Libertarians Are Not the Answer

Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party nominee. It's an unfortunate truth that, nevertheless, must be accepted by anybody with an understanding of mathematics. Personally, I think Sanders should drop out now that his candidacy is simply a vanity project, but that's a different story. The end of primary season leaves millions of Sanders supporters in a bit of a bind. According to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who, presumably, knows what he's talking about, 1/3 of Sanders will definitely vote for Clinton, 1/3 will definitely not, and 1/3 are on the fence. The Libertarian candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has, in the last few days, made overtures to the 2/3 of Sanders not completely committed to Clinton. Below, a discussion the relationship between the Libertarian Party, Johnson's personal beliefs, and Sanders program of "political revolution."

The Libertarian party is relatively young, founded in only 1971, and is among the most consistently "successful" third parties. I use scare quotes for successful because, for American third parties these days, success is receiving 1% of the vote or more. Ideologically, they borrow elements of both the traditional Republican and Democratic platforms: emphasis on individual liberty (drug legalization, pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro gun rights, etc.) with minimal government oversight of business (reduce/eliminate the EPA, IRS, Federal Reserve, lower taxes, etc.) Personally, I think the popularity of the Libtertarian party is going to explode over the next few decades, perhaps even this year. I suspect that they will either replace the GOP as the main center-right party, or that their program will be adopted so completely by the GOP that they will be indistinguishable. Admittedly, I'm basing this mostly on my own experiences and instincts. Ron Paul, a former LP member and 2004 and 2008 presidential candidate, had a surprisingly strong following on college campuses, because of his relatively liberal positions on individual rights. As millennials and Gen-Xers become dominant voting blocs, the GOP is going to have to move away from its indebtedness to far-right Evangelical voters if it wants to survive. Most young people want gay marriage and minimally restricted abortion access. Far fewer are clamoring for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Many, quite unfortunately, think Ayn Rand was a prophetic genius.

As far as Gary Johnson, the current LP nominee and former governor of New Mexico, he's in the more moderate wing of the party. The hardcore libertarians are the ones who sleep with a copy of Atlas Shrugged under their pillows and have fundamental problems with the whole idea of government. Johnson isn't in that camp. However, this doesn't necessarily make him a suitable alternative to Sanders. They do, in fact, agree on some issues: they're pro-choice, anti-bank bailout, pro gay rights, pro drug legalization. But the similarities are shallow, and the differences profound. Here are some of the most dramatic differences between the two:

• Doesn't support requiring insurers to provide birth control
• Subscribes to the usual conservative obsession with the national debt.
• Wants to eliminate the federal reserve, and presumably go back to the gold standard.
• Wants to eliminate nearly all corporate taxes.
• Supports the private prison industry.
• Plans to eliminate student loans for higher education.
• Supports abolishing the department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as he dept. of Education.
• Against strict environmental regulation -- favors "voluntary partnerships."
• Strongly pro free trade.
• Believes in unlimited campaign contributions from corporations, as long as there's disclosure.
• Supports few, if any, restrictions on gun ownership.
• Against both Obamacare and single-payer healthcare.
• Does not support raising the minimum wage, or the idea in general.
• Supports privatizing Social Security.
• Favors a flat tax rather than income tax. 

Many of these differences are central points in Sanders program. His positions on campaign contributions, healthcare and the environment are especially disturbing. If you're a Sanders supporter, don't be blinded by anti-establishment furor. The fact that Johnson isn't an "establishment" politician doesn't mean that his beliefs are similar to yours. The ideal candidate is somebody who's anti-political-establishment AND anti-corporate-establishment. Johnson fails on the second count. If you're bound and determined to find a third party candidate, I recommend Jill Stein of the Green party. However, if you plan not to vote for Clinton, I hope you'll keep a close watch on the polls in your state, and do what is necessary to stop Donald Trump. Electing Clinton would ensure four more years of oppressive plutocratic dominance. We've made it this long, we can make it another four years. Electing Trump could have much more catastrophic consequences for our democracy, free press, security, and economy. 

