Politics

Russell Brand v. John Lydon: What’s a Real Revolution?

I didn’t grow up listening to late 70s punk jams in my bedroom. So I never knew what made the Sex Pistols so iconic and edgy. As far as I could tell, the band’s music wasn’t so much the source of their success, but their message of youthful rebellion is what attracted legions of fans.

It’s not hard to captivate a band of conformists with a message of non-conformity. Impressionable teenagers and adults love to be told they are raging against the machine when, in fact, they are cogs in the system. Sex Pistols may still be regarded as an influential rock act, but the devil-may-care attitude they championed is now so commonplace that it’s boring.

That’s why it was a pleasant surprise to see John Lydon – known also by his stage name Johnny Rotten – recently rebuff the poisonous attitude engendered by his band. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Lydon berates comedian and movie star Russell Brand for his idiotic views on politics. Brand just released a book titled Revolution in the hopes of sparking an upheaval against the political establishment. Like all socialist utopians, Brand wants to smash capitalism to pieces and build an egalitarian promised land over its wreckage. His book is short on details for bringing about the so-called “revolution,” but is long on self-aggrandizement and mysticized blather.

Lydon is having none of it. He calls Brand’s fantastical notions of revolution “the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.” If Western youth went along with the Brand playbook for a new world order, Lydon warns, “What you’ll get is a rat pile of infestation. And indolence, laziness, and eventually you’ll all be evicted.” Taken to its sound conclusion, trying to change the political system through positive-based activism is just a euphemism for “A lifestyle of cardboard boxes down by the river.” “[Brand is] preaching all this from a mansion,” Lydon reminds everyone.

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Ben Bradlee and Mary Pinchot Meyer

R.I.P. Ben Bradlee:

Benjamin C. Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.

From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.

The most compelling story of Mr. Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history. …

Two deaths in 1963 altered Mr. Bradlee’s life. The first was Philip Graham’s suicide that August, after a struggle with bipolar disorder. Then in November, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. A fortnight before his death, the Bradlees had spent a glamorous weekend with the Kennedys at their new retreat in Middleburg, Va. On Nov. 22, 1963, “life changed, forever, in the middle of a nice day, at the end of a good week, in a wonderful year of what looked like an extraordinary decade of promise,” Mr. Bradlee wrote.

There was a third Bradlee was connected to from around that time that remains fascinating:

On a perfect October day in 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer—mistress of John Kennedy, friend of Jackie Kennedy and ex-wife of a top CIA man, Cord Meyer—was murdered in the rarefied Washington precinct of Georgetown. …

That October day rests in a corner of my mind, a vivid and mysterious curio. I pick it up from time to time and examine it in different lights. I have not figured it out, though I have theories. I thought of Mary Meyer’s murder again during the presidential campaign, when the drama of a black man, Barack Obama, and two women, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, in a race for the top places in American government took me back over a distance of time to a city that was then, for black people and for women, a different universe.

When Mary Meyer died, no one knew about her affair with John Kennedy, or about her ex-husband’s job managing the CIA’s clandestine services. In newspapers, Cord Meyer—wounded World War II hero and young idealist who helped found the United World Federalists—was identified as an author, with a vague government job. The papers noted that Mary, 43, was a Georgetown artist, born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, daughter of Amos Pinchot, the Progressive lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester. Her younger sister, Tony, was married to Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek, later of the Washington Post. It was Bradlee who identified the body at the morgue.

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Two-dimensional spectrum of political media

Update: An updated version of the chart can be found here.
This is an effort to chart where media outfits fall not only in terms of left-right slant, but their how restrained or bombastic they are.

Factors on the “Reasonable/Restrained – Insane/Bombastic” spectrum include:

  • What they cover: Covering trivial/overcovered matters makes you negative and covering important things pushes you towards positive.
  • Clickbait and listacles = negative.
  • Level-headedness of tone = positive.
  • Attack-style pieces = negative.

Factors on the “Left – Right” spectrum include studies of trust and bias, as well as self-description and consensus among those who suggest placement on the chart to me. You can pinpoint the “left-rightness” of an outfit by looking at where the first letter is, not the middle or last letter.

  

political-grid-the5

If you want something added or think something is out of place, leave a comment or send a tweet to @robert_mariani.

Thoughts on the NFL abuse scandal

The NFL is being forced to backtrack and install harsher penalties following the outrage of the video of Ray Rice knocking out his wife being released and Adrian Peterson being indicted for child abuse. While the attention has focused on both instances of abuse as well as the response of the NFL, I would like to consider the broader cultural implications of the story.

First, I think the outrage is driven by a certain cultural elitism. When Roman Polanski was arrested for raping a 13 year old child in Switzerland in 2009 after spending 30 years hiding from justice the public outrage was muted. In fact, numerous well known movie and television personalities expressed their support for him.  Despite this, there was no conversation about the moral failure of Hollywood. The NFL is being excoriated in the media, not for defending Rice and Peterson, but for not punishing them harshly enough. Part of the reason for this different treatment is that sports fans and players are seen as unsophisticated. They need to be told how to act while famous movie directors are the kind of people the media enjoys talking to at cocktail parties.

The second point is the blurring of the line between private and public. The NFL, not the police, is expected to punish Ray Rice for assaulting his wife. Or, if the law treats domestic violence too lightly. Then the focus should be on changing the law, not the NFL. That people, especially the liberal elite, are expecting a private actor to punish what is a public crime, especially because the public punishment failed, is somewhat ironic. Especially so because it contributes to the conflation of public and private, a distinction I imagine they would assert they want to keep.

Lastly, from the target of the outrage and the response we can infer several things. First, private monopolies are extremely sensitive to public pressure, though the NFL is especially so because it is in the entertainment business. The NFL changed their domestic abuse policy after the outrage and pressured Adrian Peterson into not playing.  Second, public monopolies such as the police force are not responsive to public pressure. There has been no additional attempt to prosecute Ray Rice in spite of the outrage, though that is probably a good thing as we do not want justice to be swayed by public opinion. Third, those arguing for additional sanctions on Peterson and Rice implicitly understand the marginal benefits of targeting their outrage at the NFL over the justice system.