A False Alternative

From the March 13, '06 New Yorker, in an article, "Political Science," by Michael Specter:

"Despite the official silence, the Bush Administration has been relentless in its opposition to any drug, vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex."

Read the sentence a few times, as the New Yorker tends to be as wordy as George Will fulminating on Barry Bonds. The Bush Administration has a consistent ongoing policy of defeating any efforts to lessen the risks of premarital sex. How would you like it if the X Administration had a policy of defeating any attempt to lessen the risks of smoking? Of driving? Of asbestos? How would you like it if your daughter got cervical cancer because some politicians decided that an available, effective vaccine was not going to be produced because they imagined that the potential risk of cervical cancer might stop teens (and adults) from having sex? How would you like it if your daughter died from cervical cancer?

In the same article one Reginald Finger, former medical advisor to Focus on the Family, is quoted as having reservations about a potential HIV cure for the same insane reason--if we cured HIV the kids would have more sex. This sick, confused minority of Americans is now, apparently, making fundamental decisions that affect the health of your children. Personally, in my book a parent who would rather have his child run a preventable risk of AIDS or cervical cancer in order to coerce him or her into not having sex should have that child removed to foster care. These people need deep, long-term counseling. They need to come to grips with the fears, no doubt instilled in them as children by their own warped, fearful parents, that are driving them to make decisions that are deeply delusional, as well as evil, cruel, hateful, unloving. You pick the adjective that applies. Some of their leaders--father figures who fill the sick need for an oppressive paternal figure that their own fathers have mostly vacated with age and death--ought to be exposed as the charlatans they really are, the poseurs raking in the cash and preening in the power to influence a weak, deluded President who apparently imagines that a coming Armageddon relieves him of the need to consider the negative aspects of his decisions. But of course that would demand a press we no longer have as a country, aside from tiny pockets of reality like the New Yorker. Nonetheless, this is the relationship that is driving the health policy decisions of this country today. Men like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson stand in, in the minds of their sad, defeated "flocks," for the oppressive parents they never saw for what they really were--small, afraid people who didn't really know much about the life they were bringing their children into.

Our President, in short, supports policies that make it more likely for your daughters to contract cervical cancer, a cancer that is silent and frequently kills before it is even discovered. We have indeed come a very long way down a muddy, slippery slope.

You will note, in the illustration that begins this commentary, that the leading contender for the GOP nomination in 2008, John McCain, is actually hugging our Dear Leader. People often say things like "well, at least he's had some real life experience," "at least he really served in Vietnam," or even "well, I'd vote for McCain if the Democrats can't find anyone better than Kerry." Mr. McCain is the third most conservative Senator by vote analysis. Mr. McCain supports this Administration and its policy to allow your daughter to contract cervical cancer if she makes the mistake of having premarital sex. (And, by the way, who the hell says it is a mistake, as a general rule, to have premarital sex?) He was also willing to give Mr. Bush this big hug after Mr. Bush slashed and slandered him to defeat in the 2000 South Carolina primary.

It is time to get real, to face the simple logic that this picture depicts. There are no Republicans to whom we should entrust this nation's government. Perhaps there's room for some of them in Congress, for balance, but I'll tell you, as a constituent of two Republican Senators myself, they ain't done nothing for me or for my state. One of 'em doesn't even live here at all. Those folks who still sit on the fence, who still think maybe McCain is some kind of compromise--Mr. Kerry, we may recall, actually offered McCain the Veep slot in the summer of '04--had better think about these policies and then look at that picture. This is real stuff, folks. I happen to have a daughter myself. We do not want to have sick, confused people behind the wheel of this huge juggernaut we call the United States of America. We have seen the results for six years now. Look at that picture one more time. Seeing is believing.

