Note: Although my copy of this album is the 2005 Deluxe Edition, with bonus live tracks, demos, and DVD, I will only be reviewing the "main album," i.e. the remastered tracks recorded in 1983. I just don't want to get into a deep comparison of the original album versus the Deluxe Edition. I'd like to focus on the songs and the music, rather than production value comparisons, etc.
The release of Fates Warning's third studio album, Awaken the Guardian, represents the moment they truly came into their own as a band. A fair criticism of their early work is that it was too derivative of other metal bands of the time, most obviously Iron Maiden. Fates Warning, though, was from the beginning a more progressive metal act. On Awaken the Guardian, they finally embraced their most progressive tendencies, allowing themselves to craft long songs with complex time and thematic changes, and make music fearlessly.
As is the case with all of Fates Warning's work, a casual and uncritical listener will tend to miss the details, where much of the band's genius is found. If all you're prepared to hear from the band is thrash metal, then that is pretty much all you will hear from Awaken the Guardian. If you're like me, on the other hand, and you're a composition junkie, this album is so rich and fertile that you'll be discovering new elements to the songs for literal decades.
I could write my whole review of the album from the perspective of the long-time Fates Warning fan that I am, expounding on the fact that Awaken the Guardian is probably the most beloved album in the band's body of work. I could praise its classic songs, "Prelude to Ruin" and "Guardian," and heap praise on original singer John Arch's powerful and unique voice and lyrics. But that's been done so many times already, and besides, what stands out to me about this album is not its position as a classic of the genre or as a testament to the "band that might have been, if only John Arch had stayed..."
No, what stands out to me about this album today, 33 years later, is how ground-breaking its compositional elements remain.
Take the album's remarkable opener, "The Sorceress," for example. Although it is not remembered as a Fates Warning classic, its innovations are numerous and breathtaking. Most specifically, "The Sorceress" introduces us to Jim Matheos' highly unique approach harmony, with which he courts dissonance in unconventional ways, yet remains comfortably within a consonant framework. (If that sounds weird, it's because it's the best way I can describe what is a great artist's particular compositional "stamp.") At various points throughout this track - and elsewhere on the album - the instruments take a break from classic metal power chords and riffing to play harmonies, but not as melodic lines so much as three-person chord outlines. The effect is at once heavy and spacious, and no other metal act was doing it at the time. Then, as the listener adjusts to the new-found Fates Warning guitar "sound," beloved original singer John Arch hits us with innovations of his own: layered, contrapuntal vocal tracks that display both the virtuosity of his voice and his own flair for composition.
Awaken the Guardian also introduced Fates Warning fans to something else that has remained a staple of the band's work ever since: The introduction of, and heavy reliance on, clean-toned and acoustic guitars. Sure, plenty of bands have played clean, and then played dirty; plenty of bands have mixed acoustic passages into songs; but Fates Warning is the first band I am aware of that has played a heavy song all the way through with one guitar playing clean and the other playing dirty. This, too, goes back to Matheos' complicated harmonic ideas, many of which cannot be expressed clearly with distorted electric guitars. By keeping his own guitar clean, he was able to introduce a level of harmonic complexity that other metal bands of the time just couldn't touch.
And it's not jazz, as so many other progressive bands find themselves when they get complex. Matheos' origins were always in classical guitar, so his harmonic approach reflects that direction. For Fates Warning, "progressive" doesn't mean a mish-mash of musical styles exploding in all direction. Rather, Fates Warning adds layers of classical harmonies to an ostensibly metal framework to create "vertical" rather than "horizontal" complexity, if you will.
Anyway, the point is, Awaken the Guardian established this new writing approach as the backbone of the band's work, and set the stage for everything that was to come over the next three decades.
The band's transition from "old-school metal band" to "progressive metal pioneers" would not come without casualties. In this case, the band bid farewell to original guitarist Victor Arduini, and welcomed a player who was better-suited to the band's new direction. The incredible Frank Aresti proved to be up to the task. Aresti came to the band with a whole new arsenal of licks and approaches. His style simply fit the band's newer direction better, and his playing on Awaken the Guardian is testament to that; from the intricate acoustic interplay between he and Matheos to his lighting-fast and innovative lead work, Aresti's performances on the album demonstrate that he was up to the task and then some.
So: As the band's first real artistic declaration of who and what they were, Awaken the Guardian proved to be the gateway drug for old-school metal fans to Fates Warning. For fans who came to the band later on, as I did, the album serves as a fascinating window into the sounds and structures at the heart of the music.
In my bid to win Feel-Good Facebook Post of the Year, I wrote:
I was born in the United States of America during the last half of the 20th Century. My parents were middle-class people who loved me and who taught me important life-lessons growing up. They made me do chores and they taught me to read and do arithmetic before kindergarten. They gave me encouragement as I pursued sports, arts, and academics, and most importantly they had enough financial means to ensure that I never had to go without while I was growing up, and well into my university years. Furthermore, I lived in a community that had an extremely low crime rate, in which I could walk a mile to school or ride my bike to the park and hang out alone for a few hours, all without having to worry about falling victim to something terrible. I have never experienced any natural disasters as long as I've lived. Every medical event I have ever experienced is treatable by modern medicine. I have never been in a war zone.
By global standards, I have experienced the upside of odds quite a bit less-favorable than those of the Powerball Lottery. If you're reading this, then chances are, so have you.
I just want to put that out there.
Gee, whiz! Touching, right? Unfortunately, I was wrong about the odds. David R. Henderson of EconLog pointed out that it is actually less likely to win the Powerball jackpot than it is to be one of the 220-some-million middle class Americans currently alive, compared to the estimated total number of human beings who have ever lived in any age at any socio-economic class.
I still think I'm a lucky guy, but I'm astounded by the remoteness of the possibility of winning a major lottery like Powerball. Next time you think about buying a ticket, remember that winning is actually less likely than your ever having been born in the first place.
When news first hit that Chris Cornell was joining with the instrumentalists from Rage Against the Machine to form a new band, unlike most other people I knew, I was incredibly disappointed.
Chris Cornell has been one of my favorite musicians since I first discovered his music. While others gravitated to the sound of his voice - a remarkable voice the likes of which has never existed in rock music before or since - what always stuck with me about Cornell was his compositional sense. His melodies are complex, his sense of rhythm is complex, his lyrics are haunting. His approach to writing songs involves some very unique approaches that I have studied closely and tried to absorb to the greatest extent possible.
