Showing posts with label the South. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the South. Show all posts

Monday, April 06, 2020

The records that made me (some of 'em):
Never Mind the Bollocks



OK, back to the coal mine -- with my ghetto blaster.

The weekend intruded upon my recounting of 10 influential albums in my life. We resume the recounting with No. 6 in the series . . . the Sex Pistols' 1977 bombshell, "Never Mind the Bollocks."

I got stories about the Sex Pistols. I'll draw upon a 2006 blog entry to tell you about that anew.


But that story starts in the summer of 1977, when my Aunt Ailsa, an English war bride, flew home to Southampton to visit family. By that time, befuddled American foreign correspondents were sending back dispatches about this British phenomenon called "punk rock" and its antihero leaders, the Sex Pistols.

The current single by Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Paul Cook and Steve Jones was "God Save the Queen." It had been banned by the BBC. I was 16. Naturally, I had to have it.

And when Aunt Ailsa got back to Baton Rouge, I did. As far as I knew, I had the only Sex Pistols record in town. Maybe one of the few in the United States. You certainly didn't hear the Sex Pistols anywhere on local radio.

I preferred to think my aunt had to go in the back door of a Southhampton record shop and ask a cannabis-toking clerk "I say, do you have the stuff?" And then, in my teenage imagination, the clerk put down his bag of chips, slipped the 45 into a brown paper bag, and handed it to her. She then would have put a pound note into his resin- and grease-tainted hand, immediately lit a cigarette to mask the smell of second-hand marijuana smoke clinging to her clothes and slipped back out the back door.



MORE LIKE IT, she went in the front door of HMV, grabbed "God Save the Queen" off the rack and paid the teenage clerk at the front counter.

I like my 16-year-old imagination's version better.

Anyway . . . the fine folks in Red Stick thought the Beatles were dangerous and the Rolling Stones were spawns of Satan. Little did they know.

For example:
God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
A potential H-bomb

God save the queen
She's not a human being
and There's no future
And England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future
No future
No future for you

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves

God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid
Oh when there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers
In the dustbin
We're the poison
In your human machine
We're the future. . . .
MAN, I WAS a blue-collar kid in the Deep South. I was, for the first time in my life, at a school where ideas mattered and, like, thinking was encouraged and not reason to label you a weirdo or a "n****r-lover" -- or maybe "queer."

I mean, in the redneck corners of Louisiana, one did not lightly refer to thespians while among people who thought a thespian was other than what he or she actually was.


No, being at Baton Rouge Magnet High School blew a blue-collar kid's mind wide open in a Technicolor frenzy of Dreaming Big. Such was life at the Maggot School.

"The Maggot School" is what White Trash Nation called Baton Rouge High throughout my tenure there -- 1976-79. It was the place where all the geeks, brainiacs, musicians and thespians could be weirdos together in relative harmony and contentment. Hey, at BRHS, it was good to be a thespian.

If Student X had admitted to being a thespian at Broadmoor Junior High, I garon-damn-tee you someone would have beat him (or her) up and administered an enthusiastic version of the Toilet Water Taste Test. And the boys would have been even more vicious.

 
You just as well had put on an ascot and admitted to being a Homo sapiens. Or, better yet, called Junior Martinez (pronounced MART'un-ez) a Homo sapiens.

Anyway, Baton Rouge High, by the 1975-76 school year, was a struggling inner-city school whose halcyon days had gone the way of poodle skirts, B-52s (the hairdo, not the band) and "separate but equal." Then someone had an idea -- a magnet school for academics and the performing arts.

My parents were leery of this thing (I'll bet you can guess why), but I got to go. Miracle of miracles!

Well, Baton Rouge High had -- and still has -- a radio station. A real, honest-to-God, student-operated, over-the-air FM radio station -- WBRH. And thus, in high school, your Mighty Favog learned everything he needed to know.

The college education was for my liver.
 


ANYWAY . . . let me tell you about when WBRH introduced Baton Rouge to punk rock in 1977.

I found out about the Sex Pistols on Weekend, the NBC newsmagazine that preempted Saturday Night Live once a month back in the day. In this case, "back in the day" was, I reckon, spring 1977. Anyway, it seemed that the Pistols were about as pissed at the world as my teenage self, they could rock and -- best of all -- they terrified polite society as much as anything I had seen in my young life.

