• Anathallo/Canopy Glow: Fans of Sufjan Stevens will enjoy this record. Layered orchestral instruments, unusual song structures, girl/guy harmonies. I’ve been really taken by the percussion on this record. The lyrics, however, are pretty silly–thankfully, it’s pretty tough to make them out.
• Black Keys/Attack and Release: Another great blues-rock record from my city’s biggest band.
• Bon Iver/For Emma, Forever Ago: Maybe my favorite record this year. I caught these guys live at the Grog Shop in Cleveland and was very impressed. I love the layered vocals (except when they get too whiny), the acoustic experimenation, and pulse that runs through these songs.
• Horse Feathers/House With No Home: Folkier, but in the same general vein as Bon Iver.
• Kate Rusby/Girl Who Couldn’t Fly: I listened to this record a lot early in the year. Traditional English/Irish folk tunes, sung beautifully.
• French Kicks/Swimming: This is good indie rock.
• Anything by Low: I’ve been listening to this band for years, but somehow they got under my skin in a new way this year. Slowly creeping their way into my favorite bands of all-time.
• Ra Ra Riot/The Rhumb Line: Poppy, fun, strings.
• The Walkmen/You & Me: These guys aren’t for everyone, but they hit a sweet spot for me. They’ve bottled the beer-soaked reverb that spills out the open entrances of grimy dives on summer nights. Every song is drenched in it. Now that I read that over, it doesn’t sound pleasant. But I like it.
• The Long Winters/Putting the Days to Bed: At first, this disc didn’t grab me at all, but I threw it on my iPod and kept it there. Then, on a very long flight back from Germany, they were exactly what I needed to hear. Have enjoyed this record since.
• Shearwater/Palo Santo -and- Rook: Both these records are pretty good. I think I enjoy Palo Santo a bit more. Sometimes overwrought, but when they get it right, they really get it right.
• Dr. Dog/Fate: Left this one off of the list originally. This was a great record–really fun, and a few of the tracks are strong lyrically. If you’re not familiar with Dr. Dog, they’re throwback lo-fi, roughly in the same vein as M. Ward, though a bit more ramshackle. A lot of Beatles influences in their tracks.

The primary motivating factor in the development of the religious right is a defensive response to the challenges posed by the power of popular consumer and entertainment culture and not a backlash against progressive or liberal ideas and social movements.

And he provides the obvious example:

Religious fundamentalism is revolutionary because it represents the only movement in American public life openly critical of American culture and society.

If the latter point seems strange to some, I would advise them to listen to an hour’s worth of programming from Dr. James Dobson’s daily broadcast on Christian radio. He is perhaps the most influential voice of the religious right on the broadcast medium. During that time, you will hear far greater criticism of American society and Americans on subjects such as greed, materialism, alienation caused by rampant individualism and the lack of supportive communities than you will hear on the purportedly liberal airways of Air America’s Radio Programs.

Bageant goes on to explain why the religion of pop culture is destined to triumph over fundamentalism,  because it demands so little from us, keeps us so distracted, and is largely disconnected from ground-floor reality. Obviously, this analysis will bring to mind the utter chaos surrounding our current economic crisis. If the credit crunch isn’t a mass crisis of belief–belief that our bank accounts will keep expanding, that our luck will never run out, that we will never have to actually curtail our consumption–then what is it?

Make sure and read Bageant’s entire essay.

Myers observes–with particular poignancy to our current election–that in the early years of this country, the Americans thinking deeply about the nature of governance and legislation were also the ones governing and legislating. In the last hundred years, the particular tasks of politics (and really, the particular tasks that make up all our lives) have been atomized into distinct specializations performed by experts, so that many politicians spend careers focused on the specializations of campaigning and legislating without dealing with  communities as a whole.

The philosophy of specialization and the metaphor of the machine have brought a similar fragmentation to every corner of our lives; our daily jobs, families, and our selves.

I cringed when McCain said he wanted to “defeat” evil, but its worth noting he immediately talked about hunting down bin Laden and winning the War on Terror. I think both formulations are wrong in their own way (I don’t much care about bin Laden, and I think the phrase “War on Terror” is stupid), but he wasn’t literally talking about the removal of evil from the world in a metaphysical sense. In fact, he was responding to Rick Warren’s formulation of picking between “ignoring, negotiating with, containing, or defeating” evil — I would have chosen “contain,” but isn’t nuance lost in most multiple choice settings?

If you’re going to compare cringe-worthy quotes from the debate, though, Obama’s “above my pay grade” comment regarding giving human rights to babies made me wince far more. Gene Veith discusses that one here.