33 rpm (New Model Army)

33 rebellions per minute


"the endless leaps and forward plans will someday have to cease"




1989

New Model Army, THUNDER AND CONSOLATION
"Whose world? OUR WORLD! Whose streets? OUR STREETS!
--- chanted by anti-WTO demonstrators in Seattle, 12/99

I am posting this review, by Central Standard Time, at 5 a.m. on December 31, 1999, the end of an entire millenium by the Christian calendar. This fact inspires, in me personally, absolutely no profound thought. Perhaps it should; perhaps I am missing something, compared to other writers who are fraught with a need to look backwards, to summarize, to design transformations; but I won't fake it. Today it is December, and very cold here; tomorrow it will be January, and slightly colder but not much. My friend Kristian is holding his wedding in five hours, and I'm a groomsman, but otherwise I wouldn't intend this day to be unusual.
This day might, perhaps, be hugely important without me. In two hours, CNN will begin round-the-clock coverage of the various time zones as, from the International Date Line westward, 4% of the world at a time is plunged into a new century in which several billion computer chips, programmed with two-digit instead of four-digit year markers, will have absolutely no clue what year it is, and will be forced to guess either that 1) time has ended or 2) it's 99 years ago, when computers were invented and therefore didn't work. We're not sure whether or why this is important. Worries about failures of the power grid are, according to some of the experts who've studied the problem, realistic; so are worries about computer viruses. So, therefore, are worries about nuclear power plants, which are highly dependent on working computer systems and power generators to not melt down; given that the long-run lessons of Chernobyl and Japan meltdowns indicate a per-meltdown long-run death toll in the millions, this isn't any too thrilling.
The problem, if it is one, was created over a period of twenty to thirty years by businesses (and occasionally governments) that wished to save money by not using the extra byte of computer memory a four-digit date would require. If it is solved, it will be because, over the last two years, business and government have taken the problem extremely seriously and initiated intense efforts to root out and replace all vulnerable code; and it will be because government regulations have required "Y2K" testing in key sectors such as nuclear power plants, and ordered the shutdown of plants that failed. Whether the apocalypse is nigh or not, then, the lives of pretty much everybody are being endangered by the short-sighted frugality of, and hopefully then saved by the desperate last-minute efficiency of, an elite most of us have never met and have no control over.
Let's assume things go well; that's why I'm explaining the problem in such basic, primer terms, for the memory of people who, six months from now, have pleasantly forgotten why anyone was so worried. If things go well, there's a lot of fright that'll be left floating freely, without a good target. I write to you, today, to suggest a worthy target. It's called the World Trade Organization. It was briefly famous, a month ago, when its Seattle meeting inspired 38,000 protestors who gathered to chant chants, sing songs, and present dozens of intelligent, remarkably sophisticated speeches and panel discussions on world trade. Assuming you had no prior interest in the issue, your main exposure to these protestors was a series of pictures in which a hundred splinter-group anarchists smashed stuff at Radio Shack and the Gap. The anarchists were interviewed eagerly by the news media, and given soundbites approaching a half minute to explain that Property Is Theft (and therefore, to judge by their behavior, that Theft Is Cool so Property Is Cool). The mainstream media did not afford equal reply time to the larger number of protestors who banded together to save the stores from the anarchists, before the police mobilized to get there; and the TV networks, in particular, afforded no time at all to explaining why this obscure WTO thingie was important enough to inspire the unprecedented oppositional attendance of labor unions from 100 countries, _and_ a ragtag worldwide assortment of environmental groups, _and_ representatives of all major world religions and quite a few minor ones.
Thus the WTO debate seems to register as something minor. On the Loud-fans, a music discussion group that can generally get some good, highly literate political debate, simmering between humor and anger, on any major issue, there was one snotty post about idiot window-smashers, and a couple of quiet "that's not fair" grumbles, and then silence. My friends mostly aren't political - for 20-somethings, there's a strong and understandable tendency to be more concerned with whether your otherwise-charming boyfriend is going to stop dumping you every week, or what to do when the guy you were about to spend a Christmas in Indonesia with, en route to possible marriage, turns out to be a serial deadbeat dad via three separate mothers, so I've heard rather more discussion of those issues lately - but still, something like the Columbine High shootings will come up for mention a few times. The WTO hasn't.
So let me state my opinion in all due moderation before I defend it: the World Trade Organization, as currently constituted, is as great a threat to democracy as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ever were. Being in favor of the WTO, as currently constituted, in 2000, is as morally blind a position as being pro-Hitler in 1940. All major American politicians, in 1940, had the good sense to, at absolute minimum, oppose Hitler in harsh though non-interfering terms. All candidates for the American presidency in 2000 are pro-WTO. Except two, two fierce and eloquent opponents, which is why I'm stuck choosing an insane Republican theocrat for president. My choices for support on the issue are Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes; I pick Keyes. You support him with me, and he'll have two votes.
I am not using Hitler analogies casually. My Dad and I would've been melted down into pills and soap with all the other kikes; I do hold a grudge. One of Kristian's friends is a Supposed Former member of the American Nazi Party who still makes anti-Semitic remarks about my best boss at work, and who reads aloud newspaper accounts of plane crashes as comedy; I avoid him. Here is the premise of the World Trade Organization: a few hundred bankers and businessmen get together and write the rules of free trade. If your country passes a law they don't like, the law is invalid. If you don't accept that, plan to pay billions of dollars in fines every year until you do accept.
What are some laws that interfere with free trade? Well, suppose a European nation bans the import of goods made with slave labor. No, wait, not bans; but specially taxes. That law is invalid. My example is not, as it happens, a hypothetical. Or suppose another European nation passes a law to subsidize homegrown movie production (to compete with MGM imports) or locally owned grocery stores (as an alternative to whatever is Spanish for Super Stop'n'Shop). Or perhaps Canada has a law that radio stations need to devote 30% of airtime to Canadian bands, so that there's room for the Rheostatics as well as (not instead of) Whitney Houston. Those laws are invalid. Again, not hypothetical, though so far the "Canadian content" has not been challenged. Or suppose the United States passes a law mandating breakage-resistant windshields so fewer people die in crashes, but cars manufactured in other countries don't meet that standard? The law would be invalid. This example is hypothetical, but I couldn't think of any humanitarian standard the U.S. is in the leadership on now, so I grabbed something from 1974. The European auto fuel standards, though, those are being challenged.
This is not the age-old dream of a philosopher-king, overruling the mob's wilder impulses. Bankers are not philosophers. CEO's are not, for political purposes, even human beings. They represent quarterly profit. The WTO aims to be a theocracy. Yet even its choice of god is unclear. What is its ideal: free trade? Don't make me guffaw.