Meanwhile, the guys from Rage Against the Machine have always been vocal critics of musical complexity, exalting in their dedication to total simplicity. Early interviews with Tom Morello revealed him to be a judgmental, pretentious man who looked down his nose at anyone who wanted to play complex music. It wasn't enough that he had his own thing going on, he scornfully referred to more complicated music as "masturbatory."
So for me, it was like pairing Bach with Ja Rule. But, I admit that I was curious. So on my day off, I made a trip to the local CD store, where at the time they had CD players loaded with new releases that customers could listen to before buying. I found the Audioslave station and gave the CD a chance.
Immediately, I was struck by the simplistic riffs, the amount of compression applied to Cornell's vocals, and the general absence of everything that I loved about Soundgarden. The truth is, I didn't really give the album a fair chance. I let my disappointment cloud my judgment, pressed "stop" and moped out of the store.
That remained my opinion of Audioslave, the band and the album, until a few years later when a friend bought me tickets to see Audioslave live in concert as a birthday present. I decided that I had better catch up on what the band had been doing since I walked out of that CD store all those years ago. By then, the band was touring in support of their second album, and had a couple of major hits on rock radio.
The concert ended up being great, really great. I was impressed. It was finally time to give Audioslave the album a second, fairer chance.
Then, as now, I heard an album that is good, overall. Certainly not as strong as Soundgarden's material, nor as strong as Cornell's solo work, but it occupies a unique sonic space in Cornell's oeuvre.
The simplicity of the instrumentation is certainly palpable. There is a lot of sonic space in all of the songs. Morello, for his part, had already used up all of his fast licks by 2001, so the guitar work is certainly nothing to shake a stick at. The bass work is relatively flat - it lacks the kind of spark that a more knowledgeable bassist could give music like this. The drums are well engineered and sound nice, but they may as well be a drum machine.
Meanwhile, the vocals, for the first time in Cornell's career, show real signs of struggle. The album's initial track (and initial single), "Cochise," is supposed to be a hard-hitting, bellowing metal song. But the riff is lifted directly from Led Zeppelin, and the vocals are a far, far cry from "Slaves and Bulldozers." The album's other major single, "Like A Stone," is a much quieter effort, one that would ideally give Cornell a chance to display the sometimes stunning softer side of his voice. Instead, his vocals sound nasally, bored, disaffected.
All that is to say that Audioslave is decidedly not an album of great performances.
What redeems the album is the quality of the songwriting. As poorly executed as the studio version of "Like A Stone" might be, the melody is absolutely infectious. The bridge is tender, with a refreshingly elegant chord progression. The song works - the live performances were testament to that fact. Its sister song, "I Am the Highway," is even better. In fact, I've never met a person who has heard that song and hasn't ended up with it stuck in their head.
Other songs on the album, like "Set It Off," give us hints of the Audioslave that would eventually develop over their tenure. There, we finally get our mix of Cornell's screaminess and Rage Against the Machine's R&B-tinged hard rock. This is the band that would, years later, pen songs like "The Original Fire," songs that represent a truly unique take on good old fashioned hard rock.
Occasionally, I dig this album out of my collection and give it a spin. Its best moments make me smile, but at the end of the day I have to admit that for the most part I forget most of the songs as soon as they're over. I'm glad that Audioslave became a better band as they continued to play together, because if they had released only their self-titled debut, they would have been as forgettable by grunge god standards as The Talk Show.
Prince has a lot of albums, and thus a lot of album openers. For my money, though, none of them are quite as astounding as the title track on his 1985 album Around the World in a Day. Musically, the song alludes to the Middle East, to South Asia, and, inexplicably, Prince's unique brand of 80s dance-rock. His voice is gritty, powerful, as soulful as ever. The combination of synth sounds, world music sounds, acoustic guitars, and drum machines creates a powerful musical onslaught. And, probably most importantly, it is a thoroughly creative song the likes of which has never been replicated by Prince or anyone else.
It's hard to write a totally unique song. But this was Prince coming into his own as an artist, and such things were coming relatively easy to him at the time. Or so it seems to us fans.
As I see it, the Around the World in a Day album is noteworthy for two main reasons. The first is the amount of space that Prince left in the songs on this album. Where 1984's Purple Rain was a complex onslaught of tracks and overdubs working together, this album feels much more spacious. The end result of that decision highlights the other aspect of this album that I love: the arrangements. God, what an amazing job Prince and his band did arranging all the instruments on this record. His previous work was certainly well-orchestrated, but the decision to leave more open space in the music required him to make each note matter a lot more. Lucky for us, he rose to the challenge.
Never is this more apparent than on the album's smash hit, "Raspberry Beret." Fundamentally, the song isn't particularly genius. It's catchy, it's nice, but stripped down to its fundamentals it's not a really special song. What really makes it wonderful is the bobbing, weaving, melody played by the synths and guitars throughout the song. They outline the chord progression without playing it outright. The song has a lot of lyrics, a lot of melody, and so the choice to sing over the top of a completely different melody played by the instrumentalists is different - and especially so, considering the amount of space in that song and throughout the album. The only way to make it work is with a razor-precise arrangement. Prince delivers the goods. That's why they call him a genius.
All these years later, it's also somewhat important to point out the difference between the album's reputation and what it actually sounds like when you listen back to it now. Wikipedia, for example, states that the album genres are "neo-psychedelia," "pop rock," and "psychedelic pop." The songs, however, are concise, and not particularly indulgent, especially coming from an artist who has, at various times released 12-minute songs, set human orgasms to music, worn seatless pants on stage, etc. Even the stranger moments are moments, not of psychedelia, but of experimentation with sampling and tape-editing. The roots of that experimentation represents the evolution of R&B music, not psychedelia at all.
But "psychedelia," when used by music commentators, is a more pretentious word for "trippy." Hence, anything that seems different or experimental can be labeled "psychedelic," as can thoroughly banal music that happens to be associated with drug use. It's widely acknowledged that drug use was not a major part of the Prince oeuvre or creative process, much to the chagrin of the Rolling Stone world. He even attests to this fact in "Pop Life," when he sings "Whatcha puttin' in your nose? Is that where all your money goes?" But since Around the World in a Day is such a different Prince record, they had to give it some kind of label that would stick, and some music fans won't allow modern music to be anything other than sex and drugs.
Hence, psychedelia...
