Lakoff: Why the Conservative Worldview Exalts Selfishness

By George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, AlterNet

John Stuart Mill, along with earlier political economists such Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx, regarded the creation and manipulation of a nation’s economy not only as a technical question but one fraught with moral dilemmas.

 Authors of THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, where morally-based framing is discussed in great detail.

In his June 11, 2012 op-ed in the NY Times, Paul Krugman goes beyond economic analysis to bring up the morality and the conceptual framing that determines economic policy. He speaks of “the people the economy is supposed to serve” — “the unemployed,” and “workers”— and “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming.”

Krugman is right to bring these matters up. Markets are not provided by nature. They are constructed — by laws, rules, and institutions. All of these have moral bases of one sort or another. Hence, all markets are moral, according to someone’s sense of morality. The only question is, Whose morality? In contemporary America, it is conservative versus progressive morality that governs forms of economic policy. The systems of morality behind economic policies need to be discussed.

Most Democrats, consciously or mostly unconsciously, use a moral view deriving from an idealized notion of nurturant parenting, a morality based on caring about their fellow citizens, and acting responsibly both for themselves and others with what President Obama has called “an ethic of excellence” — doing one’s best not just for oneself, but for one’s family, community, and country, and for the world. Government on this view has two moral missions: to protect and empower everyone equally.

The means is The Public, which provides infrastructure, public education, and regulations to maximize health, protection and justice, a sustainable environment, systems for information and transportation, and so forth. The Public is necessary for The Private, especially private enterprise, which relies on all of the above. The liberal market economy maximizes overall freedom by serving public needs: providing needed products at reasonable prices for reasonable profits, paying workers fairly and treating them well, and serving the communities to which they belong. In short, “the people the economy is supposed to serve” are ordinary citizens. This has been the basis of American democracy from the beginning.

Conservatives hold a different moral perspective, based on an idealized notion of a strict father family. In this model, the father is The Decider, who is in charge, knows right from wrong, and teaches children morality by punishing them painfully when they do wrong, so that they can become disciplined enough to do right and thrive in the market.  If they are not well-off, they are not sufficiently disciplined and so cannot be moral: they deserve their poverty. Applied to conservative politics, this yields a moral hierarchy with the wealthy, morally disciplined citizens deservedly on the top.

Democracy is seen as providing liberty, the freedom to seek one’s self interest with minimal responsibility for the interests or well-being of others. It is laissez-faire liberty. Responsibility is personal, not social. People should be able to be their own strict fathers, Deciders on their own — the ideal of conservative populists, who are voting their morality not their economic interests.  Those who are needy are assumed to be weak and undisciplined and therefore morally lacking. The most moral people are the rich. The slogan, “Let the market decide,” sees the market itself as The Decider, the ultimate authority, where there should be no government power over it to regulate, tax, protect workers, and to impose fines in tort cases. Those with no money are undisciplined, not moral, and so should be punished. The poor can earn redemption only by suffering and thus, supposedly, getting an incentive to do better.

If you believe all of this, and if you see the world only from this perspective, then you cannot possibly perceive the deep economic truth that The Public is necessary for The Private, for a decent private life and private enterprise. The denial of this truth, and the desire to eliminate The Public altogether, can unfortunately come naturally and honestly via this moral perspective.

When Krugman speaks of those who have “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming,” he is speaking of those who have ordinary conservative morality, the more than forty percent who voted for John McCain and who now support Mitt Romney — and Angela Merkel’s call for “austerity” in Germany. It is conservative moral thought that gives the word “austerity” a positive moral connotation.

Just as the authority of a strict father must always be maintained, so the highest value in this conservative moral system is the preservation, extension, and ultimate victory of the conservative moral system itself.  Preaching about the deficit is only a means to an end — eliminating funding for The Public and bringing us closer to permanent conservative domination.  From this perspective, the Paul Ryan budget makes sense — cut funding for The Public (the antithesis of conservative morality) and reward the rich (who are the best people from a conservative moral perspective).  Economic truth is irrelevant here.

Historically, American democracy is premised on the moral principle that citizens care about each other and that a robust Public is the way to act on that care.  Who is the market economy for? All of us. Equally. But with the sway of conservative morality, we are moving toward a 1 percent economy — for the bankers, the wealthy investors, and the super rich like the six members of the family that owns Walmart and has accumulated more wealth than the bottom 30 percent of Americans. Six people!

What is wrong with a 1 percent economy? As Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out in The Price of Inequality, the 1 percent economy eliminates opportunity for over a hundred million Americans. From the Land of Opportunity, we are in danger of becoming the Land of Opportunism.

