The Music Of the Primes

A guitar can be considered both, a musical instrument as well as percussion. Therefore a man alone with a guitar can often make credible music. Percussion came first - the big bang - then another, and another (echoes)… Then came a more gentle sound, probably in the form of wailing. When the wailing adapted itself to the beat, music was born. Finally, there was the ‘word’ and history began in earnest.

Similarly, harmony is a blend of the secular and the spirit. For the spirit to soar, it needs the discipline of a steady pulse. There has been undue emphasis on just pulse lately. Sound has been allowed to become discordant - the din of people expressing disparate agonies - every nation divided, pulling both ways. Voices shouting slogans in short, bumper sticker bursts mimic the staccato of an incomplete drum set. It has become a lingering sign of our times - 'The WHO' destroying their instruments at the end of the set. Drumsticks tossed into the audience. What are they going to do with them except clobber each other?

We are regressing. The drums of war are heard all around. Even God has been roused from his lofty abode and is seen hurling lightning bolts mindlessly here and there. The ground under Haiti trembles, and over a year later we still cannot cope. Iran threatens, and we shrink from our duty to stop it. And today, Japan stands helplessly while watching a wall of water advancing.

America too watches helplessly as it is being consumed by a tsunami of debt. In New York, the most expensive musical ever is being kept off-line while the bodies drop from the wires.

Curious about Spiderman: The day before Glenn Beck quit the airwaves in New York, he delivered and impassioned endorsement of Spiderman. He claimed that it represents a huge step forward in live theater, akin (perhaps) to switching from watching black and white to color TV. He spent a full half hour praising this show, saying (and I paraphrase) it is definitely worth the price of an over-inflated ticket and even the added cost of a flight from anywhere.

I remember thinking that Beck might simply be honoring some contractual obligation. Or, did he really believed what he was saying? I was torn, but leaning towards the latter. For one thing, he had high praise for the script (and music). He warned that liberals - especially New York liberals - would not like the story. Ticket sales spiked immediately after Beck’s show. Then, other reviews started filtering in. These, as expected, were overwhelmingly negative.

It is entirely possible that a conservative narrative cannot survive on Broadway. In today’s hyper-partisan climate, even the skeletal music of Bono, it seems, cannot endure the drumming of the ideological fist.

While in many ways the staccato bursts of gunfire in the Middle East seem to dominate our own narratives, 'The WHO’s classic coda to “My Generation” comes immediately to mind. And with it, the final scene of smashed guitars and sparking amplifiers.

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Black Swan

In the early 70’s singer-composer Tom Rush had a minor hit with “Circle Game” in which he talks about the cyclical nature of life.

There are essentially two ways of divining the future. Both involve looking to the past. Most fortune-tellers look to the recent past to make pronouncements about tomorrow’s weather or stock market. Others make bold leaps, taking into consideration such things as the ‘Big Bang’ and the rise and fall of empires. Either approach risks not seeing something that may be critical: the sudden and unexpected appearance of a black swan.

Take the stock market for an example. Looking to the recent past will show that markets go up and down. As we are currently clawing back from a low, conventional wisdom would have it that we should be investing now rather than later (when the markets can be expected to be higher). This view, however, assumes that nothing fundamental has changed with the election of Barack Hussein Obama. It assumes that he either will fail to deliver what he has promised; or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. I do not fall into that category.

I continue to believe that something has fundamentally changed. The free market has been discredited and will no longer be given the breathing room that it needs to survive. Instead, we will see market manipulation by men whose judgment may be flawed by emotion and skewed by bias. As competing interest are likely to undercut any given strategy every step of the way, we will see abortive rallies and reversals which will in effect grind the markets into chaotic bits.

We will look back with bitter longing for the predictable cycles of yesteryear as we find ourselves entangled in the chaos of someone’s slipshod vision from which a new world order will be said to have emerged. No yardstick will yet exist to measure the efficacy of this Utopia. It will be what it is, and what somebody tells you it is. You see, you will no longer have a brain with which to judge these things for yourself.