The fall of '77, I was enrolled in Radio I. I wasn't allowed an air shift yet; back then you first had to get a federal license -- by passing an exam. But I knew bunches of people in Radio II who had their third tickets (radio operator's licenses). Soon, the Sex Pistols were on the Baton Rouge airwaves, via the 20-watt blowtorch signal at 90.1 FM.

One fall afternoon, I was sitting in with Charles, a junior, during the afternoon rock show. He was skeptical of the Sex Pistols, but played it and asked for listener feedback. What feedback you get from a high-school FM blowtorch (that is, not a bunch) was decidedly mixed.

AFTER A WEEK or so of playing Baton Rouge's one copy of a Sex Pistols record, we did get some strong feedback. It was from the licensee of WBRH, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. And it went something like this: We don't know what the hell that is you've been playing on the radio station, but we want you to cut it out. NOW!

The radio instructor and general manager, John Dobbs, liked his teaching gig. The 45 was confiscated, and the Sex Pistols faced the same fate at WBRH that the lads did at the BBC. Banned.

I did retrieve my record from The Iron Fist of the Oppressor, but only after I agreed never to bring it back. It sits, carefully preserved in its famous picture sleeve, in a plastic file box, along with all my other 45s from Back in the Day.

Now, Charles was -- is? -- an interesting guy. Think of Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties a good five years before there was a Family Ties. Only African-American.


It probably was in the spring of '78 that I was again hanging out with Charles in the radio control room, playing the likes of David Gilmour, The Fabulous Poodles, Toto, the Cars, Journey and Queen. Maybe some Commodores -- Brick House, baby! -- and Parliament/Funkadelic.

Well, that day, obviously not enough "Brick House" or "P-Funk."

(Flash. Flash. Flash. Hey, radio-studio phones flash; they don't ring. OK?)

Charles: WBRH!

Caller: Hey, man, why don't you play some n****r music, man! ("N****r" = Not Polite, Racist and Offensive Term for African-American -- then, now or ever.)

Charles: Uhhhhh, excuse me, but I happen to be black.

Caller: Oh, uhhh, oh . . . oh, I'm sorry, man! How about playin' some BLACK music for me, man!

Charles: I'll see what I can do. (Slams phone down.) Redneck son of a bitch!
I DON'T THINK the guy got his "n****r music" played, man.

Now, I think there was a point to this post when I started it. I'll see whether I can get back to it.

When the Sex Pistols' first LP, "Never Mind the Bollocks" -- you know, the point of this whole missive -- came out in November 1977, I made it to the Musicland at Cortana Mall in the manner of someone whose head was on fire and his ass was catchin'.


Is what I'm sayin'.

And it did not disappoint when I got it on the stereo. I was dangerous, too -- in both 45 and 33⅓.

I'd like to think I still am at age 59. My wife of almost 37 years might disagree.

Friday, April 03, 2020

The records that made me (some of 'em): Meet the Beatles


Here's No. 5 of my magical mystery tour through the record albums that have influenced me greatly through the years -- "Meet the Beatles." DUH!

If one is of a certain age -- OK, Boomer! -- this one's probably on your list. And on the list of many in the generations that followed, even if indirectly. Why? It's because probably no rock band was more influential than the Fab Four.

My Beatles journey began in 1965, at age 4. My Aunt Sybil and Uncle Jimmy bought me "Meet the Beatles" for Christmas. I was hooked. Got my folks, I am sure against their better beatnik-hating judgment, to subsequently buy me some Beatles 45s from the record rack at the National supermarket in the Broadmoor Shopping Center.

Man, I was well on the way to wearing out those glorious singles by John, Paul, George and Ringo. Until. . . .

Until a British newspaper interview from March 1966 got reprinted in an American teen magazine in July that year. You probably know the one.

“Christianity will go,” John Lennon told journalist Maureen Cleave. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

Lennon was a notoriously complicated guy. Americans, for the most part, are a notoriously uncomplicated people with notoriously uncomplicated triggers for losing their shit. After what Lennon said hit newsstands in the United States, Americans' lost shit hit the fan. And how.

And then there was the South. Remember the South? I do; I'm from there.


