Preet Tweet

Thank you Baby Jesus, we've finally seen the last of the interminable month of January. I think it was the cold but the politics certainly contributed significantly. We get a 7-day forecast app on the teevee, and at the moment the freezing rain predicted for (akkk) Super Bowl Sunday has vanished into merely cloudy and not quite freezing. We get a 17 low tomorrow night. After that (at the moment) it's 50s and a few 60s for highs, 30s for lows. Many will laugh. I too have been to Calgary in February, and experienced “ice fog.”

This “Trump Era” is the misanthropic age. They ran on an amorphous pay-back, and in the weird sense that the Electoral College confers on them, they “won.” Jimmy Kimmel did a striking piece on some folks who are all for deporting even the “dreamers” the other night. This was early before the Stormy Daniels segment. That was pretty boring. The real tension was kind of “meta.” Could she break her agreement in such a way that Trump's lawyers could sue her, given that such a suit would surely imply the truth of the affair. And how strong would Franklin Graham's “blessing” be in such a case?

But the misanthropic segment was much better, because it explained, or at least illustrated, the wrecking ball power of misanthropy when harnessed to more governmental forces. Our nearly Ambassador to South Korea warned of the dangers of the so-called “bloody nose” strategy towards North Korea, which among other horrors put at risk the lives of many thousands of Americans residing in South Korea (and never mind the millions of South Koreans). This is serious. Cha was reportedly asked, before being dropped as Ambassador nominate, if he could handle the evacuation of all Americans living in South Korea.

Meanwhile, Kimmel had created a perfect situation to make a point. He had a smallish group of folks who said that no matter the particular circumstances, anyone who was here “illegally” should be forthwith deported. Kimmel presented his human case. A young mother who'd been brought here at age 2, working in nursing and living with a soldier born and raised in Kansas. The mother would be deported, removed from her child and family. The couple would be sundered. Amazingly (to me), there were no dissenters. A middle-aged black woman offered her reasoning: “I didn't have health insurance and lost my eye. Why should this woman be treated any better?” There is apparently a deep lake of this undifferentiated bitterness in the American psyche. Read it an weep.

Preet Bharara
✔ @PreetBharara
My mom is an immigrant
My dad is an immigrant
I am an immigrant
My mother's 6 brothers came to America too
It is a deeply interdependent family
All successful
All tax-paying (one is an accountant!)
All proud & contributing Americans
Call it #ChainMigration
Or call it America
11:21 PM - Jan 30, 2018

There is a lot of bad news. I don't think they'll close down the entire "liberal" side of the media like they closed down Dan Rather. For that matter, they didn't even put Dan Rather in jail. In this sense we are not yet a fascist country.

December 11, 2017

This date* may soon commemorate the demise of the internet as we know it, a place where people just toss messages in bottles off piers around the world, messages like even this one, with no aim at all for some financial gain, no teaser for eyeballs, no pay nothing down. It's had its run, this internet, where people just talked and opined. There's still, perhaps, Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, those platforms were likely invented to make way for the new shiny internet slouching towards us from Bethlehem. Sure, you can have a handful of characters. It works for the President, what's your problem? He was elected. QED.

[*In the interest of clarity, it turns out that the FCC decision on net neutrality has been delayed, briefly, due to suits and other issues.]

Tomorrow is Mr. Moore of Alabama's Day. It could still be the day he is rejected by his state, by the voters of Alabama who bother to vote. We'll know tomorrow. Vice News sent Frank Luntz to talk to Alabama Republicans, twelve of them. They told him that the testifying women were all political operatives. It was an operation to make Mr. O'Keefe jealous, since all of his games get sussed out. Some of the Alabama Republicans ask rhetorically, "why do these charges surface now?" That's supposed to be decisive rhetoric. The idea has become, an October Surprise is on the face of it self-refuting. All genuine surprises must arrive by March 1, the rest being folderol by definition. I have an old interest in Alabama. The old band I was in played down there quite a bit. My best guitar comes from a very good guitar shop in Birmingham run by a fine fellow named Herb Trotman. Libby and I sat in his shop and played any number of fine guitars, and came up with my Taylor Jumbo with the maple back. It's a sweet one, particularly for finger picking and accompanying singing, but it's good with the fiddle too.

Back when the old band used to play a bar in Birmingham with a firetruck in the lobby. We also played two big summer festivals that were strong on bluegrass, one at Smith Mountain, one called Horse Pens 40. I saw Jimmy Martin at the Smith Mountain festival. He rode around in a bus called the Widow Maker, and on stage he explained that his band wasn't good enough to record, unlike in earlier times, when he was recording. He also said he'd go around after his set and have a drink with everyone at the festival, a challenge I believe he made the attempt at least to accomplish. At Horse Pens, in October, I watched Ricky Skaggs and his band play a set wearing gloves. The temperature had dropped below freezing. Skaggs could play good mandolin with gloves on! Another time at Horse Pens an Alabama National Guard jet came over about 50 feet above the stage, creeping up on us from the south at such a speed that the sound exploded when it arrived, Horse Pens being a peninsula of the Appalachians ending above the much lower plain stretching off to Birmingham and points south, so that the pilot had plenty of altitude till just before he got to the stage, where the old band was chunking out Bill Boyd's "Wahoo, Wahoo, Wahoo." Our bass player jumped off the stage briefly as I recall, but the band more or less kept going and finished the song to the afterburners. A year or two later we heard a recording of the moment, but it wasn't really how it was, the jet was just a mild woooosh. You hada be there.

I can't particularly imagine those folks who came to see us voting for Judge Moore, but surely a lot of them are doing just that. It's there in the Skynyrd lyrics:

Well I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow

That flyboy was saluting bluegrass is the likely theory of why he was there that day, in the sky above us. Back in the '70s The Band like to fly the Stars and Bars, and it wasn't just Levon. It's there on the wall in the Last Waltz. People imagined a space where that was possible without contradiction.

Roy Moore said, during his campaign, that he'd like to repeal all the constitutional amendments after the 10th. He also said he thought America was at its "greatest" during slavery, because in those days the family was "unified," going in the same direction. That's the patriarchy in a nutshell I guess. That's part of Mr. Moore's vote, people who think the women and the black folks ought to just shut up and stop making trouble. That would include the NFL kneelers, noted by the President when he kicked off the Strong campaign (but also kicked off the Moore campaign at the same time, a brilliant example of Trump's ability to live in contradiction, and of a piece with his endorsement of Moore from Pensacola, Florida, just across the line, just in case).

"Which Side Are You On?" the old Civil Rights marching song used to ask. For a while, after Vietnam was over, it seemed like we were all on the same side. That was apparently another grand illusion. Skynyrd was on it early. I hope I'm surprised tomorrow. I hope I can get some news on line tomorrow, without a paywall. Here, in any case, the snow melted, and the cold wet leaves are a thick carpet in the woods around the cabin, and the sun offers watery yellow light from low in the south as it approaches noon.

I see that Walt Koken, the great fiddler and banjo player from the Highwoods String Band, has published a modest memoir of his time touring with his band. Walt writes:

Just wanted to say thanks to all who have ordered my new memoir, Fire on the Mountain, an American Odyssey. It’s going to be a million seller. That means I’ll have a million in the cellar! Seriously, just a reminder to everyone thinking about ordering a copy, get ‘em while they last. It makes for a good holiday present, and an interesting read. Originally intended as a retrospective of the 1960’s and ‘70’s for the old time music community readership, it has brought some compliments from folks outside that scene...

You can get it from Walt at www.mudthumper.com Ask him and he might even write you in an autograph. Walt was at a lot of those Alabama venues. He might well have been there the day the jet came over. I'll have to ask him sometime.

___________________________________

Update (12/13/17)

Roy Moore lost last night. The loss was decisive, which pretty much stops his group of Christianist conservatives from coming up with a reason to steal the election back. (See Florida, 2000). I was expecting Judge Moore to brandish his little silver popper again and call for some kind of rough justice, but the margin was over 20,000, and perhaps that was sobering to him, his ranting wife, and who knows, even Mr. Bannon, who railed about carpetbagging as a carpetbagger himself, which was probably not lost on some Alabama voters. There was much talk on the teevee comparing Alabama with the Virginia election of a couple of months back. It certainly would be a nice Christmas thought to see some turn in the electorate against the destructive, radical anarchy that reigns at the moment in the Executive Branch. I thought, as well, that the lesson of Alabama might one day actually be taken by the country, as we struggle back to some semblance of sanity: the educated urban counties of Alabama are not punished as such centers are nationally. That is, sensible people did not in majority vote in Mr. Trump, but were disenfranchised to the tune of some 3 million voters by an archaic Electoral College system that should be either abolished entirely, or at a minimum re-ordered significantly. Alabama does not give low-population rural counties excessive power over their urban centers. This is a good thing. Jones is likely going to bring a lot of prosperity to his state.

