Web Commonerpolitics, social commentary, and ramblings on pop culture

For some, Michael Jackson’s sudden death at 50 was sweet in the sense that it fostered a tremendous sense of love around the globe. He was such a beloved figure by so many people, and that love is reciprocating itself tenfold in their remembrance of a man who inspired and encouraged them to be better human beings. For others, it was bitter because he led such a tragic and tortured existence, one that was oftentimes difficult to witness and even harder to understand. For me, it was both. Many years ago, I let go of a person so incredibly admired throughout my childhood, not because of the legal accusations filed against him or the media crucifixion that followed, but simply because I no longer recognized him.

As I grew into adulthood, my childhood obsession with the King of Pop faded with his physical appearance, a face that no longer seemed to resemble the one I came to love and respect. At times, when I thought about Michael, it brewed within me a battle for my own conscience, fought over whether or not physical appearance should matter when it comes to respecting a good friend, or at least the perception of one. When all is said and done, I don’t think it was his physical appearance that truly bothered me. Instead, it was this nagging feeling from within that the man was on an inevitable path towards self-destruction, altering his body in what seemed to be a perfectionist’s pursuit to manifest the impossible. For many of us, the haunting question when it comes to Michael Jackson is what made a person so talented, loving, and caring drive him to do such unspeakable things to an already flawless appearance.

Much of the short term blame is placed on an alleged addiction to drugs, specifically painkillers, which may have contributed to Jackson’s visibly increasing physical frailty. The long term blame, though, is often directed at Joe Jackson. His brutish nature is no secret and many tabloids drew attention to it throughout Michael’s career, long before I matured to a point of understanding its effect on a child’s growth. In fact, most people don’t seem to deny that any of the Jackson kids really appreciate their father for relentlessly pushing them into superstardom long before they were ready to accept and understand the consequences of that reality. Joe Jackson forced his youngest son into the spotlight at the age of five, who proceeded to spend his entire childhood singing and dancing on stage in front of adults, and mingling with adult entertainers. Throughout his career, Michael made it known to the media and his fans the physical and mental abuse that he suffered at the hands of his father when he was a young boy.

So, the King of Pop spent close to 50 years trying to manufacture a childhood that he never had, and he wanted to spend that childhood with others in the same manner that he imagined spending it all those years back. Michael’s tragedy lies in the fact that his physical form matured much faster than his mind, which was seemingly held to stagnation at some point in his turbulent past. His brain was poised to keep the man a child, with a child’s heart, while his body compelled him to physical feats that undoubtedly made him the world’s most favored entertainer. He became an unprecedented and unbelievable talent, and his new fame brought with it a lavish lifestyle that most people, let alone children, would ever have the opportunity to experience or even dream. Ultimately, it skewed the balance between reality and fantasy, and tragically led to Michael’s bittersweet demise.

Michael, may you rest in peace, and may those who never truly understood your brilliance or even sympathized with your situation at least come to accept the unfortunate circumstances that made you different. As we continually seek to someday heal the world, we need only look as far as the mirror to do it.

Listening to Robert Reich converse with Bill Moyers on his show recently about the prospect of a public health care option, it suddenly dawned on me that this might actually be what saves American capitalism. After witnessing Wall Street crumble before our very eyes and the banks peel back decades of corruption, unjustified speculation, and unethical lending practices, nobody seems to doubt that the very idea of capitalism took a low blow to the gut last year. It seems to invite a direct comparison to the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, with lack of oversight in the form of government deregulation leading the financial industry to take advantage of its market the same way Bush used the American people to sew the seeds of war.

After unregulated and unchecked financial institutions drove the world into economic meltdown, it doesn’t seem completely irrational to believe that health insurance giants might be just as corrupt and unethical as yesterday’s banks and lenders. Those of us who are not denied coverage outright and can actually afford insurance have the unfortunate privilege of experiencing this first hand, either through denied claims, increased costs, inadequate care, or downright inhumane customer service. In an adequately regulated capitalist system, competition is supposed to mitigate the occurrence of these issues, unless the industry is so corrupt that company executives actually work together to regulate the flow of profit. No example of this cronyism could be more valid than energy in the 90′s, and no event more telling than when the vice president of the United States, former CEO of energy giant, Halliburton, held a closed-door meeting in the White House with the country’s top energy executives, including some from Enron.

