Antiquity

Just to illustrate the longetivity of this casting scheme, I'd like to tell a funny story that was told to me nearly thirty years ago by a professor of political science. 

He was a young man (at the time), and appropriately liberal for an academic in the social sciences. Naturally, he was supportive of one of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. Therefore he went to hear Jackson speak at Emory University while Jackson was in Atlanta to campaign. It is important to the story to note that the professor was white.

Now in that election cycle, the form of "white rural rage" that was in vogue was called "the angry white man," who was of course typically rural and archetypically Southern. 

Unfortunately for our protagonist, the night Jackson spoke our professor had a plane he had to catch, so he could only attend part of the speech. He listened raptly until his watch informed him that it was time to go if he was to get to the airport and catch his plane. 

Just as he checked his watch, though, by coincidence Jackson shifted into the part of the speech aimed at "the angry white man." Nervously our hero sat on the bench for a couple of minutes longer than he'd planned in the hope that the topic would change again, but it was clear that Jackson was settling in to deliver a long oratory on the subject.

And so, with intense embarrassment, our professor had to stand up and walk out of that speech -- a white Southern male, with all the hateful eyes of the congregation upon him.

Charged with being Guilty

I keep pointing out the Joe Bob Briggs lecture called "How the Rednecks Saved Hollywood," in which he explains that once you couldn't make cowboy-and-indian flicks because of guilty feelings and the Nazi war movies were getting old, Hollywood settled on rural white Americans as the designated villain for all of its stories. The reason I keep pointing this out is that the rest of the culture followed suit, and just keeps making the same movie over and over.

New book: White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy.

Tom, we'll start with you: why are white rural voters a threat to American Democracy?

Tom: We lay out the four-fold threat...

1) They're the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-gay...

2) They're the most conspiracist group, Qanon support, election-denialism...

3) Anti-democratic sentiments; they don't believe in an independent press... white nationalist, Christian nationalist...

4) Most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful...

In fairness the Native Americans had to endure decades of being the designated villians before anybody started making movies that attempted to treat them fairly or sympathetically (like 1948's Fort Apache or 1953's Hondo) and even longer before they began to enjoy being represented wholly positively (probably the 1960s with Little Big Man, but definitely it became the standard after 1990s Dances With Wolves -- ironically both named after the white character in the film). 

Likewise, just as Hollywood employs very few Southerners to play villanious Southerners -- the racist Texan sheriff in Smokey and the Bandit was played by Jackie Gleason of Brooklyn, New York -- a lot of the "Indians" in the old films were just white guys with painted faces. Hondo's Vittorio, the noble Apache leader, was played by an Australian of English descent. You not only can't expect fair representation, you can't expect representation.

All of these charges are tendentious formulations at best, but they're central casting's role for us. This is the only role we're going to be offered, and if we won't play it they'll find someone who will -- probably FBI agents dressed up like "white nationalists" with khakis and tiki torches, or "Christian nationalists" with bibles, or whatever name focus-groups well this cycle. 

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi finds that this trope is far older than I had realized.

Legislative versus Judicial

The Supreme Court's questioning on this 'bump stock' case suggests that they're getting bogged down on the question of whether there should be a law against bump stocks. That's not really the issue in the case, and it's not the Supreme Court's business to legislate. The issue in the case is whether the President or an executive agency can change the law by fiat without the bother of consulting the legislative branch.

Cargill’s attorneys emphasize that for nearly a decade, between 2008 and 2017, the federal government did not count later versions of the devices — without the internal spring — as machine guns. During that time, Americans bought 520,000 bump stocks.

President Donald Trump’s bump stock ban gave owners until March 2019 to destroy or turn over their devices. Gorsuch and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh expressed concern about the possibility that a half-million people could be prosecuted if they purchased the devices before the rules changed. But Fletcher sought to reassure them that ATF does not have the power to make something a crime that was not a crime before.

Well, indeed, and neither does the Court. 

The Court instead chose to question why someone would need a weapon that could fire 700-800 rounds a minute (the state originally misspoke and claimed they could fire '600 rounds a second'), which in fact they cannot do. 700-800 rounds per minute is the cyclical rate for the AR-15/M16 family of rifles, not a practical rate of fire that can actually be achieved or sustained. It's a theoretical calculation based on how fast the action can cycle; it doesn't take into account practical realities like the need to reload, or the fact that heat would melt your barrel. 

