SPIN CLASS

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

This might strike people as odd, given my predilection for blathering, but my least favorite aspect of songwriting is the words part. 

  I hate writing lyrics. 

  Mostly this is because the formal requirements of the pop song are a giant obstacle to the things I like to do with words. Because of the way melody and rhythm operate, complicated and contradictory feelings are difficult to fit into a song. Profound ideas get reduced to inanity; irony skews glib, and storytelling where facts and revelations are carefully kept in check goes against the grain of the form. 

  So I find lyric writing endlessly frustrating and miserable, like delivering newspapers in the rain. 

  The one good thing about it is that I never get tired of my subject, which is the story of how humans think, feel, and talk. How they see the world, how they react to the hand they’re dealt, how they make choices in life, how they talk to others, how they talk to themselves, and so on. 

 I see the songwriter as an amateur sociologist, observing and cataloguing human behavior because it’s so damned interesting. Some aspects are wearyingly repetitive and predictable; I refer to the mundane tendency of humans to act in their own self-interest. 

  For me, the most interesting thing about humans is the endless energy they apply to things that are NOT in their self-interest. Tribalism, for one. 

  I suppose tribalism was the way to go when life was mostly about hunting. Survival meant banding together to kill animals that could easily tear you to shreds, and then eating them. This was a round the clock job. 

  Eventually some clumps of humans figured out that taking stuff from other humans meant you could spend less time hunting and gathering, and tribalism was good for this too. 

  But in our modern society, the practical benefits of tribalism are less clear. Whereas tribalism was once a way to leverage power so you could get food and land, it’s now largely used to keep alive ideas that have little practical benefit. 

  Homophobia is a good example. Gay men don’t roam in packs, killing your sentries and stealing your grain stores and consumer electronics.
The same people who swell with pride about how badass Americans are can be surprisingly easy to bait. As far as I can tell, nothing sets off homophobes more than public flamboyance, when gays are “in your face.” But from the heroic energy homophobes are able to muster to battle the gay agenda, you’d think that gay men were an existential threat comparable to the Viking hordes, landing on our beaches in stylish ships, and sashaying their way down our main streets, lustily brandishing giant dildoes while mocking our good taste with their hot pants, see-through mesh shirts, and ass-revealing chaps. 

  In such a situation, I’d probably take the Vichy approach, telling them how much I like Elton John and Sondheim, and hoping they didn’t force me to drink any appletinis. 

  Whereas tribalism used to require you to suit up and collectively face danger, nowadays it mostly causes humans to endlessly spin the peccadilloes of the people they vote for. More and more, the tone of Trump apologists resembles the laughable indignation of a tween girl defending a boy band. 

  I doubt there was ever a weasel or blackguard in human history who inspired more rationalizing and special pleading than our president. It’s my fervent wish that he never be assassinated, because while I already expect to hear people defending him for the rest of my life, if he became a martyr I’m not sure I could take it. 

  Conservatives mostly don’t comment on my Facebook posts at this point, in part, I suspect, because of my verbosity. I recently made a mistake I rarely make, when I commented on a thread where political correctness was under attack. Some facebooker was suggesting that he would create a Halloween costume that offended as many liberals as possible, as a way of pushing back against the PC crowd. I told him I thought this was a stupid way to deal with the excesses of political correctness, and he told me that he couldn’t take seriously the liberals who are always hatefully lecturing everybody about how they should think and talk. He questioned their sincerity, and felt that this was in itself a refutation of their ideas. I then pointed out, in a thousand word comment, that while I agreed with him on much of what he said, I felt that the annoying personalities of liberals did not represent a justification for his idea of being offensive just to spite them. I was at some pains to detail where I agreed with him, but this takes a lot of words and I suspect few people took the time to read what I wrote. 

  Even when conservatives do attack what I write, they don’t seem to have read many of my actual words. Nor is missing my point a hobby only enjoyed by the right. I wish I had a dollar for every time a liberal told me that if I expected them to hold hands and sing Kum-ba-ya with a bunch of Nazis, I was sadly mistaken. In fact, I’ve never imagined that such behavior would be useful, and I’ve never once advocated a singalong of that sort. 

  So, while I do find Trump’s behavior endlessly fascinating, I’m much more captivated by the way supporters apparently think about him. When you talk to a Trump apologist, it’s like a science fiction story where some squidlike life form is able to adapt to every tactic used against it, causing the reader to wonder how the earthlings could ever defeat such an enemy, especially since the story’s almost over. 

  By the way, conservatives who don’t appreciate being compared to a mollusk can breathe easy. In my framing, they aren’t the enemy. Spin is the enemy. 

  In the old days, rationalization was certainly available to all, but spin was more the domain of specialists. Our media has morphed into what free market true believers have always loved, namely the marketplace where everyone can buy the thing they want, and there’s endless opportunity for entrepreneurs to make a dollar out of this. 

  Unfortunately, as we’ve discovered, the balkanization of our media has revealed that virtually every fucking American wants the same thing, which is 24-hour access to talking points they can use to justify whatever they already feel deep down. Think of the avalanche of rhetoric that infests our every waking minute, all of it designed to validate the consumer’s gut feelings about the world. Think of how quickly our economic woes could be solved if Americans were forced to actually pay for all of this validation! Globalization would be a non-issue, as the money Americans forked over to their media content providers would be enough to put virtually everyone back to work, and online bloviators could now afford to hire huge staffs. Gophers would have their own gophers, and platoons of flunkies could be housed in giant barracks. There would be jobs upon jobs generated to keep this whole poker game afloat. 

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Some weasels are lining their pockets, sure, but mostly the grotesque availability of spin has caused it to multiply not as a function of the free market, but more along the lines of the way plagues spread. Instead of rodents carrying the pestilence, we have memes and bots. Imagine a plague where those who contract it don’t die, instead welcoming it into their homes and vehicles at all hours. 

  It’s this plague of spin that made it possible for a fellow on Facebook the other day to characterize resistance to Trump as “still crying because Killary lost the election.” In his view, liberals were full of hatred, while Donald Trump was a deeply religious person. 

  There was more, of course. Much more. It’s this level of spin that made a Trump candidacy possible. In recent years, flagrantly unqualified candidates often stole the GOP’s hearts, but the lifespan of these infatuations was somewhere between post-Thanksgiving turkey leftovers and a Phone accessory sold by the Apple Store. 

  In those far-off days, it generally only took one gaffe to sour the electorate on a candidate. The revelation that a guy was a womanizer, or a gal was a witch, was enough to hobble a political horse. In the Trump era, we have a man whose gaffes are spun like no gaffes were spun before. The endless parade of bad behavior actually helps him with his base, as they have moved from “I’m sick of liberals whining every day” to “Actually, I like it when our president acts like a prick.” 

  Back when George W. was in the White House, public opinion actually shifted because a fair number of Republicans couldn’t stomach carrying his water any more. My mom even got disgusted with him, which was the only time I can recall her ever turning against a Republican. Essentially, the bullshit got too hard to defend. 

  Maybe that will happen again, but I doubt it. We appear to be living in a world where spin has been embraced with such vigor, we may one day see the literal end of the world, and the last thing we hear will be some guy rationalizing the melting corpses of his children by referring to the apocalypse as some sort of false flag.