WSJ Visits the Boonies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Bill Hicks

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

I really try to be a reasonable person, and so when the Bushies are so frequently accused of being souless, murdering hypocrites, I will kinda step back and figure well, maybe they've got their reasons for at least some of this stuff. Then along comes some guy who really does prove the fundamental point--that for the Bushies it's not at all about ideas or truth, it's all, 100% of it, about pure power. This is the place where it's fascism, pure and simple. This is Mussolini saying "my policy upon taking the office of El Duce is simply to kill you." This is why Graham Greene called his book about fascism in Haiti "The Comedians."

We may recall, then, a few months back, when the Bushies in Congress once again brought forth their perennial bill to make desecration of the flag Unconstitutional. Never mind all the contradictions, the way this sort of attack on free expression actually attacks the fundamental things our soldiers die for (at least back in the distant, romanticized past), or the way it gets into trouble with those fat little right-wingers who like to wear American Flag undies or golf shirts, or those fine patriots who find it too much of a pain to actually take down their Old Glory at sunset each night. Never mind that. Here's the thing that really points out the true issues, which aren't issues (because that would be in the realm of ideas and discussion, "thought", doncha know), but just about power, a punch in the mouth: I direct your attention to the fine Texas yahoo who ran down the little crosses with American flags that Cindy Sheehan had set up at her camp across the road from Bush's fake ranch in Crawford.

Nice move, bro. So here's the logic. We want to hold up that flag as being as pure as Jesus Himself, and if someone has the audacity to, say, burn it in disgust at the warmongering bloody halfbaked halfassed foreign policy we're following these days in Iraq, well by gawd we're going to put that hippy to the rack just like we do to those nonpersons down there in Gitmo. But, on the other hand, if some American mother whose son died over there fighting Halliburton's War has the temerity to actually place some crosses with flags on them in view of the Cowboy President, to sort of remind him that he's running an operation that's killing people, and they're really dead--really, they're dead Mr. Bush--why that's just too damn much for Dubya to bear, and a loyal subject has every right and duty to just get in his big ole pickup and run the sombitches down, flags and all. And of course maybe that'll also send a little message to Miss Cindy that maybe she'd best get on home to California fore she gets run down too, huh?

Course Dub don't have to do none of this hissef. He can even wring his hands and "feel" Cindy's pain. Or maybe that's the wrong locution; since Dub ain't Bill he doesn't "feel" other folk's pain, he just understands their position or something, and their right to actually disagree cause this is America. Dub just needs to stay all balanced. And then the truck guy has the right to disagree too, of course. The fact is, they're all Americans, unlike that Canadian boy from Syria who was locked up in the Brooklyn jail but was never "in" America because of some "legal" thing or other which somehow manages to trump the physical realities according to the US attorney defending us against his suit for damages caused when we kidnapped him back to Syria to be tortured into proving that yes, he was a Canadian.

By then end of this week (Aug 17, '05 at the moment of writing) I am sort of expecting Cindy to be in some jail in Crawford for camping without a permit or some such bullshit.
Once they get her out of view they can really work on her. Who knows, she might come out with a different view. I would, and you would too, probably. Those were some damn tough guys who made the Russian Revolution, and Stalin had them all apologizing and kissing his boots and saying they were sorry before they were dispatched for the good of Uncle Joe. We grew up, those of us back in the '50s, reading about all this and shaking our heads and wondering why in the world the Russian children hated us so much, why and how could people be so fucked up in other places, when here it was just so transparent and happy and good, day after endless day. Meanwhile, in the real world, Nixon got a check from an ex-Nazi for $100 Grr and Joe Kennedy hired Sam Giancana to work the vote for his boy Jack, who was so busy with the poontang that the first thing he did upon "election" was reappoint J. Edgar Hoover, who knew everything about everything, and who probably checked off on the operation to put the country in more predictable hands in November of '63. JFK might have double-crossed Giancana, but he wasn't going to double-cross no Texas boys, by gawd.

So, you say: "A flagwaver run over a cross symbolizing a fallen American soldier and decorated with Old Glory??? No way, Jose!!" Well back in the late '70s somebody had a song about it, with the fine chorus, "Same as it ever was." This was the last bit of the cultural dialectic that started out with "the times they are a'changin'," and continued with "four dead in Ohio" and "we won't get fooled again." We listened to the radio as it all went past, down the years, all of us just working at our jobs and stuff, trying to live a life, and now we're watching this gigantic manipulation, Twin Towers falling, wars waging, another generation bleeding in the dirt and the dumb redneck in his truck running over those crosses. You saw him already too. He's the guy who shotgunned Captain America and Dennis Hopper in that cool motorcycle movie. Come to think of it, didn't Fonda have his Harley tank painted with that ole American flag too? Woooooh, calling Captain Kirk. Makes me wish I had a little something stashed away in my gas tank, although these days the gas itself is nearbout worth as much as the stash.

