3 Chords & the Truth: Can't buy a break

We must have crossed our old man back in Oregon.

I hope somebody finds us alive.

It's been that kind of stretch in these United States. Got a case of dynamite. I could hold out here all night.

Yes, I crossed my old man back in Oregon. Been that kind of night.

And as hurricanes sit on us and spin, and fires burn and Washington won't take us alive . . . we cope the best we can. Come to think of it, a case of dynamite might. . . .

No, nix that. The Big Show ain't going there. I'll get a case of LPs, instead.

Good music will get us through it -- alive.

3 Chords & the Truth will get us through alive . . . and groovin'.

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

Music for times like these

If the Trump hits the fan, make sure you have enough 3 Chords & the Truth to last for two full weeks.

Peace, love and understanding . . . by any means necessary

Newsweek

I am not exactly a Weekly Standard kind of reader. But I read Matt Labash's long piece about how antifa went apeshit on the Patriot Prayer people at a Berkeley "protest" (and by protest, I mean riot), and you should, too.

The takeaway from this story -- and from spending any random three minutes on Facebook or media comment threads -- is that America never will defeat the fascism of Donald Trump by adopting the violent Stalinism of "social-justice warriors" like antifa and all the other toxic granola of the radical left.

The other takeaway is that Donald Trump was unknowingly more right than we're willing to admit. Not right -- just more right than we thought. There are no "very fine people" among the Nazis and other white supremacists.

Likewise, there are none among antifa or other left-wing hate groups, which these assembled fanatics most certainly represent. The sulfurous, Satanic stench coming from each camp smells about the same, because the Nazis and the "antifascists" are about the same. The difference between the opposing vortices of hatred is a mere matter of targeting methodology -- one determines who is subhuman based on race and ethnicity . . . the other, ideology.

Given free run of the United States, each would leave a trail of corpses behind it as the fanatics rampaged their way toward their Father Below.

Below, a sampling of what Labash saw in what must be the first American insane asylum to actually incorporate:

On the walk up to the square, Joey’s several paces ahead, seemingly in another zone, not even noticing the protester in the “Nasty Woman” shirt who starts filming him, as though she’s doing surveillance. After all the hype, he is now so infamous in Berkeley his face is instantly recognizable, and people act like it’s Jesse James walking into a bank. They elbow each other, scandalized.

From the moment we hit the square, the “Nazi” catcalls start. Whatever’s happening on the stage seems to cease to exist, and the energy around us turns very dark, very fast. Joey, Tiny, and Pete start walking with greater purpose, on the balls of their feet, almost like fighters entering a ring or Christians entering the Coliseum, except instead of facing one lion, they’re facing thousands. As the chants rain down (“Nazis are here! .  .  . F— you! .  .  . F—ing fascists!”), we near the stage thinking we might find some kind of buffer zone, since the police knew that some of Joey’s original rally-goers would show up. But there isn’t one. Our progress is halted when we run up into a small clearing snug up against a barrier. And behind that barrier, near the park’s “Peace Wall,” is a wall of human blackness.

A hundred or so masked-up antifa ninjas and affiliated protesters seem to simultaneously turn. It looks like we’ve interrupted al Qaeda tryouts. Joey, Tiny, and Pete all raise their hands high in the air, and flash peace signs, a conciliatory gesture. But nobody here wants peace. Not with fascists on the scene. As Joey nears the barrier, one of the ninjas swings and misses. Then the barrier topples, and they pour over, chanting, “Fascists go home!”

As I’m reading the action into my recorder, antifa slides around me on all sides, nearly carrying me off like a breaking wave. The boys are about 20 yards off and walk backwards. Pete catches a shot right on his stars’n’stripes dome from a two-by-four and goes down, blacking out for a second. Tiny, trying to protect everybody, pulls him up with his massive Samoan hand and pushes him out of the scrum. The mob ignores Pete, as he’s just an appetizer. Joey is the entree.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Don't you just love it?

There's more.

War is peace. Love is hate.

