Saturday, November 17, 2012

3 Chords & the Truth: Music for grown-ups

Longtime Monitor host Gene Rayburn inside NBC's Radio Central

This week on the Big Show, we're all on the Monitor beacon once again.

Monitor was a revolutionary program when it was introduced to NBC Radio in 1955 -- a mix of music, news, features and interviews that ran most of every weekend. But for me, it's a bit of home, a bit of the world I knew.

It's grown-up news, grown-up hosts and grown-up music for what seemed at the time a grown-up world. By the measuring stick of our never-ending silly season -- as in this present moment -- the world of Monitor . . . America in the 1950s, '60s and early '70s seems even more grown up, despite the upheaval of that era.

AT LEAST the '50s and '60s had honest, substantive conflict. We have rival factions of spoiled schoolkids throwing spitballs, calling names and alternately picking up their toys and going home.

Mom!

Dammit, we all need a happy place. The memory of Monitor is one of mine -- a memory of a world run by adults. As opposed to us.

The memory of Monitor also is the memory of "Monitor music," which seemed very adult and very square then but now, upon further review, seems very adult and kinda cool. We'll be playing a lot of that on this episode of 3 Chords & the Truth.

The Monitor theme of the Big Show this go around jibes with some other themes floating around the stacks of wax in the studio here. Like home, and can you go there again. We'll be exploring that musically.

And old days, lost youth and the march of time. That's a tasty thematic set as well on 3 Chords & the Truth this week.

THAT MAKES two more theme sets that kind of point back to Monitor . . . the long-lost happy place on the radio dial for geeks like me. Monitor, the vanquished redoubt of grown-ups who used to run the world, took serious things seriously and, truth be told, kinda had more class than We Who Knew We Knew Better Than the Old Fogies.

That's it. That's pretty much the show this week, and I think it's a good one. I'll bet you will, too.

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

Friday, November 16, 2012

The Boss, a soap box & 'that f***ing Obama'


In case you were wondering, this is where Mrs. Favog and I were for several glorious hours last night.

As is the norm for The Boss, it was a hell of a show at the CenturyLink Center Omaha. He hasn't lost a thing performing live since I saw him at the LSU Assembly Center on Nov. 11, 1980. Funny how you remember the actual dates you saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, isn't it?

Anyway . . .  ever seen a 62-year-old man crowd surf? I have now. Complete awesomeness.

And I totally got teary eyed when Jake Clemons, the late Clarence Clemons' nephew, did The Big Man's solo on "Thunder Road" and struck The Pose. He even looks a lot like the young saxophone god -- except for Jake's big hair.

That said. . . .


DURING the course of the show, we had to endure Mr. Obama Lover getting up on his damn political soap box.

Can you believe he made an impassioned pitch for us to give to the local food bank?! My Bible says if you don't work, you don't eat. It's somewhere in the back. Maybe the front. Whatever.

I was so outraged about all this political crap that I almost got up and walked out right there. I would have, too, if I hadn't thought that some layabout 47-percenter was waiting to take my seat. Concert welfare, don't you know?

Dammit, it's time to TAKE BACK AMERICA from the socialists . . . one rock concert at a time!

No retreat, baby, no surrender!























Cue Jonathan Swift.


It used to be that you didn't necessarily have to tell people you were being a sarcastic smart ass. We live, however, in an era that has killed satire, being that there's no more ceiling for bat-s*** craziness in politics or the greater culture.

So. . . .

Just so you know. . . .

Bruce's only soap-box moment in the entire show was a pitch for the Food Bank for the Heartland, of which I am fully supportive. What did put me off, though, was some a-hole in the men's room proclaiming "If he says anything about that f***in' Obama, he's gonna get booed off the stage!"

Yeah, that pissed me off. That and a whole world of hair-on-fire partisans who can't even let a man be entitled to his own political proclivities lest he be vilified, demonized and ostracized for them.

Bruce campaigned for Barack Obama. I didn't vote for the man (though, to be fair, neither did I vote for Mitt Romney). So what?

If you ask me, you don't have to be a communist to be quite Stalinist nowadays. Such is life in a country where we hate us, we really hate us.

Cue Jefferson Davis. Oh, wait. . . .

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

'In the deed, the glory'


I wish I were 30-odd years younger and had talent.

