Gimme, Gimme Shock Treatment! Gimme, Gimme Shock Treatment!

M2RB:  The Ramones

 Peace and love is here to stay and now I can wake up and face the day
Happy, happy, happy all the time shock treatment, I'm doing fine
Gimme, gimme shock treatment!  Gimme, gimme shock treatment!

By Sarah Hoyt

I’ve been reading an awful lot about England in the twenties.  Part of this is to feed the elephant child, who, for the time being, is fascinated with the period between the wars and then World War One.

Part of this is that I’m working – at last – fairly steadily on the overdue novel, which means I don’t have emotional space left for fiction.  No, I can’t explain it, but fiction demands from me a level of emotional engagement, both to write and read, that non-fiction doesn’t.  So when I’m working on fiction, particularly when I reach the stage where I’m pulling everything together, I simply don’t have emotional space left to read fiction.  This is when I read non-fiction as it falls under the hand, or according to some craving.  (And when I’m emotionally exhausted, I default to reading ONLY about dinosaurs.)

The current craving is England mostly between the wars (though some WWI also, and eventually WWII.)  If this works, once the long overdue novel is done and Through Fire – the sequel to A Few Good Men, from the POV of Zenobia (Zen) Siena – also, I intend to run a kickstarter for an historical mystery project.

As I’ve said before, I’d like to write… Agatha Christie fan fiction. I have sort of a character at the back of my mind, and a setting – right after Armistice.  In fact, the first book would be called A Death In Victory.

Agatha Christie fanfic is not exactly what it is, of course – for one most of her novels remain under copyright.  I don’t intend to use her characters or her settings – exactly – simply to set the characters in the same time period, in the same general middle/upper-middle class and to – and this is very important, because none of the books currently doing this dares do such a thing (and though they’re somewhat successful on Agatha-Christie-fandom-fumes, none of them has been as successful as she was, either)– have her snide solidity of common sense behind the character’s motivations.

What do I mean by snide common sense?  How can common sense be snide for heaven’s sake?

In our current day and age, common sense can be almost startlingly subversive.  Agatha Christie, possibly the best-selling author over the longest time period ever, is derided by the bien-pensants just like Heinlein is, although their politics, their way of life, and the feeling of their works are almost – note the almost – completely different.

Sometime ago, I read an article by one of the literati lamenting his tendency while drunk to order Agatha Christie books which he called “drunk dialing Agatha Christie.”  I confess that I thought better of his drunk self than his sober one, who referred to Agatha Christie’s “hackneyed plots and wooden characters” making this compulsive mystery reader wonder if he’d read any of the more recent “wonders of the age” and acclaimed darlings.

But of course he wouldn’t recognize today’s hackneyed plots because he would consider them daring.

And here we come to what’s bothering me this morning.

I’ve come to the conclusion what annoys today’s critics and fashionable readers about both Christie and Heinlein is the same thing.  Though they bought, somewhat into the ethos of their time, both of them were stubborn enough or talented enough to make good members of the choir.

Oh, please don’t misunderstand me.  Christie was in many ways a thoroughly conventional woman.  All you have to do is read her thrillers, in which the political understanding sounds like undigested drawing room conversation, or even the treatment of communists in her books, who are viewed as something only idiots are scared of.  She was, in many ways, an echo of the bien-pensant of her day, but with that, she had a certain amount of horse sense.  Perhaps, she got it from her grandmother who, in my reading of Christie’s autobiography, left a very Miss-Marplish impression.

In her own space, among her own people, of her own class, she could make her own observations.  And the observations she made are not the kind of thing the bien-pensant like to believe.  Take some of the current mysteries set in her time: every woman longs for liberation; every young man was made a pacifist by the war, or else suffers from a retro-projected Vietnam Vet syndrome as portrayed in movies of the seventies and eighties (and apparently exceedingly rare in reality.)

This allows Christie to look at the fashionable nightclub crawling women and divine beneath the fashionable dissipation a longing for domesticity.  It allows her to treat the upper class communists as poseurs.  And it reaches beneath to show that the bright young things were much like everyone else since the beginning of time: they wanted to partner, succeed and reproduce.