Instead, I'd classify the album as simply mature. The sensible arrangements and instrumental restraint provide hints of the Prince that was to be just a few years later, while the eclectic sounds and willingness to experiment remind us that this is an artist who is never content to rest on his laurels. Let's face it, Prince had every reason to make his 1985 album a Purple Rain II. If he had, he would have made many more millions. Luckily for us, Prince has artistic integrity and a will to push himself beyond our expectations, and his expectations, sometimes resulting in something that goes platinum thirteen times... and other times resulting in something more refined, for the people like me.
In a recent post over at Sweet Talk Conversation, I argue that at least some knowledge is manifest, and that we can leverage that fact to help de-politicize knowledge, maybe making the world a slightly better place in the process. Here's a quick slice:
Then why would I be so pedantic as to differentiate between political and apolitical knowledge when, as must be clear enough by now, Gurri’s posts have been specifically about the trust we place on the knowledge we gain from others?
One reason is that doing so provides us with a potential remedy for the problems he has identified. Knowing that an honest truth-seeker can, in highly politicized moments, step back, out of the realm of political knowledge, and into the more reliable world of direct observation provides us with an important check on the undue influence of politics and motivated reasoning.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, read the whole thing.
Last week, I wrote about leaning into declines, and picking up the pace during inclines, to maintain or improve running speed. Today I'd like to tackle another aspect of running: endurance.
Faithful Stationary Waves reader CS recently asked me, "How do you run so far?" Like many people, CS doesn't have a problem running, say, three miles. But when it comes to something more like an eight-mile run, he's not confident that he could actually do it. I, on the other hand, consider an eight-mile run not much more difficult than a three-mile run. Other than the time commitment - and for diabetics, some minor blood sugar management considerations - eight miles don't challenge me more than three miles do.
Now, some of this relates to what's known as "running economy," or the efficiency with which a runner's form propels him forward. Improving running economy requires meticulous effort in some cases, and a great deal of experience in all cases. (For a more in-depth look at running form, see here and here.)
Still, assuming there are no obvious "form issues," it's possible to get over the "mental hump" that keeps people like CS from running longer distances, but it sometimes requires a little mental trick.
If you can run from A to B, you can run from B to C
It Works Like This
Start with a distance you know you can run. Suppose you're like CS, and you know you can run three miles. In that case you'll want to choose a location that is exactly three miles from your starting point, and run there. When you get there, turn around and run back.
I can sense your skepticism, so let me explain why this works so well. If you run three miles in any direction, then you'll have to travel the three miles from that endpoint back to your starting point somehow. Chances are, you'll be tired of running (having never run that far before) and will want to get back home as soon as possible, so that you can do... pretty much anything other than running. You won't have any form of transportation readily available to you, other than your feet, so that means the quickest way out of your predicament is to... run back home. Congratulations: You just ran six miles.
Is this kind of a dumb, cheap trick? Yes. Does it still somehow work? Yes. Yes, it does.
One of the reasons I think it works is because retracing your steps always seems somehow shorter than setting out initially. You're already familiar with the scenery, the puddles you saw along the way, the corner coffee shop with the blue thing on its street sign, the overpass where you nearly fell on your face, etc. So, when you see all this scenery in reverse, for some reason it feels like, "Oh, I was just here. I can't believe I only have two miles left..."
Another reason it works is because even if it fails, it improves your endurance. That is, if you "only" make it to the halfway point and then turn around and walk the whole way back, then you just increased your workout from a "three-mile run" to a "three-mile run, followed by a three-mile walk." That still improves your endurance.
Fans of my guitar playing will be pleased to know that I will be playing a short set with my band, Kraw, at Tomcat's West. Get all the details for the event here.
Probiotics As A Treatment For Both Kinds Of Diabetes
A rather remarkable article in the Daily Mail reports that diabetic rats who were given a particular kind of probiotic experienced something amazing:
Professor March's team engineered a strain of lactobacillus, a human probiotic commonly found in the gut, to secrete a peptide - a hormone that releases insulin in response to food entering the body.
The scientists then gave a group of diabetic rats the probiotic in pill form for a period of 90 days.
They monitored the rats' blood glucose levels, comparing their findings with a control group of rats, not exposed to the probiotic pill.The team found those rats given the new drug had blood glucose levels which were up to 30 per cent lower than those rats not given the modified probiotic treatment.
But another finding proved just as exciting.
The scientists found the cells in the upper intestine of the diabetic rats given the treatment were converted into cells that acted similarly to pancreatic cells - which in healthy people secrete insulin to maintain and balance glucose levels.
Professor March, from the university's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, said: 'The amount of time to reduce glucose levels following a meal is the same as in a normal rat, and it is matched to the amount of glucose in the blood.
'It is moving the centre of glucose control from the pancreas to the upper intestine.'
Before you run out and buy up all the yogurt in town, though, keep the following in mind:
It is especially important to note that the probiotic used in the study is different to the probiotic dairy products that are already widely available.
So what we have are preliminary results that show a chemically engineered version of a human probiotic compound could actually mimic the effect of beta cells. At least, that is what has happened on preliminary tests in rants. This looks like a good therapy to keep an eye on because there is virtually no downside to ingesting probiotics, so even a small effect could easily meet a patient's risk threshold.
What this latest version of the "artificial pancreas" consists of is an insulin pump, a continuous glucose monitor, and a smart phone app, all integrated together. Scientists have developed a robust predictive algorithm that reads more than just your blood sugar data to make better predictions about an individual's blood glucose levels, then provides improved warnings and guidelines via the app to help the patient better manage their condition.
Do I think this will help? Yes. Do I think this is an important development for the treatment of diabetes? Yes.
Do I think it is worthy of being called an artificial pancreas? No, sorry. Not even close.
I've met a lot of runners who have been running 9- and 10-minute miles for years. They simply don't understand how I can pretty much stop running for nine months straight and then go out and run a 5K totally cold, but still at a 7:00-per-mile pace or faster. You could argue that part of this is "talent" or "genes," but I firmly believe the real explanation is experience.
Experience teaches you to make small adjustments to your running form, speed, cadence, or posture depending on the landscape or situation in which you find yourself. If you never vary the length of your stride, for example, then you'll slow way down when you have to run uphill. The reason for that is pure physics, not athletic ability. So, through the years, people like myself have figured out that taking shorter strides uphill - and longer strides downhill - makes an enormous difference to your running speed without costing you very much energy.
There are many such examples which, when taken together over the course of a run, turn me into a seven-minutes-a-mile guy even on my bad days, while others struggle. If they knew all these techniques, they'd probably be seven-minutes-a-mile runners, too.
So today, I'll share one such strategy, learned from experience, that I had to use during my run this morning.