I also meant to mention, in my initial post, the sweetest visit to Alabama our old group made. This would be a trip to Enterprise, the little town which features a bronze statue of the boll weevil in the town center, to commemorate the end of a single-crop economy, which eventually was an improvement. We played at a rural school, mostly black kids as I recall. It seemed as though no one such as an old time string band had ever come out to see these kids, and their delight was wonderful to experience. Underneath all the politics there are always real people. They are the ones that matter.

Xi Jinping

It was one kind of world when, every now and then, some strikingly stupid thing would happen and be worth commenting on from out here in the bleachers of far far right field. I could usually think of something to say once a month that wasn't just a rewording of what someone else might have said in front of their teevee. But this new world, which is still unfolding, still probably in its infancy, well "prozet," as Warren Oates said in an obviously ironic tone from the table just below the General Mapache's. The other day, probably Friday last, Libby was reading that LaVar Burton had received a volley of hate on the Twitter from Trump people who thought he was LaVar Ball. That's almost as good as the endless stories of men who end up shooting themselves in church whilst attempting to show off their new 9mm to their buddies or their buddies' wives. (I always thought the crack about the gene pool being improved by each gun stupidity wasn't so bad, but that was before next week's new massacre.)

Trump's response to the massacre of over 300 worshiping Muslims in Egypt is a call for further banning of Muslims. Genius. But the President trumps himself (so to speak, if you're playing the poker game where the normal low hand is the winner). Yesterday was the Pocahontas thing, garnished with layers of further irony. The whole event occurs under the gaze of Andy Jackson. The President patronizes Mr. MacDonald with a pat on the shoulder after delivering the Pocahontas line as thought it's some sort of shared joke. Those Navajoes fought in all the Pacific island campaigns, and in Korea. And an honor which they might have otherwise taken home and framed becomes instead merely another sick joke, Trump's forever festering hatred of anyone who for any reason doesn't treat him like the Emperor he imagines he is. Trump only respects the people he fears. Everyone else he patronizes, or insults.

I was proud of Mr. LaVar Ball. Ball also thinks he's a kind of Emperor, he's just playing in the world of sports promotion, and he can't pretend that his son is better than LeBron or Stef Curry. But thank you Mr. Ball, for not becoming a toady to Trump. If I had your email I'd send you a little note. Put up a big thank you to Xi Jinping, President of China. A few decades back another little Emperor, Ross Perot, had some of his employees arrested in Iran. He didn't like it. He devised a plan and, with some able assistance, got them out. Or more accurately, broke them out. Whatever you thought of Mr. Perot as a presidential candidate, he had some gumption.

Emperor Trump did not rescue the three UCLA basketball players from China. At best, Mr. Trump asked his counterpart and much more capable Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to please let the boys go. For whatever reason, Xi Jinping agreed to let them go, and so they went. It's even possible that Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi Jinping performed a little kabuki for our amusement. But Mr. Trump did not rescue the ballers from China. He didn't have the keys.

You should see the scurrilous notes LaVar Burton received from the imbecile 33.5%. (You'll have to look them up yourself.) Mr. Trump's minions include the folks who, responding to the 9/11 attack, shot Sikhs who were working in 7-11's because they thought they were Muslims. They likely include the guy up on NC49 between here and Burlington, who's put up a gigantic Confederate flag on a gigantic flag pole in the middle of a vacant field in front of his house. They surely include the sad Alabama voters who are going to vote for Roy Moore because his opponent, Mr. "soft-on-crime" Jones, got two Klansmen convicted of killing the four little girls in the Birmingham Church Bombing of 1963, at long long last. That's a good Alabama citizen for you, finally wiping up some of the bloodstains. You'd think some of the preachers supporting Moore would actually give Mr. Jones a little credit. And maybe some do--just not the ones in the news.

Finally some thanksgiving. Last Monday one of the little copper connectors that comprise our little plumbing system here on the ranch failed. I used Quest pipe when I ran the water decades ago. It was a wonderful improvement on plumbing, which before required a torch, copper fittings, and so forth. All you needed was this special crimping tool, which I borrowed from a friend. But it turned out after a few years in the field that the Quest system often failed, and that was particularly bad news if your pipes were in the wall, or under the house. So a fitting finally failed here. I was freaking out and talking about hiring a plumber. Libby (here's the thanksgiving) thought she could make the repair. She did some reading about the new replacement for Quest, which is called PEX and has it's own similar fittings, either crimp-rings or a new deal called "shark bite" push-to-fit. They're made it looks like of brass, not copper. They have a similar crimping tool. Libby set in to crimp and push to fit yesterday, after amassing the needed bits at Lowes. It took a long day, and the idea of having running water--even hot running water no less--had after a week become a big-rock candy mountain for us. Now and again I'd help--just looking mostly, but once actually keeping a pipe in place with my shoulder. Libby's perseverance has amortized over the years, while I've found my store of that commodity to be seriously dwindling. I argued several times for the plumber, but I also felt like it would be a damn good thing for Libby to have the opportunity to learn the way of PEX, if she was interested in that course of study, which she was. So I stifled my self-pity, which was a wholesome exercise, and not nearly so difficult as actually trying to figure out each new connection, and how the blamed push-to-fit gizmos really work. It turned out in the end that to fix that one broken Quest fitting--admittedly a 3-way connection--required some nine new connections. This is surely yet another of the fundamentals of plumbing. You cut one pipe and you have to put in two splices. I can't explain it here--but it's true, a kind of string theory.

We're on the way home now. We'll probably replace all the old copper connectors and get rid of a lot of the Quest pipe. I'd rather get ahead of the next break, if you know what I mean. Something to do on a winter day. And thank you again, both LaVars.
And Felice Navidad to Puerto Rico, in solidarity. We hope your water returns, and your electricity! A week was bad enough, and you have been two months and counting.

The next bomb may be the destruction of net neutrality. No one knows what will happen, but the big businesses who will be given full Republican "Liberty" may well make the internet of people like me, just ordinary folks who think they have something to say, and who think "to google" is just a part of life, a thing of the past. It's happened before. I worked for a year with some old masons who had started their working life in a time of trade unions in North Carolina, and who fondly recalled great wages, good benefits, full employment. NC went "right to work" back in the late '50s, long long ago. These old hands all complained bitterly of the vanishing of the good times. And they all voted Republican, and held deeply racist views concerning the ability of working men of other races to even do the job they excelled at. My boss used to say, "A N****r can't even push a wheelbarrow." For a while there was a black masonry team right across the road from us, building the same sort of building we were building. Trump all the way! Just wave that ole Stars and Bars. After a while I decided to get out and free-lance on my own, which was a pretty good choice as it's turned out.

Roy V Wade is the Key

Ever since Ronald Reagan decided that the abortion issue was a perfect wedge to drive into the heart of the American electorate, heartland American churches have been Republican to the core. The fact that women have always had the leverage of their bodies used against them has been entirely ignored by the American Right. Indeed, for the Southern Baptists it's just a “natural fact.” The fact that abortion is something one can do “at home” is ignored too. In a world where abortion is illegal, a woman, and particularly a young woman, is at the mercy of the company she keeps or happens to find herself with. “You're a young child. I'm the District Attorney. Who's going to believe you.” It's always the girl who gets pregnant. And to add another layer of icing on this cake, the guy can always buy her an abortion, even if abortion is illegal, if the guy has some coin. What's a nice trip to Switzerland worth these days? Or a trip to a doctor in the next town who deals with these problems. Think of the kids and their futures. He was going to law school in Tuscaloosa.

Roe V. Wade put the beginning of the end to this. Not just the illegality of abortion, but probably much more important, the leverage men have over women. In some ways Roe V. Wade is a profoundly important plank in the scaffold of democracy which the United States has been building long-term, since a founding mired in slavery and property rights and a racist colonialism that ignored the folks that already lived here from the very get-go down on Roanoke Island, NC. This is the long arc of history Martin Luther King, Jr. was talking about on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial one steamy August afternoon in 1963. It happened, that fine speech, I'll always be proud I was there.

Roe V. Wade obviously has galled Roy Moore, Jr. The reasons for his interest in very young women are probably a psychological mystery, but as he said to the girl he allegedly tried to rape behind her place of work in 1978, “you're a child.” You have no power. Relax and enjoy it. My guess is, Mrs. Nelson probably had never even heard of Roe V. Wade at that point, and even today is “agin” it, since she and her husband voted, as she testifies, for Trump.

Mr. Moore has been obsessed with Roe V. Wade, most likely because his antenna is finely tuned to the wedge issue. Note the carefully crafted images in the photo above. Through the years, as he managed to gain more and more political power in Alabama, he wrapped himself in the trappings of religion and argued in speeches and his own court rulings that the laws of God as he interpreted them superseded United States law and the Supreme Court. He was abetted in this distortion of American law by Ronald Reagan, who took a Presidential stand against Roe V. Wade in the early 1980s. Moore was also abetted by the various white, fundamentalist cult preachers who themselves saw opposition to Roe as a good horse to ride financially speaking. In Alabama, as in many other places, a great many voters think removing Roe V. Wade is the Silver Chalice, the sole criterion of how to vote. A man who managed to convict two racist murderers in the Birmingham church bombing is reviled by Moore supporters because he supports choice. It is the bright red line. It is trumped, apparently, by absolutely nothing. Among these voters, Mr. Moore still wins. (And there is the plain fact that Mr. Jones put the Klan in jail, so he's obviously a “race traitor.”)