RADIO STATIONS banned Beatles records. Radio stations burned their Beatles music. Kluxers were burning Beatles albums along with their crosses. Preachers were damning Beatles songs to the lake . . . of . . . fiiirrrrrrre.

No one was more outraged than Mama. Now, my parents weren't exactly churchgoers, but you had the principle of the thing. Or something like that.

So my Beatles singles and my copy of "Meet the Beatles" got busted up. Mama carefully explained how them Limey beatniks were sayin' terrible things about Jesus H. Christ -- who we weren't actually acquainted enough with to drop in on, like, ever -- but, you know, there was the principle of the thing.

Crack!


Rip!

Double crack!

Crunch!

Thunk!


HEY, IT WAS the Age of Batman. Who never disparaged Christianity or compared his popularity to that of Jesus Christ, who I am sure would have lost badly to the Caped Crusader, too.

But again, it was the South. One of the Southiest parts of the South. And I'm sure it didn't help that Paul McCartney was a "n****r lover." After all, in those same Beatle profiles that made John an Enemy of God, Paul showed himself to be an Enemy of the Southern Way of Life (TM).

“It’s a lousy country where anyone black is a dirty n****r,” McCartney told Cleave, the author of the London Evening Standard's original profiles -- a quote that also made it into the teen mag Datebook, the periodical that sparked the all-American freak-out. In the white, Southern working-class world into which I was born, them was fightin' words.

And Mama was fightin' mad. Or at least browbeating-your-5-year-old-kid-into-letting-you-bust-up-his-prized-Beatles-records mad.

To paraphrase a musical selection from Hee-Haw, that hillbilly artistic endeavor that came to CBS television three years later, "
Thppt! They was gone!"

It wasn't until years later, after I myself had become a certified beatnik, that I started rebuilding my Beatles stash, which decades later is considerable. Yes, I have multiple copies of "Meet the Beatles."

And I still love "I Want to Hold Your Hand," though I think the German version, "
Komm, gib mir deine Hand," on "Something New" is even better. I'm funny that way.



Thursday, April 02, 2020

The records that made me (some of 'em):
The contradiction of Mama and Daddy's 78s


The album-cover challenge continues, Part 4. The thing is, this ain't an album. It's a few 78s, ones that I've been playing since I was old enough to work a record player, which was age 4-ish.

First, behold this influential record of my youth -- Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up," on glorious shellac.

In many cases, high fidelity spun into 1950s homes, and into popular culture, at 78 rpm.

And so did the king of rock 'n' roll.

Now I have brought much of my analog musical formation into the digital present, I guess, preserved on not-so-glorious hard drives these days. (Don't worry; I still have the records.)

"All Shook Up." I couldn't tell you how many times I played this record -- this very 78 that's four years older than I am -- as a kid. The rough estimate: lots.

In 1957, "All Shook Up" was magic. As it still was when I first got a hold of it around 1964 or 1965. As it still is today.

Me (age not quite 3) and the Silvertone . . . and the records
THAT GOES as well for another of my little stash of Elvis on 78 . . . "Too Much." That's it sitting on a 1952 Webcor record changer here at Anachronism "R" Us.

And you know what? After half a century and more, the Elvis records still sound pretty much like new. Hell, I have many compact discs that sound a lot worse. I mean, some of these old 78s sound great.

RCA Victor's "'New Orthophonic' High Fidelity" was, indeed, all that. All that and a pair of blue suede shoes.

Now let's turn to a couple more 78s that more fully became touchstones when I hit my 50s -- Walter Brown's "Fine Brown Baby" / "My Baby's Boogie Woogie" and The Delmore Brothers' "Blues Stay Away From Me."

In 1946, when my parents were still newlyweds, they were buying "race" records and hillbilly blues records from their favorite Baton Rouge music emporiums.


LOW-DOWN BLUES. R&B. Along with pop, jump and country twangfests like the Delmore Brothers.

"She's got what it takes, make a preacher lay his Bible down," sangeth Mr. Brown. You should hear the flip side.

If you want to know the music of my soul, my folks' old 78s will get you close.

If you want to know what was it that made me the musical creature that I am -- if you want to hear the records I was playing when I was but a lad, just old enough to get into my folks records and operate a record changer -- here you go. This and Fats Domino . . . and Ivory Joe Hunter . . . and Fats Domino . . . and Hank Williams . . . and Louis Jordan.

