Karen Savoca and Pete Heitzman have a great song entitled “You Just Don’t Get It” and that’s my theme today and this piece comes in three courses. The appetizer is the investigation into the Wilson/Plame affair in Washington. For a main course, there’s the selling of music online. And, finally, for dessert, we have the average American voter as described on the BBC. None of them get it.
First, in Washington, the indictment of Scooter Libby brings with it disappointment in the short term and the expectation of bigger things. The initial disappointment goes something like this: “Is that all they’ve got?” But I think that the short term matters a lot less than what is coming. Before anyone gets excited, let’s all remember the fact that nothing is going to truly bring this White House down. We’re stuck with them. There was a sufficient number of idiots pulling the levers in 2004. Face it, get used to it, get over it, they’re in charge. The bigger picture is that their legacy is being blunted already.
The policies of bullying, contempt for all other opinions and beliefs, and a disregard for facts are going to fade. This administration has a few years left to it, but people are no longer staying quiet. Fewer and fewer are believing the nonsense that was so easily swallowed a few short years ago. The Libby indictment is an annoyance for the Bush Administration, not the death knell, but it is another small step toward rebuilding America as a country in which to believe.
The current administration doesn’t get it. The tide is turning and they don’t see, feel, or understand it. The war was a tremendous mistake and they are personally responsible for the deaths of over two thousand Americans and likely thirty-five thousand Iraqis. They don’t get it. But we’re starting to.
I’m struggling with a segue here, so I’ll give up the effort and just barge into thinking about businesses, especially the music publishing business. Yahoo! is raising the price of online music. This makes perfect sense in a corporate mindset. Record companies are losing money so they are going to skip burning the compact discs and leave that to consumers who download the music. Further, they aren’t going to bother packaging the album art. And finally, they aren’t going to have to pay more than a couple pennies for shipping the music out to the consumer. And since they aren’t really doing anything, they should be paid more for it.
I have purchased three compact discs this year. Three. As a kid, it was normal for me to buy three albums a week. I bought those three discs for two reasons. The first was a disc I wanted with the liner notes and the artwork, mostly because I’ve been listening to it for nearly twenty-five years. The other two discs were new and from a band I really respect. That said, I shouldn’t have bought any of them. I should have gotten on bittorrent and found them. In short, I should have stolen them.
Here’s why: the record companies don’t get it. They don’t get that we are entitled to some service for the money we pay them. They don’t get that raising the price, lowering the service, and flipping their customers off will push most of us out of buying music. They don’t get that even when we do buy music, we copy it for our friends and post it on the web when we can. They don’t get that we donate the discs to our libraries when we have burned them to our computers. They don’t get that we will do anything to circumvent their stealing from us even if it means we have to steal from them.
What a bunch of idiots.
That said, I buy every disc that Karen Savoca and Pete Heitzman make. You should too. The money goes to them and not some suit at Sony, Yahoo! or Apple.
Finally, there’s the case of the American voter as interviewed by the BBC. I wish that I had a link for this one. The BBC interviewed a voter from Ohio who is having a bit of buyer’s remorse, this even before the indictment of Libby. Turns out that George Bush kind of ran up the debt. Oh, and there’s that war in Iraq. Turns out that was based on some bad information and there’s even a chance that some folks might have lied. Seems too that the Bush Administration missed the fact that people were dying in the New Orleans Convention Center a few weeks back. And on and on.
The guy could have worked for a music company. He was that dumb.
If the people of this country don’t get it by now that this administration is a group of elitists who hate anyone outside their tax bracket, church group, and ethnic background, then all hope is lost.
They just don’t get it. Here’s hoping that the rest of us do and that we outnumber these fools, cheats, and liars.
