Political Rants

Wearing out our welcome in iraq

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Biden dropped bombs on Iraq and Syria again this week, this time using F-15s and F-16s. This is the president’s second large action against what the administration describes as Iranian-backed groups. They claim this action is in self-defense, invoking the U.N. Charter (presumably article 51). Nancy Pelosi piped up with her own cry of support for the attack, stating that “protecting the military heroes who defend our freedoms is a sacred priority.”

Now, what the fuck freedoms are these heroes defending? And how is it self-defense to hit back against local forces that are resisting our presence in their own country? A country, mind you, that didn’t ask us to invade in the first place and that has explicitly asked us to leave. Like all empires, we have an expansive sense of our own sovereignty. We feel put upon when the locals rise against us.

What’s different is lesser than what’s the same

I know, we were all happy when Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes taken away from him. And his assassination of Soleimani was an obvious and reckless provocation coming from an administration that put Iran on notice in its first week and tore up the JCPOA. That said, they still stride around the Middle East like they own the place, and that should be just as unacceptable to us as when Trump did it.

Even worse, the Biden foreign policy team is leaving bad policies in place from the previous regime. They are essentially in agreement with much of it, and because they are generally more competent than the last crew, they in some ways may pose an even greater threat to the cause of peace.

And again, what the hell are we doing in Iraq, anyway? Our troops should leave now. In fact, they should never have been there in the first place.

Death of a Salesman

Of course, there was a reason why they went there in the first place. The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq to the American people – or at least to enough of them for the tanks to start rolling. An important part of that sales effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died this week.

I’ve never made a habit of dancing on people’s graves, and I’m not about to start now. Suffice to say that this man did a lot of damage in his life. He helped to push two disastrous wars that resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people. Simply put, he was a horrible man in many respects.

Of course, he had a lot of help in this sales job. The mainstream press was a tremendous help. At the height of Rumsfeld and Bush’s popularity, before the Iraq war went predictably down the drain, the press was even painting Rumsfeld as some kind of warped sex symbol. I remember having a hard time with that as I waited in supermarket checkout lines, looking at People magazine or Us or whoever was blowing Rumsfeld that week. Jesus, how nauseating can you get?

Anyway, one of the main architects is now gone. Time to stop this stupid ass war, once and for all.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

When all your sharps sound flat.

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2000 Years to Christmas

This is not the instrument I play. Mine is over there. You know, the one in the big wooden case that has to be pushed around on dollies. No, not THAT kind of dolly … the kind that’s flat and has WHEELS, damn it. Don’t you know ANYTHING?

Oh, goodness – my apologies. I had assumed that no one was reading this. I’m afraid you’ve caught us at kind of a difficult moment. You see, an alert listener – I believe someone in rural Idaho – suggested that we sound like people who play their instruments blindfolded. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I got the guys together and we donned our cartoon-like blindfolds, then started playing the first instrument we came upon.

Needless to say, this exercise was about as unenlightening as any we’ve attempted previously in our residency at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. But we try to be responsive to the demands of our audience. That is our lot as performers, is it not? (Some would say not.)

There’s a difference, man

Nevertheless, I would have to say that I did, in fact, learn something from this experience. For one thing, not all instruments are built the same. You tend to get kind of parochial when you play the same axe over and over, right? Well, hell – put a blindfold on and play the next axe you come across. You’ll discover that there are some remarkable differences between, say, a tuba and a mandolin.

To be fair, there is one thing those instruments have in common: I can’t play either one of them. Not that I haven’t tried to play unfamiliar instruments. Long time Big Green listeners will know that I played banjo on a couple of tracks, including “Falling Behind” on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our ex-governor (cousin) Rick Perry tribute album. You can also hear me playing banjo on “Box of Crackers”, a recording we’ve played on THIS IS BIG GREEN (see our August 2019 episode).

What the hell’s the point of music, anyway?

