Duck Off and Fly

So here's "the deal" with "Duck Dynasty", as I see it:

I admit it.  I watch the show, partly because it gives me something to talk about with my dad and partly because it reminds me of the crazy antics of my relatives on that side of the family (usually recounted in stories told over Thanksgiving dinner.)  All I can say is:  if you actually grew up in small-town Texas/Louisiana/Arkansas, then you probably have a better understanding of these characters than most people.  East Texans (my dad's family) and Northern Louisianans (the Robertson family) are cut from a lot of the same cloth.  They are a non-confrontational people, as a general rule.  Religion is a pervasive thing, and the conservative politics are definitely present, but there is also a strong notion of just not talking about anything that might lead to a "real" argument.  Whoever produces "Duck Dynasty" has succeeded very well in capturing that attitude, and while I don't agree with many of the religious views expressed on the show, they have mostly been expressed in a non-divisive manner.

I may have lived in a city most of my life, but I'm only one generation removed from sharecroppers.  Both of my grandmothers grew up on farms.  One of them worked alongside African Americans in the fields.  Were my ancestors racist and homophobic?  By today's standards, yes, but by the standards of their day, no.  My few remaining relatives from that generation still use poor choices of words every now and then, but we're East Texans.  We're there to have dinner and play 42, not to argue.  I'd rather enjoy their company for the brief time that they remain on this Earth than waste time calling them out on their lack of political correctness.  The Southern culture in which I was raised is all about making people comfortable.  That means that you don't generally try to bring up something that might be a sticking point.

Am I surprised that Phil Robertson harbors some outdated Old Testament views about homosexuality?  Not really.  However, it's easy to ignore your differences with someone else if they don't make an issue out of it.  Sometimes getting along with people means knowing less about them, not more, and I wish that more people in our modern "share everything" society understood that.  Until Phil opened his mouth, I was content to imagine that he was like one of my relatives who would much rather talk about huntin' and fishin' than anything political, who probably looked upon my "big city" beliefs with amusement but would never judge or bait me, would never view me as inferior or wrong-headed just because I disagreed.  At the same time, though, had one of my relatives ever spewed forth anything like what Phil Robertson did, I would've probably left the room under the pretense of getting more sweet potatoes ... not just because the rant was homophobic but because it was just plain offensive (and before you try to apologize for him, please take a moment to read what the man actually said.)

A&E made the right choice in suspending Phil from the show.  Whether or not this is enough for me to continue tuning in remains to be seen.  A&E is going to try and sweep this under the rug (and rightfully so), and the younger Robertsons are too business-savvy to make an issue out of it, but unfortunately the Religious Right is not likely to be so discreet.  They're going to proclaim that watching "Duck Dynasty" is a "First Amendment" issue just like eating a Chik Fil'A sandwich was, but anyone who does proclaim that needs to actually read the First Amendment.  It says that Congress cannot suppress your free speech.  What it does not say is that you can express whatever you want, and we're required to continue paying you money to express it.  What it does not say is that you are guaranteed an audience, regardless of what you express.  Free speech is a right.   An audience is a privilege.  If you can keep your personal beliefs separate from your corporation's beliefs, then fine.  However, as soon as your corporation starts actively promoting a particular belief that I find offensive, then I will stop paying your corporation.  I will also tell my friends to stop paying your corporation.  I will also request that your sponsors stop paying your corporation, or I will stop paying them.  That is not a violation of Free Speech.  That is Capitalism.

So anyway, I just wanted to provide some perspective from someone who was raised in the thick of this culture.  I make no secret about the fact that I lean left politically, but I have a common sense about it that could only be born out of growing up in "hostile territory."  I never had the luxury of taking things like equality for granted.  I never had the luxury of avoiding everyone who disagreed, because that would've included, well, just about everyone around me.  I've had to fight hard for every belief I have and defend it on numerous occasions.  I have nothing against hunting (for food) as long as it's part of a wildlife management program, but I personally have never had the patience for it.  I've only ever hunted maybe twice in my life, and I didn't fire a shot either time.  So why do I watch "Duck Dynasty"?  As much as anything, it's because it reminds me of where I came from, and that helps me to more clearly see where I'm going.