First he catches a slap in the head, then someone gashes him with something in his ribs. He keeps his hands up, as though that will save him, while he keeps getting dragged backwards by his shirt, Tiny trying to pull him away from the bloodthirsty ninjas. Someone crashes a flagpole smack on Joey’s head, which will leave a welt so big that Tiny later calls him “the Unicorn.” Not wishing to turn his back on the crowd, a half-speed backwards chase ensues, as Joey and Tiny are blasted with shots of bear spray and pepper spray. They hurdle a jersey barrier, crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way while antifa continue throwing bottles at them. The mob stalks Joey and Tiny all the way to an Alameda County police line, which the two bull their way through, though the cops initially look like they’re going to play Red Rover and keep them out. No arrests are made. Except for Joey and Tiny, who are cuffed.

A crack reporter for the Los Angeles Times will later write that they were arrested for charging the police, which couldn’t be less true. A Berkeley cop tells me they were arrested for their own safety (and weren’t charged). When I catch up and reach the police line, the cops won’t let me past to follow my subjects. My reportorial dispassion has worn thin. I yell at the police for doing nothing, for standing by while two men could’ve been killed. One cop tells me there’s a thin line between solving one problem and being the cause of more, as though they’re afraid to offend antifa. I am sick at what I just witnessed. Angry, even. I wheel around on some protesters, asking them if they think it’s right to beat people down in the street. “Hell yeah,” says one. I ask them to cite anything Joey has said that offends them, as though being offended justifies this. A coward in a black mask says: “They’re f—ing Nazis. There’s nothing they have to say to offend us.”

All around me, good non-antifa liberals go about their business, pretending none of this has happened, carrying “Stand Against Hate” signs. There’s the sound truck with preachers in clerical garb, leading a “Whose streets/our streets” chant. There’s the gray-haired interdenominational “Choral Majority” singing peace songs: “There’s no hatred in my land / Where I’m bound.” I want to vomit on the Berkeley Peace Wall.
I’m made even more sick when I look down the road and see a punching, kicking mob form a circle around a new victim. By the time I roll up on them, an older man in camo-wear spits out from the maelstrom. As he runs to safety, an antifa thug runs up behind him, sucker-punching him as hard as he can in the back. I will go home that night and watch several more cold-blooded beatdowns on YouTube that I didn’t personally witness.

SAY WE ACTUALLY get rid of Trump and stem the tide of Trumpkin fascism in this country. What are we going to have left?

This?

What, then, will we have gained? Or, rather, will we have saved ourselves from the frying pan only to find America in the fire?

Remember, Communist tyrant Josef Stalin killed even more people than Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler. File under: Facts, Inconvenient.

We're supposed to embrace the ideological thugs and bullies to rid ourselves of the fascist ones? Really? When members of the Resistance glibly proclaim "By any means necessary!" are they aware they're coming out in favor of gulags in the name of staving off concentration camps?

I am a Catholic. Not a "progressive" Catholic or a "conservative" Catholic which, in my book, means you're leaving some Catholic out to better accommodate your politics.  I am just Catholic in search of the authentic freedom that lies in my faith's tension between justice and mercy -- between dogma and "God created mankind in his image."

And, as a Catholic, this is what I know as surely as I know fire burns and ice freezes: Die-hard Trumpkins hate my guts, because "libtard." The left's "social-justice warriors" hate my guts, because "hater." Verily, in the open-air insane asylum that is the United States today, from Berkeley to Baton Rouge, there is no greater love than to hate.

For all the right reasons, of course.

Eventually, this, too, shall pass. Someday for America, in the words of the old hymn,

There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord I pray
(There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, my Lord,
no trouble, trouble I see)
There will be peace in the valley for me

UNFORTUNATELY, that day probably will come because we've all killed one another. It will be the cold peace of those who rest six feet deep.

God bless America.

3 Chords & the Truth: Sanity music day

You ever take a "sanity sick day" at work?

Maybe you call it a "mental health day."