The Setup
I went for a run along a running path today. About halfway through the run, the path went under an overpass so that runners and pedestrians wouldn't have to cross a busy local street. But the running path was dug out underneath the road - the road itself did not change in elevation at all. So, it was a dip. I wasn't running under an overpass, I was running on an underpass.
Ordinarily, as you run over a landscape like this, your speed will naturally increase during the downhill section since it requires less energy to run downhill. Then, when you hit the uphill slope, you'll likely slow down a bit. The problem here is that when you reach the top of the hill, you almost always settle into a pace that was much slower than you were running before you came across the dip in the first place. So you slow down more than you otherwise would have.
Dig my MS Paint skills
A lot of runners - especially novices - lose a lot of energy, speed, and momentum when they hit little dips like this. They think the downhill slowed them down a bit, and then they returned to their old pace. Usually, they're still quite a bit behind their original pace.
This problem has a simple remedy.
First, Lean Into The Downhill
You probably already know this, but if you don't, here it is, briefly:
As you run downhill, lean forward. Don't just "lean forward," I mean really lean into it. You want to push your center of gravity far in front of your feet, so that your legs have to struggle to keep yourself from falling over. You should almost feel like you're losing control.
This reduces the amount of energy required to propel your body forward, because gravity is doing most of the work. You're not really expending any additional energy - in fact, you're probably expending less - but your body is moving a lot faster. The result is a quick burst of speed that continues even for a few steps after the decline flattens out.
Like I said, though, you probably already knew this.
Push The Uphill Hard
But the trick that will really help you here is one that sounds kind of counter-intuitive. What you have to do is push yourself pretty hard on the uphill.
Most people want to conserve their energy, so they don't mind taking things a little easier uphill. That's fine, as far as it goes, but like I said above, you'll often find that you don't return to your original pace, even after you've climbed the hill.
Instead, what you need to do when you hit the uphill is lean forward again and pick up the pace to something substantially faster than your original pace. Keep that pace all the way up the hill, then just as you reach the top, give yourself one additional burst of speed over the crest.
In doing so, you will have pushed your body harder than you wanted to, and naturally you will have climbed the hill faster than you otherwise would have. But most importantly, as you return to a more standard pace, you'll settle into something much closer to the pace at which you were originally running. In fact, you might even settle into a faster pace.
Conclusion
Keep in mind, this one tip is not going to revolutionize your running times. Great runners are made from many such tips all working together. But anything you can do to maintain a good pace and improve running economy will help.
I've been running a lot more lately, so I aim to share more of these tips as I remember them. It's been a long time since I've run competitively, and even longer since I've actively coached anyone. But I've spent a lot of time developing running-related knowledge and experience, and it would be a waste to just sit on that. Hopefully, some of my readers will be able to benefit from this.
Partly due to the fact that rock music is aging, and partly due to the fact that I myself am aging, over the years it has become progressively more difficult to find new music worth getting excited about. Sometimes I feel like I've more or less "heard it all." So it is a real treat to discover a new band that actually excites me. Even better if that band is really a new band, not just aging classic rockers lining up in a new configuration.
Twelve Foot Ninja is without question the best new band I've heard in a long, long time. Having recently heard the new single from their second, forthcoming album on the radio, I hastened to purchase the band's 2012 debut, Silent Machine. Somehow I had missed it when it was initially released. Problem corrected.
Silent Machine presents us with a series of songs that fuse together some of the best elements of recent musical trends in a way that doesn't feel like a mash-up. Right out of the gate, the album's debut track "Coming for You" hits hard with some screaming and some heavy riffing. Then, in a moment, it's gone and replaced with - wait for it - a latin jazz feel. The verses slowly build up to a pop sound, a pop rock sound, and finally metal again for the chorus. And yet, the entire track is just a few seconds longer than three minutes.
Keyboards, tempo changes, 8-string guitars... it would be tempting to call Twelve Foot Ninja a progressive metal band. But that wouldn't be quite right. First of all, the songs are two concise and radio-ready for the progressive genre.
And second, vocalist Nik Etik's smooth and engaging voice is the voice of a genuine pop singer, and that is not progressive metal fare. He has a low voice, a rich, buttery baritone that doesn't pretend to be a tenor, like most rock baritones do. He's comfortable in his lower register, evoking shades of Faith No More's Mike Patton and I Mother Earth's Bryan Byrne at his very best. But then the meticulous vocal harmonies rise behind his voice, and we hear passages that - at least in terms of vocal performance - could rival any pop album on the charts.
Etik's remarkable voice is so refreshing for a hard rock album in a world where rock vocalists either find themselves whooping and hollering in an attempt to be Chris Cornell or just giving up on melody altogether and making that odd "screaming noise" so popular among hard rock and metal bands these days. Indeed, his voice is part of the "glue" that emulsifies the broad and sudden musical changes happening throughout all of the band's songs.
The other ingredient to that "glue" is the always-everywhere-amazing drumming of Shane Russell, who somehow manages to find all the common rhythmic threads between the quiet pop sections, the heavy "djent" sections, the jazzy bits, and especially the transitions in between. It is so rare to find a percussionist capable of following along with diverse rhythms and musical feels in a cohesive way. Plenty of drummers can switch styles from song to song, but only a select few can do it within the same song. Russell proves that he's a true rarity in the music world.
Meanwhile, guitars, keyboards, and bass engage in an absolute onslaught of musical diversity. They hit us with soft pads and acoustic guitars, moments before finding the perfect 8-string heavy riff. They hit us with haunting, 60s-style echoing clean tones that rise into weaving contrapuntal lines. They always manage to find the right combination of sounds to support the lyrics, the sound of Etik's voice, leaving space for the vocal harmonies. The arrangements are perfect, simply perfect.
Of course, in today's world of digital musical manipulation and studio tricks, it's easy to wonder if a band like this is just another in a long line of "studio bands" destined for brief YouTube or Kickstarter fame. Or, are they real musicians? Can they deliver the goods?
Twelve Foot Ninja answers this question handedly with the bonus tracks on Silent Machine's "Bonus Edition," featuring the two acoustic tracks "Manufacture of Consent" and "Apocalypstik." Here, the band has nowhere to hide. Aurally naked, with nothing but acoustic instruments to convey the Twelve Foot Ninja sound, the band proves that everything they do on the main album tracks can be done in their (proverbial) living room with acoustic instruments.