If there is hope in our present situation, it lies with people who are morally complex, who are progressive on some issues and conservative on others — often called “moderates,” “independents,” and “swing voters.” They have both moral systems in their brains: when one is turned on, the other is turned off.  The one that is turned on more often gets strongest. Quoting conservative language, even to argue against it, just strengthens conservatism in the brain of people who are morally complex. It is vital that they hear the progressive values of the traditional American moral system, the truth that The Public is necessary for The Private, the truth that our freedom depends on a robust Public, and that the economy is for all of us.

We must talk about those truths — over and over, every day. To help, we have written  The Little Blue Book. It can be ordered from barnesandnoble, amazon, and itunes, and after June 26 at your local bookstore.

George Lakoff is the author of Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate‘ (Chelsea Green). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

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The Real Housewives are a despicable lot, o yea! Two views.

Real Housewives, real housewives, and feminism as consumption
Originally posted May 5, 2011 by Stendhal

The RHOC crew a few seasons ago. Gunvalson, Rossi and Barney still at it.

Editor’s Note” Some very insightful commentary here by Stendhal, on TAKE ONE, even though we take exception to his concluding complaint (which we found almost shockingly flat and bourgie for such an accomplished scrivener):

Uh?  Worried about “entrepreneurship gaps”?  Lack of female leadership at Fortune 500s? Who are you Stendhal, some hedge fund yuppie with a dilettantish knack for gifted social criticism?  I’m puzzled. Has Stendhal ever gone beyond bourgie gender goals? Don’t the careers of Nancy Pelosi, Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Condi Rice—among others— learned our author nothing?  Well, anyhow, here’s the piece. Enjoy and gain from the good parts. In TAKE TWO,  Kerensa Cadenas, of MS magazine, weighs in with some good observations. She finds a spoof by SNL hilarous but we think it falls way short of its potential. In any case, you be the judge. Ironically, while nitwits occur in all social classes and political denominations, and capitalist television will go on doing what it has always done until disabled, I think the flamboyant existence of such women as we see on the Real Housewives franchise is a testament to the failure of bourgeois feminism in our time. —PG

TAKE ONE

By Stendhal
Thank you, Stendhal
I hate the Real Housewives shows. Hate them. Every time my girlfriend watches them, I am filled with inexplicable rage. I don’t wish the Housewives any harm (I’m a pacifist, of course), but I wish they would just disappear to some nice tropical island resort, without any cameras, so I never have to see or hear from them ever again.

All this led me to wonder, though, what the appeal of the Real Housewives is. The shows are wildly successful, and their spinoffs get viewers, too. Anecdotally, my girlfriend watches these shows all the time. There’s something to the idea of a primal drama — it’s fun to watch people who hate each other. Yet, the blend of diva behavior, extravagant wealth, and self-aware snark has somehow yielded a phenomenon greater than the sum of its parts. Is this where feminism has gone?

Part of the show’s appeal is aspirational: women would like to be the Real Housewives. The Real Housewives are neither Real (unless we mean “The Real World”) nor Housewives (many are unmarried or have variously attached beaus). The Real Housewives don’t appear to have jobs, even though many of them do. The shows rarely focus on their careers — heaven forbid! — and instead focus on their constant intrigues.

WARNING: VIDEO PARODY BELOW—or when parody comes awfully close to…reality. By the SNL gals…not too funny in my viewm but then, again, SNL has been unfunny for a very long time, and can’t seem to muster laughs even at an obvious target like the pathetic Real Housewives…—PG

The intrigues fuel the other part of the show’s appeal: voyeurism. The Real Housewives mostly drink too much too early in the day, and spend most of their time (onscreen) shopping, eating at fancy restaurants, or having parties. Who wouldn’t want this lifestyle? The shows model consumption — how to consume, where to consume, what to consume. The Real Housewives shows have broken away from a model where women must have their lives dictated by the men that surround them; instead the Real Housewives dictate their lives on their own terms. Certainly, the Real Housewives do not suffer from the “Bechdel Test” problem of women only discussing men; the Housewives only discuss each other (and themselves).

Yet, this self-assuredness manifests itself as outrageous diva behavior. Instead of being mediated through a husband, the Housewives have only one concern — their own egos. Their egomaniacal behavior is merely one manifestation of a general trend. Women routinely undermine each other in the workplace (warning, long law review article in PDF), and the “liberated” woman’s solidarity with other women has splintered. The empowerment movement has not led to liberation from false posturing for men; instead, it has led to yet another posture — one of vindictiveness and neediness — performed for other women.