That's because I want to play high-school football for Coach Victor Nazario at Beach Channel, which now stands amid the ruin on the storm-swept Rockaway Peninsula of Queens. I would kick ass, take names, clean clocks and run through a brick wall for a guy who can put it all in perspective before a state playoff game like this:
"Sandy took a lot of shit from us -- a lot. It did not take our courage; it did not take our will. It did not take our courage; it did not take our will, because your will is what got you here today. So let's finish this job, gentlemen. Let's just go out there and go out in style."
Beach Channel suffered the same fate as many of its students: equipment room flooded out, pads, jerseys -- you name it -- swept away by Hurricane Sandy's storm surge. No power. No practice field. Before Saturday's state playoff game, Nazario had salvaged what equipment he could and borrowed those things he couldn't.

THE BIG QUESTION, though, was whether he could field a team from a student body hunkered down in darkened, cold homes or evacuated to God-knows-where. From a New York Times feature story:
Breland Archbold woke up hungry at his grandmother’s house on the Saturday morning of his last high school football game. Typically, Archbold, the quarterback and captain of the Beach Channel Dolphins, spends the night before game day at a teammate’s house in Far Rockaway, eats chicken fingers and macaroni, and then in the morning tackles mounds of eggs and turkey bacon. 
This time, Archbold, his 6-foot, 200-pound frame straining at the contours of a strange bed, awoke wondering whether he would eat at all before the game. It had been like that for two weeks, ever since Hurricane Sandy had flooded and disfigured his Rockaways neighborhood.
Still, there was a football game to play, and no ordinary one. Beach Channel was set to play at Port Richmond on Staten Island this past Saturday in the first round of the Public Schools Athletic League playoffs. Archbold, 17, who still dreamed of a scholarship offer, maybe from the University at Buffalo, was nervous, and grateful, too.

“This was the last time to make everything count, and in the middle of a crazy time,” he said.

Archbold’s father, Dexter, drove him to the team bus pickup spot, and the route, as it had been for days, remained otherworldly. Instead of stoplights, there were police officers dressed in fluorescent green directing traffic, and on the sides of sandblasted streets stood shells of homes and businesses, little more than piles of rubble.

Archbold’s own uniform bore the taint of the storm. His shoulder pads reeked of bleach, used to kill mildew; his rib guard was gone altogether, washed away after Beach Channel’s locker room flooded. Port Richmond, in one of a number of acts of kindness, had lent Beach Channel what gear it could. Beach Channel, in the nearly two weeks since the storm, had practiced only twice, on a dark and borrowed field at Far Rockaway High School.
 (snip)
Breland Archbold moped for a week after the hurricane. He thought his senior football season would be left incomplete. He was in his father’s car in a line for gasoline on Long Island when his coach called him. The playoff game was on, but could the Dolphins play?

Nazario salvaged what equipment he could from the flooded school, and Port Richmond Coach Lou Vesce would lend the rest. But it was Archbold’s job as team captain to find out if the Dolphins could field a squad. He called teammates he had not seen since before the storm.

“Are you serious? I’m in,” Fatukasi said.

The Red Raiders scored again after halftime. Then again. A scuffle broke out after Archbold, also playing safety, tackled the opposing quarterback, Victor Pratt, as he ran out of bounds. The Red Raiders’ captain, Compton Richmond, bumped Archbold with his chest, and Fatukasi rushed over to protect his friend. Referees threw flags. The score was 30-6 and the frustration was palpable among the dozen or so Beach Channel fans.

Dexter Archbold had used his youth league football connections to secure the Dolphins practice time at the powerless Far Rockaway football field Thursday and Friday. About 15 players showed up Thursday, but the scrimmage was little more than a head count. On Friday, four more players showed, and the team did its best in the twilight. A few parents tried to battle back the darkness by shining their headlights on the field, burning precious gas, but it was little use. Some would miss the game the next day because they did not have the gas to get to Staten Island.

If this were Hollywood, the Dolphins would have rallied. But this was Staten Island. They lost, 38-6. After the game, the team huddled on the field. Some boys wept. Fatukasi called his teammates family and told them that despite “all that adversity, we’re leaving this field with respect.”

HALF A CONTINENT away from the Rockaways, in Lincoln, Neb., there's an inscription on Memorial Stadium, where another football team plays: "Not the victory but the action; Not the goal but the game; In the deed the glory."

