Break out your banjos; looks like we have a new A.G. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions will now oversee the Justice Department, which includes the FBI, U.S. Attorneys offices across the nation, and (gulp) the Civil Rights Division. (Now I know why the chorus of Dixie goes, “Look away! Look away!”) Dark times indeed, except that this is just part of the story, because we now have anti-public education zealot billionaire Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, former Breitbart editor and longtime white supremacist Steve Bannon as a permanent member of the National Security Council, retired general and current crackpot Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor …. shall I go on? This just in: elections have consequences.
Of course, the most problematic member of the administration is the man himself. Only 20 days into this regime and it feels like forever. In a way, it might as well be three years in. I keep hearing pundits, like sometime Trump adviser Joe Scarborough, saying that he needs to dial back the motor mouth a bit …. as if that is ever going to happen. Why the hell would he? It’s worked very well for him so far. Anyone who has ever worked for a small businessperson knows how that works. The man is going to impugn the judiciary when it goes against him and praise it when it decides in his favor, period. Separation of powers, constitutional laws and traditions – none of that means anything to him. He has dictatorial tendencies, and we have placed him into the most powerful office on the planet. Nice going, people.
Okay, before I descend into a Winnebago Man – like tirade, let me talk about what isn’t different about this administration. One thing is that they hide their bad military decisions behind the soldiers who are killed by those decisions. Previous administrations have done this more artfully, but no less cravenly. I’m referring specifically to the raid in Yemen, which has many troubling implications, but which by all accounts was a Rescue One-level disaster, resulting in the death of a Navy Seal, wounding of others, the destruction of an aircraft, and the killing of perhaps two dozen civilians, including children. Spokeswalrus (sorry, walruses!) Sean Spicer announced that to call this raid anything less than a success is to denigrate the sacrifice of the lost Navy Seal. This jiu jitsu move is well practiced – the deep implication is to deflect blame on the dead guy, while making it sound like you’re outraged that others aren’t properly honoring him. Effing disgusting.
So something old, something new. Either way, it’s going to be a long four years.
luv u,
jp
exchange for discarded hammer handles from the last century.) So naturally we are left to forage for talent a little closer to home. And when I say “talent”, I’m using the word in a very generic, denatured sense. Bodies with working digits is what I mean.
The notion that the Democrats need to allow this one to go through unchallenged is truly a case of playing by the last decade’s rules. Here’s the argument: Give Mitch McConnell his vote and he won’t blow up the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees. If you don’t, he’ll invoke the “nuclear option” and you won’t have the filibuster should another vacancy – this time perhaps left by a more liberal justice – comes up in Trump’s tenure. That is just magical thinking. If the filibuster can be shot down that easily, what’s to stop them from doing that next time around? The suggestion that they would somehow refrain out of collegiality or gratitude is laughable. At least filibustering Gorsuch would demonstrate to the majority of people that you’re willing to stand for something. Do nothing and not only will their man be seated on the Court, but next time you try to use the filibuster they’ll just toss it out. You gain nothing – and lost much – by being accommodating.
The simple fact is, when we are producing a piece of music, our only resource is ourselves. We can’t go out and hire people to score and perform orchestral parts – that’s prohibitively expensive …. in that it would cost more than the fifteen bucks I have hidden in the mattress. No, sir …. Big Green forages for what it needs, plucking banjos and bagpipes from the junk pile of music history. That’s part of our thing, actually – found sound made with found instruments. What the hell … if we didn’t do that, we would have to get another thing.
The most effective way of distracting the media is by attacking them head-on, which we saw last weekend when Sean Spicer marched into the White House press room and delivered a stern lecture to the fourth estate, mostly based on outright lies and falsehoods. It was a remarkable performance, worthy of a pre-teenager, and pure Trumpist arrogance/ignorance. All presidential administrations lie; the Trump cadre, however, is distinctive in that they tell painfully obvious lies – lies that require no research to disprove. Many of their transparent lies are rooted in Trump’s overheated ego: the whining about the relative size of his inaugural crowd, the fable about millions of fraudulent votes in California, and so on. The press should just slap the “lie” label on this trash and soldier on.
think we have some bear-like ancestry back a few generations – I have a strong inclination towards hibernation. In fact, I’m getting sleepy as I type this. Bouncing bowling ball … riding up the side of a dragon’s tail. Yep, sleepy.
Lots of people have taken issue with this reaction, and more than 50 sitting congresspeople elected not to attend Trump’s inauguration as a protest. And this incident is being spun in the media as just another instance of the president-electoral not being able to let any critical comment pass, of being too thin-skinned or too sensitive. I have to say, though, that I think there’s more to this social media rant than just the T-bone’s usual expression of his hyper narcissism. This incident seriously smells of Bannon, which is to say that it’s a strategic tirade, aimed at a very specific audience.
Hey … that’s what you get for living in a backwater. No disrespect, my local friends – I freaking love it here. But staying busy as a musician, an artist, a writer … anything creative has always been a struggle. It may be a bit easier now than it was twenty or thirty years ago, now that there are more local indie music venues and a whole “thing” that has grown up around that “scene”, man. Yeah, man. So you have to store your nuts in the fall and hope you have enough to tide you over until the sun returns. Or at least until the moon returns.
That last issue got a boost from the Senate over the past few days, setting up the budgetary framework for pulling the whole thing down. The end of the ACA will of course mean an enormous tax break for top earners, particularly the top tenth of one percent, whose tax benefit will be in the six figures. That’s the real reason why Paul Ryan is smiling – nothing makes him happier than forcing people off of the kind of assistance his family needed when he was young. (A psychologist might have an explanation for that.) Trump, of course, blew some smoke at his presser, saying that the ACA would be simultaneously replaced by something better, details yet to follow. Just be patient, folks …. he’s gonna change!
Even so, Mitch seemed not too bothered by the sub-zero cold. I got curious, so I sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into his mad-science lair to take some web cam video. Turns out, Mitch has been holding out on us. Apparently, he’s been using the Orgone Generating Device left behind nearly a decade ago by our old friend Trevor James Constable. He switches on the OGD and creates a curved time-space anomaly that amounts to a portal to Miami. Well, that’s the rough equivalent of having the windows open on a summer day, right? So it’s nice and toasty in his study; meanwhile, we’re burning the furniture out here in the not-so-great room. Christ on a bike. If you’ve got a cure for leaky mill windows, send them our way.