Civic tributes
In two different pockets of the country, a debate rages about the proper way to honor (or whether to honor at all) a locally-born and iconic rock 'n roll star. AV Club has the story this week about the popularity of pilgrimages and fan-made memorials in Seattle to the late Kurt Cobain. Dead since 1994, Nirvana's front man is still not officially remembered by the municipality even though many people, as well as Google Maps, refer to Viretta Park, near the location of his suicide, as Kurt Cobain Park. The city of Seattle just named a park for rocker Jimi Hendrix last year, 40 years after the guitarist's death.In St. Louis, Chuck Berry is a controversial figure even at the age of 84. A major progenitor of the rock genre of course, Berry is still regarded as a community liability by many St. Louisans because of his criminal rap sheet. Last month, a petition with 100 signatures was submitted to the city council opposing the use of public funds to accommodate on city property a bronze statue depicting a guitar-strumming Berry. While the issue of tax usage was primarily cited by the opposition leader, the 86-year-old Elsie Gickert also comes perilously close to making herself a caricature of the small-minded old bitty, telling reporters that she objects to the plan because of her views on Berry's morality.
In both the Cobain and Berry cases, objections to civic endorsements seem to be based not on distaste for to the two artists' once-controversial musical style, but on perceptions of the hedonistic lifestyles that have always surrounded the music-- Cobain for his drug use, Berry for his court convictions on sex and property crimes. Among those three famous vices of the post-war era-- sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll-- it's the sex and drugs that seem to linger now as the least-settled matters within America's collective consciousness.
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Just when we think our nation's health care problems have been solved, an unemployed man in North Carolina has to rob $1 from a bank for the purpose of getting free health care in prison-- and even that didn't work.
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Last week on Bill Maher, MSNBC's Chris Matthews predicted, with some derision but without any hesitation in his speech, that Minnesota Congresswoman (and Waterloo, IA native) Michele Bachmann would be the 2012 GOP Presidential nominee. How the IRS tax attorney-turned-anti-tax crusader has risen from a frothing-at-the-mouth-from-the-backbench, female equivalent of Steve King to a serious contender for this prominent position speaks volumes about the modern political process in the United States-- and none of it good. Old media sees her as viable because she projects Sarah Palin's aging beauty queen vibe, follows Palin's playbook in doubling down every time she jumbles her facts, but unlike Palin, isn't getting dogged at every turn by a Levi Johnston or Kathy Griffin. But here's the positive part: Her political ascendency makes her now worthy of a vicious and colorful Matt Taibbi takedown in the new issue of Rolling Stone.
The 21st century Hunter S. Thompson calls her "grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies." She is also "at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty."
Bachmann has gained almost instant traction among GOP voters nationally, and shan't be laughed at by all the others, Taibbi says, because there are an awful lot of Americans "who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously." This Bachmann is in it to win it.
posted by CM @ 8:11 PM
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