Where We Are This Week
US interferes in Israel, TikTok's clock is ticking, and MGMT's Loss of Life
In January of 2008, I went to Best Buy accompanied by the unlikeliest of friend pairings. I’m not sure how the three of us ended up together that day. I wasn’t particularly friends with either of them, I felt like we were on opposite ends of the periphery of a group of which I wasn’t truly a part.
It’s possible that the girl may have been into me and that’s why she was there, but that doesn’t necessarily explain the guy’s presence. So, for the sake of humility and Occam’s Razor, let’s just presume they were both into me until a more obvious explanation presents itself.
It was either going to be Hastings or Best Buy or a used media store called Digital Planet. At sixteen, I hadn’t yet discovered a real record store and CDs were the medium in which I collected music. That day, I bought two records that, much more so than the doomed-from-the-beginning-friendships of that car ride, I would carry with me for the next sixteen years. What symmetry! Vampire Weekend’s Vampire Weekend and MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular.
Over the next few months and well into the summer, MGMT’s debut record would provide the soundtrack to adolescence everywhere. The singles from the record, ‘Time to Pretend’, ‘Electric Feel’, and ‘Kids’ were anthemic contagion. Anywhere car windows were rolled down, dance beats and pop synthesizers could be heard.
A couple of years later, MGMT’s follow-up Congratulations was released. Congratulations was not a commercial smash nor was it intended to be. My friends weren’t into it and I remember some of them saying it was only cool if you were high. It was then that the New York-based duo eschewed their opportunity for indie-pop stardom for artistry. It was a masterpiece that almost none of my cohort, save for my very cool, very hip future wife.
That VC/VH girlfriend of mine and I went to see them live on the Congratulations tour. It was the most bipolar audience I’ve ever witnessed; drunkenly ecstatic for the pop tunes and bored to tears upon hearing anything from their second record. The divide between me and my generation has never been more palpable or clearly illustrated.
Fast forward a few more years, my band was in a studio recording some songs, and one of the engineers on the session had engineered Congratulations. I contained my excitement and limited the amount of times I told the guy how much I loved that record. My bandmates didn’t get it. In retrospect, I should’ve known then that that partnership didn’t have the legs to go the distance.
More than a decade and three albums later, with the release of February’s Loss of Life, MGMT is still making music that resonates with the few, not the many. The group’s newest record is joyous and introspective, a welcome reprieve from the nihilism of 2018’s Little Dark Age.
If Flight of the Conchords is only slightly a more comedic than musical endeavor, then MGMT exists on just the opposite side of that threshold. Tracks like ‘Bubblegum Dog’ and ‘I Wish I Was Joking’ retain the sarcasm and pith that has pervaded their previous work while exploring new sonic opportunities. The record is a much more intimate exploration of what the duo has to offer as they’ve traded synthesizers for acoustic guitars on a good portion of the LP.
When everyone sticks, they twist. It’s not just that MGMT’s direction has flown in the face of convention, they seem to be enjoying it. Neither of the band’s members is on social media and, if their artistic output can be taken as an example, it shows. They don’t even have plans to tour on the back of the new record.
When you’re younger, you wear different hats, try out different clothes, different friends. You have to allow yourself to explore the versions of yourself you might become, and more importantly, be unafraid to let go of the failures and successes that just don’t fit. What Loss of Life demonstrates is that maybe that process is never really over.
Undermining democracies, the American way
Remember when the good ol’ days when ‘regime change’ was only muttered in smoke-filled rooms and Langley? Ah yes, when the countries of Central America and Eastern Europe had their leaders plotted against, legitimacy subverted, and neither their citizens nor ours were none the wiser. To quote Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.”
In multiple reports this week, high-level officials in Israel have suggested that the American intelligence sector is seeking to undermine the Netanyahu government’s authority. A US report published this week suggested that the legitimacy of Netanyahu’s leadership ‘may be in jeopardy’ in the coming days.
In its analysis of the situation, a US intelligence apparatus wrote, “Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”
Since the inception of these clandestine government operations, sowing the seeds of doubt in allied or oppositional ministries has been a go-to strategy. It’s affordable and only requires a few appropriately placed messages to really get the ball rolling.
