The last grown-up in American media

 
WFAA sports anchor Dale Hansen may be the last actual grown-up in American media.

All the rest, I am reasonably certain, are dead or have been run off by corporate fools who make human sacrifices to shareholder value.

Please watch this, because this grown-up says some grown-up things about the hellish chaos which we know as the New Normal.

You do that, and instead of producing an episode of 3 Chords & the Truth this week, I will go back to watching my hometown teeter at the abyss -- You may have heard of it recently . . . Baton Rouge, La. -- while white racists unleash their racist slurs on local-media comments sections, enraged blacks lash back with some of their own and local newspaper and TV figures enable this incendiary cesspool in the name of "free speech." (Nota bene: Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns the press. Listen to me; I got an A in media law in college.)

Alas, 2016 is a lot like 1968 -- "one goddamn thing after another."

And now, Minnesota

Amerika today. We have a problem, and it's the police.

We have a problem, and it's that every citizen has become a potential terrorist or insurgent in their eyes.

We have a problem. It looks a lot like some sort of fascist police state, and lots of Americans like it that way.

Donald Trump did not come from nowhere.

We have a problem. When we weren't looking, America became Amerika.

No, we can't all just get along

I've always thought of myself as a writer, among other things. I have a journalism background -- I've worked as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. I know my way around a keyboard.

Increasingly, I find myself without words, at least ones that I can print here. There is something to be said -- something important. I wish I knew what the hell it was.

The enormity of evil has murdered my words. Killed them dead, just like the Baton Rouge, La., police killed Alton Sterling.

Sterling was the CD Man at the corner of North Foster and Fairfields, in north Baton Rouge, otherwise known as the 'hood. Truth be told, lots of my hometown is the 'hood. This part of town, like so many others in north BR, used to be working class and white back when I was a kid.

Members of the community calling for an economic protest over the weekend. #AltonSterling pic.twitter.com/2Kdj9VKqH3

— WWL-TV (@WWLTV) July 7, 2016

White people hauled ass. Now it's the 'hood, the place where -- at least according to too many of those white people who abandoned their city for points south, east and way north -- the "animals" live.

Anyway, the CD Man peddled compact discs, bootleg and otherwise, outside the Triple S Food Mart. That's how he scraped together what some people might call a living, or as much of a living as you can when you have a long rap sheet and can't get a job.

Long rap sheets happen in the 'hood, the 'hood in my hometown and yours, too. You grow up poor, you grow up lacking a father . . . or a mother . . . or both, and then shit starts to happen. Then shit snowballs. Then you get out of jail and peddle CDs. And then you carry a pistol because you got mugged or a buddy got mugged or you're just scared of the 'hood that is your home.

Then you cross paths with the Baton Rouge cops. Again.

And now you're dead, a big-ass hole blown in your chest, point-blank from a cop's service weapon. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I got theories, probably wrong ones. I got no words -- no sufficient ones, at least.

I just know that there Baton Rouge is, sitting atop a tinderbox with people -- many of them white, self-righteous and racist as a son of a bitch -- tossing lit matches from atop platforms provided them by local media. Add some outraged African-American counterparts in incivility, and you have a combox race war. All you need are guns.

There are a few of those floating around Louisiana. And America.

Click for full-size image

I COULD go on and on about the gross irresponsibility of the media aiding and abetting a racist, rage-fueled shitstorm at a time such as this, on the Internet there in America's own banana republic, which of course is a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump's Amerika. Could even complain to those in charge of the newspaper and TV stations.

Wouldn't do any good. The last grown-ups in the media were laid off sometime around 2010.

Heat draws eyeballs. Light gets you squat.

If you're looking for a ray of sunshine amid the darkness, if you're looking for some earthly hope in this space, I apologize for wasting your time. I got nothing.

I got no great hope for my hometown or my home state. I got no great hope that racism won't get anything but worse in this Age of Trump. I got no words -- no useful ones. I got squat.

