| Subject: My Last Two Cents |
Author:
Tyler
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Date Posted: 20:29:57 08/27/05 Sat
In reply to:
DSO Sound Guy
's message, "On Reviews, Positive & Negative - From A Hippie" on 12:00:33 08/27/05 Sat
Epilogue.
To paraphrase 007 in Goldfinger, like a blow torch through bullshit. A very balanced, fair look by Cam, but simply way off-the-mark, in my limited view, regarding what actually went on in review space, with the exception of his very valid comments on censorship. (Sorry, Cam. I personally appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts, with which I totally agree on their face. I just don't see how they apply here, at least from my own ringside seat.)
Cam is 100% right if you agree with the premise that this can be reduced to or re-cast as a matter of differing opinions and whether we are open of mind to dissent and willing to learn from criticisms. If things happened the way I am guessing Cam surmised, eliciting his thoughtful comments, I would have never joined in the fray and would share his admonitions about ignoring or stomping out well-formed critiques, no matter how harsh or seemingly unfair. But they didn't happen that way.
To try to clarify, it is one thing to be constructively critical, to dissent rabidly, to sharpshoot from the bleachers, and even to do so after less than an hour of exposure to what you are ripping.
It is one thing to say DSO sounds like shit and disgrace the music and everything the Dead ever stood for.
It is one thing to say that only the Grateful Dead have the divine right to perform the music a certain way.
It is one thing to lambaste the quality of DSO's musicianship and totally discount their artistic and existential validity.
It is one thing to simply loathe DSO and everything/one associated with it.
It is even one thing to publicly and definitively state your piece by airing such gripes to DSO and their fans in the crudest manner.
However, it is another thing, a wholly different category of conduct, to air one's roiling angst over DSO by coming to the table of discussion with nothing but largely vicious and very acidic personalized comments about DSO�s members and those who enjoy what they do. Words that, by any reasonable judgment, far cross the boundary between considered opinion and mean-spirited, patently offensive ad hominen assaults. (Of the 1000's of words decrying DSO that I carefully read through, before commenting, I believe there is not a ONE that touches on DSO's merits as musicians or the quality of their sound�it�s all either big picture dismissals or personal cruelty).
It is also another thing to repeatedly meet even the most thoughtful, considerate attempts at empathy (like Shad�s) with unyielding dismissals, not of the subject matter or the argument but of the person (as lost, bamboozled, misled, 'fools' etc).
It is another to seek out people about whom you really know little, if anything, and greet them with utterly patronizing disdain, irredeemable contempt and then expect them to patiently 'hear you out', ad nauseam.
It is another to feign surprise and offense when you get a strong response in kind, only to keep deflecting it with increasingly outlandish and profane insults towards DSO (and eventually even members of the Grateful Dead) in a spiraling race to the bottom.
It is another to incessantly barrage a heretofore peaceful community of minds with angry, hypocritical blustering so repetitious and self-contradictory as to literally exhaust any hope for a rational conclusion.
It is another to repeatedly posit self-congratulatory wisdoms and self-serving platitudes, not meant to enlighten, educate, or uplift others, but to tauntingly deny them even the possibility of ever sharing in them.
Knowing the good-hearted people in the DSO community I have no doubt that most tried to walk in this confused visitor�s shoes, if only in a purely intuitive moment. What they found was not a good faith or even bad faith difference of opinion but the perplexing void a good-hearted person feels when trying to make sense of pure malice. It was not intolerance for his opinions that made the peaceful ferocious, but his unyielding malevolence and unacceptably base conduct from square one.
I confess to indulging in several harsh responses towards our confused visitor. Some I regret, not because they were ever intolerant of a different opinion, but because I failed to rise above the enmity.
Others I stand by, not because I believe in retribution or taking an eye for an eye, which only appeases anger and leaves the other blind, but because I hope empathy may be discovered when the preacher�s prayer befalls him and the doctor tastes his own bitter medicine. If you are rightly thinking, �who are you to make such judgments? what gives you the right?�, I can only say, right or wrong, that I am ready to accept any prayer I preach and 100% prepared to taste my own medicine.
Cam is right that if DSO (or even their fans) can't stand the heat, they should make for the living room. But there is heat and there is fire. This guy brought fire. This guy�s heat only consumed, and we let it. We even stoked it. Hopefully never again.
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