--Bill Hicks
(The image is from firedoglake.com)

Bob

I met Bob Brown in the winter of '62-'63, some night on the way towards spring, two AM or so, at the Carolina Coffee Shop, which everyone called "Byron's." I started going there in search of conversation, looking for poets, for politics for something--maybe a big brother, I don't know. The "Harry's" of the night. I had joined the Student Peace Union I think, or maybe that happened after I met Bob. I know I had already been passing out leaflets suggesting that the US "ban the bomb." Civil rights was already happening in other places in the South, and I had met a Freedom Rider at the Raleigh Trailways Station when I was still in high school and working as a copy boy and weekend gofer for the N&O. It seemed obvious to me that the South could and should change its ways. A practicing Methodist at the time, I had given a guest sermon on the theme of integrating Fairmont Methodist Church at the early service (at the later service, my female counterpart, a freshman at Duke, discussed the pressing issue of sexual abstinence). I was coming at this as a simple moral choice, with no inkling of economic theory or class dynamics, no clue even of the simple notion that keeping black working people and white working people at odds was a handy thing if you happened to be running a mill in the South, or a University for that matter. Bob had written a dissertation on such things, and delighted in talk.

Before long I was knee deep in the kindling Civil Rights struggle in Chapel Hill, picketing, between classes, the segregated restaurants that dotted Franklin Street. Bob was a leader, a voice with a real Left grounding, a man who'd been in the Korean War (33 combat missions his N&O obit says, something he never mentioned), had seen things, done things, out of grad school himself a couple of years but still engaged with the student scene. His energy was boundless and contagious. I was also, eventually, a member of the Reflections Magazine staff, spending hours in the cold downstairs office on Franklin Street, typing away at the fancy electric typewriter that was our typesetting machine, talking and talking with Bob, Mike Smith, Frank Blackford, Boyce Quinn, David Cheek, Kathy Strong and various others amongst the Reflections circle, sitting around the kitchen table with a cup of black Yuban instant, the oven door open for heat if it was winter. Bob was the person who taught me that even if you don't make a choice, that was a choice. That was what he understood as the core of Existentialism. Eventually I went on to Graduate School in Philosophy at UNC, and Bob was best man at my first wedding, the winter after my first wife and I had cat-sat out at his house on Smith Level (way before the fire) for most of the summer of '66, listening over and over again to "Blonde on Blonde."

Bob and I stayed in touch. That marriage broke apart in '69, and I went out to San Francisco with Boyce and David Cheek just to get some space (a high draft lottery number in my pocket), and spent the winter out there. When I came back I spent the first few nights at Bob's, and I recall sleeping through a total solar eclipse during that time, in mid-March 1970, because Bob and I had sat up all night talking. I remember I showed Bob a bunch of photos I'd taken out in San Francisco, and he pointed out that there were no people in any of them. Then I got my life going back here, and hooked up with Bobbie Thompson and became a part of the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, and started working at Duke University Press, which was a lot like working at Reflections Magazine, but with pay. As my interest and involvement in fiddling grew Bob offered me a column in the Anvil, which he'd started by then, and for several years I wrote something called "Old Times," a variety of essays about people and things connected to rural southern music: an account of the Union Grove Fiddler's Convention for example, and a transcription of an old mountain lady's story about a Pet Panther.

After the Red Clay Ramblers got going I saw less of Bob, tho he'd come out to shows at the Cradle from time to time. I know he came to see Diamond Studs when we returned from the big city with it in the fall of '75, and I know he was not happy with the naive politics of the play--Jesse James was in truth closer to a Klansman than a Robin Hood, something we never really thought about because the success of the show was grounded in its music and fun. Bob always had his political/moral compass activated, and his fire was never quenched. He was certainly supportive of me throughout--glad to see me succeeding in music, getting that the Ramblers were more than a simple bluegrass band, having various conversations with Tommy Thompson (another Philosophy Grad student and another big brother) and me over one too many at the Cradle bar.

Through the years I always tried to drop by the Smith Level digs from time to time and have a chat. When I left the Blurs in '81 I know I went by there to tell him, and later I introduced him to Libby and our daughter Anna. Anna, in fact, got into a political argument with Bob during one visit, while she was still in high school. Made me proud. Life went on, I was doing a lot of stone work and playing music with Libby. We spent nearly 10 years, from '95 on, mostly on Ocracoke Island. Anna grew up. I suddenly got to be --goddamn!!-- 63 years old.