In a recent critical analysis of Thelma and Louise and Pretty Woman, Carina Chocano explains in detail how Thelma and Louise, which appeared so revolutionary at the time of its release compared to Pretty Woman, was actually quite dated. Thelma and Louise reflects dangerous rebellious women, breaking free from male society and choosing suicide over subjugation. Pretty Woman, conversely, was all about subjugation to men, and more importantly, subjugation to money. It was a preview of feminism to come:

Ultimately, “Pretty Woman” wasn’t a love story; it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern. Revisiting “Thelma and Louise” recently, I was struck by how dated it seemed, how much a product of its time. And “Pretty Woman,” it turns out, wasn’t a throwback at all. It was the future.

The future envisioned by Pretty Woman is played out in The Real Housewives. The “model woman” has gone from chattel property to dangerous rebel to tame consumer, all the while undermining and badmouthing her “friends.” Is this the result of feminism’s struggles for equality? Is it so much accomplishment to have graduated from discussing men to discussing clothes, gossip and beefs?

One could argue that said behavior is no different from the way men and women have behaved for centuries. The women of the Roman Empire undermined each other as much as women today; why should we regard the Real Housewives with anything less than a shrug? Besides, women have finally achieved equality — they tote guns like men, they cuss and strut like men — why shouldn’t they consume and fight like men, too?

In “Educating Rita,” the titular character (Julie Walters) gets a literary education from a professor (Michael Caine). She says she doesn’t want to be stuck in the pub with her clod of a husband singing the same song. But after her education, when she can quote poetry and analyze beauty, she has a falling out with Caine’s character. Caine yells at her that she hasn’t found a better song to sing, merely a different one. The Real Housewives think they are singing a better song — that their money, privilege, and cameras make them better (it’s always about being “classy”) than those around them — but their song is the same as it always has been.

If, at the end of feminism’s long march, women have simply moved from objects of consumerism to subjects of consumerism, has it accomplished that much? If freedom from subjugation just means the freedom to be empty, heartless, cruel, vapid and materialist, what good is it anyways? In a world of such massive remaining inequalities — entrepreneurship gaps, lack of female leadership at Fortune 500 companies, lack of female legislators (17 female Senators!), etc. — is this truly where feminism ends?

I want to end with a note about class: the upper-class Real Housewives always hold “classiness” and “class” as the most important indicators of a person’s worth. A good person is “classy”; a bad person “classless.” It’s possible that the Real Housewives simply reveals the class distinctions in feminism as a whole — that married-rich, privileged, “classy” women have more in common with their income bracket than with other women who work two jobs and provide the bulk of domestic labor for their families. As Chocano points out, “Pretty Woman” was ultimately a money story, not a love story. Maybe feminism is ultimately a money story, too, not a solidarity story.

________

TAKE TWO

We Heart: The Real Housewives of SNL
Originally: November 12, 2010 by Kerensa Cadenas · MS Magazine

Bravo’s The Real Housewives reality show is everywhere, whether you watch it on TV or not. On the radio you can hear Kim Zolciak or the Countess LuAnn singing about money or parties. At the supermarket you can see Teresa Giudice on the cover of a tabloid, refuting claims that her husband is cheating, or pick up a bottle of Bethenny Frankel’s Skinnygirl Margaritas (only 100 calories!).

The Real Housewives is a franchise, artificially gathering groups of well-off women in (so far) Atlanta, New York, Orange County, Beverly Hills, New Jersey and Washington D.C. They’re put on display shopping, parenting, partying … and constantly arguing with each other. (Yes, I have to admit I watch the show.)

Needless to say, the Housewives aren’t painting a progressive picture of women today. I would argue (and I’m certain Betty Friedan would agree) that their catty, unsupportive behavior and horrendous botoxed beauty standards are not particularly feminist nor empowering.

Imagine my delight, then, when I heard that the very funny women of Saturday Night Live past and present, including Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Molly Shannon and Kristen Wiig, parodied a Real Housewives reunion special (complete with the show’s real host, Andy Cohen).

The parody is spot on, complete with various “housewives” storming off the set, pulling another’s hair weave, singing with the benefit of Auto-Tune, and pitching their latest products (Shannon was selling everything lowfat, including “lowfat medications” and “lowfat cocktails”). Beyond the hilarity is a smart critique of women’s regressive behavior on these shows, and beyond that a commentary on reality TV in general.

Fans of the Real Housewives tune in–guiltily or not–to see precisely what the women of SNL make fun of: vacuous, backstabbing “bitches” spending money and drinking all day. They also see rigid beauty/fashion standards, gay men treated as stock characters and race used as “ethnic spice” (at least when it comes to the Atlanta women).
So, thank you, SNL women, for laying some real humor on the inadvertently humorous housewives–and for making subtly serious points along the way. I’m in agreement with Jenn Pozner here: “I’m not saying you have to divorce the Real Housewives,” says the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. “I’m just saying you have watch with your brain engaged.”

