November's "State Of The World" Posts from Niels Lan Doky
For more than a year now, Niels Lan Doky has been putting his reflections, contemplations, thoughts, scribbles, creative thinking, concerns, hopes, and meditative thinking in writing every Sunday for all his fans to dive and dwell into. All of them dating back to September 2019 is available on Niels Lan Doky’s fanpage on Facebook. From here and forward we will present them here in a consolidated format at the end of every month. For this month, Niels has touched upon how jazz will save the democracy, “The Banality of Evil”, and thoughts on the US election. We and Niels sincerely hope that you will enjoy these reflections on the State Of The World as much as we do.
Photo by Emilie Cosmi
THE DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA - WHAT MESSAGE ARE WE SENDING TO OUR CHILDREN?
With Biden/Harris winning the US elections, we will finally get some professionals into office who can start cleaning up the huge catastrophic mess left by the previous administration, and take over the steering wheel to regain control of a ship that is totally lost and astray.
But the Biden/Harris victory is not something to get excited about, it is just the bare minimum of what needs to happen to avoid an apocalyptic political meltdown beyond repair. Although Biden had the greatest voter turnout in US history, a great sadness lies in the fact that Trump had the second largest. The fact that nearly half the country voted Trump is a great shock to many, myself included, and could mean that the US is already in a state of dystopia.
To paraphrase Michelle Obama during the 2016 campaigns, what message are we sending to our children, when we show them that the highest office in our nation can be held by a man who cheats, lies, pays off porn stars, displays the lowest levels of moral values and human dignity and checks off all the boxes on the list of symptoms associated with the narcissistic pervert personality disorder? To answer that question, we are telling our children that it is not only acceptable but also advisable and advantageous to display similar behaviour and morals. And after 4 years of Trump and seeing exactly who he is, what he does and stands for - that is exactly what nearly half of the American voters have chosen to tell their children. That is in itself a much larger disaster than Trump himself, who apparently is merely the top of an iceberg.
What caused this insanity to happen? Is it the greed and selfishness that modern society has nurtured for decades that has corrupted us? Is it the lack of education (unlike Europe, the US does not have universal healthcare and education)? Or both? Or is there more to it? The fact that something like this can at all happen is a huge tragedy and failure. Think of all the innocent children who have been born into this. Michelle certainly posed the right question, a very crucial and essential one. What message are we sending to our children by our choices and actions?
Here in Denmark you have to be 18 to vote and I moved to the US at age 17 so I never had a chance to vote in Denmark and lived abroad for the next 32 years so I stopped following Danish politics. Meanwhile, for a long while I was only a Permanent Resident in the US with no voting right there. But that eventually changed when I became a US citizen and was able to vote as a result. Of course I did vote for Biden this time around, the only right thing to do given the available options. While watching the news and realizing how razor-thin close the race was in key states, it was made crystal clear how true the statement “every vote counts” is. I am proud to have voted and contributed to this very important political process and I feel deeply connected with my fellow-American brothers and sisters who are on the front lines of American society fighting the battle of everyday life, struggling to provide education for their children and other basic essentials. To paraphrase Elton John, it’s a sad sad situation.
But again, the US is the richest country in the world and it has all the resources it needs to solve its own problems, and there are far greater problems and disasters ongoing elsewhere in the world.
But historically, the US always tends to influence the rest of the world or be a clearer reflection of tendencies already occurring elsewhere. This is certainly also the case today. So instead of looking at the US, we - who live in the rest of the world - need to take a closer look at ourselves and urgently so. We are arguably already heading in a similar direction as the US and have been doing so for decades. Most of us already know and acknowledge that we are on a road towards self destruction, yet we don’t do anything about it. The political system here in Europe is void of any real leadership and courage. Although there is certainly a high degree of skill, knowledge, intelligence and education there, there is also (in my personal opinion) a total lack of bold, passionate, genuine, inspirational and courageous leaders.
In the music business we have a term used to describe music that does not offend anyone or take any stand. It’s called MOR and it stands for “middle of the road”. To me, most politicians in Europe today are MOR. I want to see some politician equivalents to bold innovative musicians such as Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and Igor Stravinsky. Anything less than that bores me to death and I am finding it really hard to motivate myself to follow politics in Europe. I think MOR politics could lead to a political death of Europe, similar to the US failure. But I also do think that the next generation of voters, Millenials and Gen-Zs, if they reach critical mass in time, will produce the paradigm shift needed in politics across the world, including Europe. Greta Thunberg is just the top of the iceberg, most of them are more than aware of the fact that we so-called grown-ups are for the most part a bunch of fools who don’t know what we’re doing.
