Test Candidates on Their Love for Music

I’m not being serious about testing candidates for their love of music. That love is a proxy for their love of people in general. It does raise a question: Do sociopaths love music deeply? Do they love forms of human expression like music? To do that, they’d have to respect human beings but they don’t. Sociopaths are good at feigning sociability, so elections present a real problem. How could we possibly evaluate Hillary Clinton on this criterion. She says of the music she likes “So everything I grew up with – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Doors. I mean, all of that, plus I like classical music because I find it relaxing when I’m thinking about stressful things.” All right, here’s my opinion. She doesn’t really express love here. A music fan might have said something quite different or been more enthusiastic. She sounds as if she’s reaching into a memory bank to come up with an answer for a question she didn’t expect. Her feeling doesn’t come through here.

This non-serious suggestion comes from the following words spoken by Louis Armstrong in the context of his music which is jazz: “If it’s left to people that’s peaceful with music, there wouldn’t be no wars. Wouldn’t be none. It [war] comes from people that probably don’t care so much about jazz…”

As some of you may recall, I’m a fervent jazz fan (and former trumpet player myself), and I used to celebrate the music in this blog. There were those who couldn’t understand the connection between anti-war and jazz. Satchmo nails it.

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10:49 am on August 9, 2014