Sorry, Civ 4 ate a little of my time… – FA
Who throws a shoe? Honestly?
Believe it or not, I’m 100% with President Bush on this one.
First of all, it is not OK to throw stuff at a President. Ever. Even if you don’t like the job he’s doing, the President is also the First Citizen – when he goes abroad, he’s a representative of the country, the personification of it. Second of all, what if this guy had been throwing bullets instead of Nike’s? Maybe I’ve seen too many cheesy action films, but there HAS to be a guy on the Secret Service whose job it is to yell “NOOOOO!” at the top of his lungs and shove Bush aside and take that boot to the head. Third of all, give Bush some credit for being quick enough to duck that shoe. You just know that if John McCain was out there, he would have got pwned by that size 10. Props to Dubya. My fourth point is something a little more philosophical. George Bush going out there holding his head high on this international walk of shame to stick up for a war that’ll almost certainly be judged as a Very Bad Move in the eyes of history is a weird manifestation of one of his core political ideas.
So let’s talk about the Ownership Society. Barack Obama mockingly summed it up as “You’re on your own!” in his convention speech, but that’s not really the point of the idea. With a President whose policies almost invariably favor wealthy and entrenched interests, the Ownership Society is a concept that earns the political allegiance of the working class by encouraging them to buy a slice of the upper class. If you own a piece of something, you have a vital stake in it, and your interests will change accordingly. If everyone owns a home, they’ll work to cut their property taxes. If everyone has an investment in the stock market, “the corporations” cease to be a malevolent liberal boogeyman and instead become directly tied to their own fortunes. If the man’s doing good, you’re doing good. When the man’s doing bad, you’ve got a hard choice to make…
Bush is faced with either giving a negative assessment of Iraq and asking for forgiveness he wouldn’t get anyway, or owning his mistake to the end, standing up for his reasoning for posterity’s sake. People like to own things, to take personal responsibility for what they have, even if what they have sucks. Instead of running to the hills, Bush is playing the kazoo on the Titanic, and that takes nuts. What sense would it be to walk away from the grim determination that, for better or for worse, has been his identity over the last 7 years since 9/11? People like to own things, to show the world a tangible picture of who they are and what they stand for.
Segue time!
Does anybody remember that crappy Columbia Music club scam a few years back? You would get this flyer in a magazine offering you 12 CD’s for one cent each (which is pretty much what it cost to make the darn things) which, when you’re young, is a pretty exciting prospect. Now, done reasonably, this seems like a solid idea founded on the Blockbuster conceit – nobody who goes to a Blockbuster ever just rents ONE movie – a system where you’re introduced to new music and can procure it at a reasonable price. And back during the time when Columbia House was big, $12.00 for a CD was a steal. But it wasn’t long before you realized this deal was a nightmare. Every month (sometimes twice a month), you’d get an oppressive magazine featuring the album that was getting sent to you whether you liked it or not, and if you didn’t hurry up and opt out, you’d be stuck with the bill. And the quotas! If you didn’t buy however many CD’s a year, you’d get booted out of the program entirely.
How oppressive. While this could have been handled in a much better way, I think that in a larger sense, the model is fundamentally flawed. Nobody wants to rent music, especially not music that’s hosted on some distant and far-away server. What if I suddenly lose my job, or have an unexpected expense, or just don’t want to funnel money away every month? Then poof, all my stuff goes bye-bye? When I subscribe to a newspaper, I can took at the old issues whenever I like. When I go out and purchase a CD from a store, I don’t have to worry about someone from a record label breaking in and taking it! What we have here isn’t a subscription, it’s extortion. Not cool. Again, people like to own things. A tangible picture of who they are and what they stand for.
However (and I don’t this gets stressed enough), this tangible ownership does not extend to the compact disc, which isn’t even a good medium for music anymore. They take up too much space. You’ve got to load them up into your glove compartment when you want them on the road, then pop as many as you can carry into a CD player if you want to walk around with it. And the skipping every time you need to run? Forget it. They’re fragile, they break and scratch easily, the cover art and liner notes are no big deal (not compared to vinyl), I’ve got to hold down a little button whenever I want to go forward in the track. Boo.
We want to own, but we also want convenience. Subscriptions fail in this aspect, and so do CD’s. The quality of MP3’s is equivalent if you look in the right places and buy decent headphones, it’s ridiculously portable (you can put an entire bookcase of CD’s in your back pocket), they’re easily updated, they’re easily organized. No more tedious shuffling to get your discs in alphabetical order. Know what I do first when I buy a CD? I rip to MP3, then I store the CD somewhere where it gathers dust. Thanks for playing, compact disc. Hasta la vista, ba-by.
We have a “social contract” with the government, and from a political perspective, creating a fiscal contract with the Powers That Be through privatization is an inspired idea. We carry a deep investment in our own possessions – Bush and his conservative ancestors understood that. Our music shouldn’t be any different – and I think we’d all be willing to dodge a few shoes to stick up for it.
Long live the Ownership Society.
Tags: CD, Columbia House, George W. Bush, mp3, subscription model