That's not the controversy at issue: the AR-15 is perfectly legal, and the M16/M4 is legal to own if you have the appropriate license. The question is whether the ATF or a president by bare executive order can change the status of a weapon from 'perfectly legal' to 'banned without a permit.' 

For the record, I think bump stocks are stupid. I would never put one on a weapon because they reduce accuracy even if they increase the rate of fire. Shot placement is what it's all about. I don't know if I'd even oppose a law designed to move bump stocks into the National Firearms Act.

However, I definitely oppose letting Federal agencies change the law without the bother of asking Congress. I'm not a big fan of Congress either, but it's their job to legislate if legislation has to be done.

Vice Falls Down

I used to enjoy Vice, back in the days when it was more like this:

For young people trying to break into TV, pitching to every other media outlet, from the BBC to Channel 4, felt like an endlessly demoralising grind. Patronising boomers would asphyxiate any remotely fun idea you dreamt up. Meanwhile, Vice was covering cannibal warlords in Liberia and sending reporters to see what it was like to do stand-up comedy on acid. It even had a dedicated drugs correspondent called Hamilton Morris!

... At its height, Vice was the most contrarian and unconventional publication out there. Much of this is owed to co-founder Gavin McInnes. He fell out with co-founder Shane Smith and left Vice in 2008, long before I was trying to become part of the cult. Still, it was undoubtedly Gavin’s irreverence that gave the magazine its unique flavour. When it launched its British edition in London in 2002, McInnes said: ‘We will have no taboos. Vice has never been about shocking people, we’re just shocking in nature.’

By the 2010s, that punk attitude forged by McInnes had attracted huge corporate interest. 

McInnes apparently went on to found the Proud Boys after he left Vice; the article thinks it was done as an ironic joke on his former employers' sudden twist to corporate-style wokeness. 

Was it the corporates' fault, though? Did they impose 'wokeness' on Vice, or did the audience come to demand it? Another article suggests the latter: it was the generational shift in what young people wanted that transformed Vice from a punk rock shop into a woke preacher, killed the fun and eventually the brand. 

The simple fact is that Vice, once an effective and witty member of the alternative media, ran up against an epochal change it was never destined to survive. The audience for alternative media still exists, but the progressive audience for alternative media does not. The dissident energy, for good or ill, has gone over to the right, where audiences, commentators and provocateurs from a wildly dissonant series of belief systems share a rather confused exile. Some dissident leftists forced out of their old niche simply go full tilt to the other extreme, some stand in proud isolation, most end up, uneasily, somewhere in the middle. But even the most principled progressive dissidents have woken up to a drastically changed audience, with very different interests and demands. Vice’s golden age of being offensive, effortlessly cool and still courted by legacy media is never coming back, and was never going to. 

The only punk rockers left are on the right.

Building the Motte

Apparently the new "white nationalism," which later became "white supremacy" (but not white supremacy the way the Klan understood it -- it just meant everything America normally does) is going to be "Christian Nationalism."  That's what we'll all be hearing about through the election, I suppose. 

Now these sorts of things are always motte and bailey attacks, so it's important to build a good motte. David French took this on in the pages of the NYT.

Anyone may disagree with Christian arguments around civil rights, immigration, abortion, religious liberty or any other point of political conflict. Christians disagree with one another on these topics all the time, but it is no more illegitimate or dangerous for a believer to bring her worldview into a public debate than it is for a secular person to bring his own secular moral reasoning into politics. In fact, I have learned from faiths other than my own, and our public square would be impoverished without access to the thoughts and ideas of Americans of faith.

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

So that nicely illustrates both the motte and the bailey. The highly defensible motte is that he's only talking about radicals who want to establish some sort of theocracy in the United States in place of the First Amendment. As far as I know, there is no group of significant size attempting to revoke the Constitution in favor of a theocratic form of government. Nor would there be: there's no large church I know of that is happy enough with its own leadership to want to import it to the Federal government.

The bailey is 'of course Christians are willing to bring their diverse, deeply-felt opinions to the public square' -- as long as they don't insist that Christianity's vision win in establishing anything like enforceable laws. Of course you can feel that way, as long as we agree that the law cannot reflect your vision. 

