Thoughts on Making Mistakes

Sometimes I watch a YouTuber named Fil (yes, that's how he spells his name) whose channel goes by the name Wings of Pegasus. He's a musician who reviews musical performances available online. Lately he has specialized in running vocal performances through a software that detects whether they've been altered by digital pitch correction or autotune software. It's pretty fascinating stuff. Recently, he made some headlines when he determined that live performances by The Eagles on their current tour, Don Henley's lead vocal in particular, are being pitch corrected in concert. The question that arises, of course, is what is the point of paying good money for increasingly expensive concert tickets if the performances are not actually live. Isn't it at minimum false advertising? It should be said that some pre-recorded elements are not a new thing in concert performances. They've been with us since at least the 1970s. I remember attending a concert by Queen in the early 1980s at the Montreal Forum. When they played Bohemian Rhapsody at the moment they reached the operatic multi-layered vocal harmonies the stage suddenly went dark. The voices coming through the speakers were obviously not live. A collective WTF could be felt in the audience. The reason for doing this was obvious to everyone; the harmonies of the original recording (multiple tracks sung by one person, Freddie Mercury) could not be reproduced by the band in concert. At least they made no effort to hide it. 

In a recent post, Fil analyzes a performance by Whitney Houston 'singing' the Star Spangled Banner at the 1991 Super Bowl. Fil was inspired to look at Whitney's performance by scathing online reaction to country singer Ingrid Andress's recent drunken, off-key performance of the anthem at a baseball game. The point was that at least Andress's performance was completely live, while incredibly, Whitney's performance, which included a large orchestra, was entirely mimed. The reason given for Whitney's lip-synch by the show's producers was that it had to be perfect, there was no room for error with so many millions watching. Seems drastic for two reasons, a. it's Whitney Houston for crissakes, one of the most sublimely talented singers of our era, and b. it's the Star Spangled Banner, a civic prayer, and to mess with it is a kind of sacrilege. That said, Whitney does a pretty respectable but not flawless job of lip-synching her pre-recorded performance. These days, using pre-recorded elements and digital voice correction in live performance has become ubiquitous to the point of being music industry standard. The main problem is that the powers-that-be don't tell us that. For its part, Wings of Pegasus has almost 400K subscribers doing mostly voice analysis to uncover if the live vocal performances we're hearing are actually live. I guess I'm not the only one interested in finding out how artists and the music industry are pulling the wool over our eyes (ears?).    

There are questions that need answering. Is all this fakery well-meaning? A case of musicians using the new technologies to 'improve' the product they're producing? Is this just another example of the commodification of the arts, the industry taking something that was once essentially handcrafted and turning it into shoddy and inexpensive IKEA merchandise? Money is certainly a major part of it. But maybe something more nefarious is also going on. Maybe music is joining fake news, fake images and curated fake social media lives in an increasingly fake world. And maybe it's endemic of a culture, not of 'perfection', but rather of fear, the fear of making mistakes, and if so, a fear of being human. 

I think we need a little reminder of what the arts have always been about and are meant to be: honest human expression, the more honest the greater the work of art. Honesty also means fearless, and fearlessness means vulnerable, exposed, and necessarily that includes flaws. It's the only way for art to do what it's supposed to do, touch the heart and soul. Art that doesn't do that is nothing but product. 

In the last year I've been turned on to American blues music in a major way, not recent blues, or rock blues, original blues from the early part of the 20th century, the 1930s and 40s. Artists like Charley Patton, Sam Chatmon, Bill Broonzy, Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson and Son House. Fortunately, recordings by these artists are available online, many of them rare and done in one take. They were made before multi-tracking, before studio effects, before overdubbing. Even when they've been digitally 'cleaned up' from the crackly 78rpm LPs from which they've been taken they remain exquisitely 'imperfect' in their authenticity. What comes roaring across the decades in these raw performances is the only thing that matters in art, their honesty and humanity. They remind me of how much we've lost in our desire for AI-generated perfection. 