So it should be at least understood that what Mr. Moore and his cult fundamentalist proponents want is an end to women's equality in America. It angers these people, enrages them. The bargain they want to make is, “we'll protect you, just be quiet, lie back, enjoy it.” There are other bargains that can be discussed later. For now, the passenger door is locked.

Mr. Moore is adept at this old logic, the logic of the plantation. Brandishing his little silver pistol the other day was symbolism. So was riding in on his horse, with his cowboy hat and black leather vest. He was MacArthur, walking through the water to the beach. I have returned, an exiled Patriarch, to my kingdom. It was as fine a ceremony as the procession to Westminster, with golden coach and bejeweled orb. But we should be able to see through this ceremony. Roe V. Wade confers power on American women. Even women who have not yet read about Roe V. Wade, who are just coming into their own lives and working a part-time job after school at some steak house in Gadsden, where their job involves learning how to tend to and please more well-off men who can pay the tab and tip if the service is perfect enough to suit their tastes. The waitress is the apprenticeship to the fundamentalist marriage, if you just play your cards right. Mr. Moore hated Roe V. Wade back then, and he hates it now. It takes away a power he believes is his, because some Old Testament God conferred it to him via Adam. Eve in those olden days was the sinner, the bringer of not life but pain and death. She was to be Adam's servant. She was literally “made” from him, and for him.

As Mr. Moore says to Sean Hannity, “I didn't date young women, but if I did, I asked their mothers first.” It's a culture you can still find here and there, in places like Saudi Arabia and Afganistan and Albania. Mr. Moore's behavior is not aberrant. It is of a piece. Roe V. Wade conflicts, for Mr. Moore, with the Old Testament laws. Mr. Moore is deposed by Roe V. Wade. And this deep conflict drives much of current Republicanism, particularly the part grounded in white fundamentalism. Perhaps Mr. Moore's basic “problem” is merely that he took the old ways a little too literally. If you look at it from Mrs. Nelson's point of view I mean. She had to carry his problem in her heart, for 40 some years. Today, Mr. Moore whines about his “reputation.” It's a reputation he stole. And that's also in the Bible somewheres, maybe even on the stone monument Moore paid for and even carved his copyright into.

You Go Along with This?

I think it was probably mid-'50s when I learned that flying the American flag upside down was a code for trouble, nation in distress. Boy scouts lore again. We also learned to march in close formation, and to savor Army surplus gear. The Army had a more practical canteen than the Scouts model, which operated more like a purse on a long strap. I had an Army canteen on camping trips to the mountains, and to the piney woods around Fort Bragg. But I also had a dad who often said I should "read between the lines," and so when he accompanied me to movies like Flying Leathernecks and Sabre Jet, the exciting air battles were tempered in my ten-year-old brain. Good thing I still think. I still managed to shoot a neighbor kid in the ankle with a .22 one Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be at the movies--this was when I was older, probably 8th Grade. But I at least had the rifle pointed at the ground like my Dad always taught me when I accidentally discharged it, and the kid, Ed Marr was his name, went on to serve with honor in the 82nd Airborne, which meant that he could land a jump ok. He healed up in other words, and didn't decide to kill me!

But we learned a lot more than President Trump learned apparently, and thank god we didn't learn enough about living a cunning life to turn into what Trump also seems to be. There's certainly no question but that Trump learned, very long ago, that one need not ever "tell the truth." I always knew pretty well when I was lying. So did the rest of Troop 3 I think. Maybe we didn't really understand, in a way that involves real empathy, what those bullet holes that appeared in the airman's leg during the dogfight in Leathernecks actually meant. But we knew something. Maybe enough to start seeing through Vietnam, although I'll certainly give plenty of credit to Martin Luther King, Jr., who came some after the Boy Scouts in my education.

Anyways, it's pretty easy to see through Trump's phony patriotism, even when Pence articulates it in his masterful stylings of reprehence. Newt couldn't do it better, even with his new Vatican connections. And that gets us to General Kelly. USMC, Retired. Man of the Empty Barrel. With Trump there is always a kind of blur that must be contended with. Trump lives in masterful inarticulation. Kelly, the other day, was clear as ice, strolling amongst the tombstones and savoring the fact that, as he said, "I put many of them there." You'd think the only worthy soldiers in Kelly's army are the deceased. If you didn't know one of them personal, why you don't even deserve to sit with the adults and talk realities, even if those so-called realities include an utterly spurious rendition of an event Congresswoman Wilson attended which turns out (thank god) to be preserved on tape.

None of this is a surprise. General Kelly helped build his deportation force before switching jobs. Here's what some of them are doing, in Laredo, TX.

Border Agents Proudly Detain Just-Hospitalized Child Who Has Cerebral Palsy

Look at her. That's the face of evil right there. [photo of smiling ten-year-old girl with withered arm] That is the face of a future rapist or drug mule or murdering member of the MS-13 gang that has us all huddled in our houses, curtains closed in fear. Where will she strike? Whose job will she steal? Yeah, when you look at the grinning girl in a Moana t-shirt, you are seeing the insidious reality of the illegal immigration problem in the United States. And God help us if we don't treat her like the criminal she is.

Or, maybe, you could see little Rosamaria Hernandez, who was brought to the United States 10 years ago, when she was a 3-month old baby. Her parents wanted to get her more help for the cerebral palsy she has, and this week she was on her way to a hospital, from Laredo, Texas, to Corpus Christi, in an ambulance so she could get an emergency gall bladder operation.

The ambulance had to cross an immigration checkpoint, which led to Border Patrol agents discovering Rosamaria's status as an undocumented immigrant. They allowed her to get the surgery, accompanying the ambulance to the hospital, but they were stationed outside her room to take her away when she was well enough to be moved. The surgery was on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Border Patrol took her into custody and brought her to a detention facility in San Antonio to await deportation.

We're talking about a 10 year-old developmentally disabled girl with cerebral palsy who has lived all but 3 months of her life in the United States and who asked her mother over video chat, "Mom, where are you?" after she was being taken away. Oh, and she's got a grandfather who is a permanent U.S. resident and a cousin who is a citizen. If you can read those facts and not feel even a wince of empathy, you are a fucking monster who deserves this Trump-coated shit world we're damned to exist in. Hell, you probably love wallowing around in it.

I wonder how the Border Patrol agents felt doing this. I wonder if they were proud of how they were discharging their duties. I wonder if they went home after work and told their partners or spouses or other family how they were responsible for making sure that a little girl was taken away from her parents. I wonder if they thought for even a moment that they could have been using their time perhaps going after those drug mules. Or maybe stopping some human trafficking. I wonder if they thought it was really worth it, that it had been a good day. I suppose they could claim they were just doing their jobs, except that immigration enforcement standards say they shouldn't be targeting hospitals (let alone kids in hospitals).

And then I saw this: [photo of smiling uniformed Border Patrol agent]


That's one of the agents smiling as Rosamaria's bed rolled by. And I both had a moment of sympathy - here was a man who was obviously smiling to comfort a little girl going through a frightening situation - and more than a few moments of rage. Because that smiling son of a bitch is there to make sure that little girl's life is turned upside down and that damage is done to her that she may never recover from.

I hope smiling fuckface up there wakes up in the middle of the night, wondering if the anxiety that's pounding his chest is a heart attack, as he realizes that his life was devoted to hurting children. And I hope he'll tell his supervisors that it's bullshit and can't he go after real criminals. And I hope his supervisors will tell people at the Department of Homeland Security that it's bullsh--

Nah. Who am I kidding? He's fuckin' proud of what he did. And so are all of the idiot hordes who voted for this.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2017/10/border-agents-proudly-detain-just.html

This is who we're saluting when we stand for the flag and then anthem today at all the sporting events, including some that will get hours of national attention later on in the evening, in Houston, TX, just up the road a bit from those streets of Laredo. It's of course not all we're saluting. It's of course always a mixed bag, this patriotism, unless and until some black day that's not quite here when the whole body of undoubtedly courageous young Americans who Kelly worships as the one percent, the true Americans, is so stained by his own hard corps of enforcers that the nice distinctions can no longer be made. It certainly has come to that in other places and other times.

We really ought to thank our stars for the handful of NFL players who are kneeling. Today I hope they're saving a place for that little girl who went to the hospital and is now in military custody and on her way, apparently, to a deportation to a place she's never known, and without her loving mother. This is General Kelly's logic, as it was the logic of General Sherman, and of Harry Truman. When you grow up--if you've learned enough--you can often see the tragic flaws before they are visible to those who embody them. All you can do, sometimes, is fly the flag upside down.

