Category: politics

Today’s Theme Music

I heard this song in the car while running our usual weekend errands, and turned it up and listened. It employs an honesty and simplicity in the lyrics and melody. Later, I learned one of my favorite recent guys, CeeLo Green, was one of the people behind it. The song was inspired by a conversation between CeeLo and Danger Mouse about artists not being taken seriously unless the artists were insane. Yet, watching the news since then, I get the impression, in this era of personality, that being taken seriously when acting insane extends way beyond artists and into politics and business. We’re inundated with the mundane and tedium, so the insane draws our attention. Then, we start listening more carefully to what the insane are saying, and wonder, “Hmmm…can they be right?”

Here’s Gnarls Barkley with “Crazy,” from two thousand five.

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Today’s Theme Music

This song hit the scene in nineteen eighty-four.

Remember that year, with portends of George Orwell’s prescient novel hanging over us, fueling worries about privacy and government spying? “There are laws against that,” people say, smirking. “It could never happen to us. We’re America. We’re a democracy. It’s the Soviet Union and those totalitarian states like it that should worry.” The U.S.S.R.’s collapse a few years later seemed to vindicate our innate American superiority. We’d won; the communists had lost. Yes, we were so silly to be worried.

Into this era came a German group with a hard-rocking message: “Here I am, rock you like a hurricane.” I didn’t know much about the Scorpions before “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” I knew of them, but little more.

I thought of them today because of my stormy dream. The dream rocked me like a hurricane with its unceasing gloominess and desperation until its climax. I didn’t awaken afraid, but thoughtful. Thinking of the dream, I remembered this song, and its use in Dave Eggers’ novel. Odd, how the mind works, with everything connected and nothing terminated, but spreading and sprawling into new connections.

But with that, I think about the weather again. One difficulty in modeling weather is the planet’s complexity and dynamics. Everything is connected, but tracing the source back to the wings that began the storm can be tricky.

So it is with thinking.

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Today’s Theme Music

Feeling a little tired, a little numb, unthinking and unresponsive. Just a little N.E.S.*

To suit my condition, I offer Dolores Riordan and the Cranberries with our composition, “Zombie,” from nineteen ninety-four. The song was written in memory of two children killed in the nineteen ninety-three IRA bombing in Warrington.

onizuka_blue_cube

The song hit the waves as I contemplated my military career faced some choices. Stationed at Onizuka Air Station, home of the infamous blue cube in Sunnyvale, California, I was part of the Air Force Space Command. After I’d been there a few years, I was invited to join Space Command’s Inspector General Team. My wife didn’t like the situation’s dynamics. First, it would require a move from the SF Bay Area to Colorado. Second, I would be on the road about ninety percent of the time. Those conditions stirred her ire. Not being zombies, we said, “No.”

Disliking that answer, the Air Force informed me they would move me to Whiteman AFB, Missouri. Deciding I didn’t want to go there, I submitted my paperwork. Onizuka became my final duty location, and I became a civilian and Air Force retiree.

 

*N.E.S. – Not Enough Sleep

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Today’s Theme Music

It’s a basic rock and roll, guitar-hero, hot as hell day. I employ hyperbole, of course. It’s not as hell today, but will be a toasty, sweat inducing, hyperbole-inspiring ninety-seven degrees on the beloved Fahrenheit scale.

Love this song. Stationed in Germany with the U.S. Air Force and watching the Soviets when the song hit the waves and created a stream source in my head, I always considered it a direct, mocking response to President George H.W. Bush’s inauguration. Here’s my reference:

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores
and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes
for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people,
says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn,
got roads to drive.

h/t to azlyrics.com

Yes, values, priorities, and directions can get a little skewed in the free world. Here’s Neil Young from nineteen eighty-nine with “Rockin’ In the Free World.”

