Live from the Ballroom...

From TIA Daily • November 24, 2008

"Dancing with the Stars" Revives a Part of the Culture We've Been Missing

by Robert Tracinski

I frequently warn about the tendency to focus so much effort on complaining about everything that goes wrong in our culture that we don't take the time to recognize the things that go right. In that spirit, I wanted to single out one positive cultural indicator that is overdue for praise: the television show "Dancing with the Stars."

This is a bit late, I know, since the show is in the middle of its fourth year, and tonight is the finale of the seventh season. (The show airs two "seasons" per year, in the fall and in the spring.) The finale of the current season is on ABC from 8:00-10:00 pm Eastern time tonight, though they usually air a one-hour recap at 8:00 on Tuesday night.

Like I said, this is overdue. I don't think I will be introducing anyone to the show, which has been an enormous hit, but I do want to provide some context on why it is important.

I find that television as a medium is generally in a relatively healthy state—particularly compared to high-brow "serious" culture—and there are many good shows out there, which I will write about some time in the future. But "Dancing with the Stars" is particularly interesting because it resurrects a whole style of music and dance that had been, if not totally dead, at least sequestered in a nursing home, waiting to die out as its elderly audience passed away.

For those who have been living under a rock (or, like me, who don't get much time to watch TV), the show is essentially a pro-am ballroom dancing competition. "Stars" from various fields—singers, athletes, models, actors—are paired with professional ballroom dancers who teach them various styles of dance (foxtrot, tango, mambo, cha-cha, etc.). Every week the couples perform their routines on a live broadcast and get feedback from professional ballroom judges. The viewers then call in to vote for their favorite couple. A combination of the judges' scores and the viewers' votes determines who stays in the competition each week. This is why, if you haven't seen the show, the finale isn't a bad place to start. The stars have had a chance to learn a lot about dancing—and all of the incorrigible "two left feet" types have been voted off.

This format fits into a wider trend I've seen in the past decade: the revival of an old genre, the musical-variety show, but in a variation that is currently fashionable: a "reality TV" competition. See, for example, "America Idol" or "So You Think You Can Dance."

What makes this show different from the other versions of reality-TV-competition-cum-musical-variety-show is that it focuses on a style of music and dance that had largely been lost in the culture. The hippie "counter-culture" revolution of the 1960s was an usually sharp break in the culture; the products of the new counter-culture rapidly took over popular culture, and the leftovers of the old culture were simply expunged. One of the things that was expunged was big band music and its counterpart: ballroom dancing. The music was too melodic, the style of dance was too formal; it involved elegance and romance and dressing in a suit and tie; the whole thing was just too darned civilized for barefoot hippies and stringy-haired counter-culture types to coexist with.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the 1970s, and no, I do not have fond memories of the style and sense of life of that miserable era.

So big band was replaced by rock and roll and ballroom was replaced by the new modern "dance" style of jumping around wildly to a loud beat. (Rock and roll music has its merits, and I have my favorite songs and groups, but as far as I'm concerned, most contemporary rock has a beat and you can't dance to it.) Once it was fully embraced by the nihilistic counter-culture, whose goal was to overthrow and destroy every civilized value from the previous era, rock and roll was quickly pushed, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, to its dead ends: "hip-hop" and "gangster rap" (for urban blacks) and "grunge" music (for suburban whites).

Meanwhile, despite these trends—or perhaps in reaction against them—big band and ballroom have been making a slow revival. Dancing with the Stars is a culmination of that trend.

Two television shows constitute the bookends of the death and re-birth of this part of the culture. I am just old enough to remember "The Lawrence Welk Show" when it was still on the air—again, this was during the 1970s. Lawrence Welk was the last, poor leftover of big band and ballroom on their way out. A bandleader of no great artistic repute, Welk played enervated "easy listening" versions of familiar old songs. It was billed as "champagne music," because the arrangements were "light and bubbly"—hence the famous bubble machine—but it was more accurately described as "the squarest music this side of Euclid." Lawrence Welk became a synonym for making big band and ballroom seem cheesy, tired, and dull.

The whole effect is summed up by a clip of the show that I happened to see recently, in which the camera panned across the studio audience—and there wasn't a single person there under the age of 50. My grandparents and Sherri's grandparents were both regular viewers, and they were the target audience. The show was only able to stir viewers by providing them a nostalgic reminder of the music of their youths. There wasn't enough of value to spark the interest of anyone too young to associate it with old times.

No, Lawrence Welk did not kill big band and ballroom by associating them with something tired and imitative. Rather, this part of the culture was already dead, and Welk set out to preserve the remains by embalming them in a thick layer of schmaltz.