Thus, while we're defending the bailey, everything that Christianity has a fairly stable theological opinion about is off the table for US law. The First Amendment now means that nothing that happens to align with a Christian doctrine is allowed to be a law in the United States. If you disagree, you're a Christian Nationalist. 

Well, until someone experiences some success at pushing back on that, at which point they'll retreat to the motte. Of course we're only trying to preserve the Constitution against the theocracy that no one is actually trying to establish.

UPDATE: To whit. 

The fight for religious freedoms in the United States has become progressively more intense in the last three years, as the government has been chipping away at the Establishment Clause by catering to special interest groups that champion causes like child gender mutilation, sexual grooming of children, prohibition of public prayer, and more that are antithetical to many mainstream religious doctrines. The First Amendment is first for a reason, and Thomas Jefferson was clear on the topic. The wall between the Church and the State was not created to constrain religion, but rather to constrain the government. It protects us from the government creating laws demanding a single theology; but equally prevents the government from demanding the elimination of religious practices.

They got a rabbi to write this, which underlines that these standards are mere Christian without being merely Christian. Nevertheless, having laws on moral values that are basically in accordance with doctrine will be the bailey.

A Genuinely Festive Occasion

I don't know why Google Photos is bringing these photos forward now; I haven't seen them in years. This one is from a tribal compound near Mahmudiyah, and in spite of the body armor and barely-visible rifles it was a good time. They were a family led by three brothers, one of whom was US-educated, and we felt pretty welcome and secure there. Many of the "Sons of Iraq" were former insurgents, but their militia were tribal fighters who'd always loyal to the family.

Here we're dining on boiled sheep and Iraqi bread, rice and many other good things. 

On a couch in this house I once talked with a nephew or a cousin who had studied philosophy at the University of Paris. He barely spoke English and I barely speak French, but between the two of us we had a conversation about Jeffersonian democracy. It was the most hopeful moment of my time in Iraq. 

An Evening of Live Music

The Scotsman Public House featuring live Celtic music.

“Frog Level” Brewing Company Americana. 

Back to the Scotsman for Ben & the Borrowed Band, a cover country act. 

Local funk act the Mike Rhodes Fellowship.

The Last Frontier

Although so far she's not winning many votes, Nikki Haley is leading the unnamed real estate magnate in fundraising. So too is Joe Biden running away in the political donations race.

In an environment in which inflation has drained away the ordinary person's ability to feed their families and make their bills, it's no surprise that only the rich can really donate to political campaigns. The rich are sure about where their interests lay, too, which is with the Establishment -- they may differ or perhaps not even care about which party, but the Establishment for certain.

The class difference is understandable. The real wages of average Americans did better under the real estate guy than they'd done in decades (a fact willfully obscured by including the Covid collapse in his numbers). This occurred because of two signature policies: cracking down on illegal immigration, which depresses the wages of working class Americans; and the full-throated embrace of the shale oil boom that gave America back its energy independence -- even making us a net exporter again. 

Average Americans found their gasoline bill was down, which meant all their bills were down: fuel to transport goods to market is baked into the price of everything. Meanwhile, their employers were forced to pay Americans to do the jobs that they needed done in America. That was more of the jobs than expected, too, thanks to the death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would have helped ship more jobs to Asia, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which also kept jobs home instead of abroad.

It's no wonder those who run major corporations would rather have an Establishment figure in office, one who will keep the borders open and costs down. They have little to fear even from Biden's environmentalism, as he has quietly allowed shale to trickle back up to where it was before.

It's also sensible that working class and middle class Americans would prefer to keep that particular tap shut, not merely for economic reasons but for more basic reasons of human meaning. The economics are aligned with their interest in stable communities, relationships, neighborhoods (as shown by the exact similarity in the complaint against gentrification as against mass immigration).

Marxist analysis would suggest that this is obvious: economics drive history, they say. It's the most basic of their analytical tools. Yet for some reason we don't really hear people talk about this in these terms: people on both sides prefer a cultural overlay to the economic analysis. It flatters the left to think that they're on the side of progress and their values, rather than the side of importing people who will be paid less and granted no worker protections in order to suppress the wages of fellow Americans in service to the rich. It flatters the right to think they are standing up for Christianity and Western traditions instead of a fair wage and a better life for their family (those selfish things!).