All I have is that familiar sick feeling in my middle-aged gut. All I have is sorrow. All I have is contempt for my hometown and the hateful stupidity it seems to nurture like a Petri dish does bacteria.

I wish I could say, like the Steve Taylor song, "Since I Gave Up Hope (I Feel A Lot Better)." But I don't. I'm just the same -- tired, pissed and sick to my stomach, just without any real hope this side of the Second Coming.

It's always 1959 somewhere. Somewhere, thy name is Baton Rouge.

3 Chords & the Truth: The vast wasteland at 75

A country can't become awash in television -- and TV commercials -- all of a sudden. You have to start somewhere.

Broadcasting, July 14, 1941

Somewhere was New York City exactly 75 years ago. On July 1, 1941, Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" of commercial television consisted of Channel 1, Channel 2 and Channel 4. But Channel 4 was still "experimental" and couldn't run ads, so that leaves us with Channels 1 and 2 -- WNBT (NBC) and WCBW (CBS) -- on that august prewar day in July.

Yes, Virginia, there was a Channel 1 until 1946.

On that July day three-quarters of a century ago, the National Broadcasting Company was the first to "go to commercial." Before the start of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game, a WNBT camera focused on a test pattern, and in that test pattern was a clock -- a Bulova clock. And that was the first television ad.

The things have been with us since . . . annoying us, amusing us and giving us time to make a trip down the hall. I guess that's well worth taking note of on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

IN OTHER WORDS, get yourself ready for an entire set of songs devoted to the boob tube. With a little luck, video won't kill the Internet radio star.

Also get yourself ready for a jazz set, a sweet set and a hot one, too. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

Or so we've been told. I guess that's why this little program from Omaha, by God, Nebraska is so dad-blasted eclectic.

You are listening to 3C&T, Omaha. Bulova watch time is . . . time to turn on the Big Show and listen to the music.

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

3 Chords & the Truth: Excellence in hi-fi

This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is high fidelity.

Both musically and sonically. And it's best listened to on an honest-to-God hi-fi -- perhaps like this one. But it'll work on something newer, too . . . just without that certain je ne sais quoi.

That's the thing you can count on with the Big Show, fidelity to the music -- good music -- and the highest fidelity in audio. If you don't believe me, just give it a listen.

We're back from a couple of weeks off, reinvigorated and ready to lay some fantastic, and fantastically diverse, tunes on you. This week, we'll be dipping heavily into the year 1977, with a lot more vintages thrown in as well. And a nice sampling of pop and classic jazz.

And that's about it. Just the usual sonic excellence, which you have come to expect coming from the Omaha studios of 3 Chords & the Truth. So let's quit the pontificating and get on with the listening.

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

Monday night at the CWS

Nothing to say here, move along . . . to the photos, which happen to be some random slices of life Monday evening at the College World Series here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

Getting the picture in the Age of Terror

It's summer in Omaha. And with the beginning of summer comes the College World Series, a fine way to spend a sultry evening in late June.

Added to the mix, starting next week, will be the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials at the CenturyLink Center Omaha, just across the street from TD Ameritrade Park downtown.

The CWS is Omaha's signature event, one that has become part of this Midwestern city's very being. It has come to symbolize what we all love most about amateur sports and about America's national pastime.

IT'S THE PICTURE Omaha wants to present to the country, and the one America wants to present to the world. Here, three of these pictures belong together.

Three of these pictures are kind of the same. Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here?

Now, with apologies to Sesame Street, it's time to play our game.

Proceed.

SORRY for the blurriness of the picture that's not the same, the one immediately above. The sports Nazis of the NCAA won't let me bring my digital SLR with the long lenses into the stadium, and when you zoom in with an iPhone camera, you get what you get.

So let me tell you what you're seeing here. The Omaha policeman on the right is carrying what appears to be some permutation of an AR-15 -- an assault rifle. These officers are stationed right before you get to the ticket-takers, and you don't get more in plain sight than that.

It took me aback -- not that CWS security hasn't always been this heavy in our post-9/11 world, but that this year, in the era of ISIS and a week past Orlando, it seems to be more conspicuous  than ever. In your face, even.