Photo with permission from NBC Universal

 

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Mercenaries for Empire: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Human rights” has become a tortured term. The most prominent names in the western human rights business behave, essentially, as “weapons in the imperial arsenal. Their value to the empire increased exponentially when Barack Obama adopted humanitarian intervention as a pillar of American war doctrine.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch spend much of their energies “advocating that the U.S. and its friends trample on the national sovereignty of weaker states – as if human rights can exist outside the framework of international law.”

“Who better than self-styled human rights activists to justify humanitarian wars?”

Under President Obama, U.S. imperialism masquerades as the protector of the planet’s peoples. Each American aggression, every violation of centuries of international law, is couched in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention – a gift from the strong to the weak. Wars of pure pillage and conquest are heralded as acts of nobility and service to humankind. The former colonizers from Europe and their cousins from the United States, the nation that grew rich from indigenous genocide and African slavery, have assumed a Responsibility to Protect the very same Asians, Africans and Latin Americans they were slaughtering…it seems like only yesterday.

But, if yesterday, these Europeans and Americans had no regard for the lives and liberties of any of the colored or non-Christian peoples of the world, in today’s geopolitical configuration human rights has become the imperial watchword. And, therefore, the western so-called human rights organizations take on strategic importance.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are, essentially, weapons in the imperial arsenal. Their value to the empire increased exponentially when Barack Obama adopted humanitarian intervention as a pillar of American war doctrine. Who better than self-styled human rights activists to justify humanitarian wars?

“They provided much of the propaganda ammunition for the U.S. and European war against Libya.”

In mid-May, as thousands of anti-war activists protested the NATO summit meeting in Chicago, Amnesty International hosted a so-called “Shadow Summit [6]” of apologists for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. They were joined by the ghoulish Madeline Albright, the former Clinton Secretary of State who said “the price [was] worth it”, when questioned about the death of thousands of children as a result of U.S. sanctions against Iraq. Albright, the warmonger, and Amnesty International agree that the U.S. should remain in Afghanistan as long as it takes, for the sake of Afghan women. Of course, it was the United States that spent billions of dollars in a joint venture with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to empower Islamists to overthrow the left-wing, Soviet-backed government that had pursued full equality for Afghanistan’s women. Yet, only a few decades later, Amnesty International trumpets the Americans as great defenders of Afghan women’s rights.

Amnesty International [7] and Human Rights Watch [8] denounce Russia and China as enemies of human rights in Syria, because they have resisted a catastrophic western military assault on that country. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch actively campaign for wars – and they always turn out to be the same wars that Washington is planning to wage. They provided much of the propaganda ammunition for the U.S. and European war against Libya, giving credibility to lies about an imminent massacre in Benghazi. Both organizations are imposters on the world scene, pretending to care for human rights while advocating that the U.S. and its friends trample on the national sovereignty of weaker states – as if human rights can exist outside the framework of international law. As far as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are concerned, human rights are whatever the empire says they are.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are simply mercenaries for empire, and sworn enemies of international law.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [9].

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The Diamond Jubilee: A glorification of wealth and privilege

By Robert Stevens, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Thank you, WSWS.ORG.  All captions by the editors of TGP.

Elizabeth II, at the top of the British pecking order. Like the Pope, what has she done to deserve all this ludicrous adoration?

For days, the British public has been subjected to saturation coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

This diet of carefully choreographed royal propaganda, which included minute-by-minute coverage of Sunday’s 1,000-boat pageant on London’s river Thames and an official pop concert at Buckingham Palace, ensured that any serious news was all but excised.

American television has been—as expected—conspicuous for its nonstop boosterism of the event, with NBC, which has the exclusive for the London Olympics, in the lead for fawning coverage.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The mounting economic crisis in Europe, the death of another British soldier in Afghanistan (the 417th to have died since the 2001 invasion), were reduced to footnotes.

The tens of millions of pounds spent on the Royal Jubilee is in stark contrast to the demands of the ruling elite that working people—the target of the most severe austerity measures since the 1930s—must make “sacrifices” for the good of the nation. It is estimated that the cost of the celebrations, including the extra public Bank Holiday, will be around £1.2 billion.

Much of the expense has been on ensuring a security lockdown of the capital. For the Thames Pageant event alone, 13,000 security forces were mobilised, including members of the Royal Navy and Marines, as well as police officers.

Over the past month, London’s 40 square miles have been systematically swept by security forces, including police frogmen carrying out an underwater search of the Thames, to counter the so-called “terrorist threat”. This is on top of the biggest mobilisation of the armed forces in London since the Second World War, already in place in the run-up to the Olympic Games.

Sir Elton Hercules-John, CBE, sycophant extraordinaire to the rich and powerful (which he now is, too). Inevitable he'd be at this ridiculous concert.

