Home in the rear-view mirror

When did I first see Evan Mather's Scenic Highway on the Web? Three years ago, maybe?

As I recall, the combination memoir/documentary/mockumentary wasn't in a particularly embeddable format then, so I didn't post it on the blog. Or maybe it was due to a charitable swing of my famously conflicted emotions about my hometown, Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge is what Scenic Highway is all about. And, no, Scenic Highway, the main thoroughfare into north Baton Rouge, isn't. That irony -- and the spirit behind naming one's film for the decidedly unscenic stretch of road -- is what drives the film.

I am from Baton Rouge. I, too, put the city in my rear-view mirror a long time ago. I totally get the concept of an homage noir to the old hometown -- albeit one conceived, perhaps, by the Monty Python troupe on a bloody terrible bender.

Still, at the time, in the aftermath of Katrina, I was kinda sorta thinking, "Isn't that a little mean?"

THOSE WERE the better angels of my nostalgia talking. The real me knows better.

It's why the hell I hauled ass. It's why I am Omaha's biggest damned fan today; Nebraska's largest city, my home, is pretty much everything Baton Rouge ain't.

If you've been hanging around the blog much, my feelings on this question are no surprise to you. They're . . . well . . . complicated. Intense. Somewhat conflicted.

Bottom line: I am glad I'm here. I am glad I'm not there. And I recognize the unpredictable ebb and flow of how life -- and cities -- often play out can quickly make an ass of you while you're otherwise occupied expounding on crap and plotting out the future.

Still. . . .

I KEEP coming back to what my hometown ain't. Like secure in its identity, for example.

A gag bit in Scenic Highway about a "call" to the state capitol's information hotline has the earnest telephone voice expounding at great length -- and proudly -- about a 1933 Leni Riefenstahl film, Reichitekht, which outlined the great influence the structure had on Nazi architect Albert Speer and the great fascination it held for der Führer himself.

Obviously ridiculous, you say. Pure fiction. And, no, the Germans didn't bomb Pearl Harbor. Of course, I say.

But that doesn't mean I didn't check it out . . . just to make sure. Because it sounded just sooooooo perfectly Baton Rouge.

Does the name David Duke ring a bell? He's a white supremacist. He used to parade around LSU, as a student, in a Nazi uniform. He grew up to become the head of one of the national Ku Klux Klan organizations.

Louisiana almost elected him governor in 1991. Then the feds put him in prison.

ANOTHER THING my hometown ain't, is committed to public education -- or much education of any stripe.

This is why it never will be what its mayor-president keeps saying it is -- "America's Next Great City (TM)." People want to move to great cities; nobody wants to move to Baton Rouge.

The proof is in the population, which hasn't changed much since I was in college there. Thirty years ago.

I was reminded of this by that Elizabeth Warren lecture on the tribulations, and pending extinction, of the American middle class. Here's the part that did it for me, the part that just completely distills why Red Stick is hosed:

There's a great . . . study out of San Diego, where they're having parents do preferences on where they buy. Parents would rather live near a toxic waste dump than a place where they thought the schools were underperforming -- where they thought their children would not have as good a chance in school.

WARREN CITED another study, this one from Boston, that compared side-by-side area municipalities, matched for every factor -- racial composition, mass-transit access . . . you name it. It found that just a 5-point increase in third-grade reading scores in one school district over the other translated into tens of thousands of dollars' difference in housing prices.

"Families are buying schools," she said. Of course, that's obvious. But now there's the data to quantify what we already knew.

Well, at least what some of us in America already knew.

Welcome to Baton Rouge. The toxic waste dump (or at least the next best thing) is the city's biggest employer. This is it, at right -- the Exxon-Mobil refinery, the second largest in the country.

There are lots more like it all around the capital city.

And this is the kind of thing you can expect when dealing with the East Baton Rouge Parish school system.

And here's what my old high school looked like three years ago:


NOW IT'S being renovated, which means all but the main building is being torn down and rebuilt. And the main building, dating back to 1927, is being totally renovated.

Thirty years of neglect will do that for your construction budget.

