The Beck Brigade

It's been over twenty years since I visited Israel as part of a statewide delegation led by then Senator Al Gore, Jr. It was a multi-religious group, which was great for me as a product of a Jewish home and a Catholic education. I saw the tourist sights, but I was inclined to break away from the group, particularly at night, and stroll the streets where people gathered in order to get a personal feel for the place. Chance encounters, in combination with walking in ancient footprints, soon had me believing that I was a part of some larger scheme. An old rabbi physically stopped me in the street and pulled me into his classroom for a lecture on goodness, and when he had finished, he invited me to join his communal group and promised to find me a wife.

My last night in Jerusalem, I hailed a cab driven by a young Palestinian who offered to be my guide. When I told him I was leaving for New York the next day, he proudly displayed a business card from his brother's sandwich shop inside a midtown office building. He had me memorize the address since it was his only card. I glanced at it and told him I'd look up his sibling if I was in the neighborhood, then forgot about it. The next day, after an endless flight and morning hotel check-in, I was feeling jet-lagged and walked through a side door into the afternoon sun. Directly in front of me, not thirty feet away, was the office building whose address I had seen on the cabbie's card. I crossed the street, entered the building, navigated a corridor, and walked up to the lunchroom counter where a gentleman identified himself as the owner. I told him, "I was with your brother in Jerusalem yesterday. He sends his love and wants you to call him." Lunch was on the house as the proprietor explained that he had married a Jewish girl in Israel and they had come to the U.S. to escape the hostility of their respective families and communities. We agreed that the intolerance between the peoples of the holy land was regrettable and when I left him and again walked into the sun, I looked up and said, and I paraphrase myself, "Lord, You're messing with me."

Most of the Lord's messengers have beatific news to deliver, but if I was only supposed to convey a shout-out between brothers, that was cool. Afterward, I walked around for several months searching for signs and wonders, believing the Lord was personally leading me by the hand, until reality returned and I discovered that I had neither been called nor chosen, but had an ailment common to unseasoned tourists known as "Jerusalem Fever." It's the inclination for first-time visitors to the holy land to believe they are personally interwoven with the ongoing religious narrative and are receiving instructions directly from the Deity. Some believe they have been called to play great roles in the events of mankind. Such a pilgrim is Glenn Beck, who claimed his "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington D.C. landed on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech because of "divine providence," and only "wrote out a few bullet points so as not to interfere in case the Spirit wanted to talk." He professed an "American miracle" was going to occur and attendees would be present "at the awakening." I might pay money to ride a bus to D.C. to see Jeff Beck, but Glenn Beck? Nahh.

Beck's not that difficult to analyze. A self-confessed "hard-drinking, hard-living ignoramus," gets sober, reads some books, and begins to see patterns. By espousing his conspiratorial views, he is first promoted from talk-radio to back-bencher on the Headline News Channel, then on to the big leagues, where he becomes the most controversial, "entertainer" on Fox News; no easy feat. Soon his every utterance is dissected by other teleditorialists and his ratings and self-importance grow until he perceives himself as the leader of an earth-changing, transcendent movement on the march. His grandiose scheme drew a quarter million people to the National Mall, but Beck's gathering was more of a religious revival than a societal shift, and if he was trying to channel Dr. King, he came off sounding more like Elmer Gantry. At his "Million White Man March," Glenn spoke of returning to God, supporting the military, and the importance of family. Who could argue with that? The firebrand Beck was entirely inoffensive, unless you object to receiving religious instruction from a shill for Rupert Murdoch. The big crowd seemed pleased, but I thought it was like going to a Kiss concert and having the band come out in street clothes playing acoustic guitars.

Unquestionably, Beck possesses accumulated knowledge, but he consistently misinterprets it and ends up connecting the wrong dots. He praises the "Chosen People" but rails against "social justice," which is the cornerstone of the faith. He speaks of "restoring honor," yet refers to the president as "a person with a deep-seated hatred for white people," and "a racist." Personally, I thought the nation's honor was restored  the moment George W. Bush left the White House, and although a short film was shown to commemorate Dr. King's historic 1963 march, there were more blacks on stage as speakers and singers than in the audience. Beck's restraint was the result of his promise to keep the event non-political, but the location, the date, and the name, "Restoring Honor to America," by implication, made it so. To his credit, Beck waited until three hours into the pageant before succumbing to his patented sobbing. He even read the Gettysburg Address. Mostly, he did no harm, which I suppose is a good thing until his next outrageous on-air outburst. But, his stature has been diminished. Beck demonstrated that he's not a transformational figure and he certainly is no Martin Luther King. Forty-seven years ago, Dr. King had a dream; Glenn Beck just has a delusion.

No, Canada!

When the seasons turn, imagine hordes of illegal aliens streaming across the U.S. border dressed in their bizarre native garb and speaking in a foreign tongue, straining our social services and imposing their criminal ethic on sovereign citizens legally in this country. It wouldn't be the first time illegal drugs and contraband flowed undetected over that border and into the lives of everyday Americans, along with the accompanying violence that's always part of the deal. It's a frightening thought to envision roving gangs of disaffected Quebecois, crossing the Canadian border on snowshoes and wearing toques, speaking crude French slang and overwhelming border towns like Buffalo and Rochester, hanging out in the parking lots of the Home Depots with huge snow shovels looking to clear someone's driveway and take a job from an American. And who can stand that whining music they listen to...Celine Dion and Bryan Adams?  During prohibition, our porous northern border was the gateway for Canadian hooch from the forerunners of the soul-stealing Seagram's empire, just as today it is the entry way for the demonic "B.C. Bud," and the Manitoba drug cartels. Their entertainers, from Alex Trebek to Howie Mandel have taken over youth culture and television, while alien seductresses like Pamela Anderson have corrupted the internets.

No wonder our economy is in the crapper when Canadians can smuggle their cheap, socialized, pharmaceuticals into our country and sell it for half the cost of the identical product here. Busloads of Canadians are trying to escape their evil, Marxist health care system to come over here and have lots of unnecessary tests performed in substandard hospital emergency rooms that serve the uninsured. There are even cabals of subversive comedians, led by Martin Short and Jim Carrey, that try to set the American standard for what's funny. Seeing Mr. Short in a fat suit playing a character named Jiminy Glick may have been humorous to some, but what of the family of 9/11, Flight #93 hero Jeremy Glick, whom Short was clearly mocking. Or, how about a Canuck, ex-con, beatnik like Tommy Chong, who has been attempting to pervert our youth for over 40 years. This Canadian invasion has reached a tipping point and true patriots want immediate governmental action to end this outrage. I demand that the fortifications protecting us from Canadian women sneaking into Detroit to have American babies become the President's top priority. I mean, isn't that why we built Fort Ticonderoga? The only good to come out of this breach in our northern border is the proliferation of Canadian restaurants and re-fried cuisine. And their work ethic, of course.

But when these illegals come into this country and take these rare jobs, what do they do? They don't spend it here. They send their money back home to support their families. This underage, risque singer, Justin Beiber, comes to this country unchaperoned, makes a fortune, and sends it right back to his people in some province called Ontario. If he gets sick on tour, he's got the best medical care the government can offer, and he doesn't even pay taxes in this country. Same thing with this hippie surfer Keanu Reeves, who portrayed an average American teen in the Bill & Ted movies, but then I discovered he was not only born in Lebanon, he starred as Prince Siddhartha/Lord Buddha in 1992's "Little Buddha." At least this Beatleboy Beiber pays taxes somewhere. For all we know, this "transplanted" Lebanese Canadian Reeves could be funding Al Qaeda with his Hollywood money. Plus, I heard he's part Hawaiian, so there's got to be something up with his birth certificate. Is it difficult to draw the conclusion that Reeves and rock-star sex therapist Pam Anderson will settle in California with the intention of raising "terror babies" that will automatically be American citizens, but grow up to be suicide bombers as Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert has suggested?  Is it just a coincidence that suspect leftist superstar moms are already raising North Vietnamese children? And why isn't Glen Beck on top of this?

