A return from Spring Break brought us a discussion of history and historical preservation. As a history major, I take this very seriously.

We learned about the example of a museum exhibit on the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The exhibit was knowingly improved so as not to show the truly horrid conditions people suffered under. I would call this outright fraud, a falsification of history. Something cannot be presented as true when it’s not. The exhibit should have been closed immediately, the creators fired, and it redesigned to be historically accurate.

Then we went into a discussion of Black Confederates, and I was very vocal in my thoughts. To not reiterating what I lamented on in class, while individuals that could be described as “Black Confederates” existed based on anecdotal evidence, to say as a general truth that there were Black Confederate soldiers would be historically dishonest.

Class ended with Professor O’Malley agreeing that in his view the Civil War was over slavery; an interpretation that I do disagree with because I think it’s an oversimplification. It’s important to separate the issue of secession from the issue of war. The secession of the southern states did not necessitate war, and one did not have to lead to the other (which people at the time debated and acknowledged). The Deep South, which left between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, seceded almost singularly because of slavery. They thought that Lincoln would be hostile to slavery, the foundation of their political-economy, and seceded because of that (which they freely admitted). The war started because the Lincoln administration was willing to wage war to prevent secession–they did this because of economic reasons (tariffs on southern exports provided a majority of government funding) and ideological reasons (the perverted idea that a union–originally understood as a voluntary contract between states–was somehow an unbreakable bond of nature). The war was northern driven and was over secession and conquering the southern states. Only after the war began in April did the Upper South secede and join the Confederacy. They did this in response to Lincoln’s call for troops and his aim to make war. They thought this was both illegal and immoral, so they seceded. Could the motivation for the Upper South’s secession be described as a defense of states’ rights? I think so. So what you have is 3 separate events: the secession of the Deep South (over slavery), the start of the war (over union and preventing secession), and the secession of the Upper South (over states’ rights). They were unique events that happened in chronological order, and to summarize that period as saying “the war was over slavery” I think is oversimplification to the point of glaring inaccuracy.

After an (enjoyable) introduction to the Ohio Players, the class discussion moved on to a fundamental issue of what is American and who is an American?

I fully disagree with the idea so often put forth that the United States is a “proposition nation.” A nation is defined by the people who live in it. A proper nation is formed around a coherent set of people, typically tied together by similar race, religion, language, folk heroes, history, and social values. The United States, like any other nation, is tied by by those rules. This idea of American exceptionalism, that the U.S. transcends what defines every other country in the world and is somehow above human identity, I think is a kind of messianic idealism not grounded in reality.

The historic American nation has always been bi-racial. Blacks, from forcible removal from Africa, to slavery, to segregation, to attempted integration, have always formed an integral part of the United States, even when subjugated.

Indians, on the other hand, until their receiving of American citizenship in the 1920s, were never a part of the historic American nation. They were not the founders of what the modern world defines as “America.” And the first Europeans who arrived here were not “immigrants.” They did not immigrate to Native American societies or attempt to join or integrate with them. They founded their own settlements and established their own nation separate from that of the natives. Whether they’re romantically referred to as pioneers or disparagingly referred to as conquerors, they were certainly not immigrants.

Likewise, calling the United States a “country of immigrants” is an illogical canard. Yes, current inhabitants of the United States are descendants of people who came from somewhere else. But that applies to every other people other country in the world. At not point did people spring fully formed from the ground. They all arrived from somewhere at different points in time. The Indians arrived to North American 10,000 years ago. Were they immigrants? The “country of immigrants” presupposition is modern cultural marxist-influenced design to degrade the idea of an American nation.

We ended with defining folk culture as arising from “people on the economic margins too poor to participate in commerce,” such as the Cajuns or people of Appalachia. I would agree with this definition.

As is obvious to any fan of modern music, chord progression can’t be copyrighted. Today in class we were shown Axis of Awesome’s song Four Chords. I’m familiar with both and think the former is a very talented comedy band and the latter a legitimately creative song.

From there the topic changed to something much darker. I’ve always kind of known that Jim Crow was a kind of black cultural character and that’s where the term Jim Crow era derived, but it never connected to me that he was a minstrel show character. I agree with Professor O’Malley that that is very strange and I’m curious to learn more about that aspect. From there we were shown lynching postcards, a thing I never before knew existed. Something so macabre and so brutal publicized so widely seems so alien, even from what we’re taught about the post-war south. And it also made me realized that as much as students are taught about segregation and racial violence, we’re rarely if ever shown photos. I was never shown lynching photos in class prior to college; known in school text books either. It’s one thing to mentally know that over 4,000 blacks were lynched in the century after the Civil War. It’s a wholly other emotional realization to see it.

