Heavy

And now, ladies and gentlemen, by special request, direct from Budapest, Hungary and 2014, here are BIN-JIP with "Heavy".

 The video is by Levente Szabó.

The Forest for the Trees

Diane Arbus

The story of the brave escape of the 13 Turpin children of Perris, California on January 14, 2018 after nearly 30 years altogether of oppressive confinement, starvation, abusive neglect and deprivation on the part of their parents was packaged up for us recently by Diane Sawyer on ABC's 20/20.  The Turpin children at the time of their escape ranged in age from two to 29 years, although all except the youngest were physically stunted from malnutrition and even the six adult children reportedly all looked younger than 18.  On their rescue, the 29 year old weighed 82 pounds (37 kg).  

After originally pleading not guilty to all charges, in February 2019 the parents, David and Louise, pleaded guilty "to one count of torture, three counts of willful child cruelty, four counts of false imprisonment, and six counts of cruelty to an adult dependent."  Asked by Sawyer to conjecture about an explanation for the Turpin case, Mark Hestrin, Riverside County DA said of the Turpin parents' motivation that sane people do bad things sometimes.  An investigator for the DA's office likewise suggested that from his vantage of expertise, there was "no why" that he could fathom for this case.   The children themselves naturally had the opposite problem: for them there were too many whys to ponder.    

In retrospect, of course members of the Riverside County DA's office did not see a reason for the abuse.  Through prosecutorial eyes, everything that can be prosecuted looks like criminal behavior chosen by legally sane people for no reason.

I'm no psychologist, but it looks to me based on the little that is known about the elder Turpins that part of the "why" has to do with a combination of childhood trauma of their own (Louise had been sexually abused as a girl by a family member), an incredible immaturity on the part of both who married very young, and a worldview-- they had been adherents of the Quiverfull movement-- that encouraged the regular popping out of children in spite of an absence of tools or motivation to deal with parenthood.  (Their beliefs did not prohibit them apparently from experimenting with extramarital "swinging.") Having no imagination and a singular goal of selfishness, no parenting skills beyond brutal control and confinement of the brood they could only continue to increase,  and a pass from a culture that prefers to give some of its members the benefit of the doubt in how they see to the welfare of their young behind closed doors, they succeeded in stunting the development of all thirteen of their children. 

The parents each received 25 years for their convictions, but as an official from the DA's office tearfully alleged, for some of the children at least, abuse and neglect continued.  The ABC report concluded with  an investigative crew aggressively confronting county social services officials in a cliched display of getting to the bottom of the allegations of the county's bureaucratic revictimization of  many of the Turpin children following their parents' arrest.  At least one child was reportedly placed into a home where abuse was subsequently discovered to have been perpetrated on several foster children including allegedly one of the Turpins.  The hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed by concerned strangers across the country and held in trust were reportedly being withheld for the most part from the children despite several requests including for tuition and transportation.  Jordan, the then 17 year old who had escaped the house and called for police that January morning when she learned that an inactivated smart phone she found in the house could be used to make emergency calls, reported that after months of basic neglect in a group home, she was suddenly released with no address, no job, no means of support or any training on how to manage day to day living as an adult.

It's a formula for compelling TV, no doubt, but thanks very much to years of public policy deprivations promoted by the Riverside County DA’s political party and  overlooked when not outright championed and rationalized away by the media of which 20/20 is very much representative, it should surprise no one that our tattered safety net is incapable of supplying any measure of what these children had been deprived of from their parents.  But it's a bit conveniently advantageous for ABC to grandstand when the story is such an egregious outlier.  Where are the cameras for the estimated 13 million American children living with food insecurity every day?  While on the decline from its all time high of 1000 inmates per 100,000 Americans, the per capita prison rate of the US at 639 per 100,000 remains the highest in the world and is more than 13% higher than the second in rank, El Salvador.  Are Americans especially criminal, or is America, like David and Louise Turpin just especially punitive?  What does it take to get ABC News to show up for you?  The answer of course, can be summed up in one word: sensation.  It is not news that too many are imprisoned or that children are starving everyday.  You either have to be murdered on video by excessive force in the false suspicion of a crime or be the children of Caucasian freaks to get some attention in this town.  Go through the right kind of hell and you just might hit the jackpot with a prime time special devoted to your plight. Meanwhile who is advocating for the rescue of the rest of us?

Poverty by circumstance was not a factor in the Turpin case.  On the contrary, David Turpin was a successful engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grummond.  Rather, the poverty was inflicted on the children by parents who preferred to lavish their household income on themselves.  There is an undeniable extra fascination in learning that the Turpin parents, who both came from the humblest roots in West Virginia were in many respects exponents of the American dream, a fantasy never more cloyingly idealized and romanticized than in the films and theme parks of Walt Disney.  ABC, a child company of Disney made no mention in their blockbuster exclusive report of the fanaticism of both Turpin parents for all things Disney, as exclaimed on their vanity license plates which read "DLand" and "DL4EVER".  It's more than just interesting trivia that in all those years of forcible sequestering of their children from sight, the exception that the Turpins made for allowing their children in public in a semblance of all-American swellness was Disneyland. 