That's why I'm so grateful to the group of Republican senators who so revere our Constitution, that they are always prepared to change it in order to stop what S.C. Sen. Lindsey Graham calls the policy of "Drop and Leave." These Canadian women will squat in the bushes like Sacajawea just to have an "anchor baby" that leads them onto the fast track for welfare. Senators Kyl of Texas, Kentucky's McConnell, Iowa's Grassley, and since it's an election year, John McCain, have all called for a "review" and potential revocation of the 14th Amendment which grants American citizenship to those born within our borders, including all those rosy-cheeked offspring of Canadian skaters who have come to dominate the National Hockey League and take jobs away from thousands of aspiring American hockey legends. The tough thing about repealing the 14th Amendment, is that it also deals with that "equal protection under the law" business. In these turbulent times, however, perhaps "equal" protection is a little too much for the Mexicans and Muslims to expect. It takes a trained eye to spot a Canadian. The best way is to drop a hockey puck in a crowd and see who dives for it.

Ginning up bloodlust, immigrant xenophobia failed to work for the Republicans the last election cycle, and it will fail again this time. There are better ways to solve our border issues than savage demagoguery about beheadings and kidnappings when the non-partisan Pew Research Center reports an all time high in arrests and deportation of undocumented workers. Right-wing candidates for office have offered solutions as varied as internment camps to mass deportation, while most people still come here illegally because they know there are employers who will hire them for more than they can make at home, be it in Alberta or Mazatlan. Americans have forgotten the struggles of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers, or politicians like Bobby Kennedy who championed not only their cause, but their dignity. It's easier to call them all drug mules or arms smugglers than people just trying to scrape by on this earth with their hands. Wouldn't it be weird if one day we found out that God was really on Mexico's side all along and that the theory of "Manifest Destiny" actually pertained to them, and that's why they are this nation's fastest growing demographic? When Latinos become the country's majority, we'll let them deal with this encroaching Canadianization of the good old U.S.of A.

A Haspel Hat Tip to Kennedy Award Winner Bill Day for his cartoon.

Tempest In A Tea Party

 

Mark Williams, the Chairman of the Tea Party Express, got booted from the Confederacy of Dunces last month because, in response to an NAACP suggestion that the group repudiate racial elements within the movement, he wrote and published an "Open letter to President Lincoln" from the emancipated slaves, something he referred to as "satire."  The full text of the knee-slapping missive is worthy of examination, because it reveals more about the writer than the subject, and shows something about the common beliefs of a great many Americans. In his "satire," all Williams did was put down in words what many Tea Party types refuse to say out loud.

           Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

And the ridiculous idea of “reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew NAACP Head Colored Person

Laugh? I thought I'd never start! How can you convince someone there is racism in their midst when it runs in their blood and they don't even know what it looks like? A week later, Williams was still on cable news defending his remarks by saying the NAACP was guilty of reverse racism, which appears to be the Tea Party's prime rebuttal  for all the "patriotic Americans'" outrageous behavior at the various kleagle rallies around the nation. These "concerned citizens" don't like it when their ultra-rightist movement is called "racist." They defy you to prove any member of their group called Rep. John Lewis a "nigger" while simultaneously gutting ACORN with false propaganda. Their new hero, Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, can't deviate from his Libertarian philosophy enough to agree that segregated lunch counters in the Fifties were a bad thing. He expressed the still burning racist ember that private businesses should be able to choose who they serve. Not if they serve the public, they don't. If someone wishes to start a private club that caters exclusively to Caucasian, dwarf albinos, that is their right, but if you are serving the public, that means all the public. And I don't believe for a second that Paul is a racist. However, when I grew out my beard and started hanging around with people with long hair, they called me a hippie. So, if the sheet fits...

The term "yellow journalism" was created in the late 1800's to describe the sensationalist rhetoric and fabricated stories of newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, particularly the New York Journal.  As influential as newspapers were in the last century, not even Hearst could have imagined a 24-hour "news" network continually pumping out anti-government propaganda for the benefit of a particular political party, or entire radio empires built on hatred and fear-mongering. The Hearst of the 21st century, Rupert Murdoch, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in order to own multiple media outlets in the same market, like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. His brand of  contemporary "yellow journalism" is far more insidious than the sabre rattling of a few newspapers, and makes the "Remember the Maine," jingoism of the Hearst era seem almost quaint. With Fox News acting as a running-dog for right-wing extremism, pseudo-smart "entertainers" like Glen Beck get free reign to espouse their inflammatory "theories." So, when a real journalist, like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, calls Beck out for his serial use of Nazi references to describe the Obama administration, the right's reaction is to claim that the country is experiencing a phase of "political correctness," in which their freedom of speech is under attack. They have become oblivious to the difference between "free speech" and "hate speech," and the saddest and most alarming statement of all about Fox News is their massive ratings success and rabid, "true-believer" folllowing.

A typical Fox "story" comes from out-of-the-mainstream, internet sources, like the ACORN "prostitution sting," or the most recent running expose' about the "New Black Panther Party." Fox flogged the story for weeks and Bill O'Reilly pondered aloud why the other news organizations were "avoiding" the issue. Then it turned out that the "Party" consisted of two, baton-wielding wannabe radicals hanging around an overwhelmingly African-American polling station "intimidating voters" into casting their ballots for Obama. When that poisoned well ran dry, Fox virtually leaped on blogger and Tea Party apologist Andrew Breitbart's odious contention that reverse racism existed at the Department of Agriculture in the person of one Shirley Sherrod. By slicing and dicing Sherrod's speech before the NAACP, he made a convincing argument that she was discriminating against white people out of what was actually a story of redemption. Had anyone been paying attention, WorldNetDaily had reported on a July 16th appearance at a Fargo, N.D. talk radio program where Breitbart said, "Let me say something a tad newsworthy to the president of the NAACP. You can go to hell." He then bragged, "I have tapes, a tape, of racism, and it's an NAACP dinner. You want to play with fire? I have evidence of racism and it's coming from the NAACP." The law states that if you defame a person's reputation with feckless accusations with the intention of smearing them, it's called "libel," and it's a prosecutable offense. I only hope that after Ms. Sherrod sues Breitbart's ass off, she goes after Fox News.

I confess that I was fooled too. When I saw the initial reports and video of Sherrod on Fox News, I thought that she must certainly resign, and the outrage of the Obama administration and the NAACP was justified. They made the same mistake that I did by assuming that Fox was a semi-responsible news organization that abides by the rules of journalism. How foolish of me. Fox News President Roger Ailes knows what his boss wants as surely as if he were William Randolph Hearst. This current Fox "reverse racism" crusade is in keeping with Ailes past deeds like advising Richard Nixon on appealing to southern, white voters, and orchestrating "Poppy" Bush's presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis by tying the Massachusetts Governor to paroled rapist, Willie Horton, in a famous negative political ad. When questioned about the propriety of the controversial commercial, Ailes said his only hesitation was whether to picture Horton with or without a knife. Why should I have assumed Fox News vetted the Breitbart piece when he was the one behind the story and video of ACORN's adventures with the now felonious, fake pimp, and then spent six months lying about it? And all in the cause of proving Mark Williams' supposed point in his "satirical" letter to Lincoln, that honest, hard-working citizens' tax money goes directly to the support of shiftless layabouts who prefer "big-money welfare" to a job; the raison d'etre of the Tea Party movement. Former representative and Tea Party darling Tom Tancredo has announced his candidacy for governor of Colorado, only months after waxing nostalgic about literacy tests at the polls during the Jim Crow era. Since good test results are a pre-requisite for entering a respected college, isn't there some way we could institute civics literacy exams for potential candidates for public office? At least check their SAT scores.

Reefer Madness Redux

Since the initial wave of the hippie movement travelled from west to east, it didn't reach Knoxville until well after the 1967 "Summer of Love." We had more of a "Springtime of Love" in 1968. Toward the end of the school year, rumors reached our Tennessee tribe that there was marijuana growing wild in the state of Kansas, right in the interstate median. Just like the Gold Rush of '49, van loads of denim-wearing, entrepreneurial hippies raced to the great plains and, sure enough, returned with garbage bags filled with something looking identical to cannabis. It was the remnants of a WWII era government program that grew the plants for their hemp value, and all these years later, the crop had survived. The problem was, the wild plants lacked the psychoactive ingredient that caused the euphoric effect in pot and were pretty much useless for anything other than weaving into handbags or sandals.

