Baton Rouge '81: Rollin' on the river

Left a good job in the city
Workin' for the Man every night and day
But I never lost a minute of sleepin'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might've been

Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis
Pumped a lot of tane down in New Orleans
But I never saw the good side of a city
'Til I hitched a ride on the riverboat queen

Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

If you come down to the River
Bet you're gonna find some people who live
You don't have to worry,
'cause you have no money
People on the river are happy to give

Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

. . . rollin' on the river

-- John Fogarty, 1968

Pope Catholic. Pols unpopular. Everybody poops.

A new report finds that people don't want to pay for news online, says an Associated Press story.

This is what I could get of it. I think it was entitled something like "No S***, Sherlock," but don't quote me on that. I ran out of nickels to plug the meter on the Internets "tubes".

ANYWAY. . . this is what I could steal, er . . . excerpt for "educational use" with the change I had on me :

Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons," a new consumer survey suggests.

That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.

The project's report contained an extensive look at habits of the estimated six in 10 Americans who say they get at least some news online during a typical day. On average, each person spends three minutes and four seconds per visit to a news site.

About 35 percent of online news consumers said they have a favorite site that they check each day. The others are essentially free agents, the project said. Even among those who have their favorites, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online - including those who already do.

There's little brand loyalty: 82 percent of people with preferred news sites said they'd look elsewhere if their favorites start demanding payment.

"If we move to some pay system, that shift is going to have to surmount significant consumer resistance," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, part of the Pew Research Center.

Last year, online advertising saw its first decline since 2002, according to the research firm eMarketer. Four of five Americans surveyed told the project that they never or hardly ever click on ads.

Despite a lot of choices, traffic on news sites tends to be concentrated on the biggest - Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, AOL and The New York Times.

"There was this view that we're retreating into our own world of niche sites and that's not true," Rosenstiel said.

America's next great bad reputation

Click on pictures for documents

What is it that people say about never having a second chance to make a good first impression?

Yeah, Baton Rouge never heard that one. Or much about the Constitution of the United States.


AND JUST from a pure public-relations perspective -- forget basic issues of police practice, justice, race relations or jurisprudence -- what I'm sure has happened in the case of Baton Rouge officials' "Wyatt Earp meets David Duke" fetish is that New Mexico and Michigan state troopers who witnessed this stuff told some people.

Who told some people.

Who told some people.

Who told some people.

Who told some people about what redneck mongoloids the people were in Baton Rouge, La. And what abject racists. And how you don't want to go there.

Especially if you're of the Not White persuasion. Or the Not From Around Here persuasion.

And then the newspaper in Baton Rouge finally got a hold of the Michigan and New Mexico troopers official reports . . . which Baton Rouge police officials found myriad reasons not to do much about.

And then -- especially in the wake of the FBI getting to the bottom of the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge massacre perpetrated by New Orleans cops -- some national news outlet (or outlets) are going to pick up on the Baton Rouge incidents as a nice sidebar to the main atrocity in the Big Easy.

And they're going to tell their readers and viewers.

Who are going to tell some people.

Who are going to tell some people.

Let me know how that's going to be working out for America's Next Great City (TM).

America's next great banana republic

Was it embarrassment over their ugly cop cars?

Were Baton Rouge's finest just having a bad hurricane-hair day?

Or are basic tenets of U.S. constitutional law just foreign concepts in America's next great banana republic?

Whatever it was that caused Baton Rouge cops to get so out of line in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that more than a few out-of-state counterparts recoiled in horror as they rode shotgun with the locals, apparently none of it was so horrible that official Baton Rouge couldn't offer up embarrassingly lame excuses. As only officials in banana republics can.

TAKE THESE incidents uncovered by The Advocate newspaper after a four-year legal battle to obtain reports filed with the Baton Rouge Police Department by officers from New Mexico and Michigan. Here's what police from New Mexico alleged:

New Mexico state police Agent Nathan Lucero said he saw “subjects being stopped for no reason, searches being performed with no probable cause and people’s civil rights being violated.”

Lucero said he also “witnessed officers referring to African Americans as animals and that they needed to be beaten down.”

Lucero said one officer told him that after the hurricane, police had gone into black neighborhoods and “beaten them down.”

That officer, Lucero said, would point a spotlight in black people’s faces during the patrols and say: “What are you doing standing in the road? Are you stupid? Get out of the road.”

“The black civilians were on the sidewalks and were not bothering anyone,” Lucero added.

Lucero said police working in Tigerland near LSU, an area he described as “white and wealthy,” were much more congenial. The officers would say things like “Hello and how are you” or “Have a good night and be careful,” he said.

Lucero did not name any of the officers.

New Mexico state police Agent Patrick Oakley said Baton Rouge Police Officer Tim Browning used the term “heathens” to describe a group of black men they encountered.

“Officer Browning made contact with these subjects with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause, performed pat downs and extracted items from the pockets of these individuals,” Oakley said.

New Mexico state police Officer Gregory Hall said he rode with Baton Rouge Police Officer Chad King on two occasions.