But that's the thing - in today's world, it takes no small amount of daring to put your band out there like that, raw and vulnerable to careful critique. Daring is precisely how I would describe Silent Machine in its entirety. Presenting us with a band that is unafraid to explore complexity, rawness, modern melodies, djent heaviness, and more, Silent Machine is beyond a doubt the best and most exciting album from a new band I have heard in years.
Rest assured, I will be following this band closely, and so should you.
Over the weekend, the song "Common People" by Pulp came on the radio. It tells the story of a working class man who meets a rich debutante love interest who "wants to live like common people." Through the course of the song, the man takes her around town and tries to explain to her what it's like to have nothing, doomed to "drink and dance and screw because there's nothing else to do."
When analyzed in isolation, this song is really strange. It is essentially a rant against a woman who doesn't exist. The songwriter made up a character based loosely on someone he met briefly at a bar, and then subsequently invents a set of beliefs or thoughts possessed by that character. He finds those made-up, fictional beliefs deplorable, and so he writes a song about how disgusting they are. But remember: he made the whole thing up. So who is he ranting against?
Details on the song's subject matter as described at Wikipedia reveal that the song's inspiration was a woman who the principle songwriter met at a bar and attempted to sleep with, suggesting that the song is actually a revenge fantasy twice-over: Once because he disparages a woman who would not sleep with him, and twice by striking at the upper-crust people who look down their noses at commoners. But again, the song isn't actually about real people with real beliefs, it's about imaginary people with imaginary beliefs, and the anger the songwriter feels toward those imaginary things.
And what fan could actually enjoy lyrics of this kind? Only someone who hates such imaginary people equally. But, importantly, they don't exist. So what exactly is going on here?
It's too weird to ignore, so I had to think about it more carefully, and what I realized seemed remarkable. What if I told you the whole thing was a kink?
Uptown Girls And Downtown Men
In cruder language, "Common People" is about a man who meets a spoiled rich girl who wants to experience life as a regular person, so he screws her and then chews her out for never really being able to understand the plight of the poor. If you accept the premise of the story long enough to absorb its social commentary, you're still left with one loose end: Why did he have sex with her? It doesn't seem to be relevant to the social commentary at all, so it must mean something else.
In my mind, there are two possibilities.
The first one is quite unpleasant: he had sex with her as a form of symbolic rape. The working class young man can't change his station in life, and he can't show her what it's really like to be poor and miserable; but he can screw her, and in the context of the story, that event is critical to the plot. ("I want to sleep with common people like you.") This one act is the "hero's" lone means of achieving control, and so he does it. I reiterate, this is a made-up story; this sort of thing absolutely does not happen in real life. So, on one level it could be analyzed as a rape fantasy. Yechh.
I think it very well might be a rape fantasy. However, I don't think that's the only way to interpret the song, so let's consider a more charitable alternative.
As I was trying to wrap my head around this rather strange song, I started thinking of other popular songs that depict a poor male commoner having sex with a rich young debutante. The first two that came to mind were Van Halen's "Beautiful Girls" and Steely Dan's "I Got the News."
The cynicism in "I Got the News" isn't apparent until the bridge, but lyricist Donald Fagen gives us a quick glimpse in the first verse when he sings, "Daddy is a rare millionaire, I don't care. Yeah, you got the muscle, I got the news." In the bridge, he simply insults her intelligence. This song might, too, be a sort of cross-class rape fantasy; Fagen might never be a rare millionaire himself, but he can still canoodle with the daughters of industry. Still, the rest of the lyrics are unabashedly fun-loving. Fagen isn't hostile to his interlocutor, he's thrilled. The point of the song is to describe joy, not rage. Maybe his insults are just teasing in good fun. Some of the lyrics are even cutely tender.
"Beautiful Girls" is much different. David Lee Roth doesn't express any disdain for his love interest. She's rich and he "ain't no man of the world," but that's alright with him. He's just happy to be at the beach with a drink in his hand, on the prowl for beautiful girls. I'm struck by how much more pleasant and happy Roth's perspective is, compared to the others. Note also that his spoken-word during the outro implies that she turned down his advances. ("Whoa, whoa! Hey, where you goin'...?")
Billy Joel offers us a more traditionally romantic take on the idea with his 1983 classic "Uptown Girl." Joel puts the woman in control of the story. Sure, "she's been living in her white bread world," but she has "hot blood" and "now she's looking for a downtown man." Joel is more than happy to provide her with what she's looking for. As for anything long-term, Joel's not hedging his bets, but "maybe sometime when my ship comes in" he'll win her heart. In any case, poor boy meets rich girl, canoodling ensues.
All that is to say that we have many examples here, many different takes on the same basic plot premise. Working class boy meets spoiled rich girl, attempts to have sex with her with varying levels of success. It's always the boy who's out of his league, even when the boy wants nothing to do with rich folks. This isn't a Jane Austen novel; the women aren't clamoring to "marry up" in order to save themselves from poverty and obscurity. Consequently, the stories aren't depressing like an Austen novel, either. They're sexy. The way the encounters play out provides an interesting look into the psychology of the specific lyricist in question, but the common strand is there, and the glue holding it all together is sex.
I'm going to call it the Uptown Girls Principle. The question is, why do people keep writing songs about this?
It's Not Just Music
Maybe it's not just pop songs. Maybe human beings have some kind of a "dumb heiress" kink. If so, we'd certainly see it more places than just a few pop songs from the second half of the 20th Century. Do we?
...too easy?
To answer this question, let's turn to literature. The publication of D.H. Lawrence's infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover takes us back to 1928. While the novel explores various themes including class conflict, mind/body, and the nature of love, it is more notorious for being scandalously sexual. Were it merely a book about class, there wouldn't be any point to including all that gratuitous sex. But that sex is integral to what Lady Chatterley's Lover is as a work of literature, and thus we find a rather poignant example of the Uptown Girl Principle.
Two years prior to the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a German author named Arthur Schnitzler published a remarkable novella entitled Tramnovelle. Today, Tramnovelle isn't particularly well known, but film buffs know it as being the story upon which the Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut is based. (Note: I have a HUGE film analysis of Eyes Wide Shut in a draft on my blog - it is long over-due and I'm anxious to publish it, but for now...) The protagonists in Tramnovelle aren't exactly poor, but they're not as rich as the people who frequent the orgies described in the book, either. It is an incredibly cerebral story, and one whose main (and quite feminist) themes are as relevant today as they were when the book was written. But what interests us here is the fact that this highly sexualized Uptown Girl theme serves merely as a backdrop to the story's main events. Schnitzel doesn't call attention to class differences in the story, he simply takes them for granted. They don't feature prominently, they go without saying. And yet the only point at which they are relevant during the story is with respect to the orgy, i.e. the sex. So, there it is again.