To: Congress, RE: Your Job

I will be uncharacteristically brief about this.  Our founding fathers were very careful to design many checks and balances into our government.  Shutting down said government?  Not one of them.  We democratically elected the Congresspeople who crafted the PPACA.  The Senate didn't like the House's version, which had a Public Option, so they changed it.  The House agreed.  The democratically-elected president signed it.  The Supreme Court, through their power of judicial review, ruled it constitutional.  When given the chance to elect an all-Republican Congress and president who could have overturned the law, the American people didn't.  The PPACA is law because the government worked the way it was supposed to work.  Attempting to make the government not work as a way of stopping the law?  No.  Sorry, guys, but the checks and balances are all used up.  This is the USA, not Burger King.  You can't always have it your way.  We elected you to govern, not to hurt us in the name of furthering your ideology.  Representatives represent, and that means listening to all of your constituents, not just the ones who agree with you 100%.  Further, It doesn't mean using sketchy geometry to design districts that agree with you more.  If I wanted an unrelenting ideologue who is more interested in telling me what's right for me than listening to my needs, then I would have hired a dictator instead.

The Nashville Machine

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Tom Petty had a few things to say about the state of contemporary country music, and on Monday, blogger Peter Cooper took Petty to task for his remarks.

I'm going to come to Petty's defense on this one.  Cooper seems to have missed the part of the interview in which Petty said, "I'm sure there are people playing country that are doing it well, but they're just not getting the attention that the $#!+tier stuff gets."  That is, in a nutshell, the same issue that Cooper seems to be pointing out:  that country, as a genre, is not the problem.  It's the Nashville Machine that is the problem.  There are great country singers and songwriters everywhere, including within The Machine.  However, within The Machine, songwriters write in committees and in cubicles and on a schedule, churning out sometimes hundreds of songs in a year, deliberately trying to stumble upon the formula for a hit.  Most of these professional songwriters have probably never lifted a shovel in their lives, but they can pull trite blue-collar bromides off of their bromide-a-day calendars, string them together with a rhyming dictionary, and generate something that may appeal to the people who actually do lift shovels for a living.  Singers rarely sing their own songs in The Machine, or if they do, they sing songs that were co-written with professional songwriters.  The Machine records and produces songs amazingly quickly-- they have to, because studios in Nashville are so frickin' expensive.  The Machine uses the same studio musicians who play on every other hit Nashville record-- also a product of valuing expediency over uniqueness and creativity.  The Machine AutoTunes the crap out of the singer's voice, in part because it saves them the trouble of actually producing it the right way.  The Machine packages up the song and ships it off to Clear Channel, who owns the lion's share of major-market FM contemporary country stations in the nation.

I was raised on country radio, so I can testify to the fact that it wasn't always like that.  I first started becoming really aware of popular country in the early 80's, when artists like Barbara Mandrell and Willie and Waylon and Michael Martin Murphey and Dolly Parton ruled the airwaves.  There were a lot of singers back then who didn't write their own songs, but there were also a lot of them who did, and the ones who didn't would pull from the catalogs of singer/songwriters like Rodney Crowell or Sonny Throckmorton.

In the late 90's, Mutt Lange brought the same over-production techniques that had made juggernauts out of Def Leppard, The Cars, Billy Ocean, and Bryan Adams into country music, via Shania Twain.  It's hard to believe that, when Shania's first album that he produced ("The Woman in Me") was released, Nashville didn't know what to make of it.  I remember it being somewhat controversial at the time that she had released an album without scheduling any live performances.  All of the small-town radio trolls made up rumors that Shania couldn't really sing and that Mutt had used his "Hollywood production techniques" to hide that fact.  Since AutoTune didn't even exist at the time, one struggles to imagine how even Mutt Lange could have pulled that off, but it's ironic that, nearly 20 years later, Nashville is now employing those same "Hollywood production techniques" that it so vilified in 1995.  Their use of AutoTune has become so egregious that you can't even tell the character of the singer's voice anymore.  It's not that popular country singers aren't talented.  It's that The Machine no longer lets them be talented.