Maybe you never have taken such when life is getting you down. And maybe you did a few days in jail for punching a couple of people in the nose after they had the nerve to say "Good morning!"

Maybe you should have taken the voluntary sanity sick day instead of the involuntary soap-on-a-rope sojourn.

Well, we are down here in the 3 Chords & the Truth bunker here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska . . . and there's nowhere to run to when you're already in your hidey hole. Because it's crazy out there.

So, on this edition of the Big Show, we're doing the next best thing. This week, it's the musical equivalent of a mental health day.

I strongly advise you to take advantage of this Mental Health Edition of the program. Consider the alternative.

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

Moonshadow

The Great Eclipse.

Aug. 21, 2017.

Aurora, Nebraska.

Oh, I'm bein' followed
by a moonshadow,
moonshadow, moonshadow

Leapin and hoppin'
on a moonshadow,
moonshadow,
moonshadow. . . .

-- Cat Stevens

(1970)

3 Chords & the Truth: State of emergency

This is 3 Chords & the Truth.

A state of civil emergency has been declared for your area of the United States of America.

We're in it deep now, bucko. And there doesn't seem to be a manual for how to handle a mess like this.

Repeat: A state of civil emergency has been declared for your area of the United States of America.

This is your emergency podcast, 3 Chords & the Truth. Stay tuned to this Internet frequency for further instructions. And music.

Much music will be found on the Big Show. Remain calm and listen to the best in music entertainment right here on your Internet dial.

Once again: A state of civil emergency has been declared for your area of the United States of America. This is 3 Chords & the Truth.

Be there. Aloha.

This is 3 Chords & the Truth.

The look of hate is in our eyes

This is what white privilege looks like.

In GQ magazine, documentarian C. J. Hunt says the "video of this part-time Nazi, this junior secessionist, is a perfect portrait of the very white privilege the so-called 'alt-right' decries as liberal fiction."

I cannot disagree. When you're a little chickenshit Nazi who gets separated from his volk in a big, bad race riot, gets chased, then caught by a bunch of anti-fascist counterdemonstrators but gets to walk away alive -- walk away unmolested in any way except for the debasement he has visited upon himself -- because he can strip off his "uniform" and beg for mercy, saying he's not a real white supremacist . . . that's some serious white privilege.

It also is proof positive that Donald Trump's "alt-left" holds all kinds of moral high ground over the "very fine" Nazis our catastrophe-in-chief assures us he knows all about. The Nazis, you see -- the ones who are so tough en masse but turn into sniveling little cowards when alone and cornered -- would not have had mercy on someone who couldn't "pass" by taking off a white polo shirt.

Don't believe me, watch this.
 

I AM someone who thinks, as a rule, "identity politics" is unhelpful in holding this diverse and troubled country together. I also think it's a losing political proposition unless, of course, you are someone as evil and as shameless as Donald Trump, who managed to identify enough of the dispossessed,  the angrily conservative, the hypocritically religious and the blatantly white and fascist to cobble together a barely winning coalition.

But I also say this as a middle-aged white Southerner who's lived in the Midwest for more than half my life. The parts of my identity that I can't strip off like a polo shirt are not likely to get me killed.

Not if I stumble across a Nazi rally, and not if I get pulled over by an Omaha cop.

"White privilege isn’t just an easy bank loan or the cumulative effects of discriminatory housing policy," Hunt, the documentary filmmaker, said in his GQ article.

It's also the privilege to disappear. The privilege to terrorize a community and return to your regular life with the ease of peeling off a polo shirt. The privilege to come to someone else’s town, invoke the symbols and slogans used to terrorize Jews, African-Americans, and countless other races in history’s darkest chapters, and pretend it’s simply your way of showing ethnic pride. It’s the privilege to engage in terror “for fun,” and the privilege to walk away. For most of my life, I've thought of racism as the vestiges of a dying generation. It's far more terrifying to behold a sea of young people for whom white supremacy is just a rec-league sport.

