Good vs Evil

This topic comes back to my mind time and time again. Are people basically good or basically evil? Are they the aggregate of their behavior? Can they change their nature?
Clearly "good" people are not perfect. They make mistakes. Some are "honest" mistakes, but some are not - selfishness, lying, etc. They try to do the best they can and, being human, fail from time to time; but not from lack of effort.Also, "evil" people sometimes do good.

Sometimes it's because, momentarily, it's in their best interests to do so. Sometimes it's a rare moment of goodness. Back during Nazi Germany, Himmler gave one high ranking SS general a sword for his birthday. The general, stunned by this act, took it upon himself to discover the factory which made the sword, and ordered an even more ornate and luxurious one to present to Himmler on HIS birthday. These are the men responsible for the Final Solution and the Holocaust, outdoing each other on birthday presents (!).

This context provides other examples of "good" and "evil". While many of the SS and police men the Germans assigned to Einsatzgruppen (the units which took Jews out to the forest to shoot them down) were outright sadists or indifferently accepted this duty as "just doing their job", many others had serious moral problems with it. Some even went insane and shot themselves. Recognizing that these jobs were... unpleasant...the SS freely allowed men to transfer to other jobs. So even within the SS at least some of its personnel could recognize evil when they saw it and refuse to participate in it.

On the other side are local civilians and German Army personnel who not only cooperated with the Nazis efforts to weed out and exterminate local Jewish populations, they enthusiastically volunteered. In Poland, Ukraine, and Romania, local civilians sometimes mistreated and even killed some of the Jews before the SS even got their hands on them. Clearly, the Nazis had no monopoly on evil. I won't even get into Nanking, where the Japanese even took pictures of themselves raping Chinese women or bayonetting prisoners as sport, to the point where a Nazi businessman, John Rabe, complained to Hitler and the Japanese about this.

The story of Faust has been told dozens of times, and resurrected in various forms. Professor Faust makes a pact with Mephistopholes, the devil, whereby he gets renewed youth and vigor and almost unlimited power for 24 years, after which time the devil claims his soul. But throughout that time, and all the adventures he has with the devil at his side, he uses these powers of evil for good. His last act, before the 24 year period expires, is to have the devil save an elderly couple whose house, located on Faust's property, went up into flames. The power of evil, used for good. This alone prompts God to rescue Faust's soul from Hell and breaks the pact he had with the devil.

Do the evil perceive themselves as evil? Another complex question. One rationalization is that "everyone does it". It's a slippery slope: to the extent no one is perfect, and even so-called "good people" occasionally lapse into selfishness, everyone is evil; some are more honest about it than others, and those who claim to be good are nothing more than arrogant hypocrites. But it only takes a moment of thinking to dispel this. Clearly there are those who lie, cheat, steal and kill without any reluctance or remorse whatsoever; not as a "last resort", not "compelled by unique circumstances", but as easily as they walk, talk, eat, sleep or breathe. I know several people who lie without hesitation about anything. Maybe no one can claim to never have lied in their lives, but that doesn't mean they're not honest in their dealings and even tell the truth when it hurts their own interests. At some level, the evil do recognize that others do not act they way they do, and there is some definite moral distinction. But rather than admit to themselves, much less to others, their own evil, they prefer to rationalize it away and continue with their business of lies, deceit and evil. To them, the "good" are simply those too stupid to lie effectively, too lazy, too weak or just plain not ambitious or competent enough to assert their will over others. I'm not sure how this translates into modern times.


Can evil people change? I hate to quote religious sources, but three examples jump out. First is St Paul, formerly Saul. He started out persecuting Christians to the death, but experienced a dramatic vision on the road to Damascus and converted. St. Augustine had a similar conversion; he previously lived a wild and debauched life until his mother and Bishop Ambrose of Milan helped him to convert. Finally, there is the famous parable of the prodigal son, who spent his inheritance on gambling and whores, returned home a wretched beggar, but sincere in his remorse, and was welcomed home by his father. 

