Which Digit Do You Prefer, Sir!

I know you can say that the coming digital revolution with our teevees is sorta like the coming of the automobile with our formerly four sure-footed mode of transportation. You can sneer, “What about the buggy-whip industry?” You can even talk about how wonderful the new high-def clarity is, although I don’t really know how wonderful it’s going to be to actually see what these talking heads really look like—sheesh, Lehrer, what happened to the guy, he’s suddenly 85 years old, and Fred Thompson, cripes, he’s 107 at least, glad we aren’t going to elect him!

But when the automobile came down the rutted path making its gawdawful racket, there was nobody running the PR machine in its train, was there? I mean the car wasn’t, at the outset, actually marketed, was it? It was more that people just said hey, I don’t have to feed that thing when it’s not running, and it doesn’t shit or kick you in the head, and it was only after a few years, when there were different car companies and all, that people started actually selling. I mean, I think that’s the way it went back then? The automobile sold itself, so to speak, and nobody knew anything about global warming; they barely knew the Earth was orbiting the Sun and not vice-versa.

We’re being sold on digital. Think about this. We had this rather nice, in place system of mass communication and entertainment, that was free and came into the house without special wires or dishes, or tiered plans, each costing $20 more than the next lower, all of it with an initial installation cost, possibly waived if you keep the contract for two years and sell your daughter to the Shiek of Araby.

Are you aware you are being sold? I’m just asking? I don’t think there’s anything to do about it at this point. In a year plus a couple of months, millions of people are going to turn on the old teevee and it won’t work, and they’ll go “what the hell?” and some of ‘em will get really pissed off, and they’ll mostly eventually go get a cheap set at Walmart, or a fancier set at Walmart. It’ll work out. They set the date the day after the Super Bowl precisely because they didn’t want people to actually burn the cities down. Nothing on on a Monday but Antique Road Show. Let’s just go by a fucking new teevee, Harriet. We can put it on the card.

But are you aware you are being sold? I went to Walmart yesterday and there was a 60 foot display of wide screen flat panel teevees all running an infomercial about how to mount them on your wall for maximum effect, and how incredible the new high-def picture was, and waaaaay down at the far dark end, some boxes with “digital ready” teevees that look like the one I have in the kitchen, 13” screens, plus a DVD player built in, for about $120. But the main deal was $350 to a $K, and this is Walmart. Gawd knows what it’s like over in the big city, at Circuit City or Best Buy. In 1967 you could buy a dang car for $2000, brand new!

Yes, the government is going to give each of us a couple of vouchers worth about $40 each to buy a box that will translate the new digital signals to analog for your old teevee, if you just don’t want to get with the program. It’s something like a billion and a half all totaled, which is what? a couple of days of Iraq meat grinding. But it’s our money, being spent by the government via our hot little hands passing it on to the companies that make those boxes. In China I’m guessing. I mean, we can’t just take the voucher and buy beer and smokes, right?

So why is it the government—our government, allegedly—just took away this pretty great free broadcast system that our free market just evolved for us to enjoy, for free—and substituted this new deal that we have to pay a lot of money to use??? I mean this is just the start, you realize? Seems to me the whole raison d’etre for local teevee stations is pretty much melting away here. All we need is the USA Today equivalent and we’ll be entirely cabled and satillitized, everybody paying monthly (no problem, we’ll just take it out of your credit card) for what had been, oh thank you Jesus for the Unseen Hand, FREE. You have noticed, haven’t you, that there’s nothing on the local news any more but the weather?

Well I guess I have a theory, but it’s just a theory mind you. It’s because the businesses that subsidize our representative government by paying for their fun little in house tournament called The Election want us to start paying for teevee and not getting it FREE. This way, they can make the ad money, and then make the subscription money, and the new gear money as well. Yeeeehaw, ain’t the Unseen Hand a damn good thing that Jesus made for us on the 12th Day of Christmas, right after He turned on the lights and parted the waters and all that. And oh, right, made Eve.

My Eve, Libby, has been noticing all this stuff, by the way, and points it out to me while I’m sitting on the couch watching NFL (for free). She also noticed this big guilt trip thing they’re doing now, about spending ….. gasp…. cash at the store. Have you noticed that? The customer is pulling out a $20, or writing a check (this is between quarters and possession changes), and suddenly everything stops like maybe he or she just shit in his or her pants, and it arrrgghhhhhhhh smells. Boy oh boy that’s a baaaad thing there, to be pulling out cash like that and fucking up the whole economy. It’s as bad as the other shaming thing where the pretty Airline Attendant is primping up in the, oh gawd in heaven, it’s the …. Men’s Room! Cash = BAD. Credit cards = GOOOOOOOD.

The deal with that is that the government probably kicks its collective ass all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue every live long day for starting things off in the first place with something anonymous, namely, cash, as the lubricative force in the economy. Because cash really messes up the process of taxation, adding at the very least a huge amount of otherwise unnecessary overhead in the form of complex surveillance and analysis of spending behaviors, which otherwise the credit card folks would be record-keeping to beat the band for anyways. But of course cash is older than taxes, or at least income taxes.

So your choice, digitally speaking, is a new “Fair Tax” under the Christian Candidate, Mike Huckabee (call this the Forefinger Plan), or a slow incremental shift, already occurring, to an all plastic transaction model (the Middle Finger Plan favored by most candidates at this stage in our democratic evolution), said model being nudged along by a constant but unpredictably occurring (and therefore proven most effective) light twinge of shaming brought to you, digitally, by your credit card industry. And after Feb 17 of ’09, as the first new national Event of the New Presidency that will indeed come next year, this new digital penetration will be complete—high def, high colonic. Poor Democrats.

“Ouch,” or “Ahhhhhh”, sir? Or you could just let the teevee go dark, and start paying cash and looking out the window, thinking outside the box so to speak. Now that would scare the bejesus out of ‘em. Not that they don’t have some more cards hiding behind their diamond cufflinks. Like you do get the precedent don’t you? Cancel a whole technology, or shape it to your larger designs? The slogan was already enunciated by some dick in the Bush Administration, remember: “Reality, we make reality.” Shoes, we don’t need no stinking shoes. So here’s another bit of technology that might need shaping: let’s solve the gun proliferation problem the US has by, voila, changing the calibers! Except this time we don’t give out vouchers, just coupons for Budweiser and Marlboros. Hey, works for me, dude.

See, and you thought I was some Commie Liberul. Merry Christmas, and keep your powder dry.

--Bill

Dead Fall & Banjo FAQs

We got back from the Wild and Wonderful Business Opportunityland to find a decent sized red oak had removed the wires that connect our cabin to the 21st Century—the powerful hot ones that somehow didn’t start a fire in the dry leaves when their naked ends landed therein, and that’s why when we got home there was at any rate the cabin, if not the frozen food we’d left, nor lights to turn on, nor well water to flush and drink. This was of a Tuesday night, October 30, ’07, and we called Progress Energy and damn if they didn’t send out a big strong guy with a ladder who reattached everything in the dusk—Progress indeed--one wire still hot and brushing against his shoulder as he whittled away at the end of another so’s to make a good connection, and we discussed, him on the ladder and me standing in the doorway, the price of putting it all underground from the transformer so as not to have this situation arise yet again, maybe with attending total destruction the next time. A thing to do, and pretty soon.

The tree that took down the power line

The next day, Halloween, Libby was in bed with a banged up hand and a sore back, from the tiny fall up in West Va that she’d had at the end of an incredible hike in the boulders of Bickle’s Knob—a total out of the blue kind of deal to weirdly end a magical afternoon. I did all the accumulated laundry and hung it out, the drought still on even though there’d been a heavy rain whilst we were missing, and ate some of the Halloween candy that no one ever comes down our driveway for. The next day I sawed up the tree, and today, Friday, I just stacked it in a big round pile to dry further (tho it’s ready to burn, the tree’d been dead for probably three years, and I’d flagged it and tried to get the power company to come drop it, but they won’t do that for you although they’ll send a guy around to put the wires back on the house), after splitting it all up for the back room stove, which means mostly quarters. Red oak, god’s gift to back to the land lazy bones like myself, hell with gum and hickory, at least for the moment.

