Slobber And Spittle (Archive)

It's one of those songs that define the 1960s, and I love this video: There's what was good and bad about the '60s there, the protests, the war, the Moon walks. I'm not sure where the VW Bus fits in, but it could probably be either.

What strikes me as I watch it is that the people in those photos, the teenagers and young adults at least, are now the leaders. Back in those days, they protested useless wars, pollution, racism, and poverty. Now some of that same generation, in turn, are sending our kids into useless wars, and letting the polluters, the financiers, and pretty much anyone else with a big campaign contribution bleed us dry. Many more are happy to tell us that we should shut up and accept what's done, because that's the best we can do. Just like our parents did.

It's as though every generation needs to be reminded of how things were when they were young. (h/t Taylor Marsh)

Recently, Rolling Stone did another of those "Ten Best..." lists of musicians - this time it was drummers. Of course, all the usuals were there - Moon, Bonham, Peart, and also this guy:

Image credit: found here.

It's Buddy Rich, near the end of his long career. He looks like he barely survived the performance. In contrast to some of the rock drummers on the list, Rich shows more finesse and less power. Comparing him to Keith Moon is like comparing Gayle Sayers to Eric Campbell. Each great in his own way, but which you like better probably has more to do with your tastes than any objective comparison.

Caption: In solidarity, but not for long. It's really hot in this thing...

Image credit: Composite by Cujo359. Based on image found here

Usually, when I write something like "young white women in peril", I'm joking about the priorities of our news organizations, particularly the broadcast versions. Not this time, as Amnesty International notes:

Amnesty International today demanded that Russia immediately release three young women arrested for allegedly singing a protest song that criticizes both the Orthodox Church and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Several members of a music group called "Pussy Riot," with their faces covered in balaclavas, sang a protest song entitled, "Virgin Mary, Redeem Us of Putin," on Feb. 21 at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. The song criticizes the support shown by some representatives of the Orthodox Church to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and calls on the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and banish Putin.

Amnesty International Demands Russia Release Punk Singers Detained Following Church Performance

As an e-mail my real-world self received today explains, the three young women are now on trial. The U.K. Guardian describes the trial:

By the end of the first week of Pussy Riot's trial, everyone in the shabby Moscow courthouse was tired. Guards, armed with submachine guns, grabbed journalists and threw them out of the room at will. The judge, perched in front of a shabby Russian flag, refused to look at the defence. And the police dog – a 100lb black Rottweiler – no longer sat in the corner she had occupied since the start of Russia's trial of the year, but barked and foamed at the mouth as if she were in search of blood.

The trial of the three band members, jailed since March after performing a "punk prayer" against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's main cathedral, has been about more than the charges brought against them – formally, hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. In five days of testimony, lawyers and witnesses have laid bare the stark divide that has emerged in Russian society: one deeply conservative and accepting of a state that uses vague laws and bureaucracy to control its citizens, the other liberal bordering on anarchist and beginning to fight against that state with any means it can.

The court is dominated by a glass cage that holds the three women – Maria Alyokhina, who has emerged as their unofficial spokeswoman; Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, whose chiselled features have made her the band's unofficial face; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, who sits in a corner of the cage looking every bit the disgruntled punk.

...

According to Pussy Riot's lawyers, Russia has revived the Soviet-era tradition of the show trial with its case against the group. "Even in Soviet times, in Stalin's times, the courts were more honest than this one," lawyer Nikolai Polozov shouted in court.

Pussy Riot trial 'worse than Soviet era'

Women in a glass cage - it sounds like a bad '80s exploitation film. Yet it's not the first time that cage has been put to use, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom Foreign Policy calls "Russia's most famous prisoner, explains:

It is painful to watch what is taking place in the Khamovnichesky Court of the city of Moscow, where Masha, Nadya, and Katya are on trial. The word “trial” is applicable here only in the sense in which it was used by the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages.

I know this aquarium in courtroom number 7 well – they made it especially for me and Platon, “just for us”, after the ECHR had declared that keeping defendants behind bars is degrading and violates the Convention on Human Rights.

