I Dreamt of Jello

I know what you're thinking: "No way! Too far!"

They say that the raw material for one's dreams comes from everyday experience.

The night before I watched a bit too much of Jello, Ice-T and others on an Oprah episode from way back.

Jello was there with a vengeance in my dreams that night.

I knew it was a dream because Jello was listening to me.

We were at a bar and I was telling him how I credited him with part of my return to Christianity -- Catholicism in particular.

He took it really well.

I thought then (the late 1980s) and still stand by it: punk was asking the right kinds of questions. Sure, the questions generally don't ascend beyond the sociological, but still, in many ways DK was on the right track.

Here's but one example (on the nature of work): "Soup is Good Food"* treats the nature of work and the evils of treating people as disposable. It's a great song, but what's missing? Well, in a word or two: hope, transcendence, meaning. The negative is there (which is not nothing -- in an age where Original Sin is vilified or ignored), but what is the "ought" that ought to be there?

That's why punk ultimately fails. One needs not perpetual cheerfulness but reality. Neither optimism nor unbridled pessimism, but simply the whole truth of the human condition.

He will surely laugh and scoff, but I pray for Jello.

*CAUTION: The song has some naughty words.

Finding Emo OR "Have you no sense of deceny, sir?"

This is perhaps the kind of thing one might expect on The Phil Donahue Show (my generation) or Oprah Winfrey or what have you. To see our President use his office as a platform for such emotional pandering is sickening.

Here's the segment.

I don't blame Mrs. Wheeler or her husband. If such evil befell me and mine, I'm sure I want to do whatever I thought might be constructive. Nevertheless.

The basis for political discourse is not "emotionality" (see Sergeant Lincoln Osirus/Kirk Lazarus/Robert Downey, Jr.) but a reasoned conversation. This is precisely the kind of excess of the passions that Socrates feared. In his trial (see "The Apology" by Plato) he refused to bring in his family as part of his defense. He said that to do so would be to distort Justice. He wouldn't pander.

Obviously, not even the "Narcissist-in-Chief" equates himself with Socrates, but he could get a clue from him. If emotionality is what you got, you ain't got much.

It would be constructive to use research, statistics and data in the gun control debate, but we'll see continue to see overblown rhetoric on both sides.

Bedtime for Democracy.

P.S. 

Love him or hate him, gotta LOVE Jello's wry sense of humor

Infinite Jello?

One doesn't generally think of ineffable sadness and longing with punk rock, but Dead Kennedys manage to pull it off with "Moon Over Marin." Told in the first person, the song is a lamentation over a toxified California coast and the protagonist's desire to find meaning through routine and the hope of a stable cosmic order.

In this dystopian future, our narrator is privileged enough to own some beach front property amid a "crowded future" and "still find[s] time to exercise" "on my beach at night." The beach itself seems to be the coast of the Valdez oil spill gone mad and global:

Another tanker's hit the rocks
Abandoned to spill out its guts
The sand is laced with sticky glops

Despite the horror, he concludes, "There will always be a moon over Marin."

Jello Biafra -- longing for the Infinite. Who woulda thunk?