It’s no stranger to you and me

Here is your open thread for January 30, 2020.

Today is Phil Collins’ 69th birthday. Nice.

(The cool drum bit happens around the 3:15 mark in that video if you just want to skip to that.)

If you don’t remember the 1980s, it’d be easy to underestimate how huge Phil Collins was or for how long. He was everywhere — all over the pop charts as a solo artist and with Genesis, sitting in on drums with Zeppelin and the Who, guest-starring on Miami Vice, zipping across the Atlantic on the Concorde to play Live Aid on two continents.

Collins was so omnipresent that a bit of a backlash was probably inevitable. (See the long section of his Wikipedia page devoted to the Everybody Hates Phil Collins consensus that rose up in the ’90s.) Partly I think those of us who wanted to be cool felt we had to take Peter Gabriel’s side in the whole Genesis divorce. I remember hearing that Collins-led, post-Gabriel Genesis had “sold out” and “gone pop.” Even if they did, take a moment to appreciate that nothing about doing that would have been easy or automatic. (“Hey, guys, new plan: We’re gonna write a bunch of chart-topping songs that will have broad appeal to millions of people, sell a ton of records, and sell-out big arenas.”) And then take another moment to decide whether Top 40 pop really is less cool than prog rock.

Part of that backlash too, I think, had to do with the fact that Collins wasn’t a larger-than-life rock star. How dare some short, balding guy try to substitute for John Bonham and Keith Moon without having the decency to provide us with the catharsis of watching him destroy himself with drug abuse and alcoholism?

I’ll admit that I liked Phil Collins back in the ’80s when everyone liked Phil Collins, and that I pretended to hate him in the ’90s when everyone else was doing that too. Neither one of those made me any cooler. (Also, uncoolly, I didn’t resent him for not being Peter Gabriel — I resented him for not being Menken & Ashman. Tarzan was no Aladdin.)

I hereby grant you permission to form your own opinions about Phil Collins: fandom, hatred, indifference, whatever you like.

As for me, my favorite Phil Collins performance these days is probably his odd, kind appearance on This American Life, when Starlee Kine calls on him to help her write a break-up song and he mostly, instead, just tries to help her get through her break up.

The Lower Trenton Bridge opened on January 30, 1906 in my mother’s hometown. The iconic “Trenton Makes The World Takes” lettering was added in 1935, and has gradually acquired its bitterly ironic meaning ever since.

January 30 is the birthday of Edward Bransfield, the Irish sea captain who may have been the first person to see Antarctica. Almost every other purported “discovery” of some “new” land is bogus — ignoring the people already living there. But in the case of Bransfield and Antarctica, “discovery” is, for once, appropriate.

Academy Award nominee Christian Bale and Academy Award winner Olivia Colman were both born on January 30, 1974 (on opposite sides of the island). I would be happy to purchase a ticket to a movie starring Christian Bale and Olivia Colman. It could be about almost anything.

Authors Barbara Tuchman and Francis Schaeffer were both born on January 30, 1912. If you’re at all interested in pondering the question “How Shall We Then Live?” then I heartily recommend reading Tuchman, and avoiding Schaeffer. I’ve written quite a bit about Schaeffer and his pernicious legacy here, see, for example:

• “Killing in the name of”
• “Richard John Neuhaus did not think dominionism was a myth”
• “‘They’re evil humans. They are butchering children for a living’”
• “‘The Lady Vanishes’: Growing up anti-abortion”

Today is the birthday of great American Franklin D. Roosevelt, a president who made enormous progress toward making this nation a more perfect union. And it is the birthday of great American Fred Korematsu, who resisted the greatest moral failure and failure of leadership of FDR’s presidency.

On Fred Korematsu Day, let’s revisit a famous passage from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent in Korematsu v. United States:

Once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.

Talk amongst yourselves.