A child care thing goin' on

Parents: It's 6:30., do you know which cafe Mrs. Jones and your children are at?

Are they holding hands? Making all kinds of plans?

While the jukebox plays their favorite songs?

3 Chords & the Truth: Desperate for d'lovely

Pardon me if I'm a bit fed up with shooting and anger and death and strife and mayhem.

It was a bad week in Omaha. You've heard why.

I don't know about you, but I've got to get away, and I'm doing my best to take 3 Chords & the Truth with me this week. I thought I'd start off about half a century or so ago and take it from there -- "there" being a time and place where we at least pretended to be civilized, and kids shooting up schools were unheard of.

An era of madmen could do worse than drowning its sorrows with a hi-fi full of Mad Men music.

Like I said, that's our starting point this week on the Big Show.

TO TELL YOU the truth, if all our popular culture can conjure anymore is booty calls, bling and poppin' caps in random ass, I may just take up permanent residence in the Wayback Machine. I gotta get away.

We gotta get away. We gotta learn a new way of living before all we know is dying.

I'll think about that later. Now I need to remember that times were simpler -- not perfect . . . just not quite as insane as today's default existence. Now I need to remember when lovely trumped angry, at least in the culture's official box score.

Back during a time when I still could be shocked.

I need to get away for a bit. Yes, indeed. I'm reckoning you do, too.

FOR SOME of you, this week's 3 Chords & the Truth will be a trip to a familiar and beloved destination, one where the rough edges have been smoothed out by the amazing grace of passing time. For others of you, it might be a journey of discovery.

But, at any rate, it ain't here. It ain't the fresh tragedies of a new year -- 2011 -- when you'd think we'd know better.

Welcome to a touch of class from years long past. Back when men wore hats . . . and it was really bad form to bust a cap in your neighbor's ass.

Meet the parents . . . 1 and 2

It's official -- Mom and Dad will be known henceforth as Parent 1 and Parent 2.

The revised designations come by edict of the U.S. State Department, which is changing its paperwork so it's just as confusing as the rest of our society. Because now Heather does have two mommies. Or daddies.

Or something.

The government press release, however, noted that it remains up to mothers and fathers -- or mothers and mothers . . . or fathers and fathers . . . or parents who transcend gender identification altogether -- to fight it out between themselves over who gets to be 1 and who has to settle for 2.

NOT REALLY, but I don't know why the hell not:

The Department of State is pleased to announce the introduction of a redesigned Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA). The CRBA is an official record confirming that a child born overseas to a U.S. citizen parent acquired U.S. citizenship at birth. The redesigned document has state-of-the-art security features that make it extremely resistant to alterations or forgery.

CRBAs have been printed at U.S. Embassies and Consulates around the world since their introduction in 1919. Effective January 3, 2011, CRBAs will be printed at our passport facilities in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and New Orleans, Louisiana. Centralizing production and eliminating the distribution of controlled blank form stock throughout the world ensures improved uniform quality and lessens the threat of fraud.

Applications for U.S. passports and the redesigned CRBA will also use the title of “parent” as opposed to “mother” and “father.” These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.

IN A RELATED development, the Vatican this week declared that, in deference to the new U.S. policy, all Catholics in English-speaking countries immediately will begin praying "in the name of Parent 2, Child 1 and the Special Friend" when making the sign of the cross.

In response to Rome's decree, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew denounced the popish heresy and declared that the proper formula for the sign of the cross was "in the name of the Parent, the Child and the Honored Companion."

Believers worldwide, meantime, shrugged and returned to their video games.

Simply '70s: Bowie, unpainted

Apparently, this is David Bowie's first television performance, during a 1970 closed-circuit telecast of Britain's Ivor Novello Awards where his 1969 composition "Space Oddity" won a special award for originality.

This rarity shows what the man looked like when he looked like . . . a man. And before advancing age forced him to ditch androgyny because, frankly, Old Guy in Drag doesn't exactly suggest dollar bills busting out of one's bustier.