General Mattis, meanwhile, said that we're not the Peace Corps in Niger, we have guns. That didn't seem to me like some sort of consolation.

There Is No Bottom

I was reading a little on Facebook this morning now that my internet has been at least for the moment healed of its afflictions. I came upon a little post by my old friend Sundae Horne, of Ocracoke Island, NC. The tourists there are being ordered to evacuate because Hurricane Maria is still serious and approaching close to the island, and overwash, flooding, and some serious winds are expected. Sundae says they'll be ok, and having sat through one hurricane on Ocracoke in the '90s, I expect she's right, and we can at the same time be glad the damn storm isn't what it was when it crossed Puerto Rico.

Anyway, Sundae posted a reference to a 1943 Supreme Court Decision called West Virginia School Board V Barnette. Here's a link to the decision, which is important enough to have achieved a wiki-page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_Education_v._Barnette

So every rightwing idiot now in government, plus many who aim to be, or used to be, have been entirely wrong on the facts concerning Mr. Kaepernick and his responsible and one might say even touching efforts to bring some justice to a part of America which continues to be abused by a great many government employees--police--on the basis of their race, and nothing else. Even our President can rail at this entirely constitutional protest. Richard Petty can rail at it and threaten to fire any of his employees who might dare to make some peaceful protest during the incessant nationalistic displays which decorate every NASCAR race: song, fireworks, air show, prayer.

I was born in 1943. It has been unconstitutional since 1943 for anyone to force an American to stand for the National Anthem.

Jesus Fucking Christ!

From the wiki page:

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protected students from being forced to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance in school. The Court's 6–3 decision, delivered by Justice Robert H. Jackson, is remembered for its forceful defense of free speech and constitutional rights generally as being placed "beyond the reach of majorities and officials."

It was a significant court victory won by Jehovah's Witnesses, whose religion forbade them from saluting or pledging to symbols, including symbols of political institutions. However, the Court did not address the effect the compelled salutation and recital ruling had upon their particular religious beliefs but instead ruled that the state did not have the power to compel speech in that manner for anyone.

Anyone still want to argue that Mr. Trump is not an authoritarian thug? And by the way, thank you LeBron James for your wonderfully considered remarks yesterday in Cleveland, at the presser.

And meanwhile the whole NFL thing Trump ignited last Friday can actually be understood as a total and effective distraction from what could easily become the worst natural and human disaster in this century:

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2017/9/25/161250/786?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boomantribune%2FSvpw+%28Booman+Tribune%29

Why aren't there U.S. Army divisions already on Puerto Rico, and, as the poster says, an airlift. And how can Mr. Trump even mention the economic problems the island has been facing, which stem in large part from ill considered previous US policy. Puerto Ricans are Americans!

Jemele Hill

We finally got our internet back. The one that works, and doesn't stall out. Turns out it was a bad modem. Could have been much worse I think.

Yesterday I drove my sis home from a rehab center where she'd been for a couple of weeks, rehabbing a knee replacement. She's doing great, and it was a delight to see her so happy at the simple moment of walking into her own house again. She's a very determined person--trains dogs in agility skills if that tells you anything. I think she will make a full recovery, and she might even do the second knee, which is a tough choice after actually experiencing the first one.

The Trump reaction to the dreadful and ongoing hurricane tragedies is pathetic, no matter what some parts of the media say. Shilling his tax "plan" in the face of enormous aid demands from Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean US seems not only heartless, but plainly nonsensical, unless you entirely accept the Alice-in-Wonderland idea that all tax cuts yield even more government income, the great Laffer Curve scam Reagan perpetrated on the country in the early '80s. The tragedy in St. John, US VI, should humble anyone who can see beyond their own ego. I guess I should add, QED to that. It also seems like Pelosi and Schumer might should have just kept quiet after their little dinner with Mr. Trump. Why push him into the corner? The goal is to rescue some 800,000 real people from a US policy disaster. Let's get that done and worry later about who installed "amnesty" on whom.

From a great website, the conclusion to a good article on Trump's Charlottesville comments:

Finally, Trump said:

So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

Wrong question: the proper question is: when does it start? When do we fully face our racist past? Looks to me as if we have started. We have started admitting what we should have admitted a long, long time ago: that our wonderful country has an ugly racist past and, worse, an ugly racist present. Some of us are dealing with it by removing Lee’s statue, It is happening fast. We have started with the traitors. Will we get around to Jefferson and Washington? Maybe. If we decide their own racism and enslavement of people means they don’t deserve a statue. That’s for us to decide and not for the racists and their allies, even if their allies are powerful media groups. Even if their allies are in the office of the President.

https://altrightorigins.com/2017/08/16/protest_racism/

The sports pundit Jemele Hill was "repremanded" by her employer, ESPN, for asserting on air that Trump was a racist. ESPN was prompted to react to Hill, perhaps, by Sarah Sanders' assertion from her podium as White House Spokesman that Hill had committed a firing offense. By that logic, Trump should resign because of his support of Birtherism. Just sayin'.

Boy Scouts

[Norman Rockwell, "Pointing the Way"]

I was a Boy Scout, and then an Explorer Scout. We lived next to the West Raleigh Presbyterian Church, which sponsored a scout troop. I don't know exactly what year I joined up--maybe '53. If so, Korea was still on, and Ike had just been elected. There was a good bit of military stuff in Troop 3. We learned how to close-order march. We got a good bit of Army Surplus gear to augment our uniforms. I had one of those aluminum canteens, and an ammo belt with all these little pouches with snap down covers. On the other hand, we didn't really care a lot about the merit badge thing. We mostly went on great camping trips, long weekends here and there. As I got older I recall a very wet late fall trip camping down on some corner of Fort Bragg, which is mostly piney woods. Another fall we went up to a place called the Pinnacles of Dan, three rocky spires along the Dan River. I googled that one time. It's now more or less closed down due to fears of sabotage, since there's a big power plant or water plant very near the entry way to the camping and hiking area. They had pics at the website of huge water pipes you had to walk pass. I almost remembered them, and I was sorry to learn that I could never go back up there--it's not so far from here where I live. That's the past for ya.

The best trip, which I think I participated in after I'd become an Explorer, was a long hike on the Appalachian Trail. I'm not quite sure where that trip happened, but at any rate a reasonable drive from Raleigh. We started out on a Friday evening, so maybe school was in. First night we hiked a bit, then camped on some flat rocks beside a creek. Next morning we set out and marched all day. I was surprised to discover that now and then we were walking past little farms with pig pens and civilians doing farmy things. It was a long hot day, not seriously steep climbs as much of the AT follows ridge lines. Now and then you'd come around a bend and get a great vista. By nightfall we'd come to our planned camp, had some sort of meal, bedded down. Sunday we pushed on as we had to get to where the vehicles were to meet us. We ran out of water--the maps showed water points that turned out to be dry. It was pretty nice to get to those vehicles, and I remember a stop for milkshakes and hamburgers that was pretty fantastic. As we drove home there was some need for an urgent rest stop, and the scout master, who was driving and wanted to get home, said "at least you've got something to hold on to, pipe down." This was probably the same year Mantle hit 56. I'm just guessing.

There was no politics in Scouts, in "my" Scouts. That is of course a lie. Politics is about perception. There were no black kids in our Troop. We all pretty much "Liked Ike." But it really just didn't come up. Mainly, we liked to march around and hike and camp out. Even though the Church sponsored the Troop, there was hardly any church in the Troop. I don't recall praying, beyond the proforma oaths and such. There were a couple of kids who were into merit badges, and I recall once going to an actual church event where one guy got an Eagle Scout badge. I didn't think it was much of a deal. Maybe he did.

Looking at that illustration at the top, I see a clear reference to the Iwo Jima Flag Raising Monument now. I wouldn't have consciously noticed it in the '50s. I don't even know if the Rockwell painting predates the monument or not, although I'd guess the Rockwell predates even the 1945 photo on which the Monument is based.

It's not really a "copy," as you can see. The Rockwell painting just "evokes." Maybe that's me? That's how the Scouts were anyways, in the '50s, in my experience. Yes, you could see, you can see now, looking hard and squinting your eyes. There was an evocation of military culture, and a respect for the wars just past, World War II, Korea. It was part of the '50s. As I've mentioned here in another post, my 5th Grade Principal, a WW II vet, brought a German Luger to class one day and let all of us pass it around, heft it, for all I know someone or other snapped the trigger a couple of times. He told us--Mr. Edwards was his name, a nice guy in his '30s with a blonde crew cut--that he'd picked up the weapon as he marched through a German town very near the end of the war. The Germans were tossing weapons out of their windows and it landed at Mr. Edwards' feet.

It was probably another decade before I'd seen Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will with it's depiction of Hitler Youth. Some free flic at UNC. Educational stuff, but with not enough context. Another ten years and I'd seen a showing of Goddard's Contempt at UC Berkeley, which featured Fritz Lang as a guest speaker because he was in the film. I didn't know at that point that Lang and Riefenstahl were married in the '30s, that Lang had left and she had stayed, Hitler's favorite Director.