Working backwards to 1844 brings us to Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, in which young commoner D'Artagnan falls in love with noblewoman Constance Bonacieux. The Three Musketeers is ostensibly a story about a young man who goes from zero to hero on the strength of his character, his will, his wits, and the tutelage of his equally heroic friends. In that sense, Madame Bonacieux serves as a sort of testament to D'Artagnan's progress as a hero, but she needn't have been an adulteress to have served her literary purpose. That she was is merely a salacious little tidbit that makes the story more engaging, more exciting, and - yes - sexier.
I won't further belabor the point. The Uptown Girl Principle, this kink, seems to have been with us in art and literature for centuries.
Nor Is It Just A Guy Thing
Where did that dumb airhead act come from, the one some girls use to attract guys?
I realize that hundreds of articles have been written about this, and they all say more or less the same thing. It's always some version of the following:
They do it to fit in. People don't like to feel dumb, so they don't hang around people who make them feel dumb. Consequently, a woman who plays dumb will be less offensive to more people, including the subgroup of people called "love interests." The more love interests you consider, the more likely you are to find a good one. Thus, girls play dumb to ensure they don't scare off a good man.
That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't really answer the question. Another way to be attractive to the largest number of people is to be incredibly kind. Another way to do it is to be incredibly generous. Another way to do it is to be incredibly funny. There are many ways to be attractive to men. Why is playing dumb specifically such a common thing that girls do for male attention?
You could say, "Because guys don't really like funny (or kind, or generous, or etc.) girls." That almost sounds valid, except that it's a punt. Fine, they don't - then why do they like dumb girls? And why is having a love interest a good enough reason to play dumb?
In other words, if we accept any set of rationale for playing dumb, we're still left wondering, "Why dumb and not something else?"
The answer seems obvious to me: Because the Uptown Girl Principle, is common to men and women; and it's always Uptown Girls, not Uptown Guys. Sure, women like rich men, but they don't write songs about being poor and then "saved" by a rich guy... Unless they're Jane Austen, in which case the story changes from erotica into a tragedy. Very different.
Women will play the rich ditz when it works for them, and when it seems to work best for them is specifically in sexual situations. Think about the classic "pool boy" thing. Yeah, it's cheesy, but all of these things are cheesy; that they're cheesy doesn't mean that people don't still enjoy them. And women read Lady Chatterley's Lover, too. Women willingly participate in the Uptown Girl Principle.
Girls! Girls! Girls!
And, like any kink, the Uptown Girl Principle is well-represented in the adult content industry.
The initial set (the only culturally relevant set) of "celebrity sex tapes" were the ones featuring Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian playing the role of ditzy young heiress on tape with what were essentially B-list male celebrities in much, much lower income brackets. I don't begrudge a girl her choice in men, but these tapes weren't recorded to pay tribute to a match made in heaven. They were designed to titillate the parties involved. When they went public, they turned the women into massive celebrities and household names. It might be difficult for younger readers to understand that no one cared about the Hiltons or the Kardashians until those tapes were leaked to the public. As such things go, they weren't really any of any higher quality than something more, uh, professional, but they sold far better than any such "professional film." Why?
Sure, we all had a good laugh at their expense. You could say that these women brought society's wrath upon themselves by putting themselves in situations where they could be the brunt of our negative attention. But that's not really the point here. They put themselves in those situations voluntarily, because it was fun. And society didn't laugh for long - these women have made millions by creating brands out of their own notoriety, millions above and beyond whatever revenue they earned from the tapes themselves (if any).
This latter point highlights an additional and highly important dynamic involved in these tapes. Hilton and Kardashian seemed like airheads when society first got to know them, via their leaked tapes. Ultimately, though, they proved themselves to be highly business- and media-savvy - i.e. intelligent - women who were more than worthy of being the heiresses that they are. So the airhead thing really was a role, not their true identities.
It was an act. They were only pretending to be Uptown Girls, for personal pleasure. And society at large was just as into it as they were.
Including International Society
"India's first porn star" was a cartoon character called Savita Bhabhi. Bhabhi is a Hindi word that roughly translates to "elder sister-in-law," but it's rife with additional connotations, including that of attractiveness. You can think of it as being similar to the "bored housewife" thing here in North America. But "bored housewives" tend to be a little older than Savita Bhabhi. Indians traditionally marry young, so this would be, perhaps, a woman in her mid-to-late-twenties.
This character is famous for instigating a national dialogue in India regarding internet censorship by the state - thus being a cause celebre of libertarians. But I'm not grinding my free speech axe (today). Savita Bhabhi is an affluent woman who vacations in Goa and who studies at a good school. There are plenty of different men in her life, but generally they are young scoundrels, youth, commoners.
In short, Savita Bhabhi, like so many North American stories of this kind, is an Uptown Girl.
Conclusion?
So this Uptown Girl phenomenon is everywhere. The kink is universal. It stretches across borders and over generations. It seems to be part of the social fabric of human sexuality. I can't really explain it, and I guess I shouldn't even try. I decided to write this blog post mainly because I seem to have stumbled upon a cultural phenomenon - really, a human phenomenon - that I haven't really seen discussed elsewhere.
In fact, I tried to do some research on it in preparation for this blog post, and I couldn't find anything. Granted, I didn't really wander into the darker corners of the internet, but in a world in which even the most innocuous Google searches yield pornographic results, it seems odd that such a common and pervasive aspect of human sexuality would be comparatively difficult to track down.
I won't flatter myself to think that I'm the only person who has formally taken notice of this, but if my blog post serves as a starting point for someone else's research, I hope it proves to be helpful.
The rumors are false. And also non-existent. But that's my answer, and I'm sticking to it.
Every "successful" blogger of which I am aware has practiced a technique that is common-internet-knowledge for reaching a large readership. They start a blog, learn the ropes, then close shop and start a brand new blog with a narrower focus. I don't know why this works, but it does. Everyone does it.
I could have (should have?) done this years ago, and I'd probably be a much more successful blogger, if success is based on how many people read my blog. It's not that I'm lazy and it's not that I just never got around to doing it. It's also not because I'm not internet-savvy. (I know it's hard to believe when you look at the design and layout of the blog, but...)
I have my reasons.