University of Nebraska philosophy professor Hartley Burr Alexander wrote that. Through the veil separating the world that is seen and that which we cannot -- across the boundaries of time and space -- I'd like to think the good professor was able to see those words of his, carved into stone in 1923, transform themselves. On a cold Saturday in Staten Island, an abstraction suddenly wasn't.

"Not the victory but the action." A high-school coach and a couple dozen teenagers.

"Not the goal but the game." A remnant in borrowed gear, huddled in a cafeteria-turned-locker room, ready to step onto a field and stare down the winds of fate.

"In the deed the glory."



HAT TIP:  Rod Dreher. 

Kulturkaempfert


A little more night music in the studio. Why do I suddenly want to watch the Big Movie or a game show?

Why am I pretty sure no one under 40 will understand?

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

When your president's a Muslin . . .

SECDEE!
Don Mason, via Flickr

. . . what the hell is a patroit supposed to do?

No, the troo patroit must secdee! Because we must detsroy this contrey inn order to save it!

Monday, November 12, 2012

If at first you don't secede. . . .


The last Louisianian with such a bright idea ended up taking potshots at Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861.  

That didn't work out so well in the end for Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, for the sovereign state of South Carolina, for secessionist Louisiana or for anybody else in the Confederate States of America. "In the end" came almost exactly four years later, after the United States Army had smashed the South into rubble, destroyed its slave-based economy, plunged its people into privation and ripped out a region's false pride with the business end of a sabre.

All at the low, low price of about 700,000 dead.

But if at first you don't secede, try, try again. Especially if there's a Negro in the White House who also happens to be a commerniss and a socialiss and maybe the Antichrist, despite governing a lot like Richard Nixon . . . and the black sumbitch done got re-elected by them DamnYankeePinkoFags. (OK, the Nixon part might qualify Barack Obama for his Antichrist Jr., merit badge.)
 
Anyway, the Gret Stet of Louisiana done had enough of that un-American crap, so one true patriot in Slidell decided that the only rational response to such a brazen attack on everything the United States stands for . . . is to blow up the whole damned Union. 

Trust me -- this makes sense to people in Slidell.

UNFORTUNATELY, reports Nextgov, it also makes sense to people in 22 other states who don't have Slidell as an excuse for being dumbasses:
Residents of 23 states had petitioned the White House for permission to peacefully secede from the union as of 4 p.m. Monday.

A petition from a Slidell, La., resident posted to the White House’s We the People website the day after President Obama’s reelection seems to have started the trend.Nextgov first reported on that petition on Friday. The other 20 petition were posted over the weekend.

The Louisianan’s petition was mostly an extended quote from the Declaration of Independence suggesting the time had come for his state to “dissolve the political bands which have connected” it with the rest of the nation.

The majority of the secession petitions are carbon copies of the Louisiana petition with just the state’s name changed. A few petitions, such as this one from Texas, offered their own arguments for secession.

The Texas petition crossed We the People's 25,000 signature threshold for an official White House response around 3:30 p.m. Monday. All the other petitions were several thousand signatures shy at that point.

“Every petition that crosses the threshold will receive a response but we don't comment on what the substance of that response will be before it's issued,” a White House official said.

The majority of the secession petitions were from states that cast their electoral votes for Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the presidential contest rather than for the president. Six of the 21 petitions, however, were from states that broke for the president, including petitions from New York and New Jersey.

As of noon Monday, secession petitions had been filed by citizens of Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, New York, Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arizona.


I KNOW . . . I know. This is bat-sh*t crazy. And it's been long settled that a state can't secede from the Union.

And President Obama -- no matter how much he might want Louisiana and Texas to get the hell out of his rapidly graying hair -- has no authority to let any state go anywhere, being that that would require a constitutional amendment.

In other words, the secession crisis of 2012 was over before it started. This, however, is unpersuasive in Louisiana, which right now wants to know whether people thought it was over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. No, a stupid and futile gesture is required on somebody's part in the wake of Obama's re-election, and the Gret Stet just might give you a tax credit for it.

Check with Presidente Bobby Jindal.

MIND YOU, Louisianians who luv, luv, luv this petition are itching to extract themselves -- out of sheer pique over socialism, welfare Cadillacs and Obamacare -- from a country in which the hard-working, self-sufficient conservative pillars of the Gret Stet get to spend the livelong day sucking at the federal teat and bitching about how sour mother's milk has become.