YOU DON'T have to surrender to the relative tribalism of identity politics to admit what is as plain as day, yet as invisible as mountain air to your average white Trump voter: If people aren't looking at you funny . . . or following you around as you shop for fear you'll steal something . . . or blowing your brains out during a traffic stop . . . or trying to make it as difficult as possible for you to vote . . . or assuming that anything you've ever achieved had to be at their expense . . . or beating the crap out of you in a parking garage because of the color of your skin, you're probably not endangered, threatened or have that much cause to feel aggrieved.

And when you see those things actually happening to folks of color, they probably are . . . and have cause to. Be aggrieved, that is. 

To recognize the bleeding obvious today, all one needs is just a bit of empathy, a quality that also happens to be in exceedingly short supply and, when acquired, usually is applied highly selectively.

The standard American conceit is that we're better than this. Obviously, we're not. Maybe we've backslidden in recent years; maybe we never were.

Alton Sterling protest, 2016 / Reuters

WHAT KEEPS me up every night is that I see this country becoming more and more like the Louisiana I knew as a child and a teenager. That's not a good thing. That's a racist, hateful thing.

Surely, it's one of two things -- that we have profoundly regressed as a people, or that we've dropped a societal façade so convincing that it caused us to become somnambulant.

To the great detriment of my mental health, I sometimes read the comments on Facebook pages for various Louisiana media outlets, generally on stories having to do with race or Confederate statues . . . or protests against Trump. If someone, like myself, is perverse enough to read that crap, it's reasonable he's going to be alarmed. It's bad out there . . . or on there, as the case may be -- even accounting for the propensity of nuts and those full of resentment to number among the most constant commenters.

On a Baton Rouge TV station's Facebook post about Monday's protest in Durham, N.C., where leftist protesters tore down a Confederate memorial, there were at least three "kill them all" comments, several more calling them "animals" (contemporary Southern replacement for the N-word), hundreds of demands to lock them all up, several commenters eager for the commencement of civil hostilities . . . and at least one fellow as sure as his 1861 ancestors that the filthy lib'ruls would surrender as soon as the first shot was fired.

Because that's exactly what happened after Fort Sumter, right?

MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS bring me to another rumination about identity and "white privilege."

We all know what Trump did Saturday. What he reluctantly -- and unconvincingly -- said Monday. How the Trump Train came off the tracks on Tuesday and the president angrily threw his true colors in the face of the assembled White House press corps, revealing himself to be a Nazi-sympathizer. (Really, there's just no other way to put it.)

The coastal media elites seem to think that's the end of him, then.

New Orleans, 1960

Those of us still enough in touch with "flyover country," particularly the Deep South, know better. In the American South, as objectively awful as Trump's words are -- and as awful as he is -- if the 2020 presidential election were tomorrow, he'd probably win in a cakewalk. It would be reasonable for you to ask, at this juncture, "What the f***?"

The eff is pretty much this: Large swaths of the United States are now fully fascist in every way but name. And the Deep South always has been.

When I was growing up, having been born toward the end of Jim Crow (1961) and having lived nowhere else but Baton Rouge until early 1983, I didn't realize that, because I knew nothing else. None of us did -- at least none of us white folk.

I went to legally segregated public schools until 1970. Yes, 1970. In 1970, neighborhood schools was a desegregation plan. White people still lost their shit. Very Trumpian, actually.

"Degenerate Music" exhibit catalog

Between something like 1963 and 1970, desegregation was a "freedom of choice" plan for blacks to go to all-white schools in their attendance district, starting with 12th grade and adding a grade to the plan every year. For an elementary kid like I was, the biggest threat one's parent could make against your misbehaving self would be to "send you to the nigger school."

I imagine parents are still making that threat today -- education is still that segregated there. Only now, starting when the feds ordered busing in 1981, whites have almost totally abandoned the public schools; they're 90 percent nonwhite. When I graduated in 1979, they were roughly 67 percent white.

