Switchfoot confuses the pundits

Over on the Daily Vault, I’ve blogged several times in recent weeks about the various musical artists who have complained to and/or sued the McCain/Palin campaign over their appropriation of songs for use in campaign events and propaganda. Meanwhile numerous major acts (Bruce Springsteen & Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, James Taylor and the list goes on) have performed benefit concerts or hosted fundraising events for the Obama/Biden campaign. It seems safe to say that, as a class, the majority of popular musicians prefer the Democratic ticket.

Unfortunately, it also seems safe to say that lazy stereotyping remains rampant all along the political spectrum, from Fox News on the right to MSNBC on the left. Today’s transgressor is uber-glib MSNBC.com columnist Dave White, who in the context of suggesting alternative music for the McCain/Palin campaign to use, indulged in blatant stereotyping to come up with this assertion: “There are some easy ‘gets’ though. Kid Rock’s ‘American Badass,’ or Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue’ are probably fair game without consequence. And I’m guessing Reba McEntire, Switchfoot, Daddy Yankee and Trace Adkins are open to having their music co-opted.”

Toby Keith yes, that’s a no-brainer, and I can’t speak for most of the others because I don’t know their music or whether they’ve endorsed a candidate. But Switchfoot? The only plausible reason I can think of for White “guessing” they would support the McCain/Palin ticket is that they are a band that is both nationally popular and openly Christian.

And there’s your stereotype – oh, they’re a Christian band, they must be for the conservative Republican candidates. Let’s deconstruct the fallacy here.

First, Switchfoot has never publicly associated itself with any specific candidate or party. Look it up. The only overtly political song they have ever produced criticizes “Politicians” as a class without differentiating between left and right and promotes an anti-nationalist viewpoint (“I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians”) that seems way out of sync with the Limbaugh-loving, U.N.-hating crowd’s ideology.

Second, Switchfoot’s fans come to the group from all across the political spectrum, as evidenced by this lively presidential race discussion thread on the Switchfoot.com forum.

Third, Switchfoot’s political philosophy, to the extent it has ever expressed one, is distinctly anti-materialist:

“When success is equated with excess
When we’re fighting for the Beamer, the Lexus
As the heart and soul breathe in the company goals
Where success is equated with excess

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

’Cause baby’s always talkin’ ‘bout a ring
And talk has always been the cheapest thing
Is it true would you do what I want you to
If I show up with the right amount of bling?

Like a puppet on a monetary string
Maybe we’ve been caught singing
Red, white, blue, and green
But that ain’t my America,
That ain’t my American dream”

The only thing you can really say for sure about Switchfoot’s political beliefs is that they clearly don’t believe that the materialism and greed that characterizes unfettered free market capitalism is the answer to our nation’s problems. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say they have some distinctly socialist leanings -- but then, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say the same about Jesus Christ himself.

Christian does not equal conservative, nor does it equal Republican. Some of the most politically liberal people I have ever known have been deeply committed Christians. The world is not black and white, but filled with shades of grey. The only way to see them all is to remove the glasses that render everything in easy stereotypes.

The new McCarthyism

The last couple of weeks have been a little dizzying, both for me personally and out on the campaign trail. Granted, it has to be tough when your core beliefs are being challenged by a wide swath of the American public, not to mention the global eonomy, but you can also tell a lot about people, both as individuals and as leaders, by the way they react under stress. And the reaction of some Republican candidates and public officials to their party's sagging poll numbers has been nothing short of alarming.

The gist of the response is "Real Americans agree with us." So where does that leave, say, the 56 percent of likely voters in California who plan to vote for Barack Obama? Do these Republican leaders really mean to say that anyone who doesn't share their views and/or vote for them is anti-American? It sure seems like they do. Which puts these folks in bed with Senator Joseph McCarthy and every other ideological fanatic who's ever proclaimed "you either believe everything I do, or you're evil."

Enough of my little rant, though... Jon Stewart does it so much better. [Usual warning here about adult language, content, etc. Jon does not pull punches. You've been warned.]

