It’s always tempting and sometimes right to cast your political opponents as evil and stupid. For example, Donald Trump just is both evil and stupid. The throughline of his behaviour is that he positively enjoys hurting people (is evil), lies constantly (is evil) and doesn’t have the capacity to cover up either of these habits (is stupid).
However, too many people do this not just to individuals to whom it clearly applies, like Trump, but instead as a blanket judgment on everyone who disagrees with them. It’s very easy to slip into these frames: why do religious people believe in god, who obviously doesn’t exist? Why do people deny the crimes and failures of the Soviet Union, which obviously did happen? It’s very easy to fall back on the above two explanations. After all, the people making claims like ‘God answers our prayers’ are very obviously just flatly wrong about this, and indeed it’s impossible to understand how they could be right (a personal fave of mine is athletes who pray for victory in rugby matches or whatever). It’s tempting to say that this is because they’re stupid and that’s why they get things wrong.
But here’s the problem: wrongness is not sufficient to prove stupidity or evil. And I can prove it, by showing you that you’re wrong about all kinds of things, and so is everyone you know and love. Once I’ve done this, you’ll have to accept either:
- That you, your loved ones and your political allies, are approximately as stupid or evil, and therefore are no better than, people who disagree with you, OR;
- That being wrong about things does not make you stupid or evil
Gapminder is a great little activity which will show you that you’re wrong about an astonishing array of things. In a nice illustration of the old saw, ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ you’re going to find that your knowledge about the world is so limited that the little bit of information you do have just makes you more wrong: it’s a multiple-choice quiz but most people would do better if they picked answers at random. Sometimes, we’re all a dawkins.
Now, maybe you’re going to score better than the average person (full disclosure: I did better than average, and I would’ve done slightly worse if I’d picked at random). This might make you smarter or gooder(?) than the average person, but the problem remains: if being wrong on the facts is evidence that a person is stupid or evil, then it cuts both ways. Being very slightly less wrong means that you’re very slightly less evil, not that you’re good.
For the sake of our sanity, not to mention intellectual consistency, we have to conclude that people we disagree with are for the most part neither stupid nor evil. They’re just people we disagree with.
What I’ve been reading
This week, I read Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth fame (your definition of ‘fame’ may vary). Moore and his bandmates have been artistic heroes of mine, ever since my brain was completely rewired by hearing ‘100%’ on 120 Minutes, and I normally tell people Sonic Youth is my favourite band, and that Daydream Nation is the GOAT album, at the slightest prompting. So, you might think I would enjoy reading nearly 500 pages about the de facto band leader and you would be right, I loved it.
Various reviewers hoping that Moore would describe the breakdown of his first marriage in lurid detail have been disappointed in the book but those people are a. prurient, gossip-fixated misanthropes who, b., deserve to be disappointed (refer to a.). Flick to the end of the book if you’d like to read Moore largely confirm his ex-wife and -bandmate Kim Gordon’s account of their divorce given in her own memoir, Girl in a Band (which I also recommend), but don’t expect much more detail than she gave. It obviously sucks to be Gordon in that situation and I’m disinclined to be sympathetic to people who cheat on their partners, but ultimately it’s their business, not mine, and so I’m also dinsinclined to be judgmental about it.
The love affair Moore’s mainly concerned with isn’t with Gordon or with his now-wife Eva Prinz, but with music. Most of the book contains ecstatic accounts of various songs, albums, gigs and bands that Moore was lucky enough to see and hear over the last six decades, starting with his brother bringing home The Kingsmen’s immortal ‘Louie Louie’ and ending with tributes to guitar iconoclasts John Fahey and Ron Asheton (who also appear several times earlier on in the book, often part in one or another of the author’s innumerable side projects). It’s enough to send you down any number of crate digging expeditions or online rabbit holes, whether tracking down some of those side projects, re-listening to old faves or discovering something new and, presumably, insane which you’d never heard before. There are even a few surprises in there for a longtime fan like me. Obviously teenage Thurston was a big fan of Captain Beefheart, but would anyone have guessed he also loved early KISS and saw them in concert?
Moore is a decent enough writer to get across the awesome power of music as he felt and still feels it, even when he’s discussing artists I’ve never much liked (despite Moore’s enthusiasm, Sid Vicious as a person and a musician continues to be extraordinarily unappealling). That said, he has a few tics that a better editor might’ve excised: he invariably ‘connects’ with people when he wants to say that he saw, spoke or met them, sometimes more than once a page, but that’s by-the-by.