The pop concert organised outside Buckingham Palace plumbed new depths of sycophancy and deference. Performing alongside a number of tired, multi-millionaire musicians including Paul McCartney, Elton John and Stevie Wonder, were a host of manufactured reality TV show creations. Just what is one to make of Prince Charles giving thanks to one Gary Barlow, lead singer in the 1990s boy-band, Take That, for organising the event?

In the process of these celebrations, all manner of the crimes of British imperialism were brushed under the carpet. In May, the Queen hosted a tea party of international Sovereign Monarchs to celebrate her Jubilee. Amongst the attendees were the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, fresh from their bloody repression of opposition protests in Bahrain.

At the May 23 Royal Academy “Celebration of the Arts” event to commemorate the Jubilee, Bono, lead singer of rock band U2, thanked the Queen for her reign and visit to Ireland last year. This is the band whose 1982 recording “Sunday Bloody Sunday” song—about the slaughter of 13 innocent people in Derry in 1972 by the occupying British army—is rated as one of the best political protest songs of all time.

What exactly is being celebrated here? According to a recent Brand Finance report, the tangible assets of the royal family, including the Duchy of Cornwall with around 133,658 acres, over 23 counties, are worth an estimated £18 billion.

Today, the financial and social gulf between the UK’s rich and the rest of the population is at record levels. The Sunday Times Rich List, which tracks the wealth of Britain’s richest 1,000 people, records their combined wealth at £414 billion. The Queen herself is worth more than £300 million (a vast underestimation).

The Financial Times was forced to note in a comment that since the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, “society has become far more unequal. After tax, the richest 1 per cent now have 9 per cent of all income, compared with 3 per cent in 1977.”

Now the social position of the working class is being subjected to an even sharper decline as a result of the government’s austerity measures. Millions are without work. Pay cuts and freezes are the norm, while the destruction of social provision—implemented to fund the multi-billion-pound bailout of Britain’s banks in 2008—means many being denied their right to health care, education and social benefits.

In the capital, soup kitchens now feed thousands of people every day, including emaciated and starving children.

Despite the media’s best efforts to present the population of the UK “as all being in it together”, a single episode from the Jubilee made plain the real state of class relations.

On Monday the Guardian reported that a group of long-term unemployed people from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth had been bussed into London and forced to work as unpaid stewards during the Jubilee, as part of the government’s Work Programme.

Up to 30 people on unemployment benefit and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by Close Protection UK, which had won a stewarding contract for the Jubilee. Given no accommodation, they were told to sleep overnight in freezing cold conditions under London Bridge before being sent to steward the river pageant the following day. The 50 apprentices were paid just £2.80 an hour while in London.

The Guardian, based on accounts from two of the people, reported, “They had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.”

One of the females employed as a steward said, “London was supposed to be a nice experience, but they left us in the rain. They couldn’t give a crap … No one is supposed to be treated like that, [working] for free. I don’t want to be treated where I have to sleep under a bridge and wait for food.”

Despite being forced into calling an “investigation”, Close Protection UK managing director Molly Prince defended the use of unpaid workers, claiming, “The only ones that won’t be paid are because they don’t want to be paid. They want to do this voluntarily, [to] get the work experience.”
In truth, many unemployed workers are now being forced into such miserable schemes under the Work Programme, as a means of throwing them off unemployment benefit. Up to 270 voluntary organisations and charities have signed up to the programme.

The pouring of vast political, financial and human resources into the Jubilee celebrations takes place at a time of widespread alienation amongst the mass of working people and youth from the political parties and state institutions.

Support for all the three main political parties has collapsed, while much of Britain’s ruling elite—along with the police—have been exposed through their relations with financial oligarchs, such as Rupert Murdoch, as deeply corrupt.

No doubt the promotion of the monarchy as an institution supposedly above all this stench is intended to remedy this situation. Instead, the glorification of wealth and privilege only proves just how far removed the bourgeoisie is from the concerns and sentiments of millions and brings to mind nothing so much as the final days of the French aristocracy.

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ARCHIVES: Roger Waters’ The Wall Live tour: A comment from a reader

Terrence McGovern, WSWS.ORG
(13 October 2010)


Waters in Barcelona, 2011

Over the last four decades, both under the Pink Floyd name and under his own, Waters has been releasing music that is powerfully opposed to religion, imperialism and capitalism. His last solo rock album, Amused to Death (1992), was explicit and unreserved in its criticism of contemporary society—in ambitious songs like “What God Wants,” “The Bravery of Being out of Range” (about the Gulf War) and “Perfect Sense,” in which a massive audience bellows the “global anthem:” “It all makes perfect sense expressed in dollars and cents, pounds shillings and pence!”