This is a subtle and sophisticated way of mocking people who dared to file a complaint with the ECHR: ah, okay, so you say that a cage with bars is bad; well then, here’s a cage made of glass for you, a beaker with a little porthole through which you can talk to your lawyers, but you need to twist and contort yourself every which way to actually be able to speak through it. In the summer you feel like a tropical fish in that glass cage – it is hot, and the air from the air conditioner in the courtroom does not circulate through the glass. It was hard for me and Platon – two people – to be in the aquarium together the whole day. I can not even imagine how all three of those poor girls manage to fit in there at once…

Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Pussy Riot

Spencer Ackerman explains how this is going to look, whatever the outcome of the trial:

It almost doesn't matter what the court says. The three women of Pussy Riot -- an explosive, obnoxious cross between a band and an anonymous Russian dissidents' movement -- have, in an important sense, already won their farce of a trial in Moscow. Every day that their trial for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" continues, they call international attention to the paranoid repression of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Pussy Riot has skewered Putin on the horns of a dilemma: Either his government convicts the band and martyrs it even further, or it backs down and concedes that prosecuting the masked trio for a cacophonous musical protest at Christ the Savior Cathedral that called attention to the Russian church's alliance with the Putin regime was always a mistake. Three of the five band members now face the prospect of seven years in prison, which has prompted an unlikely international outcry. On Thursday, Aug. 2, ahead of a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Putin indicated he'd prefer to back down.

Making Punk a Threat Again

No matter what the outcome of the trial, Russia's leaders are the ones who end up looking like pussies - afraid of a punk band made up of young women who, near as anyone can tell, have never really been a threat to anyone.

That statement by Putin that Spencer Ackerman referred to didn't help matters.

A state prosecutor on Tuesday demanded a three-year jail term for three women from punk band Pussy Riot, saying they had abused God when they burst into a Moscow cathedral and sang a "protest prayer" against the Russian Orthodox Church's close links to Vladimir Putin.

Russian prosecutor seeks jail terms for female punk rock band

A dictator describing a three-year sentence as lenient for an act that could at worst be described as bad taste doesn't scream "pathetic rationalization", now does it?

Amnesty International has an online petition in support of Pussy Riot. While these things don't normally mean much, it's one way of letting Putin and his goons know that the rest of the world is watching. AI have had some success pressuring leaders over the years, and, as we like to say here in America, the optics don't look good on this one.

There is also a campaign website called Free Pussy Riot with news and more information about other actions.

(h/t Taylor Marsh for a couple of those links.)

I heard this song this evening, after what seems like several years:

Along with X's "The Have Nots", it's another sign that if you were in a mainly blue collar crowd back in the 1980s, you could see the future coming. Soon, we'll all be there along with them, because if there's one thing Americans prove over and over again, it's that "freedom" means whatever your problems are, they won't affect me.

I've noted before that if you want to see the decline of the United States expressed from the point of view of everyday people, you can't do much better than to listen to the work of Bruce Springsteen. If he were the only one who had noticed it, perhaps it wouldn't be such a sad thing to relate. There were plenty of others who noticed, however, both in popular music and other art forms. What's sad is that you almost had to not want to see it in order to avoid noticing.

Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello was on Moyers & Company this week, talking about his music and how it relates to his activism. You can watch the embedded video here, or follow the video credit link to the Moyers & Company page, where there's a high definition version available.


Video image credit: Moyers & Company

They discussed the history of protest music, and some of the reasons why it matters:

BILL MOYERS: Tell us about the Wobblies. Why do they--

TOM MORELLO: Sure, sure. Two things that inspire me about the Wobblies is it was a singing union, first of all. And they realized that, in order to organize diverse groups of immigrants who often didn't speak the same language, they would do it through song. And their solidarity came through music.

And Joe Hill, the great poet laureate of the early 20th century, you know, said, "You--" I'm paraphrasing. But--"A pamphlet you'll read once. But a song you can sing again and again and stays in your heart." That's one of the things that I hope that some of my music will do.

And they suggested some very, very radical things before they were even on the plate. One was that people of every ethnicity could join their union. One was that women could have leadership in their union. One was that everyone should vote. One was the everyone should sing their protests. They are things that are now sort of taken for granted but you know, be realistic and demand the impossible.