This is Christie’s unforgivable crime as far as todays cognoscenti are concerned.  Had she spent her time bemoaning the horribleness of proletarian living, the oppression of women, the unique racism and evilness of western culture, she’d be required reading in schools today.  (And not nearly as popular, but that’s something else.)

Heinlein’s crime is to an extent similar.  No one could accuse Heinlein of  being conventional—but a lot of what he did then has become conventional wisdom now, from self-consciously having varied ethnicities in his books, to tweaking conventional morality and religion.  His goal was – I think – to make people uncomfortable and to make them think.

But like Agatha Christie he had a certain practical horse sense, come, I think, from growing up in a family that lived, financially, close to the bone.

He might enjoy goring sacred cows, but like Christie he had no doubt that sacred cows or not, Western culture (and in his case American culture in particular) was the most prosperous and advanced in existence, the one that had the best chance of propelling man forward to a destiny among the stars.  He also dared have women who liked men and wanted to have children (in his defense, at the time that didn’t even rise to the level of a sacred cow, it was simply an observation of human nature and biological fact.)  He also had the nerve to claim that Western Culture was worth fighting for.

So, despite everything they would otherwise agree with him on, the cognoscenti rage at Heinlein as they rage at Christie and call him names and more or less shame people into not reading him – because if they did read him, they might find out that he’s none of those things and find within his writings that thing that intellectuals today can’t face:  Hope for the future and a belief in the basic ability of the individual to live his own life within Western Culture.

Because I’ve been reading about the twenties, and about what was going on culturally then, I’ve come to the conclusion the reason that people who want to appear educated and “smart” object so much to authors like this is that these authors pull you out of the recursive loop that has caught Western society “high-brow culture” for almost a hundred years.

Look – we do know that cultures are like individuals in one thing: they can get shocked and fall into neurotic behaviors.  Only the culture is not a very bright individual.  In fact, in perception of where it came from and where it’s going it’s probably comparable to a six year old child, misinformed, confused, and horribly emotional.  This is true – particularly these days, when we are so widespread our information gathering is done by a very few people, and when we are largely illiterate (look, our level of people who read for pleasure is exactly the same as in Shakespeare’s day) and so most of our entertainment – in movies and games – forms our view of history and where we came from.  And those are controlled by a view of history that has been disproven, is a-historical, and is in fact formed by the shock-reaction to World War One. 

World War One was terrible, and for many reasons, including the prevalence of pictures and news, the fratricide/Civilization-war quality of it, the massive number of casualties, it shocked an entire generation into … writing an awful lot about it, and into trying to tear down the pillars of Civilization, believing that Western Civilization (and not human nature, itself) was what had brought about the carnage and the waste.

Do I need to tell you they were wrong?  That they were wrong in turning against Judeo-Christianity and Western Civilization, capitalism, and industrialization? 

Yes, to an extent those, by bringing about an affluent and organized society, made it possible for the carnage to reach the levels it did, BUT it didn’t create the conditions that brought the carnage about and tearing it down certainly doesn’t stop that type of carnage.  In fact, the horrors of World War One have been bested man on man, terror on terror, shock on shock by China’s Cultural revolution, Stalin’s purges and the soggy blood-soaked piles of corpses from the societies, who rejected Judeo-Christianity (it has become fashionable to ignore the fact that Hitler was, in fact, a pagan, who promoted a pagan ethos with a vengeance - just as it’s become fashionable to ignore that he was a socialist) and Western Civilization (No, worshipping mythical Aryans or “the proletariat” is not part of Western Civilization.  It is part of the tear down.) and family structures (Have you read The Communist Manifesto?)

None of this has penetrated our cultural/literary/thought scene though.  There all of this is still counter-cultural and a little shocking.  If you mention Stalin’s purges, they will tell you capitalism is worse, man, because it kills your soul … or something. 

The idea of tearing down Western Civilization continues, even though there is remarkably little to tear down.  The “speaking truth to power” still fits the 20s definition of being sexually daring, verbally shocking, and saying bad things about the west…  even though everyone in power now are people, who believe and say exactly the same things.

