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The Charles C. W. Cooke Newsletter |
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My wife and I went out for dinner last night. We sat inside, next to a window. On the other side of that window there was a cover band, playing for the bar outside. They made me hallucinate.
I'll back up a little.
At university, I had a friend who was studying math at a level that I cannot even begin to comprehend, and he once told me that he had this thing called "Synesthesia." There are many forms of Synesthesia, but the gist, as helpfully explained by Wikipedia, is that it is "a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway." Simply put, people who have Synesthesia ("synesthetes") mix up typically discrete senses. My friend had it in two forms. First, his brain assigned all numbers a color (one was "blue", two was "red," etc.). Second, each of those numbers had a certain "height," such that if he visualized, say, the numbers one through nine sitting on a flat line, each digit sat different amount of space above it. The result was a colorful mental map that helped him a great deal with his studies.
This fascinated me for a couple of reasons. First, because I'd never heard anyone speak about this phenomenon. Second, because I instantly recognized that I do exactly the same thing with music. Since I was a small child, I've been able to hear intuitively what a given note is without needing a reference point to begin with. An F is just intrinsically an F. An Eb is immediately recognizable as an Eb. And so on. The same goes for chords. G Major just is. Mostly, this is a blessing. But it can also be infuriating. The train that I used to take from Cambridge to London used to play this annoying two-note C# to A motif before the passenger announcements that had exactly the same timing as the guitar line that starts The Beatles' In My Life, which meant that for years I couldn't make that journey without my brain filling in the rest and then proceeding through every track on Rubber Soul that comes after it. Another issue is that if a given recording is consistently out of tune — that is, if the instruments are all in tune with each other, but the master tape was sped up or slowed down a bit — it sets me on edge. Oasis's masterpiece, Don't Look Back in Anger, is sort of in C. Except, it's actually not in C. It's in very-very-lightly-sharp-of-C. Not C. Not C#. C#b. Argh.
Anyhow, I'd known that I could recognize notes and chords from the air since I was pretty small, and, because I went to a choir school from ages 6 through 13, I'd known that lots of other people could do that, too. What I hadn't realized until I met my mathematical friend was that not everybody else who could do this assigned colors to the notes or chords as well. |
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In me, at least, this takes two forms. Each chord has a color. For example: G major is green, C major is yellow, D major is blue, A minor is red. And each song has a color, too, irrespective of the key it's in. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For is a brownish gold. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is off-white. Let Your Love Flow is light blue. Occasionally, these color sets coincide — I Should Have Known Better by the Beatles is green and it's in G major, which is green, too — but when they don't, they co-exist peacefully.
Normally, I don't especially notice this phenomenon. But last night, sitting by the window at dinner, with almost everything but the bass muffled, it went into overdrive. I suppose this was because my brain was trying to "help" by mapping it out for me. Usually, I'm listening to music loudly enough that there's no doubt whatsoever what the chords and notes are. But, from behind the window, it was much less obvious. And so, in an attempt to fill in the gaps, my mind started flashing colors at me as if I'd dropped acid.
The more glasses of wine I had, the worse it got. The band played Can't Buy Me Love through the wall, and my mind started flashing GREEN (Em) - RED (Am) - GREEN (Em) - RED (Am) - BLUE (Dm — inexplicably, D major and D minor are both blue, which is fun) - GREEN (G7). On top of that, I got the song's color, which is yellow (this kind of lines up, because the verses are in C) and then the bass line's colors, which mostly line up with the chords, but not always.
There was — there is — no way of turning this off. It is what it is. |
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Here's the upside. Those online challenges that play you a second or less of a song and then ask you to work out what it is? I'm unbeatable at them. I just took this one, on the Beatles, and got 40/40. Why? Because I'm cheating, that's why. Within a millisecond of the clip starting, my brain does what it was doing last night through the window — CHORD: C MAJOR, YELLOW / SONG COLOR: TURQUOISE — which, once you add in the rest (who is singing?, is it in mono or stereo?, what's that word?) narrows it down enough to get it without even having to think.
(My math-friend is probably using his Synesthesia to land rockets on top of trains or make billions of dollars predicting the stock market or something. But I'm using mine to crush it on Sporcle, so who has really won, I ask you?) |
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Eventually, we went outside to listen to the band, and things settled down. I had another glass of wine, the acid trip stopped, and I could finally enjoy Honky Tonk Woman without the running color commentary from my subconscious.
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On Monday, I wondered why Senator Joe Manchin was not making a fuss about Joe Biden's threat to violate his oath of office and "cancel" the student loan debt that the federal government holds:
If there were ever an idea that is guaranteed to annoy Joe Manchin, it’s this one. Manchin says that he can’t acquiesce to any policy that he can’t “go home and explain.” Well, this one is inexplicable — especially in West Virginia, which has the lowest percentage of college graduates of any state. Manchin says that he’s worried about see-sawing policy, and that this compels him to champion the Senate filibuster. Well, this move would involve the president of the United States making sweeping changes to the law on his own, in a way that the Speaker of the House has already confirmed is illegal. Manchin says he’s concerned about inflation. Well, this is an inflationary policy. Manchin says he’s vexed by the national debt. Well, this would add up to $1.7 trillion to it — without congressional input. Manchin says he’s alarmed by “careless spending and bad policies.” Well, this represents both. Manchin says he’s disturbed that the United States cannot “pay for the essential programs, like Social Security and Medicare.” This would make that problem worse.
