Well, that was strange. It was just the end of July, and now look at us. Summer evaporated – must have been all that sun.
It took a few weeks, but Matt and I finally got around to thinking that we should post an August episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. I’m sure some of you may have thought we were taking an August break, much like our political class and most people of means in Europe do every year about this time, but no soap. Let’s get this clear: Big Green is a WORKING band. They’ll be no slackers around this abandoned hammer mill, my friends. Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). It’s up every morning at 5 a.m. and sweat!
Phew, that was exhausting. Anywho, what do we have on the podcast this month? Well, let’s have a look-see. First off, we’ve got a special episode of Ned Trek, entitled Ned Trek XII: The Manassery. Introduced by Lee Majors, as always, this ludicrous extravaganza features a peerless pantheon of figures from the American conservative tradition, including Ronald Reagan in a role inspired by that of Captain Christopher Pike, post disaster. A must-listen for anyone with way, way, way too much time on their hands.
Then there’s Matt and my usual broad-ranging conversation about nothing in particular, interrupted not once but twice by previously unreleased recordings of Big Green songs. The first, “Plenty of Time, Plenty of Blood”, is a number pulled from the archives; another four-track cassette recording, probably from 1990-91, somewhere in there. The second, right at the end of the podcast, is a recent recording of a song called “Ask For Leave”. This is one of those rough-draft recordings, not quite fully tracked, which we did a hasty mix on for the podcast.
Yeah, I know – it goes on a bit too long. But if you can stand two hours of THIS IS BIG GREEN, perhaps you can also endure 78 minutes of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our new album. Give it a listen. (If you’re short on scratch in these hard times, contact us and we’ll send you a copy gratis, while supplies last.)
Obama drew a red line. That is what we are defending. Our action will do nothing to protect civilians in Syria. It will do nothing to tamp down the flames of civil war. Far from it, in fact … it will pour gasoline on the conflict, quite probably enabling it to spread dramatically beyond that sorry nation’s borders. All across the media, there’s this tiresome meme about how we have to do something, something to punish the Assad regime. If we allow them to get away with this, the story goes, it will embolden them to go further and embolden others to follow suit. Obama seems to think it’s just two days of bombing and then off to Switzerland. What’s wrong with this picture?
Sure, he’s Simon the Likeable. I think of it as the liberal equivalent of conservatives seeing W. Bush as someone they would like to have a beer with. Obama has an appealing persona to people like me, mostly because he’s the first president in my lifetime that shares our experience. Of course, those considerations are an empty category, politically speaking. It doesn’t matter at all whether or not I “like” this man I don’t know. What matters is how he handles driving the enormous killing machine that is the American Presidency.
Best remind ourselves that the Russia we have today is the one we worked toward building yesterday. Putin is the beneficiary of a strong presidency established by Yeltsin in the 90s with our enthusiastic support (back when we had them privatizing state assets for pennies on the dollar and creating what was then the most dramatic demographic self-implosion in many decades). Remember how he shot the Russian Parliament full of holes? Well, now we’re just staring our own blinkered foreign policy in its beady eyes. The authoritarianism, the anti-gay laws – it’s pretty disgusting. But then, have we broken with Saudi Arabia yet? Their laws are worse.