So this is a long way round to say that Mr. Trump's appearance before the assembled Boy Scouts of America yesterday, in West Virginia, is pretty chilling in my book. Those boys don't need that stuff. They don't need to hear propaganda that young. There's plenty of time to get to serious marching, much less serious whatever Mr. Sebastian Gorka has in store for those of the lads what are drawn to "domestic" corrections. ICE will need recruits for years, but not those boys, not yet.

And maybe some of them, some small remnant, will get to where they can read Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America, and begin to see beyond the tree line. I grieve for my West Virginia. It used to be a place to hike a mountain, then it was a place to find a fiddle tune. Hazel Dickens sang the West Virginia I love. That's why she ought to have a teevee show.

How Little We Know

I'm old enough to have been captured by Humphrey Bogart's screen charisma. To Have and Have Not was created by Howard Hawkes, et al, the year after I was born. But I didn't see that remarkable film until we purchased a Dish subscription about ten years ago, more or less. I'd seen Casablanca several times, probably the first time at a UNC “free flicks” screening in the late '60s. I particularly recall seeing the film in Washington, DC, in the early '70s, at a theatre so full that I had to sit down in the very front row. With that perspective the plane taking off at the end, with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, seemed to take off straight up, like a V-2 rocket. Beyond that, there was little damage to the movie.

Casablanca is a romantic tragedy, and a call to arms. It's much like Mrs Minerva, another beautiful film that I came to after I had access to Dish and TCM. My appreciation of these sorts of movies was certainly sharpened by my education, by reading Hemingway and Camus and Norman Mailer. I think my parents' way of looking at life was shuffled in there somewhere. There was a lot in life that you'd best be capable of “taking” without breaking. That's just how it was, and part of their education in the '20s and '30s. The eventual triumph of the Civil Rights Movement in 1964 was historically coupled with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War. This historical flow around me was not a message of short term optimism. Nixon was elected as a “peace candidate” in 1968. Alternatives were eliminated during the campaign: first Martin Luther King, Jr., then Robert Kennedy.

The first time I watched To Have and Have Not it was easy to appreciate that it was a film that consciously traded on the reputation of Casablanca, and of Bogart, an existential hero along with Gary Cooper. (Probably the first “adult” movie I experienced was High Noon—my father very much approved of the message of that film.) I didn't immediately understand how specific and detailed was the relationship between Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. I was just following the immediate plot of the film. I probably caught the most famous line--”you know how to whistle...?”--but some of the other wonderful zingers, including “are you guessing her weight, Steve?” flew past, over my head.
Well, ok, William Faulkner is credited with the screen-writing.

I watched To Have again over the weekend. These days it's a staple at TCM, which is ok by me. Perhaps because I was at this point entirely aware in advance of the plot, I actually heard all of the nuanced dialog. The whistle line is still great, and wonderfully played. But the most poignant line this time around was Bogart's observation that Bacall's Slim had been through things, because she hadn't flinched when the Vichy detective slapped her for “insolence.” “Why did you come to Port of France” the cop asks. “To buy a hat,” she replies. We can all watch that scene, but Bogart instructs us on the character revealed, in case we hadn'd noticed. And it's a character he admires. They're both “tough cookies,” which is to say, seasoned veterans of life.

At some point during my Saturday viewing I realized that the genius idea Howard Hawkes had was to redo Casablanca, but this time around, give “Mr. Rick” a great girl friend. The whole exotic location is just paint color. North Africa? Martinique? What's the difference. In both films the same tension exists between Bogart's existential hero, working to stay apart from the great moral question of the day, which really amounts to “Why aren't you in the Army, son?” And the forces of oppression, in both cases the Vichy government, the Vichy police. The same moral quandary arrives in the form of a resistance hero and his wife, both of them beautiful blondes. In Casablanca Rick finds the exit visas for them. In To Have Bogart removes a bullet, then once again enables them to escape.

But this time around, the romance comes from another quarter. Slim has arrived before the resistance hero and his beautiful wife, and she explicitly makes fun of the romantic tragedy the resistance hero's wife touches on after being captured by Bogart's skill at first aid. Bacall even quotes, explicitly and with hilarious irony, the lines she's just heard the hero's wife say to Bogart. “I don't think I'll ever be angry at you again.” Bacall only adds some fluttering eyelids. That cements his appraisal of her in Steve's mind. He later, as things wind towards happy resolution, tosses her a wonderful zinger in reply. “Give her my love,” Bacall says as Steve makes one last check on the patient, hiding down in the cellar of the bar. “If's she's wearing that dress” (the one Bacall has on), “I'll give her my own.”

If I wanted to teach a course in the difference between comedy and tragedy, I might assign these two wonderful films. Both end with resolutions that are driven by the need of audiences to get at least a little good news. Shakespeare didn't shrink from “reality” like that. We don't know, in fact, if Steve and Slim and Walter Brennan and the resistance fighters will make it to the mouth of the harbor. We don't know if the airplane with Bergman and Henreid actually makes it to Portugal, or if Mr. Rick manages to become a successful resistance fighter. You want to watch some more realistic stories of World War II, try Melville's Armies of the Night, or Rossolini's Open City. Resistance was a terrible choice even if it was the only one. But at least in To Have the immediate romance is fulfilled. Casablanca leaves us with the tragic promise of “I'll Be Seeing You,” which was the fear everyone carried until the war was over. My very first memory, when I was between two and three years old, is of my father bursting in to report that the war was over.

The American audience has mostly turned away from that dark truth, of how deep the losses really are. Perhaps this is why we're where we are today. The propagandists have won, at least for the moment. They have the biggest megaphones, a physics that did not escape Goebbels, the genius of propaganda, and has apparently never been allowed out beyond the confines of the academic study of advertising in this great land of ours. Today Fox News is on the attack, bashing real news with every passing day. Over the weekend Fred C.Dobbs, on the Fox News channel, said the “deep state” was engaged in a coups. The ever changing stories of the Administration count, to Mr. Dobbs, as “fake news” because they are reported. Sean Hannity can be directly lied to, in real time, by one of the facilitators of the Russian operation to capture the Presidency, and can still talk about “fake news” in the next moment. “Fake News” is a great phrase. It resonates. As usual, the public mostly doesn't want to hear the real stuff, uncut. This means that there's a given willingness to suspend disbelief. Fake news it is. They are going to get those coal mines going again, just you wait. In my little town, the furniture factories are going to get cranking before long. Or at least the chicken plants. Of course the last standing plant has just been demolished to literal rubble by the biggest successful business in the area, D. H. Griffin Wrecking and Scrap Metal.

We Americans just don't like real tragedy. Before the little scrap metal processing company I worked for closed its doors for good last year, we used to get frequent visits from a nice local kid in an old white Chevy pickup. He was full of energy, and hauled some decent scrap, which in the good times that preceded our closing (and the world-wide drop in the price of scrap) would make him a decent pay day. It's true that his mom called us once complaining that he'd stolen a load from her pile—she also brought scrap now and then—but that was almost funny, the travails of a scrappin' family. Last week, according to our very local paper, this kid, 24 years old now, had been killed in a single vehicle wreck at 3 AM on a rural road not so far from my kitchen. Traffic, it was reported, was tied up as they worked to get his vehicle, and his body, out of the woods. He'd hit two trees. Excessive speed. No mention of “substances,” which probably didn't mean very much. Quite a lot of promise lost. He was working on getting his commercial driver's license the story reported. Who knows if he even voted back in November. If he'd gotten that CDL he might have been hauling the chicken plant rubble for D.H., and at the same time dreaming of an office job in a new chicken plant courtesy of the Make America Great team by the time 2020 rolled around.

Sartre wrote a play once called No Exit. Far as I know it was never popular in Chatham County. Too French.

Chilly Winds

My mother used to tell me a story with a message in it, about life. I think it is an Aesop's Fable. It's likely found in more than one cultural tradition. This is the message of Joseph Campbell: look around and you'll find resonances in many cultures. I was probably about five years old the first time she told the story to me. The story was basically this:

A god (or God) was having an argument about power with one of his minions, perhaps Satan in his pre-Fall state, if you want to get all Miltonic about it. Satan says, “See that guy down there, all wrapped up in his big fur coat, shivering in the North wind. I'll bet you I can make that guy take his coat off by blowing twice as hard.” So God says, “You're on. And I'll up the ante. I'll bet you I can make him take his coat off by not blowing at all.” And the two of them clink their glasses of mead and give a hearty laugh.

So there's the bet. Satan blows harder and harder, so hard that finally he gets plumb dizzy and has to sit down. Then God simply wipes away the clouds and shines the sun down on the freezing traveler, and in a few minutes off comes the coat.