To shrimp, or not to shrimp

You don't need to pick up Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet to partake of a good Shakespearean tragedy.

All you have to do is head down to Louisiana.

The New York Times' Amy Harmon, I am sure, knew she had herself a good story when she started trekking down to Delacroix to chronicle the struggles of a shrimping family in the wake of the BPocalypse. What I wonder, though, is whether she knew she was committing Shakespeare -- albeit a Shakespearean tragedy that trails off before everybody's dead or bereft.


IF YOU'RE NOT from the state of my birth, you'll start to get what I mean pretty quickly:

While Americans were debating their reliance on fossil fuel in the wake of the worst offshore oil spill in United States history, Aaron Greco was trying to decide what to do with his life. His story illuminates the singular appeal and hardships of a livelihood in jeopardy.

And as the Obama administration paves the way for deepwater drilling to resume in the gulf, it is young men like Aaron who will shoulder the direct impact of the nation’s decisions about what energy to consume and what seafood to eat in the years to come.

Few of his friends born into the Gulf Coast’s fishing communities were following their own fathers and grandfathers in the pursuit of wild seafood. Long before the oil rig exploded, rising fuel prices and competition from Asia’s cheap farmed shrimp had made a risky and physically punishing profession far less profitable: only a few thousand Louisianans now make their living fishing, down from more than 20,000 in the late 1980s.

Yet Aaron was among those of his generation still drawn to an elemental way of life. He wanted to be his own boss, to spend his days on the teeming marshes outside his door, 30 miles south of New Orleans and a world away. He wanted to pace himself to the rhythm of the oysters, crabs, and his favorite quarry since childhood, the shrimp.

“I want to chase the shrimp more than anything,” he told his girlfriend. “But I’m stuck.”

When the spill closed the waters around St. Bernard Parish, Aaron bounced between doubt and determination. His sisters pushed him to go on to college; his uncles warned of the lingering effects of dispersants used to clean up the oil. Even after the well was capped, Aaron questioned his own abilities.

IF YOU ARE from Louisiana, and if "it was good enough for my daddy" is your motteaux, you probably think the damn Yankees are making fun of you. Read on anyway.

Better yet, go to the Times website and read the whole thing. Not that it'll do any damned good.

For Buddy, who had dropped out of school in 10th grade without ever learning to read, there had been no choice: like almost everyone else in Delacroix, descendants of Spanish-speaking Canary Islanders, he never considered anything other than fishing.

The time he did spend in school he used to advantage, singing “Sweet Caroline” to the pretty blonde in front of him on the bus, whom he soon prevailed on to marry him. But like many who grew up on the banks of the Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, he felt looked down on at the high school “up the road” — a designation that denoted social class as much as geography.

Others may have regarded them as poor, but the truth was teenagers could make good money in those days on the brackish waters that flowed into the gulf. In 1986, the year Buddy and Carolyn’s first child, Brittany, arrived, wild-caught gulf shrimp still accounted for nearly a quarter of the shrimp Americans ate, commanding the equivalent of nearly $2 per pound dockside.

And when Aaron was born, in 1990, Buddy covered the hospital bill with a few hundred sacks of oysters at $27 each.

“I paid for your stinky behind in that bayou,” he liked to remind his son, and it didn’t take long for the lesson to stick. Aaron spent his childhood catching minnows with a scoop net in the ditch near their home, his shrimper boots reaching up to his shorts. On fishing trips with his father, he lined up the little fish that dropped from the netting and stuffed them in his pockets.

“You take those out of there,” his mother commanded when she caught him. “They get in my washer and dryer, I’m going to have a smell out of this world.”

By the time Aaron was 13, he was lobbying to leave school himself. “Let me come on the boat,” he pleaded.

But Buddy wanted his middle child, and only boy, to have other options. The money in fishing was unpredictable, the work was dangerous, and there was no retirement plan. Carolyn’s father, a shrimper all his life, had had his hand ripped off in an accident with his rigging. Buddy’s father, stricken with lung cancer, hauled his oxygen tank with him onto the boat until a few days before he died in 2001.

