Rep. Don Bacon Congressman, Nebraska 2nd District Reichstag Washington, Greater Trumpian Reich
Dear Rep. Bacon:
Your vote is as despicable as your claims are Orwellian. In addition, voting on a measure such as this without a Congressional Budget Office analysis and score is absolutely irresponsible and reckless.
In other words, since you seem incapable of *not* pissing down our legs, at least quit telling us it's raining policy blessings from heaven.
It may have been something I ate. Still, last night I dreamed that I was Don Draper from Mad Men . . . the post- enlightenment Don Draper who'd like to teach the world to sing (in perfect harmony).
I was with Roger Sterling and my ex-wife Betty (as opposed to my ex-wife, Betty), who wasn't dying of lung cancer anymore. We were obligated to go to some stuffy occasion at some tony, modernistic (circa 1971) apartment in some newish high-rise that looked like all the other newish high-rises. That detail made it difficult to figure out exactly where we were going. Eventually, we did. And we got there.
Inspiration from a 1964 record sleeve
As expected, the affair was staid, and the guests dull. And stuffy. Fakey, even. Naturally, being Don Draper, I had a drink or three and for some reason wandered into the kitchen, which wasn't tony or modernistic. It was old, and it was a little shabby. A gal was in there, dressed like a normal, blue-collar human being -- not a wealthy poseur. She was cooking and pouring drinks. And she was dancing to the music from an old radio or phonograph, I forget which. I looked back out the kitchen door at the immaculate, expensive and quite sterile condo. I looked back into the kitchen, which wasn't any of that. I decided the door was a portal into another dimension, and the kitchen was in another world -- a more real world than where I started. Then I walked through another door on the other side of the small kitchen area, and I found myself in a garage or storeroom. (A garage would have been damned interesting, considering high-rise. Then again, alternate dimension . . . so we're good.) There, a young person was teaching an old, suspendered geezer to do the latest dance . . . to that music that was playing. I may not have known what the hell was going on, but the song had a good beat, and you could dance to it. My self-consciousness wasn't needed here, and it was all good.
WHAT DOES it all mean? Beats me -- I'm no shrink. Maybe I taught the world to sing after all. Maybe I should have taught the world to dance instead -- though if you've ever seen me dance, you'd probably tell me to stick to the "sing" thing. For the purposes of this here podcast -- 3 Chords & the Truth -- I'd like to think it's the kitchen . . . and the down-to-earth young woman cookin' and pourin' bourbon-and-Cokes. I'd like to think it's the other young person teaching the old fellow something more contemporary than the Lindy hop.
I dunno, maybe it's the geezer teaching the young'un the Lindy hop. Either way works.
Any which way you call it, however, it's not the expensive, modernistic apartment full of stuffed shirts acting like a bunch of phonies. Old Don merely endured that kind of thing, and Enlightened Don liked it even less.
And come to think of it, there's not a damn thing "alternate" about the Kitchen Dimension. Now give me a bourbon-and-Coke and a hug. Ding!
In the Age of Trump, we Americans live in a giant tinderbox. And we're fighting over everything.
Black Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter. All hell breaks loose when Blue Lives shoot unarmed Black Lives. These skirmishes break out amid the larger struggle over the strategic crossroads of race and inequality.
Also in these fraught times, the battle over the Rebel flag and Confederate monuments still rages, and Lost Cause aficionados still cry over their spilled "heritage" as they wave the Stars and Bars in the face of civilized humanity. Sometimes, one stumbles into a situation where two or more of these things converge, which today quickly could become a Situation. So . . . welcome to an impromptu pro-police demonstration in Council Bluffs, Iowa, following the fatal shooting of a Pottawattamie County sheriff's deputy -- white -- by an escaping inmate -- black. The gathering along Broadway Avenue consisted of members of a Facebook group for off-road enthusiasts -- at least two of whom also are enthusiasts for something else not usually associated with Iowans.
THE GROUP of Counciltuckians -- and displays like this are why people across the Missouri River call Council Bluffs Counciltucky -- waved at least a couple of Blue Lives Matter American flags, a couple of regular Star-Spangled Banners and. . . . I swear to God, I didn't even know this was a thing.