So we end up talking about what everyone wants to talk about instead of this important aspect; and we end up casting aspersions on each other that are not the ones most genuinely deserved. The most true and applicable complaints are left out of the conversation.

Hilarity Ensues

Google apologizes after its new AI generated “racially diverse” images of Nazis. 

As the article explains, the diversity is limited because the AI really doesn’t like to include white people; so you can imagine the results. It would have generated everything except accurate results. 

UPDATE: Related.

El Dorado

This was one of three versions of the plot of Rio Bravo, of which the original was best but each had its charms. For example, John Wayne rode his prettiest horse in this one. 

Cf. Ivanhoe:

Having expressed himself thus confidently, he reined his horse backward down the slope which he had ascended, and compelled him in the same manner to move backward through the lists, till he reached the northern extremity, where he remain stationary, in expectation of his antagonist. This feat of horsemanship again attracted the applause of the multitude.

Horses really don’t like to do what Ivanhoe and John Wayne just did. It’s a mastery.  

Thanks Google Photos

…but this was not as festive as you might be imagining. 

Insurrection and the American Project

Johns Hopkins' Center for Gun Violence Solutions has produced yet another of the endless calls for gun control that is their purpose for existing (and source of their funding). This one asserts that gun control is necessary to control 'insurrection,' arguing against "the false narrative that the Constitution creates rights to insurrection and the unchecked public carry of firearms[.]"

Well indeed, the Constitution does not create any rights at all. The Constitution does recognize certain rights, but explicitly recognizes that there are other rights that people have which are not spelled out in its text. Balancing the natural right of rebellion with a stable government's need to be able to put down illegitimate insurrections is one of those hard tasks of governance that isn't reducible to a simple rule. "Insurrection is a right" or "insurrection is never right" are both immoral principles because they would lead either to chaos or tyranny. 

The Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, explicitly recognizes the right -- and the duty -- to revolution under specific circumstances. There is no way to disentangle the American project from the Declaration of Independence, nor from the insurrection and revolution that gave rise to America and its subsequent legal forms, including the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the Center has it backwards: an attempt to violate the natural right to arms would, by itself, justify a revolution. It is a basic violation of natural rights to disarm a population in order to render them subjects.

Fortunately the Center is as wrong pragmatically as it is theoretically; the estimates of AR-15s in American hands alone runs to one-in-twenty households, or perhaps 44 million spread across this vast  nation. The resources do not exist to strip even that one rifle out of American hands, not if every police agency in the country turned their hands to the project at the expense of all else. If you called up the whole of the US military and put them to doing it, each servicemember would need to collect 22 rifles apiece. If you drafted the whole population of age for it, they'd still each need to bring in three -- and that's assuming that the whole population was willing to be drafted into such a program. 

Give it up. The ship has sailed. You live in an armed society, and also one of the most peaceful on earth: much of the United States has a murder rate of zero.

More Such Apparent Impropriety

It's hard not to see New York's actions against a certain political candidate and real estate magnate as similarly apparently improper. This is especially true given that the governor has assured other real estate magnates in the state that they won't be held to the same standard. This isn't a new standard of law that applies to all people equally, it's just the particular stick the state has chosen to beat this one guy.

That appears to a layman to be a violation of the 8th and 14th amendments -- "excessive bail" and "excessive fines" are both plainly forbidden, as is a state depriving a person of the equal protection of the laws -- and arguably Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 ("No bill of attainder," although this was a judicial action rather than a legislative one it serves the same purpose).

The apparent purpose of this is to not only to punish him for his political activity, but to hamper his pursuit of further office by tying up his personal wealth. I would say that this appeared to be extraordinarily corrupt except, of course, that it's only one of several similar actions ongoing at the same time in courts around the country. 

The Appearance of Impropriety

So if you are facing an impeachment inquiry based on the testimony of an FBI informant, why not just arrest him and charge him with lying? That disrupts his credibility, makes him unavailable to testify to Congress, and lets you counterattack on the charges facing you and your son.

Why not? Well, usually because of the appearance of impropriety.

The appearance of impropriety is a phrase referring to a situation which to a layperson without knowledge of the specific circumstances might seem to raise ethics questions. 

I don't really need to be convinced that an FBI informant might be lying; rats are rats. When you try to silence him instead of rebutting his testimony, though....

