I’m not really fond of top lists of the year, mostly because for every single year, I’ve discovered my true favorite records of the year long after it’s passed, and long after the list is already ‘made’, and I guess it would be understandable if it were merely records that were ‘growers’, but it’s mostly new discoveries, so trying to come up with some sort of overview of a year that is certain to be hopelessly outdated just a few months later seems pointless. I suppose that’s a disclaimer: this is just what I listened to this year, and I don’t have any illusions that it’s not an embarassingly limited list, but at this point I’m happy with my comfort bands.

A few of my favorite songwriters released recordings this year, some with more success than others. Bill Callahan’s latest record was, at the very least, better than the last. I listened to his Smog records often this year, and though he’s in many ways a greater musician and composer these days, I can’t help but miss his darker streak and minimal epics. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is almost lush, which is not really what I expected at this point in the career of one of the most inwards-looking, isolated musicians I’ve heard. Cass McCombs’ Catacombs was surprisingly well-received, and I suppose it’s his most popular record by now. When I originally heard it, I found it disappointing. The best songs have grown on me, though it’s missing the edge of his previous works; it’s the docile McCombs, less idiosyncratic and a tad more sentimental. Will Oldham released an album that I enjoyed at the time, but can’t really say I’ve revisited too often.

The Mountain Goats released a new record, The Life Of The World To Come, which I’ve been unable to really enjoy on the first few listens, a pattern since 2006’s Get Lonely. There was a small window during which The Mountain Goats were my favorite band (mid 2006), but the albums they’ve released since them have been initially unsatisfying, and although I’ve grown to love some of the songs within, they haven’t really been up to par. I have two main issues with modern-era Mountain Goats. The first is John Darnielle’s singing, which is technically better, but less emotional; his yelps and screams are gone, his voice is less nasal (which I suppose is a plus for many people, but not for me), and he whispers, speaks softly, or uses a slight falsetto constantly. In my favorite records, he’d just sing-talk in his whiny voice, it worked, mostly because the lyrics fit the scrappy-underdog-singer style perfectly. It’s much harder to pull off an emotional singing voice over a piano, and he doesn’t quite succeed. The other problem I’ve had with these records, especially the last two, are the arrangements. I can’t quite describe what’s wrong with them. They often sound like they’re coming from a gaudy, low-budget Christian church band with a drummer that is like, really into UB40. When John Darnielle started recording more arranged songs and turning The Mountain Goats into a true band, it worked well, because his arrangements actually had the same rawness and vitality of his earlier, lo-fi work. These latest records just sound a little too good. The drumming in particular fits poorly; it sounds much too loud and expansive, which is just ridiculous for most of the songs. I don’t mean to pile on The Mountain Goats since there’s still a few great songs in every album, but it’s really baffling to me that they managed to avoid disaster when dropping their lo-fi style, only to start making those mistakes now.

Other records that were worth a few listens were: Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer, a record by a band I used to dislike. This time they kept it really tight and tidy, and the songs have a lot of manic energy. God Help The Girl – S/T, basically a Belle & Sebastian album, maybe better than the last one. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic, which is really long and repetitive and might be a hard swallow when whole, but has a lot of great songs in it and is a welcome change from a band that seemed really tired creatively.

As far as discoveries go, Lambchop was my biggest one this year. Kurt Wagner’s “band” had always been under the radar for me, which is strange since it’s more or less exactly the kind of band that I enjoy: focused on lyrics, deep vocally, unafraid of quiet moments. Wagner’s a terrific singer, and there’s a little quiver in his voice that adds emotion even to his most ridiculous lyrics. Unlike other songwriter bands, they’re actually able to perform energetic songs and move a crowd. Their Live At XX Merge recording was one of my favorite things this year, a really vital performance. As for records, they’re somewhat spotty, but Is A Woman definitely belongs to that pantheon of great, quiet albums from the 2000s, along with Master & Everyone, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, and Heartbreaker.