Perhaps it's a fit of conscience emanating from a state that takes in $1.35 in federal funds for every federal tax dollar Washington collects from it. Maybe it's just the Louisiana "brain drain" having done a number on math skills -- after all, even with the taxpayer largess the state gets as recompense for a loveless marriage to Yankee tyrants, it still spends a smaller percentage of its budget on higher education than Haiti.

Wait till secession, when Louisiana's higher-ed budget drops overnight to about $273.86 annually. Then, the prospect of becoming another Haiti may well be a case of one's eyes still being bigger than one's distended stomach.


OR MAYBE all this secession noise might be a result of something as simple as mass insanity. My money's on this one. Besides, Louisiana has a long, sordid history of cutting off its nose to spite Washington's face, and not much of a history with civil society.


But if you're already nuts, you just as well engage in a little magical thinking. Post-secession policymakers in Louisiana would no doubt be optimistic that the sovereign state could soon -- maybe in a matter of just a few years -- be just as up-to-date as Port au Prince.

I mean, once Presidente Jindal's "kidneys for gruel" public/black market welfare partnership started turning a profit and contributing to the fiscal bottom line, the soot-choked sky would be the limit, right?

Pass the Dutchie, man


Dude.


Duuuuude!

Like . . . duuuuuuudddde! I mean, you know, man!

Duuuuuuuuude! Whoa!

Really, man. Duuuuuude!

Far out, man! Look what the AP is saying, man! But dude, isn't it, like, really spelled "A-P-P," man?

OH, DUDE! Whatever, man.
Marijuana-legalization votes last week in Colorado and Washington state don't just set up a state-federal showdown on drug law. They might open the door to pot tourism.

Both voter-approved measures, for the first time, make marijuana possession in small amounts OK for all adults 21 or older. That's not just the states' residents but visitors, too, so long as they buy and use the drug while in Colorado or Washington.

Of course, that's assuming the measures take effect at all. The states were still awaiting word on whether the U.S. Justice Department will sue to assert the supremacy of federal drug law, which doesn't allow recreational pot use.

So the future of marijuana tourism is hazy. But that hasn't stopped a fever of speculation, especially in Colorado, where tourism is the No. 2 industry, thanks to the Rocky Mountains and a vibrant ski industry.

The day after Colorado's measure passed by a wide margin, the headline in the Aspen Times asked, “Aspendam?” referring to Amsterdam's famous marijuana cafes.

Colorado's tourism director, Al White, tried to downplay the idea of a new boom.

“It won't be as big a deal as either side hopes or fears,” he said.

Still, many people are asking about it.

Ski resorts are “certainly watching it closely,” said Jennifer Rudolph of Colorado Ski Country USA, a trade association that represents 21 Colorado resorts.

Are there any plans for an adults-only après lounge, where skiers could get more than Irish coffee to numb their aches?

“There's a lot that remains to be seen,” Rudolph said with a chuckle. “I guess you could say we're waiting for the smoke to clear.”
LIKE, dude, you got any Doritos, man, to munch on while we're waiting on the smoke to clear, man?

Sunday, November 11, 2012

People are strange. Lincoln is stranger.


Here are a couple of things seen at random in Lincoln, Neb., on a football Saturday.

The first thing, I'll post with comment -- the comment being, "As opposed to all those fake-ass Mexican restaurants, right?"

And the other comment being, "Those Romney people just don't know when to say 'Uncle!' It's something they might want to consider four days after Election Day."

And the other other comment being, "You have to tell Nebraska to vote Republican?"



This thing I'll post without comment, because words fail.

Why do you think we call 'em Gumps?


"Role, Tide," indeed.

Heh.

Friday, November 09, 2012

An important reminder


Advanced pickups aren't just good in bars and nightclubs. They're absolutely crucial on phonographs.

That's why it's important not only to play your Miracle Surface long-playing records only on the best equipment, but to make sure you're playing your stereophonic albums on the right equipment.

















After all, an RCA "Living Stereo" LP with the advanced Miracle Surface is a terrible thing to waste.

This important hi-fi reminder comes to you courtesy of Revolution 21 and 3 Chords & the Truth.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Because we're so #*@!& brilliant


This is the part of the blog where I commit cultural suicide in the Age of Political Correctness by acting like a Catholic who actually believes all that sh*t.