“King is a good officer but seems to handle black people differently than he would a pretty Caucasian woman,” Hall wrote. “Each time Officer King would make contact with a Caucasian person he would be friendly and pleasant. But when he spoke to a black person he was very loud, rude and demeaning.”

Hall said that while he believes most of the Baton Rouge officers are good, he perceived a racial bias among many.

“I do feel that most of the night officers that I had contact with had some type of comment or attitude towards black people in general,” he said.

OR PERHAPS you could take a look at these eyewitness reports by police from Michigan on Katrina duty in Louisiana's capital city:

Michigan State Trooper Jeffrey Werda said officers offered to let him beat a prisoner as a thank you for helping out with relief efforts.

“I was told that I could go ahead and beat someone down or bitch slap them and they would do the report,” Werda said. “I was told this was my gift from them for helping with the hurricane relief efforts.”

Werda reported seeing several incidents of excessive force.

One man walking down a street ran into his house after seeing a patrol unit, Werda said. The Baton Rouge officer chased the man into the house and arrested him, then forced him onto the hood of the patrol unit, the trooper said.

“The officer then began telling him that the next time he runs from the police, he will get beat down,” Werda said.

The man complained his wrist was hurting, Werda said. Another Baton Rouge officer bent the man’s wrist and threatened to break it if he didn’t shut his mouth, Werda wrote.

Werda said he asked the man why he ran if he was not doing anything wrong, and the reply was that “he did not want to get his ass kicked by the police, as this has occurred to him before.”

In another incident, Werda said, police were called to a bar near LSU because of a fight. He said the fight was over and everything was calm when an officer approached a man and “suddenly hit the subject in the side of the head with his forearm and took him to the ground in a head lock. “

“I observed this subject the entire time and at no time did he pose as a threat or mouth off at the officers,” Werda said. “In fact, he was so intoxicated he could barely stand up on his own.”

Werda did not name the officers involved in any of the incidents he reported.

AND YOU THOUGHT stuff like this only happened in the movies. Or in Juarez.

What in the world could the police chief say about his department in the wake of such allegations from sworn officers from two other states? Well, this:

Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff defends his department’s performance after Katrina, noting that the city was full of evacuees and rife with stories of looting and shooting in New Orleans.

“We had a charge to hold the line and balance this city and keep it from being overrun and looted and fired upon,” he said.

He denied giving orders to run evacuees out of town, noting he had family members staying in his own home.

Asked why law enforcement officers from other states would lie about what they saw Baton Rouge police doing, LeDuff said he suspects the troopers wanted to be where the action was.

“Everybody who came here wanted to be in New Orleans where all of this was going on, to rescue, to stop the looting, to stop the people from shooting at helicopters,” he said. “I don’t think people wanted to come to Baton Rouge. We weren’t the story.”

NO, I WOULDN'T believe this s*** either if I weren't from there. But really . . . believe it.

Officialdom in Baton Rouge not only believes you, the rest of America, will buy the load they're trying to sell, but -- on some warped level --they actually believe it themselves. And except for the unfortunates who got their faces slammed into the hood of one of Baton Rouge's ugly-ass cop cars for no good reason, Louisianians will believe it, too.

After all, a state doesn't work its way to the top of all the bad lists and the bottom of all the good ones without being able to believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Take Mayor-President Kip Holden, for example. Every morning, he gets up and tells himself that his stagnant, middling Southern capital is "America's next great city." This amid a crumbling school system, an astronomical murder rate, endemic poverty, crumbling infrastructure and an ongoing brain drain.

Then, after he tells himself that, he tells The Advocate this:

East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden denied ordering police to run people out of town, though he acknowledged wanting them to be aggressive.

“I was not going to let Baton Rouge be overrun by some people from New Orleans who were hell-bent on committing crimes,” he said in an interview last week.

He said his message to those “thugs who are robbing, raping and looting in New Orleans” was that he would provide them shelter, but “it will not be at the Red Cross — it’s going to be in jail.”

“If there’s a blame to be placed on aggressive enforcement, blame it on me,” he added.

YEAH, YOU RIGHT, CAP. It's the s***s when da slums a Noo Orluns escape, well . . . da slums a Noo Orluns.

If Holden had been any more proactive, he would have directed all the New Orleans-to-Baton Rouge vehicle traffic to facilities where the evacuees could take "showers."

But the bottom line you, the rest of America, need to remember is this: Both the mayor-president and the police chief are African-Americans. And when a city's black folk can be just as big a bunch of rednecks as your average Bubba. . . .

3 Chords & the Truth: Turn down the lights

Turn down the lights.

This episode of 3 Chords & the Truth is best listened to with the lights low. Curled up somewhere. In something comfortable.

Sipping on your favorite beverage.

And preferably in the still of the night.

That's because, at heart, your Mighty Favog is just your all-night DJ, spinning some midnight music in the semidarkness of a radio studio . . . after hours. The overnight man spins his records, and he brings the microphone real close. Like this.

