It’s a Different World Out There Now, Dennis

Masked ICE agent sprays Pastor David Black directly in the face. Photo by Ashlee Rezin of the Chicago Sun-Times

There were, no doubt, several adult visitors to my classroom when I was a boy, but there were only two I remember with any clarity.  One was a friend of my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Hamilton.  He was a very nice man who told funny stories and sang and played his banjo for us.  I remember the tale of defeating the mean giant Abiyoyo, the funny song about little boxes on a hillside, and that one beautiful tune that I didn’t understand because it was in Spanish (but he explained to us what it was about and even got us to join in on the chorus).

Mrs. Hamilton was my teacher again in 5th grade, and her friend visited us again.  It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I learned that the nice man was kind of famous, and a few more years after that, that the “Holy shit, that was Pete Seeger!” revelation dawned.

But it’s the other visitor I want to talk about today.  I think his name was Dennis something, but I might well be making that up.  Exactly why he showed up in our classroom, I don’t recall, if indeed I ever knew.  I don’t remember how old I was, although probably a tween.  Anyway, Dennis (we’ll call him that) was an FBI agent.  He was probably in his late 20s or early 30s, and he was dressed in the then-standard FBI get-up: a cheap and rather ill-fitting black suit, with highly polished black shoes, a white shirt, skinny black tie, and a crew-cut. 

Dennis was clearly very proud of being in the FBI, and went on for some time about that agency’s spotless record of integrity.  I’m pretty sure he believed his own testimony, as it wasn’t until a few years later that the atrocities of the J. Edgar Hoover era became known.  Indeed, Curmie, who even in junior high was a skeptical lad, later found it very difficult to process evidence of slander, intimidation, even assassination pointing to the agency as perpetrators rather than investigators.  The National Guard was, of course, a different story.

Dennis’s visit, that utter confidence in the rectitude, even the incorruptibility, of the FBI, still lingers in Curmie’s memory over a half century later, mostly because any such testimony now would be so risible that even kids wouldn’t buy that nonsense for a moment.  Not with every federal allegedly law enforcement agency—ATF, FBI, ICE, DHS, et al.—turned into a private army by a bullying POTUS incapable of any emotions other than rage and paranoia.  Rule of law?  What’s that?

Frighteningly enough, it may indeed be true that the FBI, even headed by a mendacious moron like Kash Patel, is still the most uncompromised of the federal agencies.  We need only look at the outrageous antics employed by ICE and their attendant lackeys in other departments (and SCOTUS) in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, to think that the FBI, though rendered incompetent, partisan, and corrupt, may not be quite so bad in comparison. 

It might also be worth noting that none of those three cities appears on the US News and World Report list of the 25 Most Dangerous Places to Live.  Indeed, the top four cities, and eight of the top ten, in murder rate per capita, are in red states.  You know who checks in at #10?  Shreveport, the biggest city in Mike Johnson’s district.  Yet there seems to be no indication that federal troops will invade the Ratchet City.  Go figure, huh?  You know who doesn’t appear in the top 20?  Los Angeles, Chicago, or Portland. 

Over-zealous, violent, and often racist policing is, to be sure, not a new problem.  Yes, it has been aggravated by the recklessness (at best) of the First Felon, but police over-reach at all levels has been around for a long time.  This situation is not, of course, exclusively the result of the efforts of the authoritarian right, but it sure does seem like there’s a correlation.  More to the point, whereas the problems haven’t changed, the degree has.  Curmie has now reached the point at which he no longer implicitly trusts any member of law enforcement at any level even to refrain from brutality and to tell the truth, let alone to be competent at the job.  That’s not a good place to be.

It is difficult to determine the rationale for impassioned and utterly mendacious proclamations coming from ICE and DHS.  They can’t really believe that dozens of heavily armed, masked, and armor-protected agents are truly at risk in the presence of unarmed protesters who are <checks notes> chanting at them.  Can they?  It is certainly true that bullies, and anyone who would work for ICE either is one or wants to be, are, by definition, cowards.  And that particular variety of pusillanimity almost always manifests in bluster and, more often than not, in outright lies.

The other alternative is more chilling.  A number of left-leaning pundits suggest that all this activity is intended for the sole purpose of raising tensions.  If the authorities can plausibly claim they were threatened, then a show of even more authoritarian power can at least appear to be legitimized.  So far, it’s clear that the aggressors are nearly always the ones recently described by a federal judge (a Reagan appointee, by the way) as “cowardly desperados.”  Unfortunately, that may not last, which, goes the theory, is precisely what Trump and his minions wants: an excuse to pretend the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments don’t exist. 

