Responses to Some Reader Queries
This is a collection of questions I’ve received in my inbox or in comment sections on my work. Thank you to those who responded to the last post asking for your suggestions. I’m not addressing here all of the questions I’ve received, only the ones that I felt I could give a somewhat short response to. Others will require their own longform post.
You’ve made a strong critique of the internet and smartphones. You’ve never had a smartphone but you do use the internet. The attention deficit problem is an internet problem, not just a smartphone one. Do you not struggle with that? You can also end up in endless loops of scrolling but with a laptop. How do you control that?
It's true that laptops and desktop computers have similar opportunities for abuse as smartphones given their access to the internet. But those devices generally don't follow me outside of the home (or when I’m working in a coffeeshop). They are not on my person at work nor when I am otherwise out and about in the world. Just that difference alone is pretty huge. I don’t have the thing in my pocket to look at that everyone is always looking at. I have the world, and that’s it. But yes, computers still require some degree of self-control, which the attention economy actively seeks to destroy. One thing that helps is that I have multiple ad-blockers on all my web browsers, so I literally haven't seen any commercials or other sponsored content on anything that I've viewed for years. Those ad-blockers also get rid of a lot of the fluff content on social media that the algorithms push on you even if you're not otherwise interested in it. Using someone else's browser that doesn't have ad-block is almost unusable to me now. Why on earth should I be seeing something on a timeline that I haven't specifically followed? Ad-blockers disable a lot of that. And if I ever happen to be in front of cable TV, which is increasingly rare these days, I'm ceaselessly shocked at how far down and debased the commercials feel now. It's like a whole other universe. I'm so glad I'm able to bypass that for the most part. For me the biggest thing that ruins my attention span is scrolling through social media, so I just try not to engage with it too much. I do get some utility out of Twitter because there's a lot of breaking news and videos on there from around the world that you won't see elsewhere. But the other platforms like Instagram and Facebook are easier for me to ignore because they're filled with more vapid content. If I ever feel like I'm getting too distracted, I step away and read a book or go for a long walk as a way to reset. Reading a longform, physical thing is what most people are increasingly struggling with, hence our increasing levels of illiteracy (having just finished teaching my first college-level upper division course, it was shocking to me how bad the reading/writing skills were amongst college students and how blasé students were about being on their phones during class). So, it’s lengthy physical media that I go to as a palliative.
Tell us more stories about the various people associated with The Band.
Firstly, I am cognizant of the fact that the thing I have written that has far and away gotten the greatest amount of eyeballs on it is my appreciation of The Band’s multi-instrumentalist virtuoso Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of the foundational Americana group who recently passed away. The video version I made for the piece currently has around 400,000 views on Youtube, which is pretty cool. I am genuinely chuffed that it has gotten the response that it has because I am genuinely infatuated with The Band and I want them to be remembered and appreciated more than they have been. But I also wish that the rest of my work regarding more important socio-political questions was more widely viewed. But hey, I don’t have much control over that.
In regards to this above request, I have some recommendations. Firstly, read Levon Helm’s book on The Band, This Wheel’s On Fire. This was the first book written by a member of The Band, the only other one being Robbie Robertson’s Testimony. Both of these books contain a lot of good stories and insider’s insight. The other books I would recommend on this topic are John Simon’s biography, Truth, Lies & Hearsay. Simon was a producer for The Band’s studio efforts and known as The Band’s “sixth member” because of how much he played on their records and helped with arrangements. I started reading it a while ago and haven’t picked it up again, but it’s worth exploring. There is also Barney Hoskyn’s biography of The Band, Across the Great Divide. I haven’t started that one yet, but being that it is written from an outsider’s perspective I’m sure it has some details that the other books miss out on. You should also pick up a copy of Greil Marcus’ The Old, Weird America, which is an analysis of The Band’s and Bob Dylan’s recording of the seminal basement tapes in 1967/68. Again, I haven’t started this one yet, but it’s waiting on my shelf. And if you’re a real nerd about the basement tapes like I am, Sid Griffin’s Million Dollar Bash is essential. Griffin goes into much finer detail about the recording process used by Garth Hudson (who stored the tapes for many years), deciphering who played what instruments on which songs, and offers a completionist index of all of the hundreds of songs recorded during that time by Dylan and The Band.