Likewise, Baton Rouge itself has been largely abandoned by whites. A city that was more than 60 percent white in the early '80s now is majority minority. What was a unified parish (county) school district has turned into four school districts, as suburban cities broke away and formed their own. Unincorporated suburbs in the southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish want to incorporate as a new city so they can form a new (mostly white) school district. This, of course, would gut Baton Rouge's tax base. A couple of years ago, St. George activists fell short after a terrible and bitter battle that got worldwide news coverage.

Yet, they will not go away. The battle likely will resume as soon as electoral law allows.

Someone could argue that, in parts of the United States, we're fighting a civil war right now, just without the shooting (so far).

IN MY HOMETOWN,  there is white privilege. It is deeply institutionalized in law and in custom. Like a white polo shirt, my people -- white Southern people -- could take it off. But they will not. Is that, broadly defined, not the heart of fascism?

Was not the antebellum South, with its brutality, master-race theorizing and chattel slavery, not a spiritual progenitor of Nazism? Did not the postwar Jim Crow South, -- that of ritualized brutality, culturally internalized racist beliefs, de jure segregation and government-enforced second-class citizenship for blacks -- provide a legal blueprint, if not the legal blueprint, for Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws of 1935?

That's exactly what a Yale law professor argues.

From the introduction to James Q. Whitman's book, Hitler's American Model:

Moreover, the ironic truth is that when Nazis rejected the American example, it was sometimes because they thought that American practices were overly harsh: for Nazis of the early 1930s, even radical ones, American race law sometimes looked too racist.

PRIVILEGE. Fascism by the name "Americanism" -- or "Southern heritage" . . . or any other damn thing but what it was. That's the all-American world in which I was reared, and which exists even today, in pockets, from sea to shining sea, and almost unbroken from Virginia to Texas.

Yet we are shocked, shocked there are Nazis among us. That white supremacy once again is ascendant.

Yet we wonder how the hell an amoral, racist -- and dangerous -- buffoon like Donald John Trump became the 45th president of the United States.

To me, the issue in this country isn't whether the United States will go fascist; the issue is whether a) the South ever will QUIT being fascist, or b) the rest of the country will become fascist, just like the former Confederate states.

The answer to that question, only God, through His tears, can see.

Land of the sucker, home of the coward

You know about Charlottesville. You know what President Trump said (or, rather, didn't say) about Charlottesville.

You probably have heard some Trump-addled right-wing ditwad blame the neo-Nazi riot in the Virginia college town on former President Barack Obama, or Black Lives Matter . . . or on any damned thing apart from the neo-Nazis and their chief enabler and encourager, Donald Trump.

You even might have heard some Trump-loving American fascists -- and make no mistake, to love Donald Trump and his agenda is to be an American fascist -- blame Heather Heyer, 32, for her own death in an act of neo-Nazi domestic terrorism. I have heard just that. Then again, I am originally from the fascist stronghold of Baton Rouge, La., and sometimes read the comments on local news stories there.  (I need to quit doing that.)

Heather Heyer

As the demented Nazi-apologist argument (such as it is) goes, Heyer is to blame for her own demise . . . because she was there. And for being a hateful "libtard" who had the gall to protest against white-supremacists who, after all, were exercising their First Amendment rights.

In the words of the American troll's favorite American antihero, "BAD!" Or was it "SAD!" ? I forget.

THIS BRINGS me to something Al Jazeera English dug from the depths of YouTube. I hesitate to bring Al Jazeera into this, because someone sees "Al Jazeera," thinks "MUSLIN TERRORISS!!!" and what's left of their brain freezes up. Anyway. . . .

What the cable-news outlet found and posted to social media was a clip from the 1947 reissue of Don't Be a Sucker, a 1943 anti-fascist propaganda film produced by the U.S. War Department. Cliff's Notes version: The film opens with a montage of all the ways one can be suckered, segues into a fascist stump speaker on the courthouse square in Anytown, U.S.A., then outlines the rise and fall (and toll) of Nazi rule in Germany.

