Sort of political Monday

Here we go again ...
Emulating the Bourbons is not the way to go but when it comes to "social justice" the Vatican never forgets and it never learns.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI said persistent world hunger was a "tragedy" driven by selfish and profit-driven economic models, whose first victims are millions of children deprived of life or good health.

Now let's sit down and think critically here. If this is true, then the worst poverty should be in countries where "profit-driven economic models" have the largest place. So if that is not true, then everything Pope Benedict has said here is wrong. And it is not true. The countries that have most effectively reduced poverty are precisely the ones that have most enthusiastically embraced profit-driven economic models. The difficult question is why does this nonsense keep resurfacing?

I like the Pope. I like him a lot. I've even lost a lot of readers (a lot by my humble standards) by defending him in the past. And I know it is Saint Benedict's feast day today. But there is a huge problem here.

The first temptation is to think the church approaches these issues in a moral as opposed to a purely economic way but that isn't right. The truth is that the church approaches things in a morally loaded way. By insisting on seeing profit as a morally evil thing, by equating profit with selfishness, the church blinds herself.

Before going into that, some more from this recent pronouncement to underline just how bad this stuff is.

In responding to the crisis, international agencies should rediscover the value of the family farm, promoting the movement of young people back into rural areas, the pope said July 1 in an address to participants in an annual conference on hunger organized by the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

And then there is this:

The pope called for support of international efforts to promote the family farm as a key component of national economies. The traditional nuclear family, he said, has shown itself to be a competent instrument for agricultural production and for training of new generations in farming.

"The rural family is a model not only of work, but of life and the concrete expression of solidarity, in which the essential role of the woman is confirmed," he said.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the real crisis in the Catholic church is in social and economic policy. What you see above is a pretty naked attempt to reject modern life and turn the clock back.

This was tried, by the way, during the great depression. It was a miserable failure. You may have puzzled at the disaster of the Catholic church in Quebec; you may have wondered how what was once the most devout part of North America is now the place with the lowest church attendance on the continent. Well, an awful lot of it has to do with the church's active support for campaigns to resettle city dwellers on farms during the depression.

Only someone whose understanding of farming was poor and heavily romanticized could imagine such a thing could be good. It's not just that effective farming is specialized and difficult work that most people cannot do. It is that family farms are not very efficient. The cost of doing what the pope proposes here would be to increase poverty and famine to a level so horrifying that we moderns can't begin to imagine it.

It would also be to reduce the quality of life of the people who would be working these family farms and to shut off any chance they might have for improvement. (Yes there was a time when most people farmed but that was for the simple reason that they had no choice.)

And it is hard not to suspect that the real concern here is not economic but selfish self preservation. For if the third world follows the west into profit-driven economic prosperity, one of the inevitable consequences of that will be a decline in church authority. We know this because it happened in the west.

“Rural Veneto was at the time the most Catholic region in Italy, with an extremely solid, grassroots presence of the Church,” Magister explained. “But even in Veneto in the first half of the twentieth century – where almost everyone went to Mass on Sundays and to confession at least once a year – the birth rate was cut in half in the span of one generation.

“It went from 5 children per woman in 1921 to 2.5 children per woman in 1951 because of generalized recourse to contraceptive practices, the most widespread of which was coitus interruptus.”

 I can understand why the church isn't keen to go through all that again. Particularly as the third world is one of the few places the church is growing in leaps and bounds. It is also one of the few areas where young men are joining the priesthood in significant numbers. To lose all that now would really hurt.

But that pain is nothing compared to the unnecessary pain millions would go through if we follow the incredibly bad advice Pope Benedict has dished out here.

Pastabagel tries to dig Scott Adams out of the hole he's made for himself

This is from Partial Objects:

Adams wrote a post called “Pegs and Holes” that pissed off all the wrong people. That is to say, it pissed off exactly the right people all at the same time. The post muses on why “Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.” These men would include Weiner, Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenneger and many many others. Here is what he wrote in that post:

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.

This block-quoted excerpt is the thesis. That single sentence is what Scott thinks, and that is what he wants to talk about.[1]

Here is where the writers of Jezebel, Salon, Change.org, and their commenters all went wrong. They took the first sentence I quoted (“Powerful men…”), and mated it with the excerpt I quoted, even though they are separated by five sentences.

