Tom Watson

Vengeance Is Mine (Sayeth the Decider)

So George W. Bush got his man. The American government handed over Bush's vengeance totem to a street gang of taunting thugs, who wrapped his neck in a thick hang-knot, taunted him over arcane differences in ancient Muslim politics, chanted the name of killer cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and dropped him to a brutish death from a cheap sheet-metal gallows. Black ski masks made the macabre scene look like something out of Spielberg's Munich; the cheap camera phone video gave the execution an air of casual brutality. And the sleeping President awakens in luxurious sheets and pronounces himself satisfied that justice has been served.

This is justice, American-style? A cheap, showy lynching in a concrete-block shack with guards in second-hand leather jackets and loose, open collars, chosen for their own particular stake in vengeance? This is what our President demands of our soldiers? That they hold a prisoner in secret American custody through a circus trial and virtually no appeal, acting on the orders of a weak and small-minded prime minister and deliver Saddam to his killers just 20 minutes before his death?

Listen. Don't shy away from the video, from the still photographs, from the corpse, from the accounts of the "witnesses." You owe that to the families of the nine American servicemen whose deaths were announced the very day of Saddam's long drop. Look at the tawdry, vengeful murder and mourn. Not for Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant who faced a tyrant's back-alley execution at the hands of a mob, as many have since the days of Robespierre. Mourn for your country, for your system of justice. Mourn for the bit of our own honor that swung from the rope in Iraq.

UPDATE: There are some wonderful, thoughtful posts out there on the Saddam hanging. Christy Hardin Smith's point of view as a former prosecutor and defense attorney is a must-read. Here's a taste (read it all):

As I read through the news articles on the Saddam hanging this morning, it was that lack of human compassion, even on any level, that struck me as somehow unseemly, as undignified and as uncivilized, barbaric even. That feeling of someone being thrown to the lions, no matter how deserving of punishment, while the masses look on and cheer at the tearing from limb to limb — the disgusting spectacle of bread and circuses, set to a theme song and a hasty graphics design on the 24-hour news networks.

And Josh Marshall's piece at TPM has been widely making the rounds, but here's the key  quote (hat tip to Jim Wolcott):

"This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur--phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us."

And Fareed Zakaria has it right in Newsweek:

The saga of Saddam's end—his capture, trial and execution—is a sad metaphor for America's occupation of Iraq. What might have gone right went so wrong.

London Calling: Movies of the Year

I'm not a film completist; with three children and a limited window of screening opportunities outside of video-on-demand, my year's best, non-kiddie category, is scant by definition. So my "best of" list in the cinematic arts is limited to exactly two pictures, the only two to really cut through the mist of over-production and bad popcorn, and to stick to my intellectual ribs like butter on a toasted corn muffin.

Both are deeply English, more so in language than in culture. Both have all their crucial action scenes in and around London. And both deal with government and with the power of perception in the masses, a crucial factor in self-governance and the source of legitimacy of power.

V for Vendetta caused one right-wing reviewer to rant that the film was "a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity." Others took it as a parable of neoconservatism run wild: its core story of America in ruins, and Britain run by a brutish totalitarian regime is filled with torture, secret imprisonment, the end of fair trials, and a government spying on its citizenry.

But the nightmarish dystopian comic book tale by the brilliant Alan Moore by published more than two decades ago, during the Reagan-Thatcher era and should not be viewed as modern topical commentary, though it was certainly a product of Moore's thoughts on Cold War politics. Written by Matrix sketch artists the Wachowski brothers, the screenplay (which Moore disavowed) has the layers and depth of a masterwork - surprising because their previous work, while fun, isn't as nearly rich. Or memorable. In a movie with tremendous dialogue - and you notice it more perhaps when the leading man wears in immobile Guy Fawkes mask - the most memorable line is this:

"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments...governments should be afraid of their people."

And that sentiment is precisely at the center of the other best picture this year, The Queen. It's a different England, of course, but there's a vein of authenticity - in language, in politics, in history - that runs through both films. In V for Vendetta, a lone assassin seeks revenge for years of terror and torture in the name of order; in The Queen, a nominally powerless monarch comes to terms with mass hysteria in the modern world of media - a hysteria that strikes to the heart of what really constitutes the shifting tides of democratic power.

Helen Mirren is, as has been widely noted, in pitch-perfect form as Elizabeth II - a charismatic, sympathetic performance of truly historic proportion. Cold, forbidding, corrupted by wealth and remove from daily life, this queen is nonetheless human. And in the strange, wild times after Diana's death in Paris, Mirren's queen confronts modernity.

