06.23.10
Wonder what the H-word Creature thinks of her boss’s latest move
. . . seeing as how three years ago she basically called General Petraeus a liar to his face. (Video embedded at the link.) TCM was none too cordial to him then, either.
06.09.10
Somebody get Madame Secretary some up-to-date briefing papers
The H-Word Creature has been on this kick lately of exhorting various nations, certainly including the US, to raise their taxes. Pretty bizarre on a number of levels. She has recklessly careened into the area of faulty facts, however, by citing Brazil as a model for how high taxes in relation to GDP can turn a country into an economic powerhouse. Turns out, according to her own department’s (that would be State) findings, as well as the CIA World Factbook, it’s the same old story we find everywhere: taxation and regulation are hampering entrepreneurship and driving up the poverty rate in Brazil.
03.28.10
“Unacceptable”: a statecraft-speak term that has become utterly hollow
Bill Kristol on the Iran portion of the H-word Creature’s speech to AIPAC.
03.15.10
Not wise to pile on after the apology
John Podhoretz at Commentary has the best take I’ve seen on the current juncture in the Biden trip-settlement-building announcement-Biden-condemnation-Netanyahu apology for the timing-Hillary screaming into the phone unfolding of events.
The timing of this was badly handled by Israel’s coalition government. Surely the responsible party sees in hindsight that it makes going ahead with the construction – which will happen and is a good thing, since we’re talking about an area inside Jerusalem – all the more fraught with US FHer histrionics.
And Roger Simon at Pajamas Media weighs in with the full set of factors that could make American Jews rethink – in the near future and big-time – their decades-long fealty to the Democrat party.
12.17.09
So many levels of the FHer mindset on display in one gesture
The H-Word Creature has turned up in Copenhagen and, in a desperate bid to bring common vision back to the fraudfest underway there, says the US will lead a “fundraising drive” from now until 2020 to shovel a bunch of money to third-world countries.
Consider the various aspects of leftism on display here:
1.) Feigned pity: It makes them look “compassionate” and feeds their self-image of being “caring” to put these countries in a charity-drive spotlight like this.
2.) A willful ignoring of why there is this disparity between the developed / developing world and the perenially destitute nations: Libs love to talk about “root causes.” Well, dictatorship, ingrained corrpution, oppression of women and lack of interest in technological advancement are pretty obvious factors here.
3.) Having an agenda beyond just wanting to help: The third world’s gripe at Copenhagen has been that the developed / developing world isn’t imposing suffieciently draconian emissions reductions upon itself. The H-word Creature’s premise in this bid is to bring the poor dears up to speed so they, too, will be ready for this Brave New World of windmill farms and solar panels, having bypassed the coal-and-petroleum-based phase that has made for actual development in the rest of the world.
The full vulgarity of the leftist vision for humankind is on display in this move.
11.02.09
A donkeys-are-flying moment here at BN
We must actually give kudos to Secretary of State H-Word Creature for standing up to Palestinan – indeed , Arab-world – insistence on a total stop to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Netanyahu stuck his neck out by agreeing to curtail settlement activity, and H backed him up when she made a stop in Israel on her way to Morocco from Pakistan.
Israelis are, according to the position of any and all types of Palestinian spokes-groups, supposed to vacate the West Bank – and- indeed, much if not all of Jerusalem – so as to clear the way for a Palestinian state, but Palestinians can continue to live, work, and participate in the government of Israel proper in any numbers they damn well please. File under “morally and politically lopsided.”
Bibi made an important point, too: This whole business of making the settlements a condition of the “peace process” is of quite recent vintage. How did it become so suddenly crucial?
10.13.09
Russia’s got us where it wants us
Says further Iran sanctions ain’t gonna happen. Also tells the H-word Creature that, now that it will be done on our terms, we’re ready to talk about missiles and missile defense. I cringe to think about how the discussion on Georgia went.
09.22.09
Giving the boss cover to vote “present”
The H-word Creature says “other military experts” dispute General McChrystal’s assessment of what’s needed to avoid failure in Afghanistan. Would she care to name them? Do any of them have the job responsibility of giving an accurate asesment of the situation?
What stunning arrogance.