The clip going around Facebook, et al, was supposed to be a history-based argument on the evils of fascism and white supremacy. And that it indeed is. But if you hunt down Don't Be a Sucker on the Internet -- a high-quality version is downloadable from the Internet Archive -- and watch the whole thing, much more becomes clear. Clear as someone caught in the high-wattage beam of a concentration-camp spotlight.

Cleaned-up a bit for 21st-century consumption, the fascist agitator's spiel in the public square is a remarkable facsimile of a Donald Trump campaign speech. The National Socialists' tactics to divide and conquer German society resemble something as contemporary, and Trumpian, as today's headlines. And our divided, faltering American society today is ripe for the conquering.



DONALD TRUMP knew that two years ago. American Nazis and other assorted white supremacists know it today. It is no accident that many of the racist rabble on parade in Virginia were chanting "Heil, Trump!" as they gave their stiff-armed Nazi salutes.

What the government of the United States warned its citizens about more than 70 years ago now is running the United States government. American voters who damn well ought to have known better -- been better -- put fascism in that high position.

Think about that, if you can stomach it.

Then think about what the hell you're going to do about it.

The Big Show: Listen while you still can

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3 Chords & the Truth: The Electrical Process

This week on the Big Show, I guess we could talk and play into a big horn in the studio here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska . . . but I'm betting it'd sound bad and you wouldn't hear anything very well.

So we're using the electrical process, instead.

That means we're enunciating into a professional RCA broadcast microphone and using the best in audio and phonographic technology to bring to you the finest in musical entertainment on 3 Chords & the Truth. On the other hand, a fair amount of the music you will hear on this week's edition of the program predates the best in audio and phonographic technology.

Yes, some of these folks in the mid-1920s were speaking and singing into large horns in the studio which, in turn, wiggled a little stylus into a wax master recording. If you wanted microphonic amplification, you would have to go -- wait for it -- on the radio.

In 1925, the record industry had some catching up to do. It would begin, on some recordings, on some of the largest labels, late that year. Behold electrical recordings. Some were even Viva-tonal.

NO, I don't know what that was supposed to mean. Uh . . . it's viva but it is also tonal.

All I know is I want a little drink. Oh. . . .

1925. Damn.

But I digress. The point to this week's edition of the Big Show is that we're getting as far away from 2017, musically and zeitgeist-wise, as we possibly can without hiring a colonial band of fiddlers to drop in at your residence to play some Virginia reels for you.

That's the deal. And we're going back, in some cases, to 1925 and big recording horns in recording studios to do it.

Victor studio, Camden, N.J. -- 1925

Coincidentally, that's also an era when record companies thought the way to compete with that newfangled radio thing was to have popular radio announcers introduce the records. On the record.

WE'LL HEAR one of those, and we'll tell you what the record radio announcer went on to do not long after he was announcing records . . . on the actual record.

And as crazy a notion as this is, it's no match for modern times. So there's that.

So, vo vo oh de oh do and twenty-three skidoo, everything's jake on the Big Show. But don't get zozzled. That would be against the law.

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

The Big Broadcast Podcast

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It's Viva-tonal!

This might be the cleanest-sounding 1928 record you've ever heard.
 
One quick takeaway from that happy accident -- 1928 recording technology was a lot better than you'd think it was, particularly the quality of the microphones.

It's a strange experience to come across a batch of 80- and 90-something-year-old 78s, as I did last Friday at an estate sale,  and have them play almost as they did in the 1920s and early 1930s -- only on modern equipment and not wind-up acoustic gramophones.

THIS IS one of those records, Lee Morse and Her Blue Grass Boys with "Shadows on the Wall." It's one of the earliest Columbia electrical recordings, which the label branded "Viva-tonal."

Simply put, an electrical recording is just that: It is recorded using microphones and amplifiers feeding an electrical signal to a cutting head. Earlier "acoustical" recordings were all-mechanical -- performers played into a large horn, which moved a cutting stylus with sheer air pressure from the sound waves.

That was the reverse of the playback on an old phonograph with a large horn that amplified the vibrations from the needle moving through the record grooves.