Like a child shocked by WWI and having both externalized the blame – listen to a six year old, sometime “I didn’t break the vase.  It was the cat.”… same thing as “I didn’t cause death and carnage.  It was capitalism and old white men.” – and misattributed it – states looking for resources and expanding their power through bureaucratic means was more important than competition for raw materials, whatever you heard in school – the idiot child that is Western Civilization continues rampaging through her room, tearing everything that made it comfortable and useful and a good place, and throwing it out the window. 

No, of course, I’m not saying everything about the early twentieth century was perfect.  Yes, of course, greater participation of women in both politics and work, a breakdown of social barriers, and greater racial integration are a good thing.  They’re also unique in the world today.  Other than Western Civilization and countries influenced by it, the evils of racism, sexism, and rigid class (and tribe) structure are, if anything, even more hardened than they were before. 

That I’m saying is that Western Civilization AND capitalism (particularly the greater affluence created by it) are what brought about the erosion of those ancient evils to which ALL OF HUMANITY is prey. 

Blaming Capitalism or affluence or industrialization for those evils is like blaming the cat for removing the scones from the oven and eating them – with jam and cream, mind you.  (Yes, younger kid did that.  He seemed absolutely convinced it was true, too.  He was four.)

And, invoking to resist these evils the untamed primitive (No?  “Smash capitalism” and well… OWS in general), which IS the found of these evils is not only insane, it is counterproductive. 

It is also where our culture has been for the last twenty years, caught in a recursive loop where everything – such as the collectivist massacres and poverty around the world – that doesn’t fit the narrative is swept under the rug, and “shocking” things that shock no one are continuously hurled Tourette’s-like at the one Civilization that COULD have been shocked by WWI or seen anything wrong with death on that scale.  (Hint: Other cultures BRAG of how many they kill/how many of them are killed in war.) 

Which is why people like Christie and Heinlein are reviled.  Because if you read them you might get the idea that well… there were people wanting to smash capitalism back in the twenties, and that they were poseurs and a little ridiculous.  Or that women CAN be competent, brilliant and still wish to create a new generation of humans.

And then, where would we be?

I’m not a psychiatrist, but I looked up what to do for someone who is caught in a neurotic recursive loop of counterproductive behaviors.  Apparently one of the ways to fix this is to correct the misapprehension and projection at the heart of the loop.

So, I say – break the cycle.  Speak real truth to power.  Write of war and evil, sure, but as human ills, and not as the result of the unique badness of Western Civilization (or Civilization) or capitalism, or affluence, or industrialization.  Dare point out that while humanity has had savages aplenty, few of them were noble.  Dare point out that while civilized man can be conventional, conventional behavior is often decent and moral and better for everyone.

Smash fake intellectualism.  Speak truth to power.  Dare write of individuals, who can and do control their destiny and make things better (or at least try to.)

Administer shock therapy.

Write Human Wave.

If you’re good at it, soon all the “right thinking people” will hate you.  What more could you want?

Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment - The Ramones

I was feeling sick I was loosing my mind I heard about these treatments
From a good friend of mine he was always happy smile on his face
He said he had a great time at the place
Peace and love is here to stay and now I can wake up and face the day
Happy happy happy all the time shock treatment, I'm doing fine
Gimme gimme shock treatment Gimme gimme shock treatment
Gimme gimme shock treatment I wanna, wanna shock treatment
I was feeling sick I was loosing my mind I heard about these treatments
From a good friend of mine he was always happy smile on his face
He said he had a great time at the place
Peace and love is here to stay and now I can wake up and face the day
Happy happy happy all the time shock treatment, I'm doing fine
Gimme gimme shock treatment Gimme gimme shock treatment
Gimme gimme shock treatment Gimme gimme shock treatment
Gimme gimme shock treatment Gimme gimme shock treatment
Gimme gimme shock treatment I wanna, wanna shock treatment 