This is about as personal as it gets.

This is who I am. The music of my parents' young adulthood (and my record-geek childhood) sounded like the world -- the Deep South -- I was born into damn near six decades ago.

It was eclectic, the Louisiana . . . the South of my youth. It was seemingly at odds with itself if you didn't look any further than the surface of things. It was also rich beyond measure.

Take Brown, the blues shouter who once sang with Jay McShann's orchestra. In the particular culture I entered into during the spring of 1961, black shouters like him could sit next to white twangers like Ernest Tubb in the record cabinet in the bottom of the old Silvertone console -- even if they couldn't sit next to each other at the Woolworth's lunch counter.

AND NO ONE thought twice about either peculiarity.

This explains my parents' music-buying habits of the 1940s and '50s, long before I came along and, a few years later, started raiding their music collection. It also explains the complex and contradictory inner lives of these people -- formed by the Southern society that brought us Williams, Louis Armstrong and Jim Crow -- who could in 1946 buy racy records by blues shouters, then in 1971 yell at me about my expletive-deleted "n***er music."

People who thought Dick Clark was a communist, probably because of the fatal combination of "beatnik music" and race mixing on "American Bandstand."

Those George Wallace and David Duke voters.

A couple more of the blackest white people on earth -- as Southern Caucasians surely are -- who may have found it just cause for homicide if you had told them that back in the day.

Go figure.

The South: It's a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, tucked away in an enigma and fueled by contradiction. These records give you a peek under its hood a little bit . . . its and mine.

You might not completely understand either of us, me and the South, but it will be a start.


Thursday, August 15, 2019

This breaks my damn heart


1962. It was the blackest of years; it was the most idealistic and hopeful of years.

Jim Crow refused to go quietly in the South. Communism, and the fear of it, haunted everything we were, did and said in America. Between us and the Soviet Union, we almost blew up the world.

But also in 1962, if we made it through October, the world would be a better place by springtime -- we just knew it.

Young Americans brimmed with idealism. Black college kids and white college kids risked their lives for their ideals in a peaceful assault against segregationist brutality in Dixie.

The youth of a country that 17 years before had vanquished Nazi Germany and militarist Japan found inspiration in a young president who challenged them to ask what they could do for their country.

JOHN GLENN orbited the earth three times. Next stop: the moon.

America had set its gaze on the New Frontier, and John Stewart of the The Kingston Trio could write liner notes like these above.

I was 1 year old. Hope was alive and kicking. Even in the South.

2019. A broken-down, 58-year-old music-show and blog guy sits at his iMac, typing. He wonders what the fuck happened.

He reads the hopeful, idealistic and oh-God-how-naive words of the late Mr. Stewart, and he wants to cry. He fears that there are no more tears left. Even more, he's terrified that fear will be put to the test again and again.

"So now, as never before, an age of introspection is reaching every one of us." Now our nation is becoming what we've willed within ourselves -- a heart of darkness.

"The horror! The horror!"

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The unshakable burden of growing up fascist


I have come to explain my native region of the country as born fascist. Fascist from its settlement by the white man -- fascist before we knew what fascism was.

The American South is fascist, was fascist and always has been fascist. Adolf Hitler and his German Nazis carefully studied the South as a blueprint for the kind of society they wanted to build at home -- and violently impose upon the world.

The evidence of this lies in the headlines of your daily newspaper today . . . and it was ever present in the headlines of yesteryear's daily newspapers, too. The articles here both were on the front page of the Morning World-Herald right here in Omaha, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 1948.

The police commissioner using his police powers to determine what records could and couldn't be sold in stores or played on jukeboxes was in Memphis. James O. Eastland -- the U.S. senator who went out of his way to make sure reporters knew he had referred to an NAACP official with a vile racial slur -- represented Mississippi, right next door to Tennessee.

Eastland served until 1978. Because Mississippi.

Any white Southerner of a certain age -- namely my age -- has to live in fear, to some degree, in the wake of the "woke" attempts at purging all racial transgressors from public life, regardless of the offense or whether it occurred decades ago. On one hand, it is inexcusable that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam dressed up in blackface as a 20-something. It ain't good that Virginia attorney general Mark Herring browned up his face as a 19-year-old college freshman to impersonate one of his favorite rappers.