If the purpose of performing arts is, per Shakespeare, to "hold a mirror up to nature" (including human nature), The Machine is doing exactly the opposite.  They are not holding up a mirror so much as they are holding up a Norman Rockwell-esque painting of a small town in the 50's, a small town in which shiny happy white people stroll along the avenue oblivious to any problems in the world.  In this painting, there are no racial tensions or meth labs or poverty or teen pregnancy, and if there is war, it must be a good war, because America would never attack anyone for no reason, would they?  But of course, as I can attest from having grown up in a small town, all of those problems do exist, and none of them will ever be solved as long as we sweep them under the rug.

There have always been some artists who kowtowed to the small-town conservative mindset.  Merle Haggard, for instance, scored some agri-baiting hits with "Okie from Muskogee", "The Fightin' Side of Me", and "Are the Good Times Really Over."  However, those songs were not what defined him as an artist, and they're a pretty far cry from the over-the-top jingoism of Toby Keith.  The rise of Clear Channel has created a feedback loop with the Nashville Machine, such that pander-ball is the only game in town these days.  From Clear Channel's point of view, they know that everything they're getting from Nashville will be "safe", and from Nashville's point of view, they know that as long as they keep everything "safe", they'll be able to get airplay via Clear Channel.  However, when something is deliberately designed to be safe, that also means that it will never break any new ground, nor will it likely be very memorable.  I mean, what are the songs you remember most from your teenage years?  Probably the ones that your parents didn't want you to listen to.  The Baptist church who handed me a flyer proclaiming that David Bowie, AC/DC, and KISS were the tools of Satan did a really good job of introducing me to the music of David Bowie, AC/DC, and KISS.

Cooper is spot-on when he says that streaming radio is where "real" country music lives these days, as well as in the bars and clubs that have served as its traditional home.  Good country music is still being made in Nashville, just largely not within The Machine.  There's also quite a lot of it being produced in Austin, or at least in areas surrounding Austin, but since artists like Robert Earl Keen and Ray Wylie Hubbard aren't "safe" by Nashville standards, you will never hear them on a Clear Channel country station.  Personally, I look forward to the day when every vehicle on the road in America is able to stream Internet radio as seamlessly as they can stream FM or XM, for that will be the day that The Machine implodes.

Virtual President? Well, I Didn't Vote For You

A lot of people whom I otherwise consider to be intelligent and well-adjusted seem to be latching on to the "best 7 minutes of gun control" video by Bill Whittle as if he was Moses descended from the mount, so I felt that a small dose of perspective might be in order.  I will ignore for a moment the irony (not to mention outright creepiness) of someone preaching about basic freedoms and democracy while proclaiming himself to be the "Virtual President", thus implying that he is more deserving of our respect than a democratically-elected one.  I will ignore for a moment the irony of someone preaching about the dangers of Hitler and Stalin and yet creating a fake video made to look like a speech to Congress, a video that employs a propaganda technique that Hitler and Stalin actually used.  I will put all of that aside and specifically address Whittle's argument.

Let me start by saying that his speech completely misses the point by trying to compare the statistics from assault-rifle-related murders with those from other types of murders.  While your odds of dying in a mass shooting are similar to your odds of being struck by lightning (read: exceedingly rare), the same can be said for your odds of dying in a terrorism attack.  And yet it's much easier to buy an assault rifle than it is to board a plane these days.  Not all murders are the same.  You cannot lump Sandy Hook into the same category as a gun murder committed in the heat of passion.  Let's call mass shootings what they are:  acts of terror.  They are acts perpetrated by people who, like terrorists, have nothing to lose and want to go out in a blaze of glory that draws attention to themselves and their cause.  And like acts of terror, mass shootings leave a permanent scar on our national psyche.  Banning, or at least making it much more difficult to obtain, semiautomatic rifles with high-capacity mags may not make much of a dent in the overall murder rate.  That's not the point.  The point is that children can go to school safe in the knowledge that the odds of someone shooting down the door of the school with one of these weapons are exceedingly small.  Similarly, the point of the War on Terror is that people can go to work in their office building or board a plane secure in the knowledge that the odds of those two things colliding are exceedingly small.  The point is not to eliminate criminals' access to guns.  The point is to increase the odds that the good guys aren't outgunned.  And no, the answer is not to have good guys with Uzis lining the halls of our elementary schools.  That doesn't make kids feel safe, either.  You can argue that the War on Terror goes too far in some ways, is too expensive, etc., and I will generally agree with you, but at least we're having a frank an honest discussion about the trade-offs of liberty vs. safety rather than spewing vitriol and regurgitating hyperbole.  Why can't we have that same frank and honest discussion about gun policy?  Why can we make it difficult to buy fertilizer in the wake of the OKC bombing but not make it difficult to buy AR-15's in the wake of Sandy Hook?

The statistic that 800,000 to 2.5 million violent crimes are prevented each year by legal guns is from a study whose methodology basically involved polling gun owners.  The study is "manifestly flawed and misleading", not to mention outdated (http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/30/opinion/frum-guns-safer).  A more relevant statistic is from the FBI, which cites only 200-300 "justified firearm homicides" per year.  That means 40-50 times as many people die in handgun murders each year as kill a perp with a legal handgun.  Hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen from homes every year.  Some of those are even used against their owners, and well, 100% of them end up in the hands of criminals, by definition.  Most of those guns are never recovered.  Quoting from the link above, David Frum summarizes my opinion:  "I'm not disputing that guns sometimes save lives.  They must.  I'm certainly not disputing that the Constitution secures the right of individual gun ownership.  It does.  I'm questioning the claim that widespread gun ownership makes America a safer place.  The research supporting that claim is pretty weak-- and is contradicted above all by the plain fact that most other advanced countries have many fewer guns and also many fewer crimes and criminals."

To expand upon the last statement, if we look at the United States compared to other non-conflict nations, the rate of gun murders per capita correlates with the number of guns per capita.  The correlation is not 1:1, and a statistical relationship doesn't mean that 100% of the correlation is causal, but there is undeniably at least some causal relationship there.  How much is the real question.  I refer you to the following FactCheck.org articles:  http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/ and http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/violent-crimes-and-handgun-ownership/.  I would say that, minimally, there is no evidence to suggest that our country is safer with more guns and some evidence to suggest that it is less safe.  Also, the evidence is clear that having a gun in the home, statistically, increases your risk of a violent death in the home (http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full).  It is not hard to understand why.  Put simply, it's a lot easier to defend yourself against a knife or a hammer, and those weapons often require multiple strikes to make a kill.  Unless the perpetrator is truly a cold-blooded killer, there is a good chance that, if they are using a knife or a blunt instrument, they may snap out of their rage before actually finishing the act, and the person they are trying to kill may still be alive at that point.  However, a gun is designed as a killing weapon.  It has no other use.  Thus, the odds are much greater that, if there is a gun available, a homicide or suicide attempt will be successful.  OK, great, so you're a smart gun owner, and you keep your gun locked up and never leave it loaded, so there's no chance that a child could get ahold of it and no chance that you would reach for it in the heat of passion or in a fit of depression.  The problem is, not everyone is a safe and smart gun owner, and as with so many other things, the misguided few ruin it for everyone else.  We have to have driver's licenses because there are some people who are not safe behind the wheel, and most states have concluded that people under the age of 16 or elderly people with vision problems fall into that category.  In Texas, however, it's easier to buy a gun if you're under the age of 25 than it is to obtain a driver's license, and in several states, you don't even need a permit to carry a concealed firearm.

As far as the heartfelt Amanda Collins story, anecdotal evidence is never a good basis for public policy.  The reason why these stories are so compelling is precisely because they are so rare, but when a politician attempts to use them to justify policy decisions, he/she is fallaciously asserting that the anecdote is the common case.  For every Amanda Collins out there, there is someone who bought a gun because they thought it would make them more safe, but the gun ended up being used against them.  You give me Amanda Collins, and I give you back Phil Hartman.  If Phil Hartman cannot be used as a reason to ban guns, then neither can Amanda Collins be used as a reason to make them ubiquitous.  An honest discussion about gun safety must include the fact that there are risks both to owning a gun and to not owning a gun.  In some cases, one set of risks is greater than the other.  It is never the case that owning a gun always makes you safer, but the problem is that too many people believe that it does, and thus we have a lot of people out there who, by not understanding and mitigating the risks of gun ownership, make themselves-- and, more importantly, others-- less safe by virtue of their gun ownership.  Or, to quote Stephen Colbert's Swiftian take on the issue, "Well, sure, with a gun in the house, my family's less safe, but isn't that a small price to pay for my family's safety?"

Getting back to the original point, though, let's put handguns aside for the moment, because in my opinion, those are not the core of the issue.  The primary issue is:  how do we prevent another Sandy Hook?  That issue is an issue of access.  After 9/11, no one suggested banning planes as a solution to prevent another 9/11, but we did take steps to ensure that not just anyone could gain access to the cockpit or even board the plane to begin with.  Same goes for assault rifles, folks.  If you want to go through as much red tape as is required to gain access to the cockpit of a plane, then I'll trust you to operate an assault rifle.  If you want to go through as much red tape as is required to operate a car, then I'll trust you to operate a handgun.  Saying that we shouldn't do anything because, statistically, Sandy Hook is a rare occurrence is missing the point.  9/11 and OKC were rare occurrences, but they were occurrences that showed us some gaping security holes that we needed to fill.

As far as Whittle's over-the-top rants about Hitler and Stalin, let's think for a minute-- if the United States government really wanted to murder its citizens, it has a lot more effective weapons at its disposal than handguns or even assault rifles.  Get real.  If you want to be afraid of government overreach and Big Brother, I suggest you read up on drone policy rather than gun policy.  No one is trying to take away your right to keep and bear arms.  What we are trying to take away is the ability of every tom, dick, and harry to easily buy firearm setups that can kill dozens of people without reloading.
 
I urge everyone to put down the Kool-Aid glass for a moment and take a look at the science behind this issue.  I am neither a gun nut nor a gun control nut, but what I am is someone who believes numbers far more than I believe impassioned pleas, and the impassioned pleas presented in Bill Whittle's video simply aren't backed up by the numbers.

Adios, Homophobe

Dear Rick Perry,

You can't use the language of tolerance to justify intolerance, nor can you use the language of open-mindedness to justify closed-minded beliefs, nor can you use the language of love to justify hate.  Being intolerant of intolerance does not make one intolerant, being closed to closed-mindedness does not make one closed-minded, and being hateful of hate does not make one a hater.

I don't think you even deserve the time or energy it takes for me to express my vitriol against you anymore, but I'm writing this to inform you that I'm officially re-claiming the word "intolerant."  Yeah, you heard me.  I'm taking it back.  If you continue to say that I'm "intolerant" of your intolerance of homosexuals, then I will say that you are intolerant of my intolerance of your intolerance of homosexuals.  And you know what?  Three negatives makes a negative, but two negatives makes a positive.  I win.

Hater's Guide to "Skyfall"

Opening theme:  On a scale of 1 to 10, with Nancy Sinatra being a -2 and Wings being a 19, I'm going to say that Adele's contribution to this hit parade of the most tragically dated-sounding songs in the history of pop music ranks somewhere between Shirley Bassey and ... Shirley Bassey.

I know invisibility is cool and all, but Daniel Craig really needs to stop wearing The Ring.