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PS: You may have watched Celine Dion's much-anticipated, 'comeback' performance at the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. The setting was dramatic, Celine in flowing white gown, standing on the Eiffel Tower overlooking Paris next to a piano, the rain pouring down as she belted out Edith Piaf's Hymne A L'Amour. Remarkable that Celine, who is suffering from a debilitating chronic illness that has kept her from performing for the last few years, could have the strength and capacity to perform at all, let alone in a drenching rain. It was a moving, jaw-dropping coda to the 4-hour long ceremonies. But I suspected it couldn't be all that it seemed, so I posted a request to Fil to do an analysis, and he answered (I was not the only one making the request). I would link to Celine's performance if I could, but it seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Fil explains why.      

Political Assassinations and Cynicism

This past week, there was one attempted political assassination, and one successful political assassination. 

Yeah, in Biden's case, he made his own decision, as long as it was the decision the power brokers and big party donors wanted him to make. What we witnessed was the transparent exercise of political power by the people who actually hold it. We saw in plain view how the mechanisms of decisions  actually work in Washington, the gears of the political class turning. They said they were reading the polls. I'd argue, as I have before, that polls at this stage of the game mean close to zero, and all the numbers did was give a patina of legitimacy to a process that was already underway. The last 538 analysis I saw - a comprehensive survey of all the most recent polling and other important variables thrown in for good measure -  mid-last week showed Biden beating trump 54 times out of a hundred. Biden's downslide was accelerated by the spineless Democrats abandoning him, and so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy for him to leave. That's my general read on what we witnessed. Politics is a vicious game, and driven by big money donors and party power brokers, with the lowly voters along for the ride.      

But what irks me the most is that the reason the Democrats gave for the hit job was that they needed a candidate who can defeat trump, which is absurd for two reasons. First, it's impossible to determine that with any certainty. Second, it's aiming at the wrong target. For a political party every election should be about choosing the best person to be President, not the best person to beat the other guy. The voters understand this, but the parties still apparently don't. They think that every election is a binary choice, one candidate or the other. Putting aside that there are sometimes 3rd party candidates who play highly disruptive, even decisive, roles in that equation. The proposition is fundamentally untrue. The choice is always at the very least between one candidate, another candidate, and the couch, and in most elections the couch wins by a landslide. Voters hate the choice they are being offered so they opt out. I've been around for elections with some very dreary candidates, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Bush father and son all come to mind. The current election was set up as perhaps the worst choice ever, which is what trump was counting on. He knew he had a base of supporters who would walk over burning coals to cast a vote for him - or attend all his rallies, which might be worse. Biden didn't have that kind of support. That's now changed potentially. The beauty of what has just happened is that by having the tables turned on them, the Republicans have now wasted untold millions of dollars and years branding trump's presumptive opponent the 'Biden Crime Family', playing political games for naught. Trump was likely only a truly viable candidate as long as the cynicism and disinterest of the electorate was maximized by a match-up that was the same as 2020. Now it's trump who is the old, low-energy, fumbling, bumbling candidate with a cognitive (and moral) impairment. If the Democrats fail to take advantage of this situation by beating each other up in a nomination contest it will be the worst case of political malpractice in American history.

I'll make a final obvious but perhaps most important observation. Biden did something that would have been unimaginable for trump. He put the interest of his party and his country first. Biden has done that his whole life. Trump has done the exact opposite every day of his. Each in his own way is an exemplar of his party. This election surely highlights in stark contrast the essence of what animates the two parties; the Democrats pursue policies that benefit the least advantaged and therefore the greatest good of society. The Republicans operate under the premise that the greatest good of society is to maximize individual self-interest. That this election is any kind of contest remains to me sort of mind-boggling, but I guess it does illustrate the push and pull of American society.  

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PS. Yesterday at my cottage on Lake Champlain. Something rarely seen (in fact I've only seen it once before in 30 years). A bald eagle perched on the tree outside my house. It landed at about noon, just before Biden announced that he was no longer seeking reelection, and stayed until around 3:30 PM.   

Et Tu Brute

The politicians want him to go. The big money wants him to go. The media wants him to go. Those three - the politicians, the media and the big money - are all connected. This is how politics works in real time. The question is, do the voters want him to go? I'm not so sure.  