In other words, it was . . . Viva-tonal. Indeed.

'Muslim!' is the new 'Squirrel!'

Dear Rep. Bacon:

Meanwhile, as the Trump Administration prepares to deport Iraqi Christians back to almost certain death in a country they've not seen in decades . . . crickets from Republicans seeking to distract attention from our very own "What fresh hell?" regime.

For God's sake, man! Every damn time an alert sounds on my laptop or iPhone, I wonder what fresh hell is breaking loose now from Mad King Donald or our dysfunctional, pathological government. Every damn time. It's usually a doozy, and it's usually happening SEVERAL TIMES A DAY.

Yet you're outraged about what the g**damned Palestinian Authority is doing as you don Ray Charles sunglasses and stick your fingers in your ears and hum the "Star-Spangled Banner" while contractors measure the Oval Office for padded rubber wallpaper? Really?

How damned stupid do you think we are? (Obviously, stupid enough to have elected Donald Trump and yourself.)

Yeah, I am just so zip-a-dee-doo-dah, orgasmically THRILLED that you intend to kick some Palestinian Authority ass as you inexplicably exhibit ZERO concern that your own House leadership is considering Flat Eartherism so it could have a shot at sailing the ship of state off the g**damned edge.

And I can't even begin to express how grateful this woebegone nation is that you're devoting precious minutes and hours to some *obviously* existentially important Palestinian baiting while North Korea fires off ICBM after ICBM, and President Donald J. Trump may be the most unequipped person on planet Earth to deal with a REAL Korean crisis, as opposed to your ordinary, everyday Korean crises.

Good grief, don't you people even LISTEN to yourselves anymore? Is it possible that y'all are really that non-self aware?

Nah, can't be. I think you're just that flippin' cynical.

God help us, because we sure as hell aren't capable of helping ourselves anymore.

Sincerely yours,

Hoping We Don't Get Nuked Before
I Can Vote for Your Opponent

The neon beacon of Underwood Street

Shining over Underwood Street, July 28, 2017

April 1957

Like the rest of radio today, especially AM radio, the carrot shavings have become pretty shrived and the lettuce gone pretty brown since KFAB's salad days.

Omaha's onetime purveyor of Jerry Vale, Bert Kaempfert, Dean Martin and the most relied-upon school closing reports in the Great White North -- the News Beacon of the Great Midwest -- now trades in right-wing talk radio, gutted by an iHeartMedia filet knife called economies of scale. Or something that sounds better than "gutted."

Nevertheless, the neon KFAB sign that shines over Underwood Street in the Dundee neighborhood is as big and bright as always.

Shine on.

3 Chords & the Truth: Staying on track

It don't come easy         
You know it don't come easy
It don't come easy         
You know it don't come easy

Ringo got it right. Love of music, like peace, is how we make it.

And I think I like how, back in my olden day, music didn't come easy. Well, at least as easily as today.

There's something to be said for stumbling across your musical passions the old-fashioned way -- happenstance, listening to the radio, a friend's record collection . . . something catching your eye at the record store. One in a building, not online.

Much also is to be said for having alien, uncool stuff imposed upon you via real Top-40 radio stations, as well as your parents' iron grip on the television . . . and the living-room console stereo . . . and the car radio, then being shocked, shocked when your youthful prejudice begins to waver.

THERE'S something to be said for having an 8 track instead of an iPod or iPhone to keep you in (CLUNK) tune. There's especially something to be said for music as a loudspeaker-based communal experience instead of an earbud-based solitary one.

What does any of this rumination have to do with this week's 3 Chords & the Truth? Beats me. I guess this -- the Not Easy way -- is where the show comes from.

We worked for it. And we're passionate about the music.

Modern times. Alas. . . .

THE BIG SHOW is music as a social exercise. And your Mighty Favog hopes you're playing it loudly on your stereo . . . sound system . . . whatever you call it today . . . and that your windows are open.

After all, it's so good it'd be a crime to keep it all to yourself.

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