Oh well then, he's off the hook.

Maybe not. Whenever anyone says a quote is out of context, we need to test that by putting it back into context. Lets put the two sentences into context with the five sentences in between and the sentence that precedes the first one Pastabagel quotes.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. 

 That is not quite so clear-cut as Adams and his defenders would have it. There are really only two possible things going on here:

1. Adams thinks that "tweeting, raping, cheating and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world" are natural instincts of men, or
2. Adams has wasted our time digressing about these things before introducing a dogmatic assertion completely unrelated to his introductory paragraph and for which he advances zero evidence.

And the sentence before the bit about powerful men, is much more significant than the five that come afterward: He starts off with "Now consider human males." That is, as Miss Grundy taught us all back in grade school, the topic sentence for that paragraph. And then he talks about how (some) powerful men have behaved. The people whom he claims have misread him, have not. Adams has told us he is talking about men in general and then he has told us that these recent misbehaving powerful men have something to do with human males in general.

Okay, let's move onto the next paragraph:

The part that interests me ...

The part of what that interests you Mr. Adams? He doesn't start this paragraph off by saying, "Never mind all that, lets talk about something else that interests me." No he starts off saying "the part that interests me". That refers back to the previous paragraph, it does not start anything new.

Sorry, Pastabagel and other Adams defenders but there is no wiggle room here. The great man wrote something incredibly stupid. He needs to explain himself or shut up. At the very least, he needs to stop accusing the people who read him in the most plausible way of not knowing how to read.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

The problem is that there isn't much to say about modesty
Last week over in the Catholic blogosphere there were a couple of pieces that drove home the utter futility of the whole modesty thing. They revealed the way the people who discuss modesty most are actually obsessed with, as Simcha Fisher (the author of both pieces) put it, sex, sex, sex. She started with a comment by one of her readers:

I am distressed at least a little by the way that these modesty discussions inevitably draw so much description of the female body, clothed or barely-clothed.

I'm sure she is, but what else could you talk about when talking about modesty? I mean this as a serious question.

Here is another way to think of it: what is the opposite of washing your feet? Not washing your feet? That doesn't really work does it? You can't say much about the activity of not washing your feet because it's not an activity. And you can't say much about the virtue of modesty because it's not a virtue. (And that is why I keep pounding on this Catholic bloggers who write about chastity as if it meant abstaining from sex. If we define chastity that way, then chastity means nothing at all.)

Catholic writers talking about modesty and chastity always end up talking about either sex or, worse, come off as imperious busy bodies telling women what they can't do because there is nothing to say about modesty or chastity.

Here is why it has to fail. You are your body and your body is sexual. To deny that sexuality is to deny your very being. Being sexual doesn't mean having sex all the time but it does mean being sexual all the time and the more you try and tell yourself otherwise the more dramatically you will fail.

Let me give you an example of just how deep this sex stuff runs. First, a clarification. I love Betty Beguiles, I have her in my Blog List. I think she has exactly the right attitude. I don't mean to criticize her. Okay? No one could reasonably accuse her of immodesty. So let's look at an apron she likes. That's right, an apron. Here it is:

Okay, a woman waltzes into church kitchen and whips that on before cutting up squares to serve during the weekly meeting of Concerned Catholic Women Promoting Modesty. Someone, could be a man, could be another woman, says, "What a darling little apron". And the wearer thanks, them, smiles and stands up nice and straight and describes where she found it and the admirer looks at her "apron".

I don't mean to be difficult here, I really don't, but it is pretty obvious what's really going on here isn't it? In French the expression for highlight is "mettre en valeur" (literally "put into value") and it gets the point better than "highlight". The apron highlights her breasts by framing them. It puts them into value. It gives you an excuse to look at them and the wearer a chance to show off her breasts.

I don't think there is anything wrong with that. To the contrary, I love it and any time I see a woman wearing that apron I'm going to make a compliment in the hopes that she will stand up straight and thank me while I admire her apron. And I discriminate. I walk into a kitchen and I see two women, and one is wearing this apron, the woman in this apron is the one I offer to help every time.

There is a lot to say about dignity if you want to talk about that but modesty is an empty shell. Modesty means not being immodest and that is all it means. It's like talking about not playing chess, or about not swimming or about not eating. It has no content of its own. That's why Catholic bloggers always end up talking about sex when they mean to discuss modesty.