Frances Fukuyama published, in 1989, a non-fiction speculation called The End of History that became briefly famous among pundits, all of whom mocked its premise that, with Communism dead, the world would fall to its only remaining all-conquering ideology, market capitalism. It was, in fact, a dumb premise. What the Seattle protests were about was whether the dumb premise was nonetheless correct. If all laws are playthings for banks (which are merged with insurance companies and credit cards, and which are devoted to the highest possible quarterly profit, and the surest possible taxpayer bailout if they by chance fuck up), then so are all natural resources, and so is the climate. I don't see much recovery from that.
But we might stop it first. The media didn't take the protesters seriously, but Bill Clinton, as smart a politician as the country has known, noticed how unusual it was for the labor unions to be holding hands with environmentalists, all banded together with any number of usually-rival church leaders. He now claims to be in favor of making the WTO an inclusive organization, with major representation by a variety of do-gooder groups. I don't like that either -- "we have decided, because of your worries about your gangrenous leg, that we'll attach a second, healthy leg to it at the thigh" -- but it would be far less bad (maybe). I'd rather abolish the WTO entirely, and I'd rather remind the activist good-guys that the American Revolutionaries abandoned the slogan "no taxation without respresentation" in less than six months when it occurred to them that all Britain had to do would be give them token representatives, then pass any law they felt like, and the pro-independence position would be undercut. But a sign of hope is a sign of hope.
Early in their musical career, New Model Army were a musical expression of the protest impulse. Somewhere between folk and punk, driven along by Robert Heaton's mobile bass lines and Justin Sullivan's earnest, sweating tenor sing-speak, they pointed out bad guys and shouted "I believe in justice! I believe in vengeance! I believe in getting the bastards, getting the bastards!". As music, the albums were invigorating without being interesting, forceful at the expense of broad-minded. I do recommend them, especially VENGEANCE, simply because I think the world needs that sort of clear-cut good and evil fable directed at the right people. NMA never had trouble picking the enemy, generally some sort of armed money-maker: either "legal" businesses (as if Monsanto and RJR Nabisco and Lockheed Martin didn't break a hundred laws a month), or gangsters and drug dealers, or corrupt government officials and their thugs. Protest rallies are important. The U.S. _did_ pull out of Vietnam faster, drunk driving and homophobia _are_ becoming steadily rarer, the racist government of South Africa WAS overthrown, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts _have_ bought us all a couple of extra decades of breathing time. New Model Army were a fine, fine protest rally band.
Protestors tend, alas, to be young: while thousands of professional labor leaders and church fathers organized the WTO protests, the bulk of the protestors were around 20 years old. What happens, with age, is that a politicized person starts to notice the precariousness of his or her own claimed power. It wasn't hippies who pulled the U.S. out of Vietnam, it was Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and those men took a good five years after the decisive 1970 point when the majority of the American public favored the withdrawal. The environmental laws and Earth Day were a clear and immediate response to public mobilization, but the enforcement of them, or lack thereof, or erasure of them, or lack thereof, has been the steady product of negotiations by Washington D.C. men in expensive suits. If the Y2K problem turns out to be trivial, it won't be because activists alertly tapped the issue (although five or six did), but because the successors of the CEO's and bureaucrats who created the mess were able to fix it. The prompting of the activists was, in all these cases and many more, absolutely necessary and vital; that's why a certain responsible percentage manage to arrange their whole lives as activists, getting tougher and cannier as they age. But then, the act of voting, one vote per person, is the _only_ determinant, in the United States, of who gets to be a legislator or a president. But no individual vote ever decides a major election, and the act starts to feel powerless specifically because of that lack of individual, undeniable, immediate responsibility. And many people grow discouraged, and turn inward for solutions to problems (if they don't give up entirely).