In fact, a remarkable take on this is "My Name is Earl", a new TV show with Jason Lee, who is a frequent actor in many of the Kevin Smith films and the main role in "Mallrats". Earl is a redneck who leads a fairly decrepit lifestyle, lying, cheating, stealing, basically a bad person. Finally he gets hit by a car and figures that this major injury was well-deserved. He decides, from that point on, to turn his life around and only do good things. He makes a "list" of all the nasty, evil, dishonest things he's done over his entire life (the list is very long and can probably string the series over several seasons) and sets out to correct each and every evil deed, one by one. He invokes "karma", which he describes as "if I do good things, good things will happen to me." It's not completely selfless, as his motivation is to have a good life, not merely to do good for the sake of doing so. But he does recognize that certain things are "wrong" and that he shouldn't do them even if others around him are doing it.
More things to think about.

Beatles vs. KISS

Yet again, a concert provides inspiration for a blog entry, in this case the Paul Stanley concert at the Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore last night. Paul Stanley is the rhythm guitarist/singer for KISS, and is touring for a solo album, using the house band of the "Supernova" TV show as his backup band. This particular comparison may evoke protests from Liverpool or Detroit/NYC, but I’ve long noticed that the two bands share some amazing similiarities.

 Both bands feature 4 guys from the lower rungs of society in large cities: the Beatles from Liverpool and KISS from New York City.

 They both have the same format: rhythm guitarist/singer/songwriter (John Lennon/Paul Stanley), bassist/singer/songwriter (Paul McCartney/Gene Simmons), lead guitarist (George Harrison/Ace Frehley), and drummer (Ringo Starr/Peter Criss). In each band the rhythm guitarist & bassist share the majority of the songwriting and talent (Lennon-McCartney & Simmons-Stanley), but the lead guitarist and drummer also sing and contribute musically, albeit far less than the other two. George Harrison and Ace Frehley both contributed about 25% of the material, and Ringo Starr and Peter Criss managed to sneak in about 10%. A major difference is that Harrison and Starr were talented and hardworking, and actually resented not having more input, whereas Frehley and Criss – if Simmons and Stanley are accurate – were content to do the minimum amount of work and mooch off the other two.

 The Beatles and KISS also started out with a gimmick: in the Beatles’ case it was the matching outfits, which they continued wearing through 1966 on stage. Combined with the haircuts and boots, this set them off from most other bands and established the precedent for the rest of the so-called British Invasion bands, including the Rolling Stones. In KISS’ case, it was the makeup and elaborate stage costumes, which they continued wearing until the 80s, after Ace Frehley and Peter Criss had left the band.

Among the core pair, there were also the "outspoken, I don't care who I piss off" John Lennon and Gene Simmons, and the "someone has to be polite and diplomatic" Pauls, Stanley and McCartney.  

 Of course, there are major differences. The largest one is the talent and development. Anyone can tell the difference between Please Please Me and Abbey Road. There is far less perceptible difference between the debut KISS album and Dynasty or Unmasked. Even in the 80s with Bruce Kulick, the formula never changed that much – why mess with what works...with the obvious exception of taking off the makeup, of course. The Beatles started off trying to be commercially successful, but around Revolver and Sgt Pepper they decided to make art and music for its own sake, rather than sell millions of albums or tour around the world. It certainly didn’t hurt, though, that this material was actually light years better than the earlier work and actually became the vanguard for popular music throughout the late 60s. KISS was, from day one until today, primarily dedicated to making money for the band, whether through selling albums, touring, or merchandising, which Gene Simmons has never been shy about admitting. They have no pretenses about being artists, poets, or anything more than musicians and showmen who give the audience its money’s worth. Whereas the Beatles quit touring in 1966 to focus on making albums, much of which involved elaborate studio innovations unreproducable on stage, KISS prided themselves on being a live band, and indeed the album ALIVE! put them on the map when the three studio albums they had at that point had flopped commercially. Clearly the Beatles were versatile and competent musicians, but even drunk-miss-the-plane Ace Frehley runs rings around George Harrison.

 Yet compare Sgt Pepper – a ground-breaking album – with any of KISS’ work. We get the Spinal Tap moment in the 80s when KISS unveiled their concept album, Music From The Elder, to a stunned record company. Sure, they had Bob "Destroyer" Ezrin helping, but what did they expect – KISS: The Wall? The band, with Ezrin, were proud, "look at it! listen to it!" and the record company was, "What the f**k????" Maybe you should stick with what you know..."Love Gun", "Lick it Up", "Uhh! All Night". Sure enough, they got the point.