He’s hugely generous to people who maybe don’t deserve it (Vicious, again) and even to acts like Alice in Chains, who most of his scene-mates were and are dismissive of as johnny-come-latelys and sellouts. He doesn’t shy away from telling stories that reflect poorly on him and his bandmates, either. Poor old Bob Bert, who was repeatedly sacked and then shamefacedly invited back to the band when new drummer number X spontaneously combusted or what-have-you, comes across as an inadvertent hero due to his unending willingness to come back into the fold despite this treatment. He even eventually comes out on top by quitting on them, leading them to recruit Steve Shelley who, by good fortune, happened to be not only in need of a job but actually hanging out in Moore and Gordon’s appartment at that very moment.
For those interested in the interactions of Sonic Youth as a band, there’s relatively little here and not much to surprise anyone. I’d guess that, with the possible exception of Gordon, Moore’s bandmates are mentioned less frequently than, e.g., Iggy Pop. Lee Ranaldo, in particular, is a bit of a ghost, and it’s tempting to wonder if that might be down to a personal rift of some sort. As far as I know, Moore and Shelley are the only members of SY who never threatened to quit before their breakup in 2011 (Ranaldo did when they left one of his songs off of Dirty without telling him; I didn’t know Gordon had till I read the book). Moore is honest about his own shortcomings as a bandmate, apologetically describing numerous occasions on which he was clearly being an overbearing dick towards the others; it’s always been clear that despite the ‘sonic democracy’ of the band, Moore was the de facto leader (no surprise that it was Ranaldo, not Moore, who found himself left out of a tracklisting discussion, for example) and the book leaves you with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that this might’ve been simply because he was more stubborn, rather than because of relative talent, contributions or hard work. On the other hand, his solo output, both during and after the band’s lifetime, suggests that he may simply have been the most prolific songwriter.
I also read Pandemonium, Andrew McMillan’s 2021 collection, which is really good, but be warned, it’s very, very dark. What I like about McMillan’s poetry (which I’ve written about before) is that he is never ambiguous and especially never vague, which many poets land on while aiming for ambiguity. There’s always a clarity of thought and emotion, perfectly expressed in clarity of language. Probably the best collection I’ve read this year.
I also just finished The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell. I really loved Hamnet and this is nearly, but not quite, as good. It’s a fictionalised biography of Lucrezia d’Medici, immortalised in Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, which we all remember from GCSE English. I found it not quite as compelling as Hamnet for two major reasons. I’m going to discuss this with spoilers in the next paragraph, so skip it if you’d rather not find out what happens.
First, it’s oddly repetitive in its use of imagery of trapped animals. It’s not that this isn’t an apt metaphor for Lucrezia’s life, but it’s used so often it loses its impact. It also struck me as just a little obvious. Possibly the fact that it was written during the pandemic (as O’Farrell discusses in an epilogue), when we were all to some extent trapped, led her to re-use this idea a little more than was necessary. Secondly, the ending, in which Lucrezia escapes and her maid, Emilia, literally marked out for death in an accident during Lucrezia’s childhood, lost its shock due to how predictable it was. Somehow, despite being predictable, it was also forced: there’s much discussion of how careful Alfonso is to guard his property, how penetrating he is in divining other people’s secret motives. Despite this, in a roughly twenty-four hour period, during which he was conspiring to commit a murder, one woman sneaks into his castle completely unnoticed while another – his wife! – sneaks out, similarly without attracting any attention. It also lets Lucrezia off the hook. She bears some indirect responsibility for Emilia’s murder, but since she never even finds out about it (which again seems unlikely: does she just never hear, at all, about the death of the ‘Duchess of the Ferrara’, or about the Duke’s remarriage?), she completely gets away with it.
I’d still recommend reading it, but it’s a slightly qualified recommendation. Hamnet, on the other hand, you should definitely read.
As a result of all my Sonic Youth reading, I’ve been re-listening to all the SY and SY-adjacent albums. They remain the greatest, if you were wondering, and I also spent a fair bit of the week trying not to buy the various rarities I don’t already own (don’t get me started on the Custom SY Jazzmasters that Fender made a few years back). I also started to put together a massive playlist of albums and bands that Moore discusses in the book. It’s a work-in-progress at time of writing, in that it ends in the 1970s. I’m going to keep adding to it but it’s already several hours long! Still, there’s some good stuff on it. You can listen to it here:
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Frank Podmore 
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