Sources:
www.politics1.com

www.ontheissues.org

A Plea

An old saying claims that there's no greater zealot than a convert, and perhaps that's true. Or, perhaps, indignation is simply a natural reaction to the discovery that one has been lied to for one's entire life. Some of you who pay attention to my Facebook® posts know that I've been a vegan for about eight months. Without any hyperbole, I view it as the most important decision I've ever made, in terms of tangible, beneficial, impact on my fellow man. I've intended to write something about it for some time, and, for whatever reason, that time is now. This is a long post, but it's much more important than my usual ramblings. I hope you'll read it carefully. 

There seems to me to be essentially three reasons why people chose veganism: 1. health benefits: the evidence is myriad and indisputable that a plant-based diet can prevent and even reverse chronic disease. 2. morality: the practice of raising and slaughtering animals for food should turn even the strongest stomachs. 3. environmental: raising animals for food has a deleterious effect on the planet. I'm not going to discuss these first two. Everyone's health is their own business, and God knows I have enough unhealthy habits that I'm in no position to lecture anybody. Similarly, I'm no a clergy member, and am ill equipped to discourse on empathy, or to try and inculcate it in you if you don't feel it. This third reason, though, is my business, and the business of everybody who likes to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and be able to live above ground.

Since so many of my friends claim to "fucking love science," I'm going to keep this as empirical as possible. Raising animals for food is killing us, and killing the planet. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gas than all global transportation. Let that sink in for a moment. The carbon produced by every car, bus, train, plane, truck, motorcycle, blimp in the world, combined, is still less than that of the cows, pigs, and poultry we consume. Consider how much money has been spent and ink spilled to try and get a handle on transportation carbon emissions. All the government stimulus money, hybrid cars, and "sustainability" initiatives over the last decade will not make a dent in our climate damage if we continue our current dietary practices.

Digging a little deeper renders the situation even more bleak. Transportation, as we all know, produces mainly CO2. Despite what the media would have you believe, CO2 is NOT the most destructive greenhouse gas. Methane, produced from burning natural gas and, in large measure, by cows, has at least 25 times the global warming potential of CO2. But even that isn't the worst of it. Nitrous Oxide (N2O, or "laughing gas") is 296 times more destructive than CO2. Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of this very un-funny substance. Also, it doesn't break down in the atmosphere for more than 150 years. Finally, even if we reduce transportation emissions to zero, we will still exceed our self-imposed limit of 565 gigatonnes CO2-equivalent by 2030, thanks entirely to animal agriculture.

"Very well," you might say, "but I'm sure the 'scientists' will figure out some way to clean up the atmosphere. They're already making progress on it after all." Fine. Here's another way we as a species are committing suicide-by-cow. Animal agriculture uses a shocking amount of fresh water: up to 76 TRILLION gallons annually. Expressed a percentage, this is 80-90% of total water consumption of the United States. You may have heard that the southwest United States will face a serious water shortage in the next 20 years. It's not because of population, it's because of animals. Just growing the crops required to feed animals accountants for 56% of the country's water use. Speaking of those crops, if all of the food we grow were actually given to people (many of whom, you may have heard, are starving), we would have enough to feed 10 billion humans. That's three billion more than the world population, and we could do it, today, if we stopped wasting massive amounts of grain on animal agriculture. For those of you who are sensitive to things like white privilege, it might interest you to know that 82% of the world's starving children live in countries where perfectly good grain is grown to feed to animals to be exported to the west for consumption. 

Back to water, over-consumption isn't the only way livestock are ruining our water supply. They also produce a tremendous amount of pollution via fecal matter, which has to go somewhere. Can you guess where? According to about 20 different sources, animal agriculture is the leading cause of domestic water pollution and ocean dead zones. Many people seem to think this is a humorous discussion. These people should go back to junior high. Animals produce 116,00 lbs of waste per second in America, 130 times more than humans. Think about the money we spend on sewage treatment and pollution prevention in our cities. Now consider a pollution source 130 times greater, with no comprehensive apparatus in place to treat, contain, or clean it up.