This self-immolation moment was prompted by Rod Dreher's blog post correctly calling out "progressives" who have the gall to disingenuously hector social conservatives that if they'd only been nicer in opposing same-sex marriage. . . .

Yeah, right. Now we're getting lectures on civility from folks whose default position involves employing the word "hater" or "bigot" when referring to people like me who think marriage may be many things, but that none of them involve, nor ever in human history has involved, a union of two men or two women.

Human dignity is one thing. But recognizing the inherent dignity and rights of persons never has precluded society denying them any number of heart's (or groin's) desires for the sake of the greater good. Throughout history, sometimes "the greater good of society" has meant something as simple as not cracking open Pandora's box.

The long span of human history has taught us a few things about what works in building a stable, healthy society . . . and what doesn't. Sometimes this wisdom comes to us through the mists of time as part of the teachings and taboos of our great religions. Think of the Ten Commandments, for instance, as God's way of telling His children "Don't put your hand on the hot burner of the stove."


Eternal 2-year-olds that we are, this is rarely compelling. Likewise, as we see today, rarely do we find ancient religious teachings and societal taboos against any manner of things -- like homosexual activity and, now, gay marriage -- compelling.

FOR A COUPLE of centuries or more, we've treated the earth itself as another thing with which we might do as we will. As if all creation belonged just to us, to use as we will and to abuse as we might, laying aside the consequences for another day.

Another day has arrived. The consequences now asserting themselves include a radically warming climate, which we now know is a direct result of centuries of wantonly belching carbon emissions into the air in pursuit of industrial might, ever more creature comforts and three automobiles in every garage.

In 1870 or 1912 or 1957, we merely thought we were building a better life through industry. Prosperity through petrochemicals. Greater happiness from greater consumption.

In 2057, our children and grandchildren will be paying for our ignorance -- and arrogance -- with brutally hot summers, vicious storms (and more of them), wilder winters and coastal cities slipping under the whitecaps of the swelling seas. Who knew?

Well, 60 years ago, we certainly had no idea. We possessed more hubris than knowledge and more optimism than ecological imagination. This was reflected in our actions, and actions have consequences . . . which someone will have to pay.

REGARDING society's wholesale acquiescence to the "gay agenda" and the acceptance and normalization of same-sex marriage, we're now hell-bent on turning taboo and societal norms upside-down within a generation. What we today proclaim as normative and just, 25 years ago was deviant and unthinkable.

With that kind of overturning of the wisdom of the ages -- with that kind of societal rush to judgment -- what could go wrong?

What could have gone wrong with the explosive growth of no-fault divorce? The normalization of procreation outside of marriage? The resulting explosive growth of single-parent households?

What could have gone wrong with the attempt to fix some of the above with more and more legal abortion? With creating a contraceptive mentality instead of a let's-build-a-family mentality? Yes, we have our "freedom," but someone has to pay the bill for it. Oftentimes, that would be our children.

Every time, it's the taxpayer. If there's a recipe for widespread poverty and social instability, "First, you have a kid but not a husband . . ." is the sociological equivalent of "First, you make a roux. . . ."

But in 1960, or '65 or '72, who the hell knew? Well, yeah, those religious nuts, but they're hardly an objective source.

"Haters" never are . . . until we're counting on them to help us clean up one of those "Who knew?" messes we've made for ourselves and now can't escape. Not only are we arrogant and ignorant, we're also presumptuous.

Good thing those Jesus-freak Gumps are too hatefully stupid to catch on to that, right?

Ding, dong, is the tea party dead?


It was a bad night for the tea party.

Creepy tea-party firebrand Allen West apparently has gone down in flames in his Florida congressional district, despite outspending his Democratic opponent 4 to 1. Kooky Michelle Bachmann almost lost in her Minnesota district, this after a failed presidential bid on a tea-stained platform.

Rep. Allen West
Tea-party insurgents also got whacked in their U.S. Senate races in Missouri and Indiana after finding it impossible to speak about touchy subjects without gagging on their feet. Tea partiers cost the Republicans seats in the Senate and in the House.

Some suggest it was just a matter of bad candidates, not a wholesale repudiation of the movement. Could be. I think that's a question that will be answered over a number of years.