I never figured Bob would die. He was too damn alive, too tough. He'd poke death in the eye, break that scythe over his knee and toss the pieces into that old yaller pickup with the horns on the front, drive home and make a sculpture out of the metal and kindling out of the handle. I did wish he'd quit smoking, and I've always figured that the cigs just kept him slightly level, kept him from punching the wall. A trade off. And who knows. Bob had a fine life, and I'm sure he'd agree in the deepest sense with my favorite bit of philosophy--living well is the best revenge. Hell, I probably got the line from him.

I wish we'd all paid more attention to the things that really pissed Bob off, that made him want to punch walls, and to start a magazine and then a forchristsakes newspaper! I have to say, looking at the current situation, Bob was absolutely right. One afternoon in '63, after the big sit in at the Chapel Hill Chamber of Commerce (a choice of target that had a lot to do with Bob, who understood where the power was, that it wasn't in the hands of some cracker who ran a little sandwich shop), Bob went out in the intersection of Columbia and Franklin, on his own, with a sign that said "Justice." He sat down under the traffic light and was shortly arrested. That was in some ways his most elegant moment, a pure statement, as true as you could get, with no hassles about the price of ink and paper and the overhead of a building on Morgan Street in Durham, the complications of a staff, deadlines, bidness. But he also gets a big big tip of the hatlo hat for sticking with it, printing that damn paper week after week, year after year, about as bad a job for an idealist as running a dairy farm come to think of it.

We thought that we'd won. We were seriously wrong, and we went to sleep at the wheel. We are paying still, right now, with this darkening political climate, with a right wing supreme court and a government that thinks corporations and fundamentalist churches are the true citizens of the country--not people. Most of us got tired of listening to Bob. The paper folded, replaced by papers that looked like papers, printed on news print, full of sex ads to pay the freight. During the '90s it looked like things had finally settled down, and we could just enjoy life and not think about the big political issues, the economic underpinnings. Probably to some degree Bob settled down too. But I don't think his fire ever went out, and I think, looking back, that he was seriously ahead of his time, ahead of this time, right now. He kept pointing till his arm got tired, then he sat down under a maple tree, fired up another Carlton, and tried to enjoy the sunset.

Well, Robert V. N. Brown, we'll sure the hell be missing you down the road we're travelling, and I hope we can do you proud. Take a well earned rest. God Speed.

--Fiddlin' Bill

*photo by Margaret Brown

"Fishin'?" Or the Pleasures of Loutdom

You know the old one about the good ole boy who takes the city slicker out fishing for catfish one hot afternoon. The slicker's one of these sticklers, and has noticed that the boy has an inspection sticker from 1999 and don't bother with his seat belt even when he's hitting 50 on a gravel road. There's no shoulder, and the dust is chasing them down the road, and the green green leaves are whizzing past and it's about then that the boy passes over a fruit jar and sort of orders stickler to "look at the bead on that, and then giver a swash."

When they get to a clearing beside the sleepy river, there's a few other trucks already parked there, and they haul the skiff out of the back of the truck and clamber in. And there ain't no life vests, and the boy's got a greasy brown paper bag with him, which the slicker figures is some kind of pork sandwiches Daisy Mae whipped up for them back at the double wide, before she went off to her swing shift at the rubber thread plant. So the slicker's surprised yet again when the boy pulls out a stick of dynamite.

"What the hell? You can't do that, that's illegal."

The boy lights the fuse and passes the stick over. "You talkin' or fishin'?"

He might have continued along the lines of "if you're talking, talk civil now." I guess the slicker would say "yes sir, sir."

There are times in history when people feel nearly omnipotent. It may be that in 1930 the generals who ran Japan felt that way. Japan at that time had by far the best military in Asia, which was pretty much the world as far as Japan saw it. China was a broken country, a true pitiful helpless giant. India was still a colonial conquest of the British, who were nearly bled white from World War I and were being hectored by Gandhi’s independence movement. On the far far side of the Pacific was a United States deep in depression, with only an outpost here and there, a few soldiers in spats enjoying life in the tropics. Europe had its own issues, and Japan had defeated Russia in 1905. It was, to the Japanese leaders, an historic moment. If they waited, things might change in ways that would enhance the inherent weaknesses of their position--they were what they were, an island nation with no oil. But they were a disciplined people. It was the moment to use their strengths, the moment to act.

an original kamikaze headband, pic from http://www.antiqueswords.com/bq973.htm

The lessons of World War II were once written across the sky, so large that everyone agreed with them: we cannot go there again. There was opportunity aplenty for new paths. These brilliant lessons have sadly faded, melted away as clouds will. Now it is the United States who is lead by people who believe we are at the historic moment. They have struck, and striking have a new argument: "you fishin' or talking?" We have, supposedly, a military power sufficient to "take out" any threat at its inception. This is the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive war, enunciated in the moment after 9/11, when the world supposedly changed, when a frightened Congress allowed this Administration to declare a permanent state of war, which now grounds its argument that it can pretty much abide by or ignore whatever laws it wants to.