Full Show: Tom Morello, Troubadour for Justice

Of course, anyone who came of age in the 1960s has heard a lot of protest music. You could say that much of rock and roll back then was a protest of one sort or another, whether it was about politics or just the mores of the time. And yes, long after the pamphlets and the speeches are forgotten, we still remember many of those songs.

If you're a rock fan, or interested in some of the history of the relationship between music and protest in America, you will probably enjoy watching the show.

Courtesy of the Philadelphia Phillies, Major League Baseball, and Tina Turner, your moment of zen:

Image credit: Major League Baseball, who must have left that embed link there for a reason...

You're welcome.

This week, it's been this song that's been playing in my head:



Why, you might ask, would a life-long secularist like me be enchanted with this song? First, let's deal with this choice of video.

If playing a bad rendition of a song would have gotten that song out of my head, this would have done it. Unfortunately, just putting up a video that has no visuals in it doesn't make much sense to me. So you get the movie version. The original version is much better, though.

As for what I love about this song, to me, it's not about the question of whether Tommy will be "saved" in any religious sense of the word. The song is about his family's concerns for Tommy's future. He needs to be saved in a very real sense - from the isolation he's built up around himself. Being able to understand religious ideas, and either accepting or rejecting them, is something he can't do. So is everything else he should be experiencing and learning. This concern is one thing that the movie's version of the song gets across, particularly his parents' growing despair over his condition.

I recently saw the Burien Little Theatre (BLT) production of The Who's Tommy, which is one of the shows I mentioned a few weeks ago. Since I work in theatre in this area, I don't feel right about saying much regarding either this or the Centerstage version that will be appearing in early May. I will say, though, that I think the BLT version renders this song better than anything I've heard. It's meant to be a choral number, and they perform it that way. The show's director made a smart choice to not try to recreate the movie's scene, for any one of a number of reasons, but I think it works at least as well at portraying the situation as the movie does.

As someone who is both a fan of The Who and of theatre, I think the BLT version is worth checking out if you live in the Seattle-Tacoma area. (see NOTE 1) As I watched the show, there were songs that I enjoyed more the way The Who did them, and one or two where I liked the movie version better. But it's still a great show, and I don't think any aging rock and roll fans will be disappointed. If you miss it, though, Centerstage will be doing it as well. Check those links for showtimes and other relevant information.

NOTE 1: The Who's Tommy is playing this weekend and next at Burien Little Theatre. Check BLT's site for showtimes, ticket information, and directions.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Changed the sentence about when Centerstage's version of The Who's Tommy begins its run. Originally, I'd said it was April.

This week the Guardian ran a preview of Bruce Springsteen's upcoming album, Wrecking Ball, including an interview. What is Wrecking Ball about?

[I]t is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: "Hold tight to your anger/ And don't fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball."

Bruce Springsteen: 'What was done to my country was un-American'

One of the songs the Guardian article featured was "We Take Care Of Our Own", in which Springsteen talks about the abandonment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the Rust Belt after the steel industry evaporated, and rest of us generally as America slowly slides into decay, using an old motto of how people pull together to show how little that phrase means in America anymore:



In the middle stanza, he asks:

Where's the love that has not forsaken me?
Where's the work that will set my hands, my soul free?

If you're familiar with his music, Springsteen's career serves as a chronicle of the decline of the American economy. From the urgent plea to "get out while we're young" in "Born To Run" to the plaintive lament of "Gypsy Biker", his songs have told the story of how good jobs have left town, followed closely by the will to look after each other. For those who still don't understand the difference between the mean and the median in the American economy, Springsteen's stories of bitter decline are the perfect soundtrack for those graphs and charts.

Caption: The rusting steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the minor league baseball stadium authorities brought in for "economic renewal". From making pig iron to watching Iron Pigs, the Lehigh Valley's transformation is a microcosm of America's.

Image credit: Composite image by Cujo359 (See Note)

Maybe it was my own proximity to Springsteen's home town when I was growing up that gave me the ability to see things as he does. I grew up in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, which is about an hour's drive down I-78 from where Springsteen grew up. When I was a boy, we made things there. We made steel, trucks, and semiconductors. We mined limestone and turned it into cement. Perhaps I should point out that by "we", I mean my parents' and grandparents' generation did that. By the time I graduated from college in the late 1970s, most of that industry was already gone. Nowadays, the Lehigh Valley mostly profits from its location near the cities of New York and Philadelphia as an inexpensive place to live while working in those cities. Nowadays, they make the trucks down south somewhere, where the labor is cheap. They make the steel and semiconductors in Asia. Most of the cement plants are closed, too.

