Karma and Getting it Right

Twelve hours out of Mackinaw City stopped in a bar to have a brew
Met a girl and we had a few drinks and I told her what I'd decided to do
She looked out the window a long long moment then she looked into my eyes
She didn't have to say a thing, I knew what she was thinkin'

I was never prone to supporting panhandlers. But I have fairly routinely bought copies of "Real Change," the newsletter proffered by street folks downtown ($1: they might make 65c per sale). Occasionally more than one copy.

I awoke last night with the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered

But I find I am reaching into my pocket a lot more frequently these days. At times even, when I can get a little outside of my narcissism, watching and preparing for the opportunity. Those prior excuses (this isn't going for food, your aggressiveness offends me, don't encourage them, I was burned by a fake bus-ticket story before, etc.) somehow have grown lame when it comes to the concept of folks despairing enough to ask for help. For whatever reason.

Not that I don't still semi-stoically walk by many opportunities for charity - persons in need of help are not hard to find downtown.

But in the spirit of and due to a key line from one of my favorite tunes of all time, i.e.,

What to leave in, what to leave out

Our new President seems to be facing on many levels what I believe are at least metaphorically similar dilemmas.

And my concerns are pretty small-change of course compared to "that guy" when it comes to an astonishing assignment in deciding what's in and what's out and "so much more to think about."

Nevertheless, I think this critique is well in order:

Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a "team of rivals." America was told that finally, after years of yes-men running the government, we were getting a president who would follow President Abraham Lincoln's lead, fill his administration with varying viewpoints, and glean empirically sound policy from the clash of ideas. Little did we know that "team of rivals" was what George Orwell calls "newspeak": an empty slogan "claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts."

Obama's national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, but also 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. The only "rivalry" is between those who back increasing the already bloated defense budget by an absurd amount and those who aim to boost it by a ludicrous amount.

Of course, that lockstep uniformity pales in comparison to the White House's economic team - a squad of corporate lackeys disguised as public servants.

At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama's National Economic Council. As President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Timothy Geithner (now Obama's Treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama's chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a "cash for trash" scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry's bad loans. It's another ploy "to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms," says economist Dean Baker - and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a "rival" voice inside the White House.

That's not an oversight. From former federal officials like Robert Reich and Brooksley Born, to Nobel prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to business leaders like Leo Hindery Jr., there's no shortage of qualified experts who have challenged market fundamentalism. But they have been barred from an administration focused on ideological purity. In Hindery's case, the blacklisting was explicit. Despite this venture capitalist establishing a well-respected think tank and serving as a top economic adviser to Obama's campaign, Politico.com reports that "Obama's aides appear never to have taken his bid (for an administration post) seriously." Why? Because he "set himself up in opposition" to Wall Street's agenda.

The anecdote highlights how, regardless of election hoopla, Washington is the same one-party town it always has been - controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by Kleptocrats (i.e., thieves). Their ties to money make them the undead zombies in the slash-and-burn horror flick that is American politics: No matter how many times their discredited theologies are stabbed, torched and shot down by verifiable failure, their careers cannot be killed. Somehow, these political immortals are allowed to mindlessly lunge forward, never answering to rivals - even if that rival is the president himself.

Remember, while Obama said he wants to slash "billions of dollars in wasteful spending" at the Pentagon, his national security team is demanding a $40 billion increase in defense spending (evidently, the "ludicrous" faction got its way). Obama also said he wants to crack down on the financial industry, strengthen laws encouraging the government to purchase American goods, and transform trade policy. Yet, his economic team is not just promising to support more bank bailouts, but also to weaken "Buy America" statutes and make sure new legislation "doesn't signal a change in our overall stance on trade," according to the president's spokesman.

Indeed, if an authentic "rivalry" were going to erupt, it would have been between Obama's promises and his team of zombies. Unfortunately, the latter seems to have won before the competition even started.

It is ever-so-obvious that those who actually care about our nation and the constitution and personal rights at it's heart (vs. limbaugh lemming-sheep and captive unjournalists) must if anything jack up our agitation and circulation of contrarian works as never before. Aside from the rare ones like Maddow, Greenwald, Froomkin, and an occasional Nobel prize winner (!), who speaks for us better than us?

Tramps like us, Baby we were born to run!

Somewhere along a high road
The air began to turn cold
She said she missed her home
I headed on alone

Stood alone on a mountain top, starin' out at the Great Divide
I could go east, I could go west, it was all up to me to decide
Just then I saw a young hawk flyin' and my soul began to rise
And pretty soon
My heart was singin'

This time let's get it right! All of us, together.