“You finish school, Aaron,” he told his son. “You take after your mother — you smart enough to go to college.”

LARGE SWATHS of my home state -- millions of its citizens -- are the last of the Mohicans . . . or the Sioux in an eternal Wounded Knee. The world has fundamentally changed around them; they stay the same.

The economy upon which they have staked -- continue to stake -- their all is sinking as fast as what's left of the marshland under their feet. The only question is what will slip beneath the Gulf swells first, the land or the people who have populated it for generations.

Tradition is a fine thing. But it can turn deadly when it leads to ossification -- to turning one's back on education and new ideas. Holding fast to a way of life is a noble thing, except when it is untenable.

Louisiana is fast becoming untenable. All the things crucial to its survival are all the things in which it so desperately lags.

Ay, there's the rub . . . to adapt and forswear a way of life, doomed though it may be, or to follow in thy father's footsteps, yea, though they lead to, and over, a precipice.

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. . . .

TO BE, or not to be -- that is the question. I dread the forthcoming answer.

Simply '70s: Stick it and win

If you grew up in Baton Rouge, La., in the 1970s, you just got goose bumps.

And, irrationally, you're hoping the guy from the radio station will see the bumper stickers on your computer screen, stop you and give you a prize.


WIBR (Radio 13), WFMF (Why, oh, why didn't they stick with progressive rock?) and WLCS (the Big Win 910) . . . we got 'em all covered. For we of a certain age, these stations -- with able assists from WAIL and WBRH (starting in '77) -- provided the soundtrack of our youth.


It was a time when school shootings were unheard of and teenagers did not live by the calendar on their smart phones, which blessedly did not yet exist. I miss those days, and I miss these radio stations.

Even the post-Loose Radio incarnation of 'FMF. But don't tell my friends; that would be so not cool.

Everybody has his reasons

"Everybody that used to know me I'm sry but Omaha changed me and (expletive) me up. and the school I attend is even worse ur gonna here about the evil (expletive) I did but that (expletive) school drove me to this. I wont u guys to remember me for who I was b4 this ik. I greatly affected the lives of the families ruined but I'm sorry. goodbye."

-- Robert Butler Jr.,
high-school gunman

Oh. Well, that explains it, then.

I'm sure Vicki Kaspar, the Millard South assistant principal gunned down by Butler this afternoon died tonight knowing it was for a damned good reason. Right?

Yes, again

Not again.

Yes, again.

Tell me it wasn't Westroads.

No, it was Millard South High School.

How many dead?

An assistant principal and the shooter, by his own hand. A Glock ain't an assault rifle, and Omaha got a little lucky this time. Just a little.

"This time." That's a hell of a couple of words -- this time. They mean it's happened here before -- which it has. They mean it probably will happen again -- which I wouldn't doubt.

"This time." A hell of a thing, "this time." A hell of a thing that means I can just recycle what I wrote about last time, which is, in itself, a hell of a thing. This matter of history -- and youthful domestic terrorism -- repeating itself in my city. In Omaha.

Mayor Jim Suttle said this thing "descended on our city." No, things like this don't descend on a city, except in the sense that evil descends upon a place to wreak its havoc. Things like what 17-year-old Robert Butler Jr., unleashed don't descend so much as they're carefully constructed in the human heart.

Fitfully hatched in a demented mind.

Cynically incubated in a full-blown culture of death. That would be us, the world's new barbarians.

HERE'S WHAT I wrote three years ago, when youthful mayhem "descended" on Omaha in 2007 during the Von Maur massacre. Not a damned thing has changed except the name, the place and the extent of the carnage.

Just replace "Robert A. Hawkins" with "Robert Butler Jr.," "Christmas shoppers and salespeople" with "students and faculty." Call it good.

Or very, very bad.