Personally, I never tried to sell pot because I lacked the ruthlessness required to profit from your friends, but even I got caught up in this deal. Since it was over 40 years ago, I trust the statute of limitations has expired. We tried to doctor this cabbage in every way possible, including baking it, but only ended up with brittle leaves of the worst pot anyone had ever tried. It wouldn't even give you a headache. I finally locked it all up in a Styrofoam chest filled with dry ice overnight and by the next day, the gas from the CO2 made you mildly dizzy. We drove it to Nashville, where a new breed of songwriters had settled and distributed all of it without complaint, and soon afterward, there was a Renaissance in country music. OK, that last part was a lie, but we did unload all the Kansas weed on Music Row.

Just recently, I was reminiscing with an old friend about that particular escapade and we couldn't help but agree what a dumbass, reckless college-boy thing that was to do, like trying to smoke the inner skin of a banana peel because we had heard Donovan singing "Mellow Yellow." We also agreed what a shame it would have been to have been arrested over such hideous weed during an age when people were going to jail for seeds in an ashtray. The irresistible lure was that it was just growing wild, but by picking it and carrying it in a sack, we were guilty of the crime of possession, and when we crossed state lines, our crime became federal. Kansas ultimately eradicated all the interstate pot because Hefty-Bag toting hippies kept popping up on the highways like penal farm work crews. It did occur to me, however, that if this weed could grow wild on a Kansas blacktop, it could pretty much grow anywhere, and people being who and what they are, it was only a matter of time before the prohibition of pot would be tossed aside just like the prohibition of whiskey. But, that was eight presidents ago. What has prevented even the discussion of decriminalization  until relatively recently, has been the same old-boy deal that has always muzzled debate on the issue; political influence. In this case, the beer, spirits, and alcohol lobby, who are still smarting from having their seductive and subliminal liquor ads removed from television. The pot industry doesn't have any lobbyists. Plenty of advocates, but no lobbyists.

Local news reported that a man was arrested in Memphis last week after a DEA task force raid with more than 1,200 pounds of baled marijuana in his humble Orange Mound home, and was being held in city jail under a bond of one penny less than ten million dollars. A somewhat saner judge reduced the bail to a quarter mil, but you'd have thought these guys caught Scarface. Rapists and murderers are given more consideration and less harsh treatment than a pot dealer, and they do less time. Though the bust warranted a scant five paragraphs in The Commercial Appeal, it was eye-popping news to pot aficionados who are experiencing the annual Memphis summer marijuana drought, or so I'm told. The DEA agents testified that after jack-booting the doors, they found large bales of a "green, leafy substance." Can you imagine the number of police and the manpower used to haul away a half a ton of leaves? In the end, they'll burned it all which was exactly what was going to happen to it in the first place. And this all-purpose panacea had a street value of over a half-million dollars. The zeal in which the pot dealers were captured and jailed was exceeded only last month by the Las Vegas police, who killed a 21 year old man while serving a marijuana search warrant. And this was in a state where citizens voted to decriminalize possession. The late outlaw's bride-to-be told local TV that her intended was "a recreational smoker. He smoked weed, marijuana, that's what he did." The police recovered "an unspecified amount of marijuana and some digital scales." A regular Al Capone, this kid.

In the Memphis bust, there will now be a trial or two and long incarcerations, costing the city and state and ultimately you. And because the profit motive is so high, (you know; Capitalism), someone else will take these guys' place and the criminality will continue. In fact, author Eric Schlosser writes, "There are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any time in American history." And that population will only grow as long as police forces around the country maintain the marijuana home-invasion mentality. Imagine if the ban on the plant was lifted for adults, and regulated and taxed by the government for the benefit of society. How many more policemen or teachers would that revenue hire? How much gang violence would be diffused by removing the profit from illegal pot sales? How would our problems on the Mexican border be affected if the demand for marijuana smuggling were eliminated? I'm not naive enough to believe that there won't always be a demand for illegal narcotics, but hard drugs that do emotional and physical damage are another matter entirely, and if we are being honest, we'll admit our major national drug problem is with good old home-made American pharmaceuticals. I'd prefer to be able to take advantage of that "pursuit of happiness" thing. All these people who are running around screaming that their freedoms are under siege and they want their country back; well, so do I. No federal agency forbids you from growing poppies on the veranda. Give me the freedom to determine what grows in my own backyard. I want the government out of my bedroom and the police out of my garden. This is an issue worthy of a tea party.

Gluttons For Punishment

I enjoy celebrating Independence Day much the same way as I do New Year's Eve; I stay off the streets. The nation's birthday has become an annual orgy of mattress and auto sales, not to mention the charcoal and lighter fluid. Aside from visiting with family and friends, there's really no good reason to leave the air conditioning for outdoor activities now that the downtown fireworks display over the Mississippi River has been cancelled due to budget cuts. However, the amateur fireworks were so loud on my block that we had to sedate the dogs. After viewing the July 4th hot dog eating contest at Coney Island, live on ESPN, I thought I would need sedation myself.

This has got to be the only country in the world where some people go hungry, while others are "professional" eaters. But, who could object to a good old fashioned sausage eating contest that's been going on at Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Stand since 1916?  I can. The once good-time event has now gone big-time with the formation of the Major League Eating organization. They are the governing body that oversees all professional eating contests in the nation, under the auspices of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOC). The MLE is looking towards global expansion, but they are constrained to places where they actually have food. Other than the U.S. and Japan, I think the International League is having trouble fielding a team in countries like Haiti or Bulgaria. And it's no longer merely hot dogs. In a year, there are over 80 major scheduled events, like the Krystal Square-Off and the Pizza Hut P'Zone Chow-lenge, with corporate sponsors as varied as Smirnoff Vodka and Netflix. The Coney Island competition was co-sponsored, appropriately, by Pepto Bismol. I like a Nathan's hot dog myself, just not 50 at once.

This years' contest was engulfed in controversy when former champion and world renowned eater Takeru Kobayashi refused to participate because of an "impasse" with Major League Eating. The Japanese challenger left the Mustard Belt up for the taking since the MLE wanted to bar him from participating in "outside competitions." This meant clear sailing for defending champ, Joey Chestnut, who out-gorged the rest of the field, winning by nine dogs plus buns. Without Kobayashi to spur him on, along with the 95 degree temperature, Chestnut fell far short of his own record of 68 dogs in ten minutes, devouring a mere 54 red- hots and half a bottle of Pepto. The real drama came after the event had ended, when Kobayashi, wearing a green "Free Kobi" T-Shirt, attempted to storm the stage during the award ceremony and was arrested and carted off by the police. The huge crowd of spectators chanted, "Let him eat" in unison, while The Who's "Teenage Wasteland" blared over the loud speakers. Just like professional wrestling, allow a league to take monopolistic control, bring in the corporate sponsors, and there goes your "sport."

In the end, the event looked more like the marathon dancers of the thirties; doing something unnatural and demeaning for the entertainment of the mob in the hope of winning the $10,000 grand prize. The "color commentators," who kept referring to the bingers as "athletes," reported that Joey Chestnut consumed 20,166 calories in 10 minutes while perfecting his technique of shoving two dogs in his mouth at once while doing a little jig to stretch his stomach lining. In his career as a professional eater, Chestnut has won over $200,000, three cars and a motorcycle. He's also eaten 10.5 pounds of macaroni and cheese in seven minutes, and 56 matzoh balls in one sitting, even though he didn't know what a matzoh was before the competition. While the other contestants looked for buckets, Chestnut waved the Mustard Belt aloft while drooling hot dog juice down the front of a T-Shirt covered in corporate logos like a race car driver. I couldn't decide which was more offensive; the mindless inhalation of massive amounts of food, or the corporate takeover of "the sport of competitive eating."

This Super Bowl of gluttony is a typically American spectacle that would be an occasion for mirth were it not for the fact that the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater since the Gilded Age of Robber Barons. But even then, the "in-your-face" attitude was subdued, lest the proletariat rise up and storm the suburbs. Major League Eating does nothing to help the nation's obesity epidemic, especially now that Tennessee has been ranked second in the country, only behind Mississippi, as the fattest state in the Union. There are many issues to blame, but there is no worse perpetrator in the enlarging of America than the fast-food restaurant chains. I sympathize with people who struggle with their weight, but lately it seems as if most have simply stopped the struggle. Exhibit A is the sandwich sold by KFC consisting of two fried chicken breasts filled with bacon and cheese, a heart attack available in the drive-thru, while products like the Triple Whopper are directly marketed to the poorest among us. Morbid obesity is so common here, the front pew in church looks like the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line.  Major League Eating seems sort of incongruous while the Memphis Food Bank is feeding over 186,000 people per year that otherwise would not have nourishing meals. Other than gluttony and sloth, there is a word that describes this big-money, "professional," eating circuit; disgusting.