Finally, Vic Chesnutt died a few days ago. I’d heard his name before and knew that Guy Picciotto was recording with him, but hadn’t heard anything. At The Cut, his latest album, is quite strong and a better use of the Mt. Zion band than the actual Silver Mt. Zion records, especially the opening track, which is simply brutal. There’s a tendency towards unmemorable arrangements, at least in the guitar, but the singing is quite powerful and generally rescues the songs when they meander. I feel like there’s something inappropriate about getting into an artist because of his death, but it happens. He was a very talented individual and it’s disappointing that things ended for him the way they did.

I’ve read liberal and center-left leaning websites, columnists, and forums ever since the Presidential campaign of 2008, not only for information but also to see the way people think, the way they understand political issues, and their thoughts on various issues. After the first year of Obama’s presidency, it seems clear to me that there are large schisms within the groups of voters that supported Obama, mostly because of their interpretations of his behavior and deeds. Some people are opposed to Obama’s actions as President since they are the complete opposite of what they expected and often indefensible from any moral standpoint. But some people aren’t opposed, or even upset. They are along for the ride, and annoyed at the fact that people are opposing Obama, who they consider a ‘good man’. I hardly ever agree with anything conservatives say, but they were not far off the mark about Obama being a figure that people were too caught up with, and this refusal to get upset at him or break with his policies in any way is going to hang from his supporters come election time.

Barack Obama once said that he was a sort of “blank slate” that voters projected their own views onto. Lately, the phenomenon appears to have gone beyond mere projection and turned into something else, that seems to resemble “replacement” more. As if they are trying to be Obama, as if people need to put aside their own thoughts and feelings and reactions and try to just think of what’s going on in Obama’s brain instead, a sort of overreaching empathy that falls more into role-playing. And you know, empathy is not necessarily a bad thing, but generally when we try to understand someone’s predicament, we don’t just ignore our own. The entire tone of the issue has turned personal to a scary degree. Obama is not really there to be your friend. There is no need to understand him as a ‘good person’; in fact, it’s likely an obstacle, much like it’s an obstacle for the perennial neighbor who can’t understand just how that nice fellow a few houses down the street turned out to be a serial killer. I don’t really know what I’d do in Obama’s shoes, but that doesn’t really matter, since I am not him. Considering the magnitude of the decisions Obama and the Democratic Party have to take, the results of their actions should be considered much more important than the politics behind them. Should be.

And yet, the typical talking points of the debate largely involve the politics and the sentiments, and they are successful. I feel like what happens is, by using these arguments from the politicians’ minds, supporters start feeling like they are a part of that process, like they too are taking those decisions for the politicians’ sake, and can thus rationalize them.

The effect of this weird tendency to believe oneself to be a ‘part’ of the process is that politicians are almost free of serious repercussions. For that I have to applaud them: they’ve almost managed to get rid of the consequences of their purely political decisions by openly acknowledging them as purely political decisions. In theory, the danger of a decision taken for purely political reasons is that the people who you represent and who voted for you are going to be (rightfully) upset at you. That’s not really happening here, because people accept the decisions as political, a fact of life to deal with. There’s little need for Obama to weight the pros and cons of breaking with his base, since large parts of the base seem to have decided to just excuse him and stand by their man like a good wife.

There is no danger or fear of reprisal partly because of that acceptance of ‘political reality’ (which in itself is a strange thing to accept, as it’s merely taking the conscious decisions of free-willed individuals who can and should answer for them and treating them as something that just happens, or is simply there), and partly because liberals simply want to win. Everyone does. If you ask leaders of political movements, they’ll tell you that such movements can’t be sustained unless they have some victories, however small. That desire to win often overrides all logic or reason, and it’s understandable, but detrimental and hard to shake off. When most Americans talk about the possibility of voting for a third party, they’ll inevitable hear the words “that’s just wasting your vote”, which is a reflection of that ‘winning mentality’: your vote preferrably should be used to win, where the definition of winning is “my vote corresponds to the winner”. At the end of the day, many Democratic Party supporters can be swayed by the thought of their party getting a victory rather than the principle of the matter, of the content of the “victory” in question.

