Hey guys, Cub Reporter Ross Lincoln here!

Billmon, in characteristic form, completely sums up pretty much everything imaginably wrong with the current political/journalistic landcape, and how that failure has led directly to the mess we’re in now, organized around a discussion of the failure of the so-called marketplace of ideas to successfully police itself.

To make his point, he begins discussing the real estate bubble we’re currently deluding ourselves into believing will last forever, and during this discussion brings up my personal vote for Chump of the Century, Irving Fisher. Fisher got me thinking about a lot of things. Before I get to that, first a bit about him.

He was a remarkable intellect and inventor, having earned a fortune inventing the ultimate business cliche and early 80s Weird Al reference, the Rolodex. By the 1920s he was Yale’s Professor of economics, where he suggested or helped to foster an number of important concepts that are now taken for granted. He is also (or darn well should be) famous for saying the following:

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” - Yale University, 1929.

Check that date. He made this hilarious statement less than a week before Black Thursday. When all indicators were pointing towards “Freak the heck out”, he was more than happy to step up and make all the jerks screwing with the economy feel better about what they had done.

I can almost imagine Fisher, in a typical 1920s “Nyeah see?” voice, getting up in front of the plutocrats to say “Don’t worry about it boys, it’s all covered, see? I’ve got a bead on the moneyline pallie, and all signs point to pennies from heaven! We’ll be rich see, rich! 23 Skidoo!”

As smart as he was, (and he was that), he wasn’t so smart that he wasn’t also a complete blistering idiot. His fate, painful to read about, dripping in glorious schadenfreude and smothered in a glazing of dense irony, was richly deserved. For making such an insanely wrong assertion, in a period when a man of his prestige should have known better, he not only lost his entire fortune in the crash, but his reputation never recovered. To this day, at least among economists and history nerds, his name is a byword for hubris, and what Alan Greenspan later (and quite hypocritically, I might add) called “Irrational Exuberance“. It was a ruin so cliched that even John Grisham would blush, before writing it into his latest legal “thriller” and cashing his latest underserved million dollar check.

Go and read the article, and come back for more of my meandering warbling on this topic.

Done? Good.

So, Fisher became a joke, Hoover became synonymous with shantytowns, and even though we slipped into the morass of depression, at least we could look back and think to ourselves that the guys who ignorantly led us there were punished along with us.

I don’t mean to pretend that we once lived in a utopia, I only mean to point out that whatever our numerous faults have been, we were once a nation with slightly more integrity, at least enough to revile in disgust when our hypocrisy was thrust in our faces, and we tended to banish the thing that personified our arrogance. Once upon a time, spectacular public failures of this type, though admittedly rarer than one would hope, could be met with the neccesary and appropriate reaction. Not so these days.

Billmon’s point, to my mind, is that the marketplace of ideas, (Much like the marketplace of, um, markets), which is famously “self correcting”, isn’t actually self correcting at all. Critics of the war in Iraq are still quite marginalized, despite having been proved right. Promoters of the war are just as famous and connected as ever. And those who try to make sense of it all are treated like plague carriers. They might as well be vommitting on each other for the way they’re portrayed.

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So why bring up John Peel?

I believe that the problem aptly described by Billmon is inherent in nearly all of our culture. Reading about Irving Fisher, I’m reminded of the music scene, or the sick state of it. As recently as 16ish years ago, Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice became national punch lines for crimes against artistic dignity that are standard contractual arrangements now. MV of course famously lipsynched their way to stardom, before the world learned they didn’t actually do anything but dance. ‘nilla Wafer made increasingly ridiculous self aggrandizing statements, and became the very model of poseur.

Their professional crashes were so complete, and the backlash so severe, that they affected an entire industry negatively. It’s fashionable now (and was at the time) to contend that generally, the public had grown tired of the processed pop of the late 80s, of the glam metal macho jerks who dominated mainstream rock, of the seemingly endless parade of material excess and inauthenticity that typified the 80s music scene, and said public finally embraced less conventional music (briefly) because of this.

However, I believe that the last 5 years prove that this reading of history isn’t quite accurate. There are dozens of artists with similar deficiencies in authenticity and integrity. The truth is that as a society, we have a huge tolerance of that sort of nonsense. We all like to pretend we’re insiders, that we’re in on the joke, and as long as things don’t make us feel stupid, we go along with them.

The current decline in popularity of Boy/girl groups has nothing to do with any actual backlash, it simply reflects the changing tastes and aging of the demographic that made them popular. These artists still sell out concerts, still remain famous and generally respected, and still out-sell “respected” rock and underground peers in leaps and bounds. The reason is that, while they may wane in influence, they haven’t actually given us a reason to hate ourselves for liking them.

What we hate is having the charade exposed. In Europe, where there is far less negative feeling for purely pop artists, there has almost never been a backlash, and these sorts of bands rarely faded from the limelight. In most cases, cheese and importance live happily, side by side, on the charts, though the cheese is still insanely annoying.

However here in the USA, we at least want a veneer of “realness”, a paper thin covering that allows us to pretend that no matter how abysmal our tastes may get, we still have taste and culture. It’s a careful dance; the artists pretend to have some integrity, but not too much to be believable, and we pretend we’re not being spit in the face when we turn on the radio. In return, we get to enjoy ourselves mindlessly, and they get paid.