La Vie En Rose - The "Fiscal Cliff" Edition

M2RB:  Edith Piaf

He’s mine and I’m his in this life
He told me it

He swore it for his life
 
And, since I spotted him
I can feel inside me
My heart beating
 
When he takes me in his arms,
He speaks to me softly
And I see life through rose-coloured glasses

 The troubling similarities between the fiscal mismanagement in Washington and the mess in the euro zone

By The Editorial Board of The Economist

FOR the past three years America’s leaders have looked on Europe’s management of the euro crisis with barely disguised contempt. In the White House and on Capitol Hill there has been incredulity that Europe’s politicians could be so incompetent at handling an economic problem; so addicted to last-minute, short-term fixes; and so incapable of agreeing on a long-term strategy for the single currency.

Those criticisms were all valid, but now those who made them should take the planks from their own eyes. America’s economy may not be in as bad a state as Europe’s, but the failures of its politicians—epitomised by this week’s 11th-hour deal to avoid the calamity of the “fiscal cliff”—suggest that Washington’s pattern of dysfunction is disturbingly similar to the euro zone’s in three depressing ways. 

Can-kicking is a transatlantic sport

The first is an inability to get beyond patching up. The euro crisis deepened because Europe’s politicians serially failed to solve the single currency’s structural weaknesses, resorting instead to a succession of temporary fixes, usually negotiated well after midnight. America’s problems are different. Rather than facing an imminent debt crisis, as many European countries do, it needs to deal with the huge long-term gap between tax revenue and spending promises, particularly on health care, while not squeezing the economy too much in the short term. But its politicians now show themselves similarly addicted to kicking the can down the road at the last minute.

This week’s agreement, hammered out between Republican senators and the White House on New Year’s Eve, passed by the Senate in the early hours of New Year’s Day and by the House of Representatives later the same day, averted the spectre of recession. It eliminated most of the sweeping tax increases that were otherwise due to take effect from January 1st, except for those on the very wealthy, and temporarily put off all the threatened spending cuts (see article). Like many of Europe’s crisis summits, that staved off complete disaster: rather than squeezing 5% out of the economy (as the fiscal cliff implied) there will now be a more manageable fiscal squeeze of just over 1% of GDP in 2013. Markets rallied in relief.

But for how long? The automatic spending cuts have merely been postponed for two months, by which time Congress must also vote to increase the country’s debt ceiling if the Treasury is to be able to go on paying its bills. So more budgetary brinkmanship will be on display in the coming weeks.

And the temporary fix ignored America’s underlying fiscal problems. It did nothing to control the unsustainable path of “entitlement” spending on pensions and health care (the latter is on track to double as a share of GDP over the next 25 years); nothing to rationalise America’s hideously complex and distorting tax code, which includes more than $1 trillion of deductions; and virtually nothing to close America’s big structural budget deficit. (Putting up tax rates at the very top simply does not raise much money.) Viewed through anything other than a two-month prism, it was an abject failure. The final deal raised less tax revenue than John Boehner, the Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, once offered during the negotiations, and it included none of the entitlement reforms that President Barack Obama was once prepared to contemplate.

The reason behind this lamentable outcome is the outsize influence of narrow interest groups—which marks a second, unhappy parallel with Europe. The inability of Europeans to rise above petty national concerns, whether over who pays for bail-outs or who controls bank supervision, has prevented them from making the big compromises necessary to secure the single currency’s future. America’s Democrats and Republicans have proved similarly incapable of reaching a grand bargain; both are far too driven by their parties’ extremists and too focused on winning concessions from the other side to work steadily together to secure the country’s fiscal future.

The third parallel is that politicians have failed to be honest with voters. Just as Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande have avoided coming clean to the Germans and the French about what it will take to save the single currency, so neither Mr Obama nor the Republican leaders have been brave enough to tell Americans what it will really take to fix the fiscal mess. Democrats pretend that no changes are necessary to Medicare (health care for the elderly) or Social Security (pensions). Republican solutions always involve unspecified spending cuts, and they regard any tax rise as socialism. Each side prefers to denounce the other, reinforcing the very polarisation that is preventing progress.