One can only imagine what 30 years of test-score carnage and resegregation -- a school system that white flight has taken from 65-35 majority-minority to 85-15 minority-majority in a single generation -- has done (and will continue to do) to Baton Rouge.

Probably something not unlike what happened to the one really unique thing Evan Mather found in his -- and my -- hometown, just north of town just off the not-so-scenic Scenic Highway. It was a massive geodesic dome built by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1950s -- the biggest in the world at the time.

It used to belong to the Union Tank Car Co. They used to fix massive numbers of railroad tank cars in there -- until time passed the facility by within a decade or so.

Bucky Fuller's masterpiece soon fell into disrepair. That's how Mather found it almost five years ago.

And the year after Mather released his short film . . . it was torn down.

Because that's what Baton Rouge does.

The poorhouse, explained

The fatal flaw of the tea party movement -- OK, the most fundamental of its myriad fatal flaws -- is that it long ago got what it now clamors for.

And that's what's killing us all. Check that. Not all.

The rich, they're doing fine, despite everything. It's the fast-disappearing middle class and the poor taking it in the shorts.

Despite all the angry rhetoric from the tea-party delusionals, despite all the laissez-faire rhetoric and faux solidarity with "real Americans" coming from millionaire hucksters such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the real problem here, alas, is not that Barack Hussein Obama is a socialist working hard to turn the United States into a people's republic.

No, the real problem is that America is becoming less socialist every day -- that the sort of laissez-faire, free-market social Darwinism that lets the rich man grow ever richer, unfettered by the "socialist nanny state," has been wildly successful at redistributing wealth away from the poor and middle class and into the hands of Corporate America and the wealthy.

What the tea-party marionettes clamor for -- the magical shot of "freedom" that supposedly will cure all our ails -- is just more of what we've had for decades, decades during which the American middle-class family has been beaten into a vegetative state.

If you're not familiar with Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and current chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, stop right now and watch the above video. Want to know what the hell happened to you (and the economic world around you) over the last 40 years? This will explain it all.

Warren tells you how the middle class has come to the brink of extinction, why both you and the missus are busting your butts and still living paycheck-to-paycheck, and why you're just a layoff -- or a serious illness -- away from oblivion.

IN THE VIDEO, she tells you all this on Mar. 8, 2007. A year and a half before the crash.

Things haven't improved since:


THE MSNBC INTERVIEW followed publication of this column of hers last December in The Huffington Post. Read on, if you've guts enough:

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves. But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

AND THE CURE for this is supposed to be less regulation? Less government? Fewer taxes on the wealthy? Removing the last of society's unraveling safety nets?

Fighting "socialism" is the answer here? For the love of God, send us a real socialist, not some too-cool, dispassionate poseur like Barack Obama.

You know, like Franklin Roosevelt. Or Harry Truman. Or Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Hell, even Richard Nixon.

By tea-party/Limbaugh/Beck standards, all these presidents were raving Bolsheviks. And under their political tutelage, we still had a middle class. We still had hope for America's future.

And now?

During Warren's 2007 lecture at the University of California-Berkeley, she explains that according to Gallup, most people in 1970 judged that it required a high-school diploma and hard work to launch a young person into the middle class. But by 2002, Gallup reported, twice as many Americans thought the moon landing was faked -- staged on a Hollywood sound stage -- as thought that someone could make it into a middle-class life with just 12 years of schooling.

From the presentation:

"The difference is -- when you look at middle-class families -- if you needed 12 years back in 1970? The taxpayer paid for it. You got it all for free. All you had to do was show up . . . live there and show up.

By the year 2000, if you need a college diploma, you pay for it yourself.

Sure Berkeley and other state-supported schools? I guess that means you guys aren't paying any tuition? [Laughter]

Room, board, books, right? It's not very much -- I guess you borrowed maybe a dollar or two in order to do this?

But notice what that means. It means the launch -- what parents have to do to get that next generation into the middle class -- has shifted from being something that everybody pays for to something that only the families with children are paying for.