Manly Thor's Day Special additional bonus item

This is beyond pathetic.

An atheist activist I've never heard of named Rebecca Watson commented on an experience she'd had at some sort of atheist/ skeptic/geek conference thingee. The incident happened after she'd stayed up until four AM with other attendees at the hotel bar. At that point, she said she was tired and going to bed. And one of the guys from the group gets on the elevator with her and says this:

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?

And she explains, quietly and politely why she doesn't like this:

Just a word to the wise, guys, don’t do that. I really don’t know how to explain how this makes me uncomfortable ... I’m a single woman, in a foreign country, in an elevator with you, just you, don’t invite me back to your hotel room.

That all seems reasonable enough to me. Not to Richard Dawkins, however, who produced a reaction that was so far over the top it was unreal. Here is an excerpt:

The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that....Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his.

'Cause  asking a woman you barely know to your hotel room to have coffee, alone, at four in the morning is a completely non-creepy thing to do.

And it gets worse, he prefaced this with a comment that she should feel lucky that she isn't living in a  Muslim country and getting her "genitals mutilated with a razor blade". Really! He wrote this.

You can watch the Rebecca Watson comment on video here and you can read about the whole chain of responses and counter-responses from Dawkins and others here. (Warning, there seem to be very few atheists who are not creepy losers.)

Seriously, guys, never open with "Don't take this the wrong way". If you really think that something you are about to say to a woman you barely know might be taken the wrong way then you shouldn't be saying it.

And be honest, if you want her to come to your hotel room and have sex with you, ask her to come to your hotel room and have sex with you. Unless you are a rock star and she is groupie that is doomed strategy but it is at least a non-creepy doomed strategy.

This guy may as well have worn a button saying, "I'm the sort of guy you'll be reading about in the tabloids someday."

Here, just so you know, is how a non-loser would have handled the situation.

He would have let her get on the elevator alone that night. The next day he would have gotten up and hoped to run into her.

If he wasn't so lucky, he'd simply think it was unfortunate and let it go easily because there are thousands upon thousands of likeable and intelligent single women in this world.

If he was lucky enough to run into her, he would have complimented her on something she'd said the night before. And he would actually remember what she had said because he would have been paying attention. He would let the conversation proceed taking the time to gauge her response. If she was interested in talking, he would ask her if she'd like to go for coffee.

He'd have asked her for coffee at a neutral location and not in his #$%&ing hotel room!

Then, if and only if that went well, he might ask her for a drink later. (Again in a neutral location and he would make it clear he was asking her on a date with all that implies.)

What the guy actually did was rushed, desperate and creepy. It's not just that he made her uneasy, he also made it very clear that he is loser because that's the way losers act. Non-losers never think, I've got to make a move right away or else I'll never get a chance again.

Final thought: Wouldn't it be too funny if it turned out that the guy who made this creepy move turned out to be Richard Dawkins himself? I have no reason to suspect such a thing—beyond his reaction proving that he is creepy enough to fit the bill—I just think it would be funny.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo Noir
I've wanted to write about neo noir films for a while now. They have a something about them that goes directly to the male psyche of my generation. Not all of them do this but the ones I like best do.

These movies play on male sexuality in a way not unlike the way 1950s schlock horror movies did. You know the schlock horror movies I mean, where the monster represents adolescent sexuality. There is a disturbing monster just below the surface who has it in for the really nice girl and this perfectly mirrors the conflicts of boys who love and respect these girls but also want to rip their tops off so they can see and touch their breasts.

The neo noir I like does something similar for adult men. We want love but for us love means a sexual relationship. It's pointless turning to men, as women sometimes do, and saying, "I want love not sex". To us separating sex from love is like wanting to separate getting wet from going swimming. You can get wet without going swimming but you can't go swimming and not get wet; you can have sex without love but you cannot have love without sex.

And there lies the problem because a lot of women refuse to see it that way and so do many moralists. So we run around feeling guilty about it. Guys don't say, "For me, love means a relationship with lots of good sex in it and nothing else will do." Instead we run around feeling guilty for wanting what we want.