He speaks softly . . . over the airwaves, in the predawn darkness, a friendly voice in the night. It's the Big Show. And you're along for the ride.

Can you dig it? I knew that you could.

SOMETIMES, your pilot of the airwaves (Charlie Dore, 1979 . . . but that's not important now) gets in a mood, as opposed to a toot. This trip on the 3 Chords & the Truth-go-round represents one of those times.

I'm in a mood. A night music mood.

You don't know where it's going; you just know that it will be unique. You know that it'll be good.

You know that it's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Baton Rouge 1981: Getting around

In the summer of '81, in downtown Baton Rouge . . .


. . . this is pretty much what it looked like . . .


. . . as folks sat or stood around . . . in the afternoon heat . . .


. . . as they patiently waited . . . because these things took their own sweet time . . .


. . . for the bus. Which eventually arrived.

You may have a drinking problem if. . . .

An Omaha man may have made a slight strategic mistake when he showed up for sentencing on second-offense aggravated drunken-driving charges.

HE HAD a few -- OK, a lot of -- pre-sentencing drinks before showing up at the courthouse in Papillion, Neb.. The Sarpy County authorities didn't take it so well, according to KETV television:

Authorities said a drunken driver showed up for his sentencing hearing drunk again.

Jason Botos, 30, was driven to court by his father and investigators said he was so drunk that he had to be helped inside and wasn't able to make his court appearance.

"He was unable to get himself out of the vehicle, he was so intoxicated," said deputy Sarpy County attorney Ben Perlman.

Investigators said Botos' father asked deputies to help carry his son inside the courthouse.

Botos was scheduled to be sentenced for a drunken driving offense in September 2009. He was driving near Highway 75 and Cornhusker Road when his car jumped a curb and smashed into five other vehicles, critically injuring three people.

"Because he failed to appear for his court appearance, a warrant was issued," said Perlman.

Deputies arrested Botos in the parking lot.

TO GET this story in all it's bizarre glory, make sure you watch the video at KETV.

I'm no chemical-dependency counselor, bu I think it's possible Botos has a drinking problem. I could be wrong . . . but probably not.

The downtown drugstore

Summer 1981.

Downtown Baton Rouge.

A college student with a Yashica twin-lens reflex camera, filling rolls of 120 black-and-white film with images for a photojournalism class.

Here is the caption he -- I -- put on the above picture in a photo essay documenting that place . . . that time in a middling Southern state capital. Some 29 years later, I don't know whether it says more about downtown Baton Rouge or more about the experience and assumptions of the 20-year-old writing it:

THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES . . . Liggett Drugs, at the corner of Riverside Mall and Florida Street, remains a downtown landmark with its vintage Coca-Cola neon sign and one of the few remaining lunch counters in Baton Rouge. Though a reminder of the Capital City's past, the store's customers generally consist of Baton Rouge's poorest residents -- a victim of the decline of downtown as a commercial area.

THE KID needed an editor. Sloppy writing. Introductory clauses that have not a bloody thing to do with what follows, except perhaps the concluding clause, which makes little sense whatsoever.

What a moron. I'll bet he thought he was hot s***, too.

I hate punks like that.

Still, the nearly 49-year-old me is oddly fascinated. I wonder what Mr. Wonderful had to say about the picture at left?

GIMME A HAMBURGER AND A ORDER OF FRIES . . . ["A order of fries"? God Almighty. OK, keep going. Jeez.] Something [?????? !] never change, like this drug store lunch counter, which pretty much looks the same as drug store counters used to look. [Scintillating insights . . . not. Idiot. Well? I've suffered this much, you just as well deliver the coup de grace. Continue with these semiliterate bleatings.] A great place to cool off on a hot Baton Rouge summer day.

WELL, at least I wasn't disappointed. Gaaaaack!

To give Joe College his due, the pictures aren't awful and -- lo, these many years later -- they do document Baton Rouge the way it used to be, as well as an establishment fewer and fewer there remember.

All right . . . photo on the right. Dare I ask what young, dumb and overconfident me wrote on that one?

Oh, what the hell. Hit me, Smiley!

SHOPPING DAY IN THE CITY . . . This family is decked out in its Sunday finest on a Saturday afternoon to do the shopping. [All RIGHT! Way to make a completely unsupported assumption about what the hell they were doing. Especially given the lack of shopping bags. Oh . . . but wait! They're just WINDOW shopping, being that "Baton Rouge's poorest residents" don't actually have enough money to BUY anything. Moron. Go on. . . .] While the city's major stores have deserted the downtown area, many smaller shops hang on, and one can still find [Way to throw a socket wrench in the gears of that compound verb, Gomer!] assorted goods at Mc Crory's five and dime.

I THINK we can say there was at least one thing more bedraggled than downtown Baton Rouge in 1981. My mad caption-writing skillz. That's a little slang that wouldn't come along for another 20 years.

Bedraggled. . . .

Interesting concept, isn't it? Surely, downtown Baton Rouge had seen better days by 1981. It is seeing better days now -- at least judging by the last time I was home for a visit.