I'm not faulting the local cops. I'm not questioning the security strategy. And I'm certainly not getting in the face of the cop with the military-grade firearm to get a better picture of his assault rifle. Besides, I look rather Mediterranean in this Age of Trump.

What I am saying is this is sad. Damned sad. It might be the right thing, but it is so, so wrong.

America's right-wing, gun-nut wingnuts don't want us to become just like those socialist "Euroweenies." Seen the security at the Euro soccer championships in France?

Looks to me like we just have.

We go on hurting each other, tearing each other apart

The United States has suffered -- yet again -- a horrible mass shooting. Another mind-numbing, soul-killing episode of domestic terrorism.

This latest, early Sunday morning, came as some madman of Afghan heritage and a Muslim upbringing shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 and wounding more than 50 others in the deadliest mass shooting in American history before an Orlando SWAT team gunned him down. The mass-murderer -- the terrorist who aimed to deal with homosexuals the same way Adolf Hitler did -- pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in a phone call to 911 dispatchers.

The atrocity's aftermath, unsurprisingly in these times, has been one of scapegoating, recriminations and outright mau-mauing on all sides. Unsurprisingly, our country's angry-ideologue class, along with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have been in the middle of the national freakout.

Take your pick on whom to blame, because everybody's getting tarred so far. Our battered, crumbling American society is in a bad patch of its ongoing nervous breakdown, and American Conservative senior editor and blogger Rod Dreher ain't feeling so good himself:

Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection. As the AP story said:

Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech.

“We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”

Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.

SO . . . what we're hearing is that, for fear that Hillary Clinton will open up a can of politically correct WhoopAss on believing Christians, it is somehow understandable and legitimate that allegedly believing Christians would cast their votes for a candidate who:

• Actively and unequivocally encouraged violence against protesters at his campaign events


• Clearly stated his support of torture — acts that not only are profoundly immoral but also are defined as war crimes in both domestic and international law


• Differs not a whit from Hillary Clinton on abortion, based on his record and not his multiple campaign positions on the subject


• Has reiterated his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, an act of religious bigotry that flies in the face of U.S. constitutional law and would, soon enough, be used against Christians once the forest of the law had been cut down and we had nowhere left to hide


• Has called for the retributive mass murder of terrorists’ wives, children and families because “We gotta be tough.


• Has used blatant bigotry and stereotyping to scapegoat and engender hatred toward Mexicans as a whole


• Sought to bully a federal judge of Mexican heritage presiding over a lawsuit against him, deploying outrageously racist arguments in the process


• Refused to immediately repudiate the support of onetime neo-Nazi and KKK grand dragon David Duke, and who regularly sends out rhetorical dog whistles to skinheads, Kluxers and all other ilks of alt-right refuse


• Has refused to rule out using nuclear weapons in the Middle East and even Europe. Europe! 


• Is a well-known moral degenerate who routinely denigrates women, this in addition to his entire adult lifetime of sexually using and objectifying them. (We are supposed to elect this as president of the United States because we’re freaked out over gays and the tragically gender-confused? Really?)


• Has built a long “business resumé” of shady dealings, crackpot schemes, failed ventures born of sheer narcissism and, finally, alleged out-and-out fraud


• Routinely bullies his political opponents


• Routinely threatens his political opponents


• Routinely makes slanderous and outrageous accusations against his political opponents, the latest being against the president of the United States when he insinuated Barack Obama was somehow in cahoots with Islamist extremists.

St. Maximilian Kolbe

I AM SORRY, but even thinking of voting for such a candidate won’t fly — not on grounds of one’s faith in Jesus Christ . . . not on grounds of one’s support of the United States Constitution and the rule of law.

That may mean that Christians are just f***ed in this election but this is the real world, and f***ed happens.

As for myself, I’d rather be honorably martyred under Hillary Clinton than live in dishonor under President Trump, effectively repudiating my Catholic beliefs as I shoveled moral excrement upon my Savior and my faith.

