What's Wrong?

[Reading News (Vamos- The Pixies)] I'm wondering if there is a way to un-self-conciously identify the influence certain types of music have on me as I write my posts. (Into the White- The Pixies). My computer is generally playing a randomly ordered playlist as I read the news and write and it just occurred to me that what I read and write is likely tainted/affected by the mood, genre, associated memories, etc... of the music. The thing is, although I may be influenced, I could never know what that influence really is as long as I am looking for it. Maybe differently though, I could say what I might choose to listen to if I were to create a playlist right now. After reading today's news- what would I choose to hear? No that's too much work. I would probably just go with a genre, maybe something folky. Maybe- speaking of folky, someone shoplifted a bunch of Bob Dylan CD's from work today. Just as I was getting ready to leave, a customer told me some guy just ran out the door with a bunch of CD's. I ran out into the parking lot to see him driving away- I got the license plate number- 3VAF103 (do you know him?) I've seen a lot of movies, it seems like it should have been so easy to chase the car down and jump on his hood or something. The funny thing is I couldn't catch him. (Do Ya- ELO) He just drove right off, no screeching tires, no crashes through a crowded market place with me barely hanging onto the hood and chicken cages and watermelons flying all over. We share a parking lot with a 24 Hour Fitness so we didn't go crashing through the plate glass windows and into a bank of tread mills where I did not get up from the crash and dust myself off. He didn't lift his head from the steering wheel, dazed and bloody then look up at me so I could punch him- knocking him out. Then there was no sound from his horn mixing with the gym's sound system (conveniently enough playing Back In Black) I didn't get to say "Looks like that didntwork out. That's weird. Odds are they won't go get the guy. They'll just put a warrant out for his arrest and wait until he gets pulled over for something. (Night Train- James Brown) At least he stole the Dylan CD's. Here's what else he had to choose from: the "new" Allanis Morissete, some guy named Zucherro (not into him at all), remix covers of Sly and the Family Stone songs, Amos Lee, and Jason Mraz. You gotta hand it to the guy for not stealing crap. But back to the criminal aspect of this, I wonder if he's worried at all. Will he be nervous when a cop just randomly pulls up behind him? Will he worry about being recognized? (Swing Low Sweet Cadillac- Dizzy Gillespie) Will he avoid our store forever or just lay low for a while? I don't wonder if he'll be put off stealing. Actually, I think he may be acutely aware of the possibility of being caught for a brief period, but then forget about it.

Segue

I wasn't such a good kid. I did a lot of bad stuff but I would only be concerned about it if there was the immediate possibility of being caught. I wasn't concerned about the consequences until they were staring me in the face. And even then, I didn't think there was anything anyone could do to me that was all that horrible, as far as a punishment- not because I wasn't doing things that could have had serious consequences but because the consequences would have been so far removed from the immediacy of my "badness" I would have seen them as a flaw in the "punisher" rather than a result of my actions. More specifically my "badness" was not who I was- I was good, but bad stuff was what I did. Even as things that I was doing were clearly wrong, I could not easily conceive of myself as bad, so did not think consequences were warranted. (Star- David Bowie) That is, even if I knew that, at some level, what I was doing was wrong, I did not think I was bad. I separated what I did from who I was by locating the moral standard of bad external to me. So for example, I might rationalize stealing street signs in a way that if I was caught, any punishment I faced was because others were not smart enough to see that it was okay for me to steal street signs. (All Because of You- U2) So, even though I may have done bad things, if I was not bad, a punishment levied against me was inappropriate. I might temporarily suffer for my ideas, but I would do so with resolve and steal any hope for victory from my enemies by refusing to change. That sounds really pathological and stupid.

That's not the whole story though. There were things I would feel guilty about, mostly relational "crimes." I think guilt is evidence of internal conviction of wrongness. It killed me when I learned/discovered/conceived of human interconnectedness and the nature of sin being an act against God and not just a violation of some ethereal moral rule. I don't think that's a generally accepted posibility. Not that people are actively opposing the way I understand human and divine connections, I think, though, it is not an idea people accept or live by. Even in the church, I think people understand sin more as a specific identifiable act rather than a condition. (Positively 4th Street- Bob Dylan)

The president has gotten a lot of guff about his whole policy in Iraq and the Middle East in general. It's no secret there were no WMD's in Iraq. The case for war was largely fabricated propaganda cynically created to support a pre-existing policy advocating an aggressive invasion of Iraq as articulated in a PNAC open letter to President Bill Clinton and the Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century paper. People have criticized the way he speaks in vague platitudes when specific and clear policies and goals are needed; some have said talk about bringing democracy to the Middle East through war in Iraq is really a bunch of "self-serving hypocrisy" since we actively support tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan. (Rudy Can't Fail- The Clash) All in all, the guff suggests that people are dying because of past lies and present incompetence.

All I have to say to that is, "Whatever, Hippies. You can have all your cogent arguments and moral reasoning, they're not the same as facts: we invaded a country, we totally kicked their assess, and they have their own new constitution that they're waiting to agree on. So some people are still dying, but if the president is confident enough to go on vacation during this time, then we should just trust that the 71 more Americans that died while he was mountain biking aren't that big a deal. And you know what else? We're building bridges. (Never- Cat Stevens).