In addition to these longform pieces, you should also definitely scour through the liner notes on the CD reissues of The Band’s albums from around 2000/2001. Those are great reissues, with a healthy amount of bonus tracks and outtakes, and the liner notes shed a lot of light on their recording and songwriting process. The boxed set A Musical History is very attractive, with lots of great photos and more background on the recordings from pre-The Band incarnations. The 50th anniversary boxed sets of their first four studio albums, along with the boxed sets of The Last Waltz and Live at the Academy offer nice appreciations of those recordings. You should also check out the (un)official website for The Band here. This is a great resource library. It has compiled: interviews of The Band and its members from throughout their careers; contemporaneous reviews of their albums; obituaries; hundreds if not thousands of photos; an index of all of their live performances spanning 39 years from 1960 to Rick Danko’s death in 1999; an index of available bootlegs; textual analyses of their songs; chord charts for their songs; lists of albums by other artists that members of The Band have played on; and so much more. There are also other forums out there for discussions about The Band. There are also several documentaries available. Ain’t In It For My Health (focuses on Levon Helm), Once Were Brothers (focuses on Robertson), Down in the Flood (focuses on Dylan’s intersection with The Band), The Last Waltz, The Band: the Authorized Video Biography, and Classic Albums: The Band (focuses on their 2nd album) are all worth checking out.
But to actually (somewhat) respond to this request, here’s just some brief teaser stories that are expanded upon more in Helm’s and Robertson’s respective books: The time when members of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks (pre-The Band) burned down a club after the owner stiffed them and then the cops let them off; the time when Levon and Robbie were preparing to rob an underground poker game at gunpoint because they were so poor; the time when Levon had to cool off some racist-ass Arkansan cops because The Band was hanging out with legendary blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson in the black part of town; the time when Rick Danko got deer shit smeared all over him because of a late-night impromptu butcher job gone bad; the time when Danko got off of a drug charge by blackmailing the arresting cop; the time when Ronnie Hawkins made a whole crowd think that everyone was going to die from nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So I know I basically just told you: go read the stories yourself. But if I’m gonna write anything about The Band at this point it’s going to be an analysis of their work from a particular angle, not just an overview of their stories, because that is already well-covered territory. One angle that interests me is interrogating the enduring power of their song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Levon Helm’s performance of this song for their final concert in The Last Waltz is the definitive version of this song and is hands down one of the best, most moving performances I have ever seen put to film. The swell on the final chorus is palpable, the audience there that Thanksgiving night in 1976 could feel it, and it reaches out to you through the screen to make you feel it too. Garth Hudson’s arrangement for the studio version of the song is gorgeous. Rick Danko’s and Richard Manuel’s vocal harmonies are cry-worthy. But also….. that song is an unapologetic romanticization of the unforgivable sin that is the Confederate South.
As The Band’s one time equipment manager (and later bestselling author) Jonathan Taplin once said approvingly, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” did more to humanize the Confederate soldier to a modern liberal audience than any other work of art has done before or since. In this sense, the song really is an impressive work of art, both lyrically and musically. Being generous, Robertson was so inspired by meeting Levon Helm’s family, seeing what the American South was really like, he felt the music in the air, it was a revelatory experience for this Canadian kid, and he wanted to give voice to that ineffable feeling of loss and a hoped-for future redemption that is so palpable when listening to the Southern American white underclass. Robertson chose the perfect person to sing that song in Levon Helm, a poor Arkansan, not far removed from driving his family’s tractor on the farm, who loved Delta music more than his soul could bear. This is all true. But being less generous, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” performs the same function as Triumph of the Will. There’s lots more to be said on this matter, it could be a whole essay, but I will leave it at that for now.
I would love to hear your thoughts about how Covid-19 policies were politicized.
I will keep this fairly cursory relative to the broad subject matter because I think a lot of this has played out already. And I did write a bit about this subject already in this recent post as well as an older post where I critiqued the private monopolization of vaccines.