You think about this and her recent comments on the TCM regime’s betrayal of Poland and the Czech Republic (and general endangerment of the West, a common trait with the regime’s handling of Afghanistan) and a pattern begins to emerge. I actually don’t think it’s so much a matter of being TCM’s lapdog, which would be out of character for her. She’s passionately on the same page. She really thinks there is some clever alternative to what the strategically obvious necessities are. It all stays very much in the realm of the general and the broad, though (no pun intended – well, maybe a litle bit). As with sweeping declarations of “rights” to life’s agreeable possibilities such as health care and a job and clean water, there’s the sense that slogans can bring about utopian results where detailed plans of implementation are utterly absent.
Is there a level on which Freedom-Hater policy isn’t a complete train wreck?
08.13.09
Les Paul, R.I.P
A singularly important human being whose contributions were clearly the outgrowth of his basic joy and zest for life.
I consider it one of the supreme thrills of my life to have seen him last summer at Iridium at 51st and Broadway. He has a standing Monday night gig there – two shows every week – until just a few months ago.
09.04.08
Right outta the park, all night long
First there was Michael Steele with his rhetorical device put to excellent use: “Do you put country first?” And, of course, his phrase “Drill, baby, drill,” which the crowd immediately picked up as a chant and which will no doubt start turning up on tee shirts.
Then there was Mitt Romney, who took off the gloves in a way I’d never seen, and also gave an excellent explanation of what opportunity is and how the government can’t provide it – and how the FHers would squash it.
Then there was Linda Lingle, offering the perspective of a fellow female Republican governor and how she’s come to know Sarah Palin personally and see her character first-hand.
Then there was Rudy, who got right to the heart of the matter and asked why it is that the FHers never once at their convention used the term “Islamic terrorism.” Of course, he was dynamite on every subject he touched.
And then, as Chris Wallace at Fox and Anderson Cooper at CNN both said afterward, “a star [was] born.” Governor Palin is now permanently etched in our pantheon of historical figures: fierce defender of primary principles, folk hero, everywoman, and intellect of the first order.
Everything is different now.
The left will have to try some tactic other than the gutter politics of personal destruction, because they hadn’t counted on how it goes when you mess with the Barracuda. She does what Dutch used to do: she takes her case right to the American people and resonates, big time.
What she’s done has very personal implications. Take me, for instance. I’m energized and I see possibility in ways I haven’t in years. I think freedom and huan dignity and the spread of proseperity have a chance. That which is supposed to prevail in this universe is doing so.
Let’s roll.
09.03.08
War
The pathetic and poisonous efforts of the left to destroy Sarah Palin gives the lie to the meme that the oh-so-moderate chin-stroking urban/coastal chattering class has been trying to get us to swallow for a while: the notion that the culture wars were winding down and Americans were now more concerned with efficient delivery of health care and energy and other dry, arcane considerations.
The delicious irony is that it’s that sector of our society that, so far, has been the most shrill and murderous about the Palin candidacy. It’s the magazine writers, TV commentators and lefty bloggers who are pulling out all the stops in their attempt to wreck the governor’s career and life.
John Edwards was wrong about what comprised them, but he was right in his basic assertion that there are two Americas. The division is deeper than it’s ever been.
As a historian, I am interested in the roots of the schism. It certainly goes back farther than the 1960s. The New Left movement in academic circles got going in the 1940s and 50s with the works of William Appleman Williams and C. Vann Woodward. But the whole thing really goes back even further. There’s the Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, Walter Duranty’s puff-piece treatment of the USSR under Stalin. Maybe it goes back to the salons in the Greenwich Village brownstones of the turn of the century. American folk art is full of pairings of cousins, one a country bumpkin and one a city slicker, and I think that’s an element. One could even make the case that the Enlightenment, which originated in Europe, with its forthright reliance on rationality and empiricism, paved the way. In America, it led to a lot of offshoots from core Judeo-Christian thought, such as Unitarianism and the array of New Thought denominations. Also, here one would need to concede that even such Founding Fathers as the Deist Jefferson were looking into interpretive ways to relate to scripture. Still, relate to it he most definitely did.
In any event, at some point, a mindset ingrained itself into certain sectors of our society and spread to others. It was based on a divorce from a foundational and commonly held set of assumptions that had, up to that point, been part of American life in such a broad sense as to be considered universal. Church, family, gender differences, the relationship between industriousness and prosperity, sufficient understanding of human nature to make obvious the need for strong national defense – these were givens for pretty much everybody.
I was in the thick of the period when the Big Split became codified, when a sufficiently large plurality of citizens embraced it as to legitimize it in schools, workplaces and arenas of civic participation. I sat in the back of high school math class and read Ramparts magazine and Do It! by Jerry Rubin. I had shoulder-length hair, told my dad he was a fascist and a corporate fat cat. Spent days on end in the lysergic trenches. Made a point of running as far away from square old Jesus as I could and insisting that some kind of all-is-one state of so-called reality constituted ultimate truth.