As Hugo Weaving's faceless V has the very human, very beautiful, very vulnerable Natalie Portman to balance his hard-crusted visage, so too does Mirren's Elizabeth have the bouncy, optimistic preen of Michael Sheen's Tony Blair to counter the cool mask of royalty. Both V and the queen are other-wordly, living outside of the real world - one with mouth turned up in paint, the other with mouth turned down in disapproving restraint.

Both films reveal the power of the mob; how ironic that the masses in each movie converge on the small patch of turf between Hyde Park and the Thames, the center of changing British power for 1,000 years. One gathers in shared grief for a superhuman celebrity none of them has ever known. The gathers to take back power, but only after their rank complicity in the loss of democratic rights has been dramatically revealed by a comic book superhero throwback to the Gunpowder Plot.

I felt drawn into both movies, and believed that the world of V was as possible, as real as the world of Queen Elizabeth; we've seen nightmares of V's world in the 30s and 40s and after. We've seen the Diana spectacle and the royals' cluelessness on cable television. As James Cromwell's wonderfully arrogant Prince Phillip announces to the household:

Sleeping in the streets and pulling out their hair for someone they never knew. And they think we're mad!

Yes we do think you're mad - and fascinating, and worthy of the finest portrayal. So my movie list is only two-deep, but they're with me still. With me in visions of people in the streets, harbingers perhaps of the coming year's headlines.

Scene and Heard: Year-End Edition

The barricades are going up in Times Square for Sunday's tinsel-flecked tourist-fest, which means I'm pulling down the shades, locking in some DVDs and some books, stocking up on magazines, and settling in for the long winter's nap.

Yes folks, I hate New Year's - all of it; the symbolic flipping of the damned calendar, the amateur night frenzy of New Year's Eve, the forced revelry, the long boring day itself. It's a lousy date and me being me, I tend to remember things and people lost during the year ending rather than imagining myself in more glamorous, successful settings during the year ahead. A pox on New Year's.

But it is a good time for making lists, the usual best-of and worst-of queues that newspapers put into the can ahead of time so that editorial staffs can get properly toasted at year's end. Of course, blogs do it too and in many cases, they do it better - they take more chances, offer more personal assessments, and carry more validity (if any list can). So here's my list of year-end lists, a work in progress I'll update over the next couple of days:

• Steve Gilliard's list of winners is top-drawer and he has particular praise for the tandem of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart: "Stewart comes out swinging, when he finishes, you know you've had your ass kicked. With Colbert, he's standing on you before you realize what happened. But the result is the same. You got beat." He also lauds Howard Dean, Sasha Cohen, (wouldn't make my list, but it's not mine), Ned Lamont (who would), and Keith Olbermann.
• Flip-side time and who lot more cussin' from Steve, who also gives us his biggest losers of '06. the obvious ones include Karl "The Magic is Gone" Rove, Bush 41, Ken Mehlman, Rahm Emanuel (he'd be on my winners list with Howard Dean, but I get Steve's anti-DC venom), Lincoln Chaffee, Liddy Dole, and Michael Steele. Biggest loser? Here I agree entirely: almost former Senator George Allen, whose racism and base boorishness ended a career - thankfully.
• Thanks to Jason's urging, I've been playing a lot of Solomon Burke's fantastic Nashville, as a fine a record as was released in 2006 - Chervokas names it album of the year in his year-end music list. He also singles out Ray Davies' masterly Other People's Lives (the wonderful Life After Breakfast became my personal anthem at times this year), the self-titled record by Psychedelic Furs front man Richard Butler, Dylan's Modern Times (which Jason thinks was not a masterpiece, and I do not agree), and The Crane Wife by the Decemberists, which I also enjoyed.
• At last count, Fred Wilson had 93 year-end posts (some from Italy no less!) and at least a dozen on music, but here's a link to the wrap-up. Fred's top record was Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by Arctic Monkeys, which to me was a very good but not great album (I still played it a lot). No. 2 was Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is a great (and very mature) rock album, though possibly not a fulsome double record. Fred also highlighted All the Roadrunning by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, perhaps the year's most beautiful pop record. Between Jason and Fred, not much use for my list but I'd add the surprisingly brilliant One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This by the "reunited" New York Dolls and parts of the new Pete Townshend, er, "Who" record. Dirty Pretty Things, Tom Petty, and the single of the year When You Were Young by the Killers were also in heavy rotation. Quite the year for geezers, too - quick, who was the biggest touring act of '06?

Got list? Send note. I'm huddled away and hiding from the crowds and the cold.