As a young engineering graduate, I realized there wasn't much work for me there. I moved to the Pacific Northwest, partly because there were still jobs out here. There was still a steel plant and a truck plant out here, and there were lots of aircraft factories and sawmills. Over the years, though, the same thing I'd seen in the Lehigh Valley has happened out here, too. The aircraft factory (NOTE 1) I worked in is mostly gone, replaced by shopping centers and apartments, the jobs either overtaken by automation, or moved to places where the labor is cheap. Someday soon, the rest of the plant will probably be moved. The steel plant and the sawmills are mostly gone, too. The truck plant is somewhere else.

We stopped being people who build things in America. We've become poorer as a result, both economically and spiritually. If you don't know that by now, I suggest you get caught up on your Springsteen.

Have a good Saturday.

NOTE 1: This is was a copyrighted image from the Renton History Museum. I've requested permission to use it, and feel fairly sure that this will be granted, since it's a small version of a print they're selling. Still, it may have to be taken down later.

UPDATE: Since then, I have heard from the Renton History Museum, and they do, in fact, charge for their pictures, even the small fuzzy ones like the one I had up here. I've taken it down, since I can't afford to spend $15 a picture. I've left the link, though. This was the original caption I had posted along with the link:

A photo of the Boeing Renton plant from the 1970s. Today, just about everything below the curving road in the middle of the photos is either apartment buildings or shopping centers.

Maybe when I'm making thousands of dollars a week from this blogging thing I'll be able to afford that kind of money and the time or money it would take to manage the copyright issues, but right now I can't.

In contrast to the case of WMG, I don't think of the Renton History Museum's policy as greedy. They're a nonprofit organization, not a government agency. Maintaining photos, and allowing even limited access to them for research purposes, costs money. This is how they make part of their money. I do some work with a nonprofit organization, so I understand this. Unfortunately, though, by charging even for images that are barely web-quality, they restrict the potential benefit of their photos to those who can pay the freight. Which, in the blogging world at least, is just about none of us.

This song has been going through my head lately:


(see UPDATE below)

It's the British rock group The Who performing "Overture" from the rock opera Tommy. It's actually not a particularly good performance (this one sounds better, for instance - Pete Townsend's guitar playing is almost letter-perfect), but it's a good look at what a Who concert was like back then. It's from the 1970s, when The Who were hip, young, and, well, breathing. I think Keith Moon was gone five years after this concert. John Entwistle lasted much longer, but he's gone now, too.

In fact, Tommy is so old, it's now a musical, and two amateur theatres in the Puget Sound region will be putting it on in the next few months.

What has always amazed me about The Who's live performances of Tommy is that it was usually just the four of them playing and singing. If the theatres showing The Who's Tommy in our area follow the usual practice, they'll be performing in similar numbers. If they play this well, I'd say they'll be doing as much as can be expected of them.

Tommy is a story about personal enlightenment and the way that organized religions can sometimes get in the way of that process. In perhaps the most revealing lines in the song "I'm Free", once Tommy is finally freed of his handicaps, he says:

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high,
You'd laugh and say nothing's that simple.
But you've been shown many times before,
Messiahs pointed to the door,
and no one had the guts to leave the temple.

Life, he was saying, is best understood by living it, not trying to find out what the rules were for happiness or enlightenment. As his own following grows, Tommy forgets this, and eventually his followers go elsewhere looking for "enlightenment".

Burien Little Theatre be showing it February 17 through March 25.

Centerstage, in Federal Way, will pick up the silver ball, and show their own production of it May 4 through May 27.

Check those links for showtimes and possible schedule changes.

If you live in this region, and you don't see it, you just aren't trying very hard. Treat yourself to one of the best works of popular music to come out of the 1960s.