One reason is because I don't really need a large readership. The way I see it, if I were writing things that were important to other people, they would read them. Occasionally "bloggers of note" have linked to my blog. Occasionally famous musicians have. Occasionally people I respect beyond all respect have done so. I'm flattered. Whenever it happens, my blog experiences a surge in traffic that eventually dies down. This suggests to me that only a very few of my blog posts are interesting to the public at large. I like writing those posts, but they're not the only kind of posts I like writing. The most important posts to me are probably irrelevant to almost everyone else.
That's okay. Stardom is not appropriate for all people. I'm happy if you like my blog, but I'm not writing to optimize my MAX(readers) function.
Another reason I don't start a newer and better blog is because I believe there is a conflict of interest between popularity and truth. The minute I decide to be a more popular person is the minute I decide to craft posts with something other than my honest, authentic thoughts in mind. To be sure, not every thought belongs out in public, and there is such a thing as being authentic to a fault. I try to do enough self-censure to avoid saying anything I wouldn't say in a room crowded with people I love and respect. It doesn't always work out that way, but I'd rather err on the side of authenticity and later own up to my mistakes than err on the side of promoting a false image of myself as an incredibly interesting and popular person. That just ain't me.
Finally, and most importantly, the reason I don't start a new blog is because it would sever the continuity between my past thoughts and my current thoughts. Ultimately, at the end of the day, this blog is a record of who I was and what I thought - and believed, and valued, and held dear - that my daughter can read and try to understand, should she ever want to. I may not always be there to explain things to her. Maybe I will be there, and I might try, but I might fail. She may reach an age when she decides she just doesn't get me, and I can say, "Well, sweetheart, start here. This is the best way I remember ever trying to say this."
I want all that information in one place. I want people (such as my daughter) to know that it all came from the same person. I want my mistakes to be easily located, and the evolution of my thoughts to be as clear as they could be. I want to maintain the conceptual continuity between disparate blog topics like running and economics and music. I have often written things that I didn't even realize were important until, in the context of a conversation two years later, I realize that I wrote something relevant, and I can say, "Hey, I wrote something about this - check it out."
In short, I want to leave a paper trail. It wouldn't be intellectually honest to interrupt my train of thought with the advent of a new blog and a new brand. I don't have the world's strongest brand, but I do have a brand that is appropriate to who I am and what I want out of blogging.
I am a nobody, and my thoughts are those of a nobody. There are millions of people out there whose thoughts are as irrelevant to you, and to "the world," as mine. Some of those people live in foreign lands about which you may have some preconceived notions. Some of those people might live next door to you, and you had no idea they thought those things. If you have something in common with me, you might have something in common with that person you hardly noticed before. Maybe it's a potential legendary romance for you, or maybe it's something that could alter your political or religious or philosophical perspectives if you actually had a long conversation with that person.
That kind of idea is interesting to me, and I think if it were more widely appreciated, the world would be a better place. We can make the world a better place by being better people. That's what it's all about. Better people, though, not different people. I'm not starting a new blog.
I begin my blog-stravaganza with an analysis of Islam; or, more specifically, an analysis of opinions held by non-Muslims of Muslim people in general.
A comment* in a recent Facebook post in the "Muslims Against ISIS" community reads as follows:
There's [sic] been a lot on this page recently about how compassionate, tolerant and broadminded [sic] Muslims are; but recent events in Saudi Arabia really do call this in to [sic] question. What am I to think when I hear that in fully islamic [sic] States [sic] such as Saudi Arabia and Iran they still hand out the death penalty to homosexuals, atheists, apostates, government critics, womens [sic] liberationists, labour unionists etc.... Are you going to tell me again that these are not true Muslims. [sic] Its [sic] obvious that ISIS has powerful and likeminded [sic] friends.
The community administrator then responded as follows:
[O]ne bit of advice is to understand that Saudi Arabia is certainly not a "fully Islamic state" they are not the representatives of Islam, or are Iran. [sic throughout that sentence] These countries have their own laws made by their own leaders. Saudi is run by a bunch of filthy rich evil people, who drink alcohol, have sex ourside [sic] of marriage, have more than 4 wives, have strippers etc.. [sic] These are all strictly forbidden in islam [sic]. They dont [sic] care about islam! [sic]
I remember an interview on CNN, Reza Aslan did and how he humiliated the journalists and educated them, what Saudi do [sic] is Saudis [sic] business, don't brush all Muslims on the basis of what Saudi and Iran do! [sic] That is called bigotry. You want to judge Muslims, judge us on what you see in front of your eyes, study Islam if you are so interested. Meet a real Muslim. Talk to us.
We posted an article earlier about sharia law [sic], did you read that?
There is much to unpack here. (And I don't mean the grammatical errors - where would I start?) Both the commentator and the community administrator make important errors in what they say. At the risk of sounding too cute, error is the enemy of understanding.
What I mean is, there seems to be a large swath of Americans who are critical of Muslims, and there also seems to be a large swath of Muslims who want to respond to those criticisms, but if both of these groups are making errors that the other side can't catch or doesn't fully understand, then this attempted dialogue is doomed to fail. The failure of this dialogue means a worsening of interpersonal relationships in America, and I don't want to see that happen. So, I'm going to do my small part to push us all a few micrometers closer to a better understanding of each other.
It Happened In Saudi Arabia, Therefore Muslims Did It
The original commentator makes a mistake that a lot of non-Muslim Americans seem to make about Muslims. He assumes that events that take place in the Middle East are representative of what "Muslims do," that views expressed by people in the Middle East are representative of what "Muslims believe," and so forth.
It's easy to see why this is a silly mistake. No one would suggest, for example, that beliefs widely held by Central Americans are representative of what "Christians believe." To suggest that the actions of the Greek or Russian governments represent the will of a largely Orthodox Christian populace is obviously laughable. Nor does the average Italian speak for Catholics at large. Nor is the American system the result of a melting pot of multiple different kinds of Christians.
National and regional cultures are much, much more potent in shaping societies than religion alone. That's why Central America is culturally different from North America, even though both are largely "Christian" regions. And, against the suggestion that the difference can be explained by race, I'll point out that South America is quite different from Central America, as well, and both are quite different from Southern Europe.
If we wanted to, we could construct a hypothetical fear-mongering narrative about the terrible things that happen in Christian societies, based on the historical events of isolated regions of the Christian world. But that would be silly, because what happens in Cuba is a result of Cuba (along with the international pressures that used them as puppets).