Oh, and they’re not really big fans of the 2nd amendment, either, unless the gun-toter is a white male who answers to “Bubba.”  Witness the desperate attempt by DHS to claim that Marimar Martinez was armed; she had a gun that never left her purse, and a valid concealed-carry license.  Martinez’s lawyer says there’s bodycam evidence that the federal agent, not Ms. Martinez, initiated the collision between their vehicles.  OK, Gentle Reader, he’s not the most objective source, but the easy way to prove him wrong is for the government to release the tape… guess what hasn’t happened.

The pressure still needs to be applied, and Ghandi-like non-violence is difficult, but it’s the only way.  Rising to the bait is the worst thing to do.  In the words of today’s birthday boy, John Lennon, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.”

Artistic License and Singing the Showpieces

I know, I know. Iowa caucuses. New Hampshire primaries. Gotta write something about the current GOP horserace. Actually, I don’t. I might later, but not now. Today’s topic: songs. Specifically, what can and cannot legitimately (i.e., ethically, as opposed to legally) be done to them? Stated otherwise: what is “artistic license”?

Two recent cases raise this topic. The first one to come to my attention, although not the first in terms of when it actually happened, was Cee Lo Green’s rendition of John Lennon’s signature song, “Imagine,” in the waning minutes of 2011. Green, completely unknown to most of the country and known to most of the rest for a single song in which he oh-so-cleverly utters the phrase “Fuck you” a couple dozen times (to be fair, the tune is actually OK), decided he’d improve on what Rolling Stone declared the #3 greatest song of all time, behind only “Satisfaction” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Yeah, that’s smart.

OK. There are two things awful about this version. One of these things, the fact that it’s crooned with all the integrity and honest emotion generated by the lounge singer at the DewDrop Inn, falls under the heading of “artistic license.” I literally left the room, it was so bad. But the fact that I didn’t like it (i.e., it wasn’t to my taste) doesn’t make it censurable: it means only that I’m less likely to buy any of the man’s recordings in the future. (But how likely was that, anyway?) My departure, however, meant that I therefore missed (live) the far more serious transgression: changing the lyrics, then tweeting a half-hearted pseudo-apology (very well disguised as defensive self-justification), then cravenly taking the thread down.

Lennon’s song, which he himself described as a sort of “Communist Manifesto” posits religion as one of the central causes of the world’s problems. His utopia, then, is one in which there is “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.” Green changes that idea to its polar opposite: “… and all religion is true.” Seriously, is it possible to get any further away from Lennon’s intent?

Put it another way. What if an atheist decided to change the words to a well-known Christmas carol? “This, this is Christ the guy, whom shepherds guard while eagles fly.” Catchy, huh? Can you imagine the uproar?

Green, whether aware of having just made a colossal fool of himself in front of a bigger audience than he’ll ever see again without buying a ticket or perhaps, as the Huffington Post suggests, “to preempt criticism,” proceeded to tweet, “Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that's all.”

This would make you about the stupidest person on the planet, then, wouldn’t it, Cee Lo? You’re in New York, you freaking moron. Anything bad happen in New York in the name of religion about a decade or so ago? Anyone?

The fact that Green is quite possibly too stupid to understand that his form of fuzzy-headed and ontologically impossible inclusiveness runs contrary to the original intent does not excuse his actions. Why? Because surely even third-rate crooners can understand that one of two things must be true if you change the lyrics to a song: either you change its meaning, or you needn’t have bothered.

Green took a lot of heat from both atheists and Lennon fans for his transgressions. Here’s @maleficat: “fuck you, @CeeLoGreen. sing it right or don’t sing it at all.” Others—a lot of others, apparently—articulated similar sentiments. The other tack was to point out that wearing a full-length fur coat and a cornucopia of bling might not exactly comport with the song’s wistful longing for a world with “no possessions.”

Needless to say, Green was being (rightly) pilloried. The best any of his defenders could muster was that a). it’s artistic license [Bullshit.] and b). the response considerably outweighed the offense [Quite possibly true.]. So he did what any pusillanimous flavor-of-the-month pseudo-celebrity would do: he pulled his Twitter thread and sulked.

Tempest in a teapot? Maybe. It was just one line (“no hell below us; above us, only sky” remained untouched), and perhaps his (initial) motives if not his actions were good. But there’s something paradigmatic at work here. In a week in which an Eric Cantor minion can interrupt an interview to make the preposterous claim that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes, we are drawing ever nearer to a “We have always been at war with Eastasia” moment. Anything we can do to pull back from that precipice is a good thing. And we must recognize that what Green did, whether we like his sentiments better than Lennon’s or not, was to radically and completely volitionally change the intent of a piece of literature that happens to be in the form of a song lyric and present it as if it were the original. Parody? Fine. But this falls more into the realm of the counterfeit than the satiric.