So I bear some culpability for the current diseased state of our precious nation. What is so blessed about time, though, is that once you get smarter than you used to be, you can genuinely change. You can pick a moment and declare, “That’s not me anymore.”
The horror, the ghastliness, of what the enemy in the culture wars is attempting to do to Sarah Palin has been a wake-up slap across the face for me. I thought there was some tiny possibility that this was going to be a civil airing of differences, perhaps with some raised voices, close elections and strongly-worded polemics.
No, this is an actual war. My main encouragement about the odds for what is good and true prevailing stem from the resolve of those like the woman currently on the front line. I think tonight she will serve notice that she can outgun any comers.
Did you hear what she said in response to someone’s question about whether she’s up to this state of affairs? She posed a question and then answered it. “Do you know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” she asked. And then she said, “Lipstick.”
08.16.08
Jerry Wexler, R.I.P.
Aged 91.
If ever there were a symbol of the richness and depth of mid-twentieth-century American music, it was Jerry Wexler. Born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Washington Heights, the neighborhood above Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan. Nose-to-the-grindstone window-washer father who tried like hell to get Jerry to see the value of taking up the trade. Mother with high-culture aspirations who made sure he was exposed to art galleries, foreign films and literature. A youth spent in pool halls and record stores – and sneaking into the Savoy Ballroom to hear the best big bands of the era. Service in WW II. A stint as a reporter for Billboard, where he made the rounds of Broadway publishing and song-plugging offices – and where he coined the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949.
But it was his two decades as partner and vice-president at Atlantic where he left his mark. When you hear “Shake Rattle and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Night Time Is The Right Time” by Ray Charles, “Cry To Me” by Solomon Burke, “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, “Respect’ by Aretha Franklin, to just scratch the surface, you’re hearing Jerry Wexler’s contribution to American culture. (To name a few more, the list also includes Clyde McPhatter, Ben E. King, Booker T. & the MGs, Otis Redding, Duane Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, King Curtis. And I’ve still just scratched the surface.)
As is noted in this obituary and the many to which it links, he came from that seat-of-the-pants school of entrepreneurship and artistic creation that is so quintessentially American.
I don’t know what kind of greatness could possiby replace the kind he embodied.
08.13.08
Sandy Allen, R.I.P.
She passed at the nursing home where she’d lived for some time.
Never met her, even though she lived her entire life in a town about 25 miles northeast of the city where I live. Within four months of my age. Saw a fair amount of media coverage of her over the years. Admired her perspective, her crusty sense of humor, her genuine warmth, her enjoyment a bracing libation. She made friends where she could find them.
What we can learn from the life of the giant from Shelbyville is that real life is just that – real. It’s not the stuff of chick-mag advice columns or rock album covers or vapid politicians’ droolings about hope and change. It’s about conditions and parameters and finding your heart and mind anyway and finding a way to refine yur humanness so that people have kind things to say – and a little tear in the eye – when you pas sfrom this realm.
08.05.08
I know what I am, but I think I know when and where to give ‘em the full shebang
Neo-neocon has offered her response to Bookworm’s post about staying in the closet as a conservative in the Marin County neighborhood where she lives. Neo-neocon, who likes and admires Bookworm, nevertheless takes her to task for hiding her lamp under a bushel.
It’s a fine line. Actually, all any of Bookworm’s neighbors would have to do is come across her blog and she’d be outed.
I run into the same quandary. I’m a blues and jazz guitarist, an arts journalist, a food-show host and a cultural historian. Most of my associates live and work in a university town and a tourist area. My work environments are wine bars, art galleries, and university classrooms. I don’t advertise my ideology in that milieu, but, hey, there’s a link to this blog from my main website.
Actually, I have made the acquaintance of two great guys about my age, guitarists, one from Asheville, North Carolina, and one from Minneapolis, who, after meeting me on musical ground, came here to BN, had a look around, and got back with me to express their solidarity. They, too, say they have to be careful in their musical lives about letting their devotion to freedom, common sense and the great body of Western tradition show amongst their colleagues.
This arangement actually allows me to do some stealth research into the minds of left-leaners. Little questions can be asked that offer clues to the depth of their thought processes without giving away my assessment of the quality of their conclusions.