In 2005, Waters released two singles over the Internet that made clear his opposition to the Iraq War and the Bush administration (“To Kill The Child”) and to the demonization of the people of the Middle East (“Leaving Beirut”).

His new tour furthers these positions. Apache helicopters roar toward the audience, Boeing bombers drop crosses, Stars of David and dollars signs, faces of dead soldiers and civilians linger on the screen and a giant projected camera “spies” on the audience. Waters rouses the audience with a resounding rendition of “Bring The Boys Back Home,” in which he dramatically projects a quotation from Dwight D. Eisenhower across The Wall: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft, from those who hunger, and are not fed, those who are cold, and not clothed.”

Waters’ music and his Wall show in particular represent a unique achievement for the rock genre. The development of rock as an artistic form has been contradictory. While rock was gradually induced to take itself more seriously by the late 1960s as the youth became more assertive and politically involved, the genre mostly absorbed the mindset that was politically expressed by the New Left. Lyrics, while no longer dwelling in the clichés of earlier love songs, were often nonsensical and at most reflected the banalities of drug use, Eastern religions and a pretentious ambiguity toward all questions that raised social (especially class) and not merely individual questions.

New experimentation in rock during the late 1960s matured into progressive rock at the beginning of the 1970s. Pink Floyd was originally a “psychedelic” band with typical nonsense lyrics and themes, becoming only gradually a band known for its deep and challenging concept albums. While progressive rock made important advances in the 1970s, it suffered greatly from the inability of progressive rock bands to concentrate on real social problems and concerns, leading to the subgenre’s association with fantastic, vacuous themes and pointless instrumentals. By the late 1970s, progressive rock had become discredited and its stylistic opposite, punk, captured the imagination of rock listeners for a time. The Wall’s success at the end of the 1970s was surprising during the period of progressive rock’s decline. Progressive rock never recovered as a dominant form of rock music, and many of its bands returned to more radio-friendly music in the 1980s, before largely disappearing from the public consciousness in the 1990s.

It is clear that Waters’ achievements should be welcomed when seen in the context of rock history, which has a tragically dismal record with political and social commentary. There are however, areas in which The Wall reflects confusion and vacillation on the part of Waters that are characteristic of the petty-bourgeois “far left” in the United States, where he now lives. Waters, who goes as far as putting George W. Bush’s picture next to Mao’s, Stalin’s and Hitler’s during The Wall concert, air-dropped leaflets lauding Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. Waters has been outspoken in his criticism of Bush, Tony Blair and past presidents and prime ministers in interviews, on albums and during his concerts in the past, but he now refrains from addressing his stance toward Obama, who has pursued a path identical to Bush.

Waters is unwilling to draw conclusions from his criticisms of capitalism and the government. He does not want to lean too far in any one direction. Waters carefully prepares the concert’s projections to give equal consideration to American soldiers who have died in the wars and to civilian victims. Along with the cross, Star of David and the dollar sign, he shows B-52s dropping crescent moons and hammer and sickles! This can only confuse the audience. What exactly is to replace the chilling slavery and mayhem that Waters so boldly presents to the audience as their reality? What action can we take? Certainly The Wall’s unaltered conclusion, that “the bleeding hearts and the artists” in their “ones” and “twos” are burdened with task of correcting the world, is inadequate and irresponsible to suggest. Why bring audiences together and rip part of the façade off capitalism only to tell the audience that there is nothing for them to do—that, as the New Left used to say, “all ideologies are wrong” and what we need is common decency?

The Wall remains, however, a positive application of rock music to the exposure of the barbarism and hatred that weigh down on working people all over the world. It remains for rock musicians and all artists to draw principled conclusions from the suffering and the inequities of modern life and use their creative gifts to enrich their audience’s vision of the future and give them the confidence to pursue the necessary struggles.

[6 October 2010]

§§§
ADDENDUM

Roger Waters: Rebel without a pause

Interview from the DAILY TELEGRAPH, England, 13 May 2000

[Annotated by the Greanville Post editor]

This fox was disemboweled by the dogs who were chasing him or her. This is just another of the evils of "sport hunting." That some people can't have fun unless they cause this to happen is a disgrace. Yest misguided celebrities like Roger Waters defend them.

Roger Waters, the guiding force behind the psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd, is now joining the hot debate in favour of foxhunting and keeping government hands off the countryside, says Rory Knight Bruce.

THINK of Pink Floyd and what comes to mind are a hazy 1970s loucheness, Dark Side of the Moon, lava lamps, and the distinctly anti-Thatcherite tone of The Wall.

What doesn’t feature is a passionate belief in the rights of country people. [Country people? You’re talking about rich people with houses in the country.] Yet that is the position that Roger Waters – who was Pink Floyd – finds himself in: he is in sympathy with, to borrow Tony Blair’s phrase, the “forces of conservatism”.  [Precisely.  He’s a mess.]