With the proposal of a new public option for health care, Reich argues that the current private health care system will be forced into competition with the government and, more importantly, itself to provide better care. That’s right, it’s an option. Despite rhetoric spewed from the mouths of mostly Republicans and health insurance lobbyists on Capitol Hill, nobody’s proposing that the government universally take over or “socialize” health care in the United States. Instead, people would have an option to stay with those who currently provide care, or they can go with the new guy. The one that offers care at lower costs and has the potential to collect and analyze patient information on a massive scale, ultimately leading to improved care in the future. This might sound to you like an unfair advantage but, to me, it sounds like competition, and capitalists always argue that competition is what spurs efficiency and innovation.

So, bring it on. An alternate option to the current system that creates real competition amongst insurance giants sounds like a wonderful idea, and one that will foster tremendous reforms. It almost seems ironic that diehard capitalists would oppose the concept, given that their entire philosophy lives and dies by the idea that competition pushes its industry forward and fosters progress. I would suggest that they stop being hypocrites and put their money where their mouth is, inherit some real risk for a change, and embrace competition like they’re supposed to do. Instead, private insurance corporations seem insistent on denying reality and maintaining the status quo by working together and dispatching lobbyist underlings to Washington in pursuit of quelling talk of reform. The truth hurts, and sometime it takes more courage to acknowledge that fact and make a change than it does to keep doing what you know is wrong. GM learned that the hard way.

Republican talking points seem ablaze after the weekend brought news of the Iranian government’s violent attempts to curb protests ten days after a presidential election left voters questioning the validity of their recently cast ballots. Today, Arizona senator and former presidential rival, John McCain, took advantage of an opportunity granted to him, ironically, by Barack Obama’s veep during last year’s campaign when Joe Biden told a group of donors, “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.”

“The world is looking,” Biden continued. “We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Watch. We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Immediately, McCain fired back by saying that Biden’s statement irresponsibly invited such a test, yet he now seems poised to engage the president in a war of words that suggests an irrational desire to set the wheels in motion for Obama’s “test” to finally flourish. Yesterday, he publicly called into question the president’s response to the conflict in Iran. The president, while condemning the use of violence to quell the protests and expressing deep concern over reports that the election might be fixed, took a neutral stance on dealing with it by stating that the US will speak for the opposition’s fundamental rights to assembly and free speech, but stopping short of military intervention or further sanctions that would serve to enhance the Iranian government’s justification for the use of more violence.

Reading an AP article on protest crackdown before Congress, John McCain, whose knee-jerk reaction to last summer’s Russian invasion of the democratic country of Georgia would have had us launching an invasion the next day, grievingly focused attention on a young woman killed by Iranian authorities while protestors captured her murder on video. The woman, known to the world as “Neda,” was quickly designated a martyr by those sympathetic to the cause of Iranian protestors, but might as well be dubbed, “Neda the Plumber,” in McCain’s own circle. The Arizona senator shamelessly used the Iranian woman’s story as a backdrop to demonstrate his leadership in calling for the president to take a stronger stance against Iran.

However, Barack Obama seems poised, instead, to heed the advise of former president, George Herbert Walker Bush, who recently expressed caution against enflaming tensions with the Islamic republic over the protests. In 1991, Mr. Bush learned the consequences of encouraging homegrown resistance and subsequently failing to follow through on military aid, which led to the massacre of Iraqi revolutionaries. Regardless of influence, there is no denying that Obama continues to demonstrate an incredible capacity to keep cool under immense pressure. Only 154 days in office, no issue on his plate is more toxic than the nightmare of nuclear proliferation, and John McCain seems bitterly fixed on using the conflict as an opportunity to demonstrate a judgmental weakness on the part of the president. Of course, this comes from a man who displayed disturbing lapses in judgement throughout last year’s presidential campaign, including the choice to nominate a highly unqualified running mate and hasty decision to inject himself into congressional negotiations concerning the economic meltdown with no useful insight.

McCain’s motives may be wrong, but Joe Biden’s statement was right. The crisis in Iran is the international test that he anticipated for Barack Obama, and the president’s patience in dealing with it is paramount to his success. Our relationship with Iran has been on shaky ground for decades, with example after example of diplomatic missteps that gave Iranian authorities opportunities to propagate the politics of hatred and mistrust among their citizenry. Then, the Bush administration cut off diplomatic ties with the country entirely. Today, its leadership progresses towards the development of a nuclear weapon that threatens the prospect of peace everywhere and, as usual, Barack Obama must practice reasonable restraint under mounting pressure from the irritable and irrational, whether it’s coming from characters like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or John McCain.