Baton in hand, Chuck Schumer hurled himself across the next 100 meters by calling for immediate elections in Israel to reevaluate who’s presiding over the office of Prime Minister - Schumer went on to say that Netanyahu was one of four of the greatest obstacles to peace in the region. The other three being Hamas, PA President Abbas, and the ‘radical right-wing government’ of Israel. Well, at least it’s a fair fight.
At the risk of sounding like I’m just repeating talking points here, it’s worth remembering that Israel’s government is a wartime coalition comprised of opposed parties. If Netanyahu is deposed one way or another, the goal of the war in Gaza will remain the same and it will only be a matter of time until Yair Lapid or Benny Gantz (Bibi’s opposition) is castigated as a fascist. The destruction of Hamas is broadly supported by the Israeli public.
American leadership used to be a little more clever than it is now. Remember the Iran-Contra affair? It takes a real astute mover and shaker to link shipping arms to Islamic fundamentalists in order to move funds to an anti-Marxist counterrevolutionary group in Nicaragua. These things used to be contrived and shrouded in secrecy, now, we just say our wishes aloud immediately after blowing out the candles. Don’t they know they’ll never come true, now?
All joking aside, it does reveal the feckless ineptitude displayed by American top brass. We can’t even get imperialism right anymore. After the tragic aid delivery debacle that we covered here a couple of weeks ago, the Biden administration announced plans to build a temporary floating port off the coast of Gaza to better distribute aid to the region. The plan’s many and varied shortcomings aside, construction is thought to take about 60 days.
In the year 55 B.C., Julius Caesar commissioned the construction of the first-ever bridge over the Rhine River. It was estimated to be over 1,000 feet long and safely delivered 40,000 Roman legionaries to the other side of one of the greatest rivers in Europe. It took 10 days.
It’s strange how calls for elections in Israel aren’t coupled with equally voluminous demands for elections in Gaza or the West Bank. The international community, the US included, isn’t exactly leaning on Egypt to open its border to allow more aid shipments to pass through either. Finally, the UAE this week announced its intention to fund aid transport through maritime channels in collaboration with Israel. At the risk of sounding glib, it must be a Ramadan miracle.
On a hot mic last week, Biden bragged he told Bibi that he ‘needed to come to Jesus’ to reform his war policies. Blunders beget more blunders, after all. At a certain point, it makes one wonder if President Biden has considered taking his own advice.
United States of TikTok
Surreptitiously, American lawmakers and officials have been working on legislation that would either ban TikTok, the latest scourge of the internet, or force its sale to a non-Chinese entity.
The House Committee went public with their latest intentions last week and the social media company has made it clear that they’re not exactly going down without a fight.
First, let’s back up a little bit. Since TikTok’s rise to prominence, concerns have increased regarding the security of American citizen’s data. As readers will know, in order to operate in China, corporations must provide a back door - and sometimes front door - access to the Chinese Communist Party.
I know that we’re supposed to be in this modern world where we’re post-enemies and any sense of realpolitik but openly sharing critical information that could be leveraged against US citizens with an adversarial government is about as moronic as sharing the nuclear bomb blueprints with the Soviets would have been. Was.
The video-sharing app is the most used in the country and the algorithm governing the platform has been called into question on more than a few occasions. For starters, users in the West are inundated with banal entertainment that spans the range from makeup tutorials to borderline pornography. The Chinese version of the app, however, promotes science experiments and math problems. Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that Americans prefer the latter over the former, but it’s not entirely the lab rat’s fault for getting addicted to cocaine, is it?
As I’m writing this in a coffee shop in an affluent part of town, a young woman with too much jewelry and a Gucci bag one table over is watching TikTok on her computer. Does she know? The trembling of her hands and the teeth marks on her otherwise freshly manicured nails suggest that she expects unprecedented levels of boredom and depression await her in the near future.
I’m not made of stone. Despite what I suspect are botox injections, the pain of today’s events is etched across her face. I lean over to offer whatever consolation I can. “Tragedy is certain to befall us all - but it doesn’t have to define us. There are brighter days ahead.”
She looks up from her ‘how to assemble an urban cowboy festival outfit tutorial’, with tears in her eyes. I fully expected her upper lip to be quivering, but alas, it wasn’t. The biweekly filler applications she’s been tending to have rendered it an unmoving, stolid feature of her anatomy. When she finally mustered the fortitude to utter a response, I looked away, embarrassed to see a stranger in such dire straits in public.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
The app doesn’t appear to be neutral politically either. In recent months, after the events of October 7th, the vast disparity between views of pro-Palestine posts versus that of pro-Israel content doesn’t appear to be entirely organic. Communists have never been known to leave their thumbs on the scales, so the contradiction is a little bewildering.
