Fixing A Hole

I've been following this whole WikiLeaks thing with no small amount of interest. Okay... I've been pretty obsessed with it. Because sometimes events just feel huge.

What's most interesting (so far) is not so much what's in the cables is how people have responded.

The U.S. government, who seems to have no problem prodding us at airports, delving into our e-mails and so on, is aghast that they should be held to the same microscopic examination themselves. There is some kind of karmic justice there... you touch our private parts, photograph us naked and eavesdrop on our private conversations, and we do the same to you.

The shame of it all is that it has gotten to that "us versus them" mentality. If anything has been exposed, it is the sham of American democracy.

Of course, that sham has been apparent to many for decades. Frank Zappa famously said years ago that he thought democracy was such a great idea we should try it here in America. What we have instead is a system in which huge corporations (apparently including the government of China) control both major political parties, all three branches of government, and the media.

The American Empire seems to be in a bit of a wobbly condition. And nobody in a position of power, being that they all work for the same master, wants to rock the boat. Because they're on it, and it's already taking on water. And thus, you have an American media that so far has been embarrassingly mute on what's going on, trying to either shrug off the importance of what's happening or demonize the messenger.

Which is exactly what government leaders from both political parties are doing as well.

And by demonizing the messenger, they've turned him into a folk hero. 

Except, of course, for Ron Paul, who hasn't attempted to demonize anyone. He has publicly stated that we should examine the policies that have led us into this dark morass of perceived necessity for secrecy and subterfuge to begin with.  But Republicans won't pay any attention to Ron Paul because they view him as the crazy old uncle who shows up at family functions,  Democrats won't pay any attention to him because he's a Republican, and nobody else will pay any attention to him because he's from Texas.  And so he remains one of the few voices of reason in Washington, D.C., whose utterances seem to reverberate through empty halls. 

I'm no political expert. But underlying all this is a fundamental fact that people in the music business have known for a long time. In the digital age, there is no way to keep people from downloading your shit.  The rules are simply not enforceable. Sure, you can shut down Napster. But a dozen other file sharing sites will pop up who will do the same thing, only more effectively.

So I can sympathize with these folks whose careers are endangered. Political careers, media careers and so on. I've seen numerous careers decimated and in some cases destroyed by file sharing.

What has emerged is a music industry that is much smaller and continues to re-invent itself to stay in sync with the world we live in.  


Of course, few will argue that the mainstream music coming out of this modern music business is better than the old mainstream music. But there is a lot more room around the edges of it for stuff that is honest and real.

So maybe we could just have a shrunken government rife with corruption and subterfuge and corporate interests, and around it an encampment of actual democracy.

Which is why I'm backing Justin Bieber for president.