"Jump" By Van Halen

You heard me: "Jump," by Van Halen. Not a great record, but not bad either, in my opinion. ("Dance the Night Away" by Van Halen -- now THAT's a great record. That is some world-class electric guitar.)

People have been known to have strong and conflicting opinions about popular music. In 1984, I turned 23, and I and some other people would smoke weed and watch MTV, and "Jump" was in heavy rotation, and I thought Eddie Van Halen was a great guitarist (still do), and another one of those people definitely did not.

It's not so remarkable that a certain guitarist is not a certain person's cup of tea. The reason I'm writing this post is how much this guy disliked Eddie Van Halen. When "Jump" appeared on the tube, he would begin to snarl about how stupid Eddie Van Halen was, putting a fake moronic smile on his face meant to mock Eddie's smile in the video, and bob his head around and say, "Hi! I'm Eddie Van Halen!" and seemed to think that that was a devastating critique. I've been thinking about it for 32 years now, and I still can't see what was deep about his mockery: that was, in fact, Eddie Van Halen in the video, and why shouldn't Eddie smile if he was happy?

And none of this would have been remarkable if the guy who hated Eddie Van Halen so much was a moron, but this guy often said things which were devastatingly profound, about music and about other things. He was better-read in English than I was, and that's saying a lot. He was also a no-foolin' musician, with an impressive knowledge of jazz and classical as well as more popular forms.

It was not just the video of "Jump" which annoyed him greatly. I did as well, when I said that I thought that Eddie Van Halen was quite a guitar player.

I don't know what the consensus of music critics is today concerning Eddie Van Halen -- because I've pretty much stopped paying attention to music critics -- but back then, among critics who paid any attention to popular music at all, most thought he was awful. It's not so much that my friend agreed with them: he WAS one of those critics. Back then, as always, there were some of us who weren't inclined to let any critics' opinions interfere with us enjoying music we actually thought sounded good.

Each one of us was better friends with a third person. It wasn't so much that the music critic and I visited each other. That did happen, but far more often we just happened to visit our mutual friend at the same time. Our mutual friend was more into popular stuff and less into jazz and classical and "alternative rock" than the critic, but I think he followed the critical consensus more than I. I can't remember whether he weighed in when the critic and I would argue about Eddie Van Halen. I don't know whether our mutual friend had no opinion about Eddie. It may well have been that expressing that opinion was less important to him than not aggravating either one of us.

Or maybe he piled onto to me right alongside the critic, and I've suppressed the memory of it.

I heard David Lee Roth (Van Halen's lead singer on "Jump") talk about recording "Jump." He said that he came up with the keyboard riff which opens the song. He said that he was drinking a can of beer, and just mashing the can absentmindedly on the keyboard, and Eddie said Hey that sounds good, and that's the riff. I wonder whether that's true. If so, maybe that anecdote is a legitimate argument, from the critic's point of view, for people with his knowledge of music and his standards, that he's right about Van Halen being crap and about me having my head up my ass when it comes to music: cause the stuff I tend to like amounts to morons absentmindedly mashing on keyboards with beer cans as if they were apes.

The thing is, I don't care. And I think I'd enjoy hanging out with Eddie and David much more than I ever enjoyed hanging out with the critic.

But that's not the end of it: this also gives me insight into how I can be right and justified in my dislike of some writer -- say, Stephen King -- but at the same time, a Stephen King fan could be right not to care what I thought.

Not to mention how both a food critic and I could be right about the same meal, if I ate it and thought it was delicious, while the food critic thought it was disgusting and inedible -- not to mention that we could both be right if he was reading a Stephen King novel and thinking it was genius, and I saw him carrying the novel around and was unable to eat for a day and a half, or how we both could be right if the food critic saw me deeply enjoying Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away" and was appalled, and so on and so forth forever, when it comes to the arts (considering cuisine to be an art form, and there could also be legitimate disagreements about that, and so forth and so on...)

In conclusion, France is a land of contrasts.

The Battle Of Lepanto And The Sinking Of The Spanish Armada

I wonder how many of you have heard of one of the events mentioned in this post's title and not the other. In 1571 the combined naval forces of Spain, the Pope and Venice scored a great and unexpected victory over the navy of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras in the Ionian Sea. 17 years later, in 1588, the same Spanish navy, the dreaded Spanish Armada, suffered a great and unexpected defeat at the hands of the English navy when they attempted to invade England.

Both events have been written about at great length, but what strikes me is that, to the best of my recollection, I have never heard them mentioned in the same breath, as I am doing now. Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, an above-average book about the 1588 battle,



has 3 entries in its index under "Lepanto, battle of," but 2 of those references merely mention that Don Juan of Austria and the Marquis of Santa Cruz had been at Lepanto, and that Sultan Selim II had spoken disparagingly of the battle's significance. Mattingly actually says nothing at all himself about the battle.