Crazy Billy's Louisiana fire sale

Click to see full size

If at first, going behind your governor's back to try to broker a flim-flam scam with Iraq doesn't succeed in bringing instant riches to your bankrupt Third Worldish state, fire your state museum's well-regarded director and go for eBay instead.

Most places, folks would call that some insane s***.

In Louisiana, that's just called another day in the lieutenant governor's office.

Tucked inside an unmarked, nondescript corner building on Chartres Street in the French Quarter are hundreds of thousands of carefully cataloged artifacts spanning more than three centuries of Louisiana’s cultural heritage.

The Louisiana State Museum system, with five nearby facilities that are open to the public, uses the four-story, climate-controlled storage facility to house the rest of its vast collection of historical records, gilt-framed paintings, period clothing and other artifacts that date back as far as Louisiana’s colonial days.

As state lawmakers have grappled with an estimated $600 million shortfall in next year’s budget, the museum system’s financial picture appeared bleak — an initially scheduled 37 percent drop in its state appropriation on top of years of funding cuts that left the museum system with its lowest budget and smallest staff in more than a decade.

Nungesser

After six months on the job, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser has been looking for ways to cut costs and raise revenue for the museum. One idea he’s exploring: selling the system’s storage building, which sits on 7,700 square feet of prime French Quarter real estate, and some of its more than 400,000 artifacts — those that are deemed to be of limited value.

“Why are we storing art in the middle of the French Quarter in such a valuable building?” Nungesser said. “That’s such an expensive building to maintain. I’d much rather see that cost going into maintaining and improving our museums.”

YOU JUST KNOW that Billy Nungesser is going to bring the same common sense, expertise and attention to detail that he did in his James Bond mission to do a world-class deal with a shady go-between to realize riches for Louisiana by refining Iraqi oil and building Iraqi supertankers to transport it.

One small detail slipped by Nungesser, though. Nobody in authority in Washington or Baghdad knew what the hell he was talking about.

Oops. But this museum deal will work out a lot better, just trust him. And besides, he's learned his lesson about doing sketchy stuff behind the backs of folks who need to know:

A former two-term president of Plaquemines Parish, Nungesser was elected lieutenant governor last fall and took office in January. By law, the lieutenant governor oversees the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, which includes the Louisiana State Museum — a system that includes museums in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and other cities.

Last month, Nungesser dismissed the system’s director, Mark Tullos, a Baton Rouge native who took over in 2013.

In interviews, several board members — who declined to comment on the record — said they were surprised to learn about Tullos’ departure only after the fact. They saw Tullos as a decent guy who held the system together despite steep budget cuts and additional challenges, like last year’s mold outbreak at the 1850 House — a house museum that is part of the Lower Pontalba Building — and the collections building.

Nungesser was vague about why he fired Tullos, but he said museum leaders didn’t have a well-thought-out budget and seemingly “just went from one fire to another fire.”

“Not that Mark didn’t do his best job, but we needed — you’ve got to have somebody at the top setting the rules, the goals and what’s expected of people,” Nungesser said.

UH . . . just do what Nungesser says, because lieutenant governor. Really, this'll work. Just ask Nungesser's predecessor, Jay Dardenne, who's now Gov. John Bel Edwards' commissioner of administration, who described selling the storage building . . . as an iffy proposition..

“If — it’s a big if — but if that building were sold, it would have to be declared surplus," he said, "and there’s a statutory scheme that governs what would happen.” In other words, the money wouldn't go to the state museum; it would go into the general fund of a state that has bigger problems than raising money to run the state museum.

Uh . . . what does Dardenne know? People say he's a RINO anyway -- a Republican in name only. He's probably not even voting for Trump.

No, we need to talk to an expert. Yeah, that's the ticket.

But if he wants to start listing items from the collection on eBay, he’s going to have a hard time convincing [longtime museum-board member Rosemary] Ewing.

“If it’s valuable on eBay, it’s valuable to us, too,” said Ewing .