Apparently Satan learned the lesson. “Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.” By then he'd Fallen, and his aim was to discredit guile so as to more easily trick us muddled humans into trying something else, more to his liking in the big picture of things, which is of course to make our little planet as terrible a hell as can be imagined.

Our most underrated trait, as humans, is probably multi-generational resilience. We create children, young people, who mostly start out seeing the future hopefully no matter what has happened to their parents and grandparents. This isn't always true of course. Sometimes this trait so annoys people with other agendas that they employ scientific methods aimed at training hope right out of the young. Some of these people mount armies of children, and train them to kill, and work at destroying all empathy. Take a ten-year-old, give him a pistol, have him shoot someone in the back of the head, then praise him mightily, call him a hero, give hm a birthday cake. Sometimes it works. For an exploration of this story, and how it works and how it sometimes doesn't, see Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien.

You could say that the 9/11 attack was an example of the bitter destruction of empathy. The men who planned and carried out the attack cared only about the symbolism of the buildings, and entirely put aside the real people who happened to be in the buildings. As well, they wanted to show the world that empathy was not going to stop them, just as fourteen years later ISIS wanted to show the world the same thing by cutting off the heads of their captives, no matter who they were.

But this battle of an eye for an eye was surely joined long before 9/11. There can be no doubt that from the point of view of a person struggling to survive in Afganistan or Iraq in 2000, there had been already many bitter blows, and a long chill wind. As many people said when we decided to attack and invade Iraq in 2003, “it's all about the oil.” Who's oil?

9/11 upped the ante, or perhaps to use another metaphor, accelerated the death spiral. Our attack on Iraq gave another goose to the accelerator. There is no obvious end point to this.

Meanwhile, there remain (until they vanish) other possibilities. Some smart, scientific-minded girls from Herat, Afganistan, applied last week for permission to come to the US and participate in a science forum on robotics. They are earnest, serious looking people, these young women. They come from a part of Afganistan that has a great, centuries old tradition of science, and more affinity with Iran than with the Pastun-speaking and Taliban supporting peoples of Afranistan who reside nearer the Pakinstani border. Nontheless, these young women were summarily denied entry into the US. The “travel ban” is a cold North wind.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world-0/us-afghanistan-robotics-robot-inventors-teenage-girls-first-global-challenge-kabul-citadel-travel-a7818191.html

There are a lot of stories covering the denial, you can google yourself.

This is what we have as US foreign policy these days—a cold North wind. The Herat girls live in a country that in significant measure frowns on women having any education at all. Apparently Mr. Trump stands with the Taliban on this. It's another weary example of Billie Holiday's strange fruit. It has been, for pretty much ever, the response of some of us. It is perhaps a definition of authoritarianism. Put their heads on pikes lining the road to the palace. All will bow down and tremble. There will be a final end to those who dare to complain. The more brutal, the more effective.

The horror is that there is no way to entirely refute this Satanic dream. The horrors can be multiplied. People in Herat probably invented multiplication a thousand years ago. Yet these girls thought the effort was worth it. Perhaps the US simply has gotten away with too much for too long. Too many of us simply do not imagine the possibility of being in the footsteps of these girls, making their way from Herat to Kabul to apply for a permit at the US Embassy. I believe I read last week that some 4,000 more US troops are on their way over there.

We never looked into the face of oblivion, except for our soldiers, who went and either came back or didn't. If you came back, we said, “Get over it.” In Japan, in Germany, in France and Great Britain and the Soviet Union, they lived it. It was harder to forget in those places. Here we've already put up a new, better tower, and there are mostly just brief glimpses of the old twins in movies from the '70s and '80s.

When you finish with Lacombe, Lucien, try Fasbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun.

My mother was of course also teaching me about how to get along with my father.

Cuffy, or Cuffee?

I learned this tune about ten years ago, which is quite recent in my tune learning history. Most of the tunes I play I learned in the '70s. This tune, "Cuffy" or possibly "Cuffee," is rather like a tune I've known since my time with the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, which was called "Magpie." Alan Jabbour had collected this "Magpie" from either Henry Reed, his primary source fiddler, or perhaps a fiddler more local to Piedmont NC. If you compare the two tunes you will hear their relationship. I've found that if I play "Cuffy" first I have a hard time switching immediately to "Magpie," because the similarities draw my fiddling mind back into the first tune. I've found that little mental feature of either my mind or the tunes themselves to appear in various other tune pair settings. Where are you Bishop Berkeley?

The way the fiddler in the video plays "Cuffy" is rather different in style from how I play it, although the notes are almost identical. I hear "Cuffy" as a very "swingy" tune, with a lot of syncopation, a sort of "strut" or maybe "cakewalk." Back when I was in the musical play "Diamond Studs," about the life of Jesse James and his gang as romanticized by some southern college boys so as to entirely whitewash the story of unreconstructed rebels (except for the acapella singing of the actual ballad "Unreconstructed Rebel" by Jan Davidson, who went on to become the chancellor of the John C. Campbell Folk School where they taught such things), we had a song called "Cakewalk into Kansas City," written by Jim Wann and Bland Simpson. It had something of that "strut" feeling I hear in "Cuffy." If I could play you some of this music I'm pretty sure you'd hear what I'm talking about. As it is, this digression is probably pointless. Oh well.

It should be noted that Jim Watson and I performed Henry C. Work's "Kingdom Comin'" in the play as well, as a kind of counterpoint to "Unreconstructed Rebel." Work's song is actually rather hilarious on one level. The slaves revolt when they see the "Lincoln gumboats" coming down the river and throw "massa" down the well. This song was very popular after the Civil War, in minstrel shows, and appears in some movies depicting that world as Hollywood did in the era of Gone with the Wind. But just as the name Cuffee turns out to be laden with implications of white supremacy, so too the "Negro dialect" Work uses to tell the tale of liberation. Thank god some of the monuments to this ongoing American fantasy are at last coming down. Our 4th graders should all be required to read Malcolm X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay_Work

Today I came upon this very interesting historical post on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a great blog I read more or less daily. Here's the post:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/05/day-labor-history-may-30-1741

We tend to forget most of the history of America. It's not seriously taught except at a graduate school level, which means the only Americans who get a pretty good idea of American History as it really is are a relative handful of people who hope, perhaps vainly in many cases, to eventually teach the subject in various colleges. There are no doubt a few other people--again a relative handful--who are just interested enough, on their own, to do the research and reading to educate themselves. The entire cohort of these folks, educated in true American History, are probably far short of the number of citizens capable in theory of electing one Congressman, even in a place like, say, Montana.

As you'll see if you click over to the post, there was a man named Cuffee who holds a significant place in American History. He was a slave and lived in the early 1700s in New York City, and he was suspected of committing arson, and was burned at the stake after being tortured into giving up (true or not) other names of slaves to the fearful white property owners in New York.

I don't know--no one can know--whether the tune "Cuffy" is a reference to this slave martyr, "Cuffee." I've always wondered just what the name of the tune "meant." Fiddle tune names fall into a small variety of classes. A lot of tunes are named for people. In some regions, such a Nova Scotia, this style of naming is very common. In other areas tunes tend to be named after tasks, or daily events. The other day I was reminding myself of how "Bull at the Wagon" goes. It's a western feeling tune. The name might mean or describe oxen pulling a wagon. Or maybe it's cowboys bulls**tting around the chuckwagon. There's "Cattle in the Cane." That's pretty easy to get. Then there's "Dog Passed a Ryestraw." That's actually a kind of scatological song, and also one of the greatest of American fiddle tunes at least in its rendering by the Indiana fiddler John Summers. A lot of tunes come from song names. "Fortune," a great Mt. Airy tune in Tommy Jarrell's hands, comes from a temperance hymn. Tommy and the rest of the Round Peak bunch would sing a verse or two of the song with more than a little irony, since they were usually sitting close to a jar of moonshine.

Generally, I think a lot of fiddle tune titles are in one way or another "commemorations." They remind people of something else. It might be someone who's moved away, or married, or died. It might be something that was fun, missed, regretted, something from the even older days when the fiddlers all played without cross-tuning, or perhaps when they all cross-tuned.

I think maybe we should remember Cuffee. There's already a ready made tune, and a good one at that, which bears his name. From now on, I'm going to spell the tune that way. It makes a damn good Memorial Day commemoration, better than an overflight of Steath Bombers surely. While we're at it, let's give some consideration to Ben Franklin's recommendation for the National Bird. He nominated the Wild Turkey. Which could certainly be sipped whilst playing Cuffee the last weekend of any May that might come along.

Update.

The excellent comment, that "Cuffy" is noted at Wikipedia as a "name for a Negro," cuts deeper than one might first imagine. On the surface my suggestion for renaming the tune is little more than a suggestion to alter the spelling of the word, which would be the same word. Also, it's very interesting that there are other similar stories of black slaves martyred in revolt in other lands, and with the same name. Deeper perhaps is the implication that, in the dominant culture, which has the power to name, there are "names for Negroes." Just as in the culture there are "names for cats, horses, dogs." So Cuffee was a name for a black man in the sense that if you saw or heard the name you would know that it referred to a black man. And parallel, if you heard someone talking about "Fido" you would know the reference was to a dog. The other part--these names, which float in the sea of human culture, mostly do not exist in a world where "spelling" is much of an issue. Most people in the 1700s didn't write and couldn't read. And that would in turn be one cultural reason why some names are understood by everyone to be "names for black people." Information is imparted. If the suspect is named Pedro he is likely to be Hispanic. A lot of this stuff is there. All you have to do is read it.

