Bent Notes

One of my favorite relationships that I have with a magazine is the one I have with Our Brown County.  It’s a free monthly publication that can be obtained at stands throughout Nashville, Helmsburg, Story and other notable Brown County towns.  Its main intent is to acquaint visitors with the lifestyle, lore and colorful characters that make Brown County life unique.

For our out-of-state readers, Brown County is generally regarded as the most scenic area in Indiana. Its heavily wooded hills were the setting for one of America’s most distinguished artist colonies in the early twentieth century.  Landscape oil painters such as T.C. Steele and Marie Goth moved there and found an inexhaustible supply of subject matter.

At this point, Nashville, the county seat, is still home to some serious and distinguished painters.  A lot of local atisan / craftspeople display in the galleries and shops.  There is, inevitably, some tourist-trap enterprise as part of the mix.  Brown County culture is defined to a considerable extent by the food.  Fried biscuits and apple butter are a treat not to be missed.  There is also a yee-haw element.  One of the world’s premier bluegrass festivals takes place in Bean Blossom every summer.

But even such a description as I have offered does a disservice to the actuality of Brown County life.  The rewarding thing about my Our Brown County work is that I’m constantly encountering people who fly under life’s radar screen.  They’re beyond “colorful.”  Where else are you going to find the likes of Jerome Sandserson or Fairy Tale Theater?

My current assignment is to profile a bluegrass band.  This afternoon, I went to the home of one of the guitarists.  When he met me at the door, he was so bent over he couldn’t look me in the eye.  He remained that way as he beckoned me in.  When he sat down on the couch, I watched his entire midsection, from his pelvis to his rib cage, move as one solid unit, just plunk down at as comfortable an angle as possible.

My assumption was “car wreck injury.”  After he got seated, it didn’t come up in our conversation for quite a while.  We had a great exhcange about improvisation and the parallels between bluegrass and jazz, about his family’s roots in the county, the band’s goals.

I believe it was in connection with his mentioning staying home with his small daughter that he came to address his condition.  What he has is some kind of disease that turns your body’s cartilege into bone tissue.  Your skeleton fuses together.  He expects to die within ten years.  His rib cage will turn into tightening armor around his heart and lungs.

He’s made a choice.  He’s going to live with as much dignity as his situation will permit, do his best to be a growing human being, a good father and an ever more refined musician.  To be in his presence is to have the “How-would-I -handle-it” question thrown right in your face.

Then again, how do we do it, anyway?  We know not our hour, but we know it will come.

Life went slower this afternoon.  There was time- or maybe I just took the time - to scan the details of my cognitive field and home in on what was important, what was really worth paying attention to.

I know there’s a lot that demands our attention these days.  It’s all important, some of it downright urgent.  Still, cultivate your humanity.  Cultivate the ability to recognize humanity.  The truly valuable stuff of life can still be had for the small price of our attention. 

That was the name of this year’s turkey.  Here is his unveiling. 

An overnight shelf-stocker at a Long Island Wal-mart is trampled to death (and a pregnant woman miscarries) in a stampede as the doors (which were torn off their hinges) opened at 5 AM for a beginning-of-the-season sale.

The quote above is, of course, from the Nazarene, who said this to no one in particular as he was stumbling up the road at Calvary, blood dripping from his scourged and shredded flesh and bearing the weight of the instrument of his execution. 

The Nazarene, of course, is ostensibly the reason for the sale and the frenzy of the shoppers.

Larrey Anderson at The American Thinker on the absolute necessity of the mom-dad-and-kids structure for family for human happiness and societal well-being.

From Asheville, North Carolina, the Fred Whiskin Trio, featuring the incomparable Bob Belmont on guitar.  Bob’s a buddy of mine.  We met at the Aebersold workshop a couple of years ago and have stayed in touch since then.  We got together in Louiville for a jam last summer.  His strong, clean comping and solo lines are a delight to interact with.

I’d like to say a litle more about “well-duh” punditry.  What amazes me is that this drivel is coming from our supposedly sharpest minds.  Even a perusal of the venues that have been my lifeline for years in post-modern America - NRO, Townhall, Real Clear Politics - yields these offerings of a tepid brew of cautious congratulation, nerdy examination of demographic and voting trends going back to 1912, vapid portrayals of America’s essence, and the invevitable mentions of the need for a new generation of conservative leaders.  Talk about blah blah blah.

The fact is that what all you chin-rubbing, number-crunching broadly American beacons of eruditon were fearing mortally in your hearts three days ago has come to pass.

