"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."--David Foster Wallace

An interesting thing happened this morning. The lady of the house, in her daily preparations for work, likes to put on a radio in the bathroom so she'll have something to listen to whilst in the shower. At any rate, as she climbed in, I went outside to smoke a stoge. I couldn't tell you what station she managed to tune to this morning, but what I do know is that when I came back in the house I could hear the faint sounds of a perfectly hideous pop-country song emanating from the bathroom. Knowing full well she was probably going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs inside the shower stall, I went in to see about changing the station. We joked briefly about how terrible the song was as I adjusted the tuner on the radio, until finally I landed on a classical station. "Here you go," I said, "This'll do you good." To wit she replied, "What, are you trying to make me smarter or something?" Which, of course, translates from Woman Speak into English as, "Are you calling me stupid?" Even though we both agreed that the selection playing made us feel less cultured and more as though we were listening to a commercial for dish soap, I left the dial alone and exited the bathroom.

As I continued to listen to the music wafting in from the next room, I remembered a discussion I had in high school with my great friend, Ulf, an exchange student from Hamburg. For whatever reason, we were talking about classical music. The original impetus for the conversation now escapes me, but what I can recall went a little something like this:

Me: You know something? I kind of like classical music. How about you?

Ulf: Yeah, it's ok. Who's your favorite composer?

Me: If I had to pick, I'd say Rachmaninov.

Ulf: That's because you're a fuckin' communist, Nevin. Only fuckin' communists
listen to Rachmaninov.

Me: [Laughing] Well, who's your favorite?

Ulf: Wagner.

Me: Well, that figures. Because you're a fascist, and only goddamn fascists
listen to Wagner.

[Both Laughing]

Ulf was/is a great guy. I remember the day he introduced me to Guinness. I was forever banging on about my Irish heritage, so I suspect that had something to do with it. As he handed me my first bottle, he said things like, "This what we Germans call 'sweet beer,' because it has so much alcohol it tastes like wine," "This is a man's beer, Nevin. You have to be a man to drink this beer. If you're not a man, it will make you one," and, my personal favorite, "This is the beer of your people, Nevin. You have to like it." Fuckin' priceless. It took all I had to disguise my disgust for the black, frothy ale as I drank it and replied simply, "It's really good." What I really wanted to do was get as far away from the stuff as humanly possible. Who knew that, 15 years later, it would rate inside my top 10 favorite beers of all time? But, I digress.

What I really wanted to talk about was, despite our differences being both cultural and ideological, the truth that held us together was a universal one. That is to say, what kept us friends was the universal truth of music. You see, despite the fact that every time he played country music in his Jeep Wrangler I wanted to kill myself, and despite the fact that every time I played rap music in my parents' Ford Probe he probably wanted to kill me, we both shared a love of obnoxiously loud rock and roll.

As the morning progressed, I continued to think about the transcendent nature of music. I thought about Beethoven and his deafness. I thought about how, impassioned by his composition and the orchestra in his head which played it perfectly, he closed his eyes and flailed his arms, never seeing the musicians in front of him fumbling and failing to keep up. I mulled over how, as an amateur bassist myself, rewarding it is to hear a piece of music in your head that nobody else has heard before and then pick an instrument and release that music into the world. I also mused at Beethoven's ultimate irony. The poor bastard must have been traumatized by going deaf, and you can hear it in his music. In every movement of every symphony he produced after afterward he's all over the map, emotionally speaking. And, therein lies the crux of his greatness and it's irony. The thing is, had he not been a man whose sole passion in life was music who went deaf, experiencing trauma of epic proportions, would he still have produced his Ninth Symphony? I sincerely doubt it, and just the thought of it all still gets me a little misty eyed.

Think about it. If you look at small children, as young as a year or two in age, it's impossible for them to express an understanding of music and dance. But, even if they don't know what dance is, even if they've never seen it on TV, what happens when a song they like comes on the radio? Invariably, no matter what country they come from or what language they speak, they'll try to dance. Something about a pleasing melody and exciting rhythm just makes them want to move. Music is one of those rare things that is both unique and universal to the human experience. It's hardwired into our DNA. I once related that observation to the brother of a friend over beers at Fadó Irish Pub in Austin. His response was, "Wow, that's actually really insightful." I was flattered, but made sure to sound humble by replying, "Well, I'm sure somebody else noticed that before I did, but it's just something I've been thinking about lately."

"I ain't got no quarrel with the VietCong... No VietCong ever called me nigger."--Muhammad Ali

So yesterday I was sitting around watching obscure movies, as is my wont. This week's selection was an old documentary by the name of The War at Home (Brown and Silber, 1979). Admittedly, my feelings going into it were most aptly described as tepid considering that a good portion of the time older documentaries tend to be rather amateurish relative to their contemporary brethren. As it turns out, TWAH, with it's thorough examination of the anti-war protests on the microcosmic University of Wisconsin campus during the 1960s and 70s was anything but. As I so often do upon completion of movies of its ilk, I trotted off to see if I couldn't start a fight about it on the IMDb message boards. Much to my chagrin, it's board was only possessed of a solitary thread containing one lonely post. Well, two posts if you include my response to the original lonely post.

At any rate, that post contained some things that started me thinking about the current state of race relations in America. The thing is, TWAH contained some pretty graphic scenes of police brutalizing some rather peaceful sit-in participants. Truth be told, I've been privy to so many books, movies, and documentaries about that era that no amount of police violence contained therein really affects me. Further, having grown up in a Deep South backwater, I've personally known a good many people who've been on the wrong end of such violence. Frankly, the only thing that's still shocking about police brutality, as I told the naive sod on IMDb, is that anyone is still shocked by it. To make a long story not so long, I could tell immediately by his horror that he was white.

And that's the rub. Within the documentary, on the one hand you had a bunch of white middle-class folks talking about how affected they were by the Kent State Killings (and I use the word 'killings' because to this day I maintain that the more common nomenclature 'massacre' is a misnomer; there were only actually four deaths, hardly qualifying as a massacre in my mind). That reaction was contrasted by two interviewees who were a pair of African-Americans, Wahid Rashad and his wife, who described feeling far less than visceral about Kent. The fact was, they said, between the murders of Martin Luther King and racist pig cops they were hardly surprised.

Unfortunately, to this day the distinction between white and minority thinking on issues like this persists. I say unfortunately because that difference in thinking is more or less exemplary of the latent racism so pervasive in the white community, a latent racism which indirectly in turn contributes to the persistence of problems like police brutality. Take for instance the Battle of Seattle and the popular reactions to it at the time. Why was it so hard for people to believe that the police there actually caused the violence despite the assertions of the protesters? Between Rodney King, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo, you would have thought people would have gotten the idea that the police were/are a rather untidy little group of jack-booted fascists. Why didn't they? I'll tell you why. The one thing King, Louima, and Diallo all had in common was the color of their skin: black.

I'm reminded of a conversation between two of a good buddy's co-workers after a company softball game. They were discussing the virtues and drawbacks of various parts of California when the discussion turned to Orange County. One extolled the area's virtues, the other expressed his disdain by saying, 'The police over there are fucked up!' The former just wouldn't buy it no matter how much the latter tried to convince him. I'll let you to work out for yourself which one was black and which one white. The difference of opinion, which could only stem from the difference in the way people of various races get treated by the cops, betrays a subtle racism in and of itself. Sadly, that conversation took place only two years ago, and given the recent murder of Oscar Grant by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle, it appears as though things (despite the election of a mixed race president) haven't changed all that much since the days of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.