NYT: "No One Deserves Citizenship"

I think that the idea of citizenship is very difficult for progressives because it entails a created difference between human beings that allows for unequal treatment. This piece begins with an example that tries to create emotional weight on the question, suggesting that it's just nonsensical to treat two children of one parent differently because of which side of a border they were born upon. 

She ends up framing the core argument thus: "After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?"

The immigration issue ends up blurring what is really the core issue. My family has been in America since before the Founding. In every generation it has paid its taxes, fought its wars, built its infrastructure, elected its officers, served in its institutions. That's why I deserve citizenship.

Others families came later but have similarly been involved. Some were imported as slaves, and deserve citizenship partly in recompense for that. Other families crossed the seas and joined America afterwards, and earned for their children a place among us. 

Someone new, from somewhere else, has no similar claim. There is another road -- migration -- that is sometimes open according to particular rules. I agree some of those rules don't make sense: for example, I don't think it's sensible to extend citizenship to a child whose parents have no established connection to the nation, just because they happen to be on US soil at the time of birth. 

Citizenship is earned, though, and it is deserved. It is just as sensible to defend the rights, privileges, and opportunities of your fellow citizens as it is to defend the interests of your family members. Indeed, as Aristotle points out, the polity is an outgrowth of the families that came together to form it. It is our country in the same way that it is our family.

The rights that are particular to citizenship have that status because they are part of governance. We defend everyone's freedom of speech or thought because those are human rights that everyone should have. The right to vote or to serve on a jury is about how Americans govern themselves, and that is American business. It belongs to those of us who have earned it, because we are part of the families that came together to form the nation. 

Experiencing Eternity and the Divine II

Last week's post in response to James' post garnered an interesting discussion, with Tom entering in towards the end to add the Orthodox perspective. What came out of that was a recognition for me that, while the Catholic Church incorporated Neoplatonic ideas early and then found a way to modify its theology later to accomodate Aristotelian ideas, the Orthodox are essentially applying Neoplatonism's approach to Christianity directly. 

This concept that Tom is talking about, theosis, involves using the parts of ourselves that are 'like' God as a road to returning to God. In Greek philosophy, that part is the energia or activity as opposed to the matter: the word form is also sometimes used to translate the concept. Matter is ordered and structured so that it becomes a table or a dog or a particular human being, and the order is a kind of activity imposed on the matter. 

(An aside: This 'order is an activity' is really true, too, at least for organisms -- Jonas' point -- because what it is to be an organism is to be an activity of taking matter from the world, as by eating or breathing, and organizing it in to the form that is also yourself.)

Since God is (incompletely) conceived of as pure energia, in that sense we have 'the image of God' in ourselves, and that likeness provides a bridge to the divine which we can follow. 

Wikipedia helpfully draws out how this Orthodox concept differs from the strict Neoplatonic approach.

Naturally, the crucial Christian assertion, that God is One, sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis: even as it is not possible for any created being to become God ontologically, or even a necessary part of God (of the three existences of God called hypostases), so a created being cannot become Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit nor the Father of the Trinity.

Most specifically creatures, i.e. created beings, cannot become God in his transcendent essence, or ousia, hyper-being (see apophaticism). Such a concept would be the henosis, or absorption and fusion into God of Greek pagan philosophy. However, every being and reality itself is considered as composed of the immanent energy, or energeia, of God. As energy is the actuality of God, i.e. his immanence, from God's being, it is also the energeia or activity of God. Thus the doctrine avoids pantheism while partially accepting Neoplatonism's terms and general concepts, but not its substance (see Plotinus).

To put it even more simply, Iamblicus or Plotinus thought that the matter was just another spun-out emanation from the One, and thus that everything that had proceeded from the One could (would!) return to it. Iamblicus, the later thinker, worked out a mode for attempting to approach the One by seeking grace from those spin-offs that were closer to the One than we are ourselves. This system of seeking grace from an intermediary to help you come closer to the One is obviously readily adaptable to seeking the Father through the Son, whose being is closer to God -- he is God -- but also more like us than the Father because the Son is also man.

The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent article on Neoplatonism that comes from a contemporary, skeptical perspective. 

The result of this effort was a grandiose and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.... 

Today, the Neoplatonic system may strike one as lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible, but to dismiss it out of hand is difficult, especially if one is prepared to take seriously a few fundamental assumptions that are at least not obviously wrong and may possibly be right.

