based on a true story

Sometime last year, I caught this documentary on cable. I didn't have high hopes for it. The very title, Live Forever, an allusion to an Oasis song, probably meant that it would use the Gallagher brothers as its focal point, and there's not much room for other artists when Noel and Liam's egos are involved. That part went as expected, but the pleasant surprise was in seeing these bits of interviews from bands that orbited that scene, who provided insights that were more piercing and insightful than the superficial proxy class war that was Blur v. Oasis. Driving around with Robert Del Naja as he reminisces on the early days of Massive Attack, hanging out in a flat with Jarvis Cocker as he wryly reflects¹ on how many people just didn't get "Common People." That's all fun stuff, but the real pleasant surprise was Louise Wener from Sleeper, who turns out to be the unlikely chronicler for the entire era. Front-woman for a band that never got out of second-tier, Ms. Wener never did the marriage of convenience thing-- you know, going out with another, more famous, rockstar like Justine from Elastica + Damon Albarn from Blur -- but Sleeper managed to stick around long enough to open for most of the bands that counted. So, she had the inside scoop and the backstage gossip for everyone in the film, and unlike everyone else, she doesn't sound like she melted most her brains on amphetamines and cocaine. I hope that some day she writes a tell-all book about that whole era, featuring a young Tony Blair, eager to earn the Cool Britannia² vote, snorting coke off Patsy Kensit's tit, because I think that would be awesome.

A couple of months ago, I had _perihelion_ and rojagato over dinner -- partially because I needed help devouring a leg of lamb and partially because I wanted to fob off Jen Trynin's autobiography. I was never a big Jen Trynin fan, but the excerpt of the book that ran in the Phoenix caught my eye with its purported claims of life in the Boston indie music scene circa early 90's, post Pixies, post Throwing Muses, when Mark Sandman was still alive. The book wasn't bad, though not nearly as dishy as I hoped for. The chapters on record label courtship, auditioning lawyers and agents, and dealing with journalists were suitably absurd and entertaining, though increasingly archaic and quaint in this day of MySpace promotions and blog buzz, but it's still told from the perspective of a shy, privileged, white collar girl who never quites embrace the rockstar lifestyle -- which, you know, is totally wise and sensible, but it makes for boring soap operas. Still, I wanted to loan the book to _perihelion_ because I figure he'd get a kick out of the old memories, and he did. For that, I was happy.

A couple of days ago, while listening to Morning Edition on WBUR, I caught this gush-crazy interview with Kristin Hersh, and she was talking about how she and Tanya Donnelly got their start playing clubs when they were fifteen years old; and just how messed it up was to be negotiating record contracts when you're just barely old enough to drive. You could probably make a pretty compelling biopic out of that one statement alone. I've had "Bright Yellow Gun" stuck in my head for the last three days, and I don't mind that much at all.

¹Does Jarvis Cocker have any other mode of observation besides wry reflection?

²God, it's almost sad to remember that Tony Blair, when he first came into office, was such a promising, cool guy. He was like Bill Clinton without the unfortunate taste in trashy interns.

A few years ago, when Joseph Estrada was elected to the Presidency of the Philippines, riding solely on his fame as a movie actor, I had an argument with one of my relatives about democracy. We both knew that Estrada was likely to lead the country to ruin, which he did, but what set me off were the words, "the Philippines deserves it. That's what democracy will do for you. Give me Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew's dictatorship any day."

You can't really find blame for that sort of opinion. When you live in a corrupted republic, surrounded in squalor, and you look at the shiny, stable prosperity of Singapore or the emerging might of a Chinese economy that's all capitalist-in-communist clothing you can't help but wonder if this democracy bit is everything that it's cracked up to be. According to Amy Chua in World on Fire the neo-liberal solutions to the problems of global poverty and injustice -- democracy and free trade -- have not helped developing nations, and actually have been counter-productive. Expanded trade goes to benefit a few privileged minorities and stokes the resentment of the poor majority, and democracy has provided opportunities for demagogues and autocrats to seize power as they conflate oppression and popular support by making scapegoats of the aristocracy. Sad thing is that, in several aspects, she's right.

It's easy for us to think of dictators in the mold of Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein, military strongmen who seize power in coups, but it's easier still to forget that Hitler was elected, or that the Rwandan genocide was engineered as the nation underwent democratic reforms. In the same way that marxism was an idealist political philosophy corrupted by Stalin and Kim Il Sung, democracy has been stained by the likes of Ariel Sharon and Robert Mugabe.

This, as Chua takes great pains to say, doesn't mean that democracy is wrong, but rather, there are flaws in the way democracy has been implemented in developing economies and the gauge of democratic progress used by Western eyes (ie. free and fair national elections) misses the forest for the trees. A democratic society is more than universal suffrage and accurate vote counts, but also a government structure and a constitution that properly addresses and reflects the nation that is to be governed.

What's interesting about Chua's thesis is how she introduces consideration for ethnic rivalries that lurk beneath so many Third World societies. Whether it's Indians in Kenya or white farmers in Zimbabwe, many developing nations struggle under the fact that much of their economies are controlled by small tribal (and ostensibly foreign) factions, and the solutions to their problems is not a simple matter of violent overthrow of an established aristocracy -- that's just swapping bourgeois tyranny for mob rule. Rather, she argues, there's a certain give and take that's necessary whereby the ruling minority has to share their power with the impoverished and illiterate majority in a gradual effort to bring both classes of society towards parity.

As well-reasoned as that approach may be, it still strikes me as a little naive. It's hard to ask a ruling class to share power. Shame only goes so far, and some sort of external force is needed to compel this sort of arrangement. One can argue that the South would never have let go of its segregationist past without civil rights laws; and likewise, absent government legislation, it's difficult to imagine the mestizo aristocrats of Manila deciding to share their wealth with lazy, shifty ethnic Malay Filipinos who only proved their stupidity by electing a president who made a career of being a third-rate Dirty Harry. Still, something must change if one wishes to avoid the fates of the Chinese families who were burned out of their houses in the riots of Indonesia.

Likewise, Chua, says, something must change for America -- who is seen as the supra global ethnic minority and elicits the same mixture of envy, hatred and admiration that most impoverished peoples reserve for their wealthy upper-class. And in this case, it's even harder to imagine how America would gain the humility and wisdom to recognize its role in the world and seek to share the prosperity that it so greatly covets.