The Moody Blues - On The Threshold Of A Dream

We finished out yesterday evening with Tres Hombres by ZZ Top. Today we're gonna give The Moody Blues another try with On The Threshold Of A Dream. This album has literally been to the moon. 

So, Compy, do that thing you do and remind me of all the reasons they're fantastic but for some reason I don't enjoy listing to them. 

Unrememberably SQUIRREL!, Folk when i'm not in the moody for it, extreme limitations in recording technology, mildly hard to follow plotlines, yep that all sounds like a smorgasbord of wasting away in Rum and Cola-ville, aka it's my own damned fault. Clearly i'm confusing the band for Jimmy Buffet, and that seems like a completely unfair comparison. 

So, first things second, we have to tackle this novella of prose and poetry, experimental fonts, bipolar critical response, you name it. Everybody has a thing or 5 to say. We might get to actually listening to it at some point, but this thing comes with a lot of prep work. 

Believe it or not, i like every single part of that. For better or worse, this album is clearly intended to be a tactile experience. I gotta say, nobody half-assed their part of it. Sure, you could look at it through the pretentiousness prism, but why do all that thinking if you've already decided to hate it? You're wasting your own time and energy. Future alert, we'll look at a stellar example of wasting other peoples' time energy and money a few albums from now, with the amazingly coincidental contextual commonality of the word "moon." 

Anywho, what's this thing about? My reading glasses are thankfully the same as my regular glasses, so we can just dive right in to the explanatory paragraph. 

Hmmm, yes, indeed. Well, David Lymonds writes exactly like i do with an incredibly similar sense of humor, and it is not in any way helpful, so it's got that going for it. 

Graeme Edge says this first poem is meant to encapsulate the themes of the whole album, so that's exactly like the concept he says it isn't. Cognitive dissonance appears to be on the menu. K, so, humorous reworking of Descartes, we are the ink that runs the Establishment's giant computer printer, smile and nod and don't let them see you not pay any attention to their machinations. Sure yeah, think for yourself, question authority. I'll of course point out that those roles can be easily reversed and i am completely capable of questioning the questioning of authority when authority turns out to mostly agree with my own assessment of things. If you're demanding i be dumb, I'm gonna morph into a brick wall. 

Here's the real-world problem. Should the current administration have the power to mandate vaccinations? No, absolutely not. Are people like Ben Shapiro or Tucker Carlson or who ever justified in cheering the Supreme Court's decision like their sports team won? No, because their argument completely misconstrues both the issue at hand, and the mechanisms necessary to produce it. These self-proclaimed champions of liberty and "freedom" ironically limit the very freedoms and liberties they say they champion. We don't live in the 1890s anymore, those notions of tyranny and freedom and power and whatnot are completely inadequate to deal with the kinds of geopolitical problems our federal government has no choice but to deal with in this bizarro reality where a single person trying to live a relatively uneventful life is legally identical to a corporate entity like Microsoft or ExxonMobil or Portland, Oregon. 

This is tough, i know, but stick with me. Here in 2022, America is a business. Each successive President since Eisenhower has been forced to increasingly treat the country like a business, and Trump (whether you like it or not) was the breaking point. America is now a really terrible corporation making it real tough to get anything accomplished outside of its jurisdiction because the leading world economies conduct their business in U.S. dollars. We won the Cold War, now we're Minnesota Fats in that Twilight Zone episode. America is a Capitalist. Not a capitalist economy, or a capitalist country, an actual imaginary human being who owns the product of its citizens' labor and conducts global competitive business for profit. Whose fault is that? It's the fault of privately owned but publicly traded corporations demanding increasing legal protection for refusing to fulfill their own trade deals and contracts in good faith. It's the fault of everyone who chooses antagonistic/competative rather than cooperative negotiations. Governors believe they are the CEOs of State corporations, the President is the CEO of Corporate America. There are only 2 ways out of that situation. One is we just glide all the way to the scene of the plane crash, the other is we pay off that outstanding debt against the wishes of the rest of the world. 

