth­ing if not com­pletely unaware of him­self — an igno­rant cynic com­plain­ing that Ryan Phillipe is not him­self doing any­thing to make the world better.

What does Dreher value? It’s impos­si­ble to tell. He admon­ishes a can­di­date who seeks cut the Gor­dian Know of Con­ven­tional Wis­dom that con­stantly says “No You Can’t.” That’s a com­fort­ing thought to those who have their clubby sinecures, I’m sure, and of course if Dreher doesn’t like the Obama video, he must favor this one:

That’s more like it! What is unstated but painfully obvi­ous about this is that Dreher is the kind of con­ser­v­a­tive who has his, doesn’t want to lose it and is afraid of any­thing and any­one around him look­ing dif­fer­ent than the claus­tro­pho­bic hori­zon of his own smug igno­rance. The United States is chang­ing, and whether Obama is the next pres­i­dent, his face is the face of the future (go to here and start down at page 71). He is already the face of Cal­i­for­nia. Dreher is no dif­fer­ent than pro­fes­sional racists like Pat Buchanan who scream about the bor­ders, about peo­ple who want to be in Amer­ica, which of course is fright­en­ing to the GOP in gen­eral because it hates Amer­ica. The main point of hate and fear is the nexus in pop­u­lar cul­ture of younger peo­ple and music (finally, oblig­a­tory music con­tent!). While I’m not sure what Dreher and Buchanan like to lis­ten to at home or in the con­cert hall, and hon­estly I think guys like them tend to hate all the arts just as much as the aca­d­e­mic life does, I’m glad to point out that pop­u­lar music cul­ture in Amer­ica is fun­da­men­tally non-white, and has been since its ori­gins. To para­phrase Duke Elling­ton, it was a for­tu­nate day for Amer­ica when the first unfor­tu­nate slave washed up on her shores.

But to gen­er­al­ize grossly, pop­u­lar music, as it bub­bles up from lit­er­ally the bot­tom to even­tu­ally take some kind of generic slot in the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, always begins as the music of the under­class and the out­sider. Blues, jazz, rock, punk, hip-hop all started off at the very bot­tom, all were scorned and feared by the prig­gish guardians of moral­ity, all even­tu­ally tri­umphed, even if only for a short-time. And what kind of peo­ple fear music in this way? Those who never played an instru­ment and who cer­tainly never made music in an ensem­ble. As for as moral train­ing and health goes, I can’t think of any­thing bet­ter than play­ing music with oth­ers. It requires coop­er­at­ing, empa­thy and lis­ten­ing to achieve good music-making, whether it’s Brahms or the Blues. It seems to me that these are wor­thy val­ues, and truly con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues. Knowl­edge is also a moral value, and play­ing music makes one smarter and more curi­ous. Igno­rance is a moral fail­ing, and Dreher, being igno­rant, is there­fore immoral. And since he is a loyal foot sol­dier in the con­tin­ued efforts of a very few to decide what is best for the very many, he has an inter­est in pro­mot­ing igno­rance as a value.

This seems to me the core of the pathetic cult of per­son­al­ity com­plaint — that there are peo­ple in Amer­ica excited to hear a politi­cian pro­mot­ing a com­mu­nity of real val­ues, not mere polit­i­cal slo­gans, excited that some­one is engag­ing them from a pos­i­tive sense of empa­thy, lis­ten­ing, coop­er­a­tion. These are good things, and fright­en­ing things to the small-minded, mean-spirited peo­ple who pre­fer fear and divi­sion, because they them­selves are cow­ards. The Drehers and Buchanans are tak­ing up arms too late, they’ve already lost this war; a mon­grel cul­ture has already defeated them. As far as what’s left, the scraps to fight over are those, again, of belief — Buchanan him­self should be pleased that immi­gra­tion gives the Catholic Church a chance to gain a larger pop­u­la­tion in Amer­ica, but he cares more about skin color. Dreher seems to be on the win­ning side in that fight, and as far as his belief goes, he’s surely on this side. But they’ll never have music. Palest­rina, Char­lie Parker and Mar­vin Pon­tiac are for the rest of us.