For 30 years, from the outside, everything looked normal.  On the inside, in some respects, it was.

Entitlement

Having once been entreated by a former employer to improve my position by taking a course in management-- by which I learned that I could never be that kind of person-- I have always wanted to write about the disgusting irony of the way in which the managerial class, when they think no one can overhear them, disparages the sense of "entitlement" of those they manage-- to more money or more choice in the workplace for less time-sucking, less soul-sucking, and less general sucking from their jobs.  I don't know how managerials behave in the wild, but this was what I witnessed in the classroom.  But this is not what I am referring to today by entitlement.  Instead, I'd like to talk about how to name a band, and more to the point how not to name a band.

I was inspired to write about this by hearing reference in one of my recent internet wanderings to the band named Animal Collective.  I've admired this band since I first heard about them apparently almost 2 decades ago, and though I don't know that I've ever heard a note of their music, I continue to think fondly of them, solely on the basis of their name.  Two words that distill the essence of music made for the young: the Animal part reflecting the emulation of the untamed; the aforementioned momentarily harnessed for politico-entertainment purposes into a Collective.  It's so good, I'd prefer not to taint the purity of what it evokes in me with whatever the reality of their oeuvre is.

In my experience, Animal Collective is bucking the trend toward more and more insipid band names.  Remember we're not talking about the music of any of these bands (most of which I am unlikely to be familiar with), but only about the handles by which fans may latch onto them. A few examples of the problem follow:

• Panic! at the Disco - The words in that combination are actually acceptable if you don't think too hard about it.  The punctuation, by calling attention to it, undermines and deflates it.
• fun. - We're not just a band named "Fun". We're "fun period".  
• Punctuation seems to be the death knell for a band name: cf. Against Me! The Wonder Who? Wham! 
• Death Cab for Cutie - Like the other epically horrible band name of the 90s, Toad the Wet Sprocket (itself a Monty Python reference), this one is a reference to classic British comedy, specifically a song written by another badly named band, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band that was featured in the Magical Mystery Tour, a vehicle for another badly named band, The Beatles.*
• Smashing Pumpkins - When you get down to it it's a pun.  It's not as bad a pun as the Beatles, but that's pretty much all it is.  Good looking gourds.  It's the rock equivalent of Curl Up and Dye for a hair salon.  Other bad pun names: Japandroids, The Dandy Warhols, Wevie Stonder.
• Mumford & Sons - All the excitement of an Econoline van.  The "& Sons" part is lame enough, but Mumford?  (See also Dave Matthews Band; Hootie and the Blowfish.)
• In the Doesn't-Require-Elaboration Department: Imagine Dragons; Cage the Elephant; Arctic Monkeys; Foo Fighters; Greta Van Fleet; Bring Me The Horizon.  
• Childish Gambino - I am familiar with Donald Glover's work and I approve of it.  I am also aware that he purposely forwent the struggle of naming his act, opting instead to let an internet band name generator do his thinking for him.  There's artistic merit in letting the horribleness of an internet generated band name speak for itself-- not to mention legitimate credibility to be had in not giving a shit what name the internet picks for you.  Then again, we all have to live with that name.  And it is a terrible name.
• Speaking of Band Name Generators, here are some actual names generated online for the purposes of this topic: Jugs for the Policeman; Rancid Hippos of Canada; McRock; Two Inch Ladies; Puddle of Fishing Rod; Devon Revival

You would do well to ask yourself, what does this random blogger on the internet know about band names? And you would have a point if only because you do not realize that the only reason I'm just some random blogger on the internet and not a name on the liner notes of a tenth of your record collection is that my standard for a band name for myself was too high.

So what are some good band names and how do you tell a good name from a bad one?  To summarize, a good name is forever; a bad name shoots its wad the first time you hear it. Sticking mostly to bands I may be less familiar with, some of the qualities to consider:

• Some names are pleasing in their own right:  Soundgarden; Earth, Wind and Fire; Funkadelic; Art of Noise, Black Flag; Arcade Fire; Roxy Music; The Fuggs
• A well-chosen, evocative, or aesthetically pleasing reference works every time: Veruca Salt; Gang of Four; Spandau Ballet; Heaven 17; Steely Dan;  The Velvet Underground; Dead Kennedys (I realized only today that this is a pun on Ted Kennedy, which I should reject on principle, but taken at face value, it's one of the toughest names around)
• Aptness: The Supremes; The Temptations; The Miracles; The Messengers
• If you're lucky, your name corners a very unique market: Fit; Crime; Television; Felt; Hole; The Revolution; The Time; The Fall; L.A. Witch; Doll Hospital
• In fairness, here are some of the better than average names generated by the random band name generator: King Pink; Blue Syndicate; Cool Cool Cool