Best. music video. ever.

I realize all the cool people on the Internet saw this two years ago. I saw it for the first time myself several months ago. I don't care. I saw it again today and it made me smile. So there.



(P.S. The group is OK GO, the song is called "Here It Goes Again," and yes this really is one continuous shot. Don't ask me how many times they had to do this before they got the shot.)

Life (the series)

It’s not every day I find myself wanting to tell people about a TV show. Yes, I have my guilty pleasures -- Lost, 24, The Daily Show -- but unless the Giants are playing, my “must-see TV” list is a very short one.

It’s not every day, but it is today, and the show is NBC’s brilliant Life. British actor Damian Lewis plays LA homicide detective Charlie Crews who, after uncovering corruption within the department, was framed, convicted of murder and sentenced to life (thus the title). After 12 years in a maximum security prison -- thrown inside with the people he’d been putting away as a cop -- what does he do when a defense attorney finally gets his conviction overturned and gets him out? First, he files and wins a $50 million lawsuit against the city. Then, as part of the settlement, he gets his old job back and proceeds to use his position inside the department to try to unravel the conspiracy that led to his being framed.

That might sound a little contrived, a little bit too “Count of Monte Cristo inside the LAPD” Hollywood pat. And it could have been, if not for the writing – which snaps, crackles and pops its way through every cleverly constructed episode – and the superb Lewis, who invests every moment with meaning and, with the writers, brings his damaged character to life in perpetually interesting ways. Charlie learned to survive the brutality of prison life by studying Zen, which philosophy seeps into everything he says and does as he works homicide cases full of equally damaged victims and suspects. What did he miss most on the inside? Fresh fruit -- every episode he’s eating some different variety of it; on this fall’s premiere episode it was miniature kumquats. What does he do for fun? Pull over his now ex-wife’s hotshot second husband whenever he sees him. Oh, and his tightly-wound, by-the-book partner -- the superb and stunning Sarah Shahi -- just happens to be the daughter of the ex-cop who’s apparently at the center of the conspiracy that got Crews wrongly convicted.

Life’s first season was cut short by the writer’s strike, but NBC appears to believe in the show, having re-launched it by running two episodes a week last week and this week on Mondays and Fridays at 10, before settling into its regular Friday 10:00 pm timeslot. It’s one of the smartest and most entertaining shows ever to make it onto network TV, so catch it now before they decide that what civilization really needs is more episodes of Wipeout…

Palin's new chorus of critics: conservative pundits

The narrative of the presidential campaign the past two weeks has frankly been rather predictable. There's just one trend that's truly new and noteworthy here -- a developing groundswell of criticism of John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate from an altogether unexpected source: conservative pundits. George Will, David Brooks, David Frum and perhaps most notably, early Palin supporter Kathleen Parker (see at right) have all expressed serious concerns in recent days about Palin's fitness to serve. Parker, who previously hailed McCain's "keen judgment" on selecting Palin is now actively calling for her to resign from the ticket "for your country." To quote from Parker's column of this morning, "Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League."

Understanding the financial meltdown

The symptoms of the current financial meltdown are everywhere; what are harder to locate and explain in plain language are the root causes. That's why this column by Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post struck me as being tremendously valuable in the straightforward and practical approach it takes to explaining the current financial mess. In a nutshell, America has been living the "I want it all and I want it now" binge-buying consumerist dream for the past decade, and now the party's over and the bills have come due. The folks with the biggest financial hangovers today are the ones who, when things began to slow down, "doubled down" on their debt rather than cutting back on spending -- and their ranks range from individual households to international financial giants.

This too shall pass, of course, but there are a couple of important lessons in here for those in the younger generation who are trying to understand what all this means.

One is that the financial markets, those avatars of pure and rational capitalism, rarely behave rationally. Rather, the markets run on a mob mentality that can veer from "irrational exuberance" to suicidal gloom in a matter of hours. And when they do, the only rational actor standing between them and self-immolation is (cue Darth Vader theme music) the federal government. Yes, sometimes government regulation is not just necessary, but essential.