Autumn has come to central Carolina. It was up in WVa last week, turning just as we got there, leaves flying all week, and from start to finish the penultimate week for the Hillbilly Nation. A nice time to go north. Now we get to watch the re-run here, so pretty I can just sit in the kitchen and look out the French doors, watching the rustle and melancholy drift of each bit of color, the shadow of the blazing summer just gone, last of the heat that’s too hot, till next May or June or whenever it cranks back up, captured in a dead leaf, cold heat that won’t burn less you take a match to it, or a down wire. And I watch the leaves, and hope for some damn cold days, and wood fires to enjoy, and maybe even a bottle of good scotch for the fire, to sip in the late afternoon, and the crunch of snow. But it’s been milder and milder winters the last ten years or so, and nothing like the fun we had down here below the crest of the hill, sledding down the driveway with Anna when she was eight or something, heating every room with wood in those days (less rooms then, on the other hand), washing up in a twenty gallon galvanized tub by the chunk heater and hauling water in a bucket from the well just off the porch.

I’d hate to haul it now. I’m sure the water’s 100 feet down, instead of 35, like it used to be. The drought’s getting the rivers and ponds too, and all the cities and towns are freaking out and making plans for more and more strict conservation, while men who have vision and money are planning how to buy water up just like oil, and sell it back to us at their prices. Which circles back around to that fallen tree, and the thought that maybe instead of burying the power line, I ought to figure out how to pay for some photovoltaic panels and big batteries, and just snip myself and mine plumb off this here grid, ‘cept for the phone line. If we’ll just keep having some winter I can always fill up the old Ford with split oak and drive it out to the paved road, and sell it to the urbanites who want a decorative blaze for Xmas. Do enough of that and maybe I’ll get a tax break on the 35 acres that do nothing at the moment but give the deer and possum and fox and owls and the rest a place to live, including me and mine. There’s usually water in the creek, but not these days. We humans never owned a damn thing but in our minds.

–Bill Hicks

Addendum: While up in West By Gawd I ran into my old friend Dwight Diller. He has a great website about his music and philosophy, and one of the best things on there is his FAQ about the banjo. The banjo needs a FAQ, or two or three, but this one is really a very kindly and wise group of remarks on the banjo as itself and as metaphor for a well-lived life, something we all strive for and struggle mightily at. Anyone who’s got this far should by all means go read the FAQ. And after that, perhaps, consider learning that instrument that burns in your heart, before it gets too late.

Here’s a brief sample of Dwight on the banjo, from the FAQ (now go read the rest yourself, and get one of his CDs too):

Q: Do you have any opinions about banjo inlays?

A: The fancy fingerboard inlay adds nothing to the playing. Side dots do because they show you where the fret you are reaching for is located. If you want inlay, go for it. But is it worth the extra expense? It is mostly for the folks that are watching. Or when you sit around and handle the banjo yourself and dream about being one of the really all time greats. You can't see the fingerboard when you play. One inlay that I prefer is from a 'pen & ink & pastel' that Elaine Diller drew and Jeff uses his version of it for peghead inlay. Comes in 4 or 5 pieces of different colored pearl and abalone. That one I am partial to. I prefer clean finger board and side dots. Anything else is fluff and a waste. Remember, you asked.

Assssscap and other Divigations

It’s too damn hot to lay stone today, and tomorrow Libby and I have a gig at a little country store in Bynum, NC. This venue has been happening for about five years or so—mostly local musicians play Friday nights in the good weather months for a pass-the-hat “gate” operated by little gung-ho kids who spread out through the audience during what the hoity-toity used to call “the interval.” A few CDs also get sold off the stage, and the store—back when it was open—sold plenty of Dr. Peppers and popsicles to the assembled throng, maybe 200 or so folks. The store closed down this past winter, so I’m guessing this time around you bring a cooler. There’s a nice bbq joint at the top of the hill, up on the 15-501, that will send you down to the store with a bag-o-chicken or some Eastern NC Q, which isn’t a bad idea at all. I’m told that a former local musician, Tiff Merritt, who used to live in Bynum while she attended UNC and took classes in song writing from Bland Simpson, helped get the venue going. She was kicking ass around these parts with her band, the Carbines, before heading off to Nashville and success. Pretty cool.

So we get a note from the venue’s proprietor, who does this for the pure love of it, because she lives in Bynum, an old mill town with a burned down mill that had closed long before the fire and a lot of funky wood-frame mill houses that people have bought and fixed up, that we had best avoid any “covers” in our show tomorrow, because ASCAP and other licensing agencies are “on the case.” To which I have to just say Jesus F. Christ, pardonne my francaise.

We can manage to avoid covers. But this is what is wrong with the music bidness, and it’s really kinda depressing. See, it’s actually run by lawyers who don’t know a pick from an A-string, and couldn’t write a rhyme or a line of beauty if they were monkeys in a Shakespeare experiment. The other day a guy who is an artist on a track-hoe told me it’s lawyers who have fucked every-damn-thing up, and I have to agree, even if I also have to agree with David Childers who wrote that “Jesus is a lawyer”—but David is a song-writing lawyer and I don’t think he’s working for ASCAP or BMI or what ever other acronyms capture the music bidness world. We need the lawyers, but we don’t need to live entirely in their world, do we? (Probably the answer to that is yes, unless you’re Karl Rove.)

Ok, the idea—the concept—is that since someone wrote a song and copyrighted it, it’s intellectual property, and so if anyone else should perform that song for money, then the owner of the property ought to get compensated some for its use. Yes, yes, I totally understand. And these agencies, like ASCAP, came into being to enforce this by monitoring performances, radio, teevee, the internet, your ringtones… whatever the hell else is out there to perform or re-perform music. It’s my understanding that ASCAP does this by hiring people with some kind of musical background, like maybe the highschool band teacher, to go to shows and listen for covers, and if he finds any, to bust the venue if they haven’t paid a significant “cover fee.” There’s a bar in Chapel Hill, the Cave, that has a big sign posted saying “ABSOLUTELY NO COVERS EVER OR YOU WON’T PLAY HERE AGAIN,” which is one reasonable solution to this problem, and the one Bynum is taking apparently. For sure Bynum can’t pay some big fee to ASCAP—they don’t make any money at all on the venue, it’s a gift to the community and to the artists who want to play there.

But it seems to me that there’s several babies squalling out there in the grass with the dirty water. Because music is a language, a living thing, as well as a property. In fact, I’ve always thought that music might well be the language that could even stop war, at least sometimes, when the hearts it reaches out to are not already as hard as granite. Musicians make a piece of music—a song, a melody—live. The good ones bring themselves, their own hearts, into it as well. They interpret, in a million ways, what otherwise might as well be Latin, dead marks on a yellowing piece of paper. And listeners of music, in the act of listening, get to experience its life. Because in a way, those marks on the parchment aren’t music at all, unless you’re the one in a million, like Ludwig Von B., who apparently could actually hear the music when he read it off the page, or wrote it down. The joy of music-making is in this act. We’d do it if nobody put any money in the hat.

Another thing about performance is that music that nobody thought of in 50 years gets revived and remembered. Libby and I do some music that was created in the ‘30s, and ‘40s, and early ‘50s. We remind the listeners of that stuff again. Who knows, they might later go out and buy themselves a CD of Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” because we did it as a kind of surprising encore to our show of mostly fiddle tunes and such. And that would be nice for Bill Haley’s grandkids I’d think. Right now he’s remembered more by Tom Russell’s sad song about his final days, than through his music. He was hot in 1954, but Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Elvis rolled right over his brand of “rock and roll,” which was actually some version of alt. country Texas two-step, a few months after “Rock Around the Clock” faded from the silver screen. Even in his most shining moment, Bill was a chubby red-neck from Michigan with a cute little ringlet that might have been a comb-over if you looked close. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was the B-side.

Now if we ever get back in a studio, and if we happen to record “Shake, Rattle and Roll” for our second CD, well we’ll pay the royalty on that. That’s a straight forward deal then—we’re selling a record of that song. (Actually I don’t think it’s Bill Haley’s either, but somebody earlier, maybe Louis Jordan, who first recorded it—a man named Jesse Stone actually wrote the song, and he died in the late ‘90s at the age of 97.) But we’re not really making money on “Shake, Rattle and Roll” when and if we play it tomorrow in Bynum. It’s just a quote, a nod to music we revere, and to the good old days which aren’t coming back. If the lawyers are going to slice and dice a place like Bynum, here’s what they’re really doing—stopping small venue performances of copyrighted music altogether. And I’d like to know who that is helping? Tiff Merritt climbed from the small venue up to a place where she’s actually making a living playing, which means she’s making real money for the lawyers sitting in the air conditioning on Music Row.

