I'm your rumba man

This is a 1956 iPod playing a 1950s iTunes download -- Xavier Cugat's favorite rumbas, to be specific.

And I'm still doing the rumba, baby. I can't seem to quit. If Chris Brown catches us doing the rumba, Chris Brown would just pitch a fit. (With firearms.)

But I can't help myself; it's much bigger than me. If I were you, I'd hang onto a rumba man like me.

NOW, you might ask, what sort of geekery gets a rumba man like me excited? Old LP records, yes. But more than that . . . old LP records in great shape that have price tags on them from a St. Louis record store that went out of business about the time your rumba man was getting in business.

So to speak.

Don't get me started about how to figure out how old a pressing is, or where did the filler songs come from when a record company reissues a 1948 10-inch LP as a mid-'50s 12-inch LP and adds four songs to it . . . because more space.

Just don't. You ain't geek enough.

Well, that's about all for now. File this under Things That Probably Will End Up on This Week's Show.

3 Chords & the Truth: Trying to wash us away

The rains tried to wash south Louisiana away.

Then the national media and America's cognoscenti tried to wish south Louisiana's waterlogged ruin and its waterlogged suffering away.

Both are still here, not that you'd notice if you weren't already looking hard for evidence of either.

This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is a protest against Americans' desire to ignore -- to condescend to -- their brothers and sisters at the soggy bottom of Flyover Country. This go around of the podcast is other things, too -- sunnier things -- but the protest, our musical protest, is the heart of the thing.

Louisiana lives matter.

AND YOU -- we -- don't get to ignore that, because all Americans matter, being that no American is more American than any other American.

That's a point this episode of the Big Show hopes to makes as entertainingly as possible. While you're listening, check out the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank and lend a financial hand, if you can.

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

The view from 10645 Darryl Drive

This is my neighborhood, the one in Baton Rouge where I grew up.

My parents built their first -- and only -- house there in 1956. I moved in at the end of March 1961 from my previous address at the old Our Lady of the Lake maternity ward.

From 1956 until three days ago, not a drop of unwanted water entered 10645 Darryl Drive unless somebody spilled a glass of it on the floor. Then we mopped it up. 

Look at the picture above, taken by the Civil Air Patrol on Sunday. 10645 Darryl Drive is in the bottom fourth, one-third from the left.
 
There's not a big enough mop in the world.

At right, thanks to Google Street View, is how the home of my youth looked three years ago -- when it was the home of my mother's old age. This picture is from May 2013, a month before Mama fell and broke her hip at age 89.

When the paramedics took her away to the new Our Lady of the Lake, she couldn't have known that she'd never see it again. A couple of months after that, she'd be here in Omaha, in the assisted-living apartment where she would spend the last 18 months of her life.

Mama lived at 10645 Darryl Drive for almost 57 years. In 2001, Daddy took his last breath in the bedroom that was once mine.

I AM grateful they did not live to see Sunday's scene at 10645 Darryl Drive -- to see their little world in their little part of Baton Rouge, La., overtaken by dirty, brown floodwater. I am grateful that, in extreme old age, they did not see the house they so loved invaded by the deluge. See their memories drowned.

I am grateful they were not faced with cleaning up a gigantic mess when they were too old and too ill to even consider putting things aright again.

Today, the scene at 10645 Darryl Drive has been repeated thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times -- much worse in most cases. Water to the countertops, water to the ceiling, water to the roofline. Water consuming everything and, in 11 cases as I write, someone's very life.

Also as I write, I've lost count of how many people I know back home, both family and friends, who got flooded out, in many cases losing everything they owned. I have cousins who now possess only their lives, their loved ones and the clothes on their backs. This is my hometown's Katrina. This is Katrina for an area spanning 20 parishes (counties) in south Louisiana.

NEXT DOOR in Denham Springs, a town of more than 10,000 just across the rampaging Amite River, 90 percent of homes were flooded. In Livingston Parish alone, where Denham Springs is the largest municipality, it's estimated that more than 100,000 people lost everything they had.