Northam is 59 now; Herring is 57. I am 57 -- almost 58.

On the one hand, this stuff is bad. Oughtn't have happened. Even in the 1980s, white Southerners should have known this stuff was unacceptable.

On the other hand . . . what the hell do people expect? How, in the name of basic sentience and a basic knowledge of American history, is anyone surprised?

And when, exactly, did Americans lose any belief in the tenets of grace, forgiveness and redemption? When did we all decide that it was impossible for people to change, to grow?

Listen, those of us born during the tail end of Jim Crow -- many of us raised by thoroughly racist parents within thoroughly racist families in a pervasively racist Southern society and culture -- too often didn't know what we didn't know. We all had to deal with the burden of our upbringing.

You have to understand the ubiquity of an extremely warped culture, and the Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow South was an extremely warped culture. After World War II, Germans of a certain age were allowed to redeem themselves once the Nazi regime had been relegated to several awful chapters of a world history textbook. Apparently, Southerners such as Northam and Herring in the commonwealth will not be granted that opportunity -- by their own countrymen, no less.


OBVIOUSLY, Northam botched his opportunity to explain himself and shine a light on what was, and to a large degree still is, a sick and racist culture. There probably will not now be a fruitful national dialogue about the role of culture -- particularly racist cultures -- in forming civil society and what it means to have been formed by a deviant society.

Neither will we have a productive national discussion about how we -- each of us -- might shed the unbearable burden of our upbringing. In this case, our very Southern upbringing.

Let me say it again: The American South, basically, was Nazi before the Nazis were Nazi. And that's the air that was the burden of Southern whites' upbringing. We didn't know anything else.

In the case of this Southern white boy who came into the world in the Louisiana of 1961, my first inkling that my world might be seriously f***ed up was network television. Specifically, Julia and Room 222. I cannot tell you how revolutionary it was to see black folk who were anything but the stereotypical "n*****s" we had been carefully taught to see and believe in.

There's a word to describe the upbringing of lots of Southern kids just like me. That would be "brainwashing." It started at birth and primarily was administered by parents who themselves had been brainwashed since birth.

Not to put too fine a point on it, network television was we Southerners' very own version of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty or the Voice of America. Many of our parents, kinfolk and the other adults surrounding us did not see it that way. In their vision, ABC, NBC and CBS were more like a bunch of "agitators," a bunch of "n***** lovers" or a "bunch of goddamn commerniss."

This can't be overstated. It just can't. Oh . . . I was born and raised in Baton Rouge. I went to public schools. That means, for my grade level, that I went to de jure segregated schools until fourth grade in 1970.

And when my school was "integrated" -- and in 1970 "neighborhood schools" was a federal-court desegregation tool in Baton Rouge -- my school had two black kids . . . whose family had lived in the neighborhood before there was a neighborhood. One, Janice, was in my class.

She was my friend, and we played together at recess. A teacher told me I shouldn't do that -- it didn't look right to be playing with "a colored girl." To her credit, my racist mother (rather inexplicably, given "racist") called the NAACP to complain about that one.

Janice was treated horribly across the board. Seeing that was another brick knocked out of the wall. A major reinforcement to the counternarrative coming from Radio Free Dixie -- a.k.a., ABC, NBC and CBS.

So, on one level, I'm reluctant to condemn Ralph Northam, as bad as it all is. I was guilty of something worse than blackface when I was just 4 years old. But we Southerners just have to quit lying to ourselves and everybody else. We have to look -- hard -- at who we were . . . and are.

And we, at long last, have to be accountable.

We Southerners, in addition to a racism/fascism problem, have had a sincerity problem for a long damn time now.

Monday, July 02, 2018

Kills all your bugs . . . and everything else, too

Morning Advocate, June 25, 1948

When I was a kid in Louisiana, you went for the Flit whenever bugs needed killin'.

And when I would ask my Yankee wife to fetch me some Flit, what I'd get instead was a look somewhere between quizzical and "Are you suffering aphasia because you're having a stroke?"


I'm lying. The look was more like "I married one of Those People why, exactly?"

Flit
Flit. FLIT, dammit! Don't you speak you some English, yeah? F-L-I-T. FLIT! To kill dem damn red wasps!