You gotta think it was lawyers who invented the pyrrhic victory. And maybe that’s a problem even with Childers’ notion of Jesus as a lawyer, come to think of it.

Miles Ahead

We went to my brother-in-law’s last evening to watch the Super Bowl and spend some time with their shiny new boy Wyatt, who’s just past one-year-old and as yet shows no interest in football but definitely likes music and also beans and green beans. The game was pretty fun—that is, it was close, and both teams were good, and the burgers and fries Libby brought back towards the end of the first quarter were a treat, as was my Heath Bar Milk Shake. She went to get the grub at a little place called the Cook Out, a small (I guess) chain, with branches here and there in the upper South (there’s one in Mt. Airy) and no ads as yet at the SB.

I thought the game turned out good for everyone but Rex Grossman, who is going to get rapped as having played up to his potential unless and until he pulls a Big One out, never mind that his team did make it to Miami. Manning, who’s carried his own monkey, flicked that sucker right off his shoulder, and I don’t think it will return. I hope he gets a few more big games in his career. It’s probably too bad it rained, and I was a bit afraid that Prince was going to be electrocuted by his axe, and I know I would have been demanding a plastic fiddle to think of doing that gig. What a bind for a musician—who plays in a downpour? Maybe Prince’s good sportsmanship to do that will save him from the Super Bowl curse that has afflicted so many other acts who’ve played the event thinking it was some kind of culmination of their career.

The ads, as has been pointed out here and there, were weird in their violence, and not just one of them, but a whole passel. Think about it: a personable robot who commits suicide, a guy who hits his friend in the head with a rock to get the last beer, a bank robbery somehow about E-trade Corporation (we already suspected they stole our dough), a snowman run through a shredder to make Coke. What’s going on? It struck me, before the big Event, that the SB has now peaked and is on the downslide. Walmart offers to stock your whole Super Bowl party in a thousand ads in the days before the game. How drear is that? Thank gawd the game was good and not a blow out.

And then there was the post game show. I know it takes something of a zealot to even watch the post-game stuff, but I enjoy seeing the interviews sometimes. This time, towards the end, there was a short commentary by some 40-something guy, a 3rd tier announcer I’ve never even seen before, that was really fairly appalling.

You may have heard that this years SB was memorable because it featured, for the first time, two black head coaches, either of which would have been the first black head coach to be in an SB. So it also featured the other obvious first, the first black head coach to have won an SB. All good, right? Not according to this unknown commentator. (And not according to Rush Limbaugh either, who spent last week continuing to grind his racist axe on the issue off and on with this and that sneer about quotas and whether women on the training staffs of NFL teams are being counted, and I don’t know what all as Rush really has become such a weeping sore on the AM dial that I can’t really do more than sample him for a minute or two any more.) No, according to this commentator the fact that these two fine coaches, Smith and Dungy, are black, was pointless and irrelevant, because the fact is, they made it to the SB because of their skills, not their skin color, and the skills of their players, and their great organizations, and etc. etc. etc. So, he concluded, people need to just shut up about the fact that these guys are black, give it a rest, move on, hope for a day when the NFL is entirely colorblind, errr, no, wait… forget that the NFL is still NOT colorblind, and neither is America.

And I wondered, what is this guy’s problem? Because absolutely no one is saying that Smith and Dungy got to the Super Bowl because they are black. The point of noting the fact that they shared this “First Black” moment is that it’s notable in American cultural history, and in Black history as well. Why is it notable—well, duh! Because they are the first, and we tend to notice firsts. And so the question is, why does this yahoo, 3rd string talking sports head, whatever his name is, get so exorcised about this fact that he wants to suppress it? Is he embarrassed for the NFL, that it took so damn long for this to happen, even though some 70% of the players in the NFL are black? Well maybe he should be, but still, I didn’t think anyone was making a big deal about that aspect of the first, that it exposed American racism yet again. Does this guy think we ought to just never admit that there is American racism, alive and well even in this new century. But surely then, this first is progress, at least, another small step, maybe even a giant step, towards a time when we’re truly color-blind about race. Or does it annoy him that a couple of black guys got this first, because it’s a first that has to do with their color and not their abilities? If that’s it, he didn’t have the nerve to just come out and scream it, because putting it that way would probably cost him his job.

Look, no one who noted this first made that big a deal about it, and absolutely no one try to say, as Limbaugh tried to say about McNabb, that either Dungy or Smith got where they are because they are black—that is, through favoritism. There might be some white coaches who’ve hung on too long because they were “made,” but that’s just not true of either of these men. So what’s the announcer’s problem?

I think it’s simple. He is just dumb.

Congrats to Tony Dungy and the rest of the Colts, and to Lovie Smith and the Bears too. Bring on spring training—pitchers and catchers report late next week.

–Bill Hicks

The Generalisimo Swings

It’s a nice global-warming kinda New Year’s Eve morning here on the ranch, with a haze in the tree line and impending warm rain for the festivities of the coming evening. I’m barefooted, with no heat on in the house and none needed. After my morning jog through the blogs and news, some final thoughts for this guttering segment of our most “interesting” times.

As has been remarked, the picture of Saddam being prepared for his hanging by hooded men is a nearly exact parallel to the pictures of beheadings by hooded men we’ve seen since the Iraq War fell into its post invasion phase. As has been remarked, in a simple sense, the hanging of Saddam is our only clear accomplishment, unbungled*, unmitigated, just another execution. Of course it’s also been remarked that this route is littered with aspects of coverup and propaganda, like everything our current Administration attempts. There remain the ghost images, of Saddam as U.S. client, with Rumsfeld shaking his hand with U.S. chemical traces on his fingers, of the Bush I Ambassador’s assurances that, really, sure, Kuwait, noooo problemo. And there are the later images, fading like flesh rotting in the ground: starving children, crooked back-channel oil deals, out of date and missing WMD, the mystery of the banner on the air craft carrier: “Mission Accomplished.”

Some years back I watched, by accident, the execution of the Ceausescus on television. They were mad as wet hens when the men dragged them from their beds and out into their own back yard. They were shot dead still raging, and then became rumpled old rags hanging from their poles, faces slack, power vanished utterly. There was a certain clarity to it even if we’ve heard precious little of beautiful Romania since. Is Bucharest still sleeping on the Danube? How are things? Probably I’ll never have the chance to go back again; that strange concert trip will only come around once. (Bizarro update—after writing this I turned on NPR and discovered that Romania and Bulgaria are being admitted to the EU today!)

Shooting Saddam in his spider hole might have been somehow better. The fatal military assault on Uday and Xnay had at least the clarity of the riddled bodies and smoking shell holes. Summary justice is justice I believe, unless it turns out like Mystic River. One last quote from the peanut gallery: Sooo, Manuel, not feeling so bad about your 40 year sentence this morning?

When I was a kid I read lots and lots of War Comics, and listened to the news of Stalin and the myth of Hitler, and imagined that if some brave character could just go over there and shoot Uncle Joe, that would be so simple and clean and then we’ll all live in a happy better world. Instead history just unfolded as it did, and the closest we came to the ultimate abyss was perhaps the Cuban Missle Crisis, which I don’t think anyone just watching TV realized was nearly the end of the world as we knew it, the world that lead instead to Vietnam, to the assassinations, to Nixon and Watergate, to a modest, flawed glimpse in the Carter years of what a democracy might be like, before the oily surface closed back over and we returned to the universe of Republican Power. The most remarkable historical fact of this New Years Eve morning might be the talisman of Don Rumsfeld’s presence appearing and reappearing through the march of time—there he is with Nixon, and again with Jerry Ford (who gets a postal holiday on January 2 for some bizarre reason, and a second funeral—was he briefly born again?), and there Don is, now with Saddam, big smile, big glad hand, and now with his pals Cheney and Dubya, and, oh dear, Bush has fired him—but did he get to be one of the hooded lads adjusting the noose?

Who knows. Don, like Saddam and Uncle Joe, is ultimately just a man. The deeply creepy part is the question behind these people, and this never ending succession of mysterious events that substitute for something more constructive. The polar bears swim on until they drown, but it’s time for the next glittering “event,” we’ll get back to the polar bears later, when we have more time. Meanwhile, there is certainly the question of Diebold, and whether we actually get a vote, but I’m concerned that even when and if we manage to fix Diebold, far too many of us are far too in need of the kind of leadership that dismisses our concerns part and parcel with its assertion of power. It may come with the psychology we all live out, and that’s a pretty scary thought.