Robert A. Hawkins was a terrorist just as much as is Osama bin Laden. Osama's a big leaguer; Robbie Hawkins was a rookie-league screwball pitcher. How do you like your newfound fame, kid?

I can appreciate that Hawkins was a sad, tormented and pathological young adult. I can. So were Hank Williams and Janis Joplin, but they still managed to leave behind much beauty in this world and killed no one but, ultimately, themselves.

And let's not forget Vincent van Gogh.

Robbie Hawkins' legacy is death, panic, mayhem, gore and heartbreak. Thousands of years of human tradition and theology tell us mayhem and death are the province of the Evil One, and modern psychology can offer no treatment -- no effective prophylactic -- for the demonic.

Robert A. Hawkins, age 20, was a sick young man. A sick young man who listened to the devil inside. A sick young man for whom self-murder just wasn't good enough.

No, he had to take eight others with him on his way out.

I grieve for the hell Robbie Hawkins' life became, just as I weep over the hell on earth he brought to innocent Christmas shoppers and salespeople. I will not, however, make excuses for what he did -- what he did to eight fellow humans, what he did to their families and friends, what he did to this city.

This city . . . Omaha. My home.

With great difficulty, I pray that God has more mercy on Robbie Hawkins' tormented soul than Robbie Hawkins had on a bunch of innocent people he knew not from Adam. But that doesn't change what Hawkins decided to become Wednesday afternoon -- a terrorist. Albeit one without a clue.

WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY that has fetishized sex, violence, death and materialism. None of the above can fill the void that haunts our being. None of the above can give adequate meaning to young lives like the one Robert A. Hawkins threw away in that Omaha shopping mall.

Americans are quick to mock those young, Islamic terrorists who embrace suicide, murder and carnage for the greater glory of Allah -- and the chance to screw themselves silly in Paradise with 72 hot virgins.

But at least they kill -- and die -- for something, no matter how warped.

For what did Robbie Hawkins -- and all his youthful predecessors like Harris, Klebold and Cho -- kill . . . and die?

For what?

Editing out the cold, hard facts of history

I find it highly amusing that at a branch of Auburn University, we have an English professor so offended by the N-word that he has search-and-replaced it from the entirety of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

This when the parent institution, apparently, has plenty of room for an African-American quarterback whose own father sought to auction off to white athletic boosters.

Twain's 19th-century, culturally accurate (unfortunately) use of a racial slur is so bad that literature -- and history -- must be sanitized. All because, in the words of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, "You can't stand the truth!"

On the other hand, a black minister pimping out his own flesh and blood to the money men of some Southern college-football power . . . that's a truth we can stand just fine. Don't forget, it's Auburn vs. Oregon for the BCS national championship, 7:30 p.m. Central on ESPN.

But that's not important now. What's important is to sanitize literature -- and history, too -- because it sometimes shows us ugly things.

Historical ugly things, of course, are the worst ugly things because we're less likely to be entangled in them at the moment, thus making self-righteousness much easier -- and less conspicuous.

THEREFORE, we find ourselves at the point described in today's New York Times:

A new edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is missing something.

Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word “nigger” is replaced by “slave,” a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

“I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” he said. “And I don’t think I’m alone.”

Mr. Gribben, who combined “Huckleberry Finn” with “Tom Sawyer” in a single volume and also supplied an introduction, said he worried that “Huckleberry Finn” had fallen off reading lists, and wanted to offer an edition that is not for scholars, but for younger people and general readers.

“I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,” Mr. Gribben said. “The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.” (The book also substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”)

Since the publisher discussed plans for the book this week with Publishers Weekly, it has been “assaulted” with negative e-mails and phone calls, said Suzanne La Rosa, the co-founder and publisher of NewSouth Books.

“We didn’t undertake this lightly,” Ms. La Rosa said. “If our publication fosters good discussion about how language affects learning and certainly the nature of censorship, then difficult as it is likely to be, it’s a good thing.”