WITH THE ADVENT of what is an almost-mandatory two years of preschool for toddlers, Warren noted that -- in little more than a generation -- we've gone from a shot at a middle-class life requiring 12 years of free education to requiring 18 years of schooling, one-third of which parents are on the hook for.

Now imagine what it's like to be poor in America today . . . because we of the former middle class may all be there soon enough.

Listen my friends . . . to the Moby Grapes

Guten Morgen! This is your daily Omaha or, in this case, your daily "Omaha," with Moby Grape on the Mike Douglas Show in 1968.

Perhaps, though, I ought to just call the seminal psychedelic group "the Moby Grapes," so as to not publicly embarrass the ghost of Mike Douglas. Moby Grape, and the whole counterculture thing, confused Mike*. A lot.

(I had forgotten to add the asterisk to Mike Douglas*, which is a major faux pas for anyone who lived through 1960s and '70s television. Mike Douglas* always gets an *. It may have been somewhere in federal law, actually.)

But, yeah, Moby Grape confused the hell out of Mike* in 1968.


OF COURSE, things had not gotten any better by 1976, when Tom Waits first appeared on The Mike Douglas Show*. Tom Waits may have confused Mike Douglas* even more than "the Moby Grapes" did.

Mainstream America doesn't do eccentricity well. It does "eccentric genius" even less well.

And by the time you're done watching Mike Douglas* and Marvin Hamlisch -- and let's face it, Mike* wasn't musically fit to hold Waits' ashtray -- awkwardly condescend to the young eccentric genius, you have this intense desire to travel back in time, flick your Bic and hold it really close to their polyester duds.

Don't miss the end of the show. Young people's lack of exposure to really, really dumb, really, really awkward spectacles such as that has left them wholly unequipped to deal with a lot of crap life can throw at a person.

Is what I'm saying.

Dear Royals, sign this guy

Pay him what it takes.

But you won't, because perennially losing major-league teams are made, not born.

What we don't know won't hurt BP

We don't know what we don't know about what BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico . . . and all the fish in the sea.

And the Angel of Oily Death is happy to keep it that way.

When you're suspected of criminal acts, and surely liable for God knows how much civilly, you'd just as soon the Almighty be the only one Who knows the full extent of what you've done.

I suspect that's why BP . . . British Petroleum . . . the Angel of Oily Death . . . Those Lousy Rotten Capitalist-Pig Bastards -- whatever the hell you wish to call that destroyer of worlds -- is balking at paying for long-term testing of Gulf seafood.

THIS LITTLE THING is merely crucial in determining whether or not your oyster po-boy is going to send you to an early grave, or whether you're getting a heapin' helpin' of petroleum and Corexit with that shrimp etoufée or crab au gratin. New Orleans' WWL television reports:

State Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham says so far, BP is refusing to commit the dollars.

"BP has been slower and slower in responding to us and seems to be dragging their feet in making a commitment to fund the studies that we're going to need to ensure that this multi-billion dollar industry is viable in Louisiana," said Barham.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles says the company is still considering the seafood testing plan.

"Some of those requests went quite far out in time," said Suttles. "They were looking at up to 20 years. At this point in the response, it just isn't appropriate to actually look that far out."

Suttles suggests that the state look at paying for the program with money BP has already pledged to the oil spill recovery effort.

"The gulf research initiative, the $500 million we have made available to do long term impact assessments here in the gulf," said Suttles.

Secretary Barham says if BP doesn't voluntarily agree to the long term seafood testing plan, there are both criminal and civil remedies the state can use in an attempt to force BP to pay up.

It may be more and more difficult to talk to BP," said Barham. "It may be their attorneys that we're talking to."

IT'S ALL ABOUT confidence. It's about whether people are confident that Gulf seafood won't hurt them. It's about whether the Gulf fishing industry will survive or not.

But, hey! The well's no longer gushing! BP figures it's not their problem -- at least not until the law tells them it is.

And the "small people," fishermen and consumers alike, get drilled again.

Why We Bite

In the 1940s, the government propaganda machine revved up to produce the Why We Fight series of films, explaining to ordinary Americans why we were neck deep in the Second World War.