“Maybe Obama will govern more from the center, in keeping with his rhetoric after the primaries were over.   After all, he will be hemmed in by economic challenges.”  My ass.

Get a clue.  Not only has he been chomping at the bit for this moment for decades, so have Reid, Pelosi, Barney Frank, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Jim Moran, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John Murtha, and a fired-up FHer base whose organizations will now be more financially and psychologically empowered than ever.

That’s what makes me cringe when I read these columns and blog posts by the main spokespeople for my side that spend the first paragraph spewing that “historic moment” dog vomit.  Let Katie Couric handle that obligatory observation.  Yeah, yeah, the guy’s black.  Well, dig this: I don’t give a flip about his color, except insofar as he does, and on that score I’m not too encouraged.  But more importantly I’m concerned about his power to turn a recession into an economic train wreck, the mortal danger he will put this country in with his patty-cake approach to foreign policy, and the effect his own narcissism will have on a postmodern American culture already way too driven by that adolescent character trait.

So count me out of the group hug.  I’m still interested in what I’ve always been interested in: our freedom.

It’s 9:50.  The Chicago Marxist has 200 electoral votes.  I don’t have much to say.

I know I won’t watch any Grant Park Triumph-of-the-Will gloatfest.

This was such a glorious country.  We showed the world so much about freedom and possibility and dignity and how to create prosperity.

I think I’m going to go to bed.

It’s early afternoon.  There’s still this resolve to see things optimistically on the part of my people, both personal friends with whom I’m in touch as well as the boggers I’m reading and the talk-radio hosts I’m listening to.

The situation in Philadelphia - Black Panthers blocking a polling place - is getting a lot of attention right now.

Part of me is emotionally exhausted and part of me is on fire.  It’s weird to be host creature to both states simultaneously.

I only knew one person in the line at my polling place, an artist buddy of mine whom I know to be a consistent FHer voter.  It was so weird to make small talk with him about what’s going on around town musically, and then watch him get behind the machine, knowing full well what he was doing, what buttons he was pushing.

At the risk of sounding like some therapist’s patient, I am wondering what I do with this thought I harbor whenever I come in contact with someone who I know full well voted the FHer ticket.  There’s a lot of someones in that category - social friends, professional associates, relatives.  The inescapable fact is that there is some level on which they are the enemy.  These are people who have taken a concrete action which jeopardizes my freedom and my future.  So, as I say, wht do I do?  I can’t jettison the lot of them and re-people my life. Plus, most of them are nice, even wonderful, if horrifyingly misguided, folks.

I know one thing.  Whether Mr. Reasonable Gentleman can squeak through, or whether the Chicago Marxist emerges victorious, there must be a from-the-ground-up reassessment of how to get conservatism to flourish again.

The first principle by which we must be guided is zero tolerance for anything less than total clarity. No McCain-esque distractions and vacuous platitudes about “fighting the status quo in Washington” or “fighting for what’s right for America” or “putting country first.”  Such crap means nothing.  An FHer could utter the same phrases.  Indeed, the Chicago Marxist does employ very similar rhetoric.  No, what we talk about are the specific principles for which we’re willing to fight to the death: the original intent of the Constitution’s framers, free-market economics, American exceptionalism, an America that does not hesitate to respond fiercely and ruthlessly to its enemies’ provocations, and America that demonstrates unwavering loyalty to nations that share these principles, the primacy of family as the basic unit of human organization, and a culture characterized by dignity, depth, decency and real inspiration.

We must expect loud arguments amongst ourselves, finger-pointing and bitterness.  Obviously, the wheels came off our movement and we must find out why.  This is why we’d all be well-advised to enter into this foundational examination with as much prayerfulness and mindfulness of our common aims as possible.  Eventually, the the useless sand of confusion will get sifted out and the nuggets of what we were seeking will be all that remains on the fine-mesh screen.

I look back at this year - my personal successes, some episodes of illness in our household and family, memorable times with friends, the spring’s tornadoes and floods, the spike in gas prices, the financial meltdown, the embrace by a frighteningly large segment of the population of socialism - and ask myself what it all has taught me.  I’d say that the biggest lesson at this point is that, in human life, the visceral and the spiritual are inextricably intertwined.  In fact, I’m sort of considering the possibility that the more one progresses on the spiritual journey, the more reality’s upside-the-head aspect becomes impossible to avoid.

Last night at the annual gala fundraiser for the Columbus Area Arts Council, I received the Mayor’s Arts in Education award.

I’m awed, humbled and honored.  You just never know who’s observing you as you make your way through life.  And to have such an observer conclude that you’re making a contribution.  Now, that’s the really good stuff.