Another equally important lesson is that everything in the economy is cyclical. There never has been and never will be such a thing as an economic expansion that goes on forever -- only a group of reckless people in every cycle who are willing to bet that this time it will. Make your own judgments and don't follow the crowd -- it's a good lesson for both economics and life.

Lies, damned lies, and the people who tell them

While the talking heads continue to buzz away in their endless spin cycle of manufactured hype, there appears to be at least one journalist in America -- the often-irascible Paul Krugman, seen at right -- willing to get right to the heart of the matter and tell it like it is. To wit: the McCain-Palin campaign lies. Again, and again, and again.

Of course, so does the management of the San Francisco Giants, which keeps mouthing the words "youth movement" while continuing to sacrifice the rookies' playing time on the altar of should-never-have-been-signed retreads like Dave Roberts. But they're in the entertainment business, not the deciding-the-fate-of-the-world business.

Giants go young, win big

In other news, the San Francisco Giants finally, on September 7, seem convincingly committed to a youth movement, fielding a starting lineup yesterday that consisted of eight players with less than two years' major league experience, and Randy Winn. End result? The Giants' first 10-run inning in over three years, and a resounding win. Yes, the defense and bullpen and even the baserunning was a little shaky at times, but here, at last, is a team that's exciting to watch...

The Sarah Palin pick: Republican women react

Never mind winning over Democratic and Independent women who disagree with Sarah Palin on key issues like choice and the environment and evolution vs. creationism, can the McCain-Palin ticket even hold onto Republican women? Apparently not UPI correspondent and longtime Republican pundit Georgie Anne Geyer, who in her column today describes the Palin pick as "the choice of a vice president whose inexperience is a slap in the face to serious Americans" and bemoans her personal view that "the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan is falling apart before our eyes."

The Sarah Palin pick: focus group

Without intending to, I seem to have convened a focus group. This occurred simply because a good friend of mine is in fact the spot-on demographic for the Sarah Palin pick -- a woman who grew up in a rural community as a lifelong Republican until the party's rightward tilt repelled her, whereupon she went independent. Now she's a suburban soccer mom / working woman, fiscal conservative, potential Hillary Clinton voter and student of both parties whose voting patterns can be quite unpredictable. So how did this perfectly targeted swing voter react to Palin's big-splash speech at the Republican National Convention last night?

And I quote: "Is this the best they could do for a female Republican candidate? She reminds me of a high school cheerleader making snotty comments at a slumber party. Smug, self-righteous and just plain obnoxious. I can't stand her."

Gee, tell us how you really feel...

Personally, I could only manage to watch a few minutes of the convention here and there. I just find the whole "anyone who disagrees with us must not love America" tone of the event too nauseating and offensive to tolerate. I love America and I disagree. Get over it.

The Sarah Palin pick: adding insult to injury

Well, Republican presidential nominee John McCain certainly reclaimed his "maverick" status with his pick of virtually unknown Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. It's probably one of the kinder things people in the Republican party have been calling him after his selection of a person who almost no one outside of McCain himself seems to believe was his best available choice.

Watching McCain try to defend his pick might be comical -- "Alaska is our largest state" (unless you count the 46 others with a larger population) -- if it wasn't so frightening. Here is a person whose career highlight up until 18 months ago was serving two terms as mayor of an Alaskan town of 7,000 people. The only 3:00 am phone calls she's used to getting are demands for better snowplow coverage.

What's truly stunning -- and so very telling -- about this pick, though, is that McCain actually seems to think it was clever. He actually appears to believe that putting the arch-conservative Palin on the ticket will pull in droves of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters despite the fact that Palin's record on every significant issue facing our country today -- war, the economy, the environment, civil rights -- is either non-existent or diametrically opposed to that of Hillary Clinton. The underlying assumption here is that the only factor that really mattered to all of those Hillary voters, the only reason they all supported her so passionately for so long, was her gender.