The Duke of Oil

Rahm Emanuel said that it looks like BP CEO Tony Hayward finally got his life back. There are millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast that wish they could say the same. Before Hayward's appearance in front of Congress, no one had said, "I don't remember" that many times since Alberto Gonzalez. It bought him his ticket back to England, however, and the torch was passed to another corporate shill. However, was it necessary for him to go directly to a yacht race? BP gave the job of Face Man, to Bob Dudley, a Mississippi boy. At least he can speak Southern and he did a good job as director of the Liberty Bowl. And Hayward was forgiven and absolved of his sins by Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who personally apologised for the "shakedown" by the White House that holds BP accountable for the disaster. Simultaneously, the twin conservative calender girls, Palin and Bachmann, came to BP's defense. Bachmann, who needs to be in the witless protection program, claimed the escrow account was "extortion," while the original "Drill Baby Drill" gal said on Fox "News," that BP was being "demonized." All this, while oil continues to gush into the Gulf and BP and their affiliates have been caught in a pattern of deliberate lies.

A book was published in 1958 called "The Ugly American," by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. It was actually an espionage novel that was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando, and the title referred to the arrogant American diplomats serving in Indochina. But it has since come to represent the loud and obnoxious American tourist abroad, oblivious to the sensitivities and customs of their hosts. Tony Hayward was the flip side of that coin. Every time he made another public statement, the victims of this outrage grew angrier and more frustrated with the state of BP's clean-up effort. All except the region's fish and wildlife, the true victims of this atrocity, who have no voice to express their rage and become collateral damage to the oil industry and their congressional lackeys like Barton. When you add the remarks of Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, a vocal double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, that BP cares "about the small people," to the grossly inappropriate, "I want my life back," from Haywood, you've got a couple of clueless, wild-and-crazy-guys who just can't quite seem to master that corporate sincerity thing. Even  Hayward saying he was "deeply sorry," only served to remind that BP does everything deeply.

The latest outrage comes from British retirees who are heavily invested in BP. The June 17 headline of London's' Daily Mail read: "Obama Bullies BP Into Fund for Oil Spill Victims, but British Pensioners will Pick Up the Bill." I wonder who could be stoking these anti-Obama passions in Great Britain. Could it be..."SATAN?" No, it's his brother, Rupert Murdoch, who owns the paper. So, allow me to say to the elderly English investors who got their dividends postponed, with all due respect, "Shut the fuck up." This isn't about you. If Exxon or DuPont came over and bespoiled the white cliffs of Dover, your reaction would be much the same. This is about a heartless international conglomerate that has been gouging the earth for over a hundred years and leaving wreckage in their global wake, that happens to be named British Petroleum. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot they changed the name to Beyond Principles or Bloated Profits, or whatever the hell it is now. A tarball by any other name would smell as foul. The good people of the UK are up in arms with Obama and the Congress over what they perceive to be a growing anti-British sentiment. There's no greater Anglophile than me, but if we wanted to be upset with you, it would have been over Tony Blair's enabling of Dubya to wage war. We eagerly look to your current inquiry into the Iraqi war to produce justice, just as our inquiry into the Gulf disaster should do the same.

The problems with BP are legion; from their cozy relations with government, massive violations and fines, the 2005 explosion at a Texas City, TX refinery that killed fifteen people, and for which BP was charged with criminal environmental violations. The list is easily researched. But let's go back and pick up a golden oldie, all the way from 1953, when the Korean War was in a stalemate, a commie scare had infected Congress, and Ike was on the golf course. The Iranian people had democratically elected a president named Mohammad Mosaddeq, who took a look around at the British owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which had been extracting Iranian oil since 1908, and decided to nationalize the oil fields. The CIA, with assistance from their British counterparts, began a smear campaign, calling Mosaddeq a Communist, and organized a military coup that toppled the president and replaced him with Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose U.S. trained secret police, SAVAK, terrorized the populace for the next 25 years. Mosadeqq spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The next year, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, fresh oil leases in hand, changed their name to British Petroleum. Consequently, in a circular way, BP shares responsibility for the Iranian Revolution.

We're currently getting fishing boats trying to lift oil from the surface of the water when what we really need is a Marshall Plan for the Gulf. Where are all these massive oil skimmers that BP keeps referring to, and now that a homeboy is the spokesman, can he see the ecological tragedy that has been unleashed by his corporate masters? And still, Governor Bobby Jindal and his GOP "free marketeers" protest a moratorium on further drilling until this case can be investigated. The latest conservative talking point is that this disaster is the fault of the effete environmentalists whose limitations on shallow water drilling forced the oil companies to go deeper. They went where no man has gone before because that's where the damn oil is, bubba. The only thing as atrocious as this continuing oil hell has been the Republicans defense of the industry. In order to try and damage Obama, they are willing to put our very habitat at risk for political power. It has been widely reported that Joe Barton would become head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee should the GOP magically regain a legislative majority in the forthcoming election, so it would be wise to remember the words of early American financier Simon Cameron: "An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought."

A Haspel hat tip to Bill Day.

The Ugly Audience

For as long as I can remember, I've been reading music reviews in Memphis' various newspapers. Perhaps it's time for someone to review the audience. I pick and choose my concerts carefully ever since I realized that people don't know how to act in public anymore. I stopped going to Tunica when a Santana concert turned into a drunken frat party and some button-downed buzz-cut sloshed a beer down my back. I no longer go to Mud Island concerts for the same reason. I passed up tickets for Steely Dan because the show was on Mud Island. Afterwards, a friend told me tales of shouting drunks, screaming their conversations over the band's music, and wanting to fight when asked to keep it down. Where we once went to concerts to get high and listen to the music, now it's to get drunk and party. You can do that to the stereo. For me to attend a show these days, the artist has to be unique and I need a reserved seat and an unobstructed view of the stage.

When I bought tickets to see Nancy Wilson with Arturo Sandoval, I expected an older, more sophisticated crowd to attend. I imagined that the rarely seen Ms. Wilson would surely draw a more musically knowledgeable audience that showed up to appreciate the two jazz legends. Not a chance. The event quickly descended into another Memphis embarrassment, complete with heckling, crowd misconduct, and admonishments from the promoter. Ms. Wilson was booked for a similar engagement two years ago but had to cancel because of family concerns. The promoter was forced to refund a near sell-out show, and in the fickle concert business, this performance drew only a half-filled house. Yet still the people came late. I mean, thirty and forty minutes into the concert, ushers with flashlights were still making rows of people stand to accommodate the tardy arrivals who seemed oblivious to their distractions. Maybe some of the attendees thought they were going to see one of those guitar-playing sisters in the band, Heart. At some point, "fashionably late" becomes unreasonably rude. After all, this was Nancy Wilson at the Cannon Center, not Meat Loaf at the Coliseum.

The opening act was world-class Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. The Grammy-winning artist and his quartet had played four polished jazz instrumentals when some boorish lout yelled, "We want Nancy." Sandoval replied, "I want her too, and she'll be here soon," but after the next song, the shouts rang out again. The now aggravated Sandoval said, "We're contracted to play here for a certain period of time," before his words were drowned out by applause from the supportive crowd. An uneasiness fell over the room as the flustered musician continued, "I've never had anybody shout out at me like this before. I hope this won't be our special memory of Memphis." Voices of protest and encouragement and a smattering of applause erupted in the darkness. The Latin jazz virtuoso added, "In fifty years, no one has ever shouted at me like this." I wanted to sink down in my seat and cover my head while the injured Sandoval played a blistering trumpet solo, seemingly to spite his detractors, and then stalked off stage, pausing only momentarily to acknowledge the standing crowd.

