A Response To T Bone's Americana Address: Part1

   A couple of thoughts on T Bone Burnett's well considered keynote address at Americana Fest from this past weekend. Burnett the winner of a Grammy and an Oscar, as well as having a mile long list of production credits that range from John Mellencamp to Diana Krall. Burnett, to say the least, is a serious artist and his address makes the case for the sanctified role of artists in shaping and pushing societal innovation now and throughout history. He cites for example a man landing on the moon in a Jules Vern novel a hundred years before it actually happened. However, he feels today’s artist is in jeopardy due to the shifting technological landscape which has so upended the  music industry's business model, directly affecting his bottom line. On the encroachment of technology, he recommends a book: The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul, and goes on to say:
John Wilkinson, the translator, in his 1964 introduction, describes the book this way- “The Technological Society is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and surpassing those values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all technological difference and variety is mere appearance.” This is the core of the dead serious challenge we face.

I really disagree with this, especially the part where he says there’s going to be one monolithic world culture with differences only in appearance, which is something akin to the right wing’s never ending fear mongering about Washington taking orders from the UN. I think as Americans, with all our adventurism and the push back we have received for it, especially over these last years in the Middle East, we should understand there isn’t much appetite for a monolithic one world culture. People want to remain autonomous and keep their unique values and heritage, as evidenced by the never ending strife in Iraq, which forced Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to live together under one centralized government after WW1. That is not to say the world remains separate and insular with the internet and global economy. We also have a common interest in working together to solve issues of climate, extreme poverty, displacement of people and a litany of other issues. Central to solving these problems are technological innovation in the production of energy as well as improvements in communication, medicine and food production. No doubt technology can have vast unintended consequences like suburban sprawl, but if managed properly we can use it to solve problems without jeopardizing our individuality.


Next he goes on to complain about the military origins of our technology:

Parenthetically, we have to remember that all this technology we use has been developed by the war machine- Turing was breaking codes for the spies, Oppenheimer was theorising and realising weapons. Many of the tools we use in the studio for recording- microphones and limiters and equalizers and all that- were developed for the military. It is our privilege to beat those swords into plowshares. 

While I really love that last line: It is our privilege to beat those swords into plowshares, I am rather unmoved by this argument. We need to face up to the fact we are a warring people. I wish it weren’t so, but we as a society have collectively decided that we value the ability to make war above almost anything else. Save your patronizing 9/11, terrorism and Putin speeches, that’s not the point. The point is we invest one-third of our resources into the military. That’s indisputable. And from this investment, besides missile systems, nuclear subs and all the rest we get microphones, computers and the internet, which begs the question: What difference does it make where these innovations, that have so enriched our lives, originated? Is the internet any less valuable or fun because it came from the military? Sure I would love every climate scientist, the CDC and computer engineer to have the resources we pour into the military, but that’s not our reality, it’s not what we value and thus, a moot, irrelevant point. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Interview With Book Blogger/Writer Anthony Avina

Image
1)Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into writing?   I grew up in a small three bedroom/one bathroom house with my parents and nine siblings in Buffalo, New York. Presently, I live in a suburb of Buffalo with my wife and three college age children, who are never going to leave. As far as how I started to write. I went through a pretty aimless period after high school where I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do and was in and out of college.  Finally, in my early twenties I started read in a pretty serious way—stuff like Kerouac, Philip Roth, the poetry of Anne Sexton—which led me to want to give writing a shot. Problem was by the time I was all read up I was in my late twenties and had the pressure of trying to keep a roof over my head and a pretty serious girlfriend, whom I would eventually marry and have children with, so I had to shelve the writing thing. But when the kids got older and needed me less, I started to get up before work (really th...
Read more

The Four Day Rental

Image
      It was a four day rental just down the road from Skaneateles (pronounced: skin-ny-at-las )  on Lake Otisco in the Finger Lake region of New York Stat e. The mid-June weather was pleasant and the rolling green hills that descended down to the lake provided a wealth of charming views. On one of those hills sat the two story rental which was constructed of decorative hard split cinder block with double hung windows and a metal roof. A large deck extended out from the side door and curved around to the front of the structure. From the deck you could hear the shallow Otisco waves gently kiss the shore and you could get a glimpse of the lake through a multitude of leafy trees, but not in a way where you would say things like, “Wow, what a view!” or “OMG, that’s some body of water!”  Though the construction of the rental was newish, the inside was filled with old wood, creaky fixtures and antiques. Shelves with hundreds of hard-covered books lined the l...
Read more

The Old Pink

Image
     The Old Pink My Old Pink story starts in the early 80’s at the establishment next store, Mulligan’s Brick Bar. It’s also when the Old Pink was still The Pink Flamingo or as we called it—The Pink. The Brick Bar became a thing when my friend and fellow Brockport State washout Kevin McNamara started working there. Not only did he work there, but he quickly rose to the rank of manager—no one could ice up a case of OV Splits like KevMac. Of course, as it is a best practice of the most effective managers everywhere, he used his elevated position to hire all of his friends, including me—the worst White Coat/Bouncer in the history of the Brick Bar.  Remember the White Coats? We used to circulate through the packed bar witnessing a thousand broken dreams and missed connections as we picked up and disposed of dead cases of OV Splits, beer bottles and spent glasses of vodka and ice tea. We also had a secondary function of keeping the peace in the bar. 
Read more