–Bill Hicks

Wonderland

I was at my father in law's yesterday, the wife and I, and we had taken him out to eat for a pre-Father's Day treat and were sitting around looking at TV and ended up watching the Conyers Hearings on the Downing Street Memo. For those who aren't familiar--and who would be, given the scant coverage of "Memogate" and of Conyers' efforts to shine some light on the current Administration--Democratic Congressman Conyers had assembled a kind of rump hearing in a basement room of the Capitol to lay out the meaning of the memo. His witnesses were Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern, and an author who has started a website called AfterDowningMemo.com or something (http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/). The Congressmen involved were, I supposed you could say, the "usual suspects," mostly black, mostly women, plus Barney Frank and a few other liberals. No Republicans of course. It was pointed out in the hearing that this was a far cry from the '60s, when Senator Fulbright held major hearings investigating Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policies--Democrats were once willing to investigate one of their own, but these days the party closes ranks.

These hearings--and yes, in a sense they were theatre, because since no Republicans were involved, they weren't really a House Committee but were rather just a handful of House Congressmen--carried nontheless the gravitas of their participants. That is, Conyers and the rest were duly elected House Members, and Joe Wilson was a real former Ambassador, and Cindy Sheehan was a real mother of a real dead soldier, and Ray McGovern was a real ex-CIA analyst. These were not just, oh, Princeton grad students, or something. I found the argument presented pretty convincing too. As I had thought at the time, the American public and the Congress as its representative were sold a bill of goods--lied to--by the Bush administration, in order to go to war in Iraq. The Downing Street Memo is but more confirmation of this, with the further fact that this memo is a real British Government Secret Document, and carries some weight because of that.

The best part of the show was at the end. Anne Wright, a very convincing former State Department career diplomat who resigned because of the Iraq War, stood up and saluted the hearing and suggested that Bush, Rumsfeld and others be impeached.

Now obviously, as far as power goes, the only power in this spectacle is in the truth of the words spoken. It's quite true that this Conyers' "committee" isn't possessed of any official Congressional power beyond whatever is conferred by the truth that it's members are indeed Members of Congress. But since when did this fact, the differential between truth and power, become the grounding of complete media dismissal? Apparently the answer to that is, "Why sometime around November 2000, when Al Gore was elected President."

Certainly power has been power forever. Mussolini was able to deal with a difficult reporter by having him arrested and shot. As we go back in history, we see Voltaire fleeing France for a time because of his unwanted remarks, and no doubt there are more cases of this sort of thing than we can possibly list. The smiling Mao can indeed say that Power flows from the barrel of a gun. But here in America we imagine that things are not really played out on this basis, that when it comes to important truths, there's at least a hope that it's not just about power. As someone said at the Conyers hearing, it's taken 40 years, but down in Mississippi this week they are holding a trial for an old Klan geezer who probably organized the murders of Cheney, Goodmon, and Schwerner back in '63. At the same time it must be said, as well, that no one is organizing a trial for the people who assassinated John F. Kennedy that same year. The implications of this negative fact must also be accepted, or at least understood. Here in America, power still exists without mitigation. One of the smaller comments at the Conyers hearing was a quote from retired General Tommy Franks, that if there were another terrorist attack in the US, the Military might well take over governing the country. No one really talked about what Franks might have meant by this, but it's worth thinking about. Did he mean that the military establishment has thought about this and come to such a conclusion? Are there plans "on the shelf"? Was this a warning to the civilians running the country? And if so, wasn't the military already truly in charge?

This current administration is in the process of merging corporate, military and governmental functions, this we already understand, if only dimly. As one Congressman pointed out, there are over 25 thousand private contractors working in Iraq at the moment, and mostly we do not know what they are doing. Presumably Rumsfeld does know. As these formerly separate aspects of our society merge, we have a kind of structural fascism. Accountability is weakened. The seemingly democratic mechanism of elections is slowly transformed into theatre and manipulation. Candidates who are not "on board" are shunted to the side--Howard Dean, for example, was destroyed as a possible Democratic candidate for President by one week of derision in the main stream media over a so-called "scream" that was in fact an illusion produced by a particular microphone. This process, of course, was begun by the unelecting of Gore in 2000, when a candidate with a majority of the popular vote was unseated by a party line vote on the Supreme Court without further complaint from the people or the press. Or from Gore himself, who took the "statesman" route or perhaps, in his deepest heart, was simply brought down to the position of a prisoner at Gitmo, chained to the floor, tearing out his hair while he is told over and over by Gangsta Rappers that clearly there is no torture involved.