• A reader sent a link to Dahlia Litwick's top 10 human rights abuses in 2006 - all committed by our current President. There were certainly far worse abuses internationally this (and every) year, but the fact that an American leader committed these shakes the foundations of our open democracy.
• Looking ahead (and these lists sometimes do) is Jon Swift's conservativotopian view of next year's trends - very amusing. My personal fave: "Increasing strife in the blogosphere leads to the appointment of a Blog Study Group, which proposes dividing the blogosphere into three autonomous Liberal, Conservative and Moderate blogistans." Good one.

Connecticut's Shame

This is what you voted for, Connecticut. Mr. Moderate calls for escalation in Iraq and hits every Bush talking point. And yet you believed the hype that Ned Lamont was the radical. Ask yourself this, Mr. Connecticut Voter, do you agree with this statement: "Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism." I thought not. You voted for it, though. You were fooled, and too damned easily. And it will cost more lives.

The Real Day of Mourning

America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence.
-- Gerald R. Ford, April 23, 1975

And so the old man's body will be brought along the wide boulevards and monuments, and the shadows of the caisson will flicker off the cold marble. A lone horse will be led riderless, boots turned backwards in the stirrups and the guns will fire their salute. This is how we mourn our dead commanders in chief.

The last time we did this, the war was young and the casualty count was low. And we were burying a President who according to common legend, lifted the nation's collective spirit in the post-Vietnam era,  the venerated creator of a national political movement that governed absolutely on that Washington DC day two years ago.

Just two years later, that movement is in ruins and disgrace; the Reagan revolution has been forever discredited; its formula of trading winked-at intolerance for tax-cutting power and wealth led to corruption and to the current White House disgrace. Two years ago, we buried the movement conservative, the great man who lifted the nation out of the malaise of a failed war. Two months ago, voters buried his movement. Now, we bury the moderate deal-maker who brought the troops home the last time America failed on a grand scale overseas.

Yet, the war drones on. The number rises always. The injured and maim return. And our disgraced President faces two more long years in office with no plan, no support, no movement, and no strength in his political parties. George W. Bush refuses the reality that Gerald Ford embraced, even after his neo-con wizards recanted their dishonorable spell in Vanity Fair and hung the sign of cowardice around their own, wrinkled necks.

And we do not mourn.

As a nation, we refuse to join together to mourn the nearly 3,000 American men and women who have died for the neo-cons' grand adventure, for George Bush's divinely-inspired dream.

The plastic flags no longer flutter from car windshields and the magnetic Support the Troops bumper ribbons are all mangled and soiled by exhaust fumes and road grime. There is no national sacrifice; in spirit, we are all the free-spending Bush twins, tossing back Cosmos and enjoying our freedom heedless of what a roadside bomb can do to a body.

Mission Accomplished has morphed into Stay the Course, which has become the New Way Forward. The Maoist Republican phrase-makers demand lockstep mind-marching by the legions even now, even as silly as it now seems, even with their party in splintered ruins, the "movement" now synonymous with humiliation.

So they'll wheel the old man through Washington one more time and our current President will stand at attention in a smart gray suit, purse his lips and scowl. The nation will mourn, he will decree.

Let us step forward instead to honor the sacrifice instead of the ritual. As we bury the man who ended the Vietnam War, let's make his funeral the National Day of Mourning our soldiers have not received.

Nearly, 3,000 dead and no national prayer service, no national day of remembrance, no national honors. Yet all the flags will be ordered to half mast and the bands will play their mournful tunes for a moderate, mediocre national leader. Where is our sense of scale, our sense of justice, our sense of duty?

George Bush is taking his time, being a deliberate Decider; he's closeted at Camp David sketching out the alternative course. Then he will return to  bury a Republican forebear who slashed his policies in a death-embargoed interview with the Power Jackal of the Washington Post.

Why not watch that long march, the line of Senators, the President with the hand over his heart and say a silent thanks for the young men and women who have died in this adventure?

Better yet, write about it. Blog about it. Use Ford's funeral dirge to play a nationwide recessional for the cost of this war. Don't mourn a 93-year-old who became President and enjoyed a quarter century of long drives and birdie putt. Mourn the young soldiers dying in Baghdad, in Anbar, in Diyala. Remember the 2990 as of today.

What better way to honor the politician who finally ordered the last generation of cannon fodder out of Southeast Asia - the one who admitted the lost cause?

UPDATE: Jim Wolcott gets off the best line on this: "A flag-draped coffin is acceptable viewing only if a dead president is inside." Indeed.

Ford's Theater

The political deal that brought Gerald Ford to the Oval Office was a good one, and cynically sure-handed: a pardon in exchange for the Presidency. That Ford only served two years before a Watergate-weary nation elected a born again reformer and sent the unelected chief executive into a golf-laden retirement was beside the point: the man from Michigan was a political deal-maker, hardly the bumbler Chevy Chase made him into on Saturday Night Live to great comedic advantage.