The I Tatti Renaissance Library recently published an entire volume of poems in Latin written shortly after the battle of Lepanto and celebrating the Christian victory,



and nowhere in the poems, the index or introduction or well over 100 pages of notes about the battle and its background and significance is any English man or woman mentioned, let alone Elizabeth I, let alone the sinking of the Armada.

I thought that surely HG Wells, in his great 1-volume history of Earth, The Outline of History,



would prove an exception and discuss both battles. But no. And more surprisingly still, the battle he mentions is Lepanto. Maybe he was deliberately thumbing his nose at those of his countrymen who in his estimation went on and on at entirely too much length about the supposed significance for world history of the sinking of the Armada.

Which brings me meandering roundabout to my point: some historians have written at great length about either Lepanto or the sinking of the Armada, either because they felt that it was of great significance in world history, or that its significance had been greatly exaggerated by historians. Either one battle or the other -- and the other was barely worth a mention.

Surely many Spanish sailors and soldiers must have been in both battles, just 17 years apart. Surely they, if no-one else, often thought of both battles at the same time, and considered them to have some connection to each other. Such sailors and soldiers were themselves an obvious connection.

But individual historians have rarely -- if ever -- felt that both battles were worth writing about. Which is my point: the great subjectivity of decisions about what is "historically significant." Surely the treatment by historians of these 2 battles shines a very great light on the fact that objectivity is an illusion. Historians write about what is significant from the point of view of the entire world? No, they cultivate myths of significance. If they are especially sympathetic to Catholicism and/or Spain, they nurture the myth of the significance of Lepanto, they talk up the glorious nature of the Catholic, or Spanish (or Venetian, or Papal) victory, and don't mention the Spanish defeat in 1588. But if they happen to think that England is particularly glorious, they support that preconception by dwelling on the sinking of the Armada, and by making it seem as glorious as they can.

Objectivity, schmobjetivity. There is no such thing. Research these 2 battles and you will be shown objectivity's nonexistence in a particularly striking way.

Against Utilitarianism

It seems obvious to me that morality is always completely subjective. In fact, I think that "morality," as most people still use the term, is not as accurate a term as "moralities."

I think that utilitarianism -- the attempt to provide a rationally-devisible basis for good behavior -- functions primarily, as does religion, as a comforting illusion. A solid guide to correct behavior is posited, referred to as God's will in the one case, and -- what? a utilitarian optimum, in the other? In either case, it is just a matter of discovering what is right.

I, on the other hand, believe that we are all just muddling through, ethically as in so many other ways, and that ethics can never be solved like a mathematical equation. The terms of which the equation is composed are always subjective. Even worse, for utiliatarianism at least, things are always changing. The moral ground under our feet never ceases to shift.

Lest you become too alarmed by my moral relativism, let me say that I believe that I, and the average ultilitarian, and the average believer in God as well, would tend to be very much in agreement most of the time, when judging what we thought was good or bad behavior in given situations, and I think we would also all three tend to agree much of the time that a given situation presents a very difficult choice about what we think should be done. In short, I think that our three distinct individual moralities are probably very similar, although we have arrived at them in three very different ways. Some people hear the phrase "moral relativism" and immediately think of things like the characters in Dostoyevsky who murder people because they are no longer decent Christians, but have become appalling moral relativists with no sense of right and wrong -- and, well, I think Dostoyevsky is overrated.

I think my viewpoint is the most optimistic, the one which allows for the most improvement in behavior. (Although I still insist that said improvement can only be measured subjectively. You may well ask: then how can it really be measured at all? Same way as in the previous paragraph: we would tend to agree or disagree about such things, and we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that there was a more exact way -- or that someone else couldn't define good and bad behavior completely differently and provide his definitions in a utilitarianism with logical frameworks as sound as those in another person's utilitarianism.) I wonder, have you seen the recent film version of Moby Dick with William Hurt as Ahab, Charlie Cox as Ishmael and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck? It's very good. The scenes of whales being attacked, injured and killed are very disturbing to the contemporary viewer. We are made to sense the animals' suffering quite intensely. And the scenes are even more disturbing in that the whalers' joy at a job well done is communicated just as intimately. So does this make the viewer think that the whalers are bad men? In the case of this viewer, not at all. They remained the very serious men grappling with ethical issues which they had been before the hunts and were again afterwards. The hunting scenes merely reminded me of a great change in moralities which has occurred since the mid-19th century as a result of our knowing much more about whales. Those whalers are muddling through as best they can, just as we today are muddling through, and doing things, probably, without a second thought which would very likely appall our great-great-great-grandchildren, who in turn are doing things which (etc etc etc). Excelsior.