Ewing was part of the board that hired Tullos. She “thought he did a really good job” and would have appreciated a heads-up that he was being dismissed.

Others once involved with the museum contend that Baton Rouge politics plays an outsized role in the system’s management.

“I’ve been a director at five different institutions, including the Louisiana State Museum, and it’s the only place that I’ve ever worked where there was incredibly and completely unprofessional interference in the day-to-day operation of the museum,” said David Kahn, who now is executive director of the Adirondack Museum in New York.

Kahn was forced out of the local director’s job by then-Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who pushed for legislation giving him the power to hire and fire the director. Not long afterward, he forced out Kahn, who had been hired two years earlier.

(snip) 

On the surface, Kahn said, selling the warehouse building is feasible. He recalled ill-fated incidents involving Formosan termite swarms and a fire years ago in a first-floor restaurant, Irene’s Cuisine. The museum recently told Irene’s its lease will not be renewed after 2018.

But such a sale, others say, may offer only a short-term solution.

“We may sell this place, but we’ve still got four stories of collections that we’re going to have to save and store somewhere,” Ewing said. “You don’t (display) everything all the time. You rotate it. That’s the attraction of a museum.”

WHAT the hell do they know?

Yes, it is good that the good people of Louisiana have a lieutenant governor who sweats the details. Oh, wait. Maybe he just sweats.

The Greatest

Muhammad Ali

1942-2016 

3 Chords & the Truth: Step into the studio

Step into the studio while I throw something on the turntable.

Ready for another episode of the Big Show? Great!

OK, stand by.

We're going live in five, four, three, two, one . . . .

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

Trump's Amerika . . . prophesied by ABC?

A fascistic American president goes rogue, decides to nuke Pakistan.

Just because. And does.

Sounds like great TV. (It was.) Sounds like a nightmare reality. (It could be.)

Now watch as prime-time TV of a few years ago meets a superpower that's going absolutely mad right now -- just in time to turn a roomful of television writers, circa 2012, into postmodern Nostradamuses, circa 2016.  

From Wikipedia:

When the crew of the U.S. Navy Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, the USS Colorado (SSBN-753), pick up a U.S. Navy SEAL team off Pakistan's coast, the Colorado receives an order to launch nuclear ballistic missiles at Pakistan.

Colorado's Commanding Officer, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher), asks for confirmation of the firing order because the orders were received through a legacy Cold War secondary communication channel, only to be used in the event that Washington, D.C. has already been destroyed. After confirming Washington's continued existence and refusing to fire the missiles until the command is sent through the proper system, Chaplin is relieved of command by the Deputy Secretary of Defense William Curry, and the Colorado's second in command, Lieutenant Commander Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman), is given command instead. When Kendal also questions the orders and asks for confirmation, the vessel is fired upon by the Virginia-class submarine USS Illinois (SSN-786). Two nuclear missile strikes are subsequently made on Pakistan by other U.S. forces.

Realizing they've been declared enemies of their own country, the Colorado seeks refuge on the island of Sainte Marina (a fictional French island located in the Indian Ocean) and commandeer a NATO communications and missile warning facility. When a pair of B-1 bombers is sent to attack the submarine and island, Chaplin launches a Trident nuclear missile towards Washington, D.C. to impress upon the national leadership that he's serious. The B-1s turn away at the last minute, but Chaplin (who has altered the missile's final target coordinates) allows the missile to visibly overfly Washington, D.C. and explode 200 miles beyond in the open Atlantic, the explosion clearly visible from both Washington and New York City. Via a television feed to the media, he then declares a 200-mile exclusion zone around Sainte Marina.

Now, the crew must find a way to prove their innocence and find out who in the U.S. government has set them up, so they can finally return home.

OURS IS an age of signs and wonders. Mostly signs, and prophecy can turn up in unlikely places. Like prime-time network TV.

Last Resort, which ran for just one season, was one of my favorite TV shows -- never missed it, and every episode kept you on the edge of your seat. And every episode, I kept thinking "This could happen. We are so close to this really happening."