Now, I’m not saying, on the basis of these crude recordings, that I can actually play the banjo. Far from it! But – and this is important – I can play it about as well as I play the bassoon. Which is to say, not really at all. You see, the bassoon is among the most difficult of the wind instruments to master. I was just explaining this to Prince Leopold the other day. It has a double reed and is the size of a bedpost. In fact, it looks like what you get when a bedpost fucks a clarinet (or vice versa).

Which naturally begs the question – what is the point of music, anyway? Like I do with most esoteric questions, I fed that one into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), whose patented eludian-Q9 melotronic brainalizer can work out any puzzle. (Except Rubic’s Cube. He’s still working on that one.)

Well, his lights flashed, his antennae twirled, he made whirring sounds, and then spit out a little piece of paper which read: “It is pointless.” There you have it, people! Stop wasting your lives! Put the damn bassoons away!

Political Rants

Voting the bums in for the last time.

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Okay, so the “For the People” act did not overcome the filibuster this past week. That was no surprise, of course. Neither was the fact that Republican senators made no effort to specify exactly why they thought the provisions of the act would negatively affect Republicans. They speak in billboards, these people – short, snappy phrases like “power grab” and “stop the steal,” with no key as to what the hell they’re talking about.

But let’s be clear: in statehouses across the country, GOP legislatures and governors are putting the mechanisms in place to commandeer the next election, regardless of who gets the most votes. The “For the People” act would have rolled much of those back. Without some restraint from the Federal level, it’s going to be very difficult for poorer and disenfranchised people to access the ballot in coming elections.

Nothing new under the gun

Republicans have been working on this stuff for a long time. They’ve been pushing voter i.d. laws, rolling back early voting, and resisting policies like automatic voter registration for decades. During the Bush II administration, they even fired a bunch of U.S. Attorneys for not aggressively prosecuting voter fraud cases (which, frankly, were practically non-existent even then). The reason is simple: the more people vote, the more they tend to lose because their stated policies are so deeply unpopular.

Also, they have long tended to appeal to their constituents’ baser instincts – namely, fear of immigrants, fear and hatred of dark people more generally, fear of crime, etc. Democrats have resorted to this as well, but less so over time as white people have become a proportionately smaller part of the electorate. (Many of them do accommodate the views of their Republican colleagues, of course.)

GOP election strategy: one and done

There is, however, a difference in kind, not degree, about the current “conservative” movement. Now they truly seem determined not only to steal elections via legal and extralegal means, but to set themselves up so that they permanently remain in power. Trump is not what I would call a “thought leader” on the right, but he does have utter contempt for rules, restrictions, and institutions, and I think he deployed this to supercharge the autocratic tendencies in the Republican party, which now seems enamored with his erratic, dictatorial behavior.

Readers of this blog will know that I had my doubts last year over whether Trump would leave office if he lost the election. Based on what we know he and his cohorts attempted to do, I think that sentiment was justified. In all honesty, if Trump or some Trump clone runs for president in 2024, I think there’s a better than good chance that, with the support of these GOP legislators and governors, that candidate will be named the winner. And once they pull that off, staying permanently becomes that much easier.

Keith was kinda right

At the beginning of Trump’s term, Keith Olbermann put out a series of videos attacking him as a usurper, a criminal, and an autocrat. While I think the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff was way overblown, he was kind of right about Trump’s congeniality towards the idea of ruling like a freaking King Rat. I, for one, will not underestimate the danger of autocracy again, and I strongly suggest that you take the same precaution.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Social media killed the radio star.

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2000 Years to Christmas

I spy with my little eye … a chair! Right, that’s the one. Now your turn. Well now … you can’t say chair, because I just did and there’s only one in the room. Pick something else, damn it!

Sheesh – that’s the trouble with playing parlor games here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. For one thing, there’s no parlor. Even worse, it seems no one in our entourage has ever played a game before. Not even Parcheesi! We are creatures of the road, my friends, driven by eternal wanderlust. Except, of course, for most of the last twenty-five years, during which we’ve been nailed in one spot.

Sure, I know – if we’ve got all this time on our hands, why the hell aren’t we recording? Why aren’t we putting out new episodes of THIS IS BIG GREEN or NED TREK? Well, that’s a good question. I would add that to our list of Freakishly Unanswerable Questions, but then that dude would call me a “dink” again, and then I couldn’t show my face in my fifth grade classroom should 1970 ever return.