Now, by the time I got married to an uncomprehending Nebraskan, Flit-brand bug spray wasn't exactly a household name or found on store shelves when you were out makin' groceries. (Forget it, it's not important now.)


BUT WHAT'S important is that it's easier than saying "bug spray" or "insecticide." You save -- at a minimum -- four letters and any number of syllables. That saved time just might be the difference between life and welts when the red wasps done got all stirred up.

So, just now I asked Mrs. Long Suffering exactly what the hell they called Flit in Omaha.

"I don't know," she replied. "Bug spray? Raid?"

Well, that's fine if the kind of Flit you want is Raid. But what if you want Black Flag Flit?

It's like when you're thirsty. Sometimes, you want Co-Cola Coke, but other times, the kind of Coke you want is Seven-Up. Maybe Pepsi Coke.

And maybe the kind of damn Coke you want is Dr. Pepper. Usually around 10, 2 and 4 o'clock.


Also Flit

OR MAYBE you just need the damn Flit, because them flying, red sons of bitches are coming for you . . . and you don't care whether it's Raid, Black Flag or sarin gas.

But no. You needed the Flit, and all you got was an annoyed and confused look from your strangely uncultured spouse. And now it's too late.

All you need to get now is some ice out of the Frigidaire.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Louisiana swamp gas . . . or weapons of ass destruction

The Louisiana Legislature's latest round of budget negotiations has prompted the return of what is becoming an annual tug-of-war match between funding TOPS and funding state health care services.

The House Appropriations Committee on Monday advanced its version of a $27 billion state budget to begin July 1 featuring full funding for the popular Taylor Opportunity Program for Students scholarships and deep cuts to safety-net hospitals and other programs that serve the poor and disabled.

"This is a process," House Appropriations Vice Chair Franklin Foil, R-Baton Rouge, said during the committee's hearing on House Bill 1. "There are other steps we'll be going through."

HB1 is scheduled to hit the House floor on Thursday, where it is certain to generate additional debate over where the brunt of nearly $650 million in cuts should land. Lawmakers haven't ruled out the idea of holding yet another special session to try to close all or part of the remaining "fiscal cliff" the state faces when temporary tax measures expire June 30, but they can't take up most revenue-raising measures during the regular session and current budgeting process. . . . 
"In rushing to pass amendments out, the House Appropriations Committee proved what we’ve been saying all along – there simply isn’t a way to fashion a budget that adequately funds our state’s pressing needs," Edwards said in a statement. "TOPS is absolutely a priority and should be fully funded, but so should higher education institutions, health care for our seniors and those with disabilities, funding for medical schools in Shreveport and New Orleans, and our partner hospitals. Now we can see that it’s not possible to do that without replacing more of the revenue that is expiring."

The move to prioritize funding for TOPS, which is wildly popular among middle class and more affluent families, mirrors recent actions from the Appropriations Committee, which gets the first bite at the state budget under state law.

Rep. Gary Carter, D-New Orleans, said he worried about the ripple effect cuts to the state's safety-net hospital partners would have. Several of those operators have already said they will walk away from the agreements, threatening the shuttering of hospitals across the state, if their funding is drastically reduced to the levels that have been proposed.

"We have health care providers in the state of Louisiana making tough decisions," Carter said. "I'm a big believer in both education and health care, but I certainly don't want to risk closing any hospital."

Several Democrats also questioned the plan to fund TOPS while cutting general funding for college and university campuses.

It didn't take jetliners flying into New York skyscrapers.

It certainly didn't take any declaration of war.

All it took was Bashar al-Assad dropping a chlorine (and perhaps sarin) gas bomb onto a Damascus neighborhood and killing 40-odd people in the latest outrageous act of Syria's long and bloody civil war. For that, the combined forces of the United States, France and Great Britain launched 100-something missiles into a country with which we weren't at war, at least not legally.

What, then, shall we do with Louisiana?

I doubt it could be argued that Louisiana politicians have not killed -- and will not kill -- any fewer than a Syrian gas attack every few weeks, if not days, by starving every social safety-net program on the books, all because their constituents have no more interest than Cain in being their brother's keeper. As we know from Genesis, Cain had no interest in being Abel's keeper because he had already killed him.