Now that crypto-fascist, loose-cannon Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, we are close enough to TV-show-as-prophetic-voice that I am getting nervous.

No, that's a lie.

I am scared s***less. Donald Trump is a racist, unhinged, authoritarian thug -- one who has repeatedly espoused violence at home and abroad, advocates torture and other war crimes, and who says he just might go nuclear in the Middle East and maybe even Europe -- and that's just fine by about half of America. The United States as a constitutional, democratic republic is dying before our eyes, and it is not shaping up to be a peaceful end.

We have enough nuclear warheads and bombs to end life on Earth several times over . . . and a petulant, unstable know-nothing has an even shot at winning the "nuclear briefcase." 

IF YOU want to do some election-year political research, buy the 13 episodes of Last Resort. They may well be one of the most prescient previews of a Trump administration that you'll find.

Make sure you have extra underwear.

Who needs Manhattan?

The Manhattan skyline is glorious, of course. But, all in all, I'll take Omaha and the big Nebraska sky.

3 Chords & the Truth: It's gonna be so great

This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is brought to you by Erase-O, the modern miracle that ensures that it's really not your fault.

Because s*** be gettin' weird, and you got nothin' to do with it.

Likewise, if this edition of the Big Show isn't up to snuff (which is impossible, because it will be excellent and awesome) your Mighty Favog is not responsible for that. It's somebody else's fault. Everything is chill here, Boo.

The music is chill. Your host is chill. So why don't you chill out for the long weekend . . . and beyond. Let 3 Chords & the Truth  transport you beyond the weird. Beyond blame. Beyond all your cares.

MUSIC HAS power, and it's being brought to you commercial-free by Erase-O. Not only does Erase-O eradicate all blame . . . it also deleted all its sponsorship announcements during the show. Well, it would have, if that were its fault.

Which it isn't. It's Chinexico's fault. Yeah, that's the ticket. Blame crooked Chinexico, the rotten product that fouls everything up.

Anyway, listen to the program. It's gonna be so great, I can't tell you.

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

It Sounded Better in the Original German, Part 437

When the Nazis did propaganda, at least they did it with a certain panache.

I think of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will here. Yes, it was morally toxic propaganda for Nazi Germany, but it also was artistic toxic propaganda for Nazi Germany.

Now we come to morally toxic propaganda for the National Rifle Association, as conceived by . . . Charlie Daniels. (What? The devil went down to Fairfax?) Whereas Triumph des Willens put the world on notice that Germany was back, Germany was united and Germany would mess you up -- Danke, mein Führer! -- Charlie looks more like . . . how should I put this?

Perhaps (and I out myself as the kind of commie pinko fag that Charlie don't cotton to by my use of the word "perhaps") the NRA's Triumph des Schmucks could best be described merely by asking you to hold my beer before exhorting a restless nation "Hey, y'all! Watch this!"




THEN INSERT random slurs about your "Muslin" president (He ain't mine!) and pointy-headed lib'ruls, all the while you're picking a fight with the Iranians, because . . . Iranians!

The overall effect? God, we're a bunch of violent, overarmed, redneck dumbf***s! Wanna fight?

In this Age of Trump, it is cold comfort, I suppose, to consider that while this bunch of schmucks has the potential to cry havoc, it has neither the smarts nor des Willens to triumph. If this be der neuen Amerika, our self-destruction will be the world's reprieve.

The Great Society

I'll take 1964.

In 1964, folk music was a thing. A popular thing.

In 1964, hip-hop did not exist.

In 1964, the Republicans were running on "In your heart, you know he's right." Now, the GOP's running on "In your heart, you know he's Reich."

In 1964, the Democrats promised "The Great Society." Now, they're trying to avoid The Great Unraveling.

In 1964, LBJ ran the "Daisy ad," because could we really trust Goldwater with the Bomb? In 2016 . . . well, some things really don't change.

In 1964, you could buy this Brothers Four LP at Dayton's for $3.59. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $27.71 today.

Chalk up one for 2016. (And estate sales -- this cost me a buck.)