Turn it down, the radio

They say video killed the radio star. Well, we never were radio stars, but we got killed none the less – not by video, though. No, sir – social media killed us. It wore us down to a nub. Just look at what it did to Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! His hands are mere claws. And the mansized tuber – he is now a helpless Facebook addict, scrolling and scrolling his life away. Pathetic!

Not like that, you idiot! Use the hockey stick.

As official spokesperson for Big Green, I do spend a little time on Facebook, Twitter, and … uh …. some other stuff. But I’m not living on that shit. And frankly, it’s the podcasts that took it out of us. At its peak, THIS IS BIG GREEN was posting 12 shows a year, half of them musicals, which meant five, six, sometimes eight new songs recorded and finished in time to post, along with an hour-long episode of Ned Trek. Holy mother – I get tired just THINKING about it.

Hammock time, geezers

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we’re retiring. For one thing, we can’t afford to. For another thing, we’ve barely even started. We’re like the Elias Sandoval of indie music. “We could have made this planet into a garden!” (It’s from classic Star Trek. Ask your mother. Or better yet, you’re moron father.)

Will we do more episodes of TIBG? Probably, but we are definitely on hiatus. Those buzzards circling over the mill, they’re just waiting on a friend. Then it’s off to the rookery. As for us, we should probably switch to backgammon. I think even Marvin could figure THAT out.

Political Rants

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.

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This week the airwaves were filled with more breathless speculation than we’ve seen since the last major award show. Biden meeting with Vladimir Putin! The newly repopulated set of Morning Joe was all a-twitter with neo-Kremlinology. They even invited John Bolton on board to share his valuable perspective (though his only use might be as a reverse barometer).

The talking heads, I kid you not, were hoisting charts that compared the wait times of various heads of state who met with American presidents over the past fifteen years. If Biden comes a half hour late, what does that mean? Is Tony Blinken frowning too much? Jesus Christ, I wish I were joking. You would think, with all the air time, they would talk about the IMF treaty, or Open Skies …. something substantive. Not a chance.

The only mildly interesting piece of this whole sordid drama was the competition for the moral high ground underway between Biden and Putin, each playing to his own domestic audience.

Sympathy for the Devil

In the lead-up to the summit, Putin was interviewed by an NBC reporter, who asked him about Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident (and ultra nationalist, btw). Now, there are plenty of counter examples Putin could have invoked in response if he wanted to demonstrate American hypocrisy. He instead chose the January 6 insurrectionists as examples of people being arrested for expressing political views.

That’s just plain adorable. Putin sees a gang of white supremacists trying to overthrow elective government as dissidents and freedom fighters, even though they had the backing of the President of the United States and more than a few members of the institution they were attacking that day. Hardly outsiders, and treated with relative kid gloves by the police. Of course, they wanted Putin’s favored candidate to remain in power – not because Putin loves Trump, but because Trump is a burning disaster.

Suggestion Box

If Vlad wanted to perform some genuine what-about-ism, he could have chosen much better subjects. Now, I’m sure he has no sympathy for Reality Winner – who was recently released from prison – because she exposed some intelligence on Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 Presidential election. But he might have gone with Edward Snowden, who after all, is relatively close at hand (in exile in Russia).

Probably a better pick would have been Julian Assange, who is now serving hard time in London and under indictment by the U.S. Justice Department and whose health is rapidly deteriorating. Assange’s “crime” was the release of the Iraq war documents, diplomatic cables, and collateral murder video, for which they’ve been hounding him non-stop for over a decade, through administrations of both parties (see my older posts on this). They are slowly killing Assange, in essence. That’s roughly equivalent to the Navalny accusation.

Of course, Putin could also point to, I don’t know, millions of other incarcerated Americans. Or perhaps the text of our 13th Amendment. The man just has no imagination!