The SBA's best guess at the failure rate of startups is around 90%. There are currently 195 countries. When we apply logic to the concept that Countries are businesses measured by their GDP, we cannot help but come to the conclusion that the whole world in fact depends on or feeds off the 20 most productive national economies. 

Obviously, that data could change, and the logic of the situation would change with it, but we do have to return to Marx to get a grip on the situation as it stands. 

Overdetermination encompasses this situation. The proportion of failure to success in terms of business is structurally identical to the proportion of top-tier to subordinate economies because they operate under the same rule system. Having these two data sets not match up would be an incredibly shocking reality. 

The interconnectivity of national economies is determined by their resources and mode of exchange, and the geography of resources has always been the primary factor of all political decision-making. But what happens when that geographical foundation disappears through technological advancement? The answer is that privately controlled economic states begin to supercede geographic states and will continue to do so until their actual resources are depleted. We'll keep burning oil until we run out. We'll keep planting field corn and soy beans and spraying artificial fertilizers until the country is a barren, unarable wasteland. We'll keep wasting millions of tons of everything until there's more plastic garbage than wildflowers, then pave it over with concrete and forget about it. I sound particularly curmudgeonly today, don't i? 

I'm actually not, I'm simply trying to point out that the harder you bash people over the head defending what amounts to intentionally stubborn ignorance, the less productive anyone actually is and the more dependent they become on the authority you're arguing against. People don't have a choice in that matter. 

Those ultra-conservative pundits are not arguing for change that benefits you the demographic. They are arguing that right now, everything exactly the way it is, major corporations making whatever choices they want without any responsibility to you is as good as it could possibly be, and any attempt to change that is an act of war against the supremacy of uncompromising individuality. They wanted GM and Ford to go bankrupt and not get bailed out leaving hundreds of thousands of people unemployed, they want people fighting in the street about their supposed god given rights, they were unhappy back when the Trade Titans got caught in their pyramid schemes and wail about the loss of their right to gamble with employee pensions, they want force and violence to be the determining factor underlying social interaction, they want people to get sick and die from completely preventable diseases because that is how they make a profit; that money gets absorbed back up the metaphorical economic food chain. Winning lawsuits really is their favorite sporting event right up until they themselves get caught on the losing side of their own loopholes. I'm thinking of Governor Reynolds who appears to be politically hedging her bets by being super happy that her administration now has 1.2 billion of discretionary tax income and is desperately trying to push through massive tax cuts to hamstring the next Governor should she happen to lose. When and if those cuts are ratified she will immediately set about allocating as much of that surplus as possible to her own political and commercial allies to prevent it from being reinjected into general (unregulated) circulation. 

Again, i know this is a gargantuan problem to try to hold in your brain, but you have to understand which side of the equation you actually stand on at any given moment. You the real person are actually 2 different legal entities from the perspective of governance: you are a consumer of goods and services AND a producer of goods and services. The government measures economic activity in terms of payroll and sales; how much you earn vs how much you buy. Collective you not individual you. 

An interesting phenomenon occurs when you do that. The city of Fort Dodge for example neither manages its water treatment facility, nor pays an in state company to do it. Instead, the water treatment plant is managed by Florida based US Water Services Corp. Presumably there is a clear economic reason for that, but the trade off is that the state and city have no choice but to monitor the outgoing expense of that contract with the incoming wages that return as salaries for local employees. In that sense the state economies of Iowa and Florida are interconnected, as are the economies of every other state in which USW operates. That's not inherently bad at all (in fact it is presumably a good thing given USW's significantly larger access to national resources), but it does require monitoring as interstate trade because the city manages the exchange between individual consumers and the company that actually maintains and operates the facility. We have to ask the question, is this state sponsored monopoly better or worse than the potential reality of continuously changing local competitive ownership of the facility? It's not a simple matter of quality or popularity, municipal water supply is not a competitive market because it must operate outside the realm of traditional economic scarcity. 100% supply of drinkable tap water to all residents is the mandatory minimum standard of operation, whether practically achievable or not. Competition in this case comes instead from the choice between the public utility itself vs private commercial water treatment. I think we can all recognize that a city completely reliant on private wells, storage tanks, and commercial distribution would be extremely impractical in terms of infrastructure, highly volatile in terms of selective scarcity, health, and economic stability, as well as unpredictably wasteful. Keep in mind, someone like me out in the country on a deep well hundreds of feet down in an aquifer trades the cost of water services for the cost of electricity necessary to pump that water, i.e. my water supply is dependent on my electricity rather than the gravity systems used in most municipalities. You certainly wouldn't want to have to worry about your tank level every time you took a shower any more than our forefamilies enjoyed carrying buckets of water home from the nearest stream. Bottled water or delivery is exponentially more expensive by comparison. 