Roger Deakins deserves an Oscar ... for every Coen Brothers film he's ever worked on.  Denzel deserved an Oscar for "Malcolm X."  Denzel got an Oscar for "Training Day."  If Deakins gets an Oscar for "Skyfall", it's basically the Academy saying, "we're sorry we had our heads so firmly implanted in our @$$es for the past 20 years that we somehow zoned out on all of your most brilliant works ...  I mean, to be clear, this ain't one of them, but why don't you just go ahead and take a statue anyway?  You can scratch out the name and put 'Miller's Crossing' on there if you want."

Seriously, if I were designing a building, one feature I would not include is the ability to log in remotely and trigger a natural gas leak.  And while we're on the subject, does no one in the building have a sense of smell?

If you're going to make such a big fizzing freak of a deal over exposing the identity of five MI6 agents, it kind of cuts into that drama a little bit to have your flagship agent walk up to a random, gun-toting, clothing-challenged female stranger in the very next scene and blow his own cover ... just like he's been blowing his own cover for the past 50 years.  I mean, if anyone in the underworld doesn't know who James frickin' Bond is by now, they are seriously in the wrong business.

If you're going to make a film about a hacker, here's a tip:  cast Angelina Jolie.  It keeps the geeks interested.  And if you're going to make a film in which large sprays of machine gun fire are directed either from, or toward, the main character, that main character's last name had damn well better be McClane, Rambo, or T1.  As it stands, "Skyfall" was 30 minutes of Bond, 15 minutes of "Sneakers", 75 minutes of "The Last Boy Scout", and 20 minutes of "Witness."

Did he really just quote Tim Rice?  Yeah, I think he just quoted Tim Rice.

Is it just me, or does stashing a hardened criminal in a 50-square-foot Lexan hexagonal prism in the middle of a 2500-square-foot cavern seem like a bit of a waste of space?   I mean, at least store some files or janitorial supplies in there or something.

Seriously with the subway crash?  I mean, that's not even one of the better rides at Universal Studios anymore.

In conclusion:  way too heavy on the bullets, and way too light on the submarines, Persian cats, martinis, and sex.  The only female badass in the entire picture retires to become a secretary?  Really?!  If Pussy Galore were dead, she'd be rolling over in her grave (and probably doing the splits as well.)

Fact from Fiction: Learn the Secrets of the Pros

A friend of a friend of mine who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of one of the foremost books on Internet urban legends once sat down with me and opened up the keys to his kingdom.  It turns out that there is a very simple procedure that anyone can follow to determine whether a story that gets forwarded to you via e-mail or social media is complete, accurate, and unbiased.  Read below to find out this world-renowned journalist's carefully-guarded secret:

1. It isn't

AutoFlavor

Food is one of the few remaining artistic media to have escaped computerization, but it is inevitable that someone will eventually invent a computerized food generator.  At first, there will be a movement toward digitization-- converting the best hand-made dishes and making them reproducible with 100% accuracy in anyone's kitchen.  This will be followed by the inevitable debate as to whether the generators reproduce the original dish 100% accurately or whether you can "taste the digital artifacts."  Eventually, though, it will be a moot point, because chefs will stop using the food generators simply as a distribution mechanism and will embrace them as a medium of expression, thus allowing them to synthesize new and different flavors that wouldn't have been possible without computers.  But then, someone will inevitably invent an AutoFlavor feature.  The best chefs will use it as it was intended-- as a way of accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative.  Some urban chefs will even embrace it as a way to make their food taste intentionally computerized and thus obviously unique.  Among the mass marketeers, however, AutoFlavor will become a tool of expedience, used to hide a lack of talent so that chefs can be marketed based on their looks rather than their skill, or as a way of pushing true culinary talent to churn out way more new dishes than would otherwise have been humanly possible.  Eventually, the average American palate will become so accustomed to AutoFlavor that any dish that wasn't prepared with it, including the lovingly hand-crafted dishes of decades past, won't even taste good to them anymore.