As with many issues though, Google Ads provides the answer – they could have made the problems “go away today” just by calling some Licensed experts. Who would’ve thought?
Change indeed. Let’s hope the actions are just as good as the promise!
Stumbled across an old Matthew Parris article today which was fascinating reading 4 years after the last election – a discussion on how the neocons should be allowed the full 8 years to implement their “vision”, as that is the only way it can be defeated by both argument and action.
“What the President and his advisers are trying to do will be a colossal failure. But failure takes time to show itself beyond contradiction. The theory that liberal values and a capitalist economic system can be spread across the world by force of arms, and that the United States of America is competent to undertake this task, is the first big idea of the 21st Century. It should be tested to destruction. The opening American presidency of the new millennium — George W. Bush, 2001-2009 — should serve as an object lesson to the world for the decades to come. There must be no room left for argument. The President and his neoconservative court should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves. When they do, when they fail, when America’s dream of becoming the new Rome dies, there should be no possible excuse, no straw at which Republican apologists can clutch.”
That said, as a good friend of mine suggested, paying for that rope is an expensive way to prove a point.
As I love statistics and analysis – especially the kind that other people do the hard work on – books like Freakonomics and Gittonomics are great for exposing the sometimes cute, sometimes weird, sometimes seedy reality underneath the glib catchphrases and slogans of modern marketing.
One study I’d pay to see, even though it’s probably impossible to quantify, is the relationship between politics and popular music in any society. Whilst the two seem diametrically opposed, put some thought to …
Late 60s, early 70s: LBJ and Nixon’s Vietnam War leads to a wave of protest songs …
Late 70s: Democrat, Liberal Jimmy Carter – Disco, baby!
Early 1980s: Reagan, Thatcher, Gordon Gekko, me me me – videos of smartly dressed popstars smashing expensive crockery (Duran Duran springs to mind)
Early 1990s: G.H.W.Bush the elder brings up Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder raging against the point of it all …
Personally, I’d then argue that Bill Clinton’s election, and the subsequent years of American prosperity, killed off a brave new art form just as it was getting going. Who knows what the next step down was from flannelette shirts as a fashion leader? In addition, I blame this era – and Clinton personally – for allowing rap, hip hop and the like to become the dominant musical form since.
Bush the younger – with another war, surprise surprise – revived Eddie Vedder, the Dixie Chicks, and a whole batch of protest songs. Which makes the next U.S. election a cultural timebomb: with Obama or Clinton likely to win, and the alternative the seemingly sensible John McCain, who’s going to lead America into the sort of unilateral geostrategic stupidity that writes it’s own lyrics?