Nevertheless, it's interesting that the man held hostage by the Tea Party Caucus until now is singing a more conciliatory song a mere day after the election. He even said the T-word, and I don't mean "tea":
House Speaker John Boehner offered Wednesday to pursue a deal with a victorious President Barack Obama that will include higher taxes "under the right conditions" to help reduce the nation's staggering debt and put its finances in order.

"Mr. President, this is your moment," Boehner told reporters, speaking about the "fiscal cliff" that will hit in January. "We want you to lead."

Boehner said House Republicans are asking Obama "to make good on a balanced approach" that would including spending cuts and address government social benefit programs.

"Let's find the common ground that has eluded us," Boehner said while congratulating the president on winning a second term.

The Ohio Republican spoke a day after the president's clear re-election victory. He said conditions on higher taxes would include a revamped tax code to make it cleaner and fairer, fewer loopholes and lower rates for all.
BUT we are talking about a budgetary standoff between the Party of Lust and the Party of Greed, so getting all optimistic that sanity might prevail in Washington is, to say the least, premature.

What I do know is that a people as arrogant and hubristic as ourselves usually gets the leadership it deserves. And you're looking at it every night on the network news.

Expect no miracles.

Monday, November 05, 2012

Staten Island today


New York is not the kind of place you want to be if you're barely getting by, I think.

And if you get wiped out by Sandy the Superstorm. . . .

This is Katrina writ smaller, and it seems to me the concern of officialdom for working stiffs like this waitress is about the same as that for the poor folks of flooded New Orleans before the media began making a big stink. The trouble in this case is this little election tomorrow that's overshadowing a situation that's almost like the old movie Escape From New York.

Only these folks can't afford to escape from New York. Just as they can't afford to stay.

Did I mention the Northeast is going to be hit by a nor'easter this week? Lord, have mercy.

Sunday, November 04, 2012

Les Miles rides all the wrong trains


I think everybody in the Western world knows this song.

Except LSU's football coach, Les Miles.

It would have been fun if CBS could have gotten a mic on Alabama coach Nick Saban -- who used to be the Tigers' coach --when he was shaking his head after every unexplainable Miles decision and saying "What a dumbass."

Which is what I was saying after that bizarre, doomed fake field goal in the second quarter of LSU's last-minute loss to the Crimson Tide.

Les just lost my protest vote for president. Maybe I'll write in Saban -- I doubt he'd have any problem at all telling Bibi Netanyahu to go ∫#¢& himself.

Saturday, November 03, 2012

3 Chords & the Truth: BRRRRRT!


What does this edition of 3 Chords & the Truth have that Brand X lacks?

Only a computer with a hard drive that sounds like it could use some Beano, some Saxy Jazz from the days of Mad Men, more freeform musical variety than anywhere else . . . and a host who knows how to put it all together. Brrrrrrrt!

I think that's a heck of an endorsement, myself. No the Big Show isn't up for election, and we won't be inundating you with campaign robocalls. Yuck.

But aren't you tempted to check out 3 Chords & the Truth just on account of the farting PC? C'mon, you know you are.

BRRRRRRT!

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth features a set that mans up, and a dreamy one, too. And there's another scrumptious and long foray into the wonderful world of jazz.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there or be . . . BRRRRRT!

Friday, November 02, 2012

Why they stay; why we won't go

(New York) Daily News

Some people.
 
Sandy the Superstorm has laid waste to large chunks of the Eastern Seaboard -- most notably, New York City and the Jersey Shore -- and some people's first reaction is to wonder why the suffering souls they see on the TV news didn't get the hell out of Dodge.

I have some thoughts on that. 

They were there because it was home. Was.

 Is?

They also were there because, generally unused to hurricanes, they couldn't believe how bad the wind and surge could be. And who thought an inferno would start amid the flood? Memories of what happened in New Orleans with Katrina are short . . . except for those of the looting, and of families there who may have escaped the federal flood but were cleaned out by the feral among them whose daily existence is preying upon their neighbors.

That's why they stayed.

Was it a particularly bright idea to stay? Hell, no. But the human instinct is to try to protect what one has worked a lifetime for, and the fear of abandoning one's home oftentimes is greater than the fear of nature's fury.

I'm waiting for someone to wonder why in the world anyone would live in New York, which sits so perilously astride the ocean fierce, which awaits the first opportunity to reclaim it, if but for a short while.You know, just like some people did about New Orleans in Katrina's murderous wake.

It happens every time.