(My writing skills, however, were as well gud gude good as they had ever gotten ever had gotten in '81. Ouch.)

Yet. . . .

Yet, if people back there are anything like me, now far away in Omaha, I'll bet they feel a certain nostalgia for the old bedraggled downtown Baton Rouge. For a weathered drugstore with a lunch counter. For a working riverfront, as opposed to a touristy, gambling riverfront.

For a place where just plain folk could hang out without a bunch of yuppies trying to out-pretentious one another amid the nightspots and trendy restaurants.

Don't get me wrong. The emerging new downtown Baton Rouge has a lot on the old, frayed-at-the-seams one. It's prettier, and nicer, and there's stuff to do.

But sometimes, when you're at the end of a hard day's night, you crave the comfortable old shoe. The frayed robe. The soft, loose (and ratty) sweats.

I GUESS THAT'S just like the realm of memory -- the comfort of looking back on what was amid the extreme uncertainty of what is yet to come. It's the realm of home. And tattered robes and old, comfortable shoes.

Which you probably bought at McCrory's, right down the street from Liggett Drugs.

OH, ALL RIGHT. What did Mr. Wonderful -- the college kid with the journalism-school camera -- have to say about this photograph? Be still my heart. . . .

IT SURE AIN'T Mc DONALD'S . . . Though business isn't what it used to be, people still stop by Willis Liggett's Rexall drug store just for its lunch counter. One of the few remaining of a dying breed, it is still a place where one can get out of the summer heat (or winter cold) and grab a coke [How about "grab a Coke"? Gee, kid, you must be on coke.] and a hamburger.

BRILLIANT! Sheer brilliance.

The kid probably will have a blog someday.

The Sex Pistols were right

If EMI couldn't promote the Sex Pistols back when record labels were record labels, music was music and no one knew what "downloading" was, except that it sounded vaguely dirty, is it any surprise the company didn't know what to do with the latest OK Go video?

Back in 1977, the Sex Pistols had the last laugh on EMI, and now OK Go is ready to do a little giggling itself. All the way to the bank, now that the group gets to keep all the profits.

YOU HEARD it first on NPR and All Things Considered:

Since the advent of streaming Internet video outlets such as YouTube, bands and record labels have repeatedly been at odds over how to address the issue that, when a user watches a video online, no money is generated for the label or the band. In an interview with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, OK Go singer-songwriter-guitarist Damian Kulash says that he — and the rest of the band — view videos not as a potential source of income, but rather as another creative outlet.

"This is all sort of part of the creative project for us," he says. "I mean, the animating passion for us is to get up and chase down our craziest ideas, and sometimes those are filmic, and sometimes they're purely sounds."

The band's label, EMI, didn't see things the same way. In an effort to maintain some control over the dissemination of the music video, EMI denied listeners the ability to embed it on their own Web sites and blogs. After receiving a deluge of complaints, the band eventually persuaded EMI to enable embedding. Soon afterward, however, OK Go parted ways with EMI to start its own record label, Paracadute.

WHAT ESCAPES bloated corporate collections of shortsighted moneygrubbers like EMI is this: The OK Go video isn't a revenue stream, it's free advertising.

The cost for putting it on YouTube? Zero.

The cost of producing it for the band? I'll bet it wasn't much, considering they got State Farm to sponsor it.

The promotional dividends from having it embedded on websites and blogs (like this one) everywhere? Limitless.

YOU WANT to know what's priceless, though? From now on, OK Go doesn't have to get nickeled-and-dimed by a record label that didn't know what to do with the Sex Pistols back in the day, and hasn't learned a damned thing in the intervening 33 years.



P.S.: One more thing. . . . Because of the promotional value of the video and the All Things Considered piece, I'm going to iTunes and buying the album. And the only credit EMI can take for that is indirectly, via the law of unintended consequences.

Terrible news in the blogosphere

The Internet Monk always has been a blog I greatly admire.

Its proprietor, Michael Spencer, possesses the great gift of being able to write gracefully while making great sense.

TUESDAY, however, brought terrible news about this brother in Christ, who has been struggling with cancer. His wife, Denise, writes:

It is with a heavy heart that I bring my latest update on Michael. We have learned that his cancer is too advanced and too aggressive to expect any sort of remission. Our oncologist estimates that with continued treatment Michael most likely has somewhere between six months and a year to live. This is not really a surprise to us, though it is certainly horrible news. From the very beginning, both of us have suspected that this would prove to be an extremely bad situation. I don’t know why; perhaps God was preparing us for the worst all along by giving us that intuition.

The combination of the cancer and the chemotherapy is keeping Michael in a very weakened state. He is in bed all day, getting up once or twice only to eat a “meal.” His meals consist mostly of Ensure, with occasional mugs of soup, dishes of ice cream and milkshakes. He’s still taking fluids well, currently preferring Sprite and ginger ale. His tastes do change slightly from time to time, and I try to be ready to jump in whatever direction they seem to be moving. He is in no pain at all, for which I am unspeakably grateful.

