Flower children

From a New York Times obituary for lead singer Rob Grill (H/T Ann Althouse) we learn that a couple of songwriters wrote a song and then recorded a demo and they gave a the dummy name "The Grassroots" to the band. When the song became a hit, they needed to find a band to be "The Grassroots". So the Grassroots were astroturf.

Or, to put it another way, they were the Monkees. Lots of bands were. There were so many Monkee-like bands in the late 1960s there is a point where you begin to suspect bands like the Grassroots were more significant culturally than anyone wants to admit. And they were.

You want social significance, there is a whole lot of it in this video. Start with Jimmy Durante introducing it. He's wearing a suit and fedora! The contrast with the band is amazing.





Why do I suspect these guys are so much more important than any serious critic would be willing to allow? Well, lots of reasons but starting with this line from their Wikipedia write up:

Between 1967 and 1972, The Grass Roots set a record for being on the Billboard charts for 307 straight weeks. They have sold over twenty million records worldwide.

The thing you need to know here is that Billboard charts are based on radio airplay not record sales. And that is important because most girls didn't buy records they liked between 1960 and 1980, they just listened to the radio.  And that was all you needed to do in the 1960s and 1970s because the really popular songs got played often enough that you didn't need to own them.

Where all this is going is that The Grassroots were one of those groups that girls liked and girls are the ones who drive popular music. Both girls and the music they like get short shrift from the mostly men who write about pop music in a serious fashion. But, consider this: 1967 to 1972 was the period when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were producing the music that gets written about but the group that set the Billboard record for being on the chart for 307 straight weeks was The Grassroots. 307 weeks is almost six years, that's to say they were on the charts constantly from 1967 to 1972. If you want to know what young girls of the time were really influenced by—who had the most profound cultural impact on the young adults of the 1980s that these girls grew up to be—you'd study The Grassroots a lot more and the Beatles and Rolling Stones a lot less.

Again, note the contrast between Jimmy Durante and lead singer Rob Grill above. You can see a real shift in ideals of masculinity. Jimmy Durante didn't tweeze and he drank whiskey.

Rob Grill on the other hand could be Rob Girll. His voice is sweet and supple. Even with sideburns he looks feminine.

He didn't write this song but catch this lyric:

Baby, I need to feel you inside of me
I got to feel you deep inside of me
Baby please come close to me
I got to have you now, please, please, please

That is not a man talking. It might be a man imagining what he wants to hear a woman say to him and that is probably how it started out in the lyricist's mind but as a pop song listened to by millions of virgin girls it became something else.

These were the flower children. They were too young to be part of the 1960s and 1970s. They heard pop music on the radio and imagined what they would become. They heard lyrics they only dimly understood and they'd project all sorts of fantasies onto them. The fantasies were dark and mysterious but they fit into ordinary lives, like most fantasies do

Oh yeah, before letting this go, Rob Grill with the sweet supple voice spent most of his life in pain because of a degenerative bone disease.

The thought for the day

I'm not blaming the victim, I am observing a universal rule: the common denominator in all of your failed relationships is you.
                                                         The Last Psychiatrist

It seems to me that that is a really good place to start thinking about virtue. You can easily lie to yourself about any other measure but counting is just counting. How many failed relationships do you have? Not teen romances, as I've said before, they are supposed to end. But since you were twenty, how many?

Of course, we could do it with anything. How many times have you handed your assignments in late? But relationships seem more important.

Here's a question, "What if there is no better measure of your worth as a human being than your ability to make a successful marriage?"

Suddenly it's a meme!

First Scott Adams:

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.

And now Naomi Wolf:

It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways.

Two or three news stories do not constitute a trend. So why do these two so want to believe there is a  trend when there is nothing that looks even vaguely like evidence that there is a trend?

I think that the real problem is that at least one guy that both Adams and Wolf used to admire (Anthony Weiner) has let them down badly and they need an explanation for this.

Why do they desperately need an explanation? Because they are members of the same generation as I am. They are members of a generation that has spent its entire existence moralizing everything. When we were teens, my generation firmly believed that people who liked disco music were morally inferior to people who liked rock music. Not surprisingly, we grew up into adults who believe that people who don't share our political views are morally inferior to people who do.

These are deeply held beliefs. If you took a time machine back to our high schools and walked around suggesting that disco fans were child rapists and anything else you could think of you'd get surprisingly little disagreement.

So when an adult of my generation is forced to acknowledge that someone on their side has serious moral failures, major cognitive dissonance happens. And something, anything at all, has to be dragged in to explain away the problem. In Adams' case that is human nature in Wolf's it is porn.

The birth of geek feminism?

Richard Dawkins believes I should be a good girl and just shut up about being sexually objectified because it doesn’t bother him. Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man! 
                                                      Rebecca Watson

Following the ongoing kerfuffle that has come about because of Rebecca Watson pointing out that it's morally offensive to be a creep, I kept thinking, "This has all happened before".

And it has. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women on the radical left found themselves alienated from the rest of the movement and ended up founding a feminist movement. I've written about this before so I won't repeat most of it but one example in particular struck me as apropos. At the 1968 National Conference for New Politics, Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman tried to put a resolution forward:

"Cool down little girl," the session chairman told her. "We have more important things to talk about than women's problems."

 And that is what is happening here again. Some male leaders in the atheist/skeptic/geek community are not taking women seriously because 1) these men are sexist and 2) they feel they have more important things to talk about.

Just in case these guys need some help focusing their minds, they might want to review the relative successes of the radical left and feminism after the feminists left and set up shop on their own.

I don't have a dogma in this fight but I do think a seeing a geek feminist movement take off would be a great thing. I think second wave feminism accomplished more good than harm and so I welcome the possibility of another movement. I also think that mainstream and radical feminism lost any real sense of purpose sometime during the Clinton administration, so some new kind of feminism that wasn't afraid to kick over the established piety of the now moribund second/third/whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-this-week wave would be great. The geek movement—whatever its faults—has a real life about it that we just don't find in feminism anymore. It also has a healthy dose of libertarianism in it. Finally, I think this is a really great point to get going on: it is morally wrong to be a creep and that is a point that needs to be made with force and a woman like Rebecca Watson is just the person to do it.

Go there Ms. Watson,  women need you!

In other news, water doesn't flow uphill

After years of obsessive research about what makes people happy, I have determined that self-discipline is the key to happiness.

It took years of research—obsessive research—to discover this new thing that one one ever thought of before.

The next big Catholic church scandal

I mentioned in an earlier post that the third world is one of the few places where significant numbers of young men are still entering the priesthood. That is true and there is a huge scandal just waiting to happen here.

We had a visit from a bishop from India recently that really drove the point home. Speaking to the congregation at the Basilica, his Grace made a clear and obvious connection between the money Catholics in North America send to his diocese and the number of Indian priests he sends to serve in the west.

The financial temptations here are significant and they will have their effect. At the very least, we will see an influx of young men to the west who are attracted by the chance to improve their economic situation rather than any genuine vocation. Once here, they will yield to other temptations. That's the best case scenario. It's not hard to imagine young men being pressured and perhaps forced into the priesthood for the financial betterment of their family or home diocese.

I know the notion that the third world might supply the west with the priests we no longer produce ourselves is tempting but that temptation opens the door to horrible abuses.

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.