Sincerely,
Niels Lan Doky
Elsinore, Denmark
Sunday, November 8th, 2020
Photo by Ole Klein Photography
THE BANALITY OF EVIL
Although I live in a safe, clean and beautiful part of the world, I often feel quite disappointed with the state of the world and the state of humanity, which is now more apparent than ever with the rise of social media. I consciously choose to avoid news media overload, because news have clearly become commercial commodities, i.e. mainly vehicles for news media to profit or sustain themselves. Long gone seem the days when news was just news for the sake of important or newsworthy information.
At the moment, the news media remains oversaturated with endless echo chambers about the Trump/Biden transition. My attitude and message to the people in charge: Spare me the details, just get the job done and let me know when it’s over so we can move on. There is of course no shadow of doubt that Biden won the election. It is no longer up for discussion. So the mere fact that news media continue to cover the controversy over the election process, is empowering to those to cast doubt on it in the first place. But this coverage, as so many other news coverages these days, serves only the single purpose of being a commercial transactional commodity. In a market economy driven world, the news media will continue to feed us with only news that we are willing to easily consume. In my personal opinion that is a recipe for disaster in the long run.
Among some of the many other things that have occurred in the world earlier this week, take for example the fact that some militant islamists beheaded more than 50 people in Northern Mozambique. Did that story hit the international media in any notable way? Of course not. It’s simply not sellable enough. Because does anyone really care about Mozambique?
And how about Pierre Larrouturou, the man who is leading the EU budget talks and who has been on a hunger strike for weeks now because the EU refuses to tax rich corporations to fund our fight to tackle the climate crisis. He says it is ‘obscene’ that money for health and climate has been cut while financial markets have prospered. Why is this story not all over the international media? It’s unforgivable if we don’t act now. By our appalling inactions we are betraying our children and subsequent generations and stealing their future. Why are we allowing this to happen? I don’t understand it. Are we braindead zombies? To paraphrase Elton John once again, it’s a sad sad situation.
In turn, the story about covid-19 amongst Danish mink is apparently a saleable commodity!!! The story is far bigger abroad, and disproportionately so, than it is in Denmark. When I started getting calls from friends abroad worried about whether I had been contaminated by a mink, I didn’t yet know that Danmark even had a mink industry (I do now - but that is a separate horrific topic).
With the COVID-19 numbers being as low as they are in Denmark, even the slightest increase in numbers can be an impressive percentage - that can be spinned into a saleable news story .
To put things in perspective - yesterday’s Danish numbers (source: Statens Serum Institut):
A total of only 236 people hospitalized nationwide with the virus.
Out of these 236 only 40 of them are in intensive care (down 3 since day before)
And out these 40 patients only 27 of them are in respirator (down 2 since day before)
Since the pandemic began, 54% of the country's ENTIRE population has now been tested and counting.
In total 756 people have died in Denmark since the pandemic began (in comparison, 790 died here of regular flu last year). This is very marginal compared to many other countries (France 43,892 USA 244,000 Brazil 165,000,etc).
The truth of the matter is that Denmark is dealing very well with the pandemic, and any news story that insinuates otherwise is simply misleading. But the news media don’t care, they just want to sell stories, and they do so with little or no respect to morals and ethics (with some exceptions of course and thank god for that).
Getting back to mink:
The fact that Denmark had a mink industry is brand new to me, let alone that it is the biggest producer of mink fur in the world. Or shall we say was, because luckily it looks like the Danish mink industry is in the process of being permanently terminated (a great positive side effect of the pandemic). This ought to happen to the Danish porc meat industry as well, and hopefully it will in the near future.
According to dst.dk (Danmarks Statistik’s website) Denmark “produced” 12.5 million minks in 2019 resulting in exports of 24.5 million mink furs. This is on the level of the Danish porc meat industry that currently has a total of 13.2 million pigs in farms across Denmark.
This is TOTALLY insane. What is even more insane is that no one does anything about it.
Scientific research has long ago concluded that pigs as well as mink are intelligent, complex, emotional and sensitive creatures just like humans - why is the media not selling this story?.
Why are we exterminating these creatures - on a level that makes Hitler’s extermination of jews during WWII look like the work of a marginal insignificant total amateur beginner? Hitler’s crimes was just a tiny fraction of the murders of fellow species that we Danes commit on an industrial scale year after year.
How can such evil come into existence in the first place, let alone persist?
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) who is widely recognized as one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century, has a viable theory on the matter.
An important part of Arendt’s work dealt with the nature of power and evil, and her findings led to the now famous phrase of hers, “the banality of evil”. If you are not yet familiar with Hannah Arendt, I highly encourage you to explore her work. For humanity’s necessary departure from dysfunction, Arendt's work provides some helpful tools for the journey.
Sincerely,
Niels Lan Doky
Elsinore, Denmark
November 15th, 2020
EXCELLENCE IS A FORM OF PROTEST
“The weak spot for any democracy is how to maintain standards when even the least expert has their legitimate voice”.