On Wednesday, the House passed the proposed legislation in a bipartisan vote 352 to 65. With so few issues garnering such unanimous support, it does make you question how good it can actually be. House Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson fast-tracked the bill despite Donald Trump’s opposition, but it may not have as easy of a time in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has so far been noncommittal on the prospects of bringing the bill to the floor.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, isn’t going down without a fight either. Before the bill was voted on in the House, many of the 170 million(!) of its American users received an urgent message from the platform warning that the US government planned on ripping their beloved social media app from the clutches of their anxiety-ridden clutched hands. First, it’s not exactly true. The bill does support a general ban on the technology unless ByteDance is willing to facilitate a sale to a non-foreign or non-adversarial actor.
Secondly, the claim that access to TikTok is protected by your First Amendment rights is preposterous. The social media site isn’t an exclusive avenue for digital expression (if you could call it that), and, despite the Citizens United ruling in 2010 that declared corporate political spending protected by the First Amendment, no corporation has the right to be a national security threat.
Regardless, that didn’t stop the company from whipping their users into a whingeing fervor. Congresspeople were subsequently inundated with thousands of calls protesting the prospective decision. If only these people could be as easily galvanized to advocate for a cause that actually mattered - like stricter policies against the use of forced labor in production lines, a policy TikTok’s CCP handlers would never push.
The ‘grassroots’ upheaval from blue-screen-addled Americans opposing any restrictions on the company ironically showcased the influence it has over the American public. A few push notifications here and pop-up messages there managed to elicit phone calls to congresspeople from constituents who likely didn’t know their names beforehand. TikTok may have hoisted themselves with their own petard.
Naturally, it depends on the rhetoric included in the bill. It ought to be specific enough so that there can’t be any mission creep by any ambitious, upstart members of the government. Passing a bill without the typical vagaries of DC legislation seems like common sense when you remind yourself of the sheer volume of sensitive information those commies have access to. For effect, I’ll mention it again. 170 million Americans - that’s a few million more than who voted in the 2020 election.
Not all public figures are for the move, however. While some may have consternations about legal precedent, others have more pedantic reasons for harboring antagonism to the bill.
Former President Donald Trump previously issued an executive order that would have enacted the very thing the bill intends to do. Now, as the new piece of legislation appears to have some weight behind it, he’s shifted positions.
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump said in an interview with CNBC. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” he continued. “There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok, but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
If I had known throwing a fit could get you anything you wanted, my twenties would have been a lot different. Trump is both pandering to a base he wants to secure ahead of the 2024 election and seeking to exact a personal vendetta he has against Facebook and its creator.
Last week on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
The invocation of Yiddish to insult Mark Zuckerberg feels like a slur. If it isn’t, it’s so close to one that a person like Donald Trump should never be using that phrase, no matter how hard he pats himself on the back.
The alternative explanation for Trump’s about-face is his ties to billionaire GOP donor Jeff Yass who has strong connections with the PAC Club for Growth - an organization that Trump recently said that the two of them were ‘back in love.’ Yass owns a 15% stake in TikTok. Whatever the former president’s reasoning for his newest contradiction of opinion, it’s safe to say it’s likely not the most principled stance.
Fortunately for those of us who have retained our sanity after the year 2020, Republican lawmakers appear to have not kowtowed to Trump’s latest whim, and Joe Biden, whom some have suggested may have unsavory connections to China, has confirmed he would sign such a bill if it made it past the Senate. Politics aren’t always in a straight line.
Geopolitically, it’s a no-brainer that the app in its current iteration should be banned in the US. Morally, yeah, get rid of it - it, and its cohort, have been a net negative to all generations that have succumbed to its swiping siren song. There may be some fancy legal footwork involved in crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s to make it all legitimate, but, hey, a little authoritarianism never hurt anybody, did it?
Ban TikTok, ban social media, ban the internet. Ban this newsletter.
I’m bringing back the Pony Express and sharpening #2 pencils at this very moment.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA