Monday 3 October 2011

revolution number nine

I suppose an individual's definition of freedom (as in the same insurrectionists being called both rebels and freedom-fighters) can be as varied as one's definition of vanity. Visitor-counters, like philately or Ken Jennings' brilliant Slate article about how Wanderlust and country-collecting have turned into a highly-competitive pastime for those with the means, are rather vain things--since one's sponsors track this data already to a fault--but the service that I adopted before I realized that the same features were already built into Blogger is reliable and endearing, and Flag Counter made me smile yesterday when I saw that our latest, newest visitor was from liberated Libya--represented by the new flag of the caretaker government. Maybe the visit was for something completely random and unhindered image-searches was only among the least of freedoms tenaciously fought for. I am very happy for their achievement, nonetheless, and all the small and grand victories of the Arab Spring--and hope that it's catching. Given the opportunity, I would have visited those countries in person before the revolution but now, with the chance to support the new leadership, one has even more reason to go.

Sunday 2 October 2011

transparez

No place has a monopoly on greed, corruption and bribery, and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has been doing important work to expose the lobbyists in Brussels and how business motives translate to political agendas within the European Union. The organization has compiled an extensive list of the ties that bind, available for downloading on their site, in addition to all the other reporting they do on influence-peddling. Such work is vital, I think, because there is a gentrification and formalization in the culture of corruption and the EU, which further shields those courtiers from the press and public backlash.

wallet inspector or nickel-and-dimed

Rarely I think new policies are introduced without calculated unpopularity, and I think that this is the case with the announcement of one of the biggest banks of America (recursively named) that it will begin charging its customers a nominal monthly convenience fee for using their point of sale debit cards.

All the outrage and resentment that have been generated over this relatively harmless move might be the final straw that causes the public to move their money and quit enabling these too-big-to-fail. If such a mildly unsettling PR failure can bring about revolution, then I am happy for it, but I think the message was instead designed to make the public at large forget about all their past transgressions and focus on this new tangible and across the board policy: never mind all the billions in tax-payer bailout assistance, predatory loans, aggressive and faulty repossessions, casually firing tens of thousands from its own workforce, being generally unrepentant about abetting the whole global financial , and now they have the nerve to nickel-and-dime people for the privilege of using their own money (merchants already pay a premium for renting debt-card machines), which the banks profit from by holding it. I think it will backfire.  One would do better to always use cash: all those electronic trillions in sovereign debt and corporate assets the world around could not fit physically fit into all the bank vaults of the world, if this trend snowballs and that’s quite something for cash-on-hand.

Saturday 1 October 2011

a dinosaur victrola listening to buck owens

I can distinctly recall being informed that all Creedence Clearwater Revival songs were references to the Vietnam War, years and years while listening to Looking Out My Back Door on the radio while visiting some friends in Reardon, Virginia. This already sounds like a bit of dialogue from The Big Lebowski or someone trying to pass an urban legend off as his own. I do not know if that association is the absolute truth but I remember it being quite a revelation to start to peer through the lyrics and suddenly understand that a lot of music is about drugs, protest, Nixon and Watergate-gate. Folk and protest music has sometimes, I think, gone underground, and I never really thought about it beforehand, but I suppose that the rap genre is the legal successor in some ways to the anti-war movement and all the artists who used their talent to weave an allegory that was more subtle. Rap is excused, of course, and can be more direct.
In between-time, there was Don Henley’s (the Eagles--there’s Big Lebowski) All She Wants To Do Is Dance that was apparently in protest to America’s 1984 counter-revolutionary support and occupation of Nicaragua about the hedonists CIA spooks stationed there who could not see the bigger political picture. Maybe that level of allegory and deference was too subtle, too polite, but good music always surpasses its immediate context.