After intermission, the concert promoter and head of Cultural Arts For Everyone (CAFE), Rebecca Edwards, interrupted her welcoming remarks and the announcement of the non-profit organization's tenth anniversary to assist some patrons in locating their seats. A passionate, one woman company, Ms. Edwards scolded the crowd that Arturo Sandoval would return to the stage later and was deserving of a standing ovation. When the house lights dimmed and Nancy Wilson appeared in a stunning red dress and a boot on her broken ankle, little white rectangles began to light up all over the hall. It's no longer sufficient to merely attend and enjoy a concert anymore. Now, everyone has to record it on their cell phone and maybe get some hits on YouTube later. Ms. Wilson responded positively to the obligatory audience shouts of, "We love you," until one woman began a personal dialogue with the artist about how much the songs meant to her and her husband. During a dramatic pause at the end of the showcase song, "Guess Who I Saw Today," a man yelled something unintelligible. Before the return of Sandoval and the unspontaneous love-fest that was to come, Melody and I left the building wondering exactly when decorum died.

I've seen recent concerts in Nashville, including Van Morrison at the Ryman Auditorium and Steely Dan at Starwood Amphitheatre, that were memorable. Maybe because Nashville has so many residents that are musicians or friends of musicians, they show a little more reverence for the music. But obnoxious audiences spring up in every part of Memphis, in all types of venues. This is why I haven't performed in a club in five years. I finally grew weary of being background noise for diners and drunks and I thought there must be something else I can do. That's why you're reading me instead of hearing me. We don't need to personally interact this way, and I can read your comments at my leisure. I admire the persistence of Rebecca Edwards in her continuing quest to bring cultural experiences to Memphis. I would have thrown up my hands long ago since I subscribe to the adage, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." After an endless caravan of yesterday's country stars and geriatric rock bands, perhaps jaded Memphis audiences take live music too much for granted. I believe, however, that an artist with the stature of Nancy Wilson deserves better. And at these ticket prices, so do I.

The Reagan Delusion

"As Democracy is perfected, the office (of president) represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."  HL Mencken, 1920

Former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford once referred to Ronald Reagan as an "amiable dunce," but Reagan's not the "downright moron" I was referring to. At least Reagan had principles. But there is a direct line leading from Ronald Reagan, to George W. Bush, to Sarah Palin. His "Trickle Down" economic theory was mocked by his then political rival and future Vice President. G.H.W. Bush, as "Voodoo Economics." But his most glaring error, the "Big Lie," was his pronouncement that, "Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem." Thus began the era of public distrust of government to solve problems, and the embryonic stages of what is now the Tea Party movement.

I was astonished that Reagan was ever elected in the first place. After a career in "B" movies and a stint as a shill for General Electric and Chesterfield cigarettes, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, where his impact was felt during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunts of the fifties. Appearing before the committee, Reagan blamed labor unions for "Communist infiltration of Hollywood," and this was when he was still a Democrat. He switched parties in 1962, arguing that the "Democrats had left him." Conveniently, this was in the heart of the Civil Rights era and Reagan had political ambitions to follow his fellow "hoofer" and Republican, George Murphy, into the California Governor's office. Having never held political office before, Reagan won the Governor's race on a "Law and Order" platform in 1966, just in time to preside over the worst period of social unrest since the Civil War.

Reagan assumed state office with all the paternalistic and patronizing attitudes of the "War and Whiskey Generation" concerning the impertinent hippie protesters. After an anti-war demonstration at Berkeley where police used deadly force to suppress the protesters, Reagan said this about restoring order on California college campuses: "If it takes a blood bath, let's get it over with now."  He later attempted to explain that he was only using a "figure of speech," but consider that Reagan's daughter, Patti, was an anti-war activist and quasi-hippie. Would he wish for a "blood bath" if it included his own child? As a Vietnam War objector, I was revulsed by the blind ignorance that prevented the rabid right from understanding that these young people protesting in the street were not "Communist agitators," but their own children. Reagan parlayed his bellicosity into a commodity and was marketed and sold by the GOP as the old cold-warrior who could restore our tough guy image in the world after the impotent Jimmy Carter refused to turn Iran into a nuclear, glassine sandbox.

It was no accident that Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the location of one of the civil rights era's most gruesome and murderous crimes. It sent a message about which side of the racial divide he was on and further capitalized on Nixon's "Southern strategy" of 1968, where the GOP actively courted white southerners disaffected by the civil rights legislation of the Johnson years. It was a foreshadowing of the heartless budget cuts the Reagan administration would make in social programs, and the mindless, unlimited cash machine they would offer to the military. "Government is the problem" is a good campaign slogan if you intend to be a reformer, but Reagan ran up the highest deficits in history, ramped up the arms race, and secretly sold weapons to the very regime that had held our diplomats hostage, in order to arm anti-government rebels in Nicaragua. Does that sound like less government to you?

Even Reagan's "aw shucks" speeches for which he was best known were a construction to burnish his uber-patriot image. The "Shining city on a hill," and "It's morning in America," weren't Reagan's words, they were Peggy Noonan's. Yet despite the sunny rhetoric, there were consequences to the abandonment of the poor and helpless. It was during Reagan's term that the rise of inner-city and ghetto gang membership exploded and began to establish franchises in other major cities. Reagan's term saw the creation of violent rap music and the spread of gun violence. And it was in Reagan's term, during his "Just Say No" campaign against drug use, that crack cocaine first hit the streets of California and spread into a nationwide scourge. There is now no question that the CIA planes that delivered arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, returned home filled with cocaine. The San Jose Mercury newspaper first reported that crack cocaine was invented, manufactured and distributed in urban areas by the CIA, but they were forced to print a retraction when their sources recanted.

The conservative "Just Say No" policy on drugs during the Reagan era is their same policy on nearly everything today, especially when it comes to "family values."  In fact, Reagan was the first to recruit right-wing activist Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell as presidential advisers, a post previously held exclusively by Billy Graham. And the eternal Republican talking point that Reagan "ended the cold war" is like crediting Pat Boone with the invention of Rock n' Roll. He deserves credit for his consistent anti-Communist stance, as do Lech Walesa, and Vlaclav Havel, and many others, but since the Wall fell on his watch, he gets bragging rights. He also deserves credit for being a much better actor than I thought. He nearly fooled all of the people all of the time, and left it to his successor to accept the consequences for raising taxes. Nonetheless, he succeeded in convincing an entire generation of the false notion that government is an intrinsic evil that must be restricted. The result is the GOP of today. They want smaller government and less governmental intrusion until a BP oil rig blows up in the Gulf of Mexico. Then, all the former proponents of "small government" find themselves standing on a metaphorical rooftop, holding on to a big sign that says, "Help Us!"

The Oily Bird Special

The most moving song I know about the Gulf Coast is "Biloxi" by Memphian Jesse Winchester. (Click on post title to hear "Biloxi"). When he resided here, Jesse went by the name of Jimmy Winchester and fronted a great garage band called the Church Keys. I was a freshman at Christian Brothers High School when he was a senior and a member of the National Honor Society. With a limitless future, Jesse was instead forced to flee this country and accept refuge in Canada rather than participate in the Vietnam War. It was while living as an expatriate that he wrote the wistful "Biloxi;" an evocative childhood memory of frolicking in the salty sea water of the Gulf, made more poignant by Winchester's circumstances. When a potential draftee sought sanctuary from Vietnam in a foreign land, he became a man without a country and was unable to return to the United States without the threat of arrest and imprisonment. So Jesse Winchester wrote "Biloxi" as someone who never expected to see the Gulf again. The song takes on weighty new meaning today, since none of us may ever see the Gulf Coast again; at least as we remember it.

After Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft resistors living abroad, Winchester was able to sing "Biloxi," at the Ritz Theatre on Madison Ave. It was the same year that Jimmy Carter tried to warn us about the dire consequences of our dependence on foreign oil. Regardless of your opinion of Carter as president, he was the first visionary to advocate for wind and solar energy. Had we heeded that advice thirty-five years ago, or learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster twenty years ago, we wouldn't be facing the most massive man-made catastrophe since the New Orleans levees broke five years ago. Even then, floodwater eventually recedes; a tsunami of oil is a bit more tenacious. With this ecological 9/11 looming, it seems as if even the local politicians still don't grasp the scope of the danger. Like myopic bureaucrats in a bad disaster movie, Senator Mary Landrieu and Governor Bobby Jindal see no reason to suspend permits for future off-shore oil exploration even while the Louisiana marshes are dying. Landrieu is so deep in the pockets of Big Oil, her campaign contributions are greasy, and "Drill Baby Drill," has reverted to the original "Burn Baby Burn."