Your Lyin' Blue Eyes

I've been watching the news week like almost everyone else. The Teevee brings the news to us here in the woods. It's been raining most of the week, so there's not a whole lot to do outside. Last night Jared's name has been explicitly added to the list. The lad has a nice dimple and seems an unlikely black hat. He's much too young. But his looks deceive, and his family company is apparently as ruthless as Trump's. Likes attract sometimes.

I was thinking of writing about the Gianforte thing. It's surely notable that a reporter asks the candidate about the horrible Republican "health" care plan and the candidate responds by beating him up. In early coverage the fact that the candidate beat him up was so remarkable that the question that elicited the assault got kinda lost in the glare. Gianforte also won his election and actually raised $100 K on the story! A news story last night featured photos of a teeshirt at some right wing rally, possibly Gianforte's, which was touting the lynching of journalists. Really, this is what the shirt "said": "Tree. Rope. Journalist. Some Assembly Required." We have arrived in Mussolini-land. (Speaking of which, I read today that Mussolini did not allow non-Italian aircraft to overfly Italy, which caused travelers on long trips such as, say, going from London to Sydney, Australia, to depart aircraft altogether at Italy and take a train across the Italian peninsula.) Laura Ingraham made fun of the assaulted Ben Jacobs on her radio show, saying he was crying about someone stealing his lunch money. A California Republican congressman said Jacobs should not have been assaulted. Unless he deserved it.

One of the better features of the Gianforte/Jacobs story was that it turned out that a Fox news team witnessed the action, and could counter the rather blatant lies of the Gianforte response, which tried to accuse Jacobs of being the aggressor, Gianforte the victim of the of course liberal press. But what doesn't get attention is the subtlety of spin these days. We're not still living in Mussolini's Italy. Ezra Pound, who was once a notable American man of letters, called Mussolini Italy's Jefferson back in the '30s, and even wrote a book on that subject.

Consider:

https://balkin.blogspot.com/2017/05/locating-absolute-minimum-level-of.html

We get played. Over and over.

The most remarkable event in the Trump/NATO visit might be this, captured and preserved on Youtube (for as long as Google cares to maintain its extensive and expensive bank of servers).



There are of course many other candidates.

I was interested to see that Gianforte has antecedents. Of course the most notable is, again, Mussolini. A reporter once asked him what his first plan was, should he be elected. "Why, to kill you!" Mussolini responded. I've always thought this was actually a pretty good definition of fascism. Turns out Senator Joe McCarthy also assaulted a journalist, the notable Drew Pearson, in 1950. Richard Nixon broke up the fight.

Paging Mr. Chaplin

[Alexander Shcherbak/TASS]

I was at the start not all that engaged with the gigantic story of 1973-74 that we now know as Watergate. I was working as a copy editor at Duke Press, in Durham. In my spare time I was helping to build the Red Clay Ramblers, with my bandmates, Tommy Thompson, Mike Craver, and Jim Watson. This meant weekly practices, as we worked up songs and tunes that each of us would bring to the table. The practices were a lot of fun, with each of us taking arranging lead depending on the number, and all of us having whatever input we wanted. Democracy in action. We found gigs, mostly local, at a club called the Cat's Cradle that had started up in Chapel Hill about the same time we'd started up. Now and then we'd drive out to some out-of-town venue. One time we played in Greensboro, and the great fiddler Bobby Hicks showed up and even let me try out his blue Barcus-Berry 5-string fiddle--which I found impossible to play because of the 5th string. We went up to New York City on a Piedmont Air prop-jet and did a show with cajun greats the Balfa Brothers, a wonderful weekend trip set up by Tommy's friend Peter Gumpert, who was teaching at Columbia. We drove down to Athens, Alabama and competed in a fiddle and band contest. Alabama fiddlers play like they're all from Major Franklin's family, so I tried playing and singing a Doc Boggs song, Prodigal Son, on the banjo.

We weren't paying any attention to Watergate. But somewhere in there they started running the Senate Hearings, and Sam Ervin showed up. I started paying more attention. I still remember some of the names. Ain't No Way Inouye (D, HI), Lowell Weicker (R, CN), Howard Baker (R, TN). The most important thing was Senator Ervin's incredulity, as he confronted lie after lie, coverup after coverup. When Mr. Butterfield arrived to testify, you might as well have closed business for the day.

Just as in Vietnam, apparently the Republicans have learned almost nothing. One begins to draw deeply pessimistic conclusions about the, well, the human race to be specific. Mr. Trump fires the head of the FBI, who is conducting an investigation into, well, Mr. Trump, concerning Russian manipulation of the election just past, wherein Mr. Trump became President. And it gets better. After having his minions come out over several days and tell a long, complicated story about how Mr. Trump was just following the recommendations of his esteemed Assistant Attorney General, his esteemed Attorney General having been forced to recuse himself from all matters concerning Russian manipulation of the election because he didn't disclose meetings he himself had with said Russians during the campaign just past, yesterday Trump himself debunked that whole story in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt and asserted that he'd already decided to fire Mr. Comey no matter what the Assistant Attorney General might or might not say.

There are many many threads. Mr. Trump's spokesmen are now joining Ron Zeigler in the cavalcade of shame. That would include Mrs. Hucakabe Sanders, who knows too many FBI agents for her own reputation. There is reasonable speculation, including by people of legal note such as Lawrence Tribe--who played a role in the Watergate hearings!--that Mr. Trump may have actually built a case for his personal obstruction of justice indictment by telling Mr. Holt, in yesterday's interview, that he wanted to affect the investigation headed by Mr. Comey into Mr. Trump. This legal risk was perhaps why more acute legal minds had concocted the Assistant Attorney General story. "One never knows, do one" (Fats Waller).

The day after the actual firing event, Mr. Trump met with the Russians in the Oval Office. TASS was there and took the only photos available, when were then published. Mr. Trump seems, in the photos, to be the delighted host. I would say he's almost dancing a happy dance. I would guess he was thinking, during that meeting, "at last." I'm just guessing. As usual with Mr. Trump there are now reports that the White House is most unhappy that the photos were published. Someone from the White House even says "The Russians lied to us."

In other news, a big new commission has been commissioned to look into voter fraud on a national level. It is chaired by some AG from Kansas who is known for his draconian voting laws, and his general concern with the undocumented. It seems like the great plan continues no matter the choppy waters of each moment. There is no doubt that voter ID laws and such have tended to disenfranchise more likely Democratic than Republican voters. A national campaign is going to be needed in 2018. Not only is the House Republican majority at stake. So, as well, is the possibility of Trump's impeachment. The potential charges are pretty much now in place.

It's hard to know what will happen. We're always in the historical moment. Every day comes a new drama. Anybody even remember Sally Yates, or wonder why Mr. Trump took so long to fire General Flynn compared to, say, Mr. Comey. Mr. Comey got the news on TV, whilst giving a speech. He had to charter a plane home.

Paging Mr. Chaplin.

By the end of '74 Nixon was gone. I think he resigned on a day when we were playing the Cradle. By the end of '74 we were up in New York City again, this time polishing a musical play called "Diamond Studs: The Life of Jesse James." It went on to open in an off-Broadway theatre on New Year's Eve, got fantastic reviews, and then to run successfully well into the summer of 1975. In the spring of that year, during the run, people were helicoptering out of Saigon and onto US aircraft carriers, and Vietnam was finally, blessedly, over. Some 58,000 American soldiers had died for pretty much nothing, in a bipartisan effort to stop the flow of history in a little country in southeast Asia.

Health Care Bill

There will be millions of words written. Here's a good start:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/05/trumpcare-moral-democratic-political-disaste

I've been in a certain quandary about Republicans and the Republican party for a long time. I was convinced back in the days of Nixon that there was never a good reason to pick a Republican, at any level of government. So in a sense I've sort of shot my wad, as they say. Nonetheless, it does seem to get worse and worse. During the era of Nixon I could have voted for Lowell Weicker, for example. And while there were a lot of issues with Sam Ervin (a Democrat), after Watergate I would have voted for him too. The Republicans have been getting worse and worse. I don't see how to ascribe much of this trend to anything other than racism. A great number and percentage of Republicans were simply incensed that a black man achieved the Presidency, and was reelected. One of those Republicans was of course Donald Trump.