Indeed, Einstein's revision of Newtonian physics began with a return to Plato and Platonic ideas; the problem is always that these ideas strike modern thinkers as 'lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible,' but that they often turn out to be right. Jonas too, as I said in the aside above, is really restating a truth that the Greeks had apprehended, even if Plato and Aristotle differed on how to apply it. 

So it might be worth starting with that article on Neoplatonism, so we can get a sense of what the different Christian churches were bringing forward in their two very different ways. It is a very fertile field, one that produces almost every time it is sought. 

Who Thought They'd Get as far as Lincoln?

The Great Emancipator's statue is now on the chopping block.

A Flattering Afternoon

Today I went to the Asheville Celtic Festival to see Albannach. The Festival has a mini-Highland Games out back, and many of my Strongman friends participate. I knew my friend Noel would be competing so I went out to see him on the sidelines. He hugged me and introduced me to the other competitors. 

While we were talking, the announcer saw me with him and started announcing to the crowd, “I see the stonelifters have started moving in! I don’t know if there’s a connection between lifting stones and ugliness, but if so it’s in full effect today!” Then he came over and hugged me too. 

Finally one of the Master Strongmen came over and asked me how old I was. I told him, and he said, “Dude, you’re thick as ****! You should be competing!” Noel explained our friendship and that turned into a nice conversation. 

I love the Strongman community, which dovetails with the Scottish Heavy athletics. It’s a great community of mutual respect, support, and friendship. 

Cognition tools

A Vagueness Problem

There's a longstanding debate about what it means for music to be "country music." Country music is a genre unto itself, with several sub-genres, and unsurprisingly there is a vagueness problem about some of the fringe cases. That is to say, there are plenty of clear-cut cases where nobody would argue that it's not country -- Johnny Cash doing Folsom Prison Blues, George Jones singing The Grand Tour (saddest song ever recorded, if you ask me), plenty of these. 

Likewise, there's plenty of stuff you can stay definitely is not country music, like The Cure or Beethoven. It's music, and Beethoven at least is great music, but without question it's not country music.

Vagueness problems come in when there's movement along the substratum between X and not-X. At first you have a clear-cut case of X and you know that it's X; later, you may be aware of some things that are not-purely-X in a case of X; later still, you may no longer be sure the thing is X at all. After a while, you'll be pretty sure it's not-X, and eventually totally sure. The problem lies in those cases where the vagueness blurs the categories in a way that can make knowledge of the truth uncertain. (That model of vagueness, and for that matter of knowledge, is philosopher Timothy Williamson's).

We are presented this week with a vagueness case, as the pop star known as Beyonce has released what she is pleased to describe as a country song. The question of what makes a song "country music" is thus relevant again.

I have not heard the song. I don't think I've ever heard a song by Beyonce; she's ordinarily operative in a part of the music world I actively dislike (which is not to say that I actively dislike the musicians or people involved: it's just the music I definitely don't like). Regular readers are aware that I think popular music is significantly degraded over the last few decades, replaced by a kind of publicity stunt without the merits of earlier popular music. An occasional topic of this blog is finding the better music that is being produced but not publicized. 

Beyonce is one of those acts that is the product of a contemporary publicity machine. For example, apparently this song was announced by an advertisement on the Super Bowl, itself a publicity machine product, which would have cost millions of dollars. It was accompanied by a photo-shoot designed to move eyebrows -- I mean eyeballs -- which was also placed in a tweet that was pushed by journalists across many outlets. You could be forgiven for thinking that prima facie this won't have much to do with country music's traditional themes of hardscrabble rural life, for example.

As country music outlet WhiskeyRiff puts it, however, the vagueness problem isn't limited to her anyway.

And while I know there will be, and already have been, complaints about the fact that this “isn’t a country song” and Beyoncé “isn’t a country artist,” I’d say the vast majority of what’s heard on country radio isn’t exactly that, either, so this really isn’t any different in my opinion.

As a side note, she’s also been rocking a cowboy hat pretty regularly since the Grammy’s, if that gives you any indication on the marketing aspect[.]

That's a very fair point. Given what Nashville is pushing, why not Beyonce? Dolly Parton has even suggested it, having just done her own adventure into rock music.

Given that it's Friday night, after the jump I'll include some videos playing with the question of what is and is not real country music, as well as another vagueness case by the Rolling Stones.