I AM SO HAPPY that no one took it lightly when setting out to bring us one step closer to the information-management practices of an Orwellian dystopia. Maybe a long face is a moral disinfectant, after all.

Or maybe we're all just as squeamish as we are stupid and morally bankrupt. Or, perhaps, so open-minded that all our brains have fallen out.

I eagerly await Winston Smith's Wikipedia edits. "Nigger," you see, always has been "nigga," and it's just a term of endearment between African-Americans in the 'hood. White people aren't allowed to say it because it's, like, a fraternity rule or something.

And it's only a rumor (started by socialists or something, surely) that a society that can't look ugly in the face only grows all the more grotesque in due time.

The danger of birthdays with an '0'

You want to know what's dangerous in our neighborhood?

Birthdays ending in a zero, that's what. This was the scene late this afternoon next door. As you can tell, Laura turned 40.

People think Omaha is this boring white-bread place full of boring white-bread white people. This may be so.

But I would like you to consider the notion that this is just a disguise. Something to throw the rest of America off balance.

I would like you to consider that, beneath the rubber masks and makeup -- beneath the carefully constructed cover stories and meticulous impersonations of this country's stereotype of the average Midwesterner -- lies a city of 430,000 severely warped individuals.

The brassieres as tree ornaments, I thought, were a particularly nice touch. Then again, I'm a boob man.


I THINK much of the block was waiting for Laura to come home from work today. I know I was.

As she stood there, stunned, the family crowded around to take the obligatory pictures of the devastation. I yelled over that I wouldn't say a word, being that I get to turn 50 this year.

At this point, Laura's dad -- Did I mention he lives across the street? -- inquired as to when that was, exactly.

"I'm not telling you," I replied.

And I'm not. It's bad enough that my severely warped wife and friends have that information. God help me.

Gerry Rafferty's dead-end street

Without the darkness, we cannot perceive the light.

Without grief, we cannot cherish joy.

Without pain, where is the blessedness of relief?

And without darkness, grief and pain, can we truly produce the art that brings light to our souls? Joy to our hearts? Relief from the pain of every day?

With the passing of Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty -- found dead today somewhere at the bottom of a bottle -- I'm thinking of all the souls who took their pain and gave us joy despite never managing to, ultimately, embrace it themselves. I'm thinking of Janis. Of Jimi. Of Jim. Of Judy. Of Donny. Of Kurt. Of Sid and Syd. Of Elvis.

I'm thinking of the light that pierces the darkness of our world, only to be consumed by it.


TODAY, I'm thinking of Gerry. Of Stealers Wheel and "Stuck in the Middle With You."

I'm thinking about "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right."

And I'm thinking about "Baker Street," which I believe never actually left the airwaves for even a moment my junior year of high school -- that and "a lad in his place."

He's got this dream about buyin' some land
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he'll settle down there's a quiet little town
And forget about everything

But you know he'll always keep movin'
You know he's never gonna stop movin
Cus he's rollin'
He's the rollin' stone

And when you wake up it's a new mornin'
The sun is shinin' it's a new morning
You're goin'
You're goin' home.

My daily post about posting daily

WordPress, known on this blogging platform as Brand X, is challenging its users to do a post a day.

To that end, it's posting helpful daily suggestions to get the ol' creative juices flowing. Like, for instance, avoiding pathetic clichés like "get the ol' creative juices flowing."

Or, for another instance, avoiding overused ironic devices like inserting a blatant cliché into one's post, then making fun of that fact. It's to literature what eating a can of Van Camp's and farting "Dixie" is to the natural-gas industry.

ANYWAY, yesterday's helpful topic from Brand X was this:

Share something that makes you smile. (Can be a photo, an idea, a memory – anything that comes to mind).

If this suggestion doesn’t fit your blog’s general topic (e.g. Your blog is about the air speed velocity of unladen hyperactive swallows), that’s ok. Simply apply the question to your topic, by adding or changing some words.

(Reminder: Do not answer this in the comments. That would be very silly. You should grab this topic and write a post about it on your blog).