But, at the same time, we maintain an odd relationship with the women who do offer us what we want. We can't bring ourselves to believe she is real or trustworthy. We worry most of all that the sex being offered is meant to hide another agenda and the fear we men have that the relationship that starts off with great sex will evaporate leaving a man trapped in a different agenda that was never his: trapped in a  sexless marriage, divorced, paying support for children he never sees ....

One of the primary differences between neo noir and classic noir is the degree to which neo noir plays on these fears by blowing them up, not into a monster, but some heinous crime the woman leads the man into.The supreme model here is Double Indemnity.

These movies are also self-consciously nostalgic. They yearn for another era and they yearn for the male fashion, technology and mores of another era. Not necessarily to recreate it but rather to linger lovingly on it. One of the big challenges for these movies is always fedora or no fedora.

I saw one of these lately. It wasn't a very good movie but the point of these movies isn't necessarily to be good. The point certainly isn't to be art. They are rather shameless and direct about titillating us.

Anyway, the movie was Palmetto and it is definitely miss-able on the one hand but not a complete waste of time on the other hand and they just don't make enough of these movies. Just as Jane Austen only wrote a handful of novels, so did Raymond Chandler. Noir and neo noir looks like an easy trick to pull off but there are a lot fewer good examples than you might guess just as there are surprisingly few good novels in the Austen tradition. As a consequence, liking neo noir means having to settle for a lot of not good as they might have been books and movies.

The manliness lesson
 It does have a great premise though. A man who has spent two years in prison falsely accused has been released and now he is back outside and driven by a sense of entitlement. You could do a lot with that. This movie never does. It sort of forgets that is the premise and meanders off in fourteen other directions. (It's such a good premise, I think someone ought to steal the premise and make a better one. And there is nothing to stop anyone from doing this as a premise can't be copyrighted.)

Anyway, the thing about a sense of entitlement is that it is driven by self loathing. The person who can earn a living, does so. The person who comes to believe others owe him a living has no faith in their own ability to do things. In love, the pathetic result is the guy who thinks he has nothing to offer women but still feels he deserves to be loved. Like a lot of men, Harry Barber is like that and I suspect the original novel on which the film is based on a novel by James Hadley Chase (that's a pseudonym used by some Brit) connected the dots. The movie has the dots but leaves out the connections.

Harry Barber's problem, he is our hero and narrator, is that he believes he is reprehensible and so he can't believe that anything he does is justifiable. He himself is loathsome like the Palmetto bug that gives the picture its title. All he has is this sense of entitlement driven by his anger at what others have done to him. And things are complicated because others really have done horrible things to him.

Because he has no sense of genuine self worth, he cannot turn down offers of sex from women who have high status. The teenage girl on the make he can refuse with no difficulty but the woman he believes to be rich he cannot turn down.

As I say, it could have been a brilliant movie if the director, Volker Schlöndorff, was actually interested in making movies.

The aesthetics of manliness
It almost has a great opening. Unfortunately this opening takes place a whole eight minutes into the move. The film wastes 8 minutes on a  lot of set up it doesn't need. It should have started here.

That's not original. It's the opposite of original. But it's perfect. A guy is sitting in a bar and he's not content. We don't need to know why he isn't content. That can be backfilled as the story goes along. The period is indistinct. He isn't wearing the fedora but it's there.

And then he hears the high heels on the floor:

And now the story has started and we want to follow. The next shot is the shoes themselves and then the woman. That is how it should have gone.

Ah, well, there is lots of other good stuff in a movie that is less than the sum of its parts.

One of the best things about it is the way it treats technology. We constantly get references to technology that is gone or going. And that is important because technology plays a role in male life not unlike what art and fashion do in female life. If you are a real man, this is a thing of beauty and deep cultural significance:

Here is the cabin. Note the typewriter and the glass-louvered door and the bar. 

Oh yeah, there is woman here too. Played by Elizabeth Shue in a stunning bit of miscasting. This is galling given that the perfect woman to play the part, Gina Gershon, is also miscast in the same movie! Or did our director think he was being clever casting against type? Perhaps, on her first appearance, Gershon seems to be playing the femme fatale but she turns out to be the loyal and trusting girlfriend.

Anyway, back to the technology. What is so great here is that all this technology was still around in the 1990s when the movie came out. It was already old and it's time had come and gone but it was around as a reminder of another world. And that works magnificently because it creates the nostalgia the movie needs without being anachronistic.

