Page Two

I'm cruising along a little before 8am, having just completed my car pool duties. I'm listening to the Jefferson Airplane – which may well label me as a hopeless old hippie, but compared to some of the things I've been called recently, I'll happily take that labeling. For about the 550th or 560th time, I find myself falling in love all over again with Grace Slick's voice, which is at least 200 times past the point where I would have sworn I'd never burn that hot for it again. As a present, I'd given my wife, Annie, a copy of an Airplane anthology, at which she had expressed less than no interest (the giveaway is when she says, "You did keep the receipt on this one?"). In Annie's defense, I'll point out this is at least the third Airplane anthology I've given her, and it's not like she lost the others. So I ended up taking it.

Even during their heyday, the Airplane was a mythic band, one we read about long before we heard the music. This was in a world before the Internet, where cultural news often traveled faster than the culture. The first time we heard them was on their famous Levi's commercial.

Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, their first album, passed completely beneath our radar (so to speak). Surrealistic Pillow, the second album, spun off two hits Somebody to Love and White Rabbit and everyone I knew owned a copy of it at one time or another.

During their first East Coast tour, we saw them at the Fillmore East. They announced a free concert in Central Park the next day. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (post-Mike Bloomfield, with Elvin Bishop on guitar) and the Grateful Dead shared the bill. Imagine a world where few had heard of the Dead, much less heard them. Butterfield was great, as was the Airplane. My friend Warren got all religious over the Dead – the first Deadhead conversation I witnessed, but far from the last. Busy fighting with my girlfriend, I missed the set.

There was so much magic in the band's sound and Slick's voice, it was exciting beyond music, in the way music representing a culture new to you can so often be. Three flawed studio albums followed: great material mixed with really mediocre material (and one live release that none of us listened to). In less then three years it was over, the band wandering more and more in the direction that would be the Starship.

Over time, I stopped listening to them. They were probably the first group I really fell in love with, and that is a very difficult relationship to continue past passion. But more than a decade later, I bought a CD anthology. What was surprising was how some of the songs worked. Whereas "Somebody to Love" could rear its majestic power, "White Rabbit" was almost embarrassing.

Here I was, well over 50, listening to "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil" from

After Bathing at Baxter's, an album on which inspiration lost out to drugs. But now, The Ballad, divorced from the 99-second monument to self-indulgence that it was linked to on the album, really rocked.

I was pretty sure the kid I was when I fell in love with the band would be ready to take up arms against the adult I was driving the car early on this brave New Year's Day morning, but I had been pretty certain about that as regards every aspect of my life for a long time.

Driving, I'm thinking about a letter on my comments about this country's true elite, which ran in the Jan. 7

Chronicle. Im trying to wrap my head around the letter. I agree with almost everything in it, but I cant quite grasp the edges.

My point was that those who gloated over the defeat suffered by the so-called liberal elite on Election Day were missing the point that the real elite in America is still very much in power. The writer complained that by "lamenting how the Democrats have been labeled with the charge of elitism ..." I had reduced "elitism to mere wealth. Were it only so simple. ... While the two qualities often overlap, they're not necessarily connected. For better or worse, elitism in America is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon."

This is what got my thinking hung up. The writer asserts that "elitism in America is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon," which I don't buy, but I think this is just a faulty statement on the way to a larger point. This country boasts more than one type of elite; the point would be that the kind of elitism people were objecting to was the "cultural phenomenon" type. This doesn't challenge the notion that the true elite are still very much in power and largely unaffected by whether Republicans or Democrats win, though they usually make even more money directly from government activities if it is the former (more defense spending, tax cuts, tax breaks, etc.).

The writer goes on to say (and this is heavily excerpted): "Democrats are labeled elitist more often than Republicans because we tend to appreciate things like contemporary art. ... We are more likely to support cultural expressions that are experimental rather than romantic (a sure sign of our strong cerebral nature). Beyond the art analogy, we are also more likely to buy organic food, worry about trans-fat, breast-feed in public, hug trees, support homosexual rights, save mutts at the shelter, read

The New Yorker, shave less often, and swear that David Brooks has devolved since the Times hired him. ... Of course this portrait sounds like parody, but American politics is nothing if not parody. ... Heres the real problem, one that I think Louis Black downplays: the fact that Democrats are more likely to support policies that value economic justice over crass cronyism pales next to our predilection for cultural judgments that casually dismiss Clint Black, AM radio, and the Hummer as grotesque abominations. ... Until the Democrats ... acknowledge that our cultural tastes genuine or parodied contribute considerably to our perceived elitism, then popular perceptions are unlikely to change anytime soon.