Artistic tradition pictures the jealous Cain slaying with the jawbone of an ass, as Samson later in scripture did away with the Philistines. In Louisiana, it's asses jawboning who mow down the poor, the disabled and the sick with their votes and their callous neglect. If the House committee's will becomes budgetary law, what little cash the state has on hand will fully fund a popular welfare program that overwhelmingly benefits the adult children of middle-class white people.

The poor and the ill, then, will be left to be their own damned keeper. Should be interesting to see how well Grandma shifts for herself when she's wheeled to the curb after the Medicaid money stops but her nursing-home tab doesn't.

The white children of white parents with ample green will have their tuition to crumbling state universities (which aren't being funded) paid in full with taxpayers' dollars.  The state Department of Health would be starved to the point where virtually every public-private "safety net" hospital closes its doors.

Meantime, medical education virtually would end in Louisiana.
“So of $346-million available, you want to spend $246-million of it for this, leaving $100-million for everything else?” [Rep. Walt] Leger [D-New Orleans] asked. “You believe $246-million is best spent in these ways?”
“I do,” [Rep. Franklin] Foil [R-Baton Rouge] replied. “We had a lot of ground to make up, since the executive budget had zero dollars spent on TOPS.”

“Isn’t this message giving students false hope, because the full body isn’t likely to maintain this in lieu of funding other programs?” Leger pressed. “You’re okay getting a positive news story today, even if it ultimately will prove to be fake news?”

“My commitment is to students,” Foil answered.

“What about the Department of Health?” Leger asked.

“What about it?” Foil fired back.

“You’re aware that department is taking biggest cuts? And you still believe it is more valuable to fund TOPS?” Leger asked, incredulously.
“Your district includes a substantial constituency that is on Medicaid, doesn’t it, Rep. Foil?” Rep. Pat Smith [D-Baton Rouge] asked. “But you’re willing to fully fund TOPS to benefit a different socio-economic group in your district, instead?”

“I think this helps everyone, in every district,” Foil replied. “We are clearly short on revenue, and even if we were to take all of the money available and give it to the Department of Health, they would still have a shortfall.”
“Yet your amendment fully funds TOPS to the detriment of all the other programs in the state: disabilities waivers, nursing homes, public-private partner hospitals, graduate medical education,” Leger said. “It’s a trap, forcing us Democrats to say we either support TOPS or we don’t. That’s a false choice, and it will really end up being nothing more than a comment about what we would like to do.”

“We are already on notice that the public-private partner hospitals will be closing,” Rep. Gary Carter (D-New Orleans) chimed in. “We say ‘we fund our priorities.’ Your amendment makes TOPS a greater priority than health care.”

“I believe we will find funding as we go through this process,” Foil insisted.

“That’s pie in the sky,” Pat Smith told him, bluntly. “You’re perfectly aware there is no guarantee to raise additional revenue. Some 20 members of this body won’t vote for any new revenue under any circumstances. What this ends up saying is that we only want to fund a program for kids doing well in school, but not the schools they go to, and not the hospitals.”
BREAKING NEWS . . . Louisiana to poor, sick and higher ed: Drop dead.

Breaking news? That's old news. It's also today's news, tomorrow's news, next year's news and your grandkids' news.

In this era of concussive enforcement of the Geneva Conventions and international human-rights charters, here's the news I eagerly await:

As a proportional and just response to unacceptable violations of civilized norms, I await news that sea- and air-launched cruise missiles from the combined armed forces of the United States and sundry NATO allies have sent a message to America's own pariah state. And that the Louisiana Capitol Complex now looks a lot like some of the sadder parts of north Baton Rouge.

Right is right, after all, and rogue regimes must be put on notice that certain red lines must not be crossed. Even in the reddest of states.

We're all in agreement on that, am I right? Am I right?

Hello?

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Robert E. who?


Way down yonder in New Orleans, Mr. Mardi Gras thinks it would be a fine idea to rename the former Lee Circle (as in Robert E.) as Mardi Gras Circle . . . in the name of unity and fraternity.
 
Especially, no doubt, fraternity.
As New Orleans celebrates its tricentennial, it is worth noting that Mardi Gras has been an essential part of the city’s history for more than half these 300 years. Street masking and private balls occurred in the late-1700s. In 1857, the Mistick Krewe of Comus presented the first organized Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

In 1874, 10 years before the Robert E. Lee statue was erected in New Orleans, Rex paraded past the area, then known as Tivoli Circle. For 142 years, families have gathered in harmony to enjoy hundreds of Mardi Gras parades that have passed the site. For decades, the city erected official parade-reviewing stands at the circle. Today, all 34 New Orleans parades roll past this location.

The name Mardi Gras Circle would not invite the public controversy that naming the landmark after an individual surely will: “Why Tom Benson Circle and not Fats Domino? Allen Toussaint and not Leah Chase? Andrew Higgins and not Pete Fountain?”

Finally, Mardi Gras Circle would fill a long-standing need for a monument in downtown New Orleans that commemorates the city’s oldest and largest local festival and world-class tourist attraction. Visitors to the city are amazed that as important as Mardi Gras is to our image and our economy, there exists no monument to it other than a fountain on the lakefront, four miles from downtown where the parades roll. Mardi Gras Circle could itself become a tourist attraction.
METHINKS Arthur Hardy and the Mayor’s Mardi Gras Advisory Committee are on to something big. Real big.

That is all.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Moonlight and magnolias . . . with a side of crystal meth


What would we Louisiana expatriates do without our hometown newspapers . . . to remind us why the hell we left in the first place?

I am from Baton Rouge. My hometown newspaper is The Advocate, which isn't the gay publication of the same name but is rather queer, come to think of it.

Anyway, The Advocate has, in the past, printed some pretty insane things. Those were a warm-up for this dog whistle.

DAN FAGAN (whatever a Dan Fagan is) accuses Mitch Landrieu of being a race-baiter and then -- somehow -- brings the whole argument about Confederate monuments to "Because abortion."

I am pro-life. And I am here to tell you this is, to quote George W. Bush, "some weird shit." It's also why I have become, as a pro-lifer, allergic to so much of the "pro-life movement," which has devolved to a bunch of pro-birth political hacks who are fine with merely delaying the execution of society's most vulnerable members to a later date.

In light of that, Fagan's argument comes down to this:

SO . . . society should be in the business of honoring things that aren't moral, ethical or right? Fagan is saying that Landrieu is a race-baiting scoundrel because he tore down New Orleans' monuments to the Confederacy and white supremacy.

And refusing future honors to Democrats, because abortion, will somehow be a cosmically just payback for tearing down monuments to those who fought for slavery? Which, of course, was somehow both horribly wrong yet worthy of honor via public monuments to the men and states dedicated to the perpetuation of institutionalized human bondage.

Actually, the non-disingenuous analogy here would be removing a statue of a Mitch Landrieu who went on to commit treason against the United States in the name of legal abortion -- and then to fight a bloody civil war against it. Because abortion.

The Democrats may be on the wrong side of history regarding abortion, but they're no traitors and, thus far, have refrained from firing upon Fort Sumter. Today's Republican Party, on the other hand, is placing itself on the wrong side of history on virtually every other issue -- some of them just as morally fraught and morally non-negotiable as abortion.

And, by the way, any number of the GOP's members in this Age of Trump are this close to being demonstrably treasonous.

Now, what does this son of the South, who now lives in the Gret White Nawth, have to say about Fagan's philosophical treatise, one he obviously penned for the benefit of Confederacy-loving mouth-breathers who can't use "treatise" in a sentence? Well, I'm thinking of a certain bumper sticker we used to see a lot in the South in the 1960s and '70s -- often affixed to pickup trucks.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

3 Chords & the Truth: The Kudzu Curtain


Your Mighty Favog escaped from one of the Southern -stans when he was a young man. Now he brings the best in music and information to the captive populations of his home region of the United States.

He brings young and old alike the world their governments censor. Free thought and a robust culture . . . with a beat.

This week, millions in the -stans on the American frontier will tune in to 3 Chords & the Truth for uncensored news and music -- the "in" sound from outside. Join the Big Show this week for a program of special interest to listeners in Alabamastan, "Jesus Don't Like Ugly . . . or What Don't You Get About Jailbait?"

Captive Bubbas may not be able to spell "freedom," but almost all can spell 3C&T. And that's enough to cut through the Kudzu Curtain just a little every day.

Freedom's as close as the Internet, and 'Bamastanis spell it 3C&T.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

(Apologies to the Radio Free Europe PSAs of the 1970s.)