From there we listened to black artists like Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters, along with different versions of the song Darktown Strutters Ball (I liked the modern version the best). We were left considering the arbitrariness of “authenticity” and how when analyized deeply enough it’s hard to place where some songs fit and how they don’t comport to our previously recognized categories.

Today we discussed beat. I know nothing about beat and don’t pretend to be able to recognize it in songs I hear.

But I do know Disney movies, and I’m gonna focus on that. Professor O’Malley repeated referred to Mowgli from The Jungle Book as white, even a dark white. I’ve never before heard that interpretation (at least for the 1967 version, which is the clip we watched). Mowgli looks Indian and is meant to be Indian. At the end of the movie he’s entranced by an Indian girl and decides to follow her. in the 2003 sequel Mowgli is presented as a member of the local Indian community. He’s not white. Now upon rewatching I can definitely sense the black cultural influence on King Louie and the way the monkeys dance (and even scat sing!). But having an orangutan mimicking a stereotypical black performer loses its racial edge when it’s in front of a brown human lead.

Dumbo (1941) was of course mentioned, and that’s a must trickier situation. Obviously the Crows are impersonating a black minstrel show. But speaking as a white kid from central Pennsylvania, I thought they were one of the best parts of the movie. They were funny and likable. Of course I’m sure minstrel shows were meant to be entertaining as well.

I was very surprised Peter Pan (1953) wasn’t mentioned. There’s the scene with very stereotypical American Indians literally singing a song entitled “What Makes the Red Man Red.” That scene is why as a kid the Disney channel never showed the original but would constantly play the very inferior sequel, Return to Neverland (2002).

We don’t even have to mention Song of the South (1946).

And I’ll cap this off just by saying I enjoyed a lot of the swing and go go music that was played in class. Very listenable.

Today was very metaphysical and I liked that. It actually got me thinking quite a bit, and as was said today in class, thinking is placing. The human mind loves to categorize, to place, to find patterns that aren’t even really there. And when something doesn’t fit a pattern, when it can’t be placed or is out of place, that’s unnerving to most people. The example in class was an excellent one: we’re surrounded by dirt. Why is dirt in the home considered so offensive? Because it’s out of place.

So going by that simple emotional trigger, a monster, so to speak, is a thing that crosses the cognitive boundaries you have in place. A monster is a “boundary transgressor.” To explain it in the fashion of classic movie monsters, they arouse both fear and curiosity because they cross boundaries. Werewolves cross the boundary of man and animal. And everything from vampires, to zombies, to Frankenstein’s monster, to mummies, cross the boundary between living and dead. It’s a very innovative and captivating way to define “monster.”

Drawing from this, we moved onto the mental categories humans place on themselves, specifically on race. While race at its base is real and racial differences a biological fact, the exact placement and definitions of those races are very culturally and socially constructed. To use a metaphor, white and black as racial groups exist, just like water. People can be placed, biologically, into those categories. Just like water can be placed in something with a discernible definition like puddles and ponds. But when does a puddle become too big, that it becomes a pond, or something in the middle? Likewise, what is white? Those answers are much more subjective and perception based than scientific.

From there we discussed the changing racial categories in U.S. history e.g. Walter Plecker and the one-drop rule. And we ended by pointing how carnivalesque crosses traditional racial boundaries and theorize that that’s why they’re so captivating to people both then and now.

Today it was emphasized how much World War II transformed American life. And that’s a truth most people forget. World War II, like the previous world war, regimented American civilian life among regimental lines. High taxes, high spending, massive food shortages, massive shortages of a lot of life’s essentials actual, economic central planning, wage and price controls, the military draft, the mass creation of daycare and the withering of the American family unit, etc. Fascism to defeat fascism.

Next we looked at how the Cold War helped develop technology like the internet and our modern information technology. It was pointed out how much of it was due to the need for good targeting and aiming systems. We have the internet because of the Cold War. But I’d like to take a moment and bash the argument that war is a great generator of technology and without conflict we’d have no new developments. Undeniably, there is a long list of products and useful things developed based on military prototypes and created out of military necessity. I don’t deny that. But the first rule of economics, as laid out by that great Frenchman Frederic Bastiat, in economics you must look at “that which is seen, and that which is unseen.” If resources are used in a certain way, that means they were not used in another way; literally any other possible fashion. Trillions of dollars were spent over the course of the 40 year Cold War. Some of it helped lead to important things we cherish today. Most of it was wasted and might as well have been burned. If even most of this money was not wasted on illogical wars, endless foreign aid, purposeless military buildups against an overhyped threat, and subsidies to corrupt arms industry figures, what good could it have done? What if the market was allowed to allocate those trillions of dollars to their greatest use, like it does with all other things so successfully? Would we have an even better version of the internet? Would we be a decade ahead technologically? Two decades? I don’t know and can’t say with absolute certainty. But that’s the key to economics; just because something was used in one way, doesn’t mean that was it’s greatest use. We get some technological progress from war. But how much more would we get in peace?

But at the end of class it was noted that “information wants to be free.” Modern technology allows the kind of individual freedom and mass decentralization never before thought possible. Although created through central planning, the internet can possibly serve as the greatest weapon against it.

A lot of the things we discussed today went over my head because I lack any knowledge of how music works or functions (like most things). As was pointed out in class, things we don’t understand might as well be magic. Ditto on that.

We were given a lot of examples of edited sound, with different aspects manipulated to sound loud in comparison to other things. I could certainly tell a difference between new songs and old songs when shown side by side. But I can’t say I was bothered. Musicians emphasize the parts of the song they want you to hear. If the lyrics and singing want to be louder over the music, so be it. If a trumpet as to be louder or quieter than a drum, okay. Its still the musician (or whatever entity is making the music) making choices about their “art” for the consumer. I don’t mind it.

We learned about Claude Shannon and how he revolutionized how we think about information. Information, he said, requires uncertainty. It can be separated from “meaning.” Meaning is what ever human beings place on information, it isn’t the information itself. He also realized that information could placed in a basic yes/no 1/0 binary. That’s why he is the “Father of Digital Media.”

Finally we were introduced to Garage Band and the endless possibilities of combinations of songs and music. We were presented with the question of whether or not this was a bastardization of song and disrespectful to a culture’s traditions. Is it rude to take a line of southern soul and combine it with ye old Scottish bagpipes? I would give an emphatic no. Musical culture, to me, is naturally free flowing. Culture is not static, it’s evolving. And of course its expected for many, even most, to have nostalgia for the culture they had before. And at least in music (not in other aspects), cultural mixing can be endless. We still have all the classics to listen to. Their existence is not damaged by the existence of new sounds. And to be offended by such a thing shows a hair trigger sensitivity that others shouldn’t be burdened with.

Today in class we looked through two major wars in American history and how they affected American life and the efficiency movement.

First we did a basic introduction to the Cold War, one I don’t feel the need to repeat. It was more interesting when we went into the military-industrial complex. While World War I gave us the modern managerial state, World War II gave us the national-security state: a permanent war state on our shores. The war department became the defense department, the CIA was created, and the military budget grew beyond proportion to its new global mission. This of course created a huge bureaucracy, and the need for “information management”: the acquiring and organizing of information. The development of this kind of information management was closely linked to central planning.

We then moved back in time, to an older example. We discussed General Montgomery Meigs, the Army’s Quartermaster General during the Civil War. We learned how his methods of centrally planning army acquisition during the war, and his leadership of the soldier’s pensions bureau after the war (the beginning of the U.S. welfare state) was a stepping stone to modern information management. Meigs specifically designed a building in the capital to store a card catalogue system. I don’d think I dealt with that system outside of grade school but I do remember being taught about it during library sessions. The content I have no memory of because I didn’t even pay attention then, but I do remember the lessons happening.

I was amazed at how interesting class today was. It hit on a number of philosophical areas I never expected to talk about in a history of music such as the concept of self, self-ownership, and the ethics of slavery.

Professor O’Malley spoke at length about the idea of the “divided-self,” the idea that each person has multiple selves. One makes a decision, the other regrets it, one acts one way in a situation, the other acts differently in a different situation, etc. I wholly and emphatically reject this. Each person, outside of severe mental insanity, is one person, one self. I may have regrets or choose to act differently at different times, but it is just me making that decision. Not competing mes. Praxeology, how we understand economics, supposes itself on the understanding that human action is purposeful. Every action a person takes is because it is a chosen action, whatever the motivation might be. This implicitly means there must be one self making those decisions and performing those actions. Perhaps I have a bigger hostility to the phrase “divided-self” and what it implies than the point Professor Malley was trying to make, but my point stands all the same: there is one self.

“Voluntary slavery” is deep dive into arcane libertarian theory; the only person I’ve ever heard expound on it at length is Dr. Walter Block, and he lives in arcane libertarian theory. It’s a fascinating concept though. I remember trying to explain it to my Business & Ethics class in 12th grade. Slavery, as defined as forced labor, is immoral for the same reason all aggression is; it’s a violation of the property rights of another individual. But such a thing as “voluntary” slavery be possible? A person can choose to sell their labor. Could they sell it permanently, 24/7? Yes, I suppose. But can someone be “owned?” Isn’t libertarian theory built on the immutable principle of self-ownership? But if I own myself, can’t I sell myself just like I would a car or an apple? If I can’t, can I truly say I even own something I can’t sell (ie myself)? It’s a difficult metaphysical question that I don’t have a straight answer for. The closest one I can grasp is the acceptance of natural, physical laws outside of man’s control.