The manipulation of public opinion is now the primary job of the mainstream press. It may be that many of the workers in the press, the simple reporters on the beat, the simple faces behind the microphones, do not even realize their deeper function. Does the guy covering the Michael Jackson verdict understand that this is completely a diversion, that it is national news only in the sense that the press has itself created the interest, that it takes up huge chunks of expensive air time that otherwise might be filled with information of real consequence to the American people? Does he or she get that the story simply blocks out other deeper, "real" stories? Who knows? The guy behind the microphone has a nice job, people recognize him, he gets his bills paid, drives a nice car, has a nice wife and kids, a beach house, a boat.

The only part of the mainstream press (aside from a few syndicated columnists) that is not functioning in this new, fascistic role, is PBS and NPR. Public TV and Public Radio are under attack by the Republican Congress as I write, and partisan Republican figures have also been appointed to high roles in these organizations. The goal of the administration is clearly to either transform these formerly independent institutions into propaganda outlets (of which there are already "private" ones aplenty), or to destroy them. Once this is accomplished, there will be almost nothing left above the level of pamphleteers that doesn't serve the interests of the State. The State, keep in mind, now means the same thing as the Military-Industrial Complex. "Private" is a term transformed, from the inside out. There has been a paradigm shift.

Now I offer you an example, a behind the curtain look at this process. Usually it's harder to see, so hard, in fact, that people who do see this process tend to be written off as "conspiracy theorists" or "kooks" or whatever. But consider Dana Milbank's "coverage" of the Conyers' Hearing. Milbank, a columnist who is supposedly a centrist, simply and completely closes the door on truth and covers only the power. And for most people, power and truth are thereby merged. This is the fascist fantasy world. This is the world in which Mussolini's remark to the reporter: "My first policy will be to kill you," actually makes sense. The only difference is stylistic. Mussolini, ever the dramatic Italian with the shiny black boots, the cape, the Gesture, actually undercuts the deepest most terrible truth of power with his flamboyance. He allows the shift to be noticed. We can recoil in shock, and with the hindsight of history, of Il Duce hanging upside down under the bridge 20 years later, we can nod knowingly. Those Italians, they never could get governing, we can say (just like the Germans said, I guess).

The impulse to fascification has made unfortunate progress over the years. Now the reporter smiles and puts the gun in his own mouth, and even that drama is reduced, and the gun is only his pencil, and after the suicide he goes home, and his paycheck arrives electronically to his bank account, where his various services are electronically deducted each month so that he has plenty of time to watch TV and live the good American life. Milbank can even say that actually he told the truth about this hearing--that what he offers here is only irony. That's the problem with irony I guess. Dig and dig and in the end you find Robert Creeley, out in the old black caddy on old Route 66: "Drive," he said, "fr christsakes watch where yr going." This is not my beautiful house!

--Bill Hicks

What Senator Dick Durbin said

What Senator Dick Durbin said about "Git'mo" in the Senate:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

It's pretty hard for this ole boy to find anything to object to in Senator Durbin's remarks. Seems to me that he's warning all of us that we've gotten off the track down there in Guantanamo, that we're not behaving like we want to behave. Same with the earlier photos and reports from Abu Ghraib, in Iraq. Who, really, is going to defend that appalling "Christmas Tree" photo? Certainly not Donald Rumsfeld. He was appalled and said so. We may wonder why Mr. Rumsfeld was so inattentive to activities that are essentially under his ultimate command, but he did, finally, reject them.

So we all ought to wonder just what it is that drives the right-wing pundits to attack Sen. Durbin, to suggest that he's a traitor for making the above remarks. The basic idea that all dissent is treasonous, which gets a lot of play whenever things are going wrong, needs to be studied, observed, and rejected for what it is--a smokescreen, a projection. It is the policies that are wrong, not the objections. Torturing people is wrong, and we already know that. It's wrong for any number of reasons, some of which are essentially selfish. But we know it's wrong just in itself, just as we know that some of the people held in "Git'mo" are probably innocent of anything other than being in the "wrong place at the wrong time."

As a democracy, we are all responsible for the actions taken in our name. America runs the prison in Guantanamo. It's our Army who staffs the place. Senator Durbin does all of us a service when he points out something our own FBI has reported--that prisoners are being tortured there. To argue about the exact definition of "torture" is quibbling. No one would seriously deny that the descriptions in his remarks above are descriptions of torture. That even worse things can be done to humans by other humans is not the question. Torture is not just the very worst thing we humans can think up to do. We already know that all too well. (Mr. Limbaugh once compared the pictures at Abu Ghraib to fraternity pranks--if so, that should explain why universities around the US frequently ban specific fraternities from campus, and why all universities have rules against "hazing.")

America, at it's most basic level, at least aims to build a world where people are not tortured. At least that. Surely we can all still agree on this much. Surely this agreement actually "supports our troops" and supports some grounding from which civilized dialog can eventually grow again amongst all of us. We share the lifeboat, after all.

--Bill Hicks, Silk Hope, June 17, '05