Anybody who came through the public education system in the 1990s (at least in a more liberal part of the country) will remember the copious number of hours spent covering the evils of Rainforest destruction and deforestation. I remember the feelings of anger and helplessness quite vividly, as we were told how many thousands of acres were already destroyed, how many species had been lost, how many native cultures annihilated. What weren't we told? You can probably guess. The leading cause of rainforest destruction (91%!!) is animal agriculture, either directly through the creation of grazing land, or indirectly through cultivation of feed crops. We lose as many as 137 unique, irreplaceable, largely unstudied species every single day. There's a human cost too -- native civilizations who've lived in, and relied on, the rainforest for centuries are killed or displaced to make room for ranching. Additionally, 1100 land-rights activists have been killed in Brazil in just the past 20 years.

Fish fair no better than bipeds and quadrupeds. Three quarters of the world's fisheries are exploited or depleted, according to the U.N. Fishing takes a toll on more than just the edible fish, though. Those of you, again, who grew up in the 80s/90s may remember the fuss made over "dolphin-safe" tuna -- tuna that was supposedly caught without dolphin "by-catch." By-catch is an industry term for all the non-edible stuff that gets pulled out of the ocean by huge commercial trawlers. How much of a problem is by-catch? Bear with me here: About 90-100 million lbs of "fish" are caught every year. About 40% of this is discarded as either inedible or poor quality leaving, conservatively, about 60 million lbs of edible fish. According to National Geographic, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.7 TRILLION animals are pulled from the ocean every year. Let's (very conservatively) estimate that the average fish weighs 1 lb. That means that 0.002% of what's caught actually makes into our food supply. For arguments sake, let's lower that average weight to 1 ounce, meaning 16 edible fish for each of our 60 million lbs, so 960 million animals. That gives us a much more impressive yield of 0.04%. In modern capitalism, if any other industry were this inefficient, it wouldn't last a month, but because we don't place a monetary value on our natural world, it continues unabated. What about those other trillions of animals who are killed by accident? Among them are 40-50 million sharks (you may want to rethink those "live every week like it's shark week" shirts), and 650,000 whales and dolphins. What about shellfish, you ask? It may interest you to know that a large amount of the shrimp we eat in America is peeled by slave laborers in southeast Asia.

Many people make a point of only eating "sustainably" raised meat. Unfortunately, there's no such thing. Pasture-grazed, grass-fed cows actually use even more resources than their factory-farmed cousins because they live longer. They drink more water, produce more shit, and deplete more land. It's also physically impossible to meet current meat demand using "sustainable" methods. If every cow in America were pasture-raised, it would require the entirety of North America and a sizable amount of South America (including mountains, glaciers, and other non-grazable land), and that's just for one country. Again, those of you who are sensitive to privilege would do well to take note here. Everybody simply can't eat pasture-raised grass-fed beef.

What about fish farms? These are very often held up as more sustainable alternatives to commercial fishing. While it's true that they avoid the scourge of by-catch, they compensate in other ways. For starters, it takes fish to raise fish, especially those fish higher up on the food chain. In other words, fish farms require commercial fishing to some degree. They also produce massive amounts of pollution due to the close quarters of the fish (as many as 90,000 in a 100x100 ft pen). Feces, dead fish, blood, rotting food, antibiotics, and more are all released into the ocean in a highly concentrated area, contributing to dead zones. These fish are also generally less healthy than wild-caught, but that's another story.

Many of you, presumably, care about the environment. I know some of you drive hybrid cars, bike or take mass transit, use high-efficiency bulbs and energy-star appliances, and take many other steps to try to limit your environmental footprint. Here's the thing, though: the most substantial action you can take to combat climate change is to give up animal products. For a long time, I operated under the assumption that vegans were self-righteous, annoying, and generally misguided. The first two may occasionally be true, which is why I've tried to stick to facts and avoid moralizing. We are not, however, extreme or misguided. We have adopted the only logical position for anybody claiming to be an environmentalist to hold. There is no way around these facts. They can't be dispelled by Facebook® memes, the tastiness of bacon, the ubiquity of milk, or the addictive properties of cheese (Google "Casein addiction" when you have a minute).