 Other bands commonly compared to the Beatles are the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys. The Stones, though, only have one singer, Mick Jagger, and are essentially a rock band, nothing more. Granted, they were in direct competition with the Beatles and even tried to emulate them to some extent, but never changed their basic nature over all these years. The Beach Boys are a closer relative. More of the band members sing, they had the matching outfits thing, but most importantly, with Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson they had a real song-writing focus and a very real competition with the Beatles. Sgt Pepper was a response to Pet Sounds, which itself was a response to Rubber Soul. Brian Wilson stopped touring to make albums, but his nervous breakdown after Pet Sounds made his artistic contribution much less than it should have been; who knows what might have happened if Smile materialized instead of Smiley Smile. The rest of the band had to step into his shoes, and their late 60s work bears the same resemblence (??) to the early 60s material as the Beatles’ does. All the same, nothing KISS did compares in quality or impact with Pet Sounds, though again, they never pretended or attempted to be "songwriters" or artists in the same sense as the Beatles or Beach Boys.

 Finally, an exhaustive comparison of the Beatles with other bands wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Pink Floyd. Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd recorded Piper at the Gates of Dawn at Abbey Road Studios...across the hall and at the same time the Beatles were recording Sgt Pepper. After a few heavy psychedelic albums, Waters took over and Floyd began making monumental albums, notably Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall (the latter produced by... Bob Ezrin!). But Pink Floyd, unlike the Beatles, never shied away from touring despite being heavily active in the studio: when recording, as much as they tried to innovate and push the envelope, they avoided doing anything they could not reproduce on stage. In fact, with their quadraphonic sound set up (with speakers set up in the back of the concert hall) Floyd have more in common with the Grateful Dead – sharing the distinction of being the house band at the London Underground acid parties as the Dead were for Ken Kesey’s California "Acid Tests" – factoring in the Beatles’ major contribution to 1967’s social and musical revolution... Sgt Pepper! So it all gets mixed up in one big mutually influencial stew, a psychedelic melting pot of electric Kool-Aid. One last nugget: Paul McCartney’s longtime girlfriend, Jane Asher, married Gerald Scarfe, the animator for Pink Floyd: The Wall.

Tesla Returns

I first learned about Tesla through an unlikely source: a five-piece metal band from Sacramento, California, by the same name, who burst into the public spotlight in 1987 with their first album (and still their best), Mechanical Resonance. We saw them open up for Def Leppard that spring, and then much later in May 2004 when they reunited after a long break. Sure enough, the band was very much into the Serbian-American inventor; he figures in album names (The Great Radio Controversy, Psychotic Supper), and has center stage, so to speak, in their song "Edison’s Medicine".

 Nikola Tesla was born in July 1856 in Croatia, at the time part of Austria-Hungary. He moved to the US in 1884, became naturalized in 1891, and lived in the US ever since, dying destitute and alone in New York City in 1942. He started out working for Thomas Edison, but quickly broke apart from him and developed an intense rivalry with the American inventor. The main point of this was Tesla’s adherence to alternating current (AC), which he and Westinghouse supported, vs. direct current (DC), which Edison championed. The electric chair was developed by Edison as a publicity stunt to show how dangerous AC was. In addition to a wide variety of inventions and work in electrical engineering, Tesla is the de facto (and, by US Supreme Court decision in 1943, de jure) father of radio. He was somewhat of a maverick and fell out of public attention and favor for much of the rest of his life; he was written off as a "mad scientist", working on a "death ray" and various other revolutionary inventions, some of which may have been nothing more than dead ends, others being too far ahead of their time. Tesla is certainly one of the more intriguing scientists of the modern era.

 A more recent spotlight on Tesla comes from the new film, "The Prestige", featuring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as competing magicians, Michael Caine as their mentor, Scarlett Johanssen as their mutual love interest, and David Bowie as Tesla himself. Jackman’s character ventures to Colorado Springs, and discovers that Tesla has managed to electrify not only the local hotel, but also the entire town. His assistant demonstrates wireless transmission of electricity, and Tesla ultimately builds an extraordinary machine for Jackman to use in his magic show.