I realize we no longer have the genius of Frank Capra to call upon, but maybe the Ad Council could do something with this old Charles Nelson Reilly commercial to explain to the average Joe how, exactly, we came to be just another banana republic.

Oh, you'll go bananas. . . .

It's a Tony Hayward world out there, and the soon-to-be-ex-BP CEO's monumental solipsism and tone deafness obviously is catching.

The Obama clan has it now, probably transmitted from Mr. Let 'Em Eat Oil to the president when he "kicked" Hayward's ass at that White House confab a while back. And then Barack gave it to Michelle who, while eschewing yachting after killing the Gulf of Mexico, did settle on a high-dollar Spanish fiesta while the American economy burns, the Gulf states smother and the ordinary Joe languishes.

OF COURSE, robber barons and the diffident rich always have behaved so, even throughout American history. But when the First Family starts behaving like Marie Antoinette amid hard times, widespread austerity and spreading decay, you just may find you've become a banana republic.

And even the Australians, a world away, are noticing. Look at this in The Age from Sydney:

As the U.S. economy endures high unemployment and a jittery stock market, President Barack Obama has preached sacrifice and fiscal discipline. But the pictures coming out of a sun-splashed Spanish resort may be sending a different message.

First lady Michelle Obama is in the midst of a five-day trip to a luxury resort along with a handful of friends, her younger daughter, aides and Secret Service. Her office said the Obamas would pay for personal expenses, but would not reveal the taxpayer cost for the government employees.

Elected officials -- Democrats and Republicans -- were reluctant to weigh in, not wanting to appear critical of the President's wife. But the trip provided fodder for television news shows, talk-show hosts and bloggers. Critics portrayed the foreign getaway as tone-deaf to the deep economic anxiety back home. Every first family takes vacations: the criticism aimed at Mrs Obama is that she chose to visit a foreign country rather than remain in the US and support its fragile economy.

Just last month, Mrs Obama flew to the Florida panhandle, a tourist draw hit hard by the oil spill crisis, and delivered the message that for parents "looking for things to do with their kids this summer … this is a wonderful place to visit."

The opulence of the European trip also has drawn scrutiny. Mr Obama has urged frugality in lean economic times. He once cautioned that families saving money for college shouldn't "blow a bunch of cash in Vegas."

AT LEAST in Vegas, there's the slimmest of chances you might hit it big, though. When you're dealing with Washington, politics and the public's bankroll, not so much.

Because while money still talks (in this case, en Español), Obama's bullshit has just taken a walk.

3 Chords & the Truth: We all sprawl

It's the scene of the crime.

It's the place we longed for -- the place to get away from it all. The place to be an individual just like the Joneses, with whom we must keep up.

It's the adjustable-rate American Dream, the one where we lose ourselves as we lose our way, and the neighbors can't help because -- frankly -- we don't know them all that well.

It's the hour commute of our discontent. It's where we come to know poverty can be more than a lack of disposable income. It's where we have everything and have nothing.

It's a way of life we're finding we no longer can afford, fueled by resources we're running out of.

It's Suburbia . . . and we're taking a musical look at it this week on 3 Chords & the Truth, just in time for the release of Arcade Fire's excellent new album, The Suburbs.

What does it all mean? Well, it depends.

Download the Big Show, put on your musical thinking cap and see whether you can sort it all out. Or just turn off your brain and rock out -- it's totally up to you.

Really.

LET'S SEE . . . what else we got going on on this edition of 3 Chords & the Truth? Well, lots, actually.

We go under the covers, and you can use your imagine to decide what that's all about, because I ain't giving it away here. You'll have to listen to be sure.

And . . . what else? Let's see, we also go all the way back to 1949 to see what was on the radio back then, as we look for the roots of rock 'n' roll in there somewhere.

Sound like fun? Yeah? Then what are you waiting for? It's up there on the audio player, and it's here, too.

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

Ghost mountains

They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days my life, I feel it has no purpose
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface

'Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They're calling at me, come and find your kind
Sometimes I wonder if the World's so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there's no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights

-- Arcade Fire,
Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

Hey! We have our standards!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Let me see if I have this straight. Or gay. I forget.