Food is a very personal subject for most people, and discussions like these can set off very bitter, angry, emotional, arguments. At the moment I have 672 friends on Facebook®. If 671 of you furiously unfriend me, but 1 person takes this to heart, I will consider this effort a success.

Please, take this seriously. The food you consume doesn't just affect your body. It affects mine, and everybody else's, and we're getting the point where the effects are going to start becoming difficult to ignore, and, potentially, catastrophic.

Are Sanders supporters selfish? A note on elections and entitlement.

After last night's primaries in DE, RI, MD, CT, and PA, it looks increasingly likely that Hillary Clinton will face Donald Trump in the general election. Hillary's strong showing puts her with a hair's breath of the delegate majority needed for the nomination, and will surely only intensify calls for Bernie Sanders to leave the race, and for his supporters to rally behind Clinton. There has been a good deal of vitriolic rhetoric regarding this last point, particularly as many recalcitrant Sanders supporters balk at the idea of supporting Clinton. Here, my own thoughts on the problem.

To begin with, the notion that one candidate is "entitled" to the support of another's voters is highly dubious, and a result mainly of our entrenched two-party system. Too often recently, voters have been asked to vote against a particularly odious candidate, rather than for one about whom they are enthusiastic. With the specter of Trump on the horizon, it seems they'll be asked to do this again. In fact, the main argument of Clinton supporters is not that she actually deserves anybody's support, but that we must do everything in our power to avoid a Trump presidency. A trump presidency is unlikely for several reasons. First, he has won only a plurality of the Republican votes in most states, and the Republican establishment is steadfastly an transparently opposed to him. More people have voted against Donald Trump in his party's own primaries than have voted for him. It is almost inconceivable that he will fare any better in the general election. The most recent poll on favorability (from early April), found that a staggering 70% of the electorate have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. That's a full 16 points higher than Clinton, a historically unpopular politician. In head-to-head polls, Clinton enjoys about a 10-point advantage, and the campaign hasn't even begun yet. Unless some new damaging information emerges on Clinton, she's got this election sewn up with or without the Sanders supporters.

As general elections have increasingly taken on the binary character of a referendum against one or the other party, it's important to realize that many Sanders supporters are not closely aligned with either party, and feel no special loyalty toward impersonal, rigid, corrupt bureaucracies. The idea that they should fall back in line with the party's nominee assumes that they were ever in line to begin with. Clinton has dominated states with closed primaries, while Sanders has won many states that allow independents to vote. The obvious conclusion is that most of Sanders's support is coming from outside the party, and that appealing to a sense of party loyalty is going to be a generally meaningless endeavor.  Younger people with less political experience (and political memory) are also less likely to hold strong party loyalties. Much of Sanders's support comes from this demographic.

There have been many comparisons drawn between this election and the 2000 election, where Ralph Nader supposedly "cost" Al Gore the victory. As a reformed Nader-ite, I think that's specious reasoning. First, Sanders has given no indication of running as an independent (unlike Trump!), and will not be "stealing" any votes in November. His supporters may chose to abstain, but that's their right, and, as I mentioned above, it's very difficult to believe that Clinton will be working on such a thin margin that the minority of Sanders voters who don't vote will cost her anything. Secondly, and I know this is a belabored point, Nader didn't "cost" Al Gore the election. Al Gore was the running mate of a very popular two-term president who had presided over nearly 8 years of economic prosperity, and was running against a barely-literate failed businessman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. There's no way that election should have been remotely close, except that Gore ran one of the single worst campaigns of the 20th century. It was possibly irresponsible for Nader not to withdraw in swing states like Florida and Ohio when it became clear they would be contested, but the bulk of the blame for that debacle has to rest with Gore (and the supreme court). I have no doubt that, should Clinton somehow find herself in a coin-flip situation, that Sanders will urge his supporters to show up for her. But this obscures the fact that it's not his responsibility to get her elected -- it's hers. One of the most common observations of Clinton's campaign by generally non-partisan observers is that she has yet to articulate a coherent, positive, message. It's unclear, in other words, why she's running for president, except that she really wants to be president. There's no mystery with Sanders. He hammers his points home in just about every speech, while Hillary offers generic talking points an piecemeal suggestions. That's not a recipe for success. She's going to have to start convincing people why they should vote for her, as opposed to against Donald Trump.