It's hard to imagine a more insulting set of assumptions being made about a group of supposedly intelligent and independent-minded voters. Leave it to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show to distill these assumptions to their rawest essence, i.e. "Sarah Palin may be the ideological opposite of Hillary Clinton, but she's her gynecological twin..." (Warning: link contains the usual irrevent language and razor-sharp humor.)

Baseball adopts instant replay; Piniella ready to throw down

I'm honestly pretty ambivalent about baseball finally following the lead of other major U.S. sports and adopting the instant replay. But quote of the day on this or any other subject clearly goes to notoriously explosive base-tossing manager Lou Piniella. "What's the format? I'd love to be able to throw a red hankie or a green hankie," Piniella said, referring to the NFL system in which a coach throws out a red flag to challenge a call. "Imagine being able to throw something on the field and not be ejected."

Things To Do In Denver When You're A Democrat

Pardon the lame movie-title pun, but after a couple of weeks of summer doldrums (read: watching the Olympics instead of blogging), there is suddenly so much raw material to commentate upon that my head is spinning and I hardly know where to begin. Fine, let's go with the Democratic National Convention for $1000, Alex.

In no particular order:

Is it possible not to be moved by the very sight of NBC's new "youth correspondent" at the convention -- Tim Russert's son Luke? I think not.

Newsweek columnist Ellis Cose raises the deeper issue that's been lurking behind the conspiracy-theory-wingnut disinformation campaign that has attempted to paint lifelong Christian Barack Obama as some sort of closet Muslim. The real issue being, so what if he was? There is no religion test for the Oval Office. Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and, yes, Muslims are all welcome to apply. Right?

As for the convention itself, all I can really say there is thank God for The Daily Show...

Good Reads: Middlesex and Chasing Darkness

After a dry spell in the reading department, I just finished two terrific books that could hardly be more different. A few words about each:

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, which means (a) I was late to the game as usual, and (b) I was predisposed to believe it would be overwritten, pretentious and deadly serious. Instead I found myself immersed in the book almost immediately. Eugenides writes beautifully, of course, but his genius is the way he draws you into his characters' experience with a series of deftly staged and deeply interconnected story arcs. The story is nominally of a family of Greek immigrants who come to Detroit early in the 20th century, and how generations of inbreeding bring about the novel's unique narrator, the intersex wunderkind Cal, nee Calliope, who lives her childhood as a girl and his adulthood as a man. Reflections on the immigrant experience, the nature of sexuality and identity, and all sorts of other fascinating ideas emerge through Cal's witty, self-aware and ultimately deeply wise observations. A "great book" that earns the label.

Robert Crais started out as more or less just another detective novelist searching for a niche. There are plenty of those; the difference with Crais is that he's found it and is busily mining it for one great story after another. His prose is rather clipped and direct in the Raymond Chandler - Robert Parker school, but over the course of ten novels featuring LA private detective Elvis Cole he has brought such rich three-dimensionality to Cole and his supporting cast that every page sings with wonderful character bits. To top it off, Crais' plots are better than ever, as evidenced by Chasing Darkness, which starts out with Cole guilt-ridden for having provided evidence clearing a man whose later suicide suggests he was a serial killer. Cole's driven search for redemption takes some terrific twists as he discovers that just about everything he thinks he knows about the case and those involved with it is false.

Enjoy...

Deadline day doldrums

It's trade deadline day in the major leagues -- the last day of the season on which teams can make trades without having to pass players through waivers first, giving every other team in the majors the chance to block a deal.

For a team as badly in need of total teardown-and-rebuild as my frankly pathetic San Francisco Giants (teams in the major leagues with a worse record = 3; runs scored in the last 23 innings played = 0), the priorities should be obvious: trade whatever role-playing veterans will fetch so much as a bag of batting practice balls in return, and play the kids the rest of the year so that you know what you've got already on your roster before contemplating trades or free agent signings over the winter.