So it goes with the Muslim world. It's no secret that the Middle East is a politically unstable, frequently violent, and heavily feudal region of the world. It was so prior to the spread of Islam, and it was afterward. It is not the only such region in the world. Its cultures, however, are very different from the cultures of, say, Chechnya, or Kyrgyzstan, or Bangladesh, or Malaysia. There is no one, underlying set of "problems" faced by these nations, and just about the only two things they all have in common are Islam and a history of British colonialism.
Long story short, you cannot say "X happens in Muslim countries" unless you can find an X that has happened in all Muslim countries. My modest proposition is this: the only X's anyone will reliably find for all Muslim countries are relatively uninteresting with respect to xenophobic concerns.
I am open to being wrong about this, but at least now the task of proving me wrong is a little clearer.
Muslims Don't Drink Alcohol, Have Sex, Etc.
The administrator of "Muslims Against ISIS" seems to have his/her own confusion about Muslims. To him/her, a Saudi prince can't be a Muslim if he drinks alcohol or fornicates. Or whatever.
This one makes me laugh because, as my readers know, I grew up in Utah, where "mormons don't drink alcohol," "mormons don't have premarital sex," "mormons don't drink coffee," and so on and so forth. And yet, growing up amid all sorts of people who made such claims, I met lots of mormons who drank, smoked, got tattoos, had sex, and all the rest of it. As it turned out, mormons fell for all the same vices the rest of us human beings do, because - surprise, surprise - mormons are human beings.
And so are Muslims. Hence (and I won't name names), I know lots of Muslims who drink, swear, get tattoos, have premarital sex, do drugs, fail to pray five times a day, never make a pilgrimage, eat haram food and drink, and don't wear the hijab. It hardly seems necessary to point out that Muslims are just like us and get into all the same kind of trouble the rest of us do, but apparently it is.
But it doesn't just stop there. Take, for example, Bangladeshi Muslims, who eat shrimp several times a week (on a good week). Are they not "real Muslims?" Well, we could ask them - and in fact, I have asked them. The answer is that shrimp isn't forbiddenat all. Do you think I'd get the same answer from a Yemeni Muslim? I doubt it (but if any Yemenis are reading this, please clarify your understanding of the matter in the comments).
Among Christians, or atheists, or Hindus, or etc., it goes without saying that different people believe different things. We could argue about which set of beliefs is the most reflective of the Qu'ran, and which Muslim is the best Muslim, but leaving all that aside, we are forced to admit the following: Because Muslims are human beings, they (like other human beings) have a diverse set of beliefs and thoughts. Some of them do things contrary to Islam because they're not good Muslims. Some of them do things that they later rationalize as being consistent with Islam, even though it might not be. Some of them are atheists and just haven't told their parents yet. Some of them want to be good Muslims but just fail because they're still working at it. Some are incredibly modern and progressive people who have found support for their beliefs in the Qu'ran and among Muslim scholars.
So, Muslims who claim that other Muslims "aren't Muslims" are being judgmental and proclaiming their own personal belief system. They are not, however, making "official" proclamations about who is and is not a Muslim.
A Few Words On Shari'a Law
It would be helpful if my readers would consult the following two articles:
Islamic law as it was interpreted by legal scholars and applied in the traditional court system is fiqh. Shari'a is what fiqh would be if the scholars always got it right, something they have never claimed to do. Think of it as law in the mind of God.
In other words, "Shari'a law" doesn't mean stoning whores and cutting off the hands of thieves. Instead, what it means is applying religious principles to legal problems with the aid of religious scholars. That's certainly contrary to America's long-standing tradition of the separation of church and state, but it's not quite as spooky as some have been lead to believe.
To better understand why it's not so spooky, consult this second article, from Salon.com, written by an American lawyer who has worked with Muslim clients in applying fiqh. (He incorrectly calls this "sharia law.")
Now a few quick thoughts from me:
First: I have deliberately chosen two sources at different ideological poles. If you are not inclined to believe a libertarian like Friedman, then you can consult the very leftist Salon, and vice-versa. There is nothing "ideological" about the above interpretation of Shari'a law.
Second: In the United States, fiqh is already happening, and has been happening for a long time. However, there is no way for a non-Muslim to be bound to this process unless s/he submits to it voluntarily. Think of it like formal legal arbitration. This, by the way, is fully consistent with libertarianism.
Third: Many, many Muslims object to the violent applications of fiqh that are common in some parts of the world. Indeed, any human being would object to such cruel and unusual punishment. Reports of widespread support of such systems by Muslims are greatly exaggerated. But, here's the important part: You'll never learn about the extent to which ordinarily Muslims object to cruel and unusual punishments by asking them about "sharia law." This is because when you ask a Muslim if they "support sharia law," you are effectively asking them, "do you support the perfect implementation of god's plan?" What religious person would object to that question?
But, of course, that question doesn't ask what the inquisitor wishes to know, because the inquisitor doesn't understand the question (and, quite often, neither does the respondent).
The point is, don't assume that a Muslim favors beheadings and stonings just because s/he favors Shari'a law. Neither would you suspect your neighbor of being a slaver if you found out he supported a return to strict Constitutional American governance.
Conclusion
From all this, I hope I have managed to impress upon those of you who still have an open mind (and are still reading - ha!) that Muslims exhibit all the same diversity of opinion and belief that is present in people of other religions. I hope I have managed to convey the idea that most of the problems faced by various regions of "the Muslim world" are really regional problems, not specific to a religion. I hope I have managed to provide some information about people in such a way that you find it a little more difficult to place all Muslims in the same "box."
If there's one thing I've learned over the course of my life, it's that absolutely every human being in the world is an individual, and thus we have to interact with each other accordingly. You simply can't make categorical statements about individuals because individuals don't fit well in categories. Even the categories you hope define yourself don't fit perfectly, and there is a list of exceptions or justifications you use to reconcile that cognitive dissonance... And that's okay! Because that's what being an individual is all about. You're not just like everyone I might group you in with.
And neither are Muslims. This is painfully obvious when you know lots of Muslims - and getting to know lots of Muslims is the best, if not the only, way to cure ourselves of our in-group/out-group biases here.
But again, I'm open to being proven wrong. Why don't you get to know some Muslims and then tell me that I am wrong about them. It couldn't possibly hurt.
_____________________________
* Note: I have omitted a link to the comment and the group out of respect for the privacy of strangers. It is, I believe, a public group, so I'm sure you can locate these comments on Facebook if you would like to verify them for yourselves.
Boy, oh boy, do I have a lot to blog about. I can't get to it all right now, unfortunately, but my thoughts are absolutely on fire and I think it's safe to say that my readers can expect this to be an active week for the blog.