If you're wondering, I will certainly vote for Clinton in November, but I'm not going to be proud of myself. It will be another hollow victory for cynicism over idealism, disenchantment over civic engagement, and oligarchy over democracy.

Why I sympathize with Trump Supporters

I'm going to give blogging another go. Once again, I miss writing regularly, and I find that I feel better if I externalize some of the thoughts that swirl in my mind most of the day. I've decided to revive my last attempt rather than starti fresh again because I'm rather proud of some of the older posts. I've removed the ones I find especially embarrassing to maintain the illusion of consistent quality. I'll attempt to not shatter the illusion.


So, why do I sympathize with Trump supporters? I myself am adamantly not a Trump supporter, but I find much of the discussion and coverage of Trump and his followers to be somewhat paternalistic and misleading.

Here's the thing: you simply can't abuse people for decades and expect there to be no backlash. People on the bottom of the economic ladder know they're getting screwed, and they resent being told that they're not. I was shocked that the president had the audacity to say, at last year's Business Roundtable, that "America is winning right now. America is great right now." (1) It's patently false, and people know it's false, and they know he's lying to their faces. The remark was immediately, and justifiably pounced upon by the republican contenders. I used to like President Obama. I voted for him twice (more enthusiastically the 1st time), but I've never liked is rhetorical style. He often takes a condescending tone, and his his bland, faux populism is similar to that of his ignominious predecessor. It only seems more palatable to us because he's a better speaker and has better speech writers. But most people, however uneducated, can tell when they're being patronized, and it only adds to their resolve to support somebody like Trump, who allegedly "tells it like it is."

Things aren't great in education, and we're demonstrably not winning. The Program for International Student Assessment ranks us 35th out of 64 developed countries overall, and 27th in math and science. (2) Our own data, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, presents and even bleaker picture. (3) No more than 42% of American students are competent or better in any subject, at any grade level, and in most cases are far below. Things seemed to be improving during the 1990s and early 2000s, but have now been stagnant for about a decade. My own experience, while obviously limited and subjective, confirms these numbers. Incoming college freshmen are almost completely ignorant of basic historical facts, and their verbal and written communication skills are, to be polite, meager. Speaking of college, tuition continues to outpace inflation like the tortoise to the hare, thanks to bloated bureaucracies and presidents that are paid like CEO's.

Things aren't great in the realm of health. Children today have shorter life expediencies than their parents' generation, largely due to obesity. (4) Yet, when the World Health Organization tried to revise its dietary guidelines to reflect healthier choices, the sugar industry flexed its financial muscle to convince the government to threaten a financial boycott of WHO. (5) That was during the Bush administration, but the same groups did a similar hatchet job on Michelle Obama's well-intentioned "MyPlate" campaign. Furthermore, despite the United States spending an almost unbelievable amount on healthcare, much more by far than any other developed country, we do not enjoy comparably greater advantages (6). Nor did we before the affordable care act, for those who might be tempted to pin all the blame there. Whether you support free-market insurance, single-payer, or the Obamacare compromise, there is no debate that American healthcare costs are obscene, and that we have almost nothing to show for it. That's losing, not winning.

Perhaps most pertinently, things aren't great in the economy. The ongoing "recovery" may be swelling the Dow Jones average and lining the pockets of America's CEO's, but low and middle-income workers are hardly benefiting at all, nor have they been for almost 40 years. (7) An investigation into the demographics of Trump's supporters reveals that they are, by and large, blue collar workers who did not go to college: precisely the people who bear the brunt of each economic downturn and never seem to experience much during the upturns. (8) They can see how the Clintons' free trade agenda cost the country good manufacturing jobs. They can see that their wages never seem to rise, despite generally higher productivity. (7) They see big political donors in both parties getting ahead while they get ignored. They don't like being told that he blue car sitting right in front of them is actually red, but that they're too simple-minded to understand it.

It's futile to continue to characterize Trump supporters as racist, ignorant yokels who don't have a firm grip on reality. Actually, they have a far better grasp of what's actually happening to the majority of Americans than those in the media. There is real, palpable anger among the underclasses in the middle part of the country and, when misdirected, that anger can be extremely dangerous. Trump has succeeded in channeling it toward immigrants, when the real target should be the corporate and political oligarchy for whom the public/private division is completely permeable, and who are all too often called upon to regulate themselves and their friends. This is what Sanders's supporters understand, and they, too, are generally angry about it.

In order to deflate Trump's campaign, it's necessary to empathize with his supporters, and show them the real sources of their frustrations. It's not "the Mexicans" or "the Muslims," or any other vague stereotype. It's an immensely complex and interrelated political and economic complex that is designed to maintain power and wealth for those who have it, and keep them from those who don't. Telling people they have no reason to be angry is wrong, callous, and frankly, just what Trump is counting on. We need to focus on fixing, rather than whitewashing, the systemic problems that prevent too many people from their pursuit of happiness.



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(1) http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/16/obama_america_is_winning_right_now_americas_great_right_now.html

(2) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/02/u-s-students-improving-slowly-in-math-and-science-but-still-lagging-internationally/

(3) http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

(4) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/health/childrens-life-expectancy-being-cut-short-by-obesity.html

(5) http://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food

(6) http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/08/us-health-care-spending-is-high-results-arenot-so-good.html

(7) http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

(8) http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/who-are-donald-trumps-supporters-really/471714/

Killing us softly

This thing appeared in the Boston Globe a few days ago: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/10/24/revitalize-catholic-church-let-kill-all-organs/9FpzZPSQzhfd4uUeCJNDbK/story.html

Below, my response.

Dear Ms. Graham-

As a professional organist and current doctoral student in the aforementioned, I was dismayed to read your recent opinion piece for the Boston Globe ("Save the church! (kill the organ)") wherein you advocate the widespread removal of the pipe organ from Christian worship in an effort to make worship services more appealing to young people. To be sure, the organ makes an easy scapegoat for observers who are unable to (or simply don't care to) take a detailed look at the many complex issues driving down attendance at American churches. That problem requires a book-length investigation, not a 750-word online-only opinion piece, and cannot be laid at the feet of any single cause. As a member of the press, you are held to a higher standard, and bear a certain responsibility to make a good-faith effort to uncover the truth, rather than resorting to tired cliches and easily digestible scapegoating. Sadly, this essay displays no commitment to this kind of responsible journalism and, as such, I feel compelled to defend my instrument, colleagues, and profession against what is in essence a baseless, childish, attack. I hope you will indulge me for a few more lines but, if you read no further than this, please know that there are hundreds of organists who have spent thousands of hours honing a beautiful craft, and to reduce our efforts to 'scary horror-movie music' is demeaning, hurtful and, frankly, ignorant. I encourage you to consider attending the weekly organ performance class at The Juilliard School, which is open to the public and occurs every Thursday of the academic year, from 11am to 1pm. I am certain it will change your opinion of the organ, and its capacity to elicit emotions other than fear and discomfort. 

To begin with, I must question the sources on which you base your argument. The top-ten list on i-Tunes is not a valid arbiter of artistic value, as the success of Justin Bieber and others gives ample testimony.  To take this radically populist approach is untenable, and incompatible with the fundamental ideal of the religion to which you adhere: that is, that there exists an absolute truth that is independent popular judgement and the fickle dictates of fashion. Are the Gospels also to be edited to be more palatable to today's children? Are Jesus's difficult demands and sometimes harsh proscriptions to be watered down for mass consumption? You say that you worry whether children will still regularly attend Mass as adults. The answer to this questions must depend on whether one as a parent is successful in instilling a respect and appreciation of Christianity and a desire to grow in a relationship with God, not on the popular or entertainment value of the worship service. 

As you are obviously aware, the post-Vatican II Catholic church made a serious effort to incorporate non-traditional music and musical instruments into public worship, an effort which was copied by many protestant denominations, and is still ongoing. The steep decline in church attendance over the past 40-50 years coincides directly with the proliferation of "popular" liturgical music, not with an obstinate commitment to traditional repertories and instruments. Praise bands abound in rural and suburban parishes; music publishers are falling over themselves to turn out indistinguishable anthems, songs, and hymns of light, popular character; most clergy receive almost no training in the traditional repertoires of the Christian church. The goal of all this has been ostensibly to make Christian worship more timely, relevant, and informal, characteristics which, it is presumed, will attract the ever-elusive "young people." As the statistics demonstrate, however, these efforts have had at best a negligible effect for the so-called "mainline" Christian denominations, whose attendance continues to decline despite efforts to make worship more accessible and less demanding: efforts that go far beyond music and into the core issues of theology and morality.  There's no reason to go off on a lengthy digression about the relative merits of these decisions: suffice it to say that you are not the first to have the the idea that traditional music should be banished, and that its relatively systematic application over the past 40-50 years has failed to bear any fruit other than the general feeling among young people that religion should adapt to the fashions of the day, rather than hold fast to temporally immutable truth.

It seems obvious to me that the music in your particular parish is somewhat lacking in quality, and this is a problem that can and should be addressed. The solution, however, must be better education and training of organists and choir directors, not placing responsibility for liturgical music in the hands of the totally untrained. If this is your only exposure to organ music, I can certainly understand how you would come to regard it as a tiresome nuisance but, I can assure you, this is not a ubiquitous situation (although it is an all too common one.) Once again, I invite and encourage you to attend the performance class at Juilliard. We would welcome the opportunity to change your mind about an instrument with a venerable past and, we believe, a bright future. 

Sincerely,

David Crean

C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow

The Juilliard School

david.crean@gmail.com

Something Stinks, and it's not Tchaikovsky

Well, it's not just Tchaikovsky.

For reasons that are unknown to me (although I strongly suspect it must have something to do with financial solvency), Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center is frequently rented out to groups with little or no connection to music. When I first arrived at Juilliard nearly three years ago, it seemed as though there was a red-carpet movie premiere nearly every week during the warmer months, complete with outdoor canopy and press area (which effectively blocks traffic on 65th st.). A few that stick in my memory are The Last Airbender, which included a massive stage erected literally in the middle of the street, and Michael Moore's Capitalism, a Love Story which, despite its ostensibly anti-establishment message, was presented with as much fanfare and extravagance as any other Hollywood blockbuster. More recently, the premiere of the 8th Harry Potter movie filled the street with so many slack-jawed gawkers that Juilliard students had to exit the building onto Amsterdam Ave. The movie premieres are a nuisance, but one could at least argue that cinema, however degraded its popular incarnations may be, is still a legitimate art form and not totally out of place in a performing arts center. It might be best to not cite The Last Airbender in that argument.

This past week, however, Alice Tully hosted the FiFi awards, an event billed as "the Oscars of the fragrance industry." It was certainly a star-studded event -- Nicole Richie, Chaka Khan, Martha Stewart, not to mention the inexplicably popular Jane Lynch, who hosted the festivities. As usual, pedestrians were diverted across the street by glaring security guards and traffic was backed up all the way to the Hudson. A few people stood on the grassy area next to Avery Fischer attempting to catch a glimpse of this or that B-lister.

Now, I'm not even sure why the fragrance industry needs or deserves an awards show, but that's not really the point. They needed a venue, and Lincoln Center apparently needs money, so what's the problem? The problem is that this was intended to be a place for the arts, where the various performing groups that were previously scattered throughout the city would come together to create an atmosphere of mutual support, creativity, and vitality. That's why Juilliard moved here -- it was intended to be the artistic nerve center not just of the city but of the entire country where students could learn from and observe the best of the best. To see one of its primary venues pimped out for such an orgiastic, unapologetic display of superficiality is something that should make artists, and anybody who has any respect for the arts, cringe. In this cynical and post-modern age it sounds hopelessly anachronistic to suggest that the arts (whatever that means!) should be given a place of honor and that their spaces should be sacred, but this was exactly the intent of those who donated to, and built, this complex. Less than 50 years later, however, the nerve center of the arts in New York has become a a high-class brothel of event spaces available to any disease-ridden organization that can slip a twenty to the bureaucrats whose enormous salaries necessitate the practice in the first place.

Where now is the messiah who will drive the peddlers of frivolity out of the temple of art?

At long last, another post by me!

The old adage "he who rests, rusts" is applicable to everything. I had a teacher who used to talk about "practicing life" as if 16-yr-old hormone-crazed high-school students understood, much less cared, what he meant. What he meant, I can see now, is that literally every aspect of our existence requires practice in order to improve, or even maintain, proficiency. From behaviors we wish to adopt to skills we wish to acquire, it all requires effort -- sometimes rewarding, enjoyable effort, sometimes pure slog work; frequently a mixture of both.

This is all a roundabout way of coming to the point that my ability to write has, I believe, begun to atrophy from disuse. The reasons are not difficult to discern. Now that I am no longer forced to produce significant amounts of relatively meaningless prose on a weekly basis by any educational establishment, I've taken the liberty of producing virtually nothing for the past year. Surely the world is no worse off for this, but I am worse off because, next to performing music, writing is one of the two things that I both enjoy and at which I seem to be decently skilled. So, here I am in the blogosphere for the umpteenth time, foisting my half-baked, obsessively scrutinized opinions and ramblings on an unsuspecting, already hopelessly cluttered, internet. This time I am determined to exercise at least a modicum of self-discipline and write something -- anything -- every day, in much the same what that our more industrious ancestors kept painstakingly detailed accounts of their day-to-day activities in diaries. Some people still keep diaries. A small subset even keep private diaries. I'm old enough to remember that the phenomenon of blogging grew out of the phenomenon of the online, public journal. No more than a decade ago, most of my friends had a livejournal. Some who fancied themselves societal outsiders had deadjournals. I was one of the latter, and I recently discovered to my horror that my angsty late-teen drivel is still stored in some remote corner of that website. I can't get rid of it, as I have long since forgotten the login information to both that site and the email address I used to set it up. I hope it doesn't make it into my obituary. I hope this doesn't make it into my obituary. 

Those sites still exist for some reason, though much of their purpose has been ceded to Facebook/Twitter, where people who don't really want to write anything can post brief sobriquets and exquisitely capture the mood of the moment, and to more respectable blogging sites, like Blogger and Wordpress, where people like me can flood the marketplace of ideas with cheap, disposable, kitsch. I'm sorry. No I'm not. I need to maintain my technical skill at writing just in case I am one day struck with the kind of inspiration that makes it a skill worth having. I don't have it now. I probably never will. It's ok, most people don't, but I'll wait, and pray. 

If my generation had any shame, we'd hide our externalized thoughts between two pieces of leather like our ancestors, perhaps to be discovered by a distant descendant or, for the extremely fortunate, an intrepid biographer. That instinct to hide our foolishness in privacy is gone, obliterated, absolutely extinguished by social media. It's so foreign to the contemporary mind that I'm embarrassed to even admit that I remember it, because it makes me feel like an antique. An old lady will bring me on PBS and inquire about the worth of a petulant gasbag that still ruminates about meaningless notions. Worthless, she will be told. I'm certainly not going to date myself any more by actually submitting to the shame I'm ashamed to remember. No, this exercise will be public. I'm sorry. No I'm not. 

Anway, I'm going to make this go this time. I swear. I can't vouch for the content, but the form will be excellent.