By the way, the other perfect touch is that Woody Harrelson in lead role of Harry Barber wears suspenders. They were being worn in the 1990s and had just gone out of style.

Here is an old car but, again, a car that might plausibly still have been on the road in the 1990s.

That's got a Vinyl roof. One of those insane ideas that seemed to make sense at the time. They called these cars "personal luxury cars" when they were new in the 1970s and were once a much aspired to by men. As a symbol of failed masculinity, having our hero still driving one in the 1990s is perfect, especially as Harry Barber doesn't even own this car but has to borrow it from his girlfriend.

(And that, if I may go back to my introductory point, is the thing that makes neo noir really neo: in the era of classic noir, a detail like this would have made Barber a laughable wimp, not even a man.  In our era, we can understand the weak feeling a man may feel when his girlfriend earns more than him because lots and lost of men experience it.)

This is a great shot and part of what makes it that is the old phone and lamp.

Again, both these things were status symbols in the 1970s and something else by the 1990s and yet any man will see that they have lasting aesthetic glory.

I could go on but won't. Suffice to say that the art direction is a lot better than the actual direction. (The unsung hero here seems to be Jane B Johnson, who also worked on Ace Ventura, a few episodes of The Sopranos and a few episodes of CSI; Miami along with a lot of pretty sleazy sounding movies.)

Here is an odd directorial decision. It's one of the final scenes and Harry's hopes are collapsing when the movie suddenly shifts all its weight to the woman who has led him into this mess. They are both arrested in an industrial setting. She is arrested at the top of the stairs. Why at the top of the stairs? So they can make this pointless homage.

It makes a certain sense. This is a woman who lived a series of fantasies now having to face reality only she never will. You can see that here in her wild look as she heads down the stairs.

Only problem, nothing at all has been done to set up this moment so it comes out of the blue for no reason other than to show us the filmmaker respects Hollywood history.

Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I'm assuming you spotted the homage but perhaps you missed it. We're supposed to think of this famous ending from Sunset Boulevard.

She's ready for her close up.

And there is some more semi-stupid pomo crap that reminds us that it's all just a  movie. In case we forgot or something.

It could have been great.

I'd love to sit down a writing class with this still from the movie and tell them to write the screenplay that goes with it. They'd know they were supposed to write a neo-noir.

More neo noir next Thursday.

Scott Adams' brave new world Pt2

There are a few loose ends to sew up from yesterday.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

So writes Scott Adams. Things just drifted in that direction? The end result of centuries of western civilization is just a bizarre fluke?

The ancients largely shared Adams belief that human nature played a huge part in our moral character and likewise concluded that any approach to morality that ignored human nature could only be a monstrous travesty. Where Adams differs is the ease with which he accepts that our human nature creates a steady state.

But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.

As any feminist would (correctly) point out, men have had an awful lot to do with the form our society takes so it would be odd that we had somehow played a part in loading the game against ourselves.

We did no such thing of course.

I was an athlete when I was in my early twenties and I spent approximately five hours a day training. In addition to being a full-time athlete, I paid the bills by working two part time jobs: sailing instructor at a yacht club and bouncer at a trendy dance club. The number of women I met in those years who were deeply interested in men who behaved like unrestrained horny animals was stunning. (All of which suggests to me that men's natural instincts complement those of women better than Adams realizes.)

But even I in the face of all that temptation was smart enough to grasp at the time that this wasn't a good long-term prospect for happiness. And this isn't false humility: the twenty year old Jules was not exactly a genius when it came to weighing the respective merits of short-term gratification versus long-term happiness.

We have instincts and those instincts do restrict the options open to us. But even at twenty though I could see that while my free will was much less free than the nuns had taught me at high school because of natural desires and instincts, I also saw that human nature didn't restrict my options down to only one choice or even just a few choices. There were all sorts of options available to me. Most importantly, I could see that we have some influence on the person we become. We can choose to cultivate some desires over others just as we can shape and prune a tree to grow into a certain form.

(An aside: the degree to which women, especially young women, reciprocate male desires is painfully obvious these days. I live in the neighbourhood adjoining a university campus where the ration of women to men is something 60 to 40. Watching the girls from campus I can see many of them discovering the hard way that their need for male approval is so strong that they will repeatedly go to extraordinary lengths to get sex.)