. . . at least two Confederate battle flags that had been Blue Lives Matterized. In Iowa.
Again, by people not Steve King.
Are you seeing where this could all go horribly wrong? Are you sensing that at least a few of these folks, in addition to saying police lives matter, might be saying that black lives do not? And that one of the Molotov cocktails we Americans so love to use for a pepper game -- when you win, you lose -- is somehow part and parcel of cop killings.
I don't know about you, but my inclination is to ask the Rebel-flag wavers "What the hell are you thinking? Why the hell do you think this is appropriate? What exactly are you saying here?" I'm curious that way. I imagine the Blue Lives that these people seem to think Matter might like a bit of insight, themselves. "Intelligence," I think they call that kind of information.
MANY REPORTERS might like to know, too. Then again, maybe not.
Too many journalists today operate under the same "narrative pressure" local TV reporters face at times like these. Dead cop. Ordinary folk show their love and support. Tears. Respect. Cue somber outro music. Fade to black.
Even so, I don't know how a reporter ignores the flag flying right in her face, but there you go.
Confederate flags do not fit The Narrative -- at least not in the Midwest. And I suspect that even in the former Confederate States of America, there would be hell to pay if they did. The descendants of slaves tend to get touchy when white folk celebrate a society predicated upon their ancestors' suffering.
And just like those who embrace the Rebel flag must let go more important things to take up a tainted standard, journalists who stick to the feelgood, feel-bad Narrative are, in their own ratings- and circulation-driven manner, doing exactly what Confederate enthusiasts do in the South and -- one presumes, because Counciltucky -- elsewhere. They whitewash fact so we might live an alluring lie where we all love the cops, the cops all love us, and everybody does it out of the goodness of our June and Ward Cleaver hearts. In The Narrative, communities are good, communities pull together and no one scapegoats, stereotypes or has ulterior motives. Never mind those people waving the Rebel flags, banners the Channel 7 reporter seems to think will cease to exist if just she ignores them hard enough. It would have been such a simple question: "The Blue Lives Matter American flags, I understand. But why the Confederate flags?"
It's a simple question that wasn't asked by reporters for the Omaha World-Herald, either, even though the newspaper made note of the flag-waving off-roaders and even ran a picture of them.
Sans Rebel flag, of course.
Perhaps the answer is the fewer questions you ask, the better off you are in post-truth Tinderbox America.
If
you're Omaha's mayor, it's probably not such a good thing when a rare
drive-by video comes out of North Korea, and the first thing that pops
into people's mind is "Our streets are a lot worse than Pyongyang's."
Kim Jean-Un
Jean Stothert
Maybe if Jean Stothert
got one of those Kim Jong-Un hairdos -- Kim Jean-Un? -- that would be the one little
thing that turned things around for her. Either that, or we could just
threaten to incinerate Council Bluffs unless. . . .
Thought I'd just charge straight ahead on 3 Chords & the Truth. See the hill; take the hill. Instead, I'm an ever rollin' wheel, without a destination real. I'm an ever spinning top, whirling around till I drop. Oh, but what am I to do? My mind is in a whirlpool!
Give me a little hope, one small thing to cling to. You got me going in circles -- oh, round and round I go! And I can't even tell you about the show without cribbing Friends of Distinction lyrics!
Sad!
I'm just going in circles. How can I make radio great again like this?
WELL . . . let's us just accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative.
And latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mister In-Between.
AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can't even write this stupid descriptive doomaflatchie without plagiarizing in circles. It's like circling the drain of professional life. The painted ponies go up and down on the carousel of life. I give up. Now I'm stealing my way into abject depression about the fleeting nature of time -- and my lost youth.
Listen, the show is good, despite it all. Some stuff about circles. And some stuff you can dance to. Right here on the Big Show.
Really, it's all good. And it's not like I have a nuclear arsenal at my disposal or anything.
IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
Here's the problem with us white Southerners, as succinctly as I can put it: We don't know who or what the hell we are apart from defining ourselves by the most horrific sins of our forefathers, then trying to whitewash that evil because it was our kin what did it.
Above, behold the truth of the antebellum South before our defeated ancestors managed to sanitize the whole unholy thing into "the Lost Cause" and -- in a triumph of what passed for "fake news" in the 1880s and 1890s -- turn the Civil War into a glorious-yet-doomed campaign against Yankee usurpers in the name of states' rights. A completely logical and fair question to ask here would be "States' rights to do what, exactly?"
The answer you would not get from the originators of Lost Cause mythology then, and the answer you will not get today from the patently racist defenders of "Southern heritage" and "history," is one reflecting the truth. The plain truth you will find in the original source materials, or from talking to any serious historian of the "War Between the States," is that, in 1861, the 11 seceding Southern states wanted to maintain the "right" of whites to hold blacks in bondage, buy and sell them like you would lumber or cotton, and then -- if Satan so moved them -- whip the "property" until their backs looked like this famous 1863 photo of an escaped Louisiana slave known as Gordon or "Whipped Peter."
The source materials and the photographic record tells us that the mutilated Gordon is a far better representative of the South's antebellum and wartime reality than the "history" and "heritage" peddled by Southern snake-oil salesmen since 1877, when Reconstruction ended at least a couple of generations too soon.
In 1961, when I was born in Baton Rouge, Southern "heritage"consisted of moonlight, magnolias and -- as Randy Newman correctly put in in his seminal "Rednecks" -- "keeping the niggers down." Or, as Alabama Gov. George Wallace put it in 1962:
"In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Today, being that our parents couldn't stop the feds from giving blacks the vote, preserving "Southern heritage" and "history" centers on venerating the Confederate battle flag and preserving the "Lost Cause" monuments to the generals and founding fathers of the Confederate States of America -- tributes in cement and stone that started going up as soon as the last Yankee soldiers got out some 140 years ago. In my native state, Louisiana, brainwashed Lost Causers of the Deep South booboisie are figuratively (and perhaps literally) losing their minds now that New Orleans is actually removing the first of those whitewashed tributes to treason and tyranny that rose with the Jim Crow reassertion of white supremacy. The first to go -- in the wee hours of Monday, as SWAT snipers and New Orleans street cops guarded helmeted, masked demolition workers clad in flak jackets -- was theBattle of Liberty Place monument. It's "fascism and tyranny," one Lost Cause dead-ender yelled at the "cowardly" work crews, who also covered up the company name on their vehicles and removed the license plates. Of course, the workers wore masks and the company name was covered because every firm that so much as bid on the job faced a barrage of abuse and death threats in the name of "history" and "heritage." The owner of a Baton Rouge firm that originally won a contract discovered that his $200,000 sports car had been turned into a molten glob of metal in his parking lot -- burned.
He declined the job.
THE FAKE NEWS about Liberty Place we Louisianians were taught for a century or more was that the victory of 5,000 White League combatants over the 3,500 from New Orleans' integrated Metropolitan Police and units of the state militia represented the beginning of the end of rule by carpetbagger "usurpers." The reality was that the deadly September 1874 insurrection aimed to overthrow the Republican governor of Louisiana following a disputed 1872 election, and the White League succeeded in capturing state offices as Gov. William Pitt Kellogg took refuge in the Customs House and begged Washington for help.
Three days later, the Pelican State putsch ended when President Ulysses S. Grant sent in the U.S. Army and the White League slinked away.
The Liberty Place monument went up in 1891, erected by the Jim Crow city government. Inscriptions noting the battle's importance in establishing white supremacy were added in 1932. From The New Orleans Advocate:
The removal was delayed, however, as the city found itself tied up in court battles that lasted until earlier this year, when the 5th Circuit ruled that the city could move forward while a trial on the monument backers' suit played out.