On this we definitely agree. The problem is one of perception over reality. In general, I think that is key to a lot that is going on politically in this country.

The perception that the liberal elite mocks the rest of the country and holds its values up to ridicule is probably critical to the whole positioning of moral values as an issue. And it is perception.

The argument that mainstream media is a hotbed of far-left political proselytizing is ridiculous. But think about the assault on the Hollywood (as a concept more than a geographical location) elite in general. Supposedly, the creative types are out of touch with mainstream America and the flyover states. So who the hell is watching all those broadcast and cable TV shows? Only Democrats? Who spent the $9.5 billion at film box offices? Only Democrats and independents? Not to mention the billions in DVD and VHS sales and rentals.

(As an aside, anyone who is trying to prove that Americans consume less of Hollywood's product today than, say, during the heyday of the studio system is performing contortions that would do a sideshow proud. This means ignoring all television-delivered programming, as well as the entire ancillary market.)

Further, mainstream programming is obsessed with core values and just as anachronistic in its basic beliefs (everything used to be better) as most Republicans are.

This country eats up the material produced by those elites. Which suggests they are actually of the general population rather than removed from it. But this reality doesn't matter, nor does it matter who the real elites are. Perception decides the rules. The perception is that the creative community thinks it is better than mainstream America and its values. Instead, the areas of real disagreement, though sometimes substantial, are still relatively minor.

But that doesn't matter. The current American political dialectic is good-guys-vs.-bad-guys. It isn't that we live in a terribly complex world that is dealing with nearly impossible-to-solve problems. It's that the bad guys have gummed things up, and we just need to get rid of them. The whole hysterical, anti-Democratic, enemy-within Republican rant is based on this simplistic belief.

How else could Republican politicians run on the outrageously demagogic platform of cutting taxes and improving government services if it were not accompanied by the message that the real problem is those utopian, idealistic, impractical, bleeding-heart Democrats, who have screwed up everything? Simply wipe away their handiwork, the idea goes, and the world will be a beautiful place. In order to have easy answers, readily accessible happy endings, and triumphant good guys, we need convenient bad guys.

This is not a one-way street. Liberals are just as likely to stereotype those with whom they disagree. A quick Polaroid of this stereotyping from a leftist point of view is provided by James McMurtry's new song "We Can't Make It Here," in which the problem isn't that Americans want to pay the least amount of money possible for goods and services while earning top wages. It isn't a changing and complex national and international economy. It's bad men doing bad things, deliberately, so they can make a lot of money. Sure, there's some truth in that; there's some truth in almost every political observation across the spectrum. The problem is that "some" has been magnified to "all" until it has turned the canvas black and white: It's all good guys and bad guys, no matter where you turn.

Currently, though, progressives aren't conveying their two-dimensional world message nearly as effectively as or with any of the widespread resonance of the Republicans. They lack the true-believer fanaticism that can love American democracy but hate our democratic ways.

Consider that the Senate majority is contemplating changing the filibuster rule, a crucial element of congressional checks and balances, not because Democrats are stalling their agenda but because they are holding up the appointment of a handful of Bush's judicial choices. Which is exactly what the Republicans did when Clinton was in power, only they had the numbers to stall them in committee rather than with filibusters on the floor. People are cheering this on because it will show those Democrats, but all it really does is screw with our political system as the founding fathers envisioned it and limit all our rights. Consider that in

The Wall Street Journal, a number of guest editorialists have worried that in this, the most divided partisan government in memory, the Republicans are not being partisan enough and should be even less considerate of the Democrats.

The problem, which I framed poorly last week, is the widely held view that Democrats are not in the American mainstream. This is not just an impossibility (by definition, the American mainstream is inclusive) but a false perspective, one fostered by common beliefs and carefully targeted spin. Until this changes, the Democrats will remain out of power.

The only good news is that Republican dominance won't last. As a longtime Texas liberal politician said to me, "I'm an optimist. The Republicans are going to screw everything up so badly that the Democrats will come back." If that be optimism, then I, too, am an optimist. The absence of partisan triumph, of any sort, is crucial to that idea; it is an argument based on substantive policy issues, not the overwhelming victory of one party over another. I truly believe that so many of the policies and programs the Republicans are dead set on ravaging are beneficial to most Americans and crucial to the health and well-being of this country.

Now, the self-righteous, know-it-all punk I was when I fell in love with Jefferson Airplane would have fully subscribed to the belief that the world was black and white – mostly black. Which is why, when rocking out, I considered what that kid would have thought but didn't let it give me even a second's pause.