Conflict and the Great Music Which Comes Out of It

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and brotherly love. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." - Orson Welles

That's some great cynicism and it gives the illusion of depth but it offers nothing more than self-defeating futility over any long term.  The summary we take from it here is it really doesn't matter what we do, civilization is impossible and we will always live like vicious brutes.

There's a fundamental difference between conflict and reasoned opposition.  Lennon and McCartney probably wanted to kill each other at times ... but ... they didn't.  Instead they made music people love to this day.

War does inspire all kinds of creative endeavors.  Most of them are toward making more advanced weapons but a great many do extend into art and we get music which becomes eternal.  However, the false conclusion from Orson Welles is the war is necessary rather than an extension of the fundamental.

We are living the falsity of the statement right now given there has been fifteen years of pointless war and there hasn't been much creativity in anything except the weapons.  The music has gone to complete shit, movies are nothing but cartoons or a boob parade, and Adele is the biggest musical hit since Michael Jackson.

Fark.   That's pitiful.

What we see here at the Rockhouse is the converse of Welles' sentiment and war actually is sucking the creativity out of the population rather than inspiring any within it.  In part that's through inculcation of a deep fear in people but the process doesn't matter that much, the consequence is self-evident.

It's not true to say swing music came out of WWII since it already existed.  It grew in peace time or the Swing Kids in Germany would never have heard it.  Swing got huge during the war but WWII definitely did not create it or inspire it.

Maybe you want to quite the sixties and the rock of psychedelia as some kind of product of the Vietnam War but that's not true in any traditional sense because almost all of it was in opposition to the war.  In that sense, the war inspired it but not in any way the warmongers wanted to see. 

We do believe a reasoned opposition is necessary to produce really great things but we don't believe all the things Welles quoted and required components of it.

At one time, Kannafoot and I worked together and my magnum opus with computers was a type of mainframe system maintenance which was a gross departure from traditional methods but which I believed was sound and worthwhile.  In the design of it, Kannafoot was the reasoned opposition and there were parts of it he hated.  We would have highly-intent discussions on the matter and through that came a compromise which ended up being the system used there until they finally out-sourced it to IBM.

Note specifically:  Kannafoot did everything he could to get people transferred to other areas so they did not get murdered.  A good many of them had been my staff so it was important to me.  I know his principles and his integrity as a human so I tell you he did all he could.  The corporate world is one brutal bitch and principles have one hell of a tough fight.

If you consider this sophistry, gratuitous intellectualism, or so, how about your marriage.  More than likely if it's a successful one, it survives through reasoned opposition.  Sometimes you want to fookin' kill each other ... but ... you don't.  So, we maintain here Welles was wrong and you can see fundamental human nature right in front of you.

The reason for all the verbosity is it may have seemed we support the quote from Welles.  We admire the word play but we don't accept the sentiment.