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Nobody does elegaic quite as well as John Perry Barlow. On his blog Barlowfrienz, he gets by turns poetic, mournful, funny and piercing. Welnick's recent death, "the curse of the keyboardist", is linked up with Jerry Garcia's death and the spiritual malaise in its wake, with the deaths of earlier GD keyboard players and with that of one of Barlow's non-GD friends, the actor Spalding Grey. There is also a beautiful lyric that Welnick wrote, which Barlow cannot recall the melody of, and an excerpt from his writing on depression (Barlow's) which is one of the most insightful and compassionate things ever said on the subject.
I like it when John Perry Barlow of Barlowfriendz gets all elegaic like this. Magnanimous Defeat is, unsurprisingly, Barlow's musings on the election results and his reaction to them and where he thinks we should go from here. In case you don't know who JPB was before the Internet, he is mainly a lyricist, which is a type of poet in my view and there is a definite beat-poetry / cowboy-ballad esthetic in his prose. I particularly liked this part, which also struck a bit of a nerve for me:
I have a terrible admission to make. I've been so fanatically opposed to this administration that I have taken dark satisfaction in their failures, even though they were American failures as well. I welcomed growing indications that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating into a sump-hole of back-alley insurgency. Good economic news was bad economic news as far as I was concerned, and vice versa. I was tickled to death with Al Qaqaa and its terrorist-purloined WMDs, and not just because the name was so great. Surely all these bad tidings would eventually add up to an indictment that would convict Bush in the eyes of the American people and they would rouse themselves from Fox-hypnosis and 'possum sleep and vote for change.
But it didn't turn out that way. While I still believe that half of America is hallucinating on hot religion and bad TV, I can't say I have been any too sane, having been delivered into a condition where I took comfort in the successes of our enemies and frowned at news of economic recovery. Despite my own financial anxieties, and those of all around me, I have been so zealous that my own well-being was secondary in importance to the political damage bad times might do the Bush administration. Now that's hallucination. And I'm sorry.
Although I seem to be developing an election theme here, and I do hope it doesn't continue unbroken right up to the election, I had to mentionJohn Perry Barlow's views on how we elect our Presidents and how that needs to improve. Or as he so cogently puts it:
We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn't really matter who's President.
This, Hecklers at a Funeral, is the sort of thing I was hoping to get when I heard that John Perry Barlow was blogging. Now the poet comes out, and the heart is in his writing. A bit of background: Barlow was a good friend of Spalding Gray, who, in case you haven't heard, has disappeared, presumed dead of his own hand. After Barlow posted an elegy to Gray on his blog, he was subject to unfeeling attacks from several vicious trolls in the comment section. The link above is his response.
Unless you are a deadhead or a musicologist or a student of early internet communities, you will not have heard of John Perry Barlow; I am the first and the third, to a small degree, so I have. Therefore, when I read in All the Pages Are My Days that JPB had started a blog, I clicked onto it eagerly. And discovered a hornet's nest. The guy has been in the blogosphere less than a month and already he is the right's favourite political football! Catch it in midstream at "Narcissism and the American Left", by Armed and Dangerous. The statement that aroused the storm of debate was:
"We can't afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we'll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is." (Safire Takes A Shot At Us, by BarlowFriendz)
I actually agree with a LOT of what the original post in Armed and Dangerous is saying. Don't get me wrong, I still love JPB as a poet (and they call him an internet uberexpert too, but I don't think that actually requires technical or real-world brilliance), and no one is saying his heart ain't in the right place (on the left, yep, right where it belongs) but the essay pushed a lot of buttons for me. As you may or may not know, I have been in and out of leftist political movements since 1970, and the two things that always drive me crazy and drive me out are : 1) the way polemicists, mostly male, always pull the "ooh I'm such a criminal rebel, the establishment is scared of me and I'm going to be disappeared soon" routine and 2) the way the SWP or even less savoury groups take over everything just as it's growing big.
Looking back at JPB's statement, I say two things. First, there were so many better ways he could have finished that sentence "If we do, . . ." He could have referred to America's eroding image in the rest of the civilised world, to the lurking unsustainability in the economy, to the corruption in corporate circles or to the mostly hidden plight of the poor. To suggest that the greatest threat the Bush admin poses is to wealthy technocrat liberal big-mouths like himself is tragically solipsistic. Second, why 60 years? That would be 1943-44, really a heyday for leftist intellectuals. It bespeaks a certain ignorance of history I have come to expect in so-called intelligentsia of the hippie school. It makes the few of us who care about such things look bad by association.
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