BP has become the villain of this piece, although they are as beholden to the petrol cartels as any other major oil trust. What's astonishing is their admitted cluelessness over what to do about it. Too bad we don't have an underwater equivalent to Red Adair. When alleged "experts" in their field begin asking the public for suggestions on how to plug a leak, you know we're in big trouble. And they continue to refer to it as a "spill." A spill is what happens to a glass of wine. Two million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf every day is not a spill, it's an underwater volcano, and BP's attempt to insert tubing into the shattered pipes to capture the oil is like siphoning water from the Mississippi with a garden hose. Now a month after the explosion and fire, and we have only seen their faulty caps and cement doghouses fail to stop it. The company's latest plan is to bombard the area with tires, ropes and golf balls. Wasn't that the premise of a Seinfeld episode? Rush Limbaugh removed an obstruction from his blowhole to blame the Sierra Club for the leak, by forcing the oil syndicates to drill further offshore with their pesky regulations. Come to think of it, old Rush might be the perfect fit to plug that thing.

This atrocity's origins can be found in the era of lax regulation by government, and corner-cutting by ruthless profiteers. Since Dick Cheney allowed industry insiders to write this country's energy policy behind closed doors, we have lurched from one Enron rolling blackout to the next, driven by unfettered corporate greed. No company in US history has benefited more from friends in high places than Halliburton. Yet from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico, they have been the very model of incompetence. It was Halliburton's responsibility to properly seal this well, but they used seaweed instead of cement. The only thing more disastrous than Cheney's oil war has been his corporate crony energy policies. Has there ever been a Vice President who has done more personal damage to his country than Dick Cheney? I think there's finally enough accumulated evidence to charge him with international racketeering under the RICO statutes. Hey, they finally got Al Capone for income tax evasion.

Cheney's been eerily silent about this mess, but he's gone back into hibernation now. This bomb went off on Obama's watch and it's past time for him to get his wingtips dirty and get his ass to New Orleans. If we learned nothing from Hurricane Katrina, it's that the perception of leadership in a crisis is as important  as the methods used to alleviate the problem. The government claims to have its "boot on the neck of BP." Well, time to take the boots off of BP and get down there in the muck with them. Assigning blame is no longer sufficient. There is an urgency now and action needs to be taken or else those white sand beaches that Jesse Winchester sang about, and all that "fun among the sea oats" enjoyed by thousands of Memphians and millions of Southerners will be lost for a century. The "Redneck Riviera" may seem remote to our distant countrymen, but let that crude get into the loop current and start landing on the beaches of Miami and Florida's Gold Coast and we may yet see some outrage. Five states are facing an environmental and economic apocalypse while sea and land creatures face extinction, yet Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, told Sky News, "I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest." My father used to say, "It's a dirty bird that fouls his own nest." Heads up to the human race: we just peed in the gene pool. 

Thanks to Bill Day for the magnificant illustration.

The Late, Great Johnny Ace

In my boyhood room on the night table next to my bed there was a plastic, box radio with a large moon dial with the word  
“Philco” engraved in a semi-circle across the top. If you turned the dial all the way to the right, you could sometimes hear Wolfman Jack howling out of Mexico. The middle of the dial brought you WLS in Chicago with Dick Bionde, or KXOK in St. Louis and Johnny Rabbitt. All the way to the left of the dial was channel 56 and Daddio Dewey Phillips with “The hottest cottin’ picking show in the country, 'Red, Hot, and Blue,’ coming to you from WHBQ, on the ‘magazine’ floor of the Hotel Chisca in downtown Memphis.” Dewey would say that he was “downtown about as far as you can get.” Phillip's radio show was on late when I was supposed to be asleep. But every night, right after Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch, I turned down the volume and leaned in close to the radio to get the greatest lesson in Rhythm & Blues on the air. Dewey had such a thick southern drawl and was so frenetic, he probably should never have been on the air in the first place. He was the complete opposite of what a radio announcer was supposed to sound like in the fifties. WHBQ only hired him because of the business being generated by WDIA, the first Negro station in the nation. The commercial potential for Memphis’ African-American community could no longer be ignored and WDIA proved that. Except WDIA went off the air at sunset, leaving fans of "race music" with nowhere to turn. Enter Dewey Mills Phillips.

If Rufus Thomas was the strong, steady presence on Memphis radio, Dewey Phillips was its’ shooting star. He shined brightly for a while and then burned out. However, during his command of the airwaves, he held the listening public in thrall for most of the fifties with his outrageous jabber and his taste for hot music. Dewey was not merely the first man to play an Elvis record on the radio; he was the first white disc jockey in the Mid-South to play black music, laying the groundwork for Elvis to emerge. Dewey’s voice; nasal, country, and rapid-fire, was more suited for a Southern auctioneer or a carnival barker. But his experience as a salesman in the record department of W.T. Grant’s on Main Street gave him an expanse of knowledge about Rhythm and Blues music and a proximity to Beale Street enjoyed by only a very few white men. He was also close to the Hotel Chisca where the WHBQ studios were located. Dewey somehow convinced the station manager that he was the man for the nine to midnight shift after WDIA, "the black spot on your dial,” went off the air, and he was right. Every night, WDIA’s massive audience switched the dial to Dewey along with growing numbers of white children discovering the music for the first time. All through the segregated 1950s, Dewey Phillips offered up a sampling of juke, jive, and jump, along with a healthy selection of black gospel music, to an ever-growing audience that was anything but segregated, and all right in the heart of Dixie.

My memories of Dewey begin in adolescence. Although I do not recall exactly when I began to listen, I know it was as early as age seven in 1954, because my paternal grandmother died that year. My sister and I returned from school to find our house filled with weeping relatives. Susan burst into tears, but I was uncertain how to react, so I put on a grim face and pondered it. My grandmother was only in her mid 50s, but she had seemed older to me. All day and night, the house filled with mourners and well-wishers until it was my bedtime. I lay in the dark pondering death until it was time for Dewey's program when I again leaned in close to the radio. I was delighted by his deranged ramblings but felt that I should not be having this much fun when everyone else was so sad. In the rest of the house, people were crying or talking in hushed tones. But in my bedroom, Dewey was playing Louis Jordan singing, "Dadgum your hide, boy/Dadgum your dirty hide/ Dadgum your hide, boy/ I gave you a pig but you wanted a sow,” and I had to laugh. I was transported to a world that the adults knew nothing about. Still, it felt odd that while the grown-ups were in the living room grieving, I was in my bedroom, grooving.

In that same year, on the night of my Davy Crockett Christmas, I wore my brand new coonskin cap to bed and tuned in again to Dewey, expecting some yuletide revelry. It was only a week after my eighth birthday, and I was still supposed to be sleeping. So, once again, with the volume low, I leaned in to listen. Dewey had the unusual practice of yammering right over the record; or if a lyric made a statement or asked a question, Dewey would answer it. Sometimes he even sang along, which made it tough for music lovers, but delighted Dewey's fans. It often seemed that the music was merely the background soundtrack for Dewey’s manic patter, but his listeners kept growing. On that Christmas night, he was as zany as ever until suddenly something unprecedented  happened; Dewey stopped being funny. The first sign was he allowed an entire song to play without interruption. When he returned to the air, Phillips was serious and somber. He said that he had just gotten off the phone, long-distance from Houston, and was sorry to announce that Johnny Ace was dead. Even as a child, I knew who Johnny Ace was, if for no other reason than every time Dewey played one of his records, he introduced it as “Memphis’ own Johnny Ace.” I listened wide-awake while Dewey described the scene in Houston. Ace was in his dressing room between Christmas shows at the Houston Civic Auditorium with a group of fans and friends when he put a pistol to his head as some sort of game and pulled the trigger. The gun went off and Ace fell over dead. It was chilling news, made more so by Dewey’s introduction to the next song. For the very first time, Dewey uttered the phrase that would become famous in popular music history. He introduced "Pledging My Love," the brand new record by, "the late, great Johnny Ace.” Then a slow ballad with a tinkling vibraphone began and the echo-drenched baritone voice of Johnny Ace sounded like it was coming from the grave itself. "Forever my darling, my love will be true,” the chimes rang like chapel bells. "I’ll forever love you, the rest of my days/ I’ll never part from you, and your loving ways.” Johnny sang as if he knew his fate in advance. I remembered that earlier night when my grandmother had died, and I was stunned to realize that I had just been listening to a voice from the beyond. At song's end, Dewey said once again, “the late, great Johnny Ace, dead at age twenty-six.”