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Taking the words WAY too literally.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Jesus, man … another song about geoscience? Just wait until Mitch gets his hands on that. What’s the topic this time – gravitation? I guess he’s already fucked with that sufficiently. Still, I worry.

Yeah, that’s right. No one wants to see your friends in Big Green just moping around the abandoned hammer mill like a bunch of sad sacks, bickering with one another. So we make an extra effort to smile when we get visitors. And if we’re not in the mood, we get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do it for us. No, he doesn’t have anything like what you might call a mouth, but he’s got some grill work to show, and that will do in a pinch.

What’s the beef? Nothing serious. Just interrogating my illustrious brother Matt about the subject matter of his recent songwriting. Some of you may recall that his lyrics have spawned some trouble in the past. No, they’re not controversial or obscene in any way, but they do give Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, some bad ideas. And he tends to take our song lyrics very literally.

The Question of George

A couple of years ago it was Matt’s song “Why Not Call It George?”, the lyric for which has always sounded to me, in part, like a bulleted list of mad-man items:

Gravity can: (a) make your mind flow out from your tongue; (b) take your eyes downtown to see the nuns all bunched up on the tiles; (c) pull your lips back from your smile

(Hear it yourself: Check out our live version of the song on our YouTube channel.)

Parts of that song made Mitch think he could (dare I say it?) rule … the world! Or at least reverse continental drift and reclaim Pangaea. I got nervous when he started spending months at a time in the lab … and the ground started shaking. Not. good.

This doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Eruption Imminent!

Then there was “Volcano Man”, a track from our 2nd album, International House. Mitch started obsessing over that one as well. You know how grade school kids sometimes build those baking soda volcanoes for school projects? Well, that’s a miniature version of what we had to deal with around this dump. Of course, Mitch had to open a vent straight down to the Earth’s molten caramel center, just so that the ‘cano was authentic. He was doing it with an upside-down rocket, Crack In The World style. What a mess!

Anyhow, I’ve tried to encourage Matt to write songs about less volatile things. You know, like …. butterflies, or cobblestones, or vegetable stew. Maybe you’ve got some suggestions that don’t suck (like these do).

Political Rants

Meeting the enemy (and it is still us).

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President Biden headed off to Europe this week to meet with the leaders of rich, white-dominated countries on that side of the pond. His meeting with Putin is drawing as much interest as you might expect. Some of the recent hacking attacks and ransomware incidents have been blamed on operatives connected at least tangentially with Russia. And, of course, a goodly number of people within the broader Democratic coalition see Russia as responsible for having delivered Trump into the White House in 2016. They see all this, and more, as pieces of the same puzzle, and they want Biden to read Putin the riot act.

To the extent that the ransomware stuff can be attributed to the Kremlin, it can be seen as part of the same effort that drives their illicit involvement in our political campaigns. They want to sow confusion and internal conflict in the world’s sole remaining superpower as a means of keeping us from confronting them – that only makes sense from their point of view.

But the idea that they are having an out-sized effect on our politics is vastly overblown. We Americans are fond of conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve nefarious foreign actors. Yes, we have serious problems, but they are self-inflicted, not imposed from without.

Clinton v. Clinton

I’ve said it on this blog many times before, and I’ll say it again – I never liked Putin, even back in the early 2000s when that was kind of a minority view. But the impact of their agitation in support of the Trump campaign in 2016 was marginal at best. The biggest reason for the failure of the Clinton campaign was – wait for it! – Hillary Clinton. The biggest non-Hillary factor in her loss was the FBI probe and James Comey, but even that issue was rooted in her own flat-footedness.

Let’s face it – she was a terrible candidate from the beginning, and in spite of that, was almost elected. Regarding Trump’s win, she has no one to blame but herself.

Putin’s Favorite POTUS

Did Putin want Trump to be president? Probably, as likely any Russian leader would. It was obvious that Trump was going to make a mess out of everything from the very beginning. That comports with Russia’s long-term strategic goals viz the U.S. And yes, Trump was nice to Putin as part of his constant self-dealing (he wanted that Trump Tower Moscow), but U.S. policy towards Russia was basically the same as in recent administrations.