That's why I find "Dancing with the Stars" so refreshing. It has the style, not of a nostalgic preservation, but of an invigorating re-discovery. It is based on another television show from an earlier era: a British series called "Come Dancing," a pro-am ballroom competition show which had a long run on British television from 1949 to 1998. It was revived in 2004, under the title "Strictly Come Dancing," with the idea of having celebrities as the amateur competitors. The show was promptly exported to America as "Dancing with the Stars," which became an overnight sensation. And if you count its various international incarnations, it is now apparently the most popular show in the word, with local versions ranking in the top ten television shows in 17 countries.

The value that is restored by the revival of ballroom dance is a greater sense of romance and elegance, rooted in a sense of self-respect that had been wiped out by the whole counter-culture revolution. The message of the "hippie" style (and its many lingering after-effects) is that you are a slob—slouching, unshaven, and incapable of taking the effort to comb your hair or iron your shirts—and it's wrong to ever aspire to be anything but a slob. Ballroom's rejection of this mentality begins with the one thing that the "Dancing with the Stars" contestants usually find hardest: posture. Ballroom dance requires a straight, elegant, self-confident posture, and it goes on to require a self-conscious control of the feet, the arms and hands, the rise and fall of the knees, and so on. It is a refutation of the idea that training, technique, and self-control are the opposite of emotional expression—fierce pride in the paso doble, sensuality in the rumba, exuberant joy in the jive, and so on. But this is a style of dance that is incapable of expressing the self-loathing angst of the "grunge" types or the thuggish menace of the gangster rappers.

In watching the show—I came in somewhere in the third or fourth season, I think—I have noticed an inchoate sense among many of the competitors that it captures something powerfully good that has been missing. When he was voted off, actor Steve Gutenberg (who was, alas, a terrible dancer) said that the show "makes the world a better place," and participation in the contest even seems to have touched those whose whole careers are based on cynicism, people like Jerry Springer and Adam Corolla.

Having names the values that I think this show brings back into the culture, I should also mention that it is not always fully true to those values. There are occasionally lapses in taste and unwelcome intrusions from the modern counter-culture (even, briefly and forgettably this season, from the "hip-hop" culture). But this merely adds to what makes the show important: big band and ballroom are now a living part of the culture, which means that they are interacting with the other parts of the culture, good and bad.

It is not often that a part of the culture that had been lost is restored to us, at least partially. It offers hope that the same can be done with other values and ideas that have also been lost and are also desperately needed.

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Peter Schiff was right...

From the Huffingtom Post:


This Guy Predicted The Financial Crisis And Was Derided For It





Thanks to Michael Smith on the Harry Binswanger List for alerting me to this.

Defending copyrights...

From The Intellectual Activist:
TIA Daily Feature Article

Defending the Creator
PRO-IP, Rights, and the Roots of Copyright Opposition

by M. Zachary Johnson

President Bush recently signed into law the "PRO-IP" bill, an act for "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property." The purpose of the bill is to enhance remedies for violations of intellectual property laws.

The law creates a copyright protection office in the executive branch of government and provides for stronger penalties for pirates. The level of the penalties is a secondary issue; the most important thing about this law is the creation of a proper authority for protecting intellectual property—and the fact that this law makes a much-needed moral statement.

Antagonism to the PRO-IP Act has focused in part on the fact that it was backed by "Big Content," including the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association, thus portraying the issue as a war between pressure groups, with the "greedy capitalists" as the ones who happen to have won. But this misses the principle of the matter, that the creator of a piece of intellectual property owns the product of his work.

If a baker bakes a loaf of bread, he therefore owns it, and anyone who wishes to acquire the bread must do so by meeting the baker's terms. The baker may set any price he wishes for it—even a high price if he so chooses. It is also within his rights to give it away for free, which he might do for promotional purposes. But in all cases, it is the baker who sets the terms for acquiring his creation. No one has the right to acquire the bread in disregard of the baker's wishes.

The same is true of music, movies, software. The fact that it is easier to copy these things does not eliminate the creator's sovereignty over his own product. The price of his work, even if it is $0, is his to set.

A major root of the opposition to copyright is the altruist morality—the premise that self-interest is evil and that sacrificial service to others is the moral ideal. This premise makes people antagonistic toward selfish rights and it makes them favor giving things away, especially when doing so is against one's own self-interest. Think for instance of the way in which the press vilified the RIAA, when it brought lawsuits against file-sharers, and threw a pity-party for the defendants. The "greedy," self-interested, profit-seeking businessmen were regarded as inherently suspicious even though they were defending the rights of music creators whom they lawfully represent, while some destitute single mother in middle America (who was not "greedy"?) was portrayed as a helpless victim, with no mention made of the fact that she engaged in theft.

What is needed is a stern reminder that the Constitution protects, not the Robin Hood type of theft, but the right of the individual to pursue his own happiness by means of his own work.

In order to grasp the concept "property rights"—the idea of ownership, which is a matter of moral justice—one must function conceptually. The same toaster has a different moral and legal status in the hands of a man who paid for it, versus the hands of a thief as he runs away. Possession is not everything, since the thief possesses it wrongly. Rights are not a matter of the physical position of the object, but of ownership—in other words, of moral status.

In the case of intellectual property, the need for conceptual thought is particularly acute. An author's right to his novel, a composer's right to his composition, a filmaker's right to his movie—these rights are more abstract still. If you buy a copy of Joe Smith's novel, you own that copy. But Joe Smith owns the particular sequence of words that are printed in that novel. So you have the right to use your copy as you wish, but you do not have the right to create a new copy of that sequence of words.

Suppose you own a copy of the book The Grapes of Wrath and also an audio-book version on CD. You own both of those physical objects, and can give the book to your mother and the CD to your brother if you wish. The author, on the other hand, owns what is common to both of those. He owns the particular sequence of words embodied in the book and the audio-book. The forms of these two things are different: one form you look at, the other you hear. But both of them are instances of the same piece of intellectual property, the same novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

Copyright is a matter not of what a monkey sees looking at a page full of words, but of what a human mind sees. Unlike a monkey, a man is able to grasp the particular meaning expressed in particular language.

So a creator's right is not per se to the particular physical instance, but to the creative content that is embodied in these objects. And the only practical way for a creator to control and profit from his work is for him to hold by right the power to decide when, where, how and under what conditions new physical instances of his creation may be made and distributed. That is the meaning of the right to copy.

These facts and distinctions have no reality for, and are completely unconvincing to, a person who does not think. Unfortunately, that category includes a very large number of Americans today. This anti-thought mentality comes about as a combination of personal lethargy and evasion—and an educational system that stultifies the mind.

A large portion of the guilt for the piracy problem lies with the American educational system. This is not primarily a matter of the content of education, but the method. For decades the dominant approach to teaching in America has been Progressive Education, which holds emotion and socialization as primary, and facts and logic as secondary—or even denounces facts and logic as repressive. Americans have been taught to be driven by emotion and to cast off thinking as a restrictive straightjacket. That is where the hippies came from.

Combine that with a lot of personal immorality—meaning refusal to think—and the result is a widespread practice of operating by whim. The practice of controlling one's own choices and behavior by reference to moral principle is completely alien to the hippie mentality. His automatized method—as a result of his own shortsighted laziness and as a result of years of schooling that encouraged shortsighted laziness—is to see something, desire it, grab it. It is the same method as a spoiled child or a pre-civilized savage.

It costs the creator nothing, these types argue, to copy one piece of software or music. What harm does it do? First of all, the very question evades the existence of anything other than that which immediately stares into the pirate's passive face: in a few mouse clicks he is able to have the content he wants. He is at best ignorant of the actual costs involved in creating the content. What about the cost of the musician's years of training, the income he gave up in order to spend the time developing his skills and creating his music, the cost of music paper, his instrument, the recording expenses? And let's not forget the cost of marketing, without which the pirate could hardly know about the content he so nonchalantly expects to take for free.

What harm does it do, at root? Man lives by the productive work of his mind. He creates and he trades his product. Trade is by mutual voluntary agreement. A unilateral taking is the opposite of a fair trade. The pirate deprives the creator not only of the relatively small amount of money to be paid for the product. He deprives the creator of his very means of living, his ability to control, trade and profit from the work of his mind. That is a crime legally, morally, and on the deepest philosophical level, metaphysically. It is a matter of the creator's ability to maintain his own existence.

What the pirate fails to grasp is that to take or "share" copyrighted content in disregard of the creator's wishes is to kill the creator's capacity to live.

The pirate's desire for the content makes him act to destroy its source.

The PRO-IP Act is one much-needed remedy. As Tom Donohue, President of the US Chamber of Commerce, stated: "By becoming law, the PRO-IP Act sends the message to [intellectual property] criminals everywhere that the US will go the extra mile to protect American innovation." It is a welcome law and a welcome message.

M. Zachary Johnson is a composer and musicologist living in the New York City area. Visit his Web site here. Or here: www.MZacharyJohnson.com