Ironically, the more we go around this grumpy-go-round, the tighter we weave our economy into the tapestry of fiduciary insurance, all money being spent not to facilitate productive trade, but hoarded for future legal defense and recuperation; profit by natural or artificial disaster, i'll emerge the richer when it all crumbles to dust! Bah humbug. 

What dream are we on the threshold of having? The band say "we don't know, it just sounded like a compelling title." Holy cow, we did finally make it to the listening to find out. I was starting to wonder. 3, 2, 1... 

I can tell you this, I like side a a whole lot better than any of their other albums. It's still a bit scattered, but that's the point. These are all random inner monologues, people just thinking about their experience. It's hard to tell what's critical or not, but i think the underlying theme is that everybody is running around all stressed out and desperate for material wealth and order and pushing people around, but wouldn't it be better if we actually loved each other instead? It's definitely The Moody Blues, but it's also a completely normal Rock album for 1969, albeit with flutes and sinister sounding synths and an undercurrent of deep skepticism. On to Side B then. 

Oh yeah, no mistaking it here. I don't know how to break this to you, so i'm just gonna say it like i always do: this Bourgeois life of work weeks and Sunday afternoons is total crap. Side B is like your own personal A Christmas Carol. This is a terrifying dream. Waste your life away working for nothing or take life back and live in the now instead of a future that will never actually materialize. 

Then Lionel Bart (who ever he is) gives us the least coherent epilogue i've ever read while the runoff grove endlessly cycles that creepy ode to the vacuum of space. He writes nothing like i do. I'm joking, Lionel Bart is pretty famous for writing the musical Oliver! and selling all his publishing rights to pay off his debts. The value of his creative output for the next 6 years went from the 300k he recieved for it up to about 2-million for someone else. That's why selling out is bad. You can't predict actually hitting it big, but you can be assured that you don't get any money at all if you no longer own the rights to your own work. I have the opposite problem, nobody's offering me diddly squat when 300k British pounds would solve every problem I could imagine and then some. 

How in the world are you still reading this? Ok, so yeah, we found a Blue Mood Group album i really like. It reminds me of Blows Against The Empire, The Association, all that great stuff from the year the feces hit the fan. This, according to Bart, is a fantastic beginning from some professional beginners, and the whole thing is a "once upon a time...." 

So, is space really the place with the helpful hardware? I suppose if all the rich people really do go there and leave us plebes alone to be perfectly happy eating food from trees and loving each other then yeah, get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. Let 'em go Florida up the universe, long as i don't have to listen to people argue about it anymore. 

Also yes if you mean Marx's actual idea of spreading people back out, giving them the ability and opportunity to be meaningfully self-sufficient rather than compete for artificial fame and fortune. Why is government so big? Because the titans of industry are absolutely terrible at running the accumulated economy. If they weren't terrible at it they wouldn't spend 90% of their time and energy suing each other for profit. They'd actually help eliminate poverty instead of creating more of it, help people meet the needs of their own communities instead of exploiting their labor to pay for unrelated bad investments. 

So, long story longer, i think i'm getting the knack of this understanding the universe, so later tonight we'll listen to Get The Knack, and tackle a double bass drum of solo albums from Keith Moon and Carmine Appice tomorrow. Unless i change my mind, which is totally a thing i'm capable of doing. You should get an award for reading this far, it literally took me 9 hours to write it, compared to the less than 1 it takes to listen to it. Enjoy, like i actually did for a change.