That someone other than a politician could be that stupid and/or arrogant is troubling. But then, Green really is dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers. How do we know? He messed with John. And not with some B-side, either: with the song Rolling Stone describes as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise that has carried us through extreme grief, from the shock of Lennon's own death in 1980 to the unspeakable horror of September 11th.” You don’t do that. It’s like criticizing Reagan at a Republican debate. The political reality is that Green might have gotten away with blithely screwing around with the lyrics of an old Guess Who song or something by Genesis or somebody. But you do not mess with John. You. Just. Don’t.

Far easier to parse, except for the troubling spectre of trying to wrap one’s head around what goes on in some people’s minds, is the news from Indiana that an idiot state legislator (there I go with the redundancies again, sorry) has decided that the state has so few problems, especially as relate to education, that the highest priority she can imagine is to force public schools and state universities, plus any private school receiving any state or local scholarship funds (including vouchers) to enforce standards for singing the national anthem at public events.

One Vaneta Becker, a Republican (but you knew that), heard last spring from a constituent who was “upset about a school program in which the words of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ were substituted or parodied in a way the caller found disrespectful. The senator said she herself had heard parody versions of the national anthem on television programs.” (N.B., the latter wouldn’t, of course, be covered by Becker’s bill.)

The bill would force schools and musicians to sign a contract to meet “appropriate standards,” whatever the hell that means. Musicians—amateur or professional—could be fined $25 (a huge hardship for the likes of Roseanne Barr, Jimi Hendrix, or Marvin Gaye) for violating those standards, which would be enforced by a panel of judges including a has-been pop star and a bitchy guy with a foreign accent. OK, I made that last part up. It would be “the State Department of Education, with input from the Commission for Higher Education” who would be Lord High Executioners for such matters.

This bill is, of course, transcendently stupid in just about every way imaginable: apart from probably being unconstitutional, it is unenforceable; it is silly; it requires judgment calls by people utterly unqualified to make them; it steers us all just a little closer to creeping Big Brotherism. Jack Marshall makes these points in a little more depth in an excellent piece on Ethics Alarms; I needn’t repeat them.

But let me talk about two things he doesn’t. First, the real progenitor of this bill may not have been that phone call from a constituent at all. Not when there’s this story from January of last year. Sixteen-year-old Shai Warfield-Cross was told by her school that she needed to perform the anthem “in a traditional way” after someone associated with another school altogether complained that—get this—her performance before a basketball game rendered the tune unrecognizable (it wasn’t) and it was “disrespectful to current and former members of the military” (WTF???).

Principal Jeff Henderson, who’d have been a contender for last year’s Curmie if I’d seen this story earlier, promptly capitulated. Whether the racial overtones read into the situation by Warfield-Cross’s family are legitimate, I can’t say: racism isn’t the only form of stupid. But, completely apart from the inanity of deciding that there’s a “traditional” way to perform the tune of an old drinking song, the suggestion that Warfield-Cross’s performance is anything but mainstream and respectful is itself ludicrous. (For what it’s worth, after the administration’s craven and silly decision went viral, they did apologize: better late than never.)

Secondly, this legislation is proposed by a Republican. This makes sense in terms of the hollow pseudo-patriotism. But this proposal runs directly counter to the presumed ideological center of GOP: small government. Not only does it provide one more way in which the government interferes in the lives of private citizens, it also creates yet another layer of bureaucracy: schools are required to tape every performance and keep the evidence for two years!

Becker sniffed that “I don't think it would be very difficult for schools. You could record it on a lot of cellphones or like a small recording device (or) a CD.” Well, yeah, in terms of technology. But somebody has got to record it and store it, somebody has got to figure out written standards… the list goes on. More to the point, it’s just another stupid, useless requirement that distracts from the real work of educators.

And if you think that filling out silly forms and reports doesn’t ultimately add up to a mountain of triviata, let me introduce you to my wife, the community college financial aid director. (Be it noted, a fair amount of the time-wasting paperwork she’s got to do is the result of silliness by Democrats.)

The more perspicacious readers will notice that I’m allowing more leeway in music than in lyrics. Maybe that’s because I’m a whole lot better writer than a singer (this is where, Gentle Reader, you snort that if this is the way I write, you really don’t want to hear me sing). It has a little more to do with the nature of the two arts: music is written to be performed: that is, it is, by definition, mediated between writer and audience. Literature doesn’t work that way. Yes, song lyrics are intended to be performed, too, but I think they’re in a different category.

Even more importantly, there’s no such thing as the polar opposite of a musical arrangement. There is of an idea expressed verbally. Or at least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.