This must have been an undated note attached to a cassette tape of the Minutemen's Ballot Result (1987) double album that I made for my friend Shale, a prodigious reader and now a tenured professor and a family man.
Obviously written in a state of advanced drunkenness, the note reveals a penchant for delusional self-celebration and hero worship -- the yang to the all-pervasive yin of self-doubt that characterizes most young adults beginning worklife, and which certainly characterized moi.
Shale,
Take care. This message attaches itself to democracy-rock. The sweet song of our youth, songs of honor and dignity and valor. Who the else sings songs about such things? When I flipped BALLOT RESULT on the spinner for the first time, on that first side, the first thing that came into my head was the halcyon age of sipping brews and chewing fat, about Hegel, or Hobbes, or the next guy in the intellectual pantheon -- about "No-Dick" [Robert Nozick], "Balls" [John Rawls], Quinn/Cohen, "Tonguer" [Roberto Mangabeira Unger]. If you listen to "Courage" or "Little Man" or "Picnic," you will hear our honest blunt pugnacious Californian young-manhood beaming through: No-holds-barred excess that always seemed tempered with insight or hindsight or intuitive goodness and rationality. Thankfully, we had some Muses available to us.