Consider that we all do start as children, dependent on adults, pretty much clueless as to what’s safe and what’s dangerous, learning the world to some degree with each bump and stumble. For nearly all of us, our first experience of leadership is authoritarian. This is true of our understanding of what being a leader is, as well. And one of the fundamental rules of parenting is to keep a united front. In a sense, Bill Clinton’s greatest mistake was to reveal that Presidents are actually just adults, with flaws and human failings just like all the rest of us. Beyond their usual craven pandering to power, the Republicans who tried to evict Clinton from office were surely afraid in their souls that government might be truly democratized by Clinton’s disregard of the façade of power. The laughable succession of Republican House leadership italicized the point to absurdity: anyone remember the Right Honorable Mr. Livingston, I presume? Surely his surprise when the trap door opened was nearly as great as Saddam’s, and lingers still. And the press pretty much agreed—whatever happens, do not show them the man behind the curtain.

Just as Carter was defeated by a collaboration between Iran and Reagan, so was Gore defeated by a collaboration of the press and the Republicans. Even the fundamental Separation of Powers was allowed to be winked at, just for a moment, to assure that the page be safely turned once again, and the country be set once again on the authoritarian path. Jerry Ford gets a postal holiday, and no one mentions his complicity in the slaughter of some 200 thousand East Timorese. Even the evidence—Ford and Rumsfeld in the same photograph—is ignored. Let there be holidays.

We, the people, have not developed a sense of adult responsibility strong enough to actually live in a democracy, that is, reality, for more than a few brief moments at a time. That’s what I see in the history of my lifetime. The press tells us only what we want to hear, like the boy who tells the girl he loves her as he slides his hand under her skirt, farther and farther up her thigh. Neal Cassidy wrote the book on this seduction, and he was only living in a world of bus stations and railroad tracks. He coulda been President! Because the fundamental truth is that we mostly want to live in denial, with a Leader. Our system produces “leaders” as incompetent and unthinking as George Bush because we don’t want a system that gives us power. George said “I am a War President,” and he thought that meant we would have to salute—and we did! We all believe we’re children—that’s our fundamental denial. And starting from that state of affairs, it is a fairly simple matter for those folks who understand how to lead flocks of deniers to keep the reins of power in hand. At least until we are really and truly in trouble.

Well, dang, New Year’s Eve again. Here’s the magic formula, so listen carefully: Nice I don’t need so much firewood, as I’m tired of the rattle of the saw, and I need to protect my hearing. Next summer there’ll be more ticks, and blue water to the pole. It’s a tradeoff, and somebody’s gonna make some money sailing those polar routes.

–Bill Hicks

*Oops, wrong—the hanging was definitely bungled, because it was transformed into a lynching according to information available after this posting. Bush continues to bat .000

Yes Men Video

In the interest of keeping even this snappy page of 19th Century Opinions with at least a toe or two into the 21st Century, we post a spiffy video from You Tube commenting on the current commissioners race in Chatham County, NC, about which I have commented previously (see Data Mines and Rock Quarries and Economic Secession). The spry if elderly woman speaking at the podium with such eloquence is Beth Dixon of Mt. Vernon Springs, a small community just SE of Siler City which is the proposed site of ISP-Minerals’ new quarry and granule manufacturing facility. She will live just across the street from the belching behemoth, and expects to see her lovely ‘30s era masonry dwelling cracked and wracked by the blasting and general trembling of the earth the mine will produce as a byproduct of its operations. She’ll also have her well go dry most likely and will probably breathe a whole lot more fine silicate—but what the hell, she’s old. The three men seen voting are the commissioners who were voted out in the May primary, the “yes men.” In this particular vote they’re agreeing to give ISP $3 million in tax monies because the billionaire owner of the company wants some more money. We’re all hoping the new commissioners will be more concerned with the common good. All politics is local, except when it isn’t. As Nancy Pelosi said, “we want subpoena power.” Y’all vote Nov. 7.

--Bill Hicks, Albright Township, Chatham Co.
Here's a link to the "Yes Men" clip on You Tube if you can't view it above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY0YlX-3oBY The video was posted on October 27 by markbarroso.

Mr. DeLay Arrives on the Midnight Train

It’s depressing that our lame duck commissioners, Emerson, Outz, and Morgan, have chosen to bring Texas Republican politics to our County. Morgan must have figured out his nifty plan even prior to his decisive defeat in the primary back in the spring, since he had two years to work on it. (Not that this is a surprise really—Bunky was a Republican before he switched parties purely as a tactic.) His defeat was fair and square, just like the Connecticut Primary just past. And just like Mr. Leiberman, Bunky and cohort have a fall back plan. In fact, their plan is even slicker than Joe Leiberman running this fall as an oxymoronic “independent Democrat.”

According to the Independent Weekly (why not according to the Chatham News; well, that’s another story I guess), our lame duck county commissioners have voted to redraw district lines in such a way as to pit two elected commissioners, Mr. Barnes, and Mr. Lucier, against each other in 2008, while at the same time the same redrawing allows Mr. Morgan to run yet again from a new, presumably safer district, two years sooner than would have otherwise been the case. It’s unfortunate that the two non-lame-duck members voting against this blatantly self-serving proposal didn’t do what the fine Democratic legislators of Texas did a few years back—remove themselves to New Mexico so as to remove the possibility of a quorum. DeLay tactics deserve delay tactics dontcha know. It’s unfortunate that Messrs. Cross and Barnes were unwilling to stoop to such games. Perhaps they felt—correctly of course—that such tactics were not what they were elected to engage in.

There is another aspect to this maneuver. As well as redrawing districts—with zero input from the northeast area of Chatham where more than half the population of the county now reside—the lame ducks have also put on the ballot in November a referendum to change commissioner election in subsequent elections starting in 2008 to district by district. In other words, Morgan, Emerson, and Outz will not have to face county-wide voters next time they run. And this even though all three were at some point in the past elected county-wide, and were most recently un-elected county-wide. What’s not working?

Get the drift? Here’s the obvious, self-serving goal of these lame-ducksters. Let’s make us some safe districts and get our power back. A majority of voters in our county don’t think we did a good job, so next time we won’t let a majority of voters vote. That’s the plan, Stan. (And why the News and Observer, in an editorial on Monday, Aug. 29, on this obvious sleight of hand, was unwilling to actually characterize it as such, but simply mused about how, possibly, the lame ducks were playing slick, I’m confounded to guess. What does it take to call a spade a spade over on McDowell Street? Has that old red rooster they used run on special occasions ended up in the pot?)

Ok, thanks a bunch, Bunky. You’re one hell of a politician. You the Hammah! Single-handedly, you’re dragging a nice, basically rural, friendly county-wide community into the unnecessary divisiveness that is demolishing our national politics. Chatham County surely has a unity, a singleness of purpose, and at the least a sense of community strong enough to work together, north, south, east and west, town and countryside, black, white, and Hispanic. It’s not us again’ thems over thar. We must not allow Bunky and his ilk—including Siler City’s jesfolks AM radio editorial voice—to create divisions in the good will of our county which are otherwise nonexistent. We share a landfill, for heavens sake, not to mention the air and water. We share an area code, a school system, a big four-lane east-west highway. We will all suffer if this County returns to district-only voting for commissioner. The only beneficiaries will be Mr. Morgan, his followers, and whatever large outside business interests pull their strings. Maybe they should rename Siler City “Deadwood.”

One of the great losses, by the way, will be the erosion of electability of minority candidates such as the popular Carl Thompson. County-wise it is clear that racial bigotry no longer holds sway—thus Mr. Thompson’s recent primary victory. But in a district-only vote there is a much smaller pool of voters, and there is no black majority district. This means that tactics such as single-shot voting are nullified, and it may well be that old racial prejudices will re-emerge with decisive results. If that’s not an argument for voting against this district-only plan, I don’t know what is. It’s one of the reasons Chatham County did away with district-only voting in the first place, by the way. (And the N&O editorial got this aspect of the plan backassward.)

Or think about it this way: with county-wide voting, every commissioner cares about your vote to some extent. With district-only voting, four out of five commissioners may not care at all about your vote. Which odds do you like better? Ask the folks out in the Siler City Extra-territorial Jurisdiction who just got a quarry dropped on them by the Siler City Town Board they didn’t elect and can’t vote against next time.