Nobody's come up with a number for Baton Rouge, the capital city of 230,000 people.

Not that you'd know any of that from the national media.

Louisiana lives matter . . . not that you could tell from watching the evening news or the cable networks, where all the airtime is devoted to more pressing things than the fate of rednecks, coonasses and black folks in a banana republic somewhere in Flyover Country.

Somewhere toward the bottom.

NO, the cable networks are preoccupied by what obviously matters in life, like panels of opposing party hacks yelling at one another over whether Donald Trump's shit stinks. Tomorrow, Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper will be hosing down the bellowing political hacks as they debate whether Trump was right to be livid that CNN suggested that his shit wasn't the best shit, the best smelling shit that anyone ever shit. Believe me.

As a former resident of 10645 Darryl Drive, I have an opinion about what these blathering, coastal media elites are full of.

But now I return to my regularly scheduled mourning, both for my people and for a country that doesn't much think their lives, their suffering and their deaths matter much at all.

Politics in the age of short-fingered vulgarians

  
My wife thought I was having a stroke.

There I stood in the Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fair, mouth agape, jaw slacked. My eyes must have been a little glazed over. I stared at the Republican Party of Iowa booth.

Actually, I stared at the Crooked Hillary photo booth. That stood in front of and perpendicular to the life-sized Donald Trump cutout, where bunches of good Iowa people were lining up to take a picture with the cardboard candidate.

I found myself compelled to take pictures of the people taking pictures, if for no other reason but to reality-check myself that this campaign -- this insane presidential contender -- was really happening, and that a formerly mainstream political party had entered the terminal stage of a decades-long descent into bat-shit madness.

THIS COARSE display . . . this supreme unseriousness and spleen venting . . . this is how the the government becomes delegitimized (see Obama Derangement Syndrome) and the country becomes ungovernable. This is how we lose faith in democracy, and how we cast off all our hopes for the future.

This is so beneath us as Americans. We are so beneath us, at least beneath our better selves, as Americans.

This is how everybody becomes The Other, and this is how opposing political parties become Lebensunwertes Leben. 

How damned sad that what's left of Republicanism sounds so much more serious in the original German.

The Real Donald J. Trump -- star of stage, screen, divorce court and bankruptcy -- would sound just as nuts in Classical Latin, alas.

As we were leaving the fair Sunday, I asked my wife whether this would be the last Iowa State Fair we'd go to without having to get a passport or obtain a visa. Would Iowa end up in the Republic of Heartland, while Nebraska joined with the Dakotas in the new Canadian province of South Manitoba? Would the United States still be united in 2017, somehow, despite Trump ginning up panic and rage among the booboisie about the "rigged election"?

Could be a hell of a "reality show."

Call it The End of the World as We Know It.

And we feel . . . pissed.

Mind the sign

Just a random thing on the American scene. Though I do have to wonder whether this is a thing in the great state of Iowa, at least such that signs must warn against the practice.

I will have no further comment. Iowa Hawkeye fans may say what they like.

On a fair summer evening

You can't escape the screen, ever.

And at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, the screen gets supersized. Now if they could just put it on a stick and wrap it in bacon.

3 Chords & the Truth: Psychedelic or psychotropic?

Who cares?

Whichever, this episode of the Big Show does seem to take the edge off.

Ain't that all that's important in the summer of our discontent?

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

Maaaan.

3 Chords & the Truth: Upping our meds

Political news? Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better to . . . run run run run run run run away.

Or listen to this episode of 3 Chords & the Truth. One or the other.

Personally, I'd recommend listening to this episode of the Big Show, which went quite smoothly, actually, after I upped my meds. Before Inauguration Day, I think we all are going to be upping

 

OUR MEDS.

Thank you! I'm fine. How are you?

Hello.

Who?

Swimmingly. Good show. Righto.

Political news? Qu'est-ce que c'est?

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

What is the candidate's position on bodily fluids?