The question is, how low can this go? This is only Obama’s first year as President, and already the refusal to see him for what he is looks misguided and sad. Earlier today he stated that he never ‘campaigned for a public option’, a deceptive statement (if not a bald-faced lie), and way too many people were willing to actually try and defend this. Before, people had defended his “Bush on Drugs” approach to terrorism in a way that makes one wonder just how honest and real those people’s opposition to Bush’s own policies was. Obama’s political machine is quite powerful (as an aside, it’s actually really interesting to see how quickly administration talking points are used by supporters on forums and websites, with such frequency and so little difference that you have to wonder if the supporters are paid plants), but it’s been showing its limitations, and the politically active ‘progressives’ have in many cases grown bolder in their opposition and even derision towards Obama’s policies. We could argue that these are outliers, and the average liberal or liberal-leaning Obama voter still supports him. It’s a fair argument. But even though in an ideal world, every voter would try to reach conclusions on his or her own and be wary of immediately trusting any argument, the truth of the matter is that just as Obama and the Democrats’ PR can sway many voters, there’ll be a large amount who’ll be swayed by the outliers, especially in these sensible times when people can’t afford being patient or understanding.

I’m not sure voters are going to be as loyal to Obama as some were to Bush. At least not the ones paying attention. When I saw Obama’s big healthcare speech, it seemed very clear to me that he was pushing and antagonizing his own activist base; he painted those who wanted real, serious reforms as being part of the problem, because they were demanding too much. I don’t recall much discussion about this on post-speech analysis, but over the past few months the Obama administration has been more overt and open about their willingness to play hardball with their base and the more liberal members of the Senate, while coddling and appeasing conservative Democrats who are hardly liked by anyone (though can be a convenient scapegoat). That, combined with the establishment’s derision of liberals who refused to accept the healthcare reform bills as anything other than a massive fraud, makes for a delicate situation. At this point it’s very clear to many dedicated Obama voters that he is more than willing to go against them openly and decisively, and is more concerned about other power bases. I’m not really sure that level of hostility is going to result in a political win.

The 2010 elections will be quite important. Obama’s failing at holding his side together, but his opposition is not in particularly good shape either. It’ll be interesting to see whether voters once again fall back on the ‘lesser evil’, ‘hold my nose’ approach, or if the disappointment at the failed promises of change will be the last straw. What I hope is that people don’t simply leave the political process in despair. The upside to Obama’s election is that he managed to mobilize large groups of young voters who became more concerned with politics and learned to be more vigilant; perhaps this first year is an additional lesson in who to watch out for. I know it’s been that for me.

The year 2009 is the ‘end of the decade’, but if something defines it, it’s the fact that it’s not an ending, or a new beginning. It’s the year that shows people of my age and generation that the 00s were not some aberration. Everything that happened during the 00s, politically, was standard. It just happened more out in the open this time.

The fact is Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress have turned out to be willing  to not only ignore the wants and needs of the people that voted for them, but to openly antagonize them and paint them as enemies unless they conform to whatever legislation Obama and Congress want to pass. It’s a blow to people who came of age in the Bush era and wanted to believe that, for once, they weren’t being lied to. These are the people that grew up in a culture of cynicism and irony, who wanted to lower their shields just for once, who wanted to cast a vote that wasn’t part of a ‘least possible harm’ calculation. They’ve been abused by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress that they put into power.

It’s been encouraging, though, to see that these people, who voted for Obama expecting a competent and honest leader, can see that he is anything but. There were a lot of spirited defenses for Obama during the early parts of the year, but they’ve slowly become less common as liberals and young voters realize they would just be fooling themselves. They’re justifiably outraged, but not always hopeless, or cynical, or defeated. There’s a very real possibility that the movement that grew out of support for Obama can exist without him, and maybe even against him. All good things.