THE ANSWER is the same as that of the citizens of New Orleans, and of the smaller communities of Plaquemines Parish, La., whose homes were sent under the waves by Category 1 Isaac this August. They live there because it's home, the place they know and love . . . and the people they know and love. It is who they are. In large part, it made them who they are.

No matter where you live, you very well could be done in by something -- hurricane, flood, tornado, earthquake, wildfire, drought, tsunami or blizzard. Such is life in this fallen world and on this wild and perilous planet.

I was born and raised in south Louisiana and have lived almost half my life in Nebraska. I know hurricanes, I know tornadoes, too, and I have come to know drought, catastrophic thunderstorms and blizzards. Folks down South wonder why I'd willingly live in a place where summer can bring 110-degree days and winter can hit you with 25-below-zero cold and snow drifts up to your neck.

It's the same reason they refuse to pack up and move because of air you nearly can drink and catastrophes you know by name that blow in off the Gulf of Mexico to try and kill you. It's because Nebraska is home now. I love it, and it's where the people I know and love stand beside me to brave whatever curveball nature chooses to throw at us. Because between the bad times and the peril lies the beauty and the wonder of the Great Plains.
 
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
HERE, JUST beyond Omaha's suburban sprawl, lies a horizon that stretches beyond all telling, rolling hills that give this wild land its texture and an endless expanse of sky brilliant with untold billions of stars. The threat of an F5 tornado once in a blue moon is nothing in the face of a landscape "charged with the grandeur of God."

I imagine the good people of New York and New Jersey feel the same way about endless beaches, the Manhattan skyline, boardwalks and an ocean that stretches beyond the blue horizon. I grew up feeling that way about the Mississippi River, upon which my hometown of Baton Rouge was built 313 years ago.

And the Mississippi can kill you in a New York second in more ways than you can list.

I know why people live on peril's edge in New York and on the Jersey Shore, and I can understand why -- foolish as it ultimately was -- they balked at surrendering their homes and home places to nature's fury without a fight, futile as that usually is.

I suggest that instead of second-guessing people who probably already are second-guessing themselves, we instead hold out a hand -- preferably one filled with cash -- to our brother and sister Americans during their darkest hour.

No man is an island, even though he might live on one, and we never know when we will be next in fate's crosshairs.

Thursday, November 01, 2012

Pistol envy as public policy


People in Louisiana always have been a little bit nuts.

Sometimes, that's a good thing. When you enter the realm of public policy and self-governance, usually not.

Chalk up this latest news of Louisiana Whack, as reported by The Associated Press, as a definite "not, no, nuh uh":
Former Gov. Mike Foster is featured in an NRA radio ad supporting a constitutional amendment on the Nov. 6 ballot that would set a tougher standard for restricting weapons use and remove a provision that spells out legislative authority to limit concealed handguns. 
Supporters of Amendment No. 2 say the change would guard against possible future Supreme Court rulings that might affect the Second Amendment. 
In the ad, paid for by the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association, Foster says he's voting for the amendment to "guarantee our rights to own a gun in Louisiana no matter what happens in Washington."
BEHOLD, the breakdown of civil society in Louisiana -- what there ever was of it -- continues apace. This kind of bat-sh*t crazy constitutional amendment is not the sign of a healthy society or culture.

It is the sign of people who believe that civil society is either a) not possible any longer, or b) undesirable. If you were to gauge what there is of the "Louisiana mind" today, you'd probably find that it's a little of both.

That the Legislature sent to voters a measure making it difficult for the state to regulate firearms at all and seemingly all-but-erasing authority for government to regulate the carrying of concealed weapons is a profound loss of faith in, if not the rule of law itself, the ability of the state to maintain order.

Or at least enough order that it wouldn't be considered normal to pack heat -- hidden heat, no less. No, ascendant is the idea of concealed firearms as so crucial to individual freedom and well-being that the state has precious little right to interfere or regulate. Welcome back to the Wild West. And good luck prosecuting gangbangers on gun charges before they actually pull the trigger and cap somebody's ass.

NEVERTHELESS, I bet it passes. Crazy does as crazy is, and if you look at the numbers and the newspapers, you realize that only a bunch of flat-out lunatics could create the monument to dysfunction and delusion that is the Gret Stet.

Louisiana never has been big on the rule of law. Now, however, it threatens to go "all in" on the rule of force. Yeah, that should work out well in America's largest insane asylum.