I could be mistaken (no, not really), but isn't nuclear annihilation a pro-life issue?

Because now it's on the table, thanks to the Republican presidential nominee.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe today -- and this followed several minutes of various iterations of "Oh, my God! Oh, my, God! Oh, my God!" in the subtle manner of the four-star Air Force general, CIA director and National Security Agency director that Michael Hayden used to be -- host (and former GOP congressman) Joe Scarborough related the following. Quote:

Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times, he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, we can’t we use them?’ That’s one of the reasons why he has, he just doesn’t have foreign policy experts around him.

Three times, in an hour briefing, ‘Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?’

End quote.

Comrade Trump

If you're not the kind of person who believes in divine judgment, or that nations can fall under divine judgment for their collective sins, maybe now would be a good time to start.

From Vox:

On Wednesday, Donald Trump did something extraordinary even for him: He called on a foreign power to launch an espionage operation against his chief political opponent, hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email server to find 30,000 emails she allegedly deleted. 

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

When Trump said it, it didn’t sound like a joke — especially in light of recent events. Over the weekend, Wikileaks released about 19,000 emails that were stolen from the DNC servers by hackers who were almost certainly linked to the Russian state. These emails included talk of a (never-realized) plot to attack Bernie Sanders on his religion, a revelation that exacerbated divisions inside the Democratic party and thus seemingly helped Trump’s political chances. 

All of this has raised one big question: What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia? 

The answer appears to be twofold. First, the Kremlin appears to be interfering in the US election in a way likely to help Trump become president. Whether or not that’s the intent of the meddling, that is the result. 

Second, Trump is deeply, weirdly pro-Russian.

I RECOMMEND reading the whole thing. Apart from saying that, I am too gobsmacked to comment.

Except for this: The only people crazier and more dangerous than Donald J. Trump are those Americans who would like to see him anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Why is that? Because when -- God willing -- Donald Trump is long gone after a resounding defeat in November, the aggrieved fools who voted for him will still be around, ripe to be exploited by the next dictator-in-waiting.

If on the other hand -- God forbid -- Trump wins, we will have no recourse but to again learn what Abraham Lincoln well knew when he gave his second inaugural address March 4, 1865:

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

THE WISDOM remains the same, only this country's sins have changed.

Cause and effect

If you say this . . . 

Expect this.

Mean, stupid and voting for Trump is no way to go through life.

It's official. GOP nominates the Donald

“I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

 -- Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter,

The Art of the Deal

3 Chords & the Truth: Don't worry, get happy

It's probably the end of the world as we know it, so pour yourself a stiff drink and let's us listen to some comfort music.

If this stuff was good enough to get the "greatest generation" through the 1960s . . . and the Baby Boomers' teenage years . . . it no doubt is good enough for this edition of 3 Chords & the Truth, one where we seek to self-medicate through happy, soothing sounds.

I mean, if the world's going to hell in a handbasket, find another handbasket.

TO TELL YOU the truth, I have no idea what that means. But it sounded good. Rather like this episode of the Big Show, the swingingest podcast on the Internets.

It's the Happy Beat.

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

Music to soothe the savage breast

 

It's hard not to be in a funk today.

Hell, it's hard not to have been hard in the throes of abject depression since this miserable year first showed its miserable face.

SO FORGIVE ME if I find it difficult to just suck it up week after tumultuous week to be Mr. Hail-Fellow-Well-Met on 3 Chords & the Truth.

It's been one damn thing after another, and I'm sure you're feeling just about as cheery.

In other words, not at all.

So, if you're feeling like I am, join me in a few hours as I indulge myself with some comfort music from a time long ago and a culture far away from us today.  Maybe it was listening to stuff like this that kept "the greatest generation" from completely losing its s*** during the 1960s.

Maybe it'll still work today.

What ye sow, shall ye also reap. Good luck with that.