American politics do seem very hopeless, but I think that more and more, people are getting the right idea, which is to simply be honest and true to values. Instead of apologizing for politicians’ calculations, or defending them because ‘they’re better than the alternative’, why not simply say ‘I don’t agree with this’, or ‘I can’t support this’ ? There is such a thing as too much of the big picture, especially when the big picture generally consists of little more than your uninformed speculation about future events.

I liked Obama during the election season and hoped he’d win. Too bad he has turned out to be less than adequate. Better to be honest about it than to enable these low standards.

People like to laugh at ‘dumb Americans and their politics’, but the truth is a vast number of Americans have caught onto these lies quickly enough, at least when compared to my home country. The political situation in Colombia, especially with regards to Venezuela, is actually really interesting in the sense that it’s about as close to a test tube experiment for cognitive dissonance as you could ever hope to be able to run in the real world. We have Alvaro Uribe, a right-leaning President who is keeping himself in power through re-election schemes, and then our neighbor country has Hugo Chavez, a left-leaning President who is keeping himself in power through re-election schemes. If you ever wanted to look at double standards, this is your chance. Colombians somehow manage to simultaneously believe that Alvaro Uribe should be re-elected, for a second time, because well, he’s just that good, and it’s his project that needs to be finished, and we need continunity, and look at all the improvements, and it’s the will of the people, and more reasons. That other guy, though? Chavez? He is making a mockery of governing, he is conning his people, he is a dangerous dictator, he is perpetually in power and damaging democracy, if people want that they should vote for a successor, etc. A similar phenomenon happens in Venezuela.

I’m not really a supporter of either, which I suppose is why I find the situation so amusing and their behavior so evidently similar. Even though the city I live in is not as pro-Uribe as many other parts of the country, it’s still strange to see so much support for a second re-election, when his presidency’s had a truly incredible number of scandals and controversies. The country’s corruption problems show no signs of improvement, and yet if Uribe can manage to be legally re-electable (through dubious means), he’ll handily win, in all likelyhood. I suppose this is what happens when there is such a large political vacuum: the first clever person to notice can fill in for as long as he or she wants.

So what is better? Voting for a guy you like that turns out to be terrible, or not really having anyone to vote for and seeing a really terrible guy remain in power? I won’t know until next year, but right now I wish I’d voted for a worthless liberal that actually won. At least that way you feel like you own the problem.

I liked this answer that David Foster Wallace gave about political writing.

BLVR: You covered John McCain for the 2000 election, and that piece, which was so fresh and honest and unvarnished, was made into a kind of book-on-demand. Do you keep up with politics, and if so, are there plans to do any more political writing? And do you have any comment on why, it seems, there are fewer young novelists around who also comment directly on the political world? Should novelists be offering their opinions on national affairs, politics, our current and future wars?

DFW: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is. Failing that, maybe at least we can help elevate some professional political journalists who are (1) polite, and (2) willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree, and (3) able to countenance the fact that some problems are simply beyond the ability of a single ideology to represent accurately.

Implicit in this brief, shrill answer, though, is obviously the idea that at least some political writing should be Platonically disinterested, should rise above the fray, etc.; and in my own present case this is impossible (and so I am a hypocrite, an ideological opponent could say). In doing the McCain piece you mentioned, I saw some stuff (more accurately: I believe that I saw some stuff) about our current president, his inner circle, and the primary campaign they ran that prompted certain reactions inside me that make it impossible to rise above the fray. I am, at present, partisan. Worse than that: I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can’t seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration. Writing-wise, I think this kind of interior state is dangerous. It is when one feels most strongly, most personally, that it’s most tempting to speak up (“speak out” is the current verb phrase of choice, rhetorically freighted as it is). But it’s also when it’s the least productive, or at any rate it seems that way to me—there are plenty of writers and journalists “speaking out” and writing pieces about oligarchy and neofascism and mendacity and appalling short-sightedness in definitions of “national security” and “national interest,” etc., and very few of these writers seem to me to be generating helpful or powerful pieces, or really even being persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already share the writer’s views.

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.