So on the way to pick up some art supplies for a project yesterday afternoon, I was listening to the radio, and unfortunately, a Green Day song came on.   Worse still, it got stuck in my head, and I’ve been suffering the effects ever since.

It has gotten me to thinking, however — and not just about how to hang myself from the balcony railing using a bedsheet.  A single question has been stuck in my brain for the last hour or so: What, exactly, is Green Day rebelling *against*?

I mean, it’s obvious they’re upset about something.    Further, they always have been, down through their entire musical career.   What could it possibly be?

Let’s do a quick survey of their biggest, and sadly, inescapable hits:

From Dookie we have their all-time biggest hit, “Basket Case”.   This seems to be about how even Green Day can’t stand Green Day, and they are driving themselves insane.  That one I can understand.

Another inescapable Green Day song from my childhood was “Minority”, off of Warning.  Let’s take a gander at the lyrics:

I want to be the minority
I don’t need your authority
Down with the Moral Majority
‘Cause I want to be the minority

Aha! Specifics! They dislike the Moral Majority, the religious right organization founded by Jerry Falwell, prominent in the Reagan era.   Except… the Moral Majority disbanded in 1989.  This song came out in 2000.

What’s next, a song where they chant ‘Down with Byzantium?’  How about declaring your disdain for the Delian League?

(Minority also contains a leading candidate for the Stupidest Lyric of All Time:

“One light, one mind, flashing in the dark, blinded by the silence of a thousand broken hearts.”

How can anything be blinded, that is to say, be robbed of its sense of vision, by the *lack* of SOUND coming from a… metaphor?  Can I be deafened by the stench of hypocrisy too?  How about losing my sense of smell to the Touch of Evil? )

There’s also “American Idiot”, which has brought Green Day a lot of love from the left (who are, after all, remarkably cheap dates).

Well maybe I’m the faggot America.
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along to the age of paranoia.

Can someone, anyone, tell me what the hell that is supposed to mean?  ’Not part of a redneck agenda’.  What agenda is that?  Are they plotting to replace all our houses with trailers?  Force us all to watch Blue Collar Comedy until we kill ourselves?  Is there some sinister Redneck Conspiracy, lurking in the wings, preparing for the Glorious Gomer Revolution that will put all of us out in the countryside, on tractors, forced to drink PBR and eat Hamburger Helper?

This was seen as a bold statement, a searing critique of…. something.  Because he curses?  Attacks a strawman?  Uses the word ‘faggot’ once in a song?

Wikipedia tells me that the larger album was a concept piece about, and I swear to Cthulhu I’m not making this up, Jesus of Suburbia:

Jesus of Suburbia hates his town and those close to him, so he leaves for the city.[9] As the album progresses the characters of St. Jimmy and Whatsername are introduced. St. Jimmy is a punk rock freedom fighter, “the son of a bitch and Edgar Allan Poe.” Whatsername, inspired by the Bikini Kill song “Rebel Girl”, is a “Mother Revolution” figure that Armstrong described as “kind of St. Jimmy’s nemesis in a lot of ways.” Both characters illustrate the “rage vs. love” theme of the album, in that “you can go with the blind rebellion of self-destruction, where Saint Jimmy is. But there’s a more love-driven side to that, which is following your beliefs and ethics. And that’s where Jesus of Suburbia really wants to go,” according to Armstrong.

Wow that’s deep.  A punk-lite album about a punk-revolutionary who, dissatisfied with life, leaves for the city.  The deeper lesson? Don’t just smash shit, you won’t get anywhere.  An astounding revelation… that most people have in preschool (though, admittedly, not all: see the Neoconservative view of foreign policy).

Finally, we have their latest hot-button song, Know Your Enemy.   This… it isn’t even music, I’m sorry.   Even for Green Day this is unacceptable half-assery.  In a 3 minute song they say the word ‘enemy’  TWENTY SIX TIMES.   They repeat their choruses, not once, but twice in a row, to pad the length and make you reach for a razorblade.  Just look at this lyrical genius:

Do you know the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy

Do you know the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy

Do you know the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy

Violence is an enemy
Against the enemy
Violence is an energy

That isn’t just dumb.  That is a mind-virus.  Somewhere out in space, an innocent alien race, headed to Earth with cures for all disease, may have tuned into one of our radio broadcasts, heard this song, and are now floating, dead in space, curled up in the corners of their gleaming, beautiful ship, reduced to gibbering husks.  This song makes a convincing argument that all of human civilization has been a lie, and that we were better off bashing each other over the head with animal bones.