For the first several installments of my newspaper column, I kept to innocuous subjects – my relationship with technology, why I play jazz, stuff like that. Gradually I began wading into areas that required more honesty of me – gender differences, nuclear proliferation, the fallacy of greed as a factor in economics. At this point, I pretty much let ‘er rip. My last column was on the virtues required of individual people for a safe and fair society.
If you have an array of outlets of expression, what pans out is the different markets for the things you do. My audience for Stirring Something Up, my readership for my column, my readership for my magazine work, and the fan base for my music have areas of overlap, but are mostly distinct from each other. It’s working out nicely so far. Something for everyone, I guess.
However, regular BN readers know the degree of my concern for this country and the civilization of which it is the vanguard. I must say what I conclude as I survey the scene in this day and age when utter nonsense gets the same knd of hearing as adult discourse. So I do know where my priorities lie. Stating the plain truth for the record must be done. The creativity will have to adapt to the reality of the world in which I practice it.
12.19.07
Woodcarver, Orthodox minister, bluegrass musician, Brown County hilltop dweller
The biggest delight of my work as a writer for Our Brown County is meeting so many people who fly under the radar screen of our assumptions. Who, for instance could imagine Jerome Sanderson?
11.19.07
It’s about grits and collard greens and real people crafting something honest
I give a lot of thought to why I find old, old-school R&B so moving. It’s technically a type of rock & roll, about which I’m having ever-more mixed feelings the older I get.
There’s something about it that resisted the juvenilization that beset most other forms of rock that have come down the pike since 1951. Beginning with the jump blues of Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Big Jay McNeely, Tiny Bradshaw et al, continuing through the great doo-wop of the early-to-mid-50s – The Robins, The Clovers, Billy Ward and the Dominoes, The Moonglows, The Drifters – and on into the golden age of soul – Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, O.V. Wright, Sam & Dave, Ike & Tina, etc. – it sounds like music made by men and women, human beings who have not only accumulated some experience, but felt that experience work a lasting effect on their worldviews.
The gospel rasp that comes through all this music ties it to the sanctified strain in American music, so that there’s an undeniable acknowledgement of spirit in even the most secular, slinky, grinding examples of it. Its fervor is the most direct and raw articulation of that tension between the devil’s music and the inclination toward the sacred that had characterized blues going back to the days of Son House and Ishman Bracey.
It’s unmistakably American music, in a way that does us all proud. For all its immersion in a particular ethnic identity (something that was achieved without any self-consciousness or political overtones), there’s a white contribution to it that infuses it with a backwoods twang. See my Suite 101.com article “What Country and Southern Rock Owe To Classic Soul Music” for an in-depth look at this. Syd Nathan, Jerry Wexler, Sam Phillips, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, Quentin Claunch, Chips Moman and Steve Cropper were as important to the making of this music as anybody.
Finally, it’s one of the last forms of American music that is rooted in a sense of community. For all the waywardness and antics of many of the genre’s most legendary figures, they lived and worked in a milieu still defined by standards and norms tha came from bedrock civic institutions, beginning with the family (a much more intact unit in those days), and including the church, the school, and the neighborhood YMCA.
In my novel, High C at the Sunset Terrace, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, Marvin, is back in his hometown, off the road for a couple of days for Thanksgiving. He and his nephew Donny are standing in Marvin’s sister’s kitchen after the holiday dinner:
“So, is New York happening? A lot of good times?” asked Donny.
“What do you mean?” asked Marvin.
“Well, like parties, you know, lots of people, like The Avenue, only bigger,” replied Donny.
Marvin looked at Donny. “If you mean can you get anything you want any time of the day or night, the answer’s yes. But you need to know that most of it’s no damn good for you, and the rest of it yu need to keep a level head about. Now, I hope that answers your question.”
“Yes, Uncle Marvin.”
So the music is a thread in a social fabric. It doesn’t lend itself to solitary ipod consumption.
Oh, to see that kind of groove return to our culture.
10.10.07
Part of the grand opening
Remember my link to my Our Brown County article about Lotus Petal Cinema? I’ll be providing music before the 7:30 and 10 PM showings on Sunday night. It’s the theater’s first weekend in business.
10.03.07
This guy’s a true original
My article in the current issue of Our Brown County on Lotus Petal Cinema is here. Christopher Dick, the guy who developed the theater, should be an inspiration to us all. read about him. He clearly gets out of bed every day and dives into life like it’s a delicious banquet. Talk about utilizing your freedom to the fullest.