NEWS LIKE THIS always renders me with no good words with which to petition the Lord. I literally am reduced, without fail, to "Lord, have mercy."

Upon further reflection, it seems to me this isn't a bad prayer at all. God has His reasons for what he does and does not permit to befall any of us -- when he will and won't directly intervene in this fallen world's fallen workings.

We cannot understand the mind of God. As Flannery O'Connor once wrote:

Whatever you do anyway, remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself.

WHICH LEAVES ME with but my simple prayer for Michael Spencer and the rest of us, too.

Lord, have mercy.

'Social justice' rears its ugly head

I guess if you're Glenn Beck or one of his disciples, you'll look at this dispatch from India and wonder why these commie-pinko protesters weren't just shot in the street.

That's right, according to the Zenit news agency, the dreaded social-justice conspiracy has set its sights on subverting The Way Things Work in the world's second-largest country:

Numerous religious, including three bishops, were arrested for taking part in a demonstration near Chennai in defense of the rights of Christian and Muslim "untouchables."

The police detained hundreds of people on Friday including priests, nuns, Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa of Madras and Mylapore, Archbishop Peter Fernando of Madurai, and bishop Anthonisamy Neethinathan of Chinglepet, UCANews reported.

Friday's manifestation was the culmination of a month-long demonstration in favor of the lowest social caste, known as the dalits or untouchables.

The objective was to make the population and the state authorities more aware of the marginalization suffered by members of this class of society.

Thousands of people participated in a march that spanned some 310 miles, beginning a month earlier in the southern city of Kanyakumari.

HELL, IF YOU'RE the crew-cutted one, you're probably wondering -- in between crying jags -- not only why the noble Indian authorities didn't shoot the Catholic bishops, but why they didn't drive a stake through their hearts as well.

It's tough being Glenn Beck. If only enough people could see . . . it's all so clear once you're actually inside the funhouse mirror.

The devil has a crew cut

It's no secret that Glenn Beck is a cynical buffoon whose stock-in-trade is scaring the crap out of people even more ignorant and crazy than himself.

It also is no secret that Beck's boss at the Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes -- as well as his bosses at Premiere Radio Networks -- just might be the most cynical people in America. That's saying something.

But cynically ginning up outrage and paranoia among ignorant (and perhaps unstable) people is nothing new in American politics and public discourse. Dangerous, yes. Destructive of the commonweal, yes.

But, alas, nothing new. This is the tired and hoary work of minor demons inhabiting middling rings of the inferno.

CONVINCING GULLIBLE and paranoid Yankee Doodle whack jobs that "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land" is pure, uncut communism -- evil incarnate under the guise of "social justice" . . . collectivist subversion of freedom and democracy -- that, on the other hand, is the work of Lucifer himself.

The devil is on Fox News weekday afternoons at 5 -- 4 Central. His stage name is Glenn Beck.

And the devil -- er, "Beck" -- is a master at getting mere mortals to mistake good for evil and evil for a public-policy prescription.

"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Socialist redistribution of wealth!

"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Commie-libs are out to destroy individual initiative . . . by confiscating your income!

"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation"? Implicit threat of violence against hard-working American achievers from totalitarian agitators in the highest ranks!

Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep? If you remember your history, this sounds awfully like what Stalin did when he collectivized agriculture in the Ukraine! Communists want you to starve while they redistribute your food!

CALL IT biblical exegesis, as seen on Glenn Beck's TV. And heard on his radio.

Glenn Beck thinks that if you go to a church that believes that Jesus Christ meant what he said in the Beatitudes, you are in deep borscht, Comrade.

And Glenn Beck says red-blooded, market-oriented American lovers of freedom had better get out of any church that believes in that "social justice" crapola. No, really:

I recently received word through a new friend that The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good captured audio of Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraging listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice on his March 2nd radio broadcast. Here’s the quote from Beck:

"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

NO, PEOPLE, this is no everyday, happens-every-couple-or-three-decades, run of the mill American political and cultural crackpottery.

What we have here is a crew-cut, whackadoodle Mormon-convert antichrist who has been given free reign by his radio and cable-TV masters to preach apostasy to millions of lost sheep. This isn't Christopher Hitchens going on TV to tell a bemused reporter that there is no God, and believers are full of beans.

Instead, this is one of the most popular hosts on the most popular cable-"news" channel, telling his viewers that Jesus preached evil, historical Christianity is a bunch of socialist agitprop and they should flee any church that believes in such things, because that church is a clear and present danger to the republic.

It's kind of like Lenin through the looking glass, actually.

A pretty neat trick, if you can pull it off. And we know just the malevolent entity for the job, don't we?

The road to hell

If there is indeed such a thing as a real hell on earth -- as opposed to pedestrian, rhetorical hells on earth -- Juarez, Mexico, might be a finalist for the designation.

And when you get right down to it, Juarez became hellish due to a lot of factors you can see, to a lesser degree, in my own Louisiana hometown, Baton Rouge. And in things closer to home here in Nebraska -- like, for example, the growth of "concierge medicine."

