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May has always been a relatively hectic month but this year’s may be the topper. The first weekend of the month was my wife’s birthday, the second was Mother’s Day, the third weekend my youngest daughter graduated from high school, the next day we flew out to look at two colleges in Massachusetts and Vermont, we returned in time for the fourth weekend (our 28th wedding anniversary) and today the youngest daughter turns 18.
The events involving the youngest are the most major. My wife and I completed nine consecutive years of having kids at Roosevelt High School. We will be “empty nesters” and beginning (hopefully) the midway point of nine consecutive years of having kids in college. With grad school, that means we not only fulfill all parents’ dreams of having three in college at once, they’ll be in three different states (Nebraska, Missouri and Massachusetts), Perhaps most significant, all three daughters are now “adults” — which if I wasn’t old already I think makes me more “officially” old.
But not only do I know what my parents went through when I was growing up (and I was far less behaved), that insight has helped me know we’re sending three well-adjusted, independent women out to conquer the world, each in their own way and with their own amazing individual talents and personalities. That’s a very worthwhile price to pay for being old.
One day you’re gonna want to go
I hope we taught you everything you need to know
“Gracie,” Ben Folds, Songs for Silverman
Observations and Announcements
Bob Schwartz evidently found political cold turkey a tough bird. Bob is now at South Dakota Humanist, which was added to the blogroll earlier this week. Love the new name, Bob.
I’m not going to do much, if anything, on the Sotomayor nomination other than to observe she’s been confirmed by the Senate twice already at the district and appeals court level. I will leave it to such sites as SCOTUSblog for closer and more informed coverage.
Achievement Awards
Blog headline of the week: GPS: A Divorce Lawyer’s Best Friend.
Bookish Linkage
Congrats to the University of Nebraska Press for being named 2008 Independent Publisher of the Year.
For your summer reading enjoyment, a list of summer reading lists. (Via.)
Nonbookish Linkage
Who needs the asinine Wheel of Justice on the local eyewitless news when you can Pick the Perp? (Via.)
The Madoff Map, which shows the location of all of fraudster Bernie Madoff’s victims, indicates there were just two in South Dakota. (Via.)
In speaking with French President Chirac in the run-up to the Iraq War, President Bush “wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.” What’s really sad is there is absolutely no reason to disbelieve this.
Hmmm, space porn.
Stupdity has a certain charm — ignorance does not.
Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
Living in the 21st Century, we believe, of course, that we base our decisions and actions upon contemporary ideas. We’ve advanced enough to throw off the shackles of antiquated thinking in favor of modernity. Yet Anouar Majid’s We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities reveals we may not be quite so free of historical influences as we might think.
 Majid, in fact, argues that our current attitudes toward such things as immigration and the so-called “clash of cultures” between the West and Islam hearken back some 500 years or more and that we have yet to overcome “medieval animosities.” Those animosities are reflected in the efforts to drive Muslims from Iberia, one phase of which culminated when the last Muslin stronghold in Spain fell in 1492 and the country became a united, Christian nation. We Are All Moors not only traces Spain’s persecution of and efforts to expel all Spaniards of Muslim descent but how those attitudes spread in both Europe and the Americas and encompassed far more than those of Islamic faith.
To Majid, Moors are a prototype, and not one that redounds to our credit. The persecution of Moors as “undesirable” or worse by a Christian nation was emblematic of how Western civilization also would treat Jews, Africans, Hispanics or Native Americans at various times. “It is only in this symbolic or metaphorical sense that minorities living in the West after 1492 are the descendants of the Moors,” he writes in the Introduction. “Given that the archetypal Other of Europe before 1492 was the Muslim, the world’s non-European natives or religions were all stamped with the taint of Muslim impurity.”
Thus, for example, We Are All Moors also explores how the treatment of African slaves and Native Americans was impacted not only by a Spanish and Muslim influence in the New World but also the fact that portions of Africa already had a Muslim influence. In essence, the argument is that the same characteristics used to justify attacks on Moors — racial inferiority, religious impurity and cultural incompatibility — also were the prism through which other non-Christian minorities were viewed. Majid argues that we still use that prism today, whether in the clash with so-called “Islamists” or European unease over the number of Muslim immigrants and similar feelings in American toward Hispanic immigrants.
At times, Majid might reach a bit too far. A chapter called “Muslim Jews” seeks to show how persecution of Jews is interconnected with anti-Muslim sentiment in the Christian world. He notes not only that Muslims and Jews were often cohabitants of particular geographic areas but also, for example, Jews were seen during the Crusades to be allied with Muslims, if not in league with them. The latter, though, seems somewhat problematic. First, it tends to undercut his reliance on the unification of Spain helping make Moors a prototype because the Crusades preceded that. Second, persecution of Jews isn’t necessarily correlated with persecution of Muslims. For example, Great Britain expelled Jews nearly 200 years before Spain did and Great Britain had little, if any, Moorish influence. Additionally, some experts trace religious-based anti-Semitism to ancient Greece and Rome. A stronger argument exists for Jews also falling within the same spectrum today’s Western prism throws on Muslims.
We Are All Moors is perhaps strongest in its analysis of anti-immigrant feelings in Europe and America. Majid cogently argues that excluding people because of xenophobic fear of threats to “native” culture or economies simply is not a viable option in the modern world and a global economy. Nationalist or nativist concepts based on expulsion or exclusion of undesirables “simply are not rational long-term solutions for an already besieged planet,” he writes. In saying we are all Moors, Majid is saying that in today’s world, we are all minorities in some fashion or another, minorities who can only survive by overcoming racial, religious and cultural differences.
Euro-Americans have simply not had to worry about their racial and cultural hegemony. Now that they do, they are beginning to sound like the conquered and colonized of yesterday.
Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors
“Coffee shops” are quite popular in Amsterdam and other parts of the Netherlands. That’s because although cannabis, a/k/a/ marijuana, is technically illegal, authorities take no action if it is smoked in a “coffee shop.” The shops are licensed and regulated by the government and marijuana and hashish can be consumed on site, although the shops cannot sell alcohol.
Thus, proponents of legalizing marijuana for medical use in South Dakota might find succor in this headline from one of Netherlands’ evening newspapers: “Netherlands to close prisons for lack of prisoners.” According to the article, “The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.”
Now it’s certainly doubtful anyone could say there is a direct causal connection between Dutch marijuana policies and the country’s declining crime rates. But it does at least give one pause and put at least one arrow, however small, in the quiver of the legalization camp.
[Marijuana is used by] musicians. And I’m not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type.
Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, 1948
On May 25, 1957, five men, including Quincy Jones, got together at the Brown Derby restaurant in L.A. The founded an organization called the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Less than two years later, the organization gave out its its first awards for excellence in music, called the Grammy Award.
The Grammy Awards are a big name item. But they are perceived by many — myself included — as suffering a major problem. Although the awards are voted on and given by “the music industry,” they often fail to reflect what’s really happening in music. Here’s a few cases in point from the music revolution of the 1960s:
- Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” grabbed the public when it was released in 1965. Not only did “A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass win the statuette for Record of the Year in 1966, Dylan wasn’t even nominated. In fact, Dylan didn’t win a Grammy until “Gotta Serve Somebody” won Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male in 1979 (although he was included in the artists when The Concert for Bangla Desh won Album of the Year in 1973).
- Although Sgt. Pepper won Album of the Year in 1968, “Up, Up and Away” by the Fifth Dimension won Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Contemporary Group Performance.
- Despite the commercial and critical success of LPs like Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. Bruce Springsteen’s first Grammy was for Best Rock Vocal Performance (Male) in 1984 for “Dancing in the Dark.”
- 1967’s award for Best Contemporary Rock and Roll Recording went to the New Vaudeville Band for “Winchester Cathedral.” The other nominees? “Eleanor Rigby,” “Good Vibrations,” “Last Train To Clarksville,” “Cherish” and “Monday Monday.”
- Not only are Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Doors among the artists never to win a Grammy, the only one of the first 20 albums in Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time to win Album of the Year is Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
- The Best New Artist award can produce interesting results. Consider this string in the 1970s: Starland Vocal Band, 1977; Debby Boone, 1978; A Taste of Honey, 1979. But who could ever forget Milli Vanilli, whose award was revoked nine months after it was presented in 1990r.
Some of the problems of the 1960s were avoided by increasing the number of categories. In fact, they’ve grown from less than two dozen in 1959 to more than 100 currently. Yet growth does not necessarily equal quality. For example, in 2002 Dylan’s Love and Theft won Best Contemporary Folk Album while U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind won Best Rock Album. What beat them for Album of the Year? The Oh Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
Still, even the Grammys can’t get it all wrong all the time. For example, the Beatles won Best New Artist in 1965 while Stevie Wonder rightfully won Album of the Year in 1974 (Innervisions), 1975 (Fulfillingness’ First Finale) and 1977 (Songs in the Key of Life). Similarly, in the jazz field the Grammys have been far more consistent with the award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album going to such top notch performers as Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wes Montgomery, Chick Corea and Phil Woods.
Fortunately, while a Grammy Award may boost a record’s or an artist’s sales, the ultimate determination of the staying power and importance of music still rests in the ears of the individual listener.
…there’s no way for you to avoid the fact that nobody [in the music industry] cares about the music, only the profits.
Frank Zappa, Express, March 1985
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