Fixed today, hobbled tomorrow

Optimists will point out that America is unlikely to face a European-style debt crisis in the near future, but the slow-burning fuse is itself a problem. One positive side-effect of Europe’s crisis is that it has forced euro-zone countries to raise their retirement ages and rationalise pensions and health-care promises. America, which has the biggest structural budget deficit in the rich world bar Japan, will become an outlier in its failure to deal with the fiscal consequences of an ageing population. Its ageing is slower than Europe’s but, as its debt piles up and business and consumer confidence is dampened, the eventual crunch will be more painful.

The saddest thing about this week’s deal is how unaware Messrs Obama and Boehner seem to be of the wider damage their petty partisanship is doing to their country. National security is not just about the number of tanks or rockets you have. As it has failed to deal with the single currency, Europe’s standing has crumbled in the world. Why should developing countries trust American leadership, when it seems incapable of solving anything at home? And while the West’s foremost democracy stays paralysed, China is making decisions and forging ahead.

This week Mr Obama boasted that he had fulfilled his mandate by raising taxes on the rich. In fact, by failing once again to clear up America’s fundamental fiscal trouble, he and Republican leaders are building Brussels on the Potomac.

 

La Vie En Rose - Edith Piaf  (Français)

Des yeux qui font baiser les miens,
Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche,
Voila le portrait sans retouche
De l'homme auquel j'appartiens

Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas,
Je vois la vie en rose.

Il me dit des mots d'amour,
Des mots de tous les jours,
Et ca me fait quelque chose.

Il est entre dans mon coeur
Une part de bonheur
Dont je connais la cause.

C'est lui pour moi. Moi pour lui
Dans la vie,
Il me l'a dit, l'a jure pour la vie.

Et des que je l'apercois
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat

Des nuits d'amour a ne plus en finir
Un grand bonheur qui prend sa place
Des enuis des chagrins, des phases
Heureux, heureux a en mourir.

Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas,
Je vois la vie en rose.

Il me dit des mots d'amour,
Des mots de tous les jours,
Et ca me fait quelque chose.

Il est entre dans mon coeur
Une part de bonheur
Dont je connais la cause.

C'est toi pour moi. Moi pour toi
Dans la vie,
Il me l'a dit, l'a jure pour la vie.

Et des que je l'apercois
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat  

La Vie En Rose - Edith Piaf (English)

Eyes, which make me lower mine,
a laugh that gets lost on his lips,
this is the image without retouching
of the man to whom I belong
 
When he takes me in his arms,
he speaks to me softly
and I see life through rose-coloured glasses

He tells me love words,
everyday words,
and that makes me shiver
 
He came into my heart,
a piece of happiness,
whose cause I know
 
He’s mine and I’m his
in this life
He told me it, he swore it for his life
 
And, since I spotted him,
I can feel, inside me,
my heart beating
 
Nights of love without end
a great happiness has settled replacing
boredom, sorrow, phases
happy immensely happy
 
When he takes me in his arms,
he speaks to me softly
and I see life through rose-coloured glasses
 
He tells me love words,
everyday words,
and that makes me shiver
 
He came into my heart,
a piece of happiness,
whose cause I know

He’s mine and I’m his
in this life
He told me it, he swore it for his life

And, since I spotted him,
I can feel inside me
my heart beating

Obama: Sacrifice Is For Thee, Not Me

M2RB:  Elton John

But it's no sacrifice
No sacrifice
It's no sacrifice at all

By Nile Gardiner

$16.4 trillion – that’s the latest figure for America’s massive national debt. Nearly $6 trillion of this debt was racked up in the first term of the Obama presidency – a 50 percent increase. It is horrifying to imagine what the debt will be when Obama leaves the White House in 2016, unless Congress has the willpower to stand in the way.

Meanwhile, as the world’s superpower is literally drowning in debt, President Obama is basking in the warmth of the beaches of Hawaii, at an exclusive resort way beyond the financial reach of most Americans. The president pays the cost of his own family’s accommodations, but there are a large number of associated costs which are paid from the public purse.