That case also was resolved on Monday, when U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier dismissed claims made by several groups led by the Monumental Task Committee, ruling that the plaintiffs had not shown they could succeed on the merits. Among their arguments was that the committee should have a say in what happened to the monuments because it had done work over the years to clean and restore them.[New Orleans Mayor Mitch] Landrieu was not spotted at the removal itself, and other city officials there were not allowed to comment to the media, leaving the city’s official comments to a release issued two hours after the process began and then Landrieu's news conference.
“Our past is marked by racial divisions. Today we are moving to a place of healing,” Landrieu said.
That event was held at the police memorial in front of NOPD headquarters, a deliberate choice by the administration to accentuate the fact that the White League killed members of the city’s biracial police force during its rebellion.
Emphasizing the city’s focus on security, members of the media had to email city officials before even being told where Landrieu would speak.
“Of the four we will remove, this is perhaps the most blatant affront to the values that make New Orleans and America strong today,” Landrieu said of the Battle of Liberty Place monument.
“We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put in the heart of our city. The removal of these statues sends a clear message, an unequivocal message to the people of our nation that our city celebrates our diversity,” he added. The Liberty Place monument has always been a flashpoint of controversy and was a site of rallies years ago by white nationalist David Duke and protests by civil rights leader Rev. Avery Alexander, something that may have contributed to Monday's level of security. This is also the second time the monument has been removed. It was taken down from its original spot on the Canal Street neutral ground during roadwork in the late 1980s and was put up again only on orders from a federal court. It was placed in a less conspicuous spot at the foot of Iberville Street, between a garage and the floodwall.
The timing of the statue’s removal came as an odd historical coincidence in a debate focused on the Civil War and its aftermath.
Monday was Confederate Memorial Day in Mississippi and Alabama. It also marked the 155th anniversary of the day Union ships under the command of Capt. David Farragut managed to pass two Confederate forts on the river in Plaquemines Parish, an attack that started at almost exactly the same early morning hour as workers began taking down the monument. Once Farragut’s squadron made it past those forts, New Orleans, the Confederacy's largest city, was left defenseless. It surrendered without a fight four days later.
Exactly 15 years later, federal troops would leave the city on April 24 on the order of new President Rutherford B. Hayes, marking the end of Reconstruction.
The end of that federal oversight, which ushered in the Jim Crow era, was commemorated on the Liberty Place statue itself in 1932 with a plaque that said “the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” Less inflammatory language was added when the marker was moved to Iberville Street.
THIS IS HISTORY. The monuments are propaganda, erected to obscure history, not to shine a light on the fraught past of the American South. The Liberty Place marker and the ones yet to come down -- massive statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, who fired the opening salvos on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, as well as the biggest of all, that of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Lee Circle -- say nothing about why the South fought or what it all meant. All they do is cloak the ugly reality of a sick culture and a wicked economy built upon the exploitation and dehumanization of an entire race . . . and the culpability of the men who led 11 states into treasonous rebellion to defend the indefensible. "History" to people either too racist or too brainwashed to comprehend the obvious is, instead, nothing more than a crude attempt to bestow a patina of dignity upon a people's and a region's ignominious and total defeat. The only relevant history involving these tributes to a well-lost cause would be that of the how-tos of disinformation and
cultural brainwashing on a civilizational scale.
The "heritage" they represent is a
God-damned abomination.
Once
upon a time, as a well and good brainwashed son of the South, I'd be
offended at all the little digs and insults from Yankees about my home place. But when you step back and look at the enormity of the South's
sin and the enormity of the South's delusions -- even to this day -- you
start to realize those humiliations haven't been nearly bad enough or
often enough.
Frankly, there
ought to have been a de-Confederafication of the South at least as extensive and
long-running as the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II.
Confederate symbolism should have been made as unacceptable and untouchable as the
swastika became for postwar Germans.