FRANKLY, I don't see how anyone can apply this idea to blogs about the air speed velocity of unladen hyperactive swallows unless we have some concrete indication of whether the referenced swallows are of the European or African variety.


THEY'RE such a bunch of booger eaters over at Brand X.

That kind of makes me smile.

Someone had to do it

I'm with Mom.

Beware this New Year's resolution

We're screwed.

Omaha's embattled mayor, Jim Suttle, has a New Year's resolution as he steels himself for a recall vote this month. It's to better listen to us, the citizens of this fair city.

Like I said, we are so screwed. I mean, we thought the city was broke. That things were bad enough to recall Suttle for, among other things, not listening to us. Wait until he does start listening to the vox populi -- we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Trust me, the city will be bankrupt in a week if the mayor is sincere about all this listening stuff.

FOR YEARS, the Omaha taxpayer has railed about high property taxes. The Omaha driver has railed about high wheel taxes. The Omaha consumer has railed about our high below-average sales taxes.

During all those years, nobody cared that city hall was making sweetheart deals with the police and fire unions to buy labor peace (and defer pay raises) in the name of holding the line on property taxes, because that's what the voters wanted. It was the municipal version of taking out a home-equity loan to pay down the credit cards -- after all, what could go wrong?

We're entitled, don't you know? Since the last economic slump -- the one before this, the mother of all modern economic slumps -- the Omaha voter has demanded, and gotten, almost-annual property-tax cuts. And then. . . .

Chickens. Homaha. Roost.

You know what started to fly then. In fact, it started to hit the fan. The tax revenue stopped flowing, and the bills kept on coming. The city pension fund was about broke.

"Cut the budget!" the angry voter says. "Not THAT part of the budget!" a hundred angry neighborhood associations and civic groups demand.

"Where's my property-tax cut?"

"Fill the damn potholes!"

"Don't close my library!"

"The cops and firefighters are making out like bandits! Stop giving away the store!"

BUT WAIT . . . the cops and firefighters won't agree to that. The contract fight will end up in arbitration. Omaha will get screwed in arbitration -- it always has. Take the concessions the mayor got.

"The cops and firefighters are making out like bandits! Stop giving away the store!"

No, really, this is the best we can do. We bargained the Cadillac owners down to a nice Chevy.

"The cops and firefighters are making out like bandits! Stop giving away the store!"

You're not making sense. The Commission of Industrial Relations will not rule kindly for the city. That's almost a lock.

"Recall the cop-coddler!"

IF IT were me in the mayor's office, I'd be tempted to resign and let the next sucker try to figure out -- after carefully listening to the fine citizens of Omaha -- exactly how one goes about letting the people have their cake and eat yours, too.

Good luck to Mayor Suttle. He's going to need it, particularly if he survives the recall election.

Happy Boxing Day!

Here's a little something that's appropriate viewing for sitting back and reflecting on a most excellent Boxing Day.


Now . . . on to New Year's!

Et Joyeux Noël, aussi, cher!

God bless you, Tee Jules, wherever you are, and God bless us every one. Joyeux Noël, mes amis, et bonne année, aussi!

A blessed Christmas

Christmas Bells

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hip-hop all the way to hell

Culture precedes politics . . . and everything else.

Music both produces and is produced by a culture.

A culture centered on titty bars -- music deemed stripper friendly before it can burrow into your children's brains -- is no culture at all. It is an anticulture.

NPR was on the anticulture beat Thursday. I'm not so sure the reporter would have been this bemused had she known what she was dealing with. Then again, maybe the NPR report is part of the anticulture just as much as titty-bar-tested hip-hop singles -- I don't know.

