An important book?

I've recently been reading Nation of Rebels byJospeh Heath and Andrew Potter, a couple of Canadian academics. It starts with two Seattle vignettes and works its way from there to a thoughtful critique of the ennervating effect of the counter-culture's discontent of post-war consumerism on progressive politics.

The choice of vignettes are interesting and play as touchstones for my (clearly ageing) generation. The first is Kurt Cobain's suicide in his Lake Washington home in 1994 - ostensibly because, in the view of the authors, of his inability to live with being famous - a belief that he was selling out his punk roots by out-selling Michael Jackson. The second were the anti-globalisation riots in Seattle in 1999 where the downtown Niketown was attacked as a symbol of captalist oppression by people wearing Nike trainers. From these beginning the authors construct an argument that counter culture has failed because it is simply a different form of the consumerism that it claims to despise. Thus, there is no fundamental difference between mainstream Macy's and radical REI except that REI's clothes are three times the price. Worse, this reflects a distraction into utopian/ pseudo psychological solutions to problems rather than pragmatic gradualist ones. At its worst this creates an oppositionalism on the progressive wing of politics, which is just as pernicious in its own way as the anti-governmentalism of the radical right.

Well, sort of. It's a thoughtful and reasonably well researched book, and makes some good points, so it's worth reading. But I'm not sure how much it explains the world. It gives some explanation of the failure of the left over the last 30 years - but my own take on this is that there has been a lack of intellectual discipline and an awful lot of self-indulgence influenced by French post-modernist drivel - a point Francis Wheen made far more cogently a few years back.

I'm not sure though that this explains much of the world we are living in, which seems much more about the about an unthinking repetition of the supremacy of unregulated markets in all situations and in the face of evidence, an increasingly naked assertion of might being right and the abuse of religion to get the poor to acquiese to their own oppression.

Their choice of opening vignettes was interesting. I suspect the meanings are far more simple than the authors considered. That Kurt Cobain was clinically depressed, a hopeless heroin addict and his wife was leaving him seem more pressing reasons for suicide than a rather tenuous concept of selling out his punk roots. As for Nike-shod Niketown assailants - it is hardly unknown for looters to attach themselves to a riot, is it?

Feeling old

Saturday we went as a family with our friends Pat and Jennifer to a large family run Italian restaurant downtown. As ever trying to avoid driving wherever possible we took the bus. On leaving the ensuing downpour required a taxi back - but as too many of us the girls taxi-d and I wandered back to the bus stop.

Where I felt old. I got into conversation with a couple of quite charming guys who I guess were about 18 or so, and I realised that they really are a completely different generation to me. Their argot was very skater speak with "man" as much a verbal tick as "y'know" is for my generation. But two things stood out. The first was their complete expectation of I-Pods being the only way to listen to music. For them CDs were completely antiquated, which as I've only had a player in the last 7 years makes me feel extraordinarily old. Oddly though they were very approving of my preference for vinyl, but they looked on me almost as a curious anthropological exhibit. See Homo vinylus with his primitive electromechnical methods of reproducing sound.

The other thing on music was the fact that they talked about bands that I've never heard of. I suspect this is a good thing - after all venerating one's parents record collection leads to the collective horror that was Oasis. What is more worrying is the similarity between my tastes in music and the leader of the Conservative Party's - as a quick check of my profile will attest. I know we are roughly the same generation but there's something wrong about this somehow...

Ah well at least I never liked Pink Floyd!!

Shaking hands with Obama

Eeeek really cringey on the name dropping front, but a recent trip to DC gave me the opportunity to do so. As I’m sure most of you know Obama is the current mega-star of American politics who has risen, as the old saying goes, without trace to stand second behind Hillary in the race for Democratic nomination for president, and he is attracting the predictable smears and innuendo from the hysterical right.

I was fortunate enough to hear him speaking at a breakfast meeting with his senior Illinois senatorial colleague, Dick Durbin, and the contrast between the men was interesting. Both were in different ways tremendously impressive, but Obama, up close, wasn’t like a politician.

By which I mean, despite the controversy, he was not particularly articulate in the slick, political, soundbitey sort of way. Rather his response to questions from his constituents was very measured and very thoughtful and actually engaged with what was asked rather than got his point on the issue across. He also had a sense of seriousness and certainty about him that was intriguing. While charming and personable, he also, oddly, seemed less at ease than Durbin, who was very chatty, interested in what were doing and so forth, but this might just reflect someone standing on the edge of the announcement (he formally announced his candidacy two days after we met him).

I think I would sum it up as that he has charisma, but not the qualities that one usually associates with charismatic people. Whether he can win or not is another matter. I have a sense that he might end up being Hillary’s running mate.

For more on the impressive Durbin - see the other blog