I think all of us recall our parents saying, in response to our trotting-out of evidence that we were the only ones among our peers who wouldn’t be participating in some social activity, “I don’t care if all the twelve-year-olds in the world are going to be doing it; you’re not.”  The underlying message was that majority opinion about the merit of something has nothing to do with whether it makes sense or is good from a moral standpoint.

I think about this not only terms of poll numbers showing the relative appeal of our two major parties or two major persidential candidates, but also an assumption I get tossed at me in conversations with left-leaners, either in person or in BN discussion threads. 

It’s actually rather amusing to see this looks-like-your-people-are-getting-their-commeuppance stance interjected into the current state of affairs.  “Republicans are about to get hammered because the people want a change after eight years of what they’ve been handed.”  It’s a bit like they’re assuming you had a stake in a particular pop singer making it to the American Idol finals when a little real observation would have shown that you were rooting for the warbler of arias.

The irony is that, in terms of the words being uttered, there is complete agreement.  Absolutely, if the Pubs get hammered, they have themselves to blame.  The departure lies in why each side thinks this is so.  What the left-leaners mean by this is that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, the Patriot Act was a heavy-handed intrusion into privacy, the unchecked free market widened the gap between haves and have-nots and so on.  No, if the Pubs get trounced, it will be because they indulged in pork-barrel spending as flagrantly as the FHers, let the State Department turn our foreign policy into mush, didn’t insist  on up-or-down votes for judicial nominees, and let our borders continue to be sieves.

To paraphrase dear old mom and dad, it doesn’t matter if the entire population behaves like lemmings and goes over the cliff, free markets, a foreign policy based on an understanding of history, and fealty to Greco-Roman / Judeo-Christian values and principles are always right, and departure from these approaches is always wrong.

Yes, it’s wonderful when you get elected leaders like Dutch and Newt - and, to use current examples, Jeb Hensarling and Mike Pence - who stand for these things, and we constantly fight to bring that about, but the political brand name more closely associated with them being in bad shape has nothing to do with whether we’ll keep affirming them.

If John McCain beats Barack Obama, freedom’s prospects will only be marginally better.  We’ll still have big-time work cut out for us.  We’ll still be choking on that “green” hooey, and kiss-it-and-make-it-well schemes like the Treasury Secretary directly buying up bad morgages.  “Comprehensive” immigration policy. 

In fact, about all we could count on in the way of sensible positions would be low taxes and resolve toward our enemies.  So, yes, when push comes to shove, it is , however incrementally, better if Pubs do well.  They are capable of responding to wake-up calls, as opposed to FHers, with whom it’s just fine if it all goes to hell, as long as they have power.

We’re - I mean conservatives - not going anywhere.  We’re not in decline, our vision isn’t diluted or distorted, and our energy isn’t sapped.  What makes sense and what is right doesn’t change.  We’ll continue to live accordingly and work at persuading our fellows to do likewise.

The task is just a little more daunting if The FHers make a totalitarian police state out of the country.

As of this writing, congressional leaders of both parties, both presidential candidates, and economic advisors are meeting in Washington to discuss the bailout plan W outlined in last night’s address to the nation.

The idea is that it will restore the financial system’s health quickly enough that the American taxpayer will realize a return on its outlay of $700 billion.  Sounds good, but also quite iffy.

It doesn’t look like a purely free-market solution to this is in the offing, since this catastrophe has its roots in a fuzzy melding of the public and private sectors.  That said, I hope and pray there will be a camp within the assemblage meeting with W that will press for the way forward that comes the very closest possible to such a plan.

As every grown-up knows, the other side of the freedom coin is responsibility.  Underneath the layers of bundled mortgages and deals and cleverly wrought instruments for growing wealth and government guarantees against failure lie actual exchanges of money for for promises to pay it back at a given interest rate.  Someone said, “Yes, I’ll loan you this amount of money on terms involving this amount of time for paying it back at this rate of return,” and someone else saying, “Okay, is this the dotted line where I sign?”  If either of them thought it unlikely that he or his organization could make good on what they were freely obligating themselves to, they’re not particularly wise individuals, are they?

Now, compound that by all the subsequent operators who saw home prices rising and said, “Hey, man, even if a lot of these loans are risky, bundling them together in this favorable market is a cool way to make some cheddar!”  We have to presume that the folks on this level understood the degree of risk in what they were doing as well.  Don’t we?