Playboy versus Weiner
Adams' examples of Hugh Hefner and Anthony Weiner are interesting in that both made astonishingly bad choices and now have to live with the consequences. Both make good scandals in that they are rather pathetic characters we can enjoy laughing at without feeling a lot of pity for either. They are not interesting moral characters from whom we can reasonably draw general moral conclusions. There is one notable difference between the two however.

The thing that the ancients would have insisted on, and not a few moderns would agree, is that our character doesn't just happen to us. They would insist that our character is the consequence of habits that we partly allow to become ingrained and partly cultivate. They would say, for example, that the life habits Hefner developed between the end of his first marriage in 1959 and the start of his second marriage in 1988 had a lot to do with his failure at that second marriage.

They would insist that living a life is a lot like training for a sport. Yes, natural factors play a role. If you are four feet, eight inches tall, no amount of training is going to make you a great basketball player. But natural aptitudes only create opportunities that have to be developed. Hefner is a like a guy who spend his whole life training for some sport and when he was forced to abandon that sport discovered that he had failed to develop any broader interests to base his life on.

Hefner is also about a pure an example of Enlightenment morality as you will find.  He didn't think the almost three decades of character formation between the two marriages would affect the chances of his success. He thought that all that mattered was that he make a rational choice to get married.

Weiner is much more pathetic. It's not just that a man in his mid forties had such poor impulse control, it's that he got so little for it. He ruined his life for a sex scandal in which he didn't get any actual sex! Unlike Hefner who willfully cultivated his character, Weiner just sort of drifted into his.

When he was caught he acted like a guilty criminal. He always knew he was a loser; he thought he could hide it.

If you had the choice, better to be a Hefner than a Weiner. (Yes, I know better to be neither.0

But you may not have the choice. A certain amount of luck, a certain amount of talent and an awful lot of hard work and sacrifice went into making Hugh Hefner into Hugh Hefner. I might sneer at someone who becomes the world' greatest slide whistle virtuoso but I shouldn't fool myself into thinking that I could easily do the same. What Hefner achieved was not easy.

 But, whatever our limitations we can do better than Weiner. Any jerk could do what Weiner did.

Because it's summer: the last two smooth songs of the day

Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks and Here Comes the Rain Again by Eurythmics
Note: I'll probably keep doing song posts as time goes on but less frequently and less restricted as to period after this.

These songs have a few things in common and some rather more significant differences and I thought they would make a good wrap up.

Both feature lyrics that are about as purely lyrical as they can be. That is to say that both lyrics evoke emotions rather than trying to be about anything. The only way you'd ever figure out that "Edge of Seventeen" is about dealing with the death of people close to us is if someone told you. You'd have a better chance in figuring out that "Here Comes the Rain Again" has something to do with unrequited love but what exactly it has to say about unrequited love is anyone's guess.

Both singers share a similar sort of romantic persona. The difference is that this is the only persona that Nicks ever had while Annie Lennox assumed a bunch of different stances depending on the song, the point in her career and what was most likely to sell at the time. This is an old theme of mine: the authentic versus the cultivated self.

And what I'd like you to notice as you listen to the two is the difference in skill. Take enunciation. The Stevie Nicks song is often given as an example of a misheard lyric but it's actually a mis-sung lyric. Consider the opening phrase. The words are supposed to be, "Just like the white-winged dove". What Nicks actually sings is more like "Juss like duh wide wing of". Listen to the Eurythmics song and you can pick out every word. Lennox's enunciation, intonation and timing are always good. Nicks is always a sloppy performer.

Anything Stevie Nicks can do, Annie Lennox can do better. I'm not going to argue the point here but I'd like to suggest that Nicks' shortcomings as a singer are a likely consequence of pursuing a authentic rather than a cultivated self.

Stevie Nicks was, as I noted before, the essential role model for the smooth, clean girls of my generation. Annie Lennox's carefully cultivated talent made that role model tired and obsolete.


Authenticity is a romantic idea and it will never go away in a narcissistic culture like ours. To really grow up, however, is to leave authenticity behind and it was at this point in time that the smooth, clean girls pack up there stuff and leave campus and start really living their lives.







The series starts here.