Being charitable to vanquished
enemies is one thing, but bygones-as-bygones isn't an option when the
real enemy is cultural and ideological. You can rebuild the ruined land,
but you damn well cannot allow the rebuilding of the toxic, deadly
ideology. The federal government, however, damn well allowed the rebuilding of the South's toxic, deadly
ideology. And here we are in 2017, with loyal sons and daughters of the Southland still making excuses for the sins of their forebears -- when they can bring themselves to acknowledge America's original sin at all. IF MITCH LANDRIEU were to ask me what to do with Lee Circle after that most prominent of the Lost Cause love letters comes down, I'd tell him that I think the city should replace the statue of Robert E. Lee with a monument to that whipped Louisiana slave whose photograph caused such a stir in the North. There should be a gigantic memorial to Gordon, or "Whipped Peter," or whoever that suffering soul was. According
to the Wikipediaentry for the famous Civil War picture, Gordon joined the Union Army
after the Emancipation Proclamation -- first as a guide (he was captured by Confederates, tied to a tree, beaten, left for dead . . . and then escaped) and then as a
sergeant in the Corps d'Afrique. He fought bravely at Port Hudson (La.),
the first battle where black troops took the lead in a Union assault.
Where the soon-to-be-removed monument to Lee stood, I would erect a wall several stories tall. On one side, a relief of that picture of the scarred, disfigured slave who fled a plantation near Krotz Springs, La., and made it to safety in Union-occupied Baton Rouge.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the wall, there would be a relief of this woodcut -- the Union sergeant named George, who fought as the equal of any white man at Port Hudson. And I'd rename Lee Circle something a lot more fitting . . . and inspiring. Resurrection Circle.
I also would point out to the mayor that this Southern boy has Southern skin in this. My great-great grandfather, François Seguin,
was a Confederate soldier at Port Hudson. And there he died.
In the name of a God-damned abomination.
(Later, we can discuss Louisianians' bitter refusal to honor LSU's founding superintendent . . . William Tecumseh Sherman. Not one thing on campus is named for him. James Carville thinks the Parade Ground should be named for him; I think it should be the Union. I have skin in that controversy, too. For one thing, I am a Louisiana State graduate. Then there's the matter of another of my great-great grandfathers, Ulysses Broussard, a Confederate soldier from Louisiana who fought . . . in the Battle of Atlanta. Which is where he is buried.)
THAT'S the thing about wicked ideologies and sick cultures -- one way or another, they kill everybody without prejudice. Caucasian sons and daughters of the South owe it to ourselves, our ancestors and history itself to, at long last, live in truth. A people and a region have no identity at all if the one they claim is a lie -- a lie that manages to both dishonor and ignore the history and humanity of fellow Southerners dehumanized, enslaved, abused and killed for the sake of "Southern heritage."
Then again, if history so far is any predictor, my people will stick with the Southern status quo of livin' the lie and partyin' like it's 1899. In that case, allow me to put a record on the turntable. You may have heard it -- fella used to live in New Orleans. We're rednecks, we're rednecks And we don't know our ass from a hole in the ground . . . .
You know the spiel. It's the standard 3 Chords & the Truth spiel: We've subcultured ourselves to death. Almost literally. In the radio sense, that's a boring thing. Do you like just one kind of music? Do you only want to know anything about one kind of music . . . or about only one tiny, tiny segment of the population that looks suspiciously a lot like yourself? I didn't think so. If you were that unbelievably narrow of taste and of mind, you wouldn't be here. TheBig Show is the place for the inquisitive and the easily bored. It's the place where cultures collide constantly -- as we've said this week in promoting the program. And -- again -- it's freakin' glorious.
NOW, I'm not sayin', but on this edition of the show, Sinatra and Steppenwolf may well coexist on your Internet connection. Might even collide.
That'd be something to hear. But I'm not sayin', you understand. I am sayin', however, that this here program is all about what radio, at its best, used to be. It's about starting there and pushing forward.
So, forward.
It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
Kind of like radio once upon a . . . GAAAAAH! Still trite. OK, let's put it this way. Some of you will recognize it. Others will have their minds blown -- as usual.
Has there ever been a better way to take it than by radio? Allow me to answer that for you with minimal gum-flapping or keyboard wordgurgitation. No.
That is the basis of this -- and, to be truthful, every -- episode of the Big Show, which is a thing called 3 Chords & the Truth. Now, radio is an endangered species these days, and younger music lovers might not know what the deal is with it . . . why old farts like your Mighty Favog keep going on and on and on and on about how great radio was. Well, it's like this. No, I mean like this. Like 3 Chords & the Truth.
