3 Chords & the Truth: Tempus fugits at Christmastime

It's Christmas season once again, and another year that has slipped through our grasping fingers.

Because it's the holidays, we do the festive thing. Because it's another year that has passed by, leaving us -- yet again -- wondering where time has gone while our attention was elsewhere, we also think of all that was, yet is no more.

On 3 Chords & the Truth this week, we're doing a bit of the ho-ho-holidays. Behind the musical scenes, I'm wondering how six-plus decades could pass so quickly. So much I thought would be forever when I was young isn't anymore.

TAKE THE Dalton Theater in North Baton Rouge. It was a little neighborhood movie house we'd always drive by whenever we went to see my Uncle August. A middling landmark of my Louisiana youth, it was, standing there at Dalton Street and North Acadian Thruway.

First it closed sometime in the1970s, then it decayed. Then the city condemned it. Then, in 2000, the city tore it down. The progression of Uncle August -- who died, age 65, of cancer in 1982 -- was not dissimilar.

I think of that stuff at Christmastime. My parents' generation of the family is all gone. So are a lot of the things and places I grew up with. We shall not go there this week on the Big Show. I suspect you, if you're of a certain age, don't need my help in that regard this time of year.

It's there, lurking, in the corners of our minds. It stares back at you in the bathroom mirror every morning. C'est la vie.

Street View, Google Maps

No, this week, 3 Chords & the Truth, as always, is about the music -- pop, rock, big band, jazz, soul, standards, easy listening, country and all the rest. It's all mashed up in the food-for-the-soul processor of the mind and spit back out onto the Internet in sets that make musical sense. Well, I think they make musical sense; such is freeform radio, even when it's in cyberspace.

If my thoughts turn melancholy when the bitter wind sweeps across the Plains and the mercury digs a hole for itself, the Big Show does what it always does. It entertains and, one hopes, enlightens a bit. That doesn't change, even though everything else does.

Even though everybody else does . . . and you, too.

That's where we are as Christmas 2022 draws nigh after two previous, warped COVID Christmases removed so many things -- and people -- from the here and now and tossed them unceremoniously into the once was.

There's so much that, in Louisiana-speak, ain't dere no more. But the thing is this; the music always will be. Dance while you can, because the tempus is fugiting, and its run at the Dalton has been extended indefinitely.

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

It's one of those flat states in the middle. . . .

I've lived in Omaha for 31 years now, and I have to tell you that it's news to me that Heidi Heitkamp is my former U.S. senator.

Oh . . . wait. She's not. She was a North Dakota senator until January.

Nebraska . . . North Dakota . . . seed caps, John Deere tractors, unbearable winters, old white rustics who wouldn't know a frappuccino from a woke meme. What's the difference?

Am I right?

I mean, if you've seen one part of Flyover Country -- And, really, why would you want to? -- you've seen it all. And now back to our breaking news . . . a gay Black Lives Matters activist is condemning some shit on one coast or the other.

Am I right, Time mag, mag?

Sorry, but as a proud rube out here on the flown-over Great Plains, my "inclusive" media betters out there in D.C. got me on the rag, rag.

And while they're at it, they can take their insults about the queen and shove them up their royal Timese machine.

News flash! Some of us prairie pigf***ers are familiar with Joan Baez.

YOU HAVE to be a lifelong resident of Flyover Country to get how grating it is to be so insignificant that you can have a story actually get onto the effing Time magazine website, and then onto effing Apple News without anyone effing noticing that Heidi Heitkamp is from effing North Dakota and not effing Nebraska. After all the news coverage about how the red-state Democrat would vote on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court after the Me Too furor over his high-school and college "boofing" (and how her no vote likely cost her re-election), how could you not effing know?

One could let it slide as a simple brain fart if it weren't for a lifetime of observing Coastal America being shocked that, for example, Omaha has goddamn paved streets, decent restaurants and broadband Internet connectivity. And that there are no cattle herds wandering down Dodge Street in search of forage.

This actually is an improvement over New Yorkers -- again, for example -- who've been here and point out what a relative backwater it is. Perhaps, but our house payment here might rent a cardboard box over a steam grate there.

What's sad is that folks in these parts actually are, on some level, desperate for the approval of our cosmopolitan "betters" and always have been. We seek validation from those who scarcely know we exist and, with vanishingly few exceptions, we ain't gonna get it.

But that's not the half of the flyover equation. I grew up in Louisiana. No, there were no alligators in my back yard. Yes, we did have indoor plumbing. Many folks can read, write and cipher some.

And you are one Category 5 hurricane in the wrong place from freezing in the dark, America.

LET'S BE honest here. The only damned reason Time magazine gives a good goddamn about former U.S. Sen Heidi Heitkamp of Nebraska . . . North Dakota . . . whatever . . . is that Donald Trump is president of the United States, lots of Forgotten America like Nebraska and Louisiana voted for him, and he's turned out to be a fascist nightmare.

There's nothing like the political equivalent of a global thermonuclear exchange to finally get your attention. Am I right?

Maybe, ultimately, that was the point of his election. After all, the alt-right may be on the upswing, but it's not an Electoral College majority. Plenty of reasonable, decent Americans in Flyover Country were content to throw a bomb into America's entire rigged, classist political and social infrastructure. Oops.

I'm just spitballin' here, but perhaps there was an element of "You can ignore us, but we can kill you" in there as well. Just like the "yellow vests" in France, who largely hail from the forgotten périphérique of the country, flyover folk know who couldn't care less about them -- and they have less and less to lose by blowing the whole damned thing the hell up.

And they also well know the limits of Woke America's inclusivity.

Only a (bleep) calls a body a (bleep) on TV

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Here's what I learned pretty much on the first day of my high-school radio broadcasting class: The microphone is always on.

Of course, not always, but if you don't act like it is when it's not, time will come when you think it's not but it is. And $%&* me if generations of actual broadcasters have found themselves eating government cheese in a van down by the river after forgetting that simple rule.

The other thing I learned shortly thereafter at the voice of Baton Rouge High, WBRH, is that when you try to bleep stuff on the fly, a certain percentage of the time, it doesn't work out. Have you ever heard the version of Pink Floyd's "Money" where the "bull" gets bleeped but the "s***" doesn't?

I have. Praise be that one wasn't actually my fault. I was to blame for various other transgressions.

SO NOW we have the world of cable "news," where entertainment trumps all and former pols and present ink-stained wretches take to the airwaves because that's what all the cool kids do. And the pay ain't horrible, either.

It was only a matter of time before the guy from Time, Mark Halperin, decided to be the coolest of the cool kids by calling the president a d*** on national TV. He thought the seven-second delay would allow him to engage in safe-badassery.

Of course, the condom tore . . . er, the brand-new producer couldn't find the "dump" button.


AND THAT "cool kid" from Time? They got him on the rag, rag.

Shove that up your royal Timese machine