Our Dystopia

UPDATE: I meant to reference the cover story in June's Atlantic, "The Birth of New American Aristocracy." It's long, but it's worth it. I didn't want to spend all the time required to read it staring at a monitor so I spent eight or nine dollars for the actual newsstand edition of the magazine. The guy who wrote the essay, Matthew Stewart, does an excellent job from a mainstream perspective of arguing that a revolution is inevitable. The question is what kind. He holds onto the magical hope that the revolution will be led by the upper-middle class.

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It is hard not to be despondent these days. Everywhere -- international, national, local -- one casts a glance putrefaction stares back. Each morning out the door I go and down the hill to work. I pass squalid bodies huddled in doorways and squats built into abandoned storefronts. With me are other pedestrian commuters dressed for work and headed downtown. We see the homeless, but they have been integrated into our conception of the normal. So on we trod. Now and then I'll feel a pang of conscience, like, "Maybe I should stop and ask if that guy is okay?" But I walk on.

It is troubling, but not nearly as troubling as the 5 o'clock vision that confronts me on my homeward bound commute through the heart of Amazonia. People line the sidewalk waiting for the #8 bus to move them up the hill. Nine out ten are staring at their smartphones. Unconscious a few yards away is a homeless person. The energy is horrible. We have arrived at Dystopia, and it's Stanford University married with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. 

To encapsulate this Dystopia there is the latest news of an initiative campaign to repeal the very modest tax-and-spend legislation passed last month by the city council to address the homeless state of emergency. Paid signature-gatherers are lying to voters in a frantic attempt to place the head-tax repeal on the November ballot. As Steven Hsieh reported at the end of May, "Several companies are funding the effort, including Amazon, Starbucks, Vulcan, and a trade group representing grocery stores. Businesses have pledged more than $350,000 to the campaign, according to a disclosure report."

I'm not sure that they will succeed. Seventeen-thousand-plus valid signatures is a lot to gather by June 15. Placing repeal before the voters was attempted by business when the city council passed a $15 minimum wage several years ago. It failed. Nonetheless, it is the unbridled greed of the corporate kingpins -- the head tax that passed was cut in half from the original proposal, a proposal that still fell far short of what was called for in the Chamber of Commerce's own study of homelessness -- that bodes ill in the big picture. The wealthy are not willing to change in order to address a state of emergency. This means the emergency will grow larger.

Possibly related was a moment I experienced yesterday afternoon. Toiling away at my desk, my window open to 1st Avenue Belltown three floors below, I heard hip hop -- maybe Meek Mill, maybe something from Atlanta -- blaring on top of a Harley engine. We have come to expect classic rock on top of a Harley, ZZ Top or Steppenwolf. So I stuck my head out the window. Sure enough, it was a white guy, middle age, in a leather vest, astride a Harley Davidson, blasting contemporary hip hop from the bike's sound system.

Rock'n'roll is dead. What does it mean? I walked over to the next office and asked a coworker who likes classic rock (she has "More Than a Feeling" as her ringtone). I offered, "I think it must have something to do with the end of postwar, post-scarcity society. Our culture of abundance has failed. I don't know. I'm working on it."

She looked at me as if she would prefer not to be bothered.

Interestingly, a critic at the one of the local weekly newspapers posted something yesterday on the same topic (see David Segal's "A Modest Proposal to Make Rock Music More Interesting"):

Rock music, generally speaking, is not in good shape. It hasn't been in sound condition—at least artistically—for about a quarter century; some observers might go back even further in time to pinpoint when rock last was in rude health. As a force in the charts, rock has been mostly waning since the Bill Clinton era. It doesn't speak well for a genre when your biggest-selling acts are Imagine Dragons, Twenty One Pilots, and Portugal. The Man, with Metallica and the Beatles still outselling much younger acts by a large margin.

As someone who's been listening to rock daily for more than 50 years and who's been going to rock shows since 1979, I think I can speak with a smidgen of authority about what I perceive to be rock's moribund state. To be sure, good-to-great rock music is still being created—albeit in diminishing quantities since its peak years of creativity (1965-1981). However, in recent decades, it has become increasingly harder to find artists doing innovative—let alone revolutionary—things within the genre. I would like to propose one way to reanimate rock, to shake it out of its stagnant period... perhaps!

He suggests inventing new instruments. It won't work. Rock'n'roll is a manifestation of a society that no longer exists.