Welcome to a new regular feature here at Taking Tiger Mountain. I’m exceptionally proud to hand over the reigns each Thursday to Dan Solomon, a fantastic writer and thinker. He’s currently spending his time away from the fractured bubble of American culture, tucked away in the heart of London. From there, he’s devoting his idle brain cycles to thoughts about the perverse worlds of sports, politics, music. He’s been kind enough to contribute his words here for everyone. Please enjoy this first installment of The Thirtying, a column whose title I’m not even sure of the exact meaning, but was promised it would be revealed shortly.
Check back each week to watch the ideas evolve.
I’ll miss John Edwards, and fear that his withdrawal from the Presidential primary campaign bodes poorly for Eli Manning’s chances of success in the Super Bowl. I can’t explain how I have become convinced that the Presidential candidacy of a former Senator from North Carolina is intimately intertwined with the on-field fortunes of a quarterback for the New York Giants who hails from Louisiana, but I know that it’s true. It is a feeling in my gut, and I know that such instinctual reactions are to be trusted. Eli’s future was wide open as long as John Edwards had the chance to pick up enough delegates on Super Tuesday to play kingmaker at the convention, but now I fear for the Giants. Eli will likely be crippled by Junior Seau and it’s entirely possible- likely, even- that he’ll never walk again after Sunday night. He’ll eventually appear in commercials in which he’s wheeled around by his brother as they advocate for embryonic stem cell research, and he’ll take on some work as an occasional commentator for mid-market NFL games, a job he’ll be given mostly out of pity.
What the fuck? That was a morbid turn for that train of thought to take. Eli crippled? Jesus, I hope not. He may be on the verge of becoming the only trustworthy quarterback in the NFC, a surprise fuck you to every other team in the conference, especially the Cowboys, and it would be tragic to see that extinguished by Junior Seau in the third quarter of a Super Bowl in which the Giants lead by fourteen points at the half…
And there’s no reason to suspect that it will. Football and politics are both vitally important to understanding the American psyche, but attempts to link the two beyond the superficial tend to result in forced comparisons and analogies. Like Rudy Giuliani- another Loser who, if he’s not officially out of the race as I type this, will likely be done by the time you read it- who insisted that he was the Presidential equivalent of the Giants. Well, they’re both from New York… but other than that, there’s no parallel. The Giants were early front-runners who appeared highly vulnerable and forgotten as the season progressed, only to surprise the nation by knocking off their high-flying opponents in contest after contest, eventually winning the opportunity to face the opposing front-runner in a final match. Well, that sounds more like John McCain, when you get right down to it. Giuliani was always more like the Dallas Cowboys, totally unprepared for an actual contest after coasting for so many weeks on a the notion of inevitability.
But, Jesus, all of this is talk about football and politics, and this is a music blog. Are you still with me? Were you ever?
There are other parallels to draw, that are unrelated to the NFL, but which may be interesting and useful. Is Giuliani the analogue to 50 Cent in his showdown with Kanye? That’s a pretty 2007-centric sentiment, but it’s the New York thing again… In truth, Giuliani is mostly irrelevant, and there are few lessons to draw from his campaign’s implosion, except maybe that there aren’t enough Americans who were fucked by their daddies to make a straight-up Fascist a viable Presidential candidate. Which, at the very least, is reassuring.
Have you ever met someone who had the wrong impression of the sort of person they were? I used to have a roommate who saw himself in one light and had a hard time adjusting when he realized that his role in any group was not the role he wanted or expected. He thought that, in most foursomes, he was the Paul of the group, but four of us lived in that apartment, and the other three of us saw him as the Ringo. It’s a terrifying sight to behold, someone forced to accept that the world does not see them as they see themselves, and that’s the human tragedy in watching a creepy little Fascist like Rudy Giuliani sulk back home to his consulting agency where even a failed Presidential campaign will raise his rates by 20%. Giuliani thought that he was the sort of person people would admire by sheer force or presence, a Jay-Z type, and instead he found out that he was a novelty act, one of the Shop Boyz. After taking a look at him, some were frightened, some were questioning and unconvinced, but most were just not interested- there were grown-ups present.
And so what if those grown-ups are Mitt Romney and John McCain? This is America in 2008, and they are enough to pass as such. In the remaining foursome of Republican candidates as of the Florida Primary, those two were Paul and John, respectively, if only because someone had to be and it wasn’t going to be Rudy or Huckabee. Change the group and they’ll change roles, but that’s as good as it gets if you’re a Republican partisan right now.
Both Romney and McCain have tragicomic videos on YouTube, incidentally, based on their hilarious and unsettling understanding of popular music. Romney’s “Who Let The Dogs Out” moment is a brief flash of stark psychological terror, but it’s McCain’s “Bomb Iran” that reveals just how dangerous old people become when they think that they’re trying to be relevant. By all rights, John McCain should be making well, cut of my legs and call me shorty-style grandpa jokes, but as long as he’s a significant figure in the American political landscape, he’ll continue trying to find ways to try to connect, and that may well lead to disaster.
Except not really, because John McCain has about the same chances of being the President of the United States as the New York Giants have of clearing a thirty point spread against the Patriots on Sunday. Which leads to another fallacy in the football analogies- if McCain is only able to fill the role of the Giants if you give him a thirty-point lead, and Hillary Clinton is clearly the Patriots, with Bill Clinton filling the Bill Belichik role, then what does that make Obama and Romney? Furthermore, who’s actually the Giants? Where do you find a Ringo in this group? You have to suspect that it’d be Romney, but who does that make George Harrison…?
And this is why writing about politics in a music blog is a waste of time; furthermore, it’s why political blogs are probably less relevant to the real world, whatever that really means, than your average music blog. So don’t let yourself feel like you’re an apathetic symbol of your generation if you check your Pitchfork bookmark more often than the Daily Kos – at least talking about music doesn’t reduce anything except popular culture to the role of popular culture, and that is acceptable.