November is our last opportunity to vote countywide for commissioners, should this referendum pass. The solution is obvious. Vote the damn thing down, decisively, for the pernicious, divisive monkey-wrench it really is. And be real sure that Mr. Morgan hasn’t managed to word the referendum in such a way that you have to vote yes to say no. I haven’t seen the actual wording of the statement, but I’ll guarantee Mr. Morgan and his advisors are calculating which way to write it up so as to cause the most confusion, and the most favorable outcome to themselves. Like Woody Guthrie said, “some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.”

--Bill Hicks, Albright Township, Chatham Co.
[photo from www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/pcoll/01chatham/chatham.html ]

A Fatal Loss of Jo-mentum

There will of course be all you care to read on the meaning of Joe Leiberman’s primary loss yesterday in Connecticut. Here’s my two cents: The Democratic Party is showing some signs of recovery.

As someone remarked (I can’t keep all the remarkers straight), it’s not the “Democrat Party” as the Republicans keep trying to assert, it’s the Democratic Party, a party that is named for a process. There’s a lot to that statement, including the observation that if you pound some sort of falsehood into people’s heads long enough, they start acting as though it was true. In fact, at its best, the Democratic Party does stand for process, for change, for development. And the Republicans do stand pretty much for stasis. That, after all, is the conservative way: just don’t mess with it.

That is why in the Connecticut Primary just past, it was the entrenched, the established, the incumbent, who rallied round Joe Lieberman. Established power tends to become conservative. Joe himself exemplifies the tendency—not accepting his own party’s rejection of him in a democratic primary election, he immediately announced he would run as an “independent.” Which in real terms means he has switched parties, because there are only two parties in U.S. politics, like it or not, and the Democratic Party has chosen Ned Lamont as their candidate for Senate in a democratic primary. Incumbency thus trumps party.

This is also why so many pundits are rallying around Lieberman. Things are good for pundits. Cokie, for example, has a nice gig on ABC Sunday, as well as a place commenting any time she likes on NPR. Why rock the boat. She has good, personal reasons to toss out the old “Oh gawd, it’s the McGovern crowd again,” jive. If the world remains as cynical and static as it’s been since Reagan, Cokie will be able to say pretty much the same cynical, static things she’s been making a good living on since she was just a smart kid with a primo political family behind her. It’s like bad teachers and old lesson plans. The first few years you have to think, but it gets easier, and then you can spend the evenings watching TV like everyone else.

But what happened in Connecticut was, actual voters came out and said, “we’re fed up with this shit, it’s time for a real change.” That is, for a change the voters were not manipulated. Partly that was because Lieberman, unlike Rove/Cheney/Bush, probably didn’t have his whole soul into the fear game. In the Connecticut Primary, Lieberman didn’t run full tilt on his war platform, or his right-wing Supreme Court Justice support platform, or his vote for Alberto Gonzales, the man who brought us Abu Ghraib, platform. Perhaps this was because mostly Democrats actually were the voting block in the primary. That was a real problem for Joe. Statistical vote-ratings aside, he had become a Republican. (As NOW told Jane Hamsher, “we don’t count cloture votes.” So much for statistics.)

At a deeper level of manipulation, we might examine for a moment the original kiss of Bush that started Lieberman on the road to ruin. The resonance to the Judas’ Kiss is surely obvious, and one wonders if Rove prepped George on this opportunity to taint one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate (at least on paper; after all, Gore was out of politics and Leiberman was the veep nominee in 2000), or if perhaps this is George's political instinct in action--no words, just a perfect moment to nail a potential opponent, the cowboy intuitive quickdraw. Certainly Lieberman had already supported Bush policy at every important turn, and from his point of view the kiss simply annointed: he was in the in- crowd; “he loves me, he loves me.” It was probably only Lieberman's own political instincts which kept him from kissing George back. Certainly Joe displayed, in the coming months, no inclination to reconsider his support for Bush and company, and his cloture vote for Alito cast the final die for many Democrats. Joe had to go. But it's still win/win for Rove in the sense that, at any rate, a potentially formidable opponent is now defanged. If Joe should win in November, it will be as a Republican, not as a Democrat. That's the reality because it's a two-party system we have, and apparently Rove has already sent word to Joe that his counsel is available. Now it’s up to the Democratic Party to keep the ball in their court, to craft deeper victories out of this awakening electorate.

But make no mistake, it’s going to be fear city from now till November. Lamont is a serious wake-up call for Mr. Rove, and he has millions of voters who live in fear 24/7. He also has about 90% of the pundit class at his service—all the Cokies and Broders, not to mention the David Brooks—who are as afraid of being sidelined as irrelevant as they are of any more substantial policy shifts in the government. You will hear every other day about how Democrats like Lamont are going to bring the troops home from Iraq immediately if not sooner, while at the same time they will be fomenting presidential impeachment from the get-go. And of course the Lamonts are going to be fine with Gay Marriage and Euthanasia and Legalized Marijuana. And they might even take back some of those tax cuts to the very well to do who, by virtue of their wealth and status, are the real ruling class of this country. Oh, and Lamont is a turncoat too, since he (just like Joe and most of the others in the Senate) is a “millionaire” not to mention a member of the J.P. Morgan family, don’tcha know.

As far as Rove/Cheney/Bush themselves, well, they have a lot of options. They are already fanning the flames of a wider Middle East War, as are Syria and Iran. By October we may be watching tank battles, air strikes, and missile exchanges all across the Middle East, and we might be looking at $5 gas as well. There will be endless talk of staying the course. Just yesterday I heard a Republican Pollster on NPR say that while Americans view the Iraq War as a disaster and a failure, only one in five Americans want to bring the troops home now. If Rove can translate Lamont’s message into “Bring the Troops Home Now,” Lieberman may yet win in November. Worse, Republicans may manage to maintain control of both houses of Congress. At the moment the Rubber Stamp Congress is at work on a new bill which redefines war crimes in such a way as to excuse Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Just to be on the safe side.

But Rove’s fear, and incumbent fear, has a basis in this truth, just expressed in the Connecticut Primary. The voters up there just woke up and said, “we’ve had a damn-‘nough!” We sure have. We’ve had a stolen election in 2000, another probably stolen one in ’04, a “war of choice” started and continued on false pretenses, a Supreme Court that is likely to erode Roe V. Wade incrementally until nothing is left but a meaningless husk, and perhaps most dangerous of all, a new imperial Presidency, arisen out of the ashes of the Nixon debacle by old Nixonians—Cheney and Rumsfeld, and others—who have blown on those discredited ashes till they burst yet again into flames that threaten the basic legal framework which has held the country together since 1789, the Checks and Balances. George Bush scoffs at Congress and redefines laws at his whim, and his lawyers offer him the justification of the “fact” that “we are at war,” a war on terror.

Well hell, we didn’t need to declare a war on terror, we already had the war on drugs, didn’t we? I know we lost the war on poverty, but whatever. For these people, these “Rethuglicans,” real democracy is too dangerous for America. It’s as outmoded as the quaint Geneva Conventions Mr. Gonzales brushed away when he presented his fine arguments for torture. And he seems to be such a nice man on TV. Just like Mr. Lieberman. Who knows what will happen if someone new actually gets some power, or a voice? Stick with the incumbents.

All I can say is, don’t buy it. Surely enough people are fed up, at this point, to give democracy a chance one more time. There’s a Democratic Party on the ballot. Vote for the process.

–Bill Hicks

Photo credit: Gerald Herbert/AP

Economic Secession (Update 2)

Back a few decades people used to talk about how New York City or San Francisco or wherever might as well saw themselves off from these here Uniteds because they just didn’t fit in. It was a kind of Republican sneer, but the image was somehow vivid. I live in the Research Triangle, a kind of amorphous region that definitely includes Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, and, as well, a number of other communities, some inside the imaginary triangle formed by those three major towns, some outside the lines but, well, still in the stadium at least. One way to tell who’s in the Triangle is to look at the Area Code. If it’s 919, you’re probably in. 210 and you’re heading towards Wilmington and the Sand Hills. 336 and you’re in the Piedmont Triad. 252 and you’re Down East.