One can hope that the Senate will simply fail to pass a cruel and evil bill aimed primarily at destroying Mr. Obama's legacy. Predictions I've read are not so sanguine. American tribalism continues to thrive. Back in the '20s and '30s, the United States government sic-ed the US Army on a variety of its citizens. Veterans who were protesting for pensions were violently driven from Washington under Herbert Hoover's orders. Hoover then lost to Roosevelt. Strikes were put down in Detroit and other places under Roosevelt.

Money has always been power. Money has mostly been greedy, and willing to lie and deflect. The top one percent of Americans, ranked by income, get over $800 billion from this bill when and if it is passed. Oddly enough, the same amount vanishes in support of Medicaid.

The Old Vet may soon be dependent on Medicaid, after serving his country bravely in France, Belgium, and Germany, in 1944-45. Hopefully it will be there for him.

I plan to never vote for another Republican. But as I say, my conviction in that regard was sealed well before this particular legislative cruelty won the US House of Representatives.

Which Side Are You On

They just relegalized this:



Meanwhile, down in El Paso, a latina woman who went to court to get a restraining order against her husband for beating her was arrested by ICE as she left the court house. There are also reports that the Trump administration is considering using various state national guard units numbering some 100,000 to round up undocumented people in various states. Mr. Spicer says these are unfounded rumors. They didn't happen to come up yesterday in the press conference. Perhaps at the rally in Florida someone will ask. Or maybe the rally will end with an altar call for volunteers who might want to join in the roundup festivities.

If we get out of all of this alive, perhaps we should take a look at building a new structure for the American family, leaving the ancient authoritarian model we still use in probably 75% of American homes to the dust bin of history. It's too bad there's no film of Mr. Trump's father talking to Master Donald as he sits at the dinner table in his knickers and refuses to eat his English peas.

25 Cents

Back in the olden days if not the mythic times we fell in a kind of love with the old music and to some extent culture of what Alan Jabbour liked to term the “rural upland south,” mostly Appalachia in other words, but since there was quite a bit of this same music extending down into the relatively flat lands below the hills, Alan was generously inclusive as was his way. As lovers do, we played and performed the music we loved. Mick Jagger could sing “the blue light was my blues, the red light was my mind.” I could sing “police come, didn't wanna go this morning, shot him in the head with my .44 this morning.” Even with Tommy Jarrell's lyrics, there was an almost immediately perceivable dissonance with our audience. That is, no matter how revered Tommy Jarrell was, we could not sing words like “darky,” or worse, “nigger,” to any audience we wanted to play for. This realization was not immediate. We made one record which included Jarrell's lyrics to Yellow Rose of Texas as we learned them directly from him. For a while we actually performed the song as we learned it, true to the basic principle of field collection. Then we realized there were boundaries. There should be boundaries. So the lyrics were changed. “Darky” and “nigger” became “soldier,” “preacher,” even now and again, “honkie.” We were highly educated and knew about scare-quotes, just like the man who rode the mule around the world.

There was of course a perfectly good audience out there that would have cheered at each “nigger.” Tommy Jarrell himself was to some extent part of that audience. He would sing his songs no matter who was in the audience. The hippies he didn't care enough about to self-censor, and the hippies loved him enough to let it pass. The black man in the crowd, well he just “got a dose,” as Tommy would say.

One of the first on-the-road gigs we did was a package tour of the deep south set up by Anne Romaine. It was mostly concerts at schools and libraries. There were no bars or big hard-drinking venues. No race tracks. No drive-in theatres, such as where Ralph and Carter Stanley would play before it got dark enough to show the film, and then get pelted off when darkness arrived. Our tour included Tommy Jarrell and also a great black bluesman who'd learned directly from Robert Johnson by the name of Johnny Shines. One night in Alabama Tommy did his set and came off, and I asked him what was the name of the last tune he'd played. Johnny Shines was sitting across from us, in the dressing room, reading a newspaper. Tommy, without hesitation, said, “well, that was Nigger in the Woodpile.”

There was a fairly deathly silence. Then Shines kind of cracked his newspaper, but did not lower it. “No,” he said, “I think that one was called “I'd Rather Be a Nigger than a Poor White Man.” The silence was not broken. Then Tommy said, “well, yep, I think you're right.” We had already by then dropped the dubious words from our Tommy Jarrell repertoire, and I should have recognized the tune and never brought it up at all, but I didn't. It wasn't one Tommy played very much, being in G.

Now and very then we'd inadvertently run into the wrong crowd—the crowd that would have cheered. One time we played a small bluegrass festival in Wise, Virginia, where Ralph Stanley lived. As you can imagine, the bands were great bluegrass bands, with the exception of us. They liked us well enough, until the slot in the set where our bass player pulled out his trumpet. We'd then crossed the line. Ain't no trumpets at a bluegrass festival in WisegoddamVirginia. During his break, someone in the audience fired a purple snow cone at the trumpeter, and hit him pretty square in the upper thigh. He was wearing white pants. His break suffered. Dale Jett, a good friend and the son of Janette Carter, said after the set, “I hate that old boy throwd that snowcone.”

Ten years after I'd left the outfit, in 1991, a country singer named Travis Tritt had a pretty good hit with a song called Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares). I'll bet he was tickled pink to get in a parenthetical in the title. He was a good songwriter, not his audience, but he understood their bitterness and anger. Here's the song:




His audience responded with cheers. They also threw so many quarters at him that, eventually, he had to stop performing the song live. Quarters hurt.

Right then and there we should have known Trump was on the way, slouching towards Golgotha to be born. Maybe we could have done something about it. Instead, we thought Ross Perot was a blessing from Jesus himself and let it pass.

UPDATE

Here's some further reading. http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2017/02/trump-doesnt-read-books-but-you-can-learn.html
Even Woody Guthrie saw through the Trumps.

The UnAmerican Muslim Ban

We've already been here you know. And here's what an actual security expert, Benjamin Wittes, thinks:

https://lawfareblog.com/malevolence-tempered-incompetence-trumps-horrifying-executive-order-refugees-and-visas

The resistance is heartening.

Competence

The basic presumption of all of us is that the government should at least be competent. This is actually one of the fundamental criticisms from the far right, at least when it suits them: the government should be reduced in size and power because it mostly can't do the jobs it tries to do. This is the argument for, among other things, "privatization." Coming to a post office near you.

In this regard, consider the following analysis from an historian and legal scholar of foreign policy:

There is an additional very troubling feature of Trump’s action [the Muslim Ban] that should not get lost in what I assume will be an enormous reaction to its discriminatory character. The action is also wholly arbitrary. There is no rational basis for this policy. This is like policy as fantasy football, policy as vanity plate. There is no evidence of an increased danger to the US from Syrian refugees or any other refugees. If terrorism is the problem, I suppose we might be more concerned by people traveling from France and Belgium than Yemen and Somalia. But however we analyze the policy, the underlying reality is that it is not the result of any rational policy process. There was no process. This is pure prejudice. For the whole post, see

https://balkin.blogspot.com/2017/01/foreign-policy-chaos.html

But it must be kept in mind that these edicts from Mr. Trump are being generated in their details by Bannon and Miller.
They do have a goal: it seems apparent that Bannon/Miller/Trump hope to create enough public unrest to justify a forceful police and military response. They hope if this response is orchestrated in just the right way to achieve at least significant public support, at least among the factions of the voting public that already voted for him in November.

This is, in effect, the Tiananmen Square incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989

Captured in a famous photograph:

The tanks did not run over the brave protester. But they did run over quite a number of other protesters in the square, and the whole protest was cast as a conflict between urban elites and rural working people who were convinced that these elites were endangering their country.

Bannon and Trump are hoping, I think, to escalate this same rural/urban tension in the United States. They believe--hopefully mistakenly--that they have "the people" on their side. And it might be noted that another Republican President, the much more liked Ronald Reagan, found the air travel nexus to be amenable politically to what at the time seemed a shocking affront to the status quo. Mr. Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers. That order stood.

We'll see. Obviously the Trump Administration has made the tactical mistake of including in their Muslim ban people who almost anyone, of any political persuasion short of confirmed racist and white supremacist, will find to be sympathetic. An Iraqi citizen who worked for twelve years as a credentialed interpreter to US Army troops in the field but who is none the less threatened with being sent back to a country that might well imprison him--this is as tone deaf as the proverbial want of a nail.
Let's hope. There is going to be a long roiling battle, and a totally unnecessary one from the point of view of anyone who doesn't want to blow up the country. This administration is aiming at something very radical. These are the indicators, and more will follow, and many. Sometimes tactical incompetence is all that saves humanity, and sometimes it's even just pure-T luck. Hitler got distracted by Yugoslavia and wasted some 15 divisions there, en route to Moscow. In the process, he never got to Moscow, and winter arrived. Meanwhile, some guys in outmoded old torpedo bombers happened to spot the whole Japanese aircraft carrier fleet near Midway island, and Japan lost air superiority for the rest of the war.

I found this nice poster on line at Lawyers, Guns and Money blog today: Pass it around if you like.

We would all do well to not merely wish for luck in the coming days. Incompetence is a break that may not continue.

UPDATE: