That was quite a convention, am I right? I’m just listening to what seems like the closing strains of Trump’s acceptance speech, a veritable greatest hits reel of the more boring parts of his stump speeches. A lot more waving the bloody shirt, a full-throated exhortation of the new nativism, and a bizarre admixture of vague populist economic rhetoric (that is probably scaring the hell out of some in his own party) and core GOP positions on fossil fuels, school choice, military spending, etc. Over an hour at the podium and still going. Holy shit.
I can’t believe how badly they miffed that introductory video, though. An amazingly bad production, narrated by an ossified Jon Voight (last seen praising Giuliani), it seemed like a farce fit for John Oliver’s show. I had to shake my head a few times – it was a jaw-droppingly lame attempt to make Trump’s life resemble a Horatio Alger story, evidently written by someone in his inner circle, perhaps a family member. He really has to widen that circle.
Okay, so … the convention can be boiled down to a handful of items. One is that Hillary put the nation in peril with her email server. (No, seriously. Priebus said this on the last night.) The second is that Hillary killed those guys in Benghazi, just like Vince Foster. Third, Hillary and Obama gave $200 billion of “our money” to Iran as part of the nuclear pact (incidentally, no one in the corporate media to my knowledge has called bullshit on this yet – the money is not from the United States; it is Iranian assets from oil exports that were frozen as part of the ongoing sanction regime).
But I think what the whole grisly spectacle boils down to is what Trump outlined in his closing argument: we are in a firestorm of crime and terrorism, and it’s all because of them foreigners and their enablers in our political class. To hear Trump say it, you would think that criminal illegal aliens are all around us, striking at will, raping our grandmothers, etc. This is a toxic, xenophobic trope that has already done tremendous damage, from Latino and Muslim kids being harassed at school to thug-like attacks on adults of the Wrong Color. No one in the corporate media is calling this out, as far as I can see. The other side of the deadly coin is total denial on climate change. Trump is the king of drill, baby, drill. If he wins this fall, it’s game over for the climate, friends.
With respect to this election, we have to do the hard thing: convince as many people as we can to vote for the ass so that we can defeat the fucker. This is a test, friends – an intelligence test, to some degree – and we dare not fail.
luv u,
jp
As I think I mentioned before, we don’t have a lot of video footage of us playing live, and even less of us playing our own songs. This demo included a lot of covers – all stuff we liked playing. So it’s kind of a freeze-dried sample of our set list from the 80s and 90s. We’ve got three takes of “Sensory Man”, as well as a rehearsal sequence on that song, a couple of takes of “I Hate Your Face”, and one of “Why Not Call It George?” – that’s it for our songs. That is, unless someone out there has video of us playing at Middlebury College or SUNYIT, when we opened for Bloodline. Anybody? Thought not.
Second, this dumb ass election. The corporate media is obsessing over vice presidential picks this week, for some strange reason (guys …. they are going to announce the names in just a few days – re the fuck lax). Clinton and Sanders did their event together, Bernie burning the house down as usual. It’s not a hard argument to make that, whatever else we do politically, we all need to make certain the wrong person out of the two possible presidential winners never reaches the White House. If the only thing you gain is exponentially better Supreme Court appointments, that in itself is enough reason to mark the ballot for Clinton, at least in swing states. A more reactionary court can do enormous amounts of damage – this we have seen.
It was a week that started with the obscene bombing in Baghdad, the death toll for which has exceeded 250. As has long been the case, this provoked some small response in American culture because of the magnitude of the crime, but the degree of “hair-on-fire” apoplexy about terrorism has been relatively minimal due to the cultural distance between Iraq and the United States. As these attacks move closer culturally to the U.S., our politicians get more worked up. Forget this export we call “freedom” – that bombing is our gift to the Iraqi people and it just keeps on giving.
One of my obsessions of late has been rebuilding our YouTube site. That’s my hobby, if you will, until Matt returns from Peregrine Falcon watch. (To catch up with him, see his 
Restored Right to Choose. The Whole Women’s Health decision by the Supreme Court has moved the needle in a positive direction on the abortion issue for the first time in many years. I’m hoping that this is the death knell for this generation of TRAP (targeted restrictions on abortion providers) laws taking hold across the country over the past few years. What the anti-choice crowd will try next is anyone’s guess. Another example of why, on the basis of the Supreme Court alone, it is well worth bothering to get out and vote the right way this fall. Just saying.
Anyway, I’ve been taking this opportunity to relearn the keyboard and vocal parts to some of our older songs. There are literally hundreds of them, so I suppose if I wanted to, I could play a different one every day for the next nine months, then start again. (I only have time to play one song a day, and usually it ends up being “Summertime” or something like that.) Yesterday’s song was Matt’s “Promised Land”, which is one of those Dylanesque songs Dylan never wrote. We’ll record these at some point, though we have scratchy demos of all of them, recorded on cassette portastudios back in the stone age. (We’ve played some of these on our podcast, 
Now I’m not crazy about the legislative approach, particularly with regard to the expansion of the terror watch list – I just don’t think it’s the best way to deal with this issue – but I think it’s high time somebody occupied the freaking House. I tweeted my support to Barbara Lee and John Lewis on Wednesday night, attracting a flurry of ammo-sexual Twitter trolls. If these folks are willing to take direct action, the least I can do is give them some encouragement. (Elizabeth Warren brought donuts, after all.) That said, there’s a lot more to do, and it can’t all happen in Congress (though some of it must).
Just the other day (don’t ask me which day) I stumbled upon some old promo shots of Matt and me back in our Big Green duo days, in the late 80s. (I can tell when it was because I was wearing a sports jacket with the arms rolled up. Hey … it was comfortable, like the fuzzy slippers.) I think it was right after Ned Danison left the group and I moved back to the Utica area. In a couple of shots we were consciously trying to lampoon a Rolling Stone magazine spread about U2’s current album at the time, Joshua Tree. (They had a shot of U2’s drummer looking admiringly at Bono from about five paces away. I think there was a cactus in the photo somewhere.)