UPDATE: I think from now on, when this message appears in a post I do about a show that was over forty years ago, I will just leave that graphic up with no link to the greedy asshats who think that they should make more money from something that was made by people who are now dead, and thus cost them next to nothing to put on the Internet. Whoever WMG is, they can kiss my furry butt.

Based on the subject matter, you'd never know that this song was composed thirty years ago:

Drink at the Bar Nothing bar anything
But the bottom step of the ladder
It keeps gettin' higher and higher

Dawn comes soon enough for the working class.
It keeps getting sooner or later.
This is the game that moves as you play.

X: The Have Nots

The song's lyrics make it clear that the things Occupy has been protesting, and the things that a whole lot of us have been pointing out in the last few years, aren't recent phenomena. The gap between the rich and the poor started getting wider back in the 1970s, and it was folks, as the composer put it, at the bottom of the ladder who were the first to notice.

This is one of the more well-known songs of a Los Angeles punk rock group called X. According to their website, they'll be doing a tour of the Southwest soon.

One of the few e-mail lists I haven't unsubscribed myself from is for one of the local entertainment ticket agencies. Every once in a while, there's a band on one of their announcements that sounds interesting, if for no other reason than they have a clever name.

Such is the case with this band, Me Talk Pretty:



They sound like a band with potential. Julia Preotu, the young woman who fronts the band, has one of those versatile voices that works well in rock and roll, and the band behind her sounds pretty tight. You can listen to their album at less-than-hi-fi at Soundcloud. Of course, saying they have potential sounds like a really backhanded compliment, now that I see they've been around since at least 2006:

Me Talk Pretty can call New York City its home, but its members aren’t all from around here: recent Romanian emigre Julia Preotu fronted the band, her small, thin form belying a strong voice, with barely a trace of accent; on guitar Spanish-born Leon Lyazidi provided solid backing with a strong grunge influence, along with the rhythm section of James Kluz on drums and Joseph Smith on bass. Me Talk Pretty’s set built well, climaxing with “Ana,” which is the title of their new CD.

MedusaFest 2006

Judging from the lack of any other album information on their website, I'd say they have recently gotten a big contract, but who knows? I count one EP and at least one other CD that they've produced, in what is apparently the new style: on their own.

They're coming to the Pacific Northwest this weekend. If it weren't for my twin aversions to crowded, dark places with lots of beer on the floor, and to being the oldest person in the room by a healthy margin, I'd probably go see them. (Plus, sadly, I already have other plans.)

It's a couple of days after Thanksgiving, and Christmas is already in the air. If you get as fed up with it as I do, you might want to try one of my favorite forms of relief:



I'm a fan of the old Animals songs, so this is one of my favorites.

There are about a half dozen Twisted Tunes albums now, and I suspect that round about December 15 most of you will have at least a few in your MP3 players.

You're welcome.

There was a time, long ago, when the "M" in "MTV" meant "music". As xkcd explains:



There was a time when you could tune into the channel pretty much any time you wanted, and be treated to marvelous little videos like this, this, this, or one of my personal favorites:



Now, you have to comb YouTube.

In some ways, television was better back then...

R.E.M., the band that perhaps most prominently represented what was once accurately called alternative music, is "calling it a day" after being together for 31 years. According to The Manila Paper, the official announcement reads:

“To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.”

REM Breaks Up: Band Announces Split After 31 Years Together

Bob Mould, of the band Husker Du, wrote a wonderful description of R.E.M.'s music today for Salon:

The music they created was often paradoxical -- literate, yet visceral; pioneering, yet reverential; commercially appealing, yet deeply personal.

Remembering R.E.M.

It's a description that applies to so much of their music, it's hard to choose an example, but for me it's this song:



You could spend weeks listening to that one, and not figure out what it all meant, and not even care. Yet the idea that change happens, and it is necessary, lies just beneath its raucous surface. In a time when positive change is resisted by so many, and frowned on by the people who ought to be bringing it about, the song's insidious call for it is a breath of fresh air.

If I ever tried to come up with a short list of greatest rock and roll albums of all time, the album that song came from, Life's Rich Pageant, would be among them. It kicks butt from beginning to end, without pausing for breath on the way.