 

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Today’s Theme Music

It’s July 4 in America. Probably that date in many other parts of the world, too. For Americans, though, it’s associated with Independence Day, a holiday commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So, what the hell. With that in mind, I started streaming this song from nineteen eighty-one:

“America”

Far,
We’ve been traveling far
Without a home
But not without a star

Free,
Only want to be free
We huddle close
Hang on to a dream

On the boats and on the planes
They’re coming to America
Never looking back again,
They’re coming to America

Here’s Neil Diamond with the rest of the song.
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Protest Dream

I dreamed I was with my wife and sister-in-law. We’d arrived at a huge meeting center and were there to protest against government actions and for social justice, freedom and equality. The opposition to these ideals, who believed that others shouldn’t get them because others getting these rights were ruining our country, were also showing up. Armed, they were intent on intimidating “our side.”

But we weren’t intimidated. We assembled to protest. When government leaders appeared, we raised our right hand and formed the letter “C.” We held it up over our heads in silence.

It was amazing for me, in the dream, back in the crowd, to look forward, down, across and back, and see tens of thousands of people standing silently in sunlight with their right hand raised in a “C.”

Why that letter and action? The dream didn’t explain that. We all just knew, that’s what we were to do.

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Today’s Theme Music

Politics, television, advancement, publishing – I can’t get no satisfaction.

Yeah, baby. The Rolling Stones sing it best. The guitar riff, thumping, unrelenting beat and the Mick’s vocalizing of the frustration with the commercial world all come together fantastic in that nineteen sixty-five rock classic, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Jesus, I was just nine but something about that combination spoke to me. While Mick is singing about being pissed over the world’s increasing commercialization and the things he’s being sold, I get that same sense from the news of the world and my efforts to move myself forward. It’s like one stride forward and a long fall backward.

Seeing it on the old “Ed Sullivan Show” is fun. Simpler times, friends, but isn’t that what each generation notices about how life changes?

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Today’s Fake Bumper Sticker

Saw this bumper sticker yesterday:

“This year will go down in history. For the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
— Adolf Hitler, 1935”

I researched it to verify Hitler said it.

No; he didn’t, or, if he did, it was never documented anywhere. Like other alt news or fake news (see Pizzagate and Jade Helm 15), there are a lot of words generating smoke and fear, but very little truth.

The NRA and gun proponents want you to believe that gun control helped the Nazi Party rise to power.

No; it didn’t.

The Weimar Republic proceeding the Nazi rise had stricter gun control; but the idea that if people had guns, they would have resisted is absurd, as Hitler had high popular support.

Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon had an article that provides an insightful summary.

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Today’s Theme Music

To continue with the theme of dancing through the first week of the season change, I’ll continue with Don Henley. “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” is one of my favorite Henley offerings. Coming out in nineteen eighty-four, the song was written by Danny Kortchmar.

I enjoyed its tech sound and cynical lyrics. The song is like a war story being told in a bar about a serviceman’s experience fighting in another country. The impression is, the heavy-handed government is locking everyone up and bugging everywhere, battling “wild-eyed pistol wavers” in a long-going engagement. The rebels are using the weapon of revolutionaries before I.E.D.s, Molotov cocktails, mixed up in their kitchen sink. Meanwhile, the serviceman is coping with a local young women. All she wants to do is dance, make romance, and party. She seems oblivious to everything going on. It becomes clear by song’s end, who was oblivious.

I thought it was an apropos song for the time. It came before the Gulf Wars and after Vietnam, during the cold war era when the United States and U.S.S.R. were trying to align other countries, no matter who led them, with “their side,” propping up governments with money and weapons, enriching the countries’ power elite at the expanse of the poor. The Soviets were battling in Afghanistan against Osama Bin Laden as the U.S. armed and trained the revolutionary. Meanwhile, the U.S. buddied up to Saddam Hussein, arming him.

With its heavy beat, this is an excellent song for streaming and tramping around. It’s a bitter reminder, too, about how weapons and places have changed, but we’re still arming and aiding governments to fight rebels.

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