The drama of these past few weeks has been good for TV ratings. In general, Biden isn't - good for ratings I mean. He's always been kind of boring. Competent, decent, somewhat self-deprecating, talks softly, often too fast and like a policy-wonk. But every once in a while, and with some increasing frequency, he makes a gaffe. He says Vice-President Trump when he means to say Harris. He says President Putin when he means to say Zelensky. And the media revels in every gaffe as an opportunity to talk about age-related cognitive decline. Trump, on the other hand, has always been great for ratings. He is hyperbolic and insulting, grandiose, lies like a rug, and can't complete a thought without trailing off into some demented fantasy world of dangers that includes an invasion of immigrant rapists and criminals, shark attacks, and the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lechter. Same old, same old.

The panic around Joe got going with his terrible and disoriented debate performance. Everyone expected the worst in the polls, but the worst didn't happen, the polls showed no change in the race. Still, the nervous Democrats continued to fret about Biden's age as he went into public appearance overdrive with more than a dozen events hoping to course-correct, some using a teleprompter, some without one. He made a few more gaffes, which, to the media talking heads confirmed their entirely unsubstantiated belief in an age-related cognitive incapacity. Big name donors and then party leaders started to publicly jump ship, and low and behold the public got the message and Biden's poll numbers did start to show some slippage. What a surprise. I'd call it manufacturing discontent.

What do the voters actually think? Can anyone really know? According to Jen O'Malley Dillon, the Biden Campaign Chair, their workers have knocked on over 100,000 doors in the swing states in the last few days to speak directly with voters, previous Biden supporters and independents. She said 76% said they will vote for Biden. Admittedly this is unscientific, but how much less so than the polls?  

This morning there was a report that Biden will announce he is leaving the race this weekend. Another report says that after watching trump's meandering diatribe last night, he is more committed than ever to running. A lot of people are saying that the only way the Democrats can win is with Kamala Harris as the nominee. The party needs to coalesce unanimously behind her with Biden's endorsement and without a contest. Any other scenario risks the party descending into more infighting. Harris as the nominee makes some sense. She'd be hard for Trump to attack without sounding like a racist and misogynist. She's a prosecutor and he's a felon, so one can imagine her prosecuting the case against him effectively. As a woman, she is the perfect representative for the fight for reproductive rights that Trump took away. Imagine the grassroots enthusiasm to elect the first Black woman president. But she also has some glaring vulnerabilities. She was Biden's point person on southern border security, the electorate's top concern, and arguably failed in that portfolio. I remember her campaign for the nomination four years ago, and she performed very poorly. 

It looks increasingly like Biden will decide to go. Hard to run a race with all those knives in your back. I sure hope Harris has learned a few things in the past four years. 

Committing Political Suicide

I thought we were done with this. Apparently not. Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries have had private conversations with Biden, telling him he can't win. I have no idea what crystal ball they are using. Now Adam Schiff has come out publicly urging Biden to drop out. It's clearly all being orchestrated. It's painful to watch the Democrats self-immolate, as the party elite tosses out the democratic process that they claim to represent and protect. It reminds me of what they did to Bernie Sanders in 2016 in favour of Hillary Clinton during the primaries with so-called 'super delegates', and we know how that ended.

Here's why I think the Democrats need to rally around their incumbent ASAP:

1. Biden is Biden, still is, just older and more so. He was never a good speaker. He always stuttered. He's been making gaffes his whole career. He never had charisma. People didn't elect him for his magnetic appeal in 2020, or for his rousing inspiring speeches. They supported him for his decency and experience. They supported him because he wasn't trump. Nothing about that has changed, except that trump has become an indicted and convicted felon, and Biden has had a successful 4-year term as president by most accounts. Oh yeah, and they are both 4 years older. 

2. About the terrible debate. Debates have never mattered in any political campaign, except maybe the first televised debate between JFK and Richard Nixon in 1960. Polls mean nothing, especially not 4 months before an election. Polls have proven to be incredibly unreliable, especially in recent years. Of course the best example of this was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was given a 99% chance of winning the election by the much lauded Princeton Election Consortium, and just 3 days before the election they had her at 312 electoral college votes (270 is needed to win). Another recent example was the 'red wave' predicted in the 2022 midterm elections which never materialized. At best, polls are snap shots of a moment in time. But as worthless as polls are this far out from an election, Biden has just had the worst month of any politician in memory and the most recent polls show that the race remains even or within the margin of error. Anyway, as I say polls mean nothing, and the Democrats don't get it.