Firstly, the left/right politicization of many things in the U.S. is mostly incredibly stupid. The sooner the people of this country break out of playing performative political sports ball against each other the sooner we can get the revolution on. That being said, the most interesting thing about this question to me is the fact that liberals have totally identified themselves with valuing “science” for its own sake while seemingly having no discernable understanding of the many ways in which the entire realm of scientific study and scientific institutions have been totally degraded by capitalism. So actually, no, we shouldn’t trust scientists just because they’re scientists in the same way that we shouldn’t trust Democrats or Republicans just because they’re Democrats or Republicans. And if you think that the scientific community is somehow above our two decadent capitalist political parties, let me introduce you to the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry! Or how about the many ways in which capitalist industries have weaponized science in order to protect their profits at the expense of people’s lives? Or the way that our entire education system doesn’t alleviate economic inequality but rather legitimates that inequality as necessary to capitalism? I could go on in this manner.
And more than this, liberals seem to see no other solution to scientific questions other than to try to educate people and battle “misinformation.” But you can’t just shout “You can’t argue with science!” at someone and expect to change anything. The entire scientific project is in fact incredibly contentious, subject to political attitudes, and indeed it ought to be. As Matthew T. Huber writes in regards to the climate crisis in Climate Change as Class War:
The implication is that because the science is settled on the question of anthropogenic climate change, it should not be subject to politics. There is a core insight here: climate change’s existence should not be a “political” debate. Yet this displaces the actual political issue: what to do about it. The response to climate change involves a colossal political struggle against some of the most powerful corporations on the planet. The sheer ubiquity of climate skeptic discourse in the 1990s and 2000s was evidence that the skeptics were winning this political struggle. It is another form of denial to suggest that this crisis can be adjudicated purely through truth and science. Making climate politics purely about science evades the question of power. It allows us to attribute our inaction on climate change as simply due to misinformation rather than lack of power.
The extent to which liberals anchor themselves to “the experts” and to technocrats and to academics while spurning the working-class is the extent to which they will drown with the sinking ship. You cannot solve this problem of the politicization of science without understanding that the scientific project is itself inherently political. As Nima Bassiri writes in a wonderful article on science skepticism for The Baffler, “Perhaps the most dangerous way to politicize science is to claim that it is off-limits to debate, safeguarded in some way by truth and expertise. … If we accept that science is inherently political, then the task becomes to politicize science otherwise. Let us, in other words, instrumentalize science for our ends—not in the name of profit or military advancement but for the sake of solidarity, accessibility, and for the promotion of flourishing and dignity for all.”
Because science has become so degraded, I frankly don’t blame anti-vaxxers or any other kind of science skeptics for having the skepticism that they do. Obviously I think a lot of their conclusions and decisions are very dumb, inconsiderate, and borne more of a cultish anti-authoritarianism than an actual thoughtful engagement with scientific questions (I see this largely in the hippie woo-woo crowd). But the people who are chiefly to blame for that state of affairs are those who chose to treat science primarily as a mechanism for corporate profit, not for human flourishing. The results were predictable. As John Ralston Saul amply demonstrates in Voltaire’s Bastards, there is no reason why any of us should trust our institutions at face value. I cannot emphasize this enough: the people with power are illegitimate and deserve to be washed away. Their institutions, including the scientific ones, have been used against us for generations. Until our institutions are truly democratic, from the bottom up, they will remain legitimate targets of scorn, and more.
Do you have recommendations for books, podcasts, alternative media, and the like?
I wrote a post that already did this here, titled “How Does Someone Become a Leftist?” I recommend you check out that whole post because I give some more background on each entry than I will provide here. But in brief:
Media Outlets / Podcasts :
Books:
Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges (and every other Chris Hedges book)
Listen, Liberal! by Thomas Frank
Notes of a Native Son | Nobody Knows My Name | The Fire Next Time | No Name in the Street | The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin
With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald
A Spectre, Haunting by China Miéville
The Divide by Matt Taibbi
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
If We Burn by Vincent Bevins
Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse
American Midnight by Adam Hochschild
Spain In Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild
Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson
Climate Change as Class War by Matthew T. Huber
Un-American by Erik Edstrom
John Brown by W.E.B du Bois
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Hunter S. Thompson
Documentaries:
The Wobblies
Sicko
The Gig Is Up
Cowspiracy
HyperNormalisation (and every other Adam Curtis documentary)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Requiem for the American Dream
And that’s all I’ve got for now. As I said before, there are more reader responses that will take some more time and space to respond to more thoroughly. In the meantime, go read a book. It’s good for you. So long as it isn’t by Ayn Rand.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Robbie didn’t write The Night They Tore Old Dixie Down. Levon did.