I am suffering some internal lashing for having passed by a downtown sidewalk scene this afternoon that included at least three (male) police officers and a woman being detained. As I approached, what caught my attention was the backpack and assorted materials being casually explored on the sidewalk. It was only as I looked back that I realized that the woman was handcuffed. That shocked me, and my inner voice says I should have backed up and calmly asked the cops about the circumstances, and I have regretted ever since that I did not. If I could have.

May I do better next time.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

Oh my lord - today is the fiftieth anniversary of "the day the music died." That is Don McLean's slightly hyperbolic term, but in some ways, I cannot disagree. There were significant rock-and-roll threads that at the very least were, coincident with that tragic event, dramatically shuttled off-stage.

Personally, I suspect I was just gaining independent access to pop music aside from family sing-a-longs, I guess, gingerly moving beyond stuff like "Cockles and Mussels," "One Fish Ball," and, yes, that Yale tune about sheep.

By my calculations, this was fourth grade and I was probably hunkered down when I could get away with it with a primitive crystal radio. I had undoubtedly enjoyed a few Buddy Holly tunes (a half-dozen or more are crystallized upstairs), and I have the sense I heard of the plane crash with regret, but these things are different when you are eight years old. I wouldn't really be fully awash in rock-and-roll for a couple more years.

By which time those musical threads had sadly weakened. I've always been interested in widening rather than restricting the music I get to hear. My listening in the immediate aftermath of that crash probably included doo-whop, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline, Neil Sedaka, the Four Seasons, Rick Nelson, Gene Pitney, and even folkies like the Kingston Trio ("Tom Dooley" and "MTA," for example) and local favorites Brothers Four ("Greenfields").

It was not long before the "British Invasion" occurred, "corrupting us" (to my total delight) with such as the Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones, and Dave Clarke Five wonderfully bowdlerizing new and old American musical themes. "Not Fade Away" hit the charts and I cherished it for a good long time before realizing it was Buddy's tune.

You know, if it hadn't been for Ste. Zimmerman, the man of the hour, those flop-haired music-mis-appropriators might have largely left our country bereft of any role of significance in rock music!

That plane crash was truly crushing in many ways, and, alas, merely a warning of pending tragedies. The subsequent assassination(s) ditto. McLean certainly hit a major chord with his great tune. And some big threads of an increasingly important music that meant a lot to me and many others died 50 years ago.

I'm so glad the music lives on. Many thanks, Bruce, et al.

"Tramps like us, Baby we were born to run . . ."

Oh, Mama, Can This Really be the End?

I had one of those moments the other day. Although that could probably be equally well phrased “one of those days the other moment,” given the chronometric upheaval I know I at least have experienced with the presidential transition – how can it be true that that was less than a fortnight ago?? Any time-warp happening in your life, or is this merely my anomaly?

I had an appointment with the dentist this week, and not one of those twice-a-year scrape-clean-and-floss numbers that I have come to tolerate pretty well. This time there was some actual drilling and excavation required, courtesy of a couple fillings from decades back that were failing. But we got the lidocaine administered with minimal discomfort, and headphones on to drown out what even the dentist acknowledged would be potentially annoying noise and vibration. Almost perfectly synchronized with the startup of the drill, up came the Gilmour-Waters classic “Comfortably Numb.” And, truthfully, for all but the last couple minutes of what must have been ten or more, the pertinent tissues were, indeed, in something close to that state. Head, not so much.

In hindsight it might have been the visual and aural ads for a stage show here in town right now (or lidocaine side-effect?), but over the last couple days I have experienced internal gremlins riffling through my mental playlists for pertinent citations, as exemplified by this musical gumbo:

Put on my blue suede shoes
And I boarded the plane
Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues
In the middle of the pouring rain

She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call
'Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall

You say you’re gonna get your act together
Gonna take it out on the road
But if I don’t get out of here pretty soon
My head’s goin’ to explode

Passin’ trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles

Now the preacher looked so baffled
When I asked him why he dressed
With twenty pounds of headlines
Stapled to his chest. [ed: brings to mind “News” in Butch Cassidy]
But he cursed me when I proved it to him,
Then I whispered, “Not even you can hide.
You see, you’re just like me,
I hope you’re satisfied.”

Walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale

Halfway home, we’ll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea

Sure I like country music
I like mandolins
But right now I need a telecaster
Through a vibro-lux turned up to ten

Her home is on the south side, high up on a ridge
Just a half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge

Now the rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, “Jump right in.”
The one was Texas medicine,
The other was just railroad gin.
An’ like a fool I mixed them
An’ it strangled up my mind,
An’ now people just get uglier
An’ I have no sense of time.

And after we get good and greasy
Baby we can come on home
Put the cowhorns back on the cadillac
And change the message on the code-a-phone