3. While some political strategists look at 'unfavourables' and others look at various polls, the only historically reliable systematic method of predicting success in presidential elections with a near-perfect track record over the last 40 years has been Allan Lichtman's 13 Keys to the White House. They make a lot of sense. Two important keys are incumbency and no primary contest ie. party unity. If Biden decides to step away, the Democrats risk losing these two important advantages. A successor to Biden is unsure (remember when Hillary was a guaranteed winner?) and the process would likely be chaotic. That's a huge risk. But what Lichtman's method actually points out in general is that candidates really don't matter as much as people think they do, unless the candidate is a once-in-a-generation uniquely charismatic figure, like Obama, JFK or Reagan. Trump doesn't count because people are united as much against him as behind him. Lichtman's method favours governance over personality when understanding election dynamics. And as it stands, the Democrats have most of those keys in their favour, if they can hold it together and get behind the incumbent. Instead, they seem to be falling for 'personality politics' which is a construction of the media, because every good story is obsessed with a protagonist. It's trump-style politics, focus on an individual, and its why he has lost every election since 2016. The Democrats have lost the more important narrative, the one that actually impacts election outcomes.

4. The coming election will be like all others in recent memory. The result will be determined by turnout. The Republicans have a core advantage in enthusiasm for their candidate, slavishly so, but their maximum number is too low to win a majority. The Democrats have majority numbers but turnout has always been structurally challenging because they are a bottom-up coalition party, not top-down like the Republicans. Party in-fighting and fragmentation takes a much heavier toll on the Democrat's side. This election cycle the Democrats have spent a lot of time and resources building an organization to buttress turnout in the swing states. This, of course, is not reflected in any polls. But the more time and energy the Democrats spend fighting each other and fragmenting their coalition the more difficult it will be to turn out their vote. It's essentially what happened in 2016 with Bernie-Hillary and why Hillary ultimately lost against an unpopular opponent. The most shocking result of that election was the number of Bernie supporters who voted for trump, or stayed home. It cost her the presidency. Bottom line, the organizational pieces are currently in place, if the Democrats can get their act together.

The stakes are too high for this kind of political malpractice. Will the Democrats figure it out in time? We'll know soon.

Shoo-in? Nah

So trump is now a shoo-in? That seems to be what most people are saying. It's undeniable that misguided trump cultists who enthusiastically bought his endorsed Bible and already believed he was the Second Coming must now be more convinced than ever that an assassin's bullet nicking his ear instead of penetrating his skull because of a chance turn of the head was due to the merciful hand of God. His Jesus-like aura as somehow both superhuman and unfairly victimized at the same time has been enhanced beyond the wildest dreams of his campaign organizers. And ever the performer, trump had the presence of mind at that moment of mayhem to pose for the perfect photo-op, surrounded by Secret Service, blood trickling down his cheek, fist raised in defiance. Those kinds of morbid, reptillian political instincts are rare indeed. His lowlife Republican spokespeople, operatives and sycophants on the cable news shows could barely contain their glee in the 24 hours that followed, almost forgetting that a devotee had been killed and others seriously injured. The Lord seems to have chosen to only spare the life of the felonious Orange Anointed One, and not the heroic firefighter standing behind him diving to protect his wife and daughter from the gunfire. Counting January 6th, how many have been killed at Trump political rallies? Of course, to trump all supporters are ultimately expendable, except when it’s time to send in those $5 and $10 donations to the legal defense fund. 

The surprise guest appearance of a 20 year-old high school gun club reject with dreams of infamy was a bonanza on the eve of the trump show's most watched episode, the Republican Convention. The question for me is whether voters will eventually see the obvious bigger picture: Trump is an agent of chaos, always was and always will be, and everything (and almost everyone) he touches dies (or goes to jail). For Trump-endorsed bible fans you find that passage in Hosea 8:7 “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind". I’m sure the Biden campaign will drive the point home, once the dust settles a bit. I'm pretty confident a majority of Americans will get it by November. 

I can remember when elections were fought over policy. The Biden pivot in that direction has already started. It's the smart move in my humble opinion. 

Alice Munro

To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of Andrea Robin Skinner's recent revelation that she was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather Gerald Fremlin. The story would be sadly unremarkable if not for the fact that Skinner is the youngest daughter of the late great Canadian Nobel Prize laureate author Alice Munro, and Fremlin was her husband, whom she stood by despite knowing how he had victimized her child. 