As Americans, we have no idea of what it’s like to be a nation in the world that has to deal with the United States. The U.S. is the most powerful military, economic, and political player on Earth, and we don’t exactly walk around on tiptoe. Basically every other nation is dwarfed by our power and influence, so they reach for whatever they can to throw us off.

In the case of Russia, the most cost-effective methods of doing that include exacerbating existing divisions between political factions and, perhaps, making commodity prices – gas and beef – go up. That’s espionage 101. We do similar things in other countries, only from a position of power.

What will Biden say to Putin? God only knows. It would be nice if he did some serious work toward de-escalation of differences, maybe reinstating the IMF treaty, etc., but only time will tell. When you have most of the power, you are inevitably tempted to wield it in increasingly arbitrary ways. That would be hard for Biden to overcome, and he shows no sign of doing so.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Daddy took the t-bird away (Damn him!)

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yes, yes …. I know it’s warm out. It’s hot as all hell in here, for crying out loud. Go ahead and open a few windows in the foundry room. You’ll need a ladder and a hook. And if anything catches fire, best call the hook and ladder.

Well, it’s predictable that as soon as the warm weather settles in, members of the Big Green entourage start getting restless. These long winters in an abandoned hammer mill can really take it out of you. But I have to say, summers are no better. It gets hot enough in here to melt all those discarded hammer heads. (I see claw-head hammers bubbling.) Who can blame the crew for wanting a little fresh air, right?

Of course, some of their notions about recreational activities are a little, let’s say, non-standard and unrealistic. Just to be clear, we don’t have an entertainment budget. We also don’t have a transportation budget. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we don’t have any kind of budget, period. We scratch and scrape for every morsel, but because we are a collectivist institution, we all share the workload. This morning I was on scratch duty. Tomorrow it will be scraping.

Surf’s Up On The Erie!

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spent too much of the winter months watching beach movies. He’s got it into his little brass noggin that he wants to go water skiing on the New York State Barge Canal, which runs right by our mill. I keep telling him the damn thing isn’t deep enough or … well … watery enough to water ski on, but he’s insisting.

He thinks if he gets enough speed, he’ll be able to do some jumps even, but dude, there isn’t enough speed in the world for you to manage that.

Looks a little too placid to me, man.

But You’re Not Ben, Abe

For his own part, Anti-Lincoln has decided to fly a kite in the middle of Little Falls, on the busiest street in this tiny city. He obviously thinks his status as an antimatter former president is going to keep him from having his ass hauled to jail like the other miscreants. I’m not so sure.

I reminded him that it was Ben Franklin, not Abe Lincoln, that was the historical American personage who flew kites in the cartoon shows of my youth. (That was how he invented electricity.) His rejoinder? “What part of anti-Lincoln do you not understand?” Fair cop.

Mitch Macaphee, on the other hand, considers true recreation to be curling up with a bottle of Thunderbird. Until daddy takes it away, of course.

Political Rants

Doing the wrong thing. Again.

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We live in a violent society. I think that’s as close to a truism as anything can be. Mass shootings are a fact of life in America, and they happen with a sickening regularity. Gun violence takes a very heavy toll, and violent crime has spiked since the pandemic – specifically, homicides over the course of 2020. It was, of course, a year of exceptions, though many pundits and prognosticators have claimed that the increase is largely the result of police going into a kind of defensive crouch in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising.

I’ve no doubt that police departments have pulled back. Some made a point of doing so after previous high-profile deaths of people of color in police custody. On the podcast Why Is This Happening?, Patrick Sharkey talks about the various factors behind this rise in violent crime. Less aggressive policing is one, but he makes the point that a lot of community-based services that contribute significantly to reducing crime were shut down during the pandemic.

This, in some ways, reflects the divide between right and left perspectives on how best to address crime. Not surprisingly to anyone who follows this blog, I come down on the left side of this question, and I do so with what I consider to be really good reasons.