The next morning, I asked my father what Russian Roulette was and he asked where I possibly could have heard that. I told him about Johnny Ace, but he said there was nothing about it in the newspaper. The death of Johnny Ace did not command the attention of white Memphis, but the hometown Tri-State Defender reported that an overflow crowd of five thousand people jammed the two thousand-seat Clayborn AME Temple, the same site of Martin Luther King’s final speech, for the funeral, while near hysterical mourners poured into the street. It was Memphis’ largest funeral gathering since the death of  E.H. “Boss” Crump, but neither the morning paper, The Commercial Appeal, nor the afternoon Memphis Press Scimitar printed a word about it. It became underground news for the city’s white teenagers because in attendance at the obsequies was Dewey Phillips. His words, “The late, great Johnny Ace,” would enter the lexicon of pop music, both as the title of a Paul Simon song, and as the description of the first shocking casualty of rock and roll. Whenever I hear the plaintive opening notes of "Pledging My Love," chiming like heavenly harps, I get the same unearthly feeling as when Dewey first played the record on the very night that Johnny Ace ended his life.

(Click on title to hear "Pledging My Love.")
an excerpt from the memoir "Can a White Boy Sing the Blues," by Randy Haspel

Hell Week

That was one helluva fortnight we just experienced. There were volcanic eruptions and ash clouds in Iceland, earthquakes in Chile and Indonesia, a slick, slow-motion, Katrina headed for the Gulf Coast, an attempted terrorist car bombing in Times Square, and Nashville drowned. And I was upset because my garage flooded. Millington and Dyersburg got waterlogged too, not to mention the hapless Beale Street Music Festival. The festival organizers have begun including the annual rainfall in the event's promotion. They have attempted to tie in the "Old Faithful" downpour with the folklore of the festival, and the mud is now supposed to be just part of the adventure. Bullshit. No one but a toddler enjoys slopping around in the mud and the veterans of Woodstock are lying about it. This year, the torrential rains had to compete with the wailing of tornado sirens and park evacuations. The Memphis in May folks need to stop pretending this filth-fest will one day turn out all right and go ahead and change the damn dates. Here's a thought; schedule it the last weekend in May. Of course, the portent of international events made the music festival the least of our worries. It seemed as if every type of disaster occurred except a bomb detonating in the Capitol. Oh, I forgot Jay Leno's routine at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.

While the country's mass media was fixated on the Texas League car bomb that some traitorous swine planted in Gotham's theatre district, and dumb-ass politicians and their rabid, radio masters speculated that Obama sabotaged the BP Oil rig to prevent further offshore drilling, Nashville went snorkeling. I remember Hank Williams used to say that he'd see you, "If the good Lord's willing and the creeks don't rise," but who ever believed that they would actually rise? My Music City pals inform me the flooding was devastating, including the suburb of Bellevue where no sane resident would have ever dreamed of wasting money on flood insurance before now. The downtown area and the Country Music Hall of Fame were under water, with several top musical acts, including Keith Urban, Vince Gill, and Rascal Flatts, reporting the total loss of  their gear in a rehearsal facility. The human and financial loss has yet to be totalled, but should you wish to help our sister city in her hour of need, a good link is here. The storm that rolled through Memphis emptying Tom Lee Park, stopped rolling in Middle Tennessee, producing what government officials called a 500 year storm, and it will take years for the city to recover. The river bluffs saved Memphis from the worst again. And, by the way, "Yo Kanye," Taylor Swift donated a half-million dollars to flood relief. Let's see you match that.

Meanwhile, a man-made disaster is oozing its way toward our friends on the Gulf Coast, like they need more problems in their lives. Perhaps it's time to ask Governor Bobby "Sox" Jindal, "How's that 'Drill Baby Drill' thingy workin' out for ya'?" Everyone is hating on BP, but if it wasn't them, it would be another amoral conglomerate. Remember the scenes in all those western movies where the wildcatter strikes oil? The reason we call them "gushers" is the same reason it's not wise to drill offshore for oil . This baby is now going to gush for an estimated three additional months before BP can cap it, and just when I was beginning to trust Gulf shrimp again. This immeasurable tragedy will only get worse every day that thousands of gallons of crude oil still spill into the Gulf, and the LA Times reported allegations of negligence by, guess who, Halliburton! Cheney's old firm was in charge of cementing the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and their work was as professional as the electric showers they installed in Iraq. In remote Alaska, the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill continue to be felt twenty years later. In Louisiana, all the people that used to shuck oysters can now get jobs washing grease off of water fowl. The National Wildlife Federation is on the ground already, and is a worthy organization for bleeding-heart environmentalists to donate money.

It took NYC's finest and the FBI only 2 1/2 days to catch the unibrow bomber. A half hour later, however, and the guy would have been on the way to Dubai. With all this nightmarish airport "security" that we have endured since 9/11, the culprit managed to purchase a one-way ticket, in cash, to the United Arab Emirates, and had his seat back forward, taxiing toward take-off when the plane was halted and he was taken into custody. His first words to arresting officers were, "I've been expecting you," leading some to speculate that this entire escapade was a scheme to test federal officials. If the "No Fly" list proved to be ineffectual, consider that the homegrown malcontent only recently returned from five months in Pakistan, bought a gun in Connecticut last month, and was videotaped stocking up on fireworks in Pennsylvania. Though the bomber's ineptitude has been ridiculed by the cable news stations, this country was only a few I.Q. points short of another major terrorist attack, proving our vulnerability despite the draconian Bush/Cheney policies. Is it difficult to connect those dots between a Pakistani vacation, gun and fireworks purchases, cash for propane tanks and containers of gasoline, and a whole shitload of fertilizer?

On a positive note, many people are now converts to health care reform after a rash of nationwide cardiac infarctions broke out last Thursday after the Dow dropped 1000 points. Now, the SEC is looking for a fat-fingered trader whose decimal point mistake nearly crashed the market. When I was first learning about the stock market from my father, I asked him what was to prevent another crash like the one in 1929? He told me that after the crash, regulations were put in place governing esoteric practices like margin stock purchases, insuring that what had happened leading up to the Great Depression could never reoccur. Satisfied, I rolled over in my crib and finished my nap. Of course, that was before Ronald Reagan was elected president and the era of irresponsible de-regulation began in earnest. I'm still waiting for an entire generation to wake up to Reagan's bogus claim that government is somehow the enemy. The government exists to protect you from your enemies, and right now it looks as if those might be domestic terrorists and unbridled, bare-knuckled, unregulated American corporate interests. My sympathies go out to our neighbors inundated by oil, fire, and floodwater. With stateside friends like these, who needs Al Qaeda?

Thanks to Bill Day for the use of his cartoon.

Gay Caballeros

It would only figure that being gay would also make you bi-partisan. Or so says a trough of bilge named William Gheen, (pronounced like the serial killer), who is the head of the South Carolina branch of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). This "Up is Down" method of reverse labelling used to be called "Orwellian" until the Michael Jordan of bizzarro sloganeering, Frank Luntz, emerged to advise the GOP. So, ALIPAC is merely Luntzian for "Round 'em up, load 'em up, and move 'em out." Even professional xenophobe Lou Dobbs was offended by Gheen's jaw-dropping speech to a Greenville, S.C. Tea Party rally, demanding that Senator Lindsey Graham, "Come out of that log cabin closet," and, "tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality." If that weren't sufficient nastiness for one speech, the Gheen slime creature continued, "I need to figure out why you're trying to sell-out your own countrymen, and I need to be sure you being gay isn't it." In a state famous for political luminaries like Strom "Jungle Fever" Thurmond, and Governor Mark "The Gaucho" Sanford, this money-changer Gheen has publicly accused the senator of being manipulated by blackmail to maintain "his secret." The days of blackmailing a public official over their sexuality have pretty much ended in this country, all except for one place; the Republican party.

