The abomination of desecration

Like millions of Americans, I watched the towers fall in New York City -- live -- on my television set.

Before they fell, I saw people leap to their deaths.rather than be burned alive.

I watched the Pentagon burn. I heard the stories from Flight 93, which gave us "Let's roll!" as a battle cry after Sept. 11, 2001.

Looking into the Omaha sky that day, I saw fighter jets and an AWACS plane. And no other aircraft for days.

I saw my country changed forever, and not for the better, in a single morning. That day, 2,996 people died. People are still dying -- many of them New York first responders -- because of that day.

Wikipedia

TO THIS DAY, I get a pit in my stomach whenever I see old pictures of the twin towers of the then-World Trade Center.

And this is how the Omaha World-Herald has chosen to commemorate that terrible day -- with a 9/11 coupon section. If there's a more telling embodiment of the America of  Donald Trump, who infamously called a New York TV station to brag (falsely) that his Trump Tower now was the city's tallest, I don't know what that would be.

Thousands die. Hey, that's a killer opportunity to make a buck! Right, Warren Buffett? Right, Lee Enterprises?

I can't wait for what the World-Herald has planned for Pearl Harbor Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, when Todd Beamer told his fellow passengers "Let's roll!" as they fought to foil the plane's hijackers, little did we know how America would be rolling nearly two decades later.

It's enough to make one wonder whether our worst enemies are the ones who just might know us best.

Great Satan, indeed.

3 Chords & the Truth: Really?

There was a hurricane.

And, like, it moved north, you know, and wasn't. . . .

Not headed anywhere near Alabama.  But then the president tweeted. And. . . .

Then . . . then . . . he was wrong. But truth is a casualty when he's wrong and reality must be bent to make lies into something like the truth in this crazy, mixed-up land.

I swear to God, what's a poor music show to do in the middle of a loony bin? I'm talking about 3 Chords & the Truth here.

PITY THE Big Show that just wants to have fun when an apocalypse calls. No, not the Apocalypse, just an apocalypse.

But Donald Trump's trying hard, you know?

So tune in for 3 Chords & the Truth in full underground, rebel radio station mode. Because someone has to tell folks they're not the ones who are crazy.

Oh . . . the music's damn good, too.

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

The emperor has no brain

The president of the United States is pictured here expecting
Americans to buy what no second-grade teacher would

This will not be a lengthy post, mainly because I don't know what you really can say about displays of Category 5 crazy.

Either you recognize moonbattery when you see it . . . or you're a moonbat.

President Donald Trump proved once again Wednesday that he's a couple tacos shy of a combination plate. The man (or one of his obsequious staffers) doctored -- with a black marker, no less -- a hurricane forecast map from last week to "prove" that Alabama so too coulda been "hit hard" by Hurricane Dorian.

All because Trump tweeted this Sunday morning:

NOW, BY SUNDAY morning, everybody following the storm (except Trump, apparently) knew Dorian was going to come nowhere near Alabama. The only way you could write what Trump wrote in his tweet is if you are a) bat-shit crazy, b) suffering from dementia, c) have no fucking idea which of those states down there is Alabama . . . or d) all of the preceding.

My money's on D.

Trump began tweeting Sunday morning at 7:25. Between then and 7:58 a.m., he tweeted, retweeted and rage tweeted a number of things. Three of the retweets, in chronological order were these:

IN THE LAST retweet, the National Weather Service forecast map shows a small probability of tropical-storm force winds over a tiny sliver of southeastern Alabama. That would be if the hurricane tracked to the western periphery of the cone of uncertainty -- that is a far, far cry from "will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated."

But what you gonna do? Dotards gonna dotard. Trump's "Alabama" tweet came at 9:51 a.m. Sunday, after all these contradictory retweets.

The non-delusional community quickly responded to all this with a collective "What the fuck?" The press weighed in with a series of "the president erroneously tweeted. . . " dispatches, which is what journalists say when they really mean "What the fuck?"

Many think Trump doctored this as well.

And because the narcissistic nut job in control of 6,000-something nuclear weapons cannot ever be wrong about anything, he soon began rage tweeting about the lying fake-news media's lies about his inability to read a damn map with "circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was." For the record, my beautiful and intelligent wife predicted he would do exactly that.

I was just trying to figure out exactly how drunk I could get before Trump managed to bring about the End of Days.

Then came Wednesday. And the press availability in the Oval Office. And the hurricane map from last week with the Marks-A-Lot makeover.

I WAS WRONG. In this Era of Truthicide, posts about what used to be self-evident can expand way beyond what used to be necessary. You can write reams attempting to convince cultists and true-believers-in-the-unbelievable that the craziness in plain sight is both crazy and in plain sight.

It is a fool's errand, and I plead guilty. In my defense, the alternative is surrender and despair.

In this Age of Trump, is it better to be a fool cupping one's hands around a flickering, dying flame of hope, or better to be a realistic fatalist awaiting the end of one's country . . . one's world . . . the end of reason and truth?

That's the question -- one of the questions -- confronting a country led by an idiot man-child coloring on government maps to make lies into something like the truth.