Of course, said priorities assume the collective management of said team has any common sense whatsoever left. Not this group. They're still talking about "competing" next year (for what, "Fastest Exit From The Playoffs Ever"?), still touting can't-hit, can't-field Pirates castoff Jose Castillo as a keeper, and still bad-mouthing their own young players who've never had a genuine chance to prove themselves as major leaguers (see: Dan Ortmeier, Nate Schierholtz, Emmanuel Burriss, etc., etc.).

I've been a fan of this franchise for 40 years and this is the most brain-dead, incompetent front office I have ever witnessed. The 1985 team that lost 100 games was more fun to watch than this one -- at least you had a sense that crew knew they were bad and were trying to get better. This ship just looks completely lost.

The biggest problem in America today

Is it the war in Iraq? High gas prices? The effects of global warming? The continuing plague of the American League's designated hitter rule?

Some would argue -- and on any given day, I might agree -- that it's the steadily growing gap between rich and poor, a.k.a. income inequality. A new story published today by that bastion of left-wing thought the Wall Street Journal only bolsters this perception. As the rest of the nation simmers in a frying pan of rising food and gas prices, a sluggish economy and a wave of foreclosures, how's the other half -- er, 1% -- doing?

Better than ever. According to IRS data obtained by the WSJ, "the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income in two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929." At the same time, "the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years."

In other words, if you get the sense that the rich are in fact getting richer while everyone else struggles to stay afloat, you are not a whiner engaging in class warfare, but rather an objective observer of a measurable phenomenon. The question now is, what are you going to do about it?

Morality play

It sure is nice every once in a while as I'm wading through the gossipy superficial slop that passes for online news to find something of genuine substance and interest. Thank the folks at MSNBC for this one, an article which explains what recent research illustrates about the inner workings of human morality. Given that decision-making based on moral assessment is one of the defining characteristics of human beings that separates us from other life forms, it's more than a little interesting to take an inside look at how our moral compass actually functions and where rationalization comes into play. The study described in the article suggests that "we are intuitively moral beings," but that "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad." The fact that people are able to rationalize actions that most would reflexively identify as wrong is at the root of more modern problems than there is space here to list.

Where The Hell Is Matt?

Many of you have probably already seen this video, which recently became such a phenomenon that the New York Times devoted an entire article to it. The most amazing thing about it for this particular viewer (i.e. me) was that I recognized people in it -- and so will anyone reading this who received our 2000 holiday card, complete with photos of our family with a group of tribal dancers in full makeup and feathers in Papua New Guinea. (If you prefer, higher def original version is here, and more about Matt Harding is here.)

The latest threat: tabloid spam

As if the real tabloids aren't bad enough, now we've got tabloid spam. No, it's not a subscription pitch from Weekly World News... it's a vicious Internet worm designed to hijack your computer, that's simply wrapped up in the tempting bow of a tabloid-headline subject line. I got one yesterday myself, some nonsense about Tom Cruise dying in a plane crash. I was of course briefly tempted to find out if poor Katie was finally free of her megalomaniacal spouse, but the better angels of my nature won out and I deleted with prejudice. Better luck next time, guys. "Giants trade seven veterans for one young slugger" -- that's how you'd get me.

Tim Lincecum: The Freak

The Giants haven't given this fan a whole lot to cheer for this season. Sure, they've done better than some expected and it's been great watching younger players like John Bowker and Fred Lewis and Jonathan Sanchez get the chance to develop. But the team has been so poorly managed that it's become actively painful for me to watch as Bruce Bochy and Brain Sabean have let half a season go to waste playing veterans and pretending they're in a pennant race instead of embracing the need to rebuild and playing the kids.

That's a rant for another day, though; today we're here to celebrate "The Freak," as some call him, or "The Franchise," as others have dubbed the most unlikely pitching hero you've ever seen throw a slashing 98 MPH heater across the outside corner. Tim Lincecum, all of 24 years old, 5' 11" and 172 pounds, is well on his way to being a national story, and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci has given The Franchise just the sort of awestruck write-up that he deserves. The kid is for real, and it's going to be incredibly fun watching his legend grow.