There's a documentary film worth seeing, readily available on cable TV, called, "Outrage", which proves it's hard out there for a closeted, gay Republican. Gay activists weary of legislators living one way and voting another, gathered witnesses to provide anecdotal evidence that some of the GOP's fiercest opponents of same-sex marriage and gay rights are themselves, closeted gays. Rumors about the bachelor Sen. Graham's sexuality are common D.C. gossip fodder, but this unprovoked and cruel public attack occurred not because ALIPAC is so concerned about Graham's conduct in the bed chamber, as in the senate chamber. Not that I savor defending a red-state conservative who called the health care reform bill, "A ponzi scheme," but Graham is one of the few remaining Republicans who, on occasion, will work with members of the opposite party for the benefit of the country. This dying breed was known in a previous century as a "moderate." The mean Mr. Gheen must think that "reaching across the aisle" means something else.

The right's outrage over Lindsey Graham results from his co-sponsorship of an immigration reform bill with N.Y. liberal Democrat Chuck Schumer. Queerbaiting is merely the surest and fastest way to rile up the rubes into indignant opposition, and the insinuation that Graham is somehow being coerced into working with the Democrats sounds like the plot from a cold-war espionage movie. Judging from the roaring response from the Tea Party crowd, however, it seems gays are among the last groups that it is still safe to publicly demonize. Curiously, the anti-gay sentiment currently afoot is very much in tune with this camouflage fashion phase among Tea Party males. The most vocal homophobes are middle-aged men that don't seem to have the same problem with lesbianism. Some of them probably spent hard-earned cash watching women touch one another in one of Washington's wicked flesh parlors as soon as the rally was over. See, they're not really anti-gay; they're anti-sodomy. A good old boy dreads the prostate exam and doesn't go fishing in the Erie Canal. Consequently, a former  Senator like Wyoming's Larry Craig can deny his homosexuality because, like a teenage girl, he believes that if there's no penetration, it's not really sex.

Openly gay Congressman Barney Frank has endured all the slings and arrows from his critics, yet remains an effective Democratic advocate, while Republican Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, outed as a closeted gay in the aforementioned documentary, is about to be hounded from the party. The Tea Party has declared jihad on those Republicans they determine to be insufficiently conservative and there's an ethnic-cleansing taking place to purge the ranks of the weakhearted.  But, screaming "homo" at Lindsey Graham wasn't really about sexuality, it was about immigration. I guess if you can get mud on several groups at once with just one swipe of the brush, all the better. Nothing gets the Tea Party mob's blood up faster than a hot-tempered tub-thumper railing against illegal immigrants or homosexuals, and if you're a gay Mexican, God help you. The true outrage is that confessed whoremongers like David Vitter and John Ensign remain in Congress, unscathed by the censure of their colleagues, while honorable men like Sen. Graham, who served six years in the Air Force and in the JAG Corps during the Gulf War, are smeared by the "new right."

This sort of open ugliness is part of the reason why sane people question the Tea Party's motives. They call for less intrusive federal government, but demand an unconditional ban on abortion; They want a smaller government while we fight two wars with an economy on life support,  but without touching Social Security, Medicare, or the military budget; They believe in the principle of state's rights, yet favor a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. And when a state grants powers to the police to detain and demand identification from anyone, at any time, and for any reason, that is called "Fascism." It's what the "Greatest Generation" sacrificed nearly 300,000 men to fight against in WWII. But then again, Arizona produced Barry Goldwater and was the last state to acknowledge a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King; and a war hero like John McCain has to re-animate his Frankenstein monster, Sarah Palin, to help him win a Republican primary. There is an angry, anti-incumbent mood in the air and the Democrats will undoubtedly lose seats in 2010. But should the Tea Party confuse that for a personal victory and continue polluting the air with their public vitriol, they will share the same destiny as the Dixiecrats in 1948. Or as their candidate, old Strom Thurmond, used to call them between visits to his sweet thang, "real Americans."

The Zombie Holiday

If there were to be an officially declared National Day of Dread, it would be today. Not 12/7/41, or 11/22/63, or even 9/11/01;  but today. Skinheads and Neo-Nazis observe the birthday of Adolph Hitler each April 19th, and have been noted to celebrate with the occasional mini-pogrom.  For anti-government "patriots" and defenders-of-the-faith militia groups, 4/19 is Easter for paranoid conspiracy theorists. On this date in 1993, the apocalyptic conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco occurred, proving to many that the end times are near and the government's out to snuff you, rather than a bungling ATF and a new Attorney General trying to flex her muscles allowing an already tragic situation to escalate into a catastrophe.

Domestic terrorist Tim McVeigh watched the Waco fiasco unfold while sitting outside the compound on the hood of his car and used the date two years later to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City in retaliation. And two zit-faced, Hitler Facebook fans commemorated the date by acting out their sociopathic,"Terminator" fantasies and killing a lot of other people's children while trying to blow up their high school. April 19 has become a touchstone for the disgruntled and delusional, like a psychotic Halloween run amok, and every year since Waco, plots and plans for copycat carnage have been uncovered and the criminals incarcerated. This year, however, presents a clear and present danger. Anti-government hysteria is at its highest levels since the Great Depression and the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that militia activity has risen 244% since the last presidential election. The arrest of members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan faded from the news before group associates in Ohio and Indiana were likewise arrested for conspiracy to murder a police officer and slaughter the mourners at the funeral.

What makes this year different is that a mainstream media outlet is actively promulgating confrontation with the government. Fox News' ratings soar on false tales of  FEMA detention camps, jail cells for health care scofflaws, census takers compiling enemies lists, and a president with a secret agenda to surreptitiously damage the nation. Stories of gun confiscation and clandestine planning for a socialist takeover of government are fomented every day on the airwaves by corporate media interests, and even the fabricated Tea Party movement has been co-opted by Republican operatives and right-wing PACs. Image and semantic consultants on the Tea Party Express magical mystery tour have tried to clean up the overt insanity at their rallies like Brian Epstein cleaned up the Beatles, but didn't we only just have a dust-up over lipstick, pigs, and hockey moms? And now we see that many of the Teabaggers are sensitive and distressed about being called angry bigots and racists. They claim legitimate concerns over fiscal policy and say if reporters would only talk to a cross-section of supporters, they would understand the libertarian concerns through all the hand-made signs with Obama and Hitler references. Well, the jig is up.

POLITICO.com reports memos showing the Tea Party Express is a creation of the California public relations firm Russo, Marsh + Rogers, doing business as the "Our Country Deserves Better" PAC, and tripling their donations since the wingnut tour hit the road. The latest New York Times/CBS poll says that of the 18% of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement, the majority are older, more educated, and affluent white men who feel that their rights are under siege. Living in the South, I know 100 guys just like that. They used to be hippies until the styles changed, so they went into business and began paying taxes, and that altered everything. A generation that used sharing as a guiding principle, strapped on their neckties, went to work, and got saddled in debt. Now they believe that Obama wants to take something from them that they have worked for, and give it to someone who has not. Nothing is sadder than watching an intelligent, idealistic young person transform themselves into another border-line alcoholic Republican with issues about welfare. My Dad used to say, "This is a great country, but the dues are expensive." Today, spurred on by profit-gobbling, exhibitionistic, media fools, wanton criminals who fly their private planes into IRS headquarters, killing a bunch of mommies and daddies in the process, are defended by elected officials.

I would suggest that if you don't wish to be falsely labelled as racist, then don't be on the same side as the authentic ones. If you lie down with those possessed of incoherent hatred, you rise up with the potential for deadly violence. Which is why Fox News, fringe PACS run by people like Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and new Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, should be aware of their public responsibilities during this volatile time and temper their fatalistic rhetoric, lest they end up with blood on their hands. If overly ambitious politicians and professional media agitators realized that words have real world consequences, today might just be another Spring day. As it is, it's a time for particular vigilance, extremely so for all those "real Americans" who also happen to work for the government, and shame on any official who squeezes lighter fluid on this burning fire on this day. In the current climate of the armed and paranoid, the threat to the country is not so much from terrorists outside of our borders, as from those within. As for me, I've made my plans for the day. I'll be right here if you need me.