The country is in an uproar over gay marriage, because that's all weird and stuff, because the gays found out that everybody else was married to somebody else on Facebook and all they had was a crappy little ceremony in the San Francisco courthouse, when everybody else gets a destination wedding in Italy -- and then one at Disney World, complete with fireworks but no divorce, which is so easy today that half of all married couples get one (So what's the deal with forgetting that common little detail?) -- and that's, like, bigamy, only the lawyers say they're just being drama queens, because nobody sexted them pictures of their junk like Brett Favre, who supposedly texted pictures of himself playing with his while wearing Crocs -- Crocs? -- because Jenn Sterger is hot and kinda looks like his wife, only 16 years younger and not a grandma.

We know Sterger because she's got a show on Versus because she used to go to Florida State football games damn near nekkid, which got her enhanced physique into Maxim and Playboy -- before she took her implants out, because she wanted to, like, totally go countercultural here -- which led to a Sports Illustrated column and a gig as a New York Jets sideline reporter, which is what apparently intrigued Mr. Retirement's penis, and now Whoopi Goldberg is all pissed off and cussing a blue streak at gate crashers, if not penis posers, which makes Michaele Salahi cry, because somebody's gonna be irate when pictures of your wanger end up on Facebook for your other wife to find, and why should gays have to miss out on that kind of wedded bliss?

AND WHY DID Michelle Obama ditch the prez on his birthday anyway to spend hundreds of grand on a Spanish vacay with the kid?

I ask this because we are a sensible, sober and moral people who think marriage is sacred and not to be trifled with by just any Tom, Dick or Harry. Or any consenting combination of the above.


IT IS the very sanctity of marriage and the spiritual and cultural gravity of sexuality (and how we use it) that is what's behind the monster effin' rush you get by boinking pert little interns less than half your age. Or sleeping your way up the corporate food chain.

Or so they say over at ESPN.

A cup of mushroom tea

You know what Bob Inglis is?

A socialist. A Republican socialist.

The veteran South Carolina congressman is a conservative-hating, Bilderburger-coddling, quisling traitor who's trying to kiss that crook Bill Clinton's ass while he runs interference for the communist "organizer" Barack Hussein Obama -- the Kenyan witch doctor now occupying (in the Nazi sense of the word) the White House.

Inglis is a hoity-toity little snot who thinks he's better than the people he's selling out up there in Washington, D.C., and now he's bitter because patriots saw through his "conservative" act and handed him his pinko-commie ass in the Republican runoff.

AND NOW the little traitor is showing his true colors, what with all his sour-grapes trash talking about God-fearing tea-party patriots to that godless commie rag Mother Jones:

During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn't—or wouldn't—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

Later, Inglis mentioned this meeting to another House member: "He said, 'You mean you sat there for more than 10 minutes?' I said, 'Well, I had to. We were between primary and runoff.' I had a two-week runoff. Oh my goodness. How do you..." Inglis trails off, shaking his head.

(snip)

Why not give these voters what they wanted? Inglis says he wasn't willing to lie:

I refused to use the word because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton—the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House judiciary committee in the 1990s]—at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I've ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, "The most violated commandment in Washington, DC"—everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President—"is, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'" I thought, "He's right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington." For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I'm conservative. We disagree...But I don't need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.

Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.

Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild. That was what I was dealing with."

OOOOOOH. Tea-party patriots are scawy, scawy people. Ooooooh, the mean tea-pawty peoples aw gowing to huwt powah, powah Biwul Ingwiss!

The RINO sounds like Barney . . . Barney Frank! HAAAAAA!

And I'll bet some Jew put him up to saying tea-party people are anti-Semitic.


OH . . . get this! He says the Republicans will regret following the common-sense, freedom-loving patriots instead of the commie-libs and Bilderburgers!