JUDGE for yourself:

Hip-hop producers have been breaking records in Atlanta strip clubs for a long time now — at least as far back as 2003, when Lil Jon was doing it with songs like, "Get Low." He's been quoted as saying "the butts don't lie," meaning if the strippers can dance to it, the song has potential. In Tamara Palmer's book, Country Fried Soul: Adventures in Dirty South Hip Hop, Lil Jon says "Get Low" had a slow start: the dancers "didn't feel it at first." But eventually it grew on them and several dancers at different strip clubs asked the DJs to play it during their stage sets. "Get Low" took off — in mainstream clubs and on radio and TV across the country.

What attracted us to this story was that the strippers seemed to have a lot of power in the hip-hop hit-making process. Obviously they are the focal point when a new song is being played. As DJ Scream told me, "There's nothing like seeing a woman dance to a record. There's records that I hate and when I see a woman dancing I think, 'It's not that bad.'"

Another reason strip clubs are the perfect place to test out a song is the clientele. In Atlanta, I'm told nobody thinks twice about going to strip clubs for a bite to eat or just a night out. They're so popular that some of the dancers are treated like local celebrities.

On any given night you might find record label execs and radio programmers, other professionals, college students and couples watching the booty shake.

The dancers have an incentive to make a song exciting: They get paid when the patrons 'make it rain,' or throw money on the stage while they're dancing. I asked Sweet Pea, one of the main dancers in the Snack Pack at Magic City, if she'd ever refused to dance to a song she didn't like. She made it sound as though that just doesn't happen. "If it's got a good beat, you can dance to it," she said. In other words, even if she doesn't think a song has potential, she'll give it a try because she knows the folks from the record label will make it rain extra hard when she's dancing to their song.

As for the strip club DJs, they get paid when the dancers tip them at the end of the night. So it's in their best interest to keep the dancers happy and play whatever songs they request. Record label executives usually spend a lot of money on those nights they're trying to break a record, not just on the dancers but on drinks and food. When the song is working, and the dancers are happy, it might rub off on the patrons who — it's hoped — will spend even more money. So the strip club owners fully embrace the process. Sweet Pea says, "It's like a little promotional circle." One DJ told me, "We're all just hustling each other."

ANTICULTURES CANNOT long endure. They're either going to collapse utterly of their own societal, dysfunctional weight, or they're going to fold like a cheap tent before some opportunistic onslaught. See Visigoths, The.

Decline and fall -- one way or the other.

Laugh if you like. The ancient Romans did.

3 Chords & the Truth: The Big (Christmas) Show!

I understand you've been kinda stressed out this Christmas, Cap.

Hear tell that you've been the Target of lots of hype by desperate retailers -- it Sears your brain, really -- to Shopko till you dropko, because you're somehow less of a great American (Nay! Less of a human being!) until you make that Best Buy this holiday season.

Over and over again.

Why don't you just buy the wife a new Beemer? Yeah, that's the big ticket!

And then there's the lights. And the tree. And getting the house perfect. And the kids to the Christmas parties. And you to your Christmas party. Where the magnifying glass is upon you as you lift a glass or three. Where that scrutiny would never impact your career, noooooo sir, nuh uh.

THEN THERE'S the bell ringers, and the Christmas Eve wingding you're throwing, and the kids wanting new cell phones -- and laptops and iPads -- and appearances that have to be kept up. Despite your mortgage that's under water.

Merry Christmas, all!

Now . . . just stop. Why are we doing all this, again? Is there something we might be missing here, something buried beneath all the desperate consumerism and corporatism and overextendedism and general "festive" mayhem?

Could it be . . . Christmas?

Stop. Look. Listen to 3 Chords & the Truth, and the sounds of the season.

This Christmas, we at the Big Show give you a break. We give you the chance to just stop, grab a hot cup of something, take a load off and relax for 90 minutes. No commercials, no urgent calls to consumeristic action.

It's Christmas. Don't forget the joy, or the opportunity to just be. Don't forget to just stop for a while and appreciate the things that really matter this time of the year.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Alo-ho-ho-ho-ha.

Your Daily '80s: Remember Ma Bell?

In 1983, there was the phone company. Singular.

Her name was Ma Bell.

Life was so simple then.