In Barbados to work on his first album in eight years, a series of live American concerts and an opera based on the French Revolution, 56-year-old Waters has found time to reflect upon the England which, under Mrs Thatcher, he did so much to condemn. Unexpectedly, Tony Blair’s assault on what Waters sees as the basic freedoms of the countryside may prompt him – a lifelong Labour supporter – to vote Conservative for the first time at the next general election.

Waters invites me to his house and we sit on the verandah. He is, for the time being, fixed on a pastoral view far beyond the horizon before us. “I think all rational people agree that foxes need to be controlled,” he says. “I believe passionately in an Englishman’s right to make up his own mind. I am afraid that the Government has been swayed by a vocal minority.”

His love of the country, of the British landscape [this is nonsense], has been passed down to Waters from his father and grandfather. It is something he has never spoken about before. Waters is famously private and during the three days I spend with him, he resists invitations to appear on the David Letterman television chat show in America. When we go one evening to a pool bar, not a single head turns in recognition, although everyone there would know his most famous creation, Dark Side of the Moon.

This is the notion of "sport" held by these decadent people. A fair fight? Certainly not.

They would not know the darker side of the man, the brooding about such diverse subjects as river pollution and the war in Kosovo. But now his chief concern is that the English rural idyll he grew up in is being systematically destroyed by a government that does not understand, and cares little for, anything outside the cities.

It is as if his conscience has heard the call to arms. “We all have the opportunity to make one mark on the Big Picture,” he says.

As a child in Cambridge, Waters would cycle out to the countryside and go bird-nesting in the beech woods. He used to fish the tributaries of the Cam at Grantchester for gudgeon and roach “with a bamboo pole and a bent pin”.

This has given him a lifelong love of fishing and the rivers of England, and he regularly fishes the Test which, he points out, would not be there without the sporting fishermen [sic] who reclaimed the river from marshland and who protect its wildlife and fish-stocks today. “I see what has happened to the rivers of my youth, polluted by fertilisers, and I see how people who are concerned as sportsmen have saved them, with no help from the Government, and brought them back to life.”

As a result of the riparian owners and sporting fisherman, in which he includes the Cockney fisherman catching the Tube to the canal bank at weekends, Waters points out that we enjoy significant birdlife on the river. “From my home,” he says, “I can see mallard, merganser, Goldeneye and tufted duck, as well as a profusion of coots and moorhens.”

Against such sentiments, it is fascinating to hear Waters’s views on Sir Paul McCartney, an avowed vegetarian and opponent of hunting, and who has, it could be argued, used his fame to promote his opinions. “He is a person of great sincerity and I respect his right to hold his views,” says Waters. “However, McCartney also disapproves of horse and dog racing on the grounds that they exploit the animals.

“Maybe,” Waters allows, “if Sir Paul had his way, he would ban racing and eating meat as well as hunting and fishing. A ban on hunting could be the thin end of a very thick wedge.”

Waters also dismisses Sir Paul’s suggestions that foxhunting should be replaced with draghunting. “Draghunting won’t catch on because it’s not hunting, there’s no spontaneity. People enjoy foxhunting, at least in part, because it is ‘hunting’. There is a quarry, that’s the point. Man is a hunter. To legislate against his natural instinct is folly.”

Waters’s views on hunting were formed early. When he was a child, his grandparents would drive him out into the south of England countryside in their Ford Anglia to meets of the local foxhounds. “I remember seeing hunts in progress across farmland and thinking what a spectacular sight they were. I was very struck by the hunt followers on their bicycles or in Ford Populars with their Thermos flasks and a ruddy atmosphere of enthusiasm.” [So much for this supposedly proletarian’s enthusiasm for one of the most barbaric anachronism of a brutal upper class.]

Waters lost his father at Anzio in 1944, when he was one, and his grandfather to the trenches of the First World War. His grandfather had been a coal miner in the drift mines of County Durham, and latterly Labour agent for Bradford; his father, a communist Christian. Both men loved the English landscape. “You could not fail to be a communist then. The children of Bradford did not have shoes or clogs but rags about their feet,” says Waters.

“I’m filled with the sense that I am heir to their passion and my forbears’ commitment to right and wrong, to truth and justice,” he continues. “I hope I have inherited what I admire about them as men, that they had the courage of their convictions, which caused them to give their lives for liberty and freedom.

“If this legislation finds its way on to the statute book, it could create, if not open revolt, at least a bitter schism between town and country, the reverberations of which could only sour our increasingly culturally impoverished society.”

This is a conversation one could be having at one of the Countryside Rallies, the first of which he attended with his family and which he found terrifically moving. The atmosphere reminded him of the Aldermaston marches in the 1960s.