Huffington Post

Welcome to the confluence of every damn thing that's wrong with my hometown, Baton Rouge, La.:

• Banana-republic policing,
 

• Ineffective, dysfunctional state and local government,
 

• An angry, ignored and historically severely damaged (in every way) inner-city population,
  
• A critical mass of stone-cold white racism locally, and
  

• Systemic breakdowns in education, the justice system, public health care and social services.

You tell me how this ends well. I got nothin'.



I KNEW this would go south Friday night when the protest outside police headquarters -- I've been obsessively watching The Advocate's live streams -- began to turn ugly and the local "community leaders" tried to talk to the crowd and restore order. They were all shouted down.

One state senator from inner-city Baton Rouge kept talking about legislation she was going to introduce to deal with the situation, and how she needed the protesters to get politically involved, blah blahblah blahblah blahblah.

The hotheads may have been beyond reason, but they're not stupid. Any legislation she were to introduce to "deal with the situation" would pass the Louisiana Legislature how, exactly?

The kind of breakdown of public order that the hotheads among the demonstrators would like to achieve in the streets of Baton Rouge, because outrage, is what the GOP-dominated legislature already is achieving politically, because . . . Louisiana. And "conservative" ideology.

BATON ROUGE HAS TURNED INTO SYRIA #AltonSterling #BlackLivesMatter #BatonRouge pic.twitter.com/LCwAyP1AJA

— liz (@lizzkatherine_) July 11, 2016

TELL ME how this gets better. Tell me how this gets better when officialdom is urging everyone to lower the temperature of their rhetoric, but then the comments sections of Baton Rouge media outlets -- both on their websites and on their Facebook feeds -- more or less look like so many Ku Klux Klan message boards, with some outraged black folks responding in kind here and there.

Suggest that -- in the public interest and to promote reasoned dialog -- they either shut down comments or actively moderate them and you get lectured about the First Amendment and not wanting to stifle people's "freedom of speech."

I got that line from some 20-something Channel 2 talking head. Having gotten A's in media law at the LSU journalism school a decade before this lightweight was born, I explained to him that freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press. Which ain't the amazing number of racist trolls taking over these outlets' comments sections.

So, given all of the above, tell me . . . how is Baton Rouge not even more screwed than it usually is? How is someone, or several someones, not going to end up as dead as Alton Sterling before all this is through?

The last grown-up in American media

 
WFAA sports anchor Dale Hansen may be the last actual grown-up in American media.

All the rest, I am reasonably certain, are dead or have been run off by corporate fools who make human sacrifices to shareholder value.

Please watch this, because this grown-up says some grown-up things about the hellish chaos which we know as the New Normal.

You do that, and instead of producing an episode of 3 Chords & the Truth this week, I will go back to watching my hometown teeter at the abyss -- You may have heard of it recently . . . Baton Rouge, La. -- while white racists unleash their racist slurs on local-media comments sections, enraged blacks lash back with some of their own and local newspaper and TV figures enable this incendiary cesspool in the name of "free speech." (Nota bene: Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns the press. Listen to me; I got an A in media law in college.)

Alas, 2016 is a lot like 1968 -- "one goddamn thing after another."

And now, Minnesota

Amerika today. We have a problem, and it's the police.

We have a problem, and it's that every citizen has become a potential terrorist or insurgent in their eyes.

We have a problem. It looks a lot like some sort of fascist police state, and lots of Americans like it that way.

Donald Trump did not come from nowhere.

We have a problem. When we weren't looking, America became Amerika.

No, we can't all just get along

I've always thought of myself as a writer, among other things. I have a journalism background -- I've worked as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. I know my way around a keyboard.

Increasingly, I find myself without words, at least ones that I can print here. There is something to be said -- something important. I wish I knew what the hell it was.

The enormity of evil has murdered my words. Killed them dead, just like the Baton Rouge, La., police killed Alton Sterling.

Sterling was the CD Man at the corner of North Foster and Fairfields, in north Baton Rouge, otherwise known as the 'hood. Truth be told, lots of my hometown is the 'hood. This part of town, like so many others in north BR, used to be working class and white back when I was a kid.