I say that I don't know what to make of it because, in spite of my impulse to condemn Munro, I don't believe any of us has the right to judge or moralize about such deeply personal matters, and a public flogging is all I've been witnessing in the press and online. I can only suppose it's a consequence of dealing with a national shock. 

I'm angry, on at least three levels. I'm angry at this public hit-job, this attempt to tar the reputation of a cultural icon, a symbol of Canadian excellence known around the world. I'm also angry at myself for feeling this way, my naivete, because everyone knows no one is perfect, and cultural icons are flawed human beings like the rest of us. 

I'm also angry at Munro's daughter. Not because she went public with the story - that's her prerogative - but that she chose to do it now. The timing seems unfair. I can hazard some guesses as to why Andrea decided to wait until after her mother had died to reveal this terrible family secret. It's possible that she wanted to spare her mother the difficulty of dealing with the public repercussions. It's also possible that she herself didn't want to face the consequences of publicly attacking her literary icon mother while she was alive. Either way, it's regrettable that her mother is not here to respond. 

Based on her public comments, Andrea is understandably devastated by her mother and part of making the story public is clearly an effort to frame (or taint) Munro's legacy in some way. She says as much in a Vanity Fair essay: “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography, or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” This strikes me as vindictive and in bad form. 

The one thing that I am not, is angry at Munro. Andrea seems to want to portray her mother as selfish, which does fit the MO of most artists. But I feel sad for her. I see Munro for what she was, a woman of a certain generation (she was born in 1931) who was taught to stand by her man come what may and suffer in silence. Okay, she wasn't exactly silent, and thank goodness for that. She turned her emotional inner-conflict into the most poignant and powerful literature and is justifiably celebrated around the world for it. If the feminists who embraced and celebrated her for telling stories about the lives of women and girls are now outraged because the author was not the paragon of virtue they desired, that's not Munro's fault.  

To me this heartbreaking revelation has no bearing at all on the value or importance of Munro's work, even as it will give readers and scholars something to talk about. It's essentially fodder for gossip. It can't be compared in any way to the revelation that the celebrated novelist Joseph Boyden, who claimed to be indigenous, actually isn't. Boyden sold his books and himself as indigenous, so that's at the very least a form of false advertising.  

If Andrea's story, because it involves someone who is 'high-profile', helps in some way others who have suffered as she has, all for the better. I still cannot abide the fact that Alice's privacy has been violated in a manner and at a time when she isn't here to respond, although admittedly it was probably inevitable given her stature. Instead of wishing her mother would leave her stepfather, and hating her mother for not doing so, I wish that as part of the therapeutic healing process, Andrea would have had the courage to work with her mother and gone public with the story together. I'm sure Alice would have agreed, or at least she would have been fair-warned when Andrea went public with it. Now it just looks like a cheap shot.

Presidential Immunity: Second Thoughts

Thinking up what-ifs is the ultimate test to see how reasonable a law is. You can't help running outlandish scenarios through your head. That's why the scenario, what if the President ordered the elite commandos under his authority Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival, was so vexing and shocking. It's a possibility, although admittedly an unlikely one, less likely than, say, what if the President told his Attorney General to indict his political rivals with crimes. Classic dictator stuff. Trump has already said he wants to do that as part of his retribution campaign in a second term. The Supreme Court ruling just gave him the legal tool. It would be an 'official act' and therefore 'presumptively immune', which means it could be scrutinized for criminality. But the act of talking to the Attorney General itself could not be used as evidence for an indictment because the Court deemed that it would constitute a potential 'intrusion' on Presidential authority, which is an absolute no-no. Also, the President's motive could not be questioned. The more I think and write about this decision the more bonkers (and political) it seems. 

Another thing this ruling does, that not many people have talked about, is settle the Presidential Pardon question. It's perhaps the most significant aspect about the decision. It was already understood that Presidents had exclusive power to pardon. But there remained questions about how far a President could go with that. For example could a President sell pardons? The dissenting Justices ran that scenario. Now we know he is absolutely immune. Another scenario no one has talked about is whether the President can pardon himself, which was a question that loomed large with Donald Trump. Now that question has also been settled. Yes. Of course a pardon implies an acceptance of guilt, which I guess could be a disincentive. To some people.