The backlash begins when the party holding the more difficult to swallow end of the deal forgets to play along, and makes everyone look and feel stupid. Then the dance enters phase II, wherein everyone else “realizes” that it was, um, shineola all along, and turns on the offenders like rabid dogs. We suddenly demand, nay REQUIRE some kind of redemption, and for a while at least, we look to things that are unimpeachably authentic to make us feel smarter, a bit more careful.

I am utterly convinced that what happened in late 1991 and 1992, the brief ascendancy of the so called alternative movement, wouldn’t have been possible had the American record buying public not collectively been made to feel like chumps by the public hilarity put forth by minuscule artists like ‘nilla and Millie. Suddenly, the entire apparatus that gave them to us was suspect and the hunt was on for something, anything, different. What we got was a very brief period in which truly authentic bands were given a chance, and a much longer period in which bands copying those authentic bands remained popular well into the later 90s.

After a time, the sea of authenticity got to be too much, and we wanted to lighten up again. That’s part three of the dance you see, and all of us, even those of us who have what I consider to be good taste play along. The current indie scene, which I consider to be very, very, very, very, very excellent, is dominated by bands like Architecture in Helsinki, Sufjan Stevens, Fiery Furnaces, and the like, bands every bit as fun as the lame pop acts and ridiculous rock retreads we hear everywhere else are supposed to be (Though I argue very much their artistic superiors). These brilliant indie bands aren’t very popular, with few exceptions, and any fame they get is fleeting at best.

So now we have a landscape similar to the 80s, right? But some thing’s different – There is no backlash, no sudden The Emperor Has No Clothes moment to make us question our tastes. Brittney Spears has tried her damnedest to give us one, but her quest for sincerity, so obviously impossible for such an exceptionally shallow and limited performer, has been overshadowed by her full on transition from fake popstar to fake celebrity, and she’s completely out of the real discussion.

I don’t doubt that there are countless examples of musical mendacity that would make us collectively blush, but they’re just not seen out during the day. Why you ask? Because the apparatus responsible for handling the current music scene is about 5 bajillion times better at hiding, glossing over, smoothing out these problems then they were in nilla’s day, and combined with a much higher tolerance, collectively, for nonsense that we as a society seem to have, the moment of zen would simply take a much much higher degree of effort to achieve.

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This phenomenon is exactly reflected as the central problem facing our media and political establishments. Despite evidence from all sides that things are utterly full of it, we’re all just going along with it. Nothing seems to be able to shake us out of our sleep.

I fear that a shake up might only be possible with a depression sized crisis. Assuming this isn’t neccesary, we need to stop playing along with it, and we ought to just disregard everyone who does.

Could we try to make political straight talk, political honesty and being liberal sound as cool as musical iconoclasm seemed in the late 80s and early 90s? perhaps. At the very least, if we end up with a Emperor Has no Clothes moment, we;ll have something to replace the narrative with.

I mentioned John Peel in the title because he was one of the more famous difficult-to-snuff-voices in the music media who popularized tons of music forms that were facing stiff opposition from the mainstream music press and media. This was during the 70s and 80s, by the way, when the music establishment was supremely narrow minded.

The work that people like Peel did in popularizing the work of underground bands laid the groundwork for those bands and their successors to be considered the, for lack of a better word, alternative to the drivel people finally tired of, when they finally tired of it.

To carry my metaphor further than is neccesary, Irving Fisher was the Milli Vanilli of 1920s economics, Hoover of government. They paid dearly for it. During the Great Depression, the people who were widely seen people who were seen as complacent in the creation of the depression became public paraiahs. Nowadays, such amazing mistakest get you promoted.

The marketplace of ideas has failed in much the same the record industry once failed, only in both cases, the establishments are insanely good at making us believe otherwise. It’s going to take some spectacular luck and positioning to manage any sort of fix, assuming that the fix isn’t prefaced by some deafening crisis.

What we need, to kill this metaphor, is a culture of dissonance and indie sensibility in politics, something real to counter the bs in the mainstream, and we need clear and obvious spokesmenpeople to be the public face. So please, liberal pundits of note. Act cool. be cool, and for the love of mike, make us think you’re cool for doing it. We can’t win by pretending to be down with the “mainstream”, which is what republicans are excellent at doing.

Sarah Vowell famously compared modern politics to high school, and I believe she’s right, especially when you look at musical trends and compare them to politics. And like in high school, the outcasts who try to suck up to the preps are ridiculed even further for being such spineless suck ups. Those outcasts represent nearly every single prominant liberal in the media.

Faced with the choice of being ognored, and being ignored and keeping our dignity, I’d much rather keep my dignity.

We have to make our mark, I think, by sticking to our guns and loudly asserting our opinions and principles, even if we know right now that we’re being told, essentially, that the media tarts “don’t hear a single”. We have to not give a damn what they think. If we play our cards right, we can lay the groundwork now for a Political Punk revolution, so that when the final moment of zen happens, you’ll have something to fill the gap with.

But what do I think? We already have people like Michael Moore, but he represents an older voice more akin to the history of liberalsim than the past. I suspect it’s people like this who will figure it out.

UPDATE: I’m sure this is unneccesary, but for those of you who don’t know who John Peel is, please click here or check out the BBC site. Also, i initially forgot to add the link to Billmon’s site. Sorry about that.

PS: For the record, I Love pop music and underground stuff, and I do not subscribe to the notion that you must only like “serious” music in order to be a serious music lover. I only mean to point out the underlying hypocrisy in our record buying tastes. Personally, I don’t mind an artist whose only goal is to amuse. We need more of them. What I hate is when people who can’t try to be deep, important, and meaningful.