It will only be with a change in the party that controls Congress that there comes a possibility of change in this amazing state of affairs, assuming that it is even possible to make such a change in Congress. It is quite possible that no change is even possible, and that even in 2008 we will be offered a choice which does not include change. Consider that in 1968 America could choose between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. The real embodiment of choice with which 1968 started so grandly--Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, even Eugene McCarthy--mysteriously evaporated by convention time. Richard Nixon, let us recall, was the "peace candidate."

Our world contains, and will always contain, the Existential Problem. It is the problem of "Are you talkin' or fishin'?" World War II did end. The Japanese discovered that the world had a bigger stick of dynamite. They suffered an ocean of misery bigger than the blue Pacific, and their grandchildren play video games in Tokyo. We only ask whether these tidal waves of misery are historical necessities, or whether we might avoid the next one, the one that seems poised to crash over our own heads and the heads of our children. To put it in a "civil" fashion. I mean, I'm not wearing a tee shirt at the dance or nothing.

--Bill Hicks

Half Right

I was going into Bojangles the other day to get my favorite sausage and gravy biscuit breakfast, sporting my "Heckofa Job Brownie" sticker, which I feel like strikes a blow for freedom and exempts me from having to give any money to the Democratic Party as long as they keep talking about how they'll run the war better than the repubs, and a young guy in a dusty black SUV followed me into the lot close enough that I hoped he was reading my sticker. He parks closer to the door than I do, and he and his lady friend are inside by the time I walk by his truck and see his yellow ribbon on the back. I'm close enough to read it, and I do. It says "Bring the Troops Home and Station them on the Mexican Border."

Well. Have to say there was a bit of pleasure in the read, because it suggests a fissure in the monolith. Tactically, it'd be just peachy if half the repubs started chanting that line. And I'd rather, given such a grim, negative choice, that we line 'em up down in Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, behind the partition our fine House of Representatives has moved to erect, than to read these headlines every day: 3 LeJeune Marines Killed in Roadside Bombing. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Damn, do we remember nothing at all? Oh right, these kids we're killing today in the machine weren't born back in Country Joe's day. The song went like this: "what are we fighting for, we don't give a damn, we're going to Vietnam..."

About that wall, by the way. I suggest we hire Christo as the lead architect/engineer for that project. Christo has worked on a number of similar projects all over the world, with amazing success and with a much smaller budget than we can offer him. I'm sure he'll come up with the best materials list, but I would suggest he use taffeta, since it's a wall that runs through the Texas South, and through John Ford country as well. Taffeta is sturdy yet can billow and flow in an eye-pleasing way--just think of the wonderful ballroom scenes in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." Damn if it don't all come around. Where's my headsmack key??

I digress. I went on in and had my breakfast. From inside Bo's I could read the little license plate on the front of the kid's SUV. It said "Fireman." Nice. There happen to be quite a lot of Mexicans living in my town, his town. They work at the chicken plants mostly, and their kids have managed to win the first state championship in soccer that our high school has ever won, beating much bigger schools all over the state. I'm sure if this boy fireman wants a side job at the chicken plant, they'll be happy to give him one, probably start him higher than any Mexican and give him a lead job on the head choppin' line. He don't want that job though. Somebody just told him to stew about these "illegal" people coming up here and changing things, and he got his ass in a sling. It was easy. It's what people do, a human trait I'm afraid. We all love to get our asses in slings.