What is the actual cost of Obama’s lavish vacation to the American taxpayer? A staggering $7 million, according to veteran White House reporter Keith Koffler, who wrote in his blog earlier this week:

In a move that is rich in irony, President Obama agreed Tuesday night to sign an emergency deficit reduction bill that does almost nothing to rein in spending and then jetted out to Hawaii to resume his vacation at an extra cost of more than $3 million to taxpayers.

The price tag is in addition to more than $4 million that is already being spent on the Obamas’ Hawaii idyll, bringing the total cost of the excursion to well over $7 million.

The added cost was incurred because by the time the Obamas return from Hawaii – whenever that is – the president will have used Air Force One to travel to Honolulu and back twice.

The White House doesn’t like to publish the costs of presidential vacations, but Koffler has done the sums:

Air Force One is known to cost about $180,000 an hour to fly. Based on an estimated 18 hours roundtrip flying time for the jet between Washington and Honolulu, the travel cost alone of Obama’s decision to return to Hawaii amounts to around $3.24 million. And that doesn’t include the price tag for the massive security operation required to move the president or the cost of the cargo plane that follows Air Force One around.

As Koffler notes, President Obama could easily have saved taxpayers a good deal of money:

The Obamas could have saved taxpayers millions by returning from Hawaii together after Christmas and then resuming their vacation at one of the many ritzy resorts that lie outside of Washington. If the beach is a must, even a trip to Florida would have been far less expensive.

Or they could have simply stayed at the White House or Camp David, each a luxurious government-run installation, billing taxpayers a relative pittance.

According to Koffler, "the total cost to taxpayers of Obama’s vacations to Hawaii since becoming president is likely in excess of $20 million, and possibly much, much more."

The message this sends is one of sheer contempt for the American taxpayer. $7 million may be viewed by the White House as a drop in the ocean compared to the overall size of America’s federal debt, but it is the principle that counts. The vast majority of American people simply couldn’t afford the kind of vacation enjoyed by the US president, not least at a time when 12.2 million Americans are still out of work.

For most of America’s embattled middle class, who, unlike the president have already returned to work, this kind of luxury is simply unimaginable in the current economic climate. And they’ve just been hit hard with a significant rise in their payroll taxes due to the expiration of the Social Security tax break. According to the Tax Policy Center, 77 percent of US households will now be paying more in federal taxes following this week’s fiscal cliff deal.

Barack Obama benefits from a largely deferential liberal press in the United States which rarely questions his opulence in office. It would be unthinkable for the British prime minister to act in the same manner. If David Cameron flew off to Hawaii and billed the British public £5 million for his Christmas vacation, he would be out of a job.

President Obama frequently calls on the American people to make sacrifices, but he is simply unwilling to lead by example and do so himself. In a speech in Virginia back in April 2011, Obama famously declared:

We are going to have to ask everybody to sacrifice. And if we’re asking community colleges to sacrifice, if we’re asking people who are going to see potentially fewer services in their neighborhoods to make a little sacrifice, then we can ask millionaires and billionaires to make a little sacrifice.

The president is elected to serve his country, rather than lord over it, a message which appears to be completely lost on the present White House. The federal government is simply running out of money, and America faces economic ruin unless spending is cut dramatically and the vast entitlements system is reformed. Barack Obama’s Hawaii vacation is merely a symbol of his wider presidency – a culture of impunity and extraordinary arrogance, reckless spending, a striking lack of accountability, and a shameless let them eat cake mentality. America’s middle class deserves to be treated better than this from a president who fails to practice what he preaches.

Sacrifice - Elton John

It's a human sign
When things go wrong
When the scent of her lingers
And temptation's strong
Into the boundary
Of each married man
Sweet deceit comes calling
And negativity lands
Cold cold heart
Hard done by you
Some things look better baby
Just passing through
And it's no sacrifice
Just a simple word
It's two hearts living
In two separate worlds
But it's no sacrifice
No sacrifice
It's no sacrifice at all
Mutual misunderstanding
After the fact
Sensitivity builds a prison
In the final act
We lose direction
No stone unturned
No tears to damn you
When jealousy burns