A Series of Unusual Connections

Two things happened in the past week that drew attention some attention.  One was serious and terrible, the other was not important to the point of making me wonder why anyone was even paying attention.
Let's start with the stupid thing: Kanye West made a face and refused to shake Beck's hand when Beck's album won a Grammy for album of the year.  Kanye West is narcissistic to such an extent that his whole persona becomes a sort satirical, maybe even prophetic, statement about our own self importance.  Kanye is angry and petulant and never misses a chance to make everything about him.  Some say he's a genius, others say he's a boil on the posterior of society, and perhaps they're both correct in some form.  I don't really know, my involvement with hip hop and rap pretty much died when Ice Cube, Mr. Straight Outta Compton, started acting in kids movies.  I just don't know any more.  That said, I do know something about Beck, Beck is about my age, his career is now approaching venerable status.  His first really significant hit was a song called "Loser," and he has spent his career impressing music critics, if not necessarily mass audiences.  Beck is a total nerd, seriously, check this out:

That's Beck.  That's the 40 something father and dorky musician type that Kanye chose to snub.  I'm pretty sure Beck is used to being ignored and insulted by guys like Kanye, I'm pretty sure he's not crying over his Grammy right now because Kanye left him hanging.  The point is that Kanye looked like a complete tool for trying to go all hard on a person like Beck, whose career has contained enough self deprecating humor to make Kanye want to look up what self deprecating means.  If you're going to try and humiliate someone whose first major hit proclaimed that he was a Loser (in two languages no less), you're probably scowling up the wrong tree.

The general reaction to Kanye seems to be that he's becoming irrelevant, which is actually one thing that an artist like Kanye absolutely cannot afford to be.  If his antics become so predictable that the public just yawns and chuckles, he's absolutely becoming a man without a country.  If we're not shocked and offended, and we just think he's being a prig, he's lost all his edge and he's really good for nothing except being married to a Kardashian (and we know how that usually goes right?)

Now for the serious business: ISIS.  They burned a Jordanian pilot to death and put out a video of it.  Add it to a long list of atrocities that those clowns have committed since they first showed up.  It's really no worse than beheading journalists and committing mass torture and rape and generally being about as nasty as their imaginations will allow and then pretending like they're doing it all for Allah.  They're absolute scum, we have known that for a while.  The interesting thing is that in picking a Jordanian for their latest atrocity, they may have actually done the same thing that Kanye did; which is make people who might otherwise give him the benefit of the doubt (i.e. anti-western Arab Muslims) think that they're a bunch of jerks.  See Jordan is an Arab nation, a Muslim nation, but in the world of the middle east they're also one of the very few good guys.  Jordan is governed by a stable and generally benevolent monarch, King Abdullah II, here he is with the Queen of Jordan (who is rather well known for her humanitarian work):

Notice that they look pretty Western, and they are pretty well respected in the international community.  Jordan is generally a country that shelters refugees from Iraq and Syria and even Israel at times.  They are known for being moderate and helping out where they can.  In other words, especially in the screwy world of the Middle East, they're good people.  But they're not patsies, and they're probably not going to just sit there for the outrage, but they've got skin in the game, and they're the people who need to confront the situation, they're exactly the ones who can really work towards an end to this mess.

ISIS picking a fight with Jordan is like Kanye picking on Beck, it just seems wrong to pretty much anyone who isn't a complete psychopath.  But I have come to suspect that this is actually the way that the war against extremism is going to be won: we have to let them hang themselves.  We can't play the policeman of the world for very much longer, in fact, we probably should have stopped a while ago.  And this isn't one of my pleas for non-violence, because if anyone ever deserved a violent end, it's ISIS and Boko Haram, it's just that I think the reaction has to come from the collective outrage of humanity, not just from anything that can be explained away by the haters as American self interest.

This is just the sort of thing that will turn the tide.  As long as we play the role they expect us to play, extremists will win, they will be martyrs, and they will draw others to their cause.

Let's make them irrelevant instead.