Remember, man, that you are dust

This cartoon comes from the 1928 edition of the Baton Rouge High School yearbook, the Fricassee.

I first saw it some 37 years ago, when I was layout editor of the 1979 edition of the Fricassee. Some of us were going through the yearbook archives, leafing through all the old editions of our school's annual that we could find in the cluttered old cabinets of our cluttered old classroom . . . and there it was.

Even back in 1978 or '79, even for those of us Baton Rouge public-school kids, who went to segregated schools -- legally segregated schools -- until just eight years before, the cartoon was striking. Stunning, actually.

Yes, it was the open racism -- the naked, unvarnished and unapologetic racism. But more than that, it was that kids our age -- a decade or more before our parents would be that age -- would be that ugly, that publicly and that casually. This was something powerful enough to give pause to a generation, black and white, raised in the midst of, then in the dark shadow of, Jim Crow.

We had grown up with the crazy aunt in the Southern attic. For many of us, the N-word was something we heard every day. For others of us, the N-word was something used to describe us every day.

"Humor" from the 1924 Fricassee (Click to enlarge)

FOR SOME OF US, rank hypocrisy was a virtue that our culture had developed in the years since 1928. Southerners of a certain age can explain to you . . . well, can try to explain to you how there are worse things than being a damned, two-faced hypocrite. For instance, one worse thing is not being one.

Another worse thing is white Baton Rouge, circa 1928 -- of living with a horror you cannot experience as horror at all.

Can you imagine the wretchedness of living with a  conscience that dead? Or, more charitably, a conscience that unformed and uninformed?

Is there much in this world worse than glib, cheerful and constant evil that one commits, thinking of it all the while as an obvious virtue?  

Oh, I imagine many people today could imagine that . . . if only they were self-aware enough to realize they're living it.

AT ABOUT the time we on the Fricassee staff were getting acquainted with just how far our forebears could let their racism and bigotry hang out, Kansas (the rock group, not the state) had a Top-40 hit, "Dust in the Wind."

I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind
All they are is dust in the wind

Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind

ALL THE STAFF of the 1928 Fricassee were dust, and to dust they have returned, no doubt. All their hopes, all their dreams, most of their works . . . dust.

That cartoon? It endures. There it is, frozen in time to judge and be judged.

We see the thing today, and we proclaim judgment on that which now is dust. The thing itself, it emerges from nearly nine decades past to stand in yellowing witness to a creator and a culture. To dust . . . dust from the ash bin of history.
 
That casual racism, the glib reduction of those unlike themselves to objects of ridicule, belies the notion that for some, others are indeed The Other, and The Other is less human than oneself, or perhaps not human at all. And if a group is less human than oneself, or not human at all -- and certainly if they're less powerful -- you can do whatever you like to them.

That's human nature. That's our fallen condition, and it's as old as Adam. We, of course, don't recognize -- or refuse to admit -- that, because Baton Rouge High, 1928.

Because Selma, 1965.

Because Birmingham, 1963.

Because Montgomery, 1954.

Because Berlin, 1933.

Because Fort Sumter, 1861.

Because. Just because.

SO HERE we stand, Donald Trump, 2016. Many American whites have decided that old hatred is the new black, and we get to be as ugly, and bigoted, and in your face as we want because a rich, vulgarian scumbag of a real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star is "telling it like it is."

"Telling it like it is" isn't, of course. Instead, it's just more of those same old lies that we prefer to hear -- the stinking spiritual and mental garbage we find so much more palatable than the God's honest truth.

Today, "fighting political correctness" just means we no longer have to bother with the virtue of rank hypocrisy, that mechanism through which malefaction pays backhanded tribute to virtue. Nowadays, we prefer our evil straight up.

"Telling it like it is" brings us back to Fricassee 1928. "It pays to read the signs."

A bit of virtuous hypocrisy from the depths of Jim Crow . . .
an ad from the 1952 Pow-Wow, the yearbook of Baton Rouge's
Istrouma High School. Click on the ad to read.