Indeed, the deal to get Nixon to San Clemente was the capstone on a legislative career built on something that many pundits believe is impossible these days - bipartisan compromise, which is, you must understand, the exact opposite of nonpartisan surrender.

Ford represented Grand Rapids in the House from 1949 till he became Vice President after Spiro Agnew's disgrace. Little remembered is that he gave up significant political power to serve Richard Nixon in his last year of power: Ford was the minority leader for a decade, and he opposed LBJ's Great Society programs in public, while cutting deals to approve them in private. He described himself as "a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy" - the kind of description that would fit any number of ambitious Democrats these days.

Ford's Presidency began with one of the seminal political speeches of the last 50 years, clearly the moment he will best be remembered for; I remember listening to it by my Dad's old portable radio in our rental on Cape Cod that August. But in the end, his White House tenure was one of necessary and painful defeat - the pull-out in Vietnam, the comic Whip Inflation Now campaign, the Swine Flu epidemic, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," the Mayaguez incident, and the two weird assassination attempts.

He was at the center of what was popularly viewed as a failed institution in the 1970s just as we view it here in the 2000s. Gerald Ford made the deal, took the hits, and lit out for the links. Somebody had to. May as well have been a deal-maker from Michigan.

I Feel Good

Some sudden celebrity deaths are shocking to me: Elvis, Bing Crosby, Joe Strummer all fit the category. The hold on life, even for the talented - those larger than life - is but a slim strand. The Godfather of Soul's passing from heart failure related to pneumonia stopped the Christmas frenzy just now - when I got the news through my feedroll (don't we always these days) from Jason's blog that James Brown was dead. MSNBC says Brown initially felt better and even talked about playing New Year's Eve in New York. He was only 73 and seemed younger, still did the moves when the lights went on. Chervokas has the first-hand memories (mine are recorded, alas) so I'll let him tell it:

Of course James Brown was a titanic musical figure, one of the giants of 20th century music, up there with Louis Armstrong and Igor Stravinsky. He invented funk. It wasn't a single handed invention--the crackerjack musicians of the James Brown Show had a lot to do with it--and of course funk had roots in funky blues, the rolling music of New Orleans, and centuries old Yoruban music of West Africa. But in 1965, with the release of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," Mr. Brown did something new--orchestrating a drum beat across the whole band the way Duke Ellington spread his Debussyan chords across the brass and reeds.

"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" sounded radical in 1965, but it was still more or less a straight R&B record with rhythmic horn vamp. Over the next few years things got more intense, with the music stripped of chord changes entirely. The breakthrough came with "There was a Time." The song evolved from the out vamp of the group's live arrangement of a forgettable mid 1960s hit "Let Yourself Go." In performance the out vamp came to dominate the song, soon stretched out to seven minutes, with Brown improvising his autobiography over the furious pump of the music. Although my favorite version of "There Was a Time" can be found on the fake live 1970 classic album Sex Machine, you can hear the development of the song in the Let Yourself Go/There Was a Time performance from Live at the Apollo Vol. II. 

But the overpowering influence of funk on world music in the latter decades of the 20th century sometimes obscures the influence of Brown's early years as the greatest soul singer of all. Like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Brown did things that other singers couldn't go, so his influence as a singer is not all that deeply heard today. But the first generation of hard rock singers stole everything from James Brown.

UPDATE: Ah what the hell, here's a TV video up top of Sex Machine cut in with Soul Power from (I'm guessing) around 1970-71.

Olden Times and Ancient Rhymes

BlueGirl and Neddie Jingo have a Christmas gift for their blogger friends, and it's quite beautiful indeed. They made music of the season, by long distance, and yet vibrantly personal - clear, nostalgic, and sad; modern technology linking a fine arrangement and a sweet, rich voice. They amaze.

And if you're at Neddie's, you might pass along condolences on the passing of his beloved father-in-law. This is a very difficult time for death; somehow, it doesn't seem to fit. We're supposed to be giving and spending and making resolutions. Yet, we're reminded that a day can be just like any other day when the time runs out on someone we love.

And since it's the season to give, I want everyone who reads this to help support one of the great blogging voices - none other than Shakespeare's Sister, whose beloved has had some trouble of the nation's highways, causing the bill collectors to nip. Shakes has such a clear, resolute voice; morever, she encourages our little community in so many ways. So let's pull a Mary Bailey, break into Martini's juke-a-box, and hit that tip jar, OK?

Betting on the Band

Ultrasound Studios comprises a couple of floors in the impressively named but relentlessly relaxed Recording & Rehearsal Arts Building over on West 30th Street, just shy of Eighth Avenue, around the corner from the Garden.

St. John the Baptist, with its grimy brownstone facade and Gothic tower, designed by Napoleon LeBrun and completed in 1872, anchors the block. The rest is a slapdash of fur wholesalers, music shops, and second story massage parlors. There are always a bunch of guys carrying guitar cases walking over from Seventh Avenue after work. Sometimes that's me and Steve, staving off hunger with a greasy slice on the corner and then humping the guitars over to Ultrasound.

Upstairs, we meet with Adam and square off in one of the warren of rehearsal studios. Each has a drumkit and a couple of banks of amplifiers, pretty good little sound-crunchers generally - the tech hooks up a couple of mics, and for two or three hours once a month, we work out the kinks on some power chords and blues hooks. Nothing crazy. Surfer tunes. A little punk. Classic rock. Some blues jams. The occasional original.

I'm on the guitar and vocals, alternating between rhythm and lead on my Telecaster, a prized possession and the guitar I couldn't afford way back when. Steve's on bass, but he also works the keyboards and is a classically trained musician with a killer ear. Adam handles drums, through his own kit is still back in Ohio and he loves the mid-tempo numbers where there's room to swing.

Truth is, the cost of renting a studio at Ultrasound is cheaper than any Manhattan therapist, and a damned sight more effective. Slide into Ziggy Stardust or The Kids Are Alright or Come Together, and you're gone - totally gone, transported from the grind, the mortgage, the payments, the ass-kissing drag of making your living, putting shoes on the baby's feet.

It ain't rebellion anymore. We're accepting slaves. We bend. We scrape. We walk the line. But it's more than a mere distraction, a little reverie. It's not escapist. Like travel to someplace new, it stays with you for days - those chords and downbeats get inside and move every last cell in the body. The effect is like newly-oxygenated blood, or a cold front blowing through the sweltering August streets with its clear, honey-scented air.

As Stevie Wonder told it, music is a world unto itself, it's a language we all understand. Getting a groove down, playing it through with the unspoken cues of veteran bandmates, the language of the music partner, man that's some sweet fresh air to breathe.

Last week, we stepped out, as is our habit, at the company's annual holiday party in a wonderful old Chelsea ballroom. Co-workers sang (some of them quite well), we nailed our songs change for change, cue for cue, solo for solo, and accepted the post-performance congratulations with the humility that we frankly believe our low level of musicianship deserves.

But across the crowded room, there were purposeful glances exchanged, a few nods. Yeah man, we rocked. We're a band.

And we did, better than before. So the plan is to keep playing. Perhaps we'll do a few local bars, a watering hole or two early in the week. You can grow addicted to playing in front of people. And we may do some recording (anyone know a good studio with an engineer who doesn't mind working with near amateurs, let me know), working on those originals. But even if we don't, that monthly anti-stress session is still on the docket.

Plug in, relax your mind, and float downstream.

Scene and Heard

Ah, the most wonderful time of the year. A few choice links and garland-topped observations from around the cheery and not-so-cheery blogosphere between dashes the Amazon (paying extra for quick shipping, the bane of shopping haters), deadlines for work, and playing with the band (more on this later).

• 'Twas the night before Saturday, and all 'round the roundtable, the Democrats bantered, and recalled Betty Grable. Politics, music, culture and movies and a few cocktails were on the menu for a celebratory post-election collation at the Algonquin Friday last, and after four hours I left with a new appreciation of certain conspiracy theories, the tortured soul of Christopher Hitchens, and the effects of Sam Peckinpaugh on women who are bloggers. Also, the chicken pot pie was delicious. Mannion, as usual, has a better round-up than I'd be able to provide. And I'll also note that BlueGirl's inspired poetry set the right tone. [UPDATE: it's been pointed out that his confab actually happened on Thursday night - I was close].
• Well, we didn't win - but we did finish a very respectable fourth. So many thanks to those who voted for this humble blog in the 2006 Weblog Awards. Of my picks, only DailyKos (no surprise) and The Moderate Voice (a huge victory for the humble Joe Gandelman) brought home the gold. Shakes didn't win either, but scored well and has a scorecard of kudos to ponder.
• I have another in my continuing series on American philanthropy trends up at Huffington Post if you're so inclined. Comments very welcome.
• Jon Swift. Just because this conservative lob-lolly boy makes me laugh.
• Finally, if you want to understand reaction to the Sean Bell shooting in New York, you really have to read Gilliard.