Members of the community calling for an economic protest over the weekend. #AltonSterling pic.twitter.com/2Kdj9VKqH3

— WWL-TV (@WWLTV) July 7, 2016

White people hauled ass. Now it's the 'hood, the place where -- at least according to too many of those white people who abandoned their city for points south, east and way north -- the "animals" live.

Anyway, the CD Man peddled compact discs, bootleg and otherwise, outside the Triple S Food Mart. That's how he scraped together what some people might call a living, or as much of a living as you can when you have a long rap sheet and can't get a job.

Long rap sheets happen in the 'hood, the 'hood in my hometown and yours, too. You grow up poor, you grow up lacking a father . . . or a mother . . . or both, and then shit starts to happen. Then shit snowballs. Then you get out of jail and peddle CDs. And then you carry a pistol because you got mugged or a buddy got mugged or you're just scared of the 'hood that is your home.

Then you cross paths with the Baton Rouge cops. Again.

And now you're dead, a big-ass hole blown in your chest, point-blank from a cop's service weapon. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I got theories, probably wrong ones. I got no words -- no sufficient ones, at least.

I just know that there Baton Rouge is, sitting atop a tinderbox with people -- many of them white, self-righteous and racist as a son of a bitch -- tossing lit matches from atop platforms provided them by local media. Add some outraged African-American counterparts in incivility, and you have a combox race war. All you need are guns.

There are a few of those floating around Louisiana. And America.

Click for full-size image

I COULD go on and on about the gross irresponsibility of the media aiding and abetting a racist, rage-fueled shitstorm at a time such as this, on the Internet there in America's own banana republic, which of course is a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump's Amerika. Could even complain to those in charge of the newspaper and TV stations.

Wouldn't do any good. The last grown-ups in the media were laid off sometime around 2010.

Heat draws eyeballs. Light gets you squat.

If you're looking for a ray of sunshine amid the darkness, if you're looking for some earthly hope in this space, I apologize for wasting your time. I got nothing.

I got no great hope for my hometown or my home state. I got no great hope that racism won't get anything but worse in this Age of Trump. I got no words -- no useful ones. I got squat.

All I have is that familiar sick feeling in my middle-aged gut. All I have is sorrow. All I have is contempt for my hometown and the hateful stupidity it seems to nurture like a Petri dish does bacteria.

I wish I could say, like the Steve Taylor song, "Since I Gave Up Hope (I Feel A Lot Better)." But I don't. I'm just the same -- tired, pissed and sick to my stomach, just without any real hope this side of the Second Coming.

It's always 1959 somewhere. Somewhere, thy name is Baton Rouge.

3 Chords & the Truth: The vast wasteland at 75

A country can't become awash in television -- and TV commercials -- all of a sudden. You have to start somewhere.

Broadcasting, July 14, 1941

Somewhere was New York City exactly 75 years ago. On July 1, 1941, Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" of commercial television consisted of Channel 1, Channel 2 and Channel 4. But Channel 4 was still "experimental" and couldn't run ads, so that leaves us with Channels 1 and 2 -- WNBT (NBC) and WCBW (CBS) -- on that august prewar day in July.

Yes, Virginia, there was a Channel 1 until 1946.

On that July day three-quarters of a century ago, the National Broadcasting Company was the first to "go to commercial." Before the start of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game, a WNBT camera focused on a test pattern, and in that test pattern was a clock -- a Bulova clock. And that was the first television ad.

The things have been with us since . . . annoying us, amusing us and giving us time to make a trip down the hall. I guess that's well worth taking note of on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

IN OTHER WORDS, get yourself ready for an entire set of songs devoted to the boob tube. With a little luck, video won't kill the Internet radio star.

Also get yourself ready for a jazz set, a sweet set and a hot one, too. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

Or so we've been told. I guess that's why this little program from Omaha, by God, Nebraska is so dad-blasted eclectic.

You are listening to 3C&T, Omaha. Bulova watch time is . . . time to turn on the Big Show and listen to the music.

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