In 1969 Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band released their magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica. The double album did not sell well at first, but soon became, and remains, the gold standard for the avant-garde, music too weird even for hippies. The album’s influence was and remains immeasurable. A long list of musicians cite Trout Mask Replica as THE chief musical influence of their careers.
The problem is that it stinks. Stinks as much as that carp head on the cover.
Trout Mask, they say, will “grow” on you after about 10 listens. I can attest this is not true. I have polluted my ears with it a lot over the years. It is intentionally dissonant, iconoclastic noise from what are otherwise very talented musicians. I am reminded of a line in the Hobbit about orcs: “They make no beautiful things, but many clever ones…” Instruments of torture being one of many.
So Beefheart, Don Van Vliet, was a kind of orc, a talented Uruk. He never met a harmony he didn’t want to kill, or at least maim and watch slowly die. But clever he was, working his musicians into slavish stupors to perfect his vision. His quest for absolute control, not just creative control, drove several iterations of the band to quit him. Ry Cooder was one of the first to leave. One member said the situation was “Mansonesque.” They lived communally and practiced daily for months, filthy, sometimes starving and suffering Vliet’s daily abuse. They were once arrested for shop lifting food. Frank Zappa bailed them out.
Van Vliet’s virtue failed. His consuming artistic vision drove his will to power. He chose tyranny. As with all tyrants, he could not have done it without the compliance of his subjects and their own selfish desire for success.
Van Vliet was an artistic prodigy and didn’t mind letting everyone know that he was. We cannot doubt his talent. His band quickly mastered a repertoire of delta blues. Van Vliet assumed the vocal persona of Howlin Wolf. Their early music was tolerable, but sold poorly. So he moved onto iconoclasm. His music still didn’t sell well, but he did garner respect and manage to influence generations of more conventional and, importantly, more sensible, artists (namely, Tom Waits). They were careful not to make the same mistakes Beefheart did.
Like Beefheart, Anthony Fauci is also a clever man, who has done many clever things. He does not make “beautiful” things as such. We cannot deny that his intellect and service over the years has saved lives and benefited thousands. Like Saruman the White, he at first served among the wizards (of medicine). But Anthony Fauci gazed into the palantir and ended his career serving the white hand of The Science (meaning himself). The metaphor is appropriate.
Fauci, like Beefheart, was a prodigy in his own way, joining the National Institutes of Health about the same time as Trout Mask Replica was being recorded. He worked until 1980 when he became Chief of Immunoregulation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a move perfectly timed with the rise of HIV in the United States. Fauci’s work there was too slow for some AIDS activists and, for a time, he was the main target of their ire. His painstaking work eventually won them over however, and he was later hailed as hero. He was also known to be skeptical about a looming "heterosexual epidemic” of AIDS (which never materialized) and was not a “hysteria-monger.”
Had he been an AIDS hysteria-monger, he would likely have gone nowhere with the effort. There was no power to be gained in those days with HIV. AIDS was a slow-burn. Frightful, but slow.
Not so with COVID. I surmise Fauci had long dreamed of the day when Science could finally step into the Policy Arena unchallenged, the audience near hysteria, in anxiety and quiescence, open to influence by its betters, open to a savior of rationality. Technocracy unchained.
Here his virtue failed. When COVID arrived, Anthony Fauci had worked for the NIH for 52 years and was the highest paid employee in the Federal government. No one who stays on the job that long is in it just for the money or the perks. It’s personal.
Thus, when tempted by power, the power to move a nation, he chose NOT to defend the pursuit of truth, Instead he defended “The Science.” His pride triumphed over honesty, loyalty and humility. In so doing, his music became dissonant to the common ear.
While I see a failure of virtue, Faucian acolytes see merely a failure of discretion: he was too public, too exposed. The problem was one of messaging, of “out-reach” to the unreasonable, the ignorant and the vulgar. Condescension, like halitosis, is not apparent to those who have it. They have been smelling themselves for years.
Below is a link to some very awkward and embarrassing footage of Dr. Fauci trying to connect with the common folks.
A crucial distinction: “The Science” is not the scientific method: inductive or abductive (common in astronomy and geology) reasoning are practiced by myriad back-biting professional and academic dweebs who pick apart each other’s work and somehow add value in fits and starts.
In contrast, “The Science” is not deliberative and it suffers no debate. The Science, demands loyalty, complicity, willful silence and even lying. The Science demands “we all get our story straight.” The Science is an ideology, a pride, a creed. Fauci may have even tried to influence the CIA to cover-up the likelihood of a lab leak, which is to say he took a stand against us, the people he swore to protect. The CIA may have obliged him.
Anthony Fauci is gone now, but do not think that the Uruks he spawned didn’t notice his missteps. The young men and women in the NIH and other organizations who believe in “The Science”, who are filled with a seething bewilderment against non-believers, will be much more careful, their message more subtle.
These yet-to-be known young-ins are now early to mid-career, three to four levels down from Fauci’s throne. Some slick ones will come from private industry as well. All of them will be competent, sensible and managerial. They will be publicly diplomatic and privately diabolic. They will be saving us from us without telling us.
They will be masked replicas, refining Fauci’s dissonant music into a smooth but insidious beat, stamping, stamping, stamping the White Hand on our faces.
Whom do you serve? Quo Vadis?
Man the Towers, keep a watch ever Eastward, and pray.
PS: Human beings usually succumb to the temptation of power, crave authority to alter events, to sit before great adulation. Fauci wasn’t the exception, he was the rule. For details of the COVID era, I recommend
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This might be the best analogy I've ever read. (Also, I remember when I first saw that video. . . oh so cringe).