Of course, scarcely a day goes by without their anthem, The End of The World As We Know It going through my head. That song, consisting of a mish-mash of references from pop culture and recent history, sounds like a bad night of channel surfing. It sometimes seems that these times are perfect for R.E.M., but when it's working right, art imitates life, not the other way 'round.

R.E.M. was perfect for their time.

Yes, it's that time again. What's worse, its the tenth anniversary, and it's 9/11/11. All the way around, I'm sure this is a bad day to be on the Internet or watching TV news.

Last year at this time, I wrote that I would never write about this day again on this day. I suppose I kept that promise, because I'm writing this in March, having just listened to the song I featured last year on this day. Remember this?

Caption: Screenshot from the music video for "Life Is A Highway".

Image credit: Screenshot from this YouTube video by Cujo359

If you have, then good, you were paying attention. If not, and you feel some need to remind me to remember Sept. 11, 2001, please just answer the following questions:

• How much of the world do we have to blow up before you forget about 9/11?
• How many freedoms do we have to give up before you feel safe?
• Do you really think I, or anyone else who was around at that time, is ever likely to forget? Just how forgetful are you?

So, just shut the fuck up and drive, and for crying out loud, let September end. Because goodness knows, I've heard enough obsessive nonsense about it to last a lifetime.

UPDATE: As One Fly pointed out in comments, that video has been blocked. You can see the same video here, where it's apparently OK as long as there's a commercial in front of it.

UPDATE 2: If you want to know what obsessing about an event like this can do to a society, read Riverdaughter.

UPDATE 3: To those who keep declaring that the world changed on 9/11 - no, it didn't. The world was like that already. Vietnam happened, so did Cambodia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Sarajevo, Tianamen Square, Persian Gulf, and scores of other slaughters that I've simply forgotten about, and that's just since I was born. Some America had a hand in, many we didn't. There were terrorist attacks, too. It's like that because, often as not, it's run by cold-hearted selfish bastards who are perfectly willing to climb to the top of the heap by making a ramp of the bodies they've created.

If you think the world changed, it was because you finally noticed what was going on in the rest of the world, after it finally happened here.

What changed was us. We changed, because we obsessed about what happened when we should have been thinking about so many other things, and because we were afraid. We didn't change for the better. People who obsess about things never do.

Don't tell me to remember. Tell me when you're ready to move on.

With the endless faux-drama over the national debt, I think this video is as timely as it was in 1972:



"Good God, consider yourselves fortunate that you have John Adams to abuse, for no sane man would tolerate it!"

Remove the wigs, substitute "Barack Obama" for "John Adams", and we could sell this thing as a musical comedy about the "Great Recession".

UPDATE: Speaking of the debt ceiling nonsense, economist Dean Baker has put the politics of it in perspective better than anyone I've read thus far:

The Democrats need the Republicans' to get a tax increase passed through Congress. The Republicans need the Democrats to give them cover for cuts that are unpopular across the board.

The NYT's False Symmetry Between Republicans and Democrats

As with so many things recently, the surest way for Republicans to get their agenda implemented is to put the Democrats in charge.

And yet there's an endless supply of people who wonder why I say don't support the Democrats until that changes...

This is how we'll remember Clarence Clemmons:

It's a screenshot from this concert video, taken in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1978. They're playing "Jungleland", a song that featured Clemmons' saxophone playing a sad line in a song about the trials of life. His sax and his stage presence were so central to the E Street Band that it's hard to imagine it without him.

Anyone see a Rapture on Saturday? I sure didn't. There were these guys:
Caption: Roger Clyne And The Peacemakers in concert - Neumos, Seattle, WA, May 21, 2011.

Image credit: Cujo359

They made some jokes about the world coming to an end, but that didn't happen, either. And they didn't get sent to Hell or anything.

Go figure.

Unless the Rapture involves standing in a bar listening to country rock, then it didn't happen anywhere near me. Guess maybe someone was wrong about all that, huh?

UPDATE: If you want some more about how the concert was, Dana Hunter has some more pictures of the concert, with a promise of more later.

Bumped to keep this article on top today.