Inglis is a casualty of the tea party-ization of the Republican Party. Given the decisive vote against him in June, it's clear he was wiped out by a political wave that he could do little to thwart. "Emotionally, I should be all right with this," he says. And when he thinks about what lies ahead for his party and GOP House leaders, he can't help but chuckle. With Boehner and others chasing after the tea party, he says, "that's going to be the dog that catches the car." He quickly adds: "And the Democrats, if they go into the minority, are going to have an enjoyable couple of years watching that dog deal with the car it's caught."

AND WE'RE GONNA enjoy watching you burn in hell with your communiss friends, you America-hating pansy!

You don't get it, do you Inglis? Or is that English? You sure don't sound like a real conservative American.

You just don't get that sometimes you have to destroy the village to save it. Destroy it all! Destroy it so that the green shoots of freedom will emerge from the rubble of the socialist state, fertilized by the corpses of all the pinkos and the parasites.

Burn, baby, burn!

Oil, hell! Watch out for RF burns

In this vintage trade ad for Channel 2 in Baton Rouge, WBRZ, being smothered in crude oil would seem to be the least of Pierre the Pelican's problems.

As a matter of fact, that 100 kilowatts of radio-frequency excitement he's hangin' onto is about to wipe the smile right off his beak.

If you're laughing right now, you just may be a geek. And if, in the lede, you recognized the wording WBRZ used in every on-air legal identification way back when, you may be a double-plus geek.

Me? I would be your leader.

Life in these United States: Shores apart

On the Jersey shore

"I'm the best thing in this town," she arrogantly declared after cops busted her for being a drunk nuisance Friday, according to an insider.

"She was bad-mouthing everyone who walked by her [in the police stationhouse]. She was saying 'I'm a star, you can't do this to me.'"

Snooki unleashed a boozed-up, expletive-filled rant after being arrested for disorderly conduct, and attempted to use her new-found fame as a "get-out-of-jail-free" card.

"You can't tell me what to do - I'm Snooki," she yelled at officers, according to witnesses. "Do you know who I am? I'm f------ Snooki. You can't do this to me. I'm f------ Snooki. You guys are going to be sorry for this. Release me!"

Not surprisingly, her harsh language didn't do the trick.

The pint-sized reality TV star was hauled away from the Jersey shore boardwalk in cuffs Friday as her oversized shades slid down her nose. A photo of her looking dishevelled with mascara running down her face while in custody also surfaced yesterday, as locals took stock of her unruly behavior and lashed out at the reality show cast.

-- From the (New York) Daily News

On the Louisiana shore

"My world's been turned upside down," says Chris Wilson, a charter boat captain in Venice, La. "Our life as fishing guides and marina owners — and everybody down here. We used to fish every day. Now we ride around and look for oil, or ride people around, you know. They say we're working, they say they're paying us, but nobody's got paid yet ... I guess it's coming."

This quotation comes from photographer David Zimmerman's latest series, "Gulf Coast." A fine-art photographer based in New York and Taos, N.M., Zimmerman relocated to Louisiana just after BP's April oil spill and, for the past few months, has been using a large-format view camera to put faces to the oil spill. "For all the devastation I saw offshore," Zimmerman writes in his artist statement, "the worst of what I saw was onshore; in the faces and voices of the people who call this place home."

-- From NPR

Sing along with Mitch

Welcome to one of my earliest television memories -- Sing Along With Mitch.

"Mitch," of course, was the legendary Mitch Miller -- TV sing-along host, world-class oboist and hit-making record executive -- who died Saturday at 99. And, yes, his program was as corny as hell.

The critics hated it. But the audience loved it -- this show that would come to be known to Boomers nationwide, along with Guy Lombardo and The Lawrence Welk Show, as an exemplar of Stuff Your Parents Liked.

As a toddler, I liked the bouncing ball over the on-screen lyrics.


AS A MIDDLE-AGED, graying (and balding) Baby Boomer, I like that watching old episodes of Sing Along With Mitch makes me smile. And sing along.

And as someone who bemoans our culture's penchant for giving the Snookis of the world their own TV shows -- and I'm not sure what's more disturbing, laughing at the white trash or wanting to be the white trash -- I desperately miss the innocence of the idea of sitting around the Zenith console and singing along to songs whose prime was a long, long time ago.