USED TO BE that you had radio that sounded like this all over the place. Now, not so much. Now, there are places where radio -- the medium of legend -- still exists. Places where music is that best of drugs, one that can wash over you in a tidal wave of sound that will soothe your soul and expand your mind. Radio. Wonderful, trippy, unpredictable radio.
I hope the Big Showis one of those places. These days, radio isn't always on the radio. You do what you can.
This is what happened to a paying passenger -- a physician who said he needed to get back home so he could see his patients today -- when United overbooked a flight and no one volunteered to get off the plane so four airline employees could take their places.
This is what United's chief executive said about it.
1977 United advertisement
NOW, I'd like to know a couple of things.
First, is there anydamn horrible thing American cops won't do in the name of "just following orders"? If they had caught the glint off a pager or cellphone the doctor was carrying out of the corner of their eye, would the hired thugslaw-enforcement officers have just the f*** shot him?
Second, if Corporate America marshaling law enforcement to manhandle and brutalize law-abiding, non-violent, paying customers on the whim of incompetents isn't a hallmark of a fascist state, what the hell is? If justice is still any kind of a thing in this desiccated and decadent land, that doctor will be America's newest multimillionaire, will be clutching the scalp of United CEO Oscar Munoz, and those aviation cops will be saying hello to their new cellmate, Tiny.
There are worse things than the Dinner Theater for Jesus ditties of Marty Haugen. You have to go to THIS extreme to get there, but get there you can.
The only thing I can say for this is "Rayvon" didn't call himself a "Jesus Wigga." But with this level of stereotypical idiocy, I'm not sure it would have been any more offensive if he had.
Not heard in the video: God, Jesus, Resurrection, Crucifixion, Sacrifice, Grace, Passover, Redemption, Christ, Christian, Sin, Forgiveness, Heaven, Hell, Life, Death or Love.
He can't even bring himself to utter the word "church." That's just as well.
His bling, however, runneth over.
This could be the only church(or at least the only one in Bel Air, Maryland) where you walk in as Homer Simpson and walk out as Beavis or Butthead (maybe both) -- followers, no doubt, of a feckless deity seemingly more ridiculous than yourself.
THE GREAT Southern (and Catholic) writer Flannery O'Connor once said that a God you understand is less than oneself. I fear that any God -- or, more accurately, god -- that "Rayvon" proclaims as his Primo Playa logically would be forced to damn himself to hell.
What a thing to achieve in the name of relevance but not necessarily righteousness -- a "gathering" of goddamn fools in the "swagtacula" name of a damn-fool god.
I think the term for insipidness such as this is "abomination of desolation." That's in the Bible . . . another thing, come of think of it, carefully avoided in da Gozpulshizzle uh Rayvon.
Which has managed to turn Jesus Christ -- He of "seeker-friendly" implicizzle but not revelizzle -- into something seemingly even tackier than Donald Trump.
Let the congregation say "Oy veh!" Or "Anathema sit." Whichever.
This is 90-something minutes of alternative rock 'n' roll greatness.
Thisis WBRH, 90.3 on your FM dial in Baton Rouge, La., almost a quarter century ago now. This also is a high-school radio station -- the broadcast voice of Baton Rouge Magnet High School.
I don't know who the DJ is . . . but she is on fire with the music she's choosing.
Likewise, I don't know when in September 1992 this aircheck was recorded, nor do I know the time of day. All I do know is this is my old station (1977-79) near the height of its musical powers.
I had been living in Omaha for more than four years by the time someone rolled tape on this bit of radio history . . . and there is no way the much larger city up Nawth had a rock station as good as this back then.
The Mexican joint in the Old Market Passageway has just closed for the evening, and I am full of chips, cerveza and the No. 2 combination plate.
The swanky joint next door is closed on a slow night for dining out.
Omaha is sluggishly, reluctantly steeling itself for the end of the weekend and the start of another workweek. But it's even worse than that -- there's a city primary election Tuesday.