This song was playing in my head when I got up today:



It was a love song to America that was produced by the rock band Styx while I was in college. In some ways, it seems almost hopefully naive now, and yet strangely prescient:

Once long ago, a word from your lips
And the world turned around
But somehow you've changed, you're so far away
I long for the past and dream of the days
With you, madame blue

Suite madame blue, gaze in your looking glass
You're not a child anymore
Suite madame blue, the future is all but past
Dressed in your jewels, you made your own rules
You conquered the world and more, heaven's door, oh

Elyrics: Suite Madame Blue

Great art can often have meanings its creators never intended. Back then, it seemed that America was destined to lead the world to a better place. We'd just gone to the Moon, for what now looks like the last time. We'd taken care of a disturbing aberration in our nation's commitment to being a government of laws, or so we thought. What that song and Watergate both turned out to be was a harbinger of our decline into the frightened and corrupt nation we are now. (Isn't it just a sign of the times that I used the keyword Democrats to find that last link?) As Bob Herbert wrote in his final column in The New York Times:

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Losing Our Way

America was never perfect - just ask the people whose ancestors were here before Columbus accidentally bumped into the place. But, back when I was growing up, we wanted to be better. We clearly don't anymore.

What a difference a few decades can make.

Caption: Riverbend's book. Alive or dead, she's a casualty, like millions of her countrymen.

It's hard not to read something like this without some mixed emotions:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011, saying his new government and the country's security forces were capable of confronting any remaining threats to Iraq's security, sovereignty and unity.

Mr. Maliki spoke with The Wall Street Journal in a two-hour interview, his first since Iraq ended nine months of stalemate and seated a new government after an inconclusive election, allowing Mr. Maliki to begin a second term as premier.

A majority of Iraqis—and some Iraqi and U.S. officials—have assumed the U.S. troop presence would eventually be extended, especially after the long government limbo. But Mr. Maliki was eager to draw a line in his most definitive remarks on the subject. "The last American soldier will leave Iraq" as agreed, he said, speaking at his office in a leafy section of Baghdad's protected Green Zone. "This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration. It is sealed."

Iraq Wants the U.S. Out

Of course, the most prevalent feeling is that it's about time we were out of there. We never should have been there in the first place. It's pretty clear that Iraqis have good reason to want us gone, we've wrecked the place, and it wasn't all that great when we got there.

Still, it does feel sad to be getting the bum's rush out of there. We lost good people there, and spent a lot of treasure, too. It's hard not to expect that people would be grateful for that, but I doubt I would be if I were in their place.


Caption: BARWANAH, Iraq (November 7, 2006) - U.S. Marines gather around the boots, helmet and rifle to pay homage to a fallen Marine during a memorial service in Barwanah, Iraq, on Oct. 25, 2006. Photo by Sgt. Jason L. Jensen, U.S. Marine Corps.

Image credit: U.S. Army Central Command, reduced by Cujo359

The other sad thing is that feeling of having gone through Vietnam all over again - lives lost and wealth destroyed in the name of making sure that some people didn't have to admit they were wrong, and others didn't lose profits from military spending. Our thousands of dead, the walking wounded who may never recover, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died, and the millions who lost their homes all suffered for nothing.

Somehow, this song seems appropriate:

The speculators made their money
On the blood you shed
Your Mama's pulled the sheets up off your bed
The profiteers on Jane Street
Sold your shoes and clothes
Ain't nobody talking 'cause everybody knows
We pulled your cycle out of the garage
And polished up the chrome
Our Gypsy biker's comin' home


Lyrics: Gypsy Biker

This video is a memorial to someone's friend, but I like it. It's the story of a life, and the people who valued that life. Hundreds of thousands of lives were extinguished in Iraq for no reason at all. It was started by a lie. Our current national house of prostitution (Congress), and our current con man of a President have decided that no one who told that lie will ever pay for it. And why should they? They did nothing to stop this tragedy from unfolding when they had the power. Many, in fact, profited from it, if only indirectly via campaign contributions from defense contractors.

As another great writer of tragedies once wrote, If it were done, when 'tis done; then 'twere well/It were done quickly.

It's taken more than eight years. In the end, we didn't even get that mercy.

The only good thing we can say is, at least for us, it will finally be over in a year or so.

UPDATE: Added the last two sentences in the fourth paragraph from the bottom. It's part of the tragedy of this war, and part of the folly, that the people who made the bad decisions are benefiting from them.