I don't know what's going to happen between now and November 2020. All I know is this -- whatever happens, however the Age of Trump ends, that this might somehow all end well lies well outside the Cone of Uncertainty.

Farther even than Alabama.

3 Chords & the Truth: And it's all right?

We all, I think, had a close call with apocalyptic crazy last week, and it's all right.

For now.

I think.

The sun has continued to rise, and it appears we will make it to September. I think. That is, hurricanes and Washington willing.

Anyway, we're counting our being here to do yet another installment of 3 Chords & the Truth as a victory, which we're celebrating in the usual manner -- with really great music, eclectically presented.

IT'S THE BEST music. Unbelievably beautiful music. You would not believe how beautiful the music is on this week's edition of the Big Show.

And that's no fake news. Or is it Fake News?

The new rules for capitalization still kinda throw me. You know?

That said. . . .

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

Wigged out

July 28, 1970: This. Just this.

It would be a decade, roughly, before I figured out what a deeply, deeply weird place I came from. It would be another decade or so before it dawned on all of us what deeply strange times in which we Baby Boomers came of age.

Aug. 27, 2019: All the incentive anyone needs to open a saving account (assuming we had any money to save) would be . . . interest on our deposits.

I missed all the big events

July 24, 1970: The Antichrist takes up residence at a Baton Rouge, La., appliance store. And I freakin' missed it.

I had no idea that the malevolent ruler of the world had such a fascination with color TV. He and the 9-year-old me would have had something to talk about.

I bet he could have gotten me an RCA AccuColor set long before 1975, when the Old Man finally relented, succumbing to non-stop bitching by me and my mother and admitting that color television was not, alas, a fad. We did not get an RCA from McLeod's, however.

My father was a Magnavox man.

3 Chords & the Truth: We had a good run, eh?

The lunatic tweets like an ass.

The lunatic speaks out his ass
Remembering blame and crazy claims and gaffes
Got to keep the loonies on the path

The lunatic has cast a pall
The lunatics have so much gall
TV news keeps his crazy rants in our ears
And every day the lunatic spews more

And the crazy train is off the rusted tracks again
And if this is the end of the damn line
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you here on 3 Chords & the Truth

It's the Big Show, y'all. Let's be here while we can. Aloha.

(Apologies to Pink Floyd.)

Fair in motion

The last weekend of the 2019 

Iowa State Fair . . . in motion.

3 Chords & the Truth: Music box

What is the Big Show?

The program, 3 Chords & the Truth, is basically an internet-enabled, really eclectic, Favogian frickin' music box. Like a radio.

I assume you're listening on something that roughly approximates a box. And that there's music coming out of it.

Voila! Music box.

And in the case of the Big Show, it's a good music box. Or a box filled with good music. However you'd like to phrase it.

It's certainly a box radiating eclectic music, carefully curated. I'm told I should use phrases like "carefully curated." I don't know why.

WE LIVE IN an age of branding, I suppose. That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't equal doing. And thoughtfully selected and placed music is what we just frickin' do on 3 Chords & the Truth.

Heat up that iron in a fire and brand something with it, Cowboy.

Hell, I don't even know where I'm going with this. Hell, the veterinarian didn't know where I was going with it when I asked him whether the organizers were giving out Who's a GOOD Boy? awards at his 30-year vet-school reunion this summer.

AND, by the way, Belle the Dog is lying on the back of the couch watching Elmo on PBS Kids.

I don't know why.

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

This breaks my damn heart

1962. It was the blackest of years; it was the most idealistic and hopeful of years.

Jim Crow refused to go quietly in the South. Communism, and the fear of it, haunted everything we were, did and said in America. Between us and the Soviet Union, we almost blew up the world.

But also in 1962, if we made it through October, the world would be a better place by springtime -- we just knew it.

Young Americans brimmed with idealism. Black college kids and white college kids risked their lives for their ideals in a peaceful assault against segregationist brutality in Dixie.

The youth of a country that 17 years before had vanquished Nazi Germany and militarist Japan found inspiration in a young president who challenged them to ask what they could do for their country.

JOHN GLENN orbited the earth three times. Next stop: the moon.

America had set its gaze on the New Frontier, and John Stewart of the The Kingston Trio could write liner notes like these above.

I was 1 year old. Hope was alive and kicking. Even in the South.

2019. A broken-down, 58-year-old music-show and blog guy sits at his iMac, typing. He wonders what the fuck happened.

He reads the hopeful, idealistic and oh-God-how-naive words of the late Mr. Stewart, and he wants to cry. He fears that there are no more tears left. Even more, he's terrified that fear will be put to the test again and again.

"So now, as never before, an age of introspection is reaching every one of us." Now our nation is becoming what we've willed within ourselves -- a heart of darkness.

"The horror! The horror!"

Listen to Wubbie

Watch intently.

Obey Wubbie. You're feeling the need to listen. Listen. You really need to listen to the Big Show.

Listen to Wubbie.

Wubbie says listen to 3 Chords & the Truth. Wubbie loves good music. YOU love good music. Wubbie says listen.

Listen.