THUNDER AND CONSOLATION is the album of a band starting to make that discouraged transition. It is, without question, my favorite New Model Army album to that point in their career; on musical grounds alone it would have to be. They'd learned atmosphere, for one thing. The decorative guitars on "I Love The World" and "225" jitter like caged test-tones rattling the bars in search of freedom, while Justin declaims in a fraught, ragged monotone, and the bass is a fearsome swamp of echo. "Inheritance" is sung accompanied only by a tribal timekeeping beat and a slow succession of ringing piano double-whole-notes. "The Green and the Grey" and "Vagabonds" make violins a central part of the arrangement, spacious and mournful on the former, anthemic and lilting on the latter. "Family Life" is a stark campfire song, Justin's lowest stage whisper to picked-out guitar. "Archway Towers" gnashes intimidatingly between two minor chords until it spirals inward to oblivion. "Stupid Questions" and "the Ballad of Bodmin Pill" and "Family" rush along in classic rabble-rousing fashion -- and to my mind they do so brilliantly -- but even they display newfound tension between the taut basslines of the verses and the sing-along rush of the choruses.
The lyrics, though, are where Justin and Robert really mark their growing-up process; for the first time they're looking at themselves as much as at the world around them. Not with excess scathing, to be sure. "It's not a crime to be innocent/ these things we have not done", they summarize on "Stupid…", an inquiry into human cruelty, and I'm sure that's fair.
"But even in the freshest mountain air
the jet fighters practice overhead
and they're drilling the hills for uranium deposits
they'll bury the waste for our children to inherit
and though this is all done for our benefit
I swear we never asked for any of this"
decides "225", and that's fair too - but it's also a resigned recognition that some of the good guys, somewhere, weren't alert enough, unseduced enough, to stand up and fight at the right time. "Green…" seems to be a song to a beloved former fellow activist who's cut all ties in the pursuit of success, but if, today, "there was no need for those guys to hurt him so bad/ when all they had to do was knock him down/ but no one asks too many questions like that/ since you left this town", presumably the narrator is part of the "no one".
But of course, when "it's open season on the weak and the feeble/ their meagre ambitions, their impotent fury/ there's bulletproof glass in case there is trouble/ no doors in the building between this side and that side", why bother? As the salary difference between an average American worker and an average CEO goes from 24 times (in 1980) to 273 times (in 1999), it's ever so much easier to segregate the housing, until, indeed, today there are areas of the Los Angeles ghettos where a resident can't walk or drive a mile from home in any direction without running into an armed police checkpoint. This, surely, is why activists start directing some of their wonderings from "Why did they do this to you" (from "Family Life") to why they, the activists, are compelled to worry about what everyone else takes for granted. "Family" is a story song with characters, but "get out, we've got our own lives to lead, now that water is thicker than blood" sounds distinctly like social commentary, and the chorus of "swimming out alone against the tide/ looking for family, searching for tribe" is not sung in the third person. "Inheritance" is a letter from Justin to his parents, funny but searching, trying to find an individual Justin whose actions can't be explained as "doing the things you would have done". "The things I want/ the things I feel/ they're yours, yours, not mine", he announces, but rueful instead of indignant, like the portrait of apocalypse (on "…World") that's as self-mocking as it is deadly earnest.
"I know somehow I will survive
this fury just to stay alive
so, drunk with sickness, weak with pain
I can walk the hills one last time.
Scarred and smiling, dying slow
I'll scream to no one left at all
'I told you so. I told you so. I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!.'"

If Cordoba nuclear power plant, 30 miles from me, melts down tomorrow -- I strongly doubt it, but we'll see, won't we? -- I'll probably die less amused, but ever more fortified, by the irony of those lines. I also prefer that "…Bodmin" be less than literal in its assurance that "we are lost, we are weak/ we are crippled, we are freaks/ we are the heirs, we are the true heirs, of all the world". We are, you know. The question is this. Do we inherit it by seizing it from the clean-cut and strong, now, while our votes, however individually puny, still contribute to a genuine body of laws, and our screams of protest are heard by politicians who have some need, however indirect, to win our approval? Or we inherit by letting things slide until the lost/weak/crippled/freaks win only by force of our ever more overwhelming numbers?

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