This hit me like a thunderbolt as I listened to All Things Considered this afternoon. In the NPR program's feature on the plight of Juarez, one part hit me between the eyes with a journalistic two-by-four.

IT WAS this segment in the report:

In March 2009, Calderon put the Mexican army in charge of the Juarez police department after one of the local drug cartels ordered the police chief to quit.

Calderon now concedes that military muscle alone isn't going to end the violence. "We need to tackle this social plan, because the problems in Juarez have deep roots in the structure of this city," Calderon told a group of local business and community leaders.

Young people lack opportunities, he said. Juarez doesn't have enough schools, hospitals or soccer fields. Only half the roads are paved. Murder, extortion and kidnapping go unpunished.

Calderon said the social fabric and rule of law need to be re-established in Juarez. He received one of his biggest rounds of applause when he declared that motorists should be accountable and people should no longer be allowed to drive around without license plates.

Calderon pledged tens of millions of additional dollars for social programs in Juarez, but he also said he will not pull the Mexican army out of the streets.

The double punch of the global economic downturn and the gruesome drug war has battered the border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The maquiladoras, or assembly plants, in Juarez have cut more than 100,000 jobs since 2008. The owners of thousands of restaurants, bars, corner stores and other small businesses have shut their doors rather than pay "protection money" to local gangs. Many professionals have moved to El Paso.

Alvador Gonzalez Ayala, a civil engineer who works in Texas, has chosen to keep his home in Juarez. "And I want to remain here," he says. "I want my children to remain here."

He says one of the biggest problems facing the industrial city is the huge disparity in wealth.

Gonzalez says much of the blame rests with the local elite, which he says is "a privileged and influential minority that's totally indifferent to the great mass of poor people [who] live in the area." [Emphasis mine -- R21]

He adds that the city has been neglected for decades. Young people who see the opulence in Juarez and just across the border fence in Texas are attracted to the quick money of the drug trade, he says. Workers in the maquiladoras earn $60 to $70 a week. Drug runners can earn that or much more in a day.

Gonzalez is involved in several civic groups, and he recalls going recently to talk to a group of preteens in one of Juarez's poorer neighborhoods.

"We were promoting education and science and math. And we were asking them, what do you want to do when you grow up? Many of them told us, 'I want to be a sicario.' That's striking. A sicario is a paid assassin," he says.

THE PART about tolerating cars driving around without license plates reminded me -- in the sense of a concept being carried to its logical conclusion -- of the great Gallic shrug Louisiana gives the larger concept of civic responsibility and good behavior. As did the part about indifferent elites.

It was the indifference of elites that also reminded me of life here in Omaha, home of one of the nation's poorest African-American communities -- one with only the tiniest of middle classes. The indifference doesn't, in my opinion, reach Louisiana (and certainly not Mexican) levels, but it there.

It's there whenever people can tout "concierge medicine" in the face of high infant mortality rates, astronomical levels of sexually transmitted disease, endemic street violence and disenfranchised people whose greatest deprivation is that of hope for a better life.

There are only two things that can lead to such tone deafness and rank selfishness. One is abject malevolence. The other is abject indifference. I don't know, frankly, which is worse.

But the end of the road, if the better angels of our nature do not eventually prevail upon us, is Juarez.

Medi¢ine the$e day$

Breathe deeply while you still can for free.

Soon enough, someone will find a way to make you pay a premium for clean air. And if you can't afford the good stuff, America . . . well, you can just kindly remove yourself to the back of the bus, where the "free market" makes "those people" sit.

Every day and in every way, the ranks of "those people" are swelling.

Take health care, for example. If you'd like some, it will cost you. If you'd like the good stuff, it will cost you a lot -- though you really can't afford the good stuff.

AND KNOW that to the extent the well-off opt for the "good stuff -- something we're coming to know as "concierge" care, where the doctor actually gives you the time of day . . . and his phone number -- what's left for the rest of us likely will come to resemble the scraps from the rich man's table.

According to Sunday's Omaha World-Herald, you can just call the vast majority of us Lazarus:

Imagine opening a letter like this from your doctor:

“I'd love to keep you as a patient, but to stay with me you'll have to pay an extra annual fee of $2,500.

“Please let my office know if you will be paying the fee. If not, we'll help you find another primary care doctor.”

Although it might be worded more politely, that's the gist of the letter you could receive if your doctor adopts a style of primary health care known as concierge medicine.

Its backers say the concept can attract and retain more primary care doctors by improving their lives and enabling them to practice medicine the way they want, rather than under the time-constrained demands of the typical doctor's office.

But the concept also raises philosophical and ethical issues. Concierge physicians limit the number of patients they see by charging annual fees, which wealthy people can more easily afford. Also, this kind of medicine could reduce the number of primary care doctors at a time when demand already exceeds supply.

Nationally, the practice of concierge medicine is still small — perhaps 400 primary care physicians out of about 250,000 nationally — but in some regions it is firmly established.