Back ten years or so Siler City got moved from 919 to 210. There were complaints, and we got our 919 back. What that meant was that the whole of Chatham County, west to east, north to south, all “faced” towards the gravity of the Triangle. Bidness was mostly done in that direction, and folks who were looking to buy a piece of rural land to build a house on—or for a few movers and shakers, a bigger piece of land to build a subdivision on—saw Chatham County as in the ambience.

But the people who have sat on the Town Board of Siler City since before Aunt Bea moved there to retire haven’t paid much attention to all this fooferrah about the Research Triangle. Luther Hodges, who dat? They, or their parents, are after all First Citizens of Siler City, a town that grew up at a crossroads back in the late 1800s, and developed its economy on textiles and furniture making and, when I first moved here in 1978, Chatham Dog Food. Siler City officially didn’t much care about the 919 Area Code. They remembered that dog food plant that burned down in about 1981 and still stunk up the place until after Reagan finally left office. Indeed, there’s still a big vacant block in the middle of downtown.

We all know what happened to textiles. They left NC about the same time Reagan left government for the funny farm. Around here we got big chicken processing plants staffed with thousands of Mexicans, mostly of alleged illegal entry status. (We like our cheap chicken in this heah America.) But the Town Fathers have been fretting about getting some kind of new industry ever since that dog food plant went up in smoke, and they don’t really count a nice winery than came in so close to Siler that they put Siler City in the name of the wine. Maybe it’s the alcohol issue—Chatham was dry when I moved here. Maybe it’s just that wine is too “cultured,” too outside, or just too outside the imagination.

At any rate, next Monday, June 5, Siler City’s commissioners are going to vote Siler City right out of the Research Triangle. They’re going to install a major new business, a heavy industry that generates a lot of noise, dust, and traffic and will be operating for at least 75 years, within earshot of the Siler City post office. This business, ISP Minerals, will probably lower the water table in an already dry part of the county, since quarries are fundamentally big well shafts—that’s why quarries fill up with water. The grinding and blasting will be going on pretty much 24/7, and the dump trucks will number about 300 per day. The plant, which will produce those tiny dyed rocks that are painted onto asphalt roofing shingles, will stand some ten stories high. There will be new rail traffic on that line that runs right through the heart of town. Running a Winery beside such a business will not be possible, and Horizon Cellars of Siler City will close. Probably other heavy industry will arrive, as soon the Siler City area will be a perfect location—each new grinder and polluter will say, “look at ISP, y’all were fine with that.”

There will probably be some new jobs a-comin’ too. There will be some guys running outside heavy equipment, and some other guys running inside heavy equipment. There will be a handful of nice fellows in suits who will go to the Baptist Church or the Methodist Church. There will not be unions, because North Carolina and unions are like oil and water. There will also not be any more of those folks from the Research Triangle who are looking for a nice piece of rural land to live on. Pittsboro will be known as the Edge of RTP. Out here in “deep Chatham,” we’ll be in the foothills, or the edge of the sandhills. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get that 210 Area Code eventually. It doesn’t much matter, and ISP Minerals will surely have an 800 number.

Eventually, the town as a whole is going to notice that plant. I think the blasting and the general roar will be quite audible from the Post Office steps, as will the dust on some days. The audible presence will be most noticeable from the Siler City Country Club, which looks like it abuts the quarry property. Might be some of the Town Board belongs to the Club? Maybe that’ll make for some spirited conversation over the G&Ts five years out.

Nobody much who’s an adult today will see the end of ISP-Minerals, though most of us will see the spring at Mount Vernon Springs stop, at last, after running for longer, probably, than there was a United States. So remember this day, Monday, June 5. The day Siler City left the Triangle. And don’t blame ISP Minerals either. It was Siler City that cranked up the chain saw and sawed off the limb they were sitting on. –Bill Hicks

[photo from www.swapmeetdave.com/Humor/Workshop/Chainsaw.htm ]

--Bill Hicks

See also:
Part 1 of this topic: Data Mines and Rock Quarries
Part 3 of this topic: Yes Men
From the Chatham Journal Weekly: Will ISP Minerals be a good neighbor?

‘Retha

I was giving a fiddle lesson last night while the big final American Idol show was on, and after my student left I went into the back room and turned on the other TV, which was on the local public network, and there was this old “American Masters” program about the life of Aretha Franklin. Talk about an antidote to the sugar high. Talk about reality based life.

Aretha is so completely the real thing. She wasn’t dreaming of being a “star,” she was a star and simply was searching for the outlet to her audience. There was never a shred of doubt, from when she was just a kid singing in her dad’s church. Everyone knew it too. No one had any doubt. Martin Luther King knew it. When she began to receive awards, in 1967, he came by to give her a kiss on the podium. Ray Charles knew it. He showed up at a gig she was doing at Fillmore West, sitting in the back not to be noticed. She heard he was there and got him up on stage. When she sits down at the piano on her first Atlantic recording session in Muscle Shoals, all the studio professionals knew instantly “there would be no musical troubles at all.” Keith Richards says the same thing twenty years later: “We got her to play piano because she’s so good on the keyboard we knew she’d hold everything together.” Eric Clapton says, “she uses her voice like an instrument, never settling on a note, but climbing up to it, and past, and back below.”

The American Masters show is extremely well done. My only complaint would be that it is just too short. All the musical excerpts, which have to be excerpts just so the show will not go on into the wee hours, could really have been full performances in my book. But then I’m a musician. Aretha, long may you live!

It put the whole Idol thing in such perspective. Poor Taylor, the winner: a charming lad who can get loose enough to sing, but who doesn’t really know what to sing beyond a small range of stylings he’s picked up from people like Elton John, who got them in the first place from Ray Charles and Aretha. Poor Katherine, the runner up: a beautiful voice, a beautiful face, and she can sing “Over the Rainbow,” but she seems to be totally detached from most other lyrics, and also seems to drift away as she sings, thinking some airy thoughts, forgetting that there are words coming out of her mouth. One presumes that she picked “her first single,” “Destiny.” The song killed her last chance of besting Taylor. For that matter, poor Carrie Underwood, who seems to have just one song up her sleeve, and it’s a weird one at that, where the idea seems to be that in a crisis you “give Jesus the wheel.” Gawd, please, no mas, no mas. Take the fuckin’ wheel, take it now, turn into the skid, turn into the skid.

American Idol, this time around, came back to earth I think. It had never left of course. I’m hoping though, that this time the public gets it. It’s a talent show, it’s a random fiddle contest. There’s going to be some people who are better than some others, because it’s grading on the curve. There’s going to be the sick entertainment of the people at the beginning of the adventure who have no earthly clue at all. There’s going to be the sick entertainment of people dreaming big, hoping desperately, and being dashed to earth, Icarus in weekly installments.

But please, can we all keep in mind that there is such a thing as real talent. Talent that doesn’t need a show like this, doesn’t need Simon and Randy and Paula and Fox Network and neon and… where the hell do those audiences come from that they get, with all these people in ecstasy over almost nothing? How do we all forget Aretha. How can we even watch if we didn’t forget, if we really remembered. I’m speaking for myself as well. I watched a lot of this season’s Idol.

Aretha. Forgive me.

--Bill Hicks

Data Mines and Rock Quarries

ISP-Minerals Mining and Manufacturing Facility in Blue Ridge Summit, PA (photo by Bill Hicks, 6/23/06). Note the dust cloud that's floating down the mountain into the little residential community where I'm standing. I was coughing for the next 12 hours--it felt like I'd been sawing bricks without a dust mask--and I couldn't see or smell the dust around me. The facility itself must be at least a half mile away.

Here’s a pretty clear analysis of what the NSA/phone records flap is really about: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060511-6813 Briefly, although keeping a data base of nearly every domestic phone call in the United States is not strictly speaking “spying” on me and you, in fact it is a simple thing to connect actual phone numbers with actual people. That means that it’s not only possible but even likely that at this moment, gentle reader, there is an active dossier in some government office on you—your interests, your beliefs, your values, or economic status—and that much of this information can be gleaned from your various phone and email correspondences and correspondents. We’re already quite aware of this ability to describe the specific customer when it relates to each of us. Who hasn’t gone on line to Amazon.com and been immediately welcomed by first name, and informed of whatever new products might be available at Amazon since our last visit?