Waters would regularly go to Boxing Day meets in his local market town until they were stopped because of anti-hunt protesters. “The antis’ tactics were so violent that it became a threat to public order and so an important tradition was stopped by the actions of a few thugs. Is this the democracy for which my father died?”

The unexpected discovery of a poignant family memoir has reinforced his commitment to defend hunting. Last year, after the death of his father’s sister, he was left a diary written by his father when he was 16. It begins on New Year’s Day 1929, when Eric Fletcher Waters was a schoolboy at Bishop’s Auckland, before winning a scholarship to Durham University.

On that day the young Eric left his mother’s house at Copley, near Barnard Castle, where she was the housekeeper for the local country doctor, and went out on foot with the Zetland foxhounds. “It is a beautiful, eloquent account of the crispness of the air, the snow on the ground and the cry of the hounds, and how a fox was finally killed in a railway cutting,” he says.  [Sure, let’s enjoy the beautiful countryside by ripping to shreds an innocent and badly outgunned and outmanned creature. If this evident and revolting form of cowardice and cruelty is elevated by this man to elegiac proportions, why are we to believe his posturing along the lines of “progressive” politics?]

The diary, which shows the enthusiasm of teenage years and ends after a couple of months, also describes more prosaic elements of country life. “Caught the United bus to Barnard Castle. Played snooker with Jack. Won tuppence.” For anyone who has lost a father when young, such scraps give immense succour and comfort. “It makes me weep to think of it,” says Waters. “It has provided me with an understanding of part of the reason I feel so passionately about the hunting issue. It’s not just in respect of memory for him and the sacrifice he and his father made, but the sacrifice they made for the freedom of Britain.”

This vision has a strong place in Waters’s philosophical outlook. He wonders, in slightly nightmarish Pink Floyd fashion, if there might one day evolve a politically correct society that permits only vegans to breed and that human canine teeth, those in all of us that represent the hunter, will be extracted to extinction. “All sports are a symbolic form of hunting or warfare. Should we ban darts because it represents a sporting side of human nature of which Big Brother Blair disapproves?”

Politics dominates Waters’s conversation. Although moved by New Labour’s proposed assault on the countryside, he also feels that the standard of parliamentary democracy has fallen to such a level that it is merely television politics. “There is no longer room for a Charles James Fox or Pitt the Younger to express their views at length with passion and eloquence because our attention span has been reduced to a few seconds of soundbites. Populist politics has become everything.”

He also feels that attacks on the Prince of Wales for allowing his children to hunt are wrong. “He is a deeply thoughtful man who should be allowed to pursue his life, liberty and happiness in the way that he chooses.” When he read about the criticisms of William and Harry for hunting, he says his reaction was that he was not sure he wanted to return to an England that was so mealy-mouthed, nasty, dishonest and incoherent. “Most of the time I ignore the papers, but a ban on hunting will not run off my back.”

He believes that interference in the countryside is an insult to the farmers and sportsmen who, by and large, do their job pretty well to husband the wild and farmed animal population. “The hunting community has provided the bulwark against the forces of the market which would bulldoze the countryside flat, cover it in fertiliser and grow genetically modified wheat.”

Waters is neither bucolic nor historic in his appreciation of animal husbandry. There are practices, from the transportation of live animals to the raising of veal calves and the tethering of sows in labour, which he condemns. He would support any legislation to bring these to an end. But he maintains that, in England, animal husbandry is pretty good and that without sound farming “our green and pleasant land could easily be turned into a dustbowl”.

Ultimately, he believes it is the huntsmen and the country people who prevent this from happening. “We desperately need for these communities to remain intact, even those of us who live in towns, if future generations are going to have any countryside to enjoy at all.”

Waters does not talk about his music, but in his 1987 album Radio K.A.O.S., he foresees a society numbed by the satellite generation that will eventually revert to the values of nature and the countryside. A Welsh choir, with echoes of the valleys where farmers and miners co-exist, concludes:

      “Now the satellite’s confused because on Saturday night,
      The airwaves were full of compassion and light,
      And his silicone heart warmed to the sight of a billion candles burning,
      The tide is turning.
      I’m not saying that the battle is won,
      But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun,
      Wrested technology’s sword from the hands of the Warlords,
                 The tide is turning.”

It is an anthem to understanding, belief and hope which could well be taken up today by those who are prepared to defend the countryside.

As I leave, passing grand houses that resemble Berkshire on a sunny day, to weave through the Bajun shanty huts, I reflect there is a corner of a foreign field that is forever England. In that field, Roger Waters stands tall with his convictions and the memory of his father and grandfather. And he is not alone.

 

 

 

 

 

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