we don't need no stinking investigation

The Katrina story is so big, so faceted, it's like a big sparkly ball spinning at the prom, where a girl can never quite get a fix on what spot to watch until she wakes up in the back seat of a '57 Chevy, down by the levee, another slice of American Pie. This week Dubya is the Savior of the Gulf, flying this way and that, rolling up his sleeves, revealing his mighty lumberjack arms, buttoning his shirt with the grace of The Fridge, Getting It Done, Bro. And one of the jobs on his mighty plate is this investigation of just what went wrong, anyway. He's going to get to the bottom of it, by gawd, while he holds up this beam so that crane can drop the last load of fiberglass reinforced super duty cement in place so we can get old I-10 rolling again, out of Slidell and into the west. What a guy!

The ball spins on. On Monday the New Orleans Saints played a home game in the Meadowlands in New Jersey and got whupped by the Giants. On Tuesday the Iraqi Defense poobah under Paul Bremer's puppet regime was indicted for stealing a billion green backs. Also on Tuesday, New Orleans was re-evacuated just in case Rita comes ashore nearby. Closer to home, gas was at $2.89 at our closest gas station, and I said, "Wow, hon, it's come down," and Libby said, "COME DOWN?????" And by then it'd gone up.

Today's news is a White House led investigation of what went wrong. Friends, you had better keep your panties on. There is nothing to investigate. That's right, let me say it again, because the spinning ball has distracted you. There. Is. Nothing. To. Investigate.

"What has happened down here is the wind has changed." What we saw is what we saw. There are facts, available now to all who could stomach to watch. They will not change. One hundred and fifty-four hospital patients and rest home patients died, abandoned, in hospital facilities in New Orleans, after the storm had passed. For example. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, run by cronies appointed by George W. Bush, gutted by decisions made by George W. Bush, overseen by George W. Bush from his ranch in Crawford and from various political venues out in the west, failed the desperate people of New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast for over a week, live and on TV. It took his quaking staff making him up a DVD of TV footage to even get his attention. When the sentry says, "But I was asleep, Sir!" we do not go, "Oh, ok, musta been that delicious turkey dinner."

This does not need to be investigated. What an investigation does is discover the facts, find out what went wrong, perhaps after several years of political "compromise" come up with a 10-thousand page monograph detailing all the ways that all the things that went wrong went wrong. This is not a mysterious airplane crash, a TWA 747 exploding in plain view just off New York City for no apparent reason, with some eyewitnesses asserting that they saw a missile. This isn't a deal where you have to assemble a million bits of plastic and metal retrieved from the ocean floor, in some big hanger some place, and then walk around and around the mess for months, scratching your chin.

We know what happened. George Bush, our President, utterly and completely failed in his job. So did his associates and minions. The resignation of Mr. Brown is pointless and laughable. Mr. Brown did his job--he destroyed FEMA. The plain fact is that George Bush is unfit to be President, that his Administration is unfit to govern. Running around after the failure and trying to mime what "doing a good job" might look like does not change the facts. It's like the little bad boy who jumps up to do the dishes after he's been caught with his hands in mom's underwear drawer. The problem is that there is absolutely no recourse open to the voting public at this time with which to express our complete lack of confidence in Mr. Bush's abilities. Hey, can we courts martial the guy, he is Commander in Chief, isn't he? Let's ask Judge Roberts.

Mr. Bush holds all the political cards at the moment. The first calls for an investigation were voted down 54-45, straight party line vote, in the Senate. (Soon even the Republicans will realize that they actually "need" an investigation; the vote will reverse and some Dems will tag along, and we'll get to watch more theatre.) The vote to confirm Mr. Bush's toady John Roberts will proceed on similar lines. Does any one doubt that the elegant waltz that Roberts performed before his jury of inside the beltway peers was NOT performed in interviews he must have had prior to his nomination with Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the bunch?

Perhaps there is absolutely nothing the voting public can do between now and '06. Sometimes things can't be repaired. Custer couldn't find an elegant road out of the valley of the Little Big Horn. As Rita barrels towards Galveston and nearly one fourth of the US gasoline production capacity, and gas prices climb again, and we start to face lines and shortages and the inability to afford to get to our jobs, I'm reminded of what I have read about Herbert Hoover, a much smarter guy who simply had no ability to think "outside the box." It's going to take some competent Democrat to come in and begin to do the much needed job of "President" again. If we don't find one soon it may truely be too late. But let's remember this too: America had to endure Hoover for two years after the big market Crash in '29. I expect those folks felt sorta like this.

--Bill Hicks

WSJ Visits the Boonies

Dave Shiflett's little Wall Street Journal piece on "Clifftop" raised a small dust storm in the world of old time. Even though he did ambush the Old Time Herald editor and made light in a fairly obnoxious way of a real person who happened to pass away at Washington Carver State Park that weekend, by now the whole article has pretty much evaporated into the ether, spilled Busch Lite on a stretch of Crawford TX macadam in the August heat. There is a relationship, however, between Crawford and Washington Carver State Park. Just the week before Shiflett's foray into old time, various other more notable right wing pundits had been working hard at various ad hominem discreditations of Cindy Sheehan which included attempts to characterize her supporters as simply lost souls from the '60s, aged out hippies looking for some cause. There is a theme here--if they're "liberal," they're not "winners" like "us," but "losers" like "them." This even surfaced on that most liberal bastion of mainstream media, PBS, in an interview with the executive editor of the Nation Magazine, when the interviewer asked said editor how it felt to be "on the wrong side of history."

What a bizarre question that is! What's the answer to be? As good as any might be, "Speak for yourself, kemosabe." But Shiflett in his article is bringing the same sort of notions to bear on the world of old time as represented by the handful of folks he talked to at Clifftop. These people, he concludes, aren't "really" playing old-time music at all, but rather some sort of faux hippy stuff they've cooked up to season their last boomer summer. Sort of an Owl Creek Bridge kinda deal, you see; next stop, the rest home. Meanwhile, the implication in Shiflett's article is that the "real" musicians are the bluegrass folks, they're on the right side of history and represent musical "progress" by giving breaks to the bass and guitar and not just playing along in unison for as long as they want. And the proof of that Luddite mentality amongst the boomer oldtimers is that they think Bush lost in 2000--for Shiflett, the politics are driving the whole thing, it's just veiled, interwoven in the story he wrote so that you can't quite make it out.

But it's Shiflett who's the Luddite; he doesn't recognize what old-time music is. The nature of the beast is obscured if you try to understand it by looking at a festival like Clifftop, or Galax, or any of these events many of us attend. Back in the day, meaning for me the mid-'60s, the fiddlers' conventions just had contests--fiddle, banjo, mando, maybe guitar, autoharp, whatever, and band. This reflected the reality of the music that the conventions represented. Bands would either have a three-finger style banjo player or a clawhammer style player. Fiddlers would either use more long bows and bent notes and double stops, or more short bows and less double stops, but more alternate tunings. Some bands sang and some didn't sing so much. (For a sampler of what this world kinda sounded like, see the Folkways LP "The Red Clay Ramblers with Fiddlin' Al McCanless," circa 1973, now available as a CD through the Smithsonian--we were playing what we heard pretty much.) Some had a bass, and others relied on a guitar or two for the bottom end. A band like the Camp Creek Boys and a band like the Stanley Brothers had a whole lot in common. Dr. Ralph knew how to frail.

Everyone pretty much knew that Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys were fundamentally a hot old-time band that had made it so big that people started calling what they played "bluegrass." If you went to Carlton Haney's bluegrass festivals over in Reidsville, NC, you could talk to Charlie Monroe about how Bill had done left him behind, gone uptown so to speak. In the fiddling world, a lot of fiddlers had been strongly influenced by the way Fiddln' Arthur Smith played a tune. Kenny Baker was even influenced by how Stephane Grappelli played a tune (he says so on one of his County LPs).

But there was also, in the fiddling and banjo-playing world, a strong reverence for how the best, older, local guy played. In that sense, the music expressed a kind of conservative philosophy. For Tommy Jarrell, it mattered a lot where he learned a tune, who he learned it from, and just how it went. And for us, a guy like Tommy Jarrell was a model: you wanna be a fiddler, well this is a fiddler by gawd. So there were both these streams flowing, to observe, to follow as you wished, back in the day. It didn't have anything at all to do with politics or with the power dimension. If you could play you were included. A guy like Clark Kessinger played pretty different from Tommy Jarrell, and Kenny Baker was different again. All three knew each other and respected each other. Or to use another example of the same thing, Fritz Chrysler thought Clark Kessinger had the best bow arm there was, and Kessinger said, "...but you should hear French Carpenter, now there's a fiddler." Over on the banjo side, Earl Scruggs respected Kyle Creed and vice versa. Scruggs certainly gave Monroe's band a wallop and drive, but I don't think you could really say that anybody ever "defeated" the Camp Creek Boys when they had Fred Cockerham and Kyle Creed in the band. (Memo to Mr. Shiflett: before there was Flatt & Scruggs they was Bluegrass Boys--what a fraternity Big Mon founded!)

The definitions started coming later, when the contests became the issue. If a group of judges always favored a three-finger style, then finally somebody started grumbling about it, and a clawhammer category was added. Same with fiddle styles. And because singing is a whole 'nother complex dimension, it started to be that old-time bands played instrumentals and bluegrass bands tended to be the singing bands, even though in fact there's all kinds of singing in the old-time world--from the Stanleys to the Carter Family to the Skillet Lickers and Charlie Poole's band, there are vocals galore. The contests themselves have an evolution, which is to some degree arbitrary and to a large degree does not reflect the world of music out of which they have arisen. The music you hear in a contest, in other words, reflects what some judges tended to reward over the preceding decade. The music you hear if you listen to the world of old time, to the old records, the new records, the commercial issues and the rare collections from the field, the folks playing dances and little bars and rest homes and rec rooms and campsites, is waaaaay more diverse than what you hear on stage. And that's old time.

Because of this fact--that old-time music is actually a sea of music, where you might fish out a big shark or a marlin or a mess of blues or a broken submarine or an old boot, or even Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys--it's really a fairly large conceptual mistake Shiflett makes in his little article, to talk about how old time is just some stuff those aging boomers are distracting their irrelevant selves with. This mistake may reflect a deeper mistake the so called conservatives with whom Shiflett is aligned tend to make over and over--they want to create this "culture war" deal, to couch everything in the terminologies of power, to always have some "winners" and some "losers." Life isn't a contest in this sense. Bill Bennett might be the most notable proponent of this bit of cultural analysis. He's gotten strangely silent since he turned out to have some shadow showing on the "wrong" side of the fence. That's the way it is with most of these folks. Like someone pointed out, the annoyance locals down in Crawford felt about the "invasion" of Cindy Sheehan's army might have actually given them insight into the annoyance folks in Iraq feel about the presence of Americans there. Instead they just worked out their angst by running over Cindy's flagged crosses and shooting off some guns. Shiflett is annoyed, obviously, that there are a bunch of people playing music and having fun and yet they're not Republicans (well some aren't and some are--the truth is that the music pretty much trumps the politics of the participants as long as somebody don't break out with "Masters of War"). He's so annoyed that he kinda runs over a real person who happened to die there in Clifftop--Dave Bing's inlaw it happens, but in this Shiflett account he's been turned into a bad joke.

Here's a bit of reality for those who want to make bluegrass be "red" and old time "blue." Back in the late '60s Ralph Stanley cut a record that included Jesse Winchester's fine song, "Brand New Tennessee Waltz." Give it a listen some time. People say it's about Vietnam. And then check out Grayson and Whitter's "He's Coming To Us Dead." "Take warning!" Whitter would shout that after each poignant verse, while Grayson was playing the breaks. Take warning, too, when the Shifletts try to tell you--as they're starting to--that opposition to the carnage in Iraq is giving the "other side" aid and comfort. The tragedy in Iraq was in full bloom way before Cindy Sheehan drove the first tent stake into that Texas dirt this summer.

--Bill Hicks