We're driving down the middle of Music Road today, spinning sophisticated selections in full-fidelity stereophonic sound to provide the soundtrack for the cocktail lounge of your dreams.
I'll give you a moment to get your Draper on.
Skinny tie? Check.
Fedora? Check.
Old-Fashioned? Hit me again, Sam. And a martini for the lady.
YEP, this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth would not be out of place one bit somewhere on the FM dial of four or five decades ago -- apart from folks saying, "Hey! This is the best station on the radio!"
This week, the Big Show is all about music for grown-ups back in a time when I wasn't one yet. And I must say that the grown-ups weren't nearly so dumb as I thought back then. Their taste in music, I must admit, was impeccable.
Which is as good a word as any to describe what you'll hear this week on this little program of ours. So sit yourself down, take off your hat and order yourself something refreshing. The entertainment's gonna be great tonight.
IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
Over on Rod Dreher's American Conservative blog, it took exactly nine comments before someone started throwing around the L-word to denigrate anyone expressing any doubt that St. Louis cops may have been too quick to turn a disturbed, steak-knife wielding individual into Swiss cheese.
Could there be any more telling example of the dangerous ideological warfare this country is engaged in? Someone had just watched a cell-phone video of a man being shot to death, and the first instinct after someone says "Whoa! Wait a minute!" was to politicize the entire thing. To start, without any evidence of anyone's actual political leanings, hurling the word "liberal" as an epithet.
The video above isn't the only tragedy we are witnessing here. It's also tragic that, in a world gripped by spiritual, cultural and social crises, the only thing Western civilization (or what is left of it) has left is ideology.
If that’s the way we’re going to roll these days, I suppose it would be equally “fair” to throw out the F-word — fascist — to describe anyone who’d be so damned quick to politicize a tragic death from the get-go, taking a knee-jerk position that police were absolutely, positively right to gun down a guy with a steak knife and dismissing any questioning of the officers’ actions, period.
HERE'S a thought: A world without doubt is a breeding ground for genocidal maniacs.
Here’s another thought, this one specifically dealing with the "officer-involved shooting" of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis: There were people reasonably close to the officers’ line of fire. There were storefronts behind the guy that appeared to be in the line of fire. What if the cops had missed with a few rounds?
What if they’d missed and there was a ricochet off of a brick wall?
Most hunters know better than to pull the trigger when there’s a possibility you might hit something else if you miss your target. Many cops, it would seem, not so much.
FURTHERMORE, why not slowly back away to keep separation between you and the mentally-ill guy with a knife and buy a little time for other options? Why not put the door of the police SUV between you and the disturbed man?
Buy time. Try to engage. Make an effort to calm the guy down.
Why is deadly force seemingly the first and only option in such situations? And note that the officers’ guns were out the second they got out of their vehicle.
I can’t say for certain whether or not the shooting was justified but, as others in the media have said, this just doesn’t look right.
I THINK the St. Louis shooting -- not to mention the egregious police misbehavior during the Ferguson, Mo., protests -- raises numerous legitimate questions that require answers and not being derided as a “liberal” — a veritable enemy of “truth, justice and the American Way.”
I wouldn’t think twice if the St. Louis incident was the response of two infantrymen on the battlefield. But police officers aren’t infantrymen — or at least they used not to be. I think it raises a legitimate question of whether cops now are being trained as such and, if so, why?
But there’s no room for questions in Ideological America, where the “other side” is always the Other, and we’re always spoiling for a fight. As God is my witness, this will not end well.