Whew.  Ok.  So, basically, Green Day is mad.  Mad at.. themselves.  Mad at.. the majority, whatever that is.  Mad at the Moral Majority,  which was gone 11 years by the time they got upset.  Mad at rednecks who they think set policy.  Mad at violence, which they want to use as ‘energy’ against silence, which they are even madder at, I guess.

If I can be candid for a moment, it’s hard to see how anyone takes Green Day seriously.  Here you have an angsty, rebellious psuedo-punk band that makes album after album about how they hate the majority of.. something.  How put-upon they are, oppressed by nefarious forces of the majority who somehow never block the sale of millions of their cds.   How any day now they’re going to rebel against the establishment, just as soon as they finish cashing in on their latest commercial deal, they swear.  It’s a joke.   Green Day is the Hot Topic of music, a shallow, blended, unthreatening, vanilla form of rebelliousness that is easily marketed to children.

I admit I’m a bit biased; I’ve hated Green Day ever since they recorded a snarky cover of ‘I Fought the Law and the Law Won’ for a Pepsi/iTunes commercial, where they paraded some poor kids who’d been caught downloading music before a national audience for their 15 seconds of humiliation.  Right.  That’s really fighting back against the big, bad media, the big, evil majority there, Green Day. That’ll teach those kids.  Rebellion is ok, so long as you pay retail.

*groan*

I saw this piece in Slate defending Governor Mark Sanford as a human being linked from Balloon Juice, which I read semi-regularly and like quite a bit, and I have to say, I really disagree with the premise:

I’m not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

Sanford’s fumbling efforts to explain how he’s tried to rescue himself with his faith offered some people an opportunity to make fun of his religion, as if a confused, lost, flawed person were the right spokesman for anything. People tend to think the most awful thing about a person is the most true thing. They also apparently think it’s the most true thing about his or her associations. So an e-mail arrived asking, “[I]s there any Republican not sleeping around?” Maybe Sanford should have been a presidential candidate. He apparently represents an entire party and an entire religion.

What Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say is that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world. Yet in the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings, it seemed everyone having a good time pointing at his self-indulgence was also engaging in a form of it.

(Emphasis mine.)

You have got to be kidding me, seriously. Mocking a man who governs on the basis of staunch conservativism and then secretly abandons his job, family and state to slip across a hemisphere and bang his mistress is somehow equivalent to that man’s hypocrisy? Even slightly?

Give me a break. Mark Sanford is the butt of a lot of jokes because he has destroyed himself in truly epic, hilarious fashion. This is a man who fought to deny gay people basic civil rights, like marriage, then destroyed his own marriage through a profound betrayal of not just his family, but the voters of the state of South Carolina as well. The man disappeared without telling his staff, without transferring his authority, leaving the state in a power vacuum and ungovernable, let alone accountable to its own people. Sanford tried to block the Obama stimulus money from going to help the citizens of his own state, then wasted untold taxpayer dollars by collecting a salary while he banged his mistress on another CONTINENT. His staff, his security detail, the entire executive branch of the state sat on their hands, burning cash, so that he could diddle someone in Argentina. The sheer, incredible, disgusting depth of his hypocrisy will either make you laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh, and I don’t think that makes me a bad person.

As for mocking his religion, why not? This is a man who wears his faith on his sleeve, has for some time, and now he’s claiming it can… rescue him from himself? That’s great Mark, really. Why couldn’t it do so last week? Last month? Clearly there’s an effectiveness issue here.   In the conference he says he’s been working with this spiritual advisor of his on this issue for five months.  Really?  After five months, ‘Don’t keep cheating on your wife’ or ‘Don’t abandon all your adult responsibilities for a fuck on the side’ never came up, specifically, during this counseling?  I could do a better job advising Sanford than this ‘spiritual giant’ in five minutes, without a bronze age tome to guide me either.

As for using Sanford to mock the Republican Party… why not? There IS a serious and obvious crisis of basic human decency in a party run by, let’s see: Sanford (until just now, head of the Republican Governor’s Association), Rush Limbaugh (drug abusing, racist misogynist pig), Dick Cheney (pro-torture ideologue) and Sarah Palin (Governor who uses state resources to settle family disputes, serial liar and ethics violator).

Why not ask if there’s an issue with powerful Republicans and marital ethics? Newt Gingrich famously divorced his wife while she was dying of cancer. Giuliani divorced his by PRESS conference. John McCain divorced his first long-suffering wife to marry a younger woman, who he was running around with before the divorce. Sanford is… well, he’s an obvious example now.   Larry Craig, as we all  know, LOVES his wife.  Just last week another prominent Republican, Ensign, was caught having an affair. Their party is the party that seeks to decide who is, and is not, fit to marry another human being, and yet they are up to their eyeballs in adulterers. I think it’s perfectly valid to ask if their obsession with marriage stems from their seeming inability to have decent adult relationships.

So yes, Sanford is a human being.  I don’t recall anyone saying otherwise.  He is also a liar, a hypocrite and a fraud, an immoral sideshow attraction who denies other people their basic human rights and dignity.  It is only right and proper that his self-immolation brings some satisfaction to the rest of the species.   Consider it moral education mixed with comedy.

I should say up front that I am a huge fan of Kage Baker’s work.  I’ve read all the Company novels, most of her short story collections, including Mother Aegypt, and The Anvil of the World is one of my all time favorite books, though it is over way too soon.

This isn’t one of those backhanded ‘I’m a huge fan BUT’ introductions either.  I liked The Sons of Heaven.  It’s a lively, interesting read.  I’m just not sure I like where it ends up, and from the way it *does* end, both the book and the larger Company story, I’m not sure the esteemed author does either.

This is of course not a book for first time readers.  Go back, read the Company books in order, see what you think.  It’s not my favorite by any means; it might, in fact, be my least favorite, but it will be completely and utterly indecipherable to anyone who hasn’t been keeping up.

Basically, The Sons of Heaven wraps up the Company storyline once and for all… at least, supposedly.  Without giving too much away, I can safely state that a series of books about time travel presents a lot of opportunity for revision.   You might call it Doctor Who Syndrome:

Writer and future Doctor Who executive producer Steven Moffat has gone further, arguing that “a television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can’t have a continuity error — it’s impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say ‘he changed time — it’s a time ripple from the Time War’.”

(From the Wikipedia article on the Time War in Doctor Who)

The same thing applies, I think, to a lengthy tale of conspiracies, wheels within wheels, and time travel by secretive immortals.

One of the blurbs in the front of the Sons of Heaven really does sum it up nicely — it states that Baker ‘bestows appropriate fates on all her characters.’   Looking it up now, it was from The Sci-Fi Weekly, for what that’s worth.

Basically, this novel screams ‘Coda!’ the same way that The Empire Strikes Back screamed ‘Middle Movie!’.  It’s a book that serves a purpose, to put away a box of toys that Baker, and her many fans, love, but that she no longer wants to play with, at least full time… and there are a lot of toys in this box to deal with.  There are points in the books where even longtime readers will puzzle over who a certain person is, or why we’re bothering with them; but I suppose even the most minor walk-on role might be someone’s personal favorite, or Baker felt she had to say goodbye to everybody.  It can be a little cluttered.

The writing is still top-notch, and the wonderful Baker characterization is still intact, though as a longtime fan I do have to say Joseph has changed a *lot* over the course of the books, somehow, without seeming to change at all, at least to his fellow characters.    The Silence… well, I’m not sure anything could live up to the terror of the unknowable End of the World.  It’s not entirely what you’d expect.  Is it entirely satisfying?  Not for me, personally.  Your mileage may vary.

Baker seems vexed on this point a little too.  Though The Sons of Heaven more or less definitively deals with the fate of the immortals and good old Dr. Zeus, there is an afterword of sorts by one of the people involved, which acts as both an epilogue and a sort of giant, cosmic, authorial shrug of the shoulders.  ’This is how it is… I guess…’

There’s a lot to love about this book.  The cliffhanger of the previous volume is dealt with neatly; Alec and Edward in particular get a lot of love and attention, and the first half of the book, which deals primarily with the relationships surrounding Mendoza, as well as the concept of Immortals having KIDS, is really great stuff.

But much like in Anvil, everything is over too soon, and at least I was left with both personal reservations for how certain characters/events turned out (which I welcome — who wants to agree with an author all the time?) and.. a certain mild dissatisfaction.   The ending just doesn’t have quite the heft it needs, I suppose, after who knows how many thousands of pages.

Still, beggars can’t be choosers.  Whether or not it really is The End, it’s the end for now, and it’s still a good read.  Recommended, 4/5 stars, etc.

Update:  Upon further reflection I realize that this still comes out sounding too negative.   It’s just hard to put an imprecise feeling like this into words… the metaphor I tend toward right at the moment is the letdown you naturally feel at the end of a rollercoaster that you wish had just one more loop, a really smash-up finish.  Oh well.  Now who isn’t satisfied with an ending, eh?