It looks to me like our culture’s zeal for ever-more slickly designed gizmos, with ever-more bells and whistles - think iphones and Blackberries and voice-activated GPS devices - permeated the financial world.  The main difference, it seems to me, is that microchips and plastic and steel and aluminum aren’t inherently risky substances.  You combine them into this product or that, and you can rely on them to do their thing as what they are.  Mortgages and other loans, in contrast, may, shall we say, decay over time.  They may fall prey to slow payment or even default.  This makes designing super-fancy financial products out of them kind of a shaky proposition.

So what I hope gets trumpeted loudly at the gathering in Washington today is this:  Let’s determine to the best of our ability who is responsible for each of the various aspects of this mess and hold them accountable as much as possible and minimize the burden to the American taxpayer, who needs to see his or her overall burden reduced anyway, as much as possible and as soon as possible.  Free people keeping their own hard-earned money is the real key to moving pst this perilous moment.

I think the appropriate way to regard the tofu-and-sprout-munching, peace-and-social-justice, agnostic, save-the-planet types - the ones who were the first on your street to get an Obama yard sign - is with pity.  The deepest kind of pity, the pity that’s just a microinch removed from scorn and contempt, but does qualify as pity.  For these people really swallow the lie.  They’re awash in Kool-Aid.  After all the evidence that their man is not only a fake, a Marxist and a liar but a thug, they still see him as the change-and-hope prophet he appeared to be last winter.

I’m not talking about the hate-crazed vanguard doing the flooding of radio station phone banks or hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account or cynically taking Rush Limbaugh quotes out of context for Spanish-language ads.  I’m not talking about the economic charlatans in his camp - most notably his running mate, he of paying-higher-taxes-is-patriotic fame - or the 9/11-was-America’s-chickens-coming-home-to-roost crowd.  I mean the nice folks down the block, the ones you see at the farmers market or the wine bar or your kids’ soccer matches.  The ones who, gosh darn it, just want things to be fair and peaceful.

About all that can be done in these remaining forty-plus days is to whittle away at their numbers.  As it becomes easier to expose the ugliness behind the big grin, the confident stride, the thoughtful tone of voice, those numbers can indeed be wuittled.

But remaining numbers there will be.  The enemy in this war has been quite effective at convincing them to sip the Kool-Aid.

Yes, war.  And what it is is the domestic front in the overall world war, the one that manifests itself in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, joint Venezuelan-Russian naval exercises, Russian invasion of Georgia, new and more powerful engines for North Korean long-range missiles, bombings in India, Iraq and Yemen.  It’s a war in which we face an array of enemies who share a hatred of the goodness that lies at the heart of our greatness.  We love freedom, we know it is a gift from almighty God, and we know it is the key to our prosperity and progress.  And they hate us for it.

So let the minions of the Marxist From Chicago “get in [your] faces.”  You’re prepared.  Meanwhile, take every opportunity to compel the nice folks down the street to wake up.  Feed them ideas. Lace your conversation with noble principles.  A lot of them can be convinced to value their own freedom and prosperity, to see truth and smell falsehood.  The rabid types are too far gone, but a lot of the nice folks down the street can be reached.

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.

 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.

A few more thoughts occur to me along the vein of last night’s post about livingthe life of a closet-rightie. 

Clearly, the majority of my friends and associates are on the other side of the ideological fence from me.  It makes me cringe and gnash my teeth, but I know how they’ll vote in November. 

Most of them get their news and opinion on the fly as they maneuver through their daily lives - a little Today show or The View while on the treadmill at the gym, a little NPR during the daily commute, Time or Newsweek during the grooming-and-hygiene interlude, the op-ed page of their local paper, stuff that friends e-mail to them.

A few of them make a point of, as far as they understand the term, being highly informed.  They regularly check out The Nation, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Keith Olberman, Chris Matthews.

It’s this second tier that I’d like to consider here.  After all, they ostensibly have the most meat on the bones of their worldview.  They avail themselves of sources unabashedly self-identified as progressive.

As Bookworm and Neo-neocon say about such people in their lives, it’s clear from my observation of, and interaction with them that they are not dumb people.  Most have done quite well in live.   They live comfortably, travel, send their kids to fine colleges, contribute to the civic life of their communities.  This is why I am so confounded by their steadfast fealty to an ideology that has demonstrated its intrinsic failure in every area of public life: economics, culture, education, religion, and science.

Implicit in their dinner-party exchanges about how to get more Americans concerned about global warming, or how immoral US involvement in Iraq is, or how large corporations are greedy is that core assumption that America’s main identity is not that of a grand experiment in human liberty, but rather some kind of storehouse in which power and wealth exist of their own accord, andthat it’s just a matter of which classes or vested interests are going to control those commodities.

It’s an assumption that really goes back to Marx.  It’s the idea that there’s some kind of power structure that welcomes in those who demonstrate a cynical understanding of how the game works, and excludes those who insist on an egalitarian dispensing of access to the levers of success.  In this view of things, a revolution is required to put the egalitarians in charge of admission to the success network, and send the old power-brokers to the re-education camp.

The irony is that reality works in the exact opposite fashion.  When free-market economics, as laid out by Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, is combined with a keen understanding of the Judeo-Christian scriptural narrative and all it has to say about family and character and a devotion-filled heart, as well as a keen understanding of what history shows us about human nature and the evolution of the modern nation-state, you get the freest and fairest possible society.

Especially since the civil-rights triumph of forty years ago, there is truly no substantive obstacle to a United States citizen becoming or achieving whatever he or she envisions.  What is it you want to do?  If you equip yourself with a full toolbox of the character traits needed to accomplish it - a generally educated mind, knowledge of your field, a friendly dispostition that fosters a network of contacts, mentors and associates, a willingness to find out what material resources you’ll need, and an understanding that life is fluid and you’ll need to adapt to pretty much constant change - the only hassles that can possibly pose setbacks will be random occurrences of bum luck.

A further irony is that this is how these people I know who are personally successful but still harbor the leftist worldview got where they are.  What i cannot get to the core of - and, I think, still puzzles even conservatism’s greates minds - is why they can’t see the universal applicability of their own success stories.

It has something to do with this matter of control.  I used to divide leftists into two groups - those who sincerely believed that government was needed to make life more fair for unfortunate people, and those who were in it because it was a slick way to talk themselves into power.  I look at it a little differently now.  I think some sense that human beings ought to be controlled lies at the heart of even the do-gooder impulse.  Otherwise, these people would be able to see that they came to their quite favorable junctures- the American dream - without asking anybody’s permission.

Age 93 and still holding down a standing Monday night gig at 51st and Broadway.  He played the heads to most tunes and took a few solos.  Great trio behind him.

We’d been having these insanely torrential thunderstorms nearly daily since the beginning of June.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I acknowledged that something’s gotta give.  I really started seeing the writing on the wall when, arriving at a downtown hotel for a gig last evening, I noticed the water in the park across the street, bounded on its far side by a river, lapping at the Brown Street entrance.  My musical associate came in from west of town, near Bloomington.  I asked him if there had been any difficulty coming in.  He shrugged and said that a few spots had been a little messy.  We set up and launched into our first tune when the hotel’s power went out.  Cooled our heels with cocktails for a bit, then got out acoustic guitars and continued our performance.  There were several tables of folks on the deck who were most appreciative.  Inside the lobby, the vibe was getting more tense.  It was getting dark, for one thing.  People in upper-floor rooms were getting rather warm.  More people were coming in off the interstate, seeking respite.

We cut our show short, packed up and headed back here.  Tim, Mrs. BN and I enjoyed lights and AC until about 10 PM.  Then it was candles and a battery-powered boom box.  The local news updates were the only noise punctuating the still night air, save for the whirring blades of National Guard helicopters.  We sat on the porch, drinking wine.  We eventually wandered a few blocks north to see what the perimeters of our “island” were.  We found the north shore of it, so to speak, about five blocks away.  People standing in what was left of their yards, talking looking around and wondering, wondering . . .

Power came back on about 4 AM.  We all got up about 7.  Tim heard about a route out of town via a north-side artery, so he went for it.  Mrs. BN and I went for a bike ride.  These are some of the scenes we saw, mere blocks away.  The White River crested late morning, so I think we’re out of the woods, but I don’t dig the 60 percent chance of more T-storms forecast for Tuesday.

A 1999 column by Thomas Sowell that remains thunderously relevant.

An actor of great power and versatility, and a ctizen and thinker who always stood for the principles enshrined in the BN Manifesto with dignity.

As with the passing of WFB, one is inspired anew to strive a bit harder for that combination of clarity, steadfastness and humanity that characterizes the greats in our cause.

A slice of red onion and avocado slices on red-leaf lettuce, with orange-sesame dressing.

Rack of lamb with couscous with toasted slivered almonds, dried currants and diced scallions.  Roasted asparagus.

Can you dig this?  I’ve never cooked lamb before.  What I did was infuse some olive oil with crushed rosemary and garlic.  Brushed that on, sprinkled on a little salt and freshly cracked black pepper.  Slow-roasted for, I don’t know, forty minutes, I guess, and then gave it a couple minutes’ worth of sizzle on the grill.  Kept covered until the guests arrived.