The largest concierge company, MDVIP, has more than 300 doctors nationwide and recently was purchased by Procter & Gamble. It's been more than 12 years since the first such practice opened in Seattle. There's even a cable TV program, “Royal Pains,” about concierge medicine.

But the approach has only recently arrived here. Nebraska's first, a two-doctor practice, opened last month near 90th Street and West Dodge Road in Omaha after a three-year trial at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

It's affiliated with a new Omaha management company, Members.MD, whose chairman is former Burger King franchise owner and cancer survivor Mike Simmonds.

“Primary care is broken,” said Dr. Joel Bessmer, who is medical director of Members.MD and who opened the new practice with partner Dr. Robert Schwab. “It allows us to step off the treadmill and spend time with patients. This is a different world of trying to provide primary care.”

Physicians get to know patients thoroughly and become their health partners, he said. The doctor's office becomes the patients' comfortable, easily accessible medical home, instead of a hurried place full of other sick people and doctors who have no time to spare.

But Dr. John Goodson of Harvard Medical School said concierge medicine could worsen a system that to some degree already dispenses care based on whether people can afford insurance.

“Do we as physicians hang together and maintain our commitment to access?” he said. “That really ought to be a fundamental principle of medicine. We're there to help people, and we're not going to discriminate against people because of their economics.”
Goodson said primary care doctors should supervise their patients' hospital stays as part of normal care, not for an extra fee. Members.MD offers hospital supervision only with its upper level of care.

Eliminating people from a medical practice by charging a fee is “abandonment,” he said. Even if a patient's records transfer, the new doctor doesn't know all the information that the first doctor learned about the patient.

Yet the rise of concierge care, he said, shows that as a profession, primary care “is on the ropes and dying fast. It's like the polar ice cap, starting to fracture. It ought to be a wake-up call to everybody.”

He said that the start of a practice in Omaha indicates the concierge model, although marginal in most regions, isn't going away. “It makes me sad as a professional that my colleagues are doing this sort of charging.”

WE NOW LIVE in a country where one's bank account determines one's worth in life. You are what you make. Human dignity has become a commodity.

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Formerly available for free from one's Creator, they now are available only with purchase of the America Plus premium package.

If you don't want to die before the next operator is available to schedule your appointment with a Proletarian Partners physician's assistant, it's going to cost you. And you'd better hope your insurance plan allows diagnostic stethoscope use.

But that's not important now. What's important is that "concierge medicine" is the talk of the town -- the part of town that matters, that is:

Simmonds, who was inducted in the Omaha Business Hall of Fame last year for his success in the fast-food business, said the concept is “sort of the talk of the town, at least in my circles.”

Simmonds said he heard about Bessmer's practice from a fellow airplane traveler, called Bessmer the next morning, interviewed him over lunch at Charleston's and “hired him” as his doctor. Simmonds' former primary care doctor was good and even a friend, but Simmonds couldn't call or e-mail him whenever he wanted.

“When I don't feel good, I like to talk to somebody right now,” he said. “Joel spoiled me,” including supervising his care when he was hospitalized and providing other care over the past year and a half. He was diagnosed with cancer several years ago.

IF YOU BELIEVE it's a self-evident truth that "all men are created equal," you should be offended as hell right now. Some folk think their money makes their well-being more important than yours. They think that rationing isn't rationing if they slap a "free market" label on it and have enough cash to game the system in their favor.

There's a four-letter word for that kind of thinking: E-V-I-L.

And I think the Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason. I hope people like Mike Simmonds have another think coming before finding out exactly what that reason was.

Us in 1929

When I arrived in North Platte, Neb., during the last gasps of winter in 1983, something struck me about the place -- especially as a native of the Deep South.

There weren't any black people to speak of. I mean, the place was as white as the snow on the ground.

AS IT turns out, there were reasons for that. I'd wager that something close to being chief among those reasons would be what happened Saturday, July 13, 1929. ("Darkies"? A newspaper in Prescott, Ariz., thought it respectable to use the word "darkies" in a headline -- or anywhere else? Really?)

The North Platte incident was especially eerie in light of what happened here in Omaha a decade earlier, on Sept. 28, 1919.

DON'T THINK we're much more civilized these days, and don't think there aren't groups out there ready and willing to play with fire in these "interesting times."

3 Chords & the Truth: Boogie wonderland

Enter dancing.

With the first signs of maybe there being a spring later this year, that's how we choose to enter this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth -- dancing. Stepping lively.

Getting down to the sounds.

Boogying, as it were.

AND WE GO from there on the Big Show. Personally, I think it's rather infectious. I bet you will, too.

Well, that's about all there is to say. If our musical excursion this week doesn't have your toe tapping and a smile on your face . . . you just may be John Mayer in a roomful of angry Jessica Simpsons. Or something like that.

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

Neo-nazi junk rebels against 'clean' Mayer

John Mayer, freshly tired of being an "a**hole," tells anybody who'll listen -- and folks had better, being that they paid, like, a bazillion dollars for the privilege -- that "It's a clean me now, people, clean me."