With Amazon, this is fairly innocuous, and perhaps even helpful. I don’t know that I’ve bought a CD that Amazon’s Father Data has recommended, but I will admit that indeed several of the recommendations hit the spot. Translate this to the political arena, however, and surely even the most conservative among us will not be so sanguine (at least if you’re willing to be honest with yourself). Here’s a scenario. Citizen A gives a donation to, oh, to make it simple, John Conyers, Democratic Congressman from Detroit. Citizen R, who believes that President Bush is the only thing standing between his family and Terrorist Attack, and who works for Mr. Bush, believes that in the world of post 9/11 people with the politics of a John Conyers are therefore a threat to his personal safety. NSA informs Citizen R of Citizen A’s contribution to John Conyers.

What’s he gonna do, this Mr. Rove? And what, Mr. Conservative “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” if the power positions of Citizen A and Citizen R are reversed, and it’s you who has sent some hard earned dinero to Reverend Dobson, and Hillary is about to snip off your nutters for you. Actually, the real fascists over on the right, like Ann Coulter, are projecting this fear even as we speak. “Elect the Democrats in November,” she suggests, “and Hillary will have you hunkered down in Guantanamo.” On Monday, Mr. Bush will speak to the nation about the looming brown menace from the south. Playing to the base, anyone? Hard to be scared of a nanny or a sheetrocker or a chicken plucker. Mention a living wage and look around. The scared faces are not brown, they’re wearing nice suits and sitting behind a gold-plated door on the 31st floor.

How dumb do we have to be, people?

Here in Chatham County we have been subject to an insidious political strategy aimed at dividing the county west and east. In this week’s Chatham News, some guy from Sanford (which isn’t even in Chatham County last I looked) is lobbing “carpetbagger” bombs at the folks who just elected the new slate of hopefully more long-term-planning friendly commissioners and ousted the growth at any cost bunch. Out here in west Chatham, Siler’s commissioners are about to ok a big open pit mining operation right next to a developing winery, on the grounds that it brings jobs. Never mind that it will probably destroy the winery (a generational investment) and the little town of Mount Vernon Springs which heretofore has been famous for it’s water. Looked at long term, which industry would you rather have in your back yard? Which industry is better for the county. Ain’t none of those commissioners gonna work in that mine, or have his or her kids work there either, unless it’s in the air conditioned office trailer.

I guess we’ll argue that point out the hard way, as the winery folks have had to hire lawyers. But do we have to toss all these fear mongering tactics into the discussion. There are more “carpetbaggers” in Chatham precisely because the big growth boys sold them big developments and big houses. Now they want winerys and not open-pit mineries. Seems like an improvement to me. It would be a systematic improvement in politics both local and large if we could manage to dispense with projection and fear-mongering. All of us actually have a lot in common, including the folks who speak Spanish and the folks who speak New Jersey.

UPDATE

There’s apparently a lot of good ole boy stuff going on in the Horizon Cellars Winery deal. Picture this: you get to the winery by driving across Norfolk & Southern railroad tracks, and then across a very short bridge that resides in the N&S right-of-way. The owner of Horizon contacted N&S a month or so ago to offer to upgrade that little bridge, at his own expense. N&S apparently views the potential ISP Minerals account as a boon to its Chatham County business. When the N&S rep discovered that Horizon isn’t happy with the quarry being located right on its property line, he told Horizon that N&S was going to close the access across its tracks in 30 days. It wasn’t an idle threat either. An official posting appears at the crossing even as we speak. Its 19 days and counting at this writing before the sole access to the property is closed. I wrote Norfolk & Southern asking for a comment about this. This is their complete response:

Mr. Hicks:

This is essentially a liability issue. The bridge in question was originally put there by the owner of some adjoining vacant timberland with the intent of providing access to a few homes and the timberland on the other side of the ditch from the railroad. It is our understanding the original bridge was damaged by a fire truck going to a fire at one of the houses some years ago. A crossing agreement was never made with the railroad to use the crossing. Such an agreement is customary when a private crossing is put in; it grants the property owner access across the right-of-way in return for liability protection for the railroad commensurate with the level of potential liability associated with the use of the property. If the quarry goes in, a new crossing will be put in, with a private crossing agreement with the customer, that can provide access across the tracks to the quarry as well as to the residents, the winery and the owners of the timberland. Regardless of whether the quarry is permitted by local officials to operate, the residents, the winery and the owners of the timberland will have to enter into a private crossing agreement with Norfolk Southern to protect our liability if they wish to use the existing crossing. The owners of the timberland have expressed an interest in developing the timberland for housing, which would change the use of the land and create additional liability for Norfolk Southern. The four existing homes have not been a problem and do not pose a future problem. We stated such to Siler City's mayor and the council members at a public hearing on May 8 and will ensure the residents have continued access with minimal disruption. The commercial activity and other planned expansion of the crossing's original use has created the liability issue and gives us great concern at this time.

As background, Norfolk Southern, along with every other railroad in the country, places a high priority on closing crossings in the interest of improving public safety. We work with municipalities to negotiate public crossing closings, and we close private crossings whenever practical. Given that all property owners in question would still have access with a new crossing, we consider it a practical matter to close this crossing, and absent a crossing agreement, we feel it necessary to do so.

Robin C. Chapman
Manager Public Relations
Norfolk Southern Corporation

The law is a universe, as well as, on occasion, “a ass.” I guess the entomology of “railroaded” becomes clear. I always thought it was just a vague metaphor about power.

--Bill Hicks

See also:
Part 2 of this topic: Economic Secession (Update 2)
Part 3 of this topic: Yes Men
From the Chatham Journal Weekly: Will ISP Minerals be a good neighbor?

Bibliography

Where is this rock?
I know.
I took the picture.
It was in early April, 2003.
The Iraq War was in its invasion phase.
Johnny Mata, of Pecos, Texas,
Was still alive.
So was Lauri Pestiwah, of Tuba City, AZ.

I stood and looked at this rock.
It’s out in the high desert of New Mexico.
Not so far from Trinity, where the first A-Bomb was tested.
It is part of a library, 2500 images, 25,000?
On these smooth black rocks,
With snow capped mountains behind and to the east.
Beyond the mountains, Texas.

The US Government knows this rock too.
It’s in a National Monument, staffed with an old geezer from Connecticut.
Who comes out west to sit in a trailer and talk to folks,
Who loves this off-road spot, and smokes his cigarettes.
“I seen a rattler up there the other day,” he coughs.
“Watch yr step.”

I look at this picture on my computer.
I feel like I found this book.
I feel like I was there, in its unknown celebration.
Wood smoke. Meat. Moon. Stars.
Or maybe a message about the big city way to the Northwest:
Chacco.
And their beautiful women.

I give the old guy a dollar.
I’m too cheap to buy a souvenir.
The stuff doesn’t look too real either,
After my walk in the library on the hill.

The rock stays in my mind.
And I meanwhile reside in someone else’s
Ones and zeros, centralized
Datafied, reminders, like these rocks too.
Just in case.

--silk hope, 5/16/06

Harbinger

Bye Bye Bunkey: These three "cowboys" won the Chatham County NC Commissioner's Democratic Primary Tuesday, May 2, against three conservative incumbents aligned with full-tilt growth at all costs interests. It might be a bit o the old tip of the iceburg deal, huh?

I haven’t been writing much lately because… I don’t really know. Picking up lots of stone, and playing a good bit of music, might just be excuses. The news keeps outrunning my outrage, yeah, that’s the ticket.
Anyway, the three white hats who won the primary election in Chatham County this past week could be the tip of a big iceberg. I’m sure lots of folks are thinking that at least: could it be? A return to reality at last?

Reality has a way. Over in what we call the Heart of the Triangle, they are running out of water. You folks in New Mexico, just laugh all you want. Yes, I’ve driven across, from here to out there, and yes, the trees pretty much stop at the Mississippi, and we over on the East Side don’t really have a clue about dry. Nonetheless, they are having water problems in Raleigh. The reason is not so much that there’s not been enough rain, although last year was a relatively dry year (again, relative to here, not to Out There). The reason is that there are way way more people living over in the Heart of the Triangle, which means that there are more taps on the supply, and also more rapid rain runoff which doesn’t get down to the local ground water table but instead rushes to the rivers and on down to the ocean, for the most part. People are worried. For us, it’s at the stage of What If We Can’t Warsh Our Cars??? The white hats in the photo beat out some commissioners who seemed to believe in All Growth, All the Time. Clear the land, build the houses, damn the water. That might not be a winning campaign any more.