On Thursday, I took issue with Bret Stephens, who had argued in the New York Times that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade it will be acting in a "radical," rather than a "conservative," manner. This, I argued, is nonsense:
Properly understood, conservatism does indeed demand some respect for the status quo. But it does not require its adherents to oppose all change — especially when that change simply restores the status quo ante — and it certainly does not demand that they accept pernicious lies in perpetuity simply because those lies have managed to survive for a few decades. Roe and Casey are lies. They were lies when they were written. They were lies ten years after they were written. They are lies today. There is nothing remotely un-conservative about wishing to expose them as lies and remove them summarily from our law.
Stephens's problem, I argued, is that he's blaming the wrong people:
Indeed, he seems to believe that conservatives should be less upset by the Court’s original “abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations” than by the people who have spent the last 50 years trying to reverse them. This is silly. The Constitution is the highest law in the land, and to demand that the Court enforce that law incorrectly forever because it has enforced it incorrectly for the past half century is absurd. As conservatives understand, incentives matter a great deal. Were Stephens’s approach to prevail, the United States Supreme Court would be blessing a structure that rewarded liars, punished truth-tellers, and set in aspic the idea that if a transient majority of justices decides to make something up, their contrivances must be respected forever.
One wonders if Stephens has ever met anyone who disagrees with him on this point. By overturning Roe and Casey, he writes, the Court “will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control.” But, quite clearly, that fire isn’t “under control,” and it most certainly does not need “lighting.” Far from being a mere relic or abstraction, the fire is raging still. It was lit in 1973, it was sustained in 1992, and, 50 years later, it continues to burn. At some level, Stephens seems to intuit this — to his credit, he concedes that Roe “helped turn confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court into the unholy death matches they are now,” and that “it diminished the standing of the court by turning it into an ever-more political branch of government” — and yet, inexplicably, he is unwilling either to place the blame for these developments on whom it belongs or to conclude that the best way of tamping down the conflagration is to get the Court out of the issue altogether.
I finished by expressing my surprise that Stephens regards the potential reversal of a bad 50-year-old precedent as a threat to “American steadiness and sanity," given that, a few years ago, he wrote a column proposing that Americans repeal the Second Amendment. |
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Yesterday, I asked why the Biden administration is unable to condemn bad behavior:
There are a handful of plausible answers to this question. One is that this administration is so scared of being dragged on Twitter that it is willing to sell out its friends to avoid that fate. Another is that, despite occupying the highest executive office in the land, Biden and his team have convinced themselves that they are plucky outsiders. Yet another is that Biden is no good at his job. Whatever the real answer is, the administration’s reluctance to condemn when condemnation is called for is awful politics and even worse civics. Sure, the loudest online voices like to shout about “burning down the system,” to complain about “tone policing,” and to insist that they “don’t give a f*** about your respectability politics.” But the thing is: Everyone hates those people. Of all the people in America, Joe Biden should know this. In 2020, his opponent in the presidential election was a man with an inability to flatly condemn bad behavior — a flaw from which Biden made a great deal of hay. Today, Biden has become what he claimed to hate.
When addressing bad behavior, I noted, the White House has a tendency to say that people are upset. But that's not really the point, is it?
When discussing unacceptable behavior, it is a given that the perpetrators will be “passionate” or “scared” or “sad” or “worried” or “unhappy.” That part is obvious. The material question is whether those people are to be forgiven for indulging their strong emotions and damaging our political order in the process. Because the maintenance of our civilization demands that they not be, the answer to the question, “Should these passionate, scared, sad, worried, unhappy people break the rules?” must be “No” — especially when the person answering speaks for the president of the United States. The important thing about the rioters of January 6 was not that they were passionate or scared or sad or worried or unhappy; the important thing about the rioters of January 6 was that they attacked our system of government and put other people’s lives in danger. There is no place for a response to January 6 that starts with a recitation of grievances and ends with a “but,” and there is no place for such a response to this leak, either.
For my full archive at National Review, you can click here. |
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I was on The Megyn Kelly Show on Friday, to talk about what Americans really think about abortion, what Roe v. Wade actually says, what the White House is saying about threats to the justices and the SCOTUS leak, Mitch McConnell's impact on the courts, what should happen to the leaker, and more. |
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Listening To: Barclay James Harvest's 'Poor Man's Moody Blues' |
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I wish more people knew this song. In general, I could take or leave Barclay James Harvest, but this? This is one of the most hauntingly beautiful tracks ever recorded: |
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It's so sad that it's almost painful to listen to. You'd think that the kitchen-sink production — the orchestra, the reverb-soaked drums, the 10cc-style harmonies, the ethereal wall-of-sound, the synths — might detract a bit from what is ultimately a folk song. But they don't. They provide a counterpoint. Even the finale (which is what Pink Floyd would have sounded like if they'd recorded Beethoven's 9th) works somehow.
For me, the highlight comes at 2:40, when the song drops right down to the bones, before collapsing into that searing guitar break at 3:10. How has this song not been used in a movie? |
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