I saw a little video last night, a narration by a Polish woman of her own trail of tears in World War II. Don't think the Germans invented forced marches, or the Japanese either. We did that, and the guy who's on our $20 gave the orders. Anyway, this woman lived in a little town on the west side of Poland and spoke German as well as Polish. She was Jewish. One day, just before school started, the Germans arrived. She was 15. School never started. By Christmas she and her parents were living in their own basement, in the cold and dark, while other folks were living upstairs, in their house. Her 19-year-old brother had been hauled off in a truck, never to be heard from again. The next summer her dad was hauled off, then she and her mother. The two of them were separated by soldiers, and she was literally tossed into a truck and taken to a factory where she made uniforms for German soldiers and shoveled coal out of coal cars till she was so exhausted that she considered jumping under the next train. In the winter of 1945, while the US Army was pushing the German Army back after their last gasp attack at the Battle of the Bulge, she and several thousand other girls were forced marched from Poland into Czechoslovakia, most of them dying or being shot along the way. She survived, she related in the movie, because the day before her dad was hauled away to his death he told her, ordered her, to wear her ski boots. Many of the girls on the march, all through the eastern European winter, wore only sandals. When she was liberated by an American soldier (whom she later married), she weighed 68 pounds.*

Lots of people nowadays want to tell you this kind of stuff didn't happen. It's not so hard to just tell them they're idiots. The boy fireman, that's a little more subtle. He's going numb though, he's in serious trouble. Already he can't feel how a Mexican person feels reading that sticker. Maybe it's a Mexican who walked across the Sonora desert to get here to get that $5 an hour chicken-choking gig. Maybe a Mexican who lost his little sister along the way, who knows. Or a guy who rode in a locked up cattle truck for two days and nearly smothered. So the kid wants to save people, he has this fine altruistic nature that led him to volunteer to be a fireman. But his dark side is coming out too, for whatever reason, and he doesn't even realize it. Right now he can be ok with hurt eyes. Maybe before long he'll be ok with worse. This is the trajectory for many of the kids we're sticking over in Iraq, too. They'll never be ok again, some of them, and some of them will come back and blame the Mexicans. And some of them are the Mexicans.

It makes me wonder if the problem we have goes to some level much deeper than we realize, to something that lets us accept every choice that's grounded in efficiency. That's what happened to the Germans. Once we turn off the ability to feel those hurt eyes, we can start rolling. And we don't even get the weird, contradictory rules we end up establishing along the way. Little starving Jewish girls sewing the German soldiers uniforms. Big companies offering endless nasty, low-wage jobs to Mexicans, who then get Catch-22ed with "but you're illegal," while their kids do us proud by bringing home the state championship.

It's like the old joke. Down in Mississippi, back in the mid-'60s, Lyndon Johnson finally made the powers-that-be allow black people to get a driver's license. This got the modern Republican Party started, but that's another story. Anyway, this guy did get his license, after having to solve ten pages of calculus problems in five minutes (and that's how we got those crackers to the moon and back, but that's another story). So he's driving down Main Street in Meridian or somewheres, and he's going about 23 but the sign says 20, so he's busted. Well, they have to make an example. They knew it wasn't going to work. So after a trial he's hauled over to Ole Miss Stadium and buried up to his neck on the 50-yard line. The stadium's plumb full of crackers. Down at one end, under the goal posts, the black man sees a big cage. In it is a lion. A big fat sheriff walks over there and opens the door to that cage, and the lion comes out. It looks around, and then it sees that black head, up at the 50-yard line, and it takes off running. The guy's eyes are glued to the lion, growing bigger and bigger, drooling in anticipation, and the lion's so hungry that he actually overshoots the mark a bit and finds himself standing over the buried head. The crowd was screaming, but has fallen silent. The black man does the only thing he can do. He cranes his neck and reaches up and bites that lion as hard as he can on the balls.

A hush falls over the assembled. Then from the back, a lone voice, maybe some kid fireman, who knows, calls out: "Play fair, Nigger."

--Bill Hicks

Final note...Maybe you think I'm being a tad unfair to the great state of Mississippi. Surely they would never subject a black citizen to such punishment just to "make an example." If you have such thoughts, please read the following from the Clarion Ledger, December 31, 2005. My compliments to Dave Niewart for digging this one out.

*"One Survivor Remembers," HBO Films, the story of Gerda Weissmann Klein, narrated by her, 1995 Academy Award, best documentary short film