My twin brother thirteen has a special flare for naming bands.  His chef d'oeuvre is my favorite of all time, and I will tell you what it is if you promise not to use it.  (And if you can't promise, you have to attribute it to my brother thirteen when you get famous with it): Diet of Worms.

~~~~~~

* The Beetles would have been good.

If Lewis Powell told you to jump off the Empire State Building . . .

I've finally come to the understanding that there really is no such thing as an American left.  It's not my own idea; it's just that after spending a great deal of time reading and listening to discussions about the state of the left in this country from those whom I have come to trust on these matters, it has finally sunk in that while leftist sentiment and thought is alive and well and manifold in its forms and manifestations, and is embodied in a proliferation of leftists, The Left as a relevant sector of American society is not so much a specter as a phantom.  The key ingredient that is missing is labor-- at the moment a defeated and divided plurality (although the past year has seen promising stirrings).  Those who claim the mantle of the left tend to be clever, academic, disconnected voices (not unlike a certain numerically nomenclatured blogger I could name) who paradoxically proclaim their leftness while connected.  Hence the predominance of conflict and cancellation as the mode of online leftist discourse, and more importantly, the rarity of actual tangible political victories that could be claimed by the left-- not so much because leftists do not participate in the process, as that their campaigns, despite the demonstrable popularity of their platforms, rarely make it beyond the pupal stage since their entrees into electoral politics are for the most part successfully squelched by the superiorly funded and organized efforts of democratic party operatives and their donors who have a knack for destroying the field when it comes to primaries but a decided cluelessness about winning general elections.

Speaking of Virginia...I saw a Lewis Powell quote the other day on one of these leftist videos.

...one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups... that political power is necessary; that such power must be [assiduously] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

 In Richmond, Virginia, late summer 1971,  US Chamber of Commerce president Eugene Sydnor reached across the back yard fence to his neighbor, Richmond attorney and soon-to-be Nixon Supreme Court appointee Lewis Powell to request a "secret memorandum" concerning what to Sydnor, head and chief stockholder of a chain of department stores was a disturbing trend -- namely the capturing of the public discussion by decidedly anti-free enterprise and anti-establishment voices.  Herbert Marcuse and other exponents of the Frankfurt school diaspora, for instance, were selling books and capturing the imagination of military draft age college youths and others of their cohort, inspiring campus unrest, causing widespread skepticism among youth of the American "establishment", and seducing them away from service in what had become a very unpopular war in Southeast Asia. DC policy wonk and attorney Ralph Nader had written a best seller- Unsafe at any Speed--  about the epidemic of highway deaths that were avoidable but for the recalcitrance of the US Auto industry in making safer automotive designs, raising awareness and widespread support for an overdue and, as it turned out brief, era of government regulation of American businesses.  Concomitant with these, a growing planetary consciousness inspired by humanity's civic forays into space inspired an environmental awareness that had seized the public, engendering a clamoring for accountability from the businesses whose profligate way with waste in the pursuit of greater and greater profits had visibly taken a toll on the natural beauty of the country and was threatening the future of the Earth.  So it's not like there wasn't cause for the owning class to worry.  In response, Lewis drafted up the confidential memo whose main point was "business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late."  The memo called for an aggressive response to growing fed-up-ness with American Enterprise-- a greater presence on campuses, aggressive pursuit of legislation, relentless counterattacks to criticism of business with editorials, advertisements and media of their own.

There was something to it.  I don't know that the Powell memo was ever delivered publicly, and yet, it's not at all hard to imagine the receptive audience for Powell's remarks being the paunchy, horn-rimmed, white haired set, commerce bank patrons, fat cats and glad-handers setting down their white napkins dabbed with béarnaise sauce from the corners of their mouths to applaud the pep talk from one of their better boys.  The beauty of Powell's vision was that it was purposely co-opted from the enemy.  It would inspire a wildfire of aggrievement on the right as a counterpart to the call on the left for justice-- fire fighting fire. 

The memorandum was leaked to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson who made much of the clandestine plan to combat public distrust in American Business with propaganda, legislation, jurisprudence, and stealth commandeering of the discourse through media, print and academic infiltration.  The outing from a feared journalist did nothing to dampen the rallying of the well-heeled troops. On the contrary, fifty years later, here we are.

The question I have to ask is, so Lewis Powell said power was essential and that it had to be used.  Did it necessarily follow that the right would dig in to power and exert it?  What motivated the men who already had everything? More to the point, what would those on the ostensible left be able and prepared to do with a counterpart document?