Then I read this morning that not only did Mr. Colbert actually tell the mainstream media, in the presence of the President no less, that they were all pretty much living in a fantasy world, but just a week before that, Noam Chomsky had given a speech at West Point! Delightful. I hate summers, and pretty soon that Gulf Stream is gonna stop (because the Greenland Ice Sheet is gonna melt and all that fresh water will stop the convection current up in the North Atlantic that keeps the Stream moving) and it’s gonna get seriously chilly, just before it really warms up. That’s reality for you. It shows up.

Here’s another bit of reality, captured in a thought experiment. We’re having this horrible flap around here about the Duke lacrosse team and its alleged rape party, which might otherwise be called an alleged male bonding ritual, and whose other name if you recall your NYC tabloid history is an alleged “wilding.” If you’ve not been following this sordid story, the team has stuck together in team-like fashion (bonded as they are) from the very start of the inquiry, forcing DNA testing on all 46, errr, members, and the team has hired a veritable phalanx of lawyers who have been running WTVD’s newsroom with their daily pronouncements of innocence and district attorney malfeasance, to where you have to do things like this here thought experiment to catch a bit of reality in the exposed film you’ve hidden in the black box, the whiz of the truth showing up like a white blur as it joggles those silver nitrate molecules on its way past. Get ready. Now, ask yourself, What Would Coach K Do?

I guarandamntee you he would not have simply resigned his position and left town, as the Duke lacrosse coach has done. Not unless he was so completely embarrassed and so completely sure they were guilty of the allegations—which would be such a profound indictment of his failure as a coach that there was absolutely nothing more to say, nothing at all but undiluted shame and depression. Memo to the defense—a missing coach isn’t the same as missing DNA. When there’s DNA present, it’s information. When it’s absent, it means absolutely nothing. A missing coach though, that’s a little odd.

Slick’s good, but it has limits. Rumsfeld’s answer to all criticism, that in a democracy there will always be dissent, is as slick as Miles Davis’ “So What.” But it has a flaw, that smooth glide of the hands he performs at his pressers, and somebody really ought to call him on it. The defense is too big. “Are you saying, Mr. Secretary, that there is no point in considering the content of specific dissent, because after all, there’s always dissent? Is this how we got into the morass of Iraq? You used that defense against all your internal opposition, just waved your hands and, as they say, moved on?” Explains a lot at least. The best thing about the Colbert routine was that the Washington Press Corps sat there and said nothing. They couldn’t laugh because Coach Dubya might notice. He nailed them to the wall. Look who’s saying nothing in the Duke lacrosse story. Sometimes, like my man Wittgenstein said, what you cannot speak of you must pass over in silence.

I think we’re eventually going to get our press back. That’s reality again. It’s going to take some more time. It might take $10 a gallon gasoline, which will arrive about the same time as we drop bombs on Tehran, if that’s what we’re going to do. $10 gas will also bring with it a clearer view of the United States’ true place in the world of nations. It will not be fun. Another bit of reality was when Mike Nifong won the Durham DA primary on Tuesday. I read that some of the defense attorneys for the Duke lads voted for him. Reminds me of what a defense attorney told me one time.

He was part of a team defending some dudes from Maryland who’d come down south to gun down some competitors in the crack trade. It was a bloody mess, shotgun shells and splayed bodies all over an old frame house in the wrong part of town. Cops had the shooters cold right off, but the DA’s folks were messing the case up terrible in court, and my friend looked at his teammates as they went out to lunch one day and said, “Shit, we might get these guys off!” I’m just sayin’. Course it’s also true that maybe the defense folks voted for Mr. Nifong cause they figured he’d be an easier opponent. Guess we’ll just see about that. Eventually. If they can ever find a jury.

--Bill Hicks

Guest Workers

It has suddenly become popular to talk of "guest workers." First the right wing/racist/fascist element pounded the drum of fear about how all these Mexicans and other latino workers were coming into the US illegally taking all the chicken plant and child care and roofing jobs that weren't nailed down, not to mention transforming our Food Lions and Walmarts to where we had to figure out what kind of pepper to buy, plus having to call it a "chile" or a "chili" or whatever, and figure out when we got home what the hell to do with the thing (hint: poblanos do not go in spaghetti sauce). Just the other day I heard the fear being ratcheted up yet again with some estimate by some faux educated voice that in 100 years this country would have a population of a billion people, with a heck of a lot of these future denizens speaking Spanish, not Anglish, as their mother tongue. Oh my gawd, a billion, did you hear that, Cletis?

Well for one thing, that means social security will not go bankrupt, so what exactly is the problem? Back in '98 I heard Rush Limbaugh say we could fit the whole population of the US into Texas with no problem. There's plenty of space, and there's no global warming or anything according to the GOP. Plus, these people have to be somewhere. Whether they're in Mexico or here, who cares. Let them pay our taxes and do our hard jobs so we can enjoy life to the fullest. The planet may be filling up, but the GOP isn't talking about that, they're stopping all funding of planned parenthood type agencies around the world.

But anyways, now there's the new plan, the guest worker plan. I think we're getting the plan because when a million people come out and march in LA like they did last weekend, even Republicans are going to make some sort of little jog in their march down the road to hell. They sure as hell aren't going to go head up against that, and the Haliburton detention camps they've bought and paid for aren't built yet I don't think, and probably won't be until Haliburton siphons off a few more millions in unexpected overhead. And we've seen that super domes don't really cut it when it comes to "storing" people. Guest workers it is.

Let's look deeper at what a guest worker is, since he/she is going to be part of the American social fabric from now on. Basically, it's a gussied up name for a... drum roll...... er, um, slave. How bout that. This country was founded on slavery, and damn if we don't keep coming back to it. Maybe it's the economy stupid. That is, the idea that us white folks really don't, shouldn't, need to actually work out in the sun, picking up hard things, stooping, bending, pushing, humping shit around, breathing dust and dirt and rat shit. We're the elite. We sit in the crew cab, on the cellphone. We eat a fine sweet mango and listen to jazz and drink a glass of good red wine in the sea breeze, watching the fine sun setting yet again into the blue green waves. And we can't afford to enjoy that sunset if the mango costs what we'd charge to pick it. Oh I know, "slavery" is such a terrible word, I'm going overboard. Ok. It's not quite slavery. It's just real real cheap labor, ok?

Somebody has got to do a whole lot of work on the cheap. That's the deal. That's the bottom line. Been that way forever. Been that way since massa planted his first cotton seed and cracked his first whip over the first fine strong black back that got hauled over heah. You may have noticed that a lot of these hard jobs have been exported to places where people work for $2 a day, or $2 a month. "Guest Workers" allow the jobs that can't leave to be done on the cheap by folks who don't "really" live here. See how that works? The rest of it, all of the rest of it, is just bullshit, icing, window dressing, blather about how this and that is necessary for the wellbeing and you know we are progressing, our fine world is really come a long long long ways from back then, and finally it's just a hard angry question: well, do you want to work that fucking hard?

Most of us just say no, and that's the deal. And so here we are. A bunch of blather and talk and suddenly the US of A has got itself a whole second underclass of people, mainly brown people (how odd, how bizarre, how coincidental!) who from now on are going to do the actual hard ass work that really, yes indeed, it does have to be done. These folks are going to empty the shit our decrepit parents produce. They're going to deal with the boring work of tending to the children we make in our spare moments, when we're not making money. They're going to do all the hard nasty parts of making our houses, our fine four thousand square foot houses going for 500K to a mil in the fine parts of town. They'll climb up on those steep roofs in the summer. They'll crawl into those attics, buried in the fibreglass insulation that keeps the R-values high. They'll pump the chemicals around the perimeters that kill the termites and carpenter ants. They'll lay the 12" block in the fine full basements we want so badly. Storage, we need more storage! Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They'll be "guest workers," working for the carrot of "citizenship," which some of them will actually achieve if the bill is written with enough fear of those million man demonstrations. Or if the real fascists get their way, they might just be working for the money to send back as long as some guy in a suit keeps deciding it's ok.

One thing's for damn sure, the pay is going to stay low. Ain't nobody in this great land of ours gonna do shit work for good money. Otherwise, nobody would be living in those fine houses, or driving those fine cars, or sipping than fine red on the western deck, with the sun slipping into the Pamlico. Nice. Let the glaciers melt. Comes down to it, like it or not, we're all guests here anyway.

--Bill Hicks
A similar point is made by Paul Krugman in "The Road to Dubai"
[photo courtesy of http://www.lookoutlodge.com/]