Reading Daniel Klein’s article “Jazz To The Rescue” on ARC Digital Media earlier this week was a reminder of some great truths about jazz and democracy and the parallels between the two.
Although Daniel’s article focused predominantly on the late American essayist and critic Stanley Crouch, the essential questions raised and topics covered transcend Crouch and have a much broader significance and relevance.
In a democracy, power tends to belong to the majority. But in most societies, that majority is a mediocracy and luminaries are a minority. Therefore democracies are always at risk of degenerating, as we are seeing it in the world today following many decades of blind faith in democracy as was it a law of nature (macro historian Yuval Noah Harari deems it a religion).
Jazz is just as improvised and interactive as life itself and it has been called “the most perfect example of democracy in action” - and it really is. Over time I have come to realize that jazz is the only place where I have ever experienced a 100% successful and perfectly functioning democracy. The world could learn and gain a lot from jazz if larger groups of people were brought to understand the inner workings and principles of our art form.
Let’s see what Daniel Klein, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis have to say about these topics in the excerpts below from Daniel’s article:
Crouch was early to connect what has today become an endemic cultural problem — pseudo-intellectuals dignifying low culture with fancy labels and references — to ghastly social outcomes. Shallow slogans being used to legitimize a nihilism inimical to real progress. This debasing of the intellectual currency Crouch understood as an attack on the very possibility of standards, not just in music but in behavior too. Absurd juxtaposition with low culture could only tarnish the high.
Crouch rejected white America’s indulgence of hip-hop culture as a kind of new minstrelsy. That the cultural big-wigs should celebrate among blacks behavior that among whites would inspire their condemnation was for Crouch simply racist.
Just like Tony Bennett, Crouch also advocated the fact that Jazz is America’s very own classical idiom, one to rival that of Europe. A uniquely American language bearing a universal message.
In this alternative frame, black Americans look more American than anyone — “perhaps the most American of Americans,” according to Crouch. Owing to their ancestors’ traumatic severance from West Africa they were uniquely placed to absorb America’s new syncretic spirit — the spirit that made jazz.
The music is rooted in the experience of exclusion and violence, but it offers to salve, not enflame, those wounds. In exchange it demands discipline, self-elevation, and a measure of compromise.
Indeed, in Crouch’s long campaign against the avant-garde — for him only falsely termed jazz — he returned habitually to one point: despite its pretension to complexity, that music is not difficult to play. It demands little of the players and of the audience mere credulity, being a sort of “emperor’s new clothes.” Real skill, by contrast, takes time to acquire and can be tested against external standards.
But the authentic jazz tradition, rooted in blues and swing, teaches rewarding lessons in abundance: that freedom comes hand in hand with rules, that neither the individual nor the community may take total precedence.
Just as if you want to master a language you must pay attention to its grammar and spend time listening to its speakers, in jazz you can only improvise well if you know your stuff inside out. Listen to a classic record — say, Art Blakey’s 1954 A Night at Birdland. It seems each player is free to express himself, naturally and almost without effort. It seems the harmony of the players is guaranteed. All those stuffy, rigid rules can be dispensed with, one imagines, and this will be the glorious result.
But as in jazz, so in political and social life, it’s a false temptation. The music is an ongoing exercise in democracy, not orchestrated from above but nonetheless carefully finetuned. In monologue you don’t have to listen, but to play together means to be considerate of others, to follow the rules. Each player gets a chance to do their thing, but mustn’t mess with others in the process. The outcome is neither chaos nor monopoly. It is a model of pluralism, requiring stability and trust.
The weak spot for any democracy is how to maintain standards when even the least expert has their legitimate voice. Already in 1958 in his book “The Jazz Scene” Eric Hobsbawm noted the threat its democratic nature posed to jazz: “at its worst it degenerates into philistinism”. But the music’s magic trick has been to square that circle. Harsh meritocratic competition and the ever-despised, snooty critic have played their roles well.
Is this all then just a conservative ploy, meant to see off unwelcome challenges to the cultural — and political — status quo? Critics of Crouch’s efforts to define the proper boundaries of jazz have argued so. The traditionalist steer he and Wynton Marsalis gave Jazz at Lincoln Center — the preeminent jazz education program in the United States — put many noses out of joint. But as the legendary trumpeter resonantly puts it, “excellence is a form of protest.”
That is precisely the ethos we could all do with, the humanist alternative jazz offers in place of sectarian destruction. And jazz is not just any “democratic ideology,” Marsalis points out, but one first “expressed by people who were being denied it, so they really believed in it.”
Link to Daniel Klein’s full article here:
https://arcdigital.media/jazz-to-the-rescue-21149c550ef3
Sincerely,
Niels Lan Doky
Elsinore, Denmark
November 22nd, 2020