LIKE AN old song of Milton Berle's says (and, yes, Milton Berle wrote songs), "I'd give a million tomorrows for just one yesterday." Wouldn't we all -- especially nowadays.








YEAH, this is corny stuff. Embarrassingly so. Just like family.

And it feels comfortable, like a cup of hot tea and lemon -- though we're loathe to admit it.

It feels like home . . . or what our time-edited memories of home would have us believe.

Now Mitch Miller is dead. He was preceded in death by a world that could countenance such as Sing Along With Mitch on the public airwaves.

And we mourn him. And we mourn his lost world -- that bygone era of gentler sensibilities and no Snooki . . . well, at least not on television.

Today we mourn home, to which we cannot return.

They died for your sins

Never has there been a more appropriately named place than Delacroix, La.

Delacroix. De la croix.

Of the cross.

Two millennia ago, civilized society hung the Son of God on a cross and killed him due to practical concerns, as recounted in John 11:

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So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs.
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If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation."
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But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing,
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nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish."
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He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
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and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
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So from that day on they planned to kill him.

TWO MILLENNIA LATER, modern, industrial society hung Delacroix, its people and their way of life on a modern, industrial cross and killed it due to practical concerns, as recounted in The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune:

On a blustery spring day, Delacroix native Lloyd Serigne stands on the banks of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, 30 miles south of New Orleans, talking about the village that raised him in the 1950s. Reaching into a deep well of memories, he paints an idyllic picture: A community of several hundred fishers, farmers and trappers whose homes were surrounded by a wetlands paradise of high ridges, marshes and swamps. The outside world -- unwanted, unneeded -- seemed a thousand miles away.

But the scene surrounding him only mocks that vision.

Naked slabs and raw pilings that once supported homes stand like tombstones in open, soggy ground. Bare tree trunks rise from a salt marsh that used to be a vegetable field. Battered home appliances, ice chests and derelict boats litter the bank while a high tide moves through the remains of a hardwood forest. And a steady stream of heavy equipment heads down the road to fight the invasion of BP's oil.

None of it matches memories that seem as sharp as yesterday's news.

"Really, what we had here was a paradise -- a natural paradise," Serigne, 70, says with a smile of fond remembrance. He pauses to shake his head, a gesture half of wonder, half of despair.

"But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me like I'm crazy. They just can't imagine what was here such a short time ago.

"And now it's gone. Just gone."

DELACROIX. It died for your sins -- or, more specifically, for your SUV and all your stuff. A people, a culture and a now-gone landscape have born a cross of our society's making.

And the blood of people, cultures and whole places that are no more is upon us and our children . . . and our avarice.

Dinner and a (horror) movie

They don't do restaurant reviews like they used to.

For that matter, they don't make muscatel like they used to. And they damn sure don't make local television like they used to.

Where's Dr. San Guinary when you need him?

The ratings game, explained

Look at the television -- and radio -- biz as the Hundred Years' War.

Back when broadcasters were first itching for a fight, back when a radio was a big wooden box with glowing tubes inside, the War Between the Stations was a glorious cause, and Brand X was a dastardly foe worthy of one's best shot. We note above the enthusiasm which Dr. San Guinary enters the fray for KMTV on the Omaha battlefield of the 1970s.

Yes, the combatants were full of piss and vinegar and, by God, Brand X would be finished off in a few months at worst. Think of the barbecue at Twelve Oaks at the start of Gone With the Wind

BUT THE WAR drags on. And war is expensive. And you get politicians corporate execs who figure the ratings war can be fought on the cheap -- a calculated strategy for reducing taxpayers' burden increasing shareholder value.

The troops become weary, and morale flags. Then, on stage at an industry gathering, open dissent:


NOW, DECADES later, radio is all but dead. Local television is but a shell of its former self.

Dr. San Guinary was canceled in 1980 and, sadly, departed this mortal coil in 1988.

And today, Channel 7 is hanging on, Channel 6 is known as Channel Sux, while the once-proud army for which the good doctor fought so . . . er . . . for which the good doctor fought so, is known simply by the results of its ratingskampf:

Channel Third.