Fighting Crime With Crime

The idea that, as a society, we should reduce crime by over-policing disadvantaged communities is cynical beyond belief. Yes, you can marginally depress crime by mass arresting people, throwing them in jail for long terms, harassing people of color, etc., but in so doing you do irreparable violence to entire communities. That in itself is criminal far beyond the level of anything you might hope to prevent.

Other approaches work better, frankly – mutual aid, community-based counseling and mentorship services, nutrition programs, housing support, direct aid to families and individuals, etc. They also build communities, not destroy them.

Dirty Harry Syndrome

The advocates for hyper-aggressive policing work to create the impression that cases like the murder of George Floyd are necessary by-products of the service police provide. Sure, goes the argument, occasionally someone gets killed who probably shouldn’t have died, but that’s the price you pay for having safe streets. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few skulls … I mean, eggs, right?

There’s a visceral appeal to this argument – a kind of cathartic, give-them-what-they-deserve attitude that makes a lot of white people feel right with the world. There’s a reason why movies like Dirty Harry were big hits – it’s a very attractive narrative for people who don’t do a lot of thinking.

The Political Economy of Policing

Of course, we know that political careers are made on hyper-aggressive anti-crime politics. That’s true of everyone from your local DA to the President of the United States. It’s a lot easier to get taxpayers to pay for MRAPs and sophisticated weapons for the cops than it is to get them to fund after-school programs and free breakfast for kids of color. And even though aggressive policing is a bad solution to the problem of crime, it’s an easier sell for politicians than the much more effective and less destructive approach that involves supportive community services.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in expanding the police/prison state, just like there was a lot of money in slavery. That’s why defund causes so much consternation – it hits them where it hurts. Very insightful on the part of BLM to work that out. We need to carry that knowledge with us as we seek real solutions to this dysfunctional system.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Usual Rubbish

Climbing the ladder up into the basement

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2000 Years to Christmas

Nobody knows the troubles we’ve seen, Tubey. Nobody knows but Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen …..

Oh, hey, there. Just singing a mournful little tune to the mansized tuber, now reachable on Facebook. Lord knows, we don’t like to complain here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – the fact is, we LOVE to complain, particularly anti-matter Lincoln (or A-Link as his friends now call him), who’s been complaining about the war since …. well, since the war. (He’s not specific about which war, but I think it was one of the badder ones.)

Hey, look … everybody has their bumps coming up the ladder. As the saying goes, be nice to everyone you meet on the way up the ladder, because they’ll be the same people you meet on your way down. What is the relevance of that statement? I have no idea. We’ve never been anywhere near that damn ladder. Couldn’t say if it’s wood or aluminum. That’s the kind of complaining I’m talking about.

Changing Pre-History

Now, I know we’ve spun a few tales about our origin story, but like any band, we needed to have an interesting back story, and I’m not saying it’s not true, but …. we may have embellished one or two details here and there. That’s as far as I’ll go, but bear this in mind – the Freakishly Unanswerable Questions are as true as the day is long. And the day is long, my friends.

Well, anyway … that’s the band’s story. Our individual stories are a bit more complicated. Take mine (please!). Back when we were concerned with making something like a living, we all had side gigs to support our Big Green habit. Mine were mostly playing in other bands, as I had no other skills and no inclination to develop any more.

The Bad Side Of Massachusetts

Here’s an anecdote. One band I played in with one of the co-founders of Big Green, Ned Danison, was an almost total waste of time. I remember a gig we had in Western Mass, an awful town whose name I won’t mention (North Adams) where we played a hotel gig, five nights a week for a couple of weeks at a time. The place has probably improved since four decades ago, I imagine, but back then …. hoo boy. The lodgings were adequate, but the money was crap, the music was awful, and the place was full of crazy people.

Did anything happen of interest? No. Ned and I worked on some songs that never saw the light of day. Was it a stepping stone to greater things? No. It was just another crappy gig. Not the first, and certainly not the last.

Don’t Listen To Me!

This is my way of saying, don’t follow my example. Don’t listen to anything that I say! If you’re reading this now, STOP WHILE YOU STILL CAN. Or start a band. Up to you, really. Don’t let me influence you.

Official site of the band Big Green