Meanwhile, a new generation of highly motivated Iranian citizens, who matured under false pretenses of freedom, are expressing disapproval over an oppressive regime that they helped muster. It’s their fight, and increased rhetoric from the party that gave us George Bush and Dick Cheney will only lead us down the path towards political and diplomatic self-destruction. Put plainly, it’s ‘dem fightin’ words that John McCain, his party, and the extremist Iranian dictatorship expect from Barack Obama, and their flawed logic follow familiar tones that draw from mistakes made in the past. They are part of an old-school train of thought, which could neither anticipate or fully comprehend the idea that the Internet might play such a significant role in shifting the tides of change. The president knows better than to lead by their example, and understands that the way forward is by learning from past mistakes in order to fully embrace the promise of progress. By exercising reasonable restraint while aligning himself and the American people with the plight of those who stand their ground in the fight for freedom, he will pass the test with flying colors.

I love you guys. I really do. I’m one of those PC converts who, over the years, went from having two Windows-based desktop computers in the house to a MacBook Pro, Mac Mini in the living room, Time Capsule to back it all up, and three iPods for non-stop entertainment on the go. While Microsoft’s XP efforts were appreciated, I simply got tired of weaving through the cobweb-like process of organizing a library of digital media that seemed to grow exponentially by the minute. OS X not only makes it easy, but stimulates creativity at the same time and actually invokes fun. So, after a lifetime of recording my own beloved music mixes to analog tape or burning 15 or so select songs to a compact disc, I cannot put in words how vamped I was to discover smart playlists in iTunes. This was the turning point when I finally chose a side, and it seemed as if my feelings on the matter were so strong that there would be no turning back. Mac for life, right?

Music is my vice, my addiction, and my lifeblood in most circumstances. I need it to survive, and I need it to follow some sort of creative order, or else it’s just background noise. I listen to all kinds of music from Rock to Rap, Jazz to Country, Folk to Metal, and R&B to Electronic. My method for organizing it is fairly straight-forward, and involves keeping everything properly categorized, which results in songs being played in the right context. For me, this means adding comments to individual tracks or albums that will blend genres with the help of smart playlists, which I cater to express a specific mood or theme. It works perfectly and, to this day, I’m awestruck and amazed by the capabilities granted to us by simple, free applications like iTunes. I love the idea of setting a few simple parameters that throw three or four hundred compatible-sounding songs into a playlist and granting your playback device permission to pick their play order for you. This instills in me a childlike sense of angst that leaves me guessing in anticipation what the next song or artist may be. However, ask any professional DJ and they will tell you that there are rules to follow when playing music in this manner, and the one that seems to be universally understood is that you don’t play the same artist two times in a row.

This brings me to my personal yet public plea to Apple, and I hope someone out there in the upper echelons is listening. I understand that randomization does not mean even distribution. It’s fairly straight forward. Flip a coin ten times and there’s still a chance that it will land tales every time, and that’s still random. If one of my playlists features an artist that is weighted significantly higher in content than others, I understand the chances of that artist’s music ending up snuggled closer together within the confines of that playlist. Still, I’m not interested in my device shuffling music at random. All I’m asking my iPod to do is find a way to ensure that artists do not play back-to-back, at least within the first 30 or 40 songs of a playlist that boasts three or four hundred tracks. If that means you create a formula that throws most of the heavily weighted artist’s music to the back of the line in order to give others a chance at playback, so be it. At least I won’t want to rip my iPod out of its docking station and pitch it against the wall every time I hear the same artist or, even worse, the same artist from the same album played back-to-back within a playlist featuring a wider pool than my local Clear Channel radio station.

I may be wrong, but it would appear that iTunes once allowed its users to indicate how likely it should be for its software to repeat the same songs, or artists, or albums. In fact, I know this feature existed because the urge to toss my iPod out the window when this happens suddenly disappeared and made me a very happy person for a short while. There must have been at least a year, maybe two, of listening bliss, rare sightings of back-to-back servings of the same artist, and then Apple updated iTunes to 8.0 … gone. It’s gone. They dropped the feature and feelings of pent up rage once again bubble inside as my new iPod classic feels content, even proud, to distribute three Oasis songs in a row. I fail to understand the logic here, and while I prefer not to go back to hand-picking tracks out of a library of thousands to avoid taking my frustrations out on a simple and virtually lifeless mechanical device, it would appear that my only option may be to abandon smart playlists altogether and, consequentially, abandon the iPod.

Apple. If you’re out there. I’m begging you. Please address this issue, openly and honestly, for the sake of those who truly believe in your products, their value, and their justified added expense. I know I’m not the only one voicing concern over such a seemingly simple request.