That well may be.

David Duke's c***, on the other hand, was spotted gettin' down and dirty at an Omaha strip club Wednesday night, a day before his show at the Qwest Center. Josefina Loza's story in this morning's Omaha World-Herald, however, didn't say whether Mayer knew where his neo-Nazi junk was hangin' all night:

Mayer — or someone who looks just like him — kicked it at The 20’s, an exotic dance club in midtown. He performed at the Qwest Center on Thursday.

Terry O’Halloran, longtime owner of Omaha bars — but not The 20’s — tipped me off in an e-mail: “Did you hear Mayer was allegedly at The 20’s last night? Not quite sure what to make of that guy.”

The 20’s dancers typically wear a mixture of bikinis and fantasy lingerie outfits. Guess Mayer — or his doppelgänger — was there to discover many wonderlands — more to tell Playboy.

Several sources at the club who wanted to remain anonymous confirmed that the pop-blues star was there — and was a generous tipper.

BACK IN THE DARK AGES, when my home away from home was a newspaper newsroom, one particular city editor was fond of saying someone had been "thinking with his little head and not his big one." True, that happens all the time.

John Mayer, on the other hand, may be the first person ever to have his little head -- in a fit of pique born of sexual frustration and boredom with the Sackcloth & Ashes '10 World Tour -- declare absolute autonomy from the "clean me" and head off to a titty bar . . . alone.

Wednesday night in Omaha wasn't the first time.

IN FACT, no sooner than Mayer had proclaimed himself the "clean me" at New York's Madison Square Garden a week ago, David Duke's c*** ran screaming into a nightclub and started talking dirty to all the ladies. At least that's what the Daily News says:

Mayer [The newspaper was confused because David Duke's c*** bears an uncanny resemblance to its former host, Mayer -- R21] spent the weekend partying at NoLita hot spot La Esquina - which is near the 2,500-square-foot SoHo apartment he owns - and acting, well, less-than-gentlemanly.

"He was drinking and saying vulgar things to the girls at the bar," says a spy. "He was hitting on one pretty brunette in particular, but she found him slimy because he was being so over-the-top."

We hear women aren't the only challenge the crooner can't seem to navigate: Friends say that even before the Playboy fiasco, he was having a love-hate relationship with the media.

"After every interview he gave, John would agonize over it and mentally kick himself over everything he said," says an insider. "He would swear it would be the last time, but it never was, and it became a never-ending cycle."

POOR JOHN. He goes to the trouble of apologizing and apologizing -- not to mention proclaiming his new "clean me" and letting 11-year-olds up on stage to play guitar with him for a number -- and look what happens. Done in by adolescent rebellion on the part of David Duke's c***.

As Uncle Jed used to say about Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayer is "gonna have to have a looooong talk with that boy."

P.S.: I don't know about these things, so could someone tell me whether The '20s features an all-white crew of exotic dancers?

There yesterday, gone today

The old North Platte (Neb.) High School building, 1930-2003.

NBC's Don't See TV

The award for The Best Thing Written About the Conan-Leno Affair goes to. . . .

Envelope, please. (Where's that damn letter opener when you need it?)

One moment, please.

AHEM. The award for The Best Thing Written About the Conan-Leno Affair goes to . . . Christopher Lawrence of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Roll the videotape:

If you've ever been screwed over at work, don't watch "The Tonight Show." Conan O'Brien passed up lucrative offers, waited five years and moved, along with his staff, across the country to take over "The Tonight Show," but NBC never really gave it to him. By putting Leno on in prime time, with more fanfare and better guests -- not to mention giving viewers who just wanted to watch any talk show the chance to do that and get a decent night's sleep -- NBC set Conan up to fail from the start.

If you have any business sense whatsoever, don't watch "The Tonight Show." During his last two weeks on the air, Conan stopped being intimidated by "The Tonight Show" and started making captivating television. While Leno's ratings ticked up slightly, Conan's surged. Then there was the "Evita"-style scene with hundreds of Conan fans rallying for hours in the driving rain outside his studio. By contrast, Leno played The Mirage two days earlier, only doing one show instead of his customary two, and the venue had to offer half-price tickets. And NBC still dumped its newly minted folk hero in favor of the weasel with whom only 4 percent of Oprah's audience, some of the most forgiving viewers in the world, sided.

If you've ever been bullied, don't watch "The Tonight Show." Between slamming Conan in the press when he's contractually forbidden to respond and the tacky "Get back to where you once belonged" commercials for Leno, NBC's behavior has bordered on the shameless.

If you've ever actually been fired, don't watch "The Tonight Show." For someone who considers himself a man of the people, Leno's whining about how NBC "fired" him twice has been surprisingly tone deaf. Especially considering he doesn't even need the job, as he boasts of living solely off his stand-up money. Millions of Americans, including Conan, have genuinely lost their jobs over the past two years; Leno had his start time moved forward, then back, by 95 minutes.