Hey, Matt .. what was that joke about the wooden balls again? Oh, right. Nah … it doesn’t work very well without the visual. Scratch that.
Oh, hello. We are, of course, working on the next installment of our podcast. It’s like the freaking Forbin Project, for chrissake. Takes us months to write the sucker, record it, edit it, compose and record songs, cut it all together, upload it, then collapse in a heap. (That last part actually happens kind of quickly.) Sometimes you want to just shout, “Enough!”, throw up your hands and walk away. Mic drop! But no, my friends, no … the show must go on.
That said, well … it HAS been kind of a long time. So we dropped another installment of our Ned Trek podcast – that’s the show that is just Ned Trek and no random jabbering between me and my brother. This month’s installment is extracted from one of last year’s THIS IS BIG GREEN episodes, Ned Trek 23: Mitt’s Brain. Based on the Spock’s Brain episode of classic Star Trek, it’s full of ridiculous plot departures and snarky portrayals of neocon freak bastards. Just the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from a Big Green podcast. On top of all that, there are 6 original Big Green songs in the mix, not available in 
stores or on any album (yet). I could tell you what time code numbers they appear at in the show, but then you would just skip the whole play or simply laugh at my presumption, so I’ll forgo that.
The songs are, well, some of my favorites from the last year or so. I’d say number one in my book is “Two Lines”, a song sung by Lt. Sulu describing his artistic angst over being limited to two-line speeches throughout the entire three-year run of classic Star Trek. The chorus commandeers some of these two-line speeches to communicate Sulu’s despair:
Captain, the controls are frozen
the helm won’t respond; we’re being pulled inside
Aye, aye, my career is broken
like a giant hand has me in its hold
Captain, the controls are frozen
manual override is completely out
Aye, sir, I’ve been trying
but my shields are down and I cannot last
Then there’s a song about a yellow submarine. Actually not – there is one Pearle song called “Send in Some Advisers” which, well … the name pretty much says it. Anywho, the show it totally refried, so enjoy it … a second time.
This is a media driven process. The horse-race coverage of the primary campaigns has pretty much swallowed up MSNBC, for instance. They basically pushed Melissa Harris-Perry out the door because she didn’t particularly want to be a campaign correspondent. Hard to blame her for that. Horse-race politics coverage is basically like sports journalism. The marketing approach is practically indistinguishable from that of sporting events – same kinds of music, graphics, etc. And this debate is a bit like Pacquio vs. Bradley. Except that it’s shrill white people.
Okay, so let’s assume the weather has nothing to do with Mitch’s cloud bazooka. This is effed up, man! Remember now – we are squatters in this here hammer mill, see? And, well … the heat in this place is a little unreliable. Most of the winter we depend on an old wood stove in what used to be the shipping office. It’s the mansized tuber’s job to stoke the thing, and sometimes he falls down on the job a little. But most days we manage to keep the ice off the dishwater … though I don’t suppose you’re aware of how effective ice can be as a dishwashing medium. It scrapes, it emulsifies, it …. okay, I’m exaggerating. You have to look on the bright side when you’re freezing your ass off.
Frankly, it amazes me how cynical the resistance to a higher, inflation-indexed minimum wage truly is. Pegging the minimum at $7.25 was low enough in 2009; but the buying power of that wage has declined since then. Those who argue for leaving it where it is need to explain why they feel business should pay progressively less money for the same labor, year after year. (Am I the only one bothered by this?) Those who say that only teenagers looking for after-school work earn the minimum wage need to move into the current century. Those who feel raising the minimum wage gives earners more than they deserve, amounting to a kind of tax/entitlement, should be reminded that poor wage-earners rely more heavily on remaining forms of public assistance just to get by, such that we are all, in effect, subsidizing employers like Wal-Mart.
Still, he has a point. It would be a kicker to go on one of these shows, particularly Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, since it would mean being transported back to the 1970s. I think our music would do much better in that decade, even if a lot of the songs pull from cultural references that would not have occurred yet. (On top of that, I could, maybe, save Salvador Allende and Oscar Romero from assassination!) Unlikely? Perhaps, but a man can dream. And dreams can be nightmares. And I had plenty of nightmares in the seventies, so … it’s not so impossible, is it? Huh?
The most important component in the argument against “Bernie or Bust” is simply that we cannot afford eight years of one-party rule under the Republicans. This would have a hugely negative impact on the most vulnerable in our society, on the environment, on our brothers and sisters in other countries around the world, and more. The fate of the Supreme Court alone is enough reason to vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is. Scalia’s replacement is only just the first slice; three or four more justices could step down in the coming years. If Donald Trump or Ted Cruz ends up being the person replacing them, say goodbye to any hope of social justice for decades to come. A Cruz court would make Roberts seem like Earl Warren.
these into an album of sorts and toss it out on the street for passers-by to happen upon and drop into their MP3 players.
If back in 2014 more of us had said “Damn the torpedoes, I am going to vote against those fuckers if it takes me all day,” Obama would have been able to send a nominee through a normal Senate review process. If we had kept the Senate out of the hands of the wrecking crew known as the GOP, we would likely have pulled the Supreme Court back from the extreme right for the first time in more than thirty years. Now that opportunity is completely up in the air. We don’t know what’s going to happen in November, but I can tell you what isn’t going to happen before then: a Supreme Court confirmation vote, that’s what.
Next up in the internal audition queue was, well … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). This didn’t go very well either. Picture that scene in Room Service when the Marx Brothers are trying to pass customs with Maurice Chevalier’s passport, attempting to imitate him convincingly. Marvin was like Harpo with the phonograph strapped to his back. He’s got a bunch of scratchy recordings stored in his internal hard drive (or tape drive – he is getting a little long in the tooth), and when he sings he selects individually sung words from that entire library. It’s great if you want a mashup, but …. I don’t.
With that out of the way, I am sure the imperial war machine party is looking for another tin car to drive around in. It’s quite possible that they would settle on Trump. Someone, after all, is going to populate his foreign policy establishment – thousands of them, keeping the gears of empire turning day by day. That’s kind of what makes him dangerous, though not so much as a Rubio or a Bush. It is also just conceivable that the neocons at least might begin to look favorably on a Clinton presidency. She is bellicose, obviously, and her differences with the Bill Kristol crowd on regime change are relatively minor. They might not overtly support her, but I could see them not vehemently opposing her if the alternative is Trump.