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September 17, 2005

Trust Issues

I keep coming back to this, have been one way or another ever since the Reagan ascendency: Why do the conservatives, who seek to capture it (well, who HAVE captured it), so hate government? Is this simply a political play to gain power, which assuredly has profited them these last few decades, or is it something else? Well, it has to be something else, else they'd not be returned to office in greater numbers, and Rush Limbaugh would have long ago lost his bully pulpet.

So what is it? Why do we hate government so?

I mean, I know why we mistrust it, for as a known liberal (somehow I always hear Joe McCarthy's biting pronunciation of "communist" when the conservative talking heads use the word "liberal"). I have this vague apprehension that I'm being spied on, catalogued, tracked as an undesirable; but that's government run amok, and is corrected, periodically, once exposed. And, anyway, I'm an insignificant fellow and that's just the paranoia talking.

None of which explains the national distemper toward a government of, by, and for the people.

But one encounters with increasing regularity the words of conservative mover & shaker Grover Norquist, "My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," he said in the Nation, May 14, 2001.

Why such hatred?

I'm beginning to understand, though the lesson has come from oddly placed sources. I doubt it's making national news, but Kentucky's Governor Ernie Fletcher, the first Republican elected to that office in, I believe, 30 years, is in hot water and has already been obliged to pardon nine of his staff members before even the grand jury empaneled to investigate could finish its work, much less the first trial be held. The problem is that he (or his staff) are alleged to have systematically sought to evade the state's civil service statutes to pass out patronage jobs to their supporters. The Lexington paper cited some 3,000 angry supporters wondering why they hadn't already been hired as the instigation of the whole mess.

Now, it is argued that this is the rsult of 30 years of frustration and that the Democrats had run hob with the merit system. Which may be true, but still makes it no less...um...wrong.

Belated disclaimer: This is not about the facts of Gov. Fletcher's case. I cannot pretend to have followed it in great detail the press, much less to have any particular expertise in Kentucky politics. This is about the underlying message.

Which is that at least 3,000 of his supporters apparently felt -- rightly or not -- that they were entitled to state jobs when Gov. Fletcher took his oath of office.

This is, if true, a stunning kind of retail corruption. One friend simply shrugs and suggests that's how things are done here in Kentucky.

Maybe so. Maybe that's how things are done in many parts of the country where I have not yet lived. But I never gave money to a candidate, nor put his/her yard sign on display, nor pulled a lever in the voting booth in the expectation that there was a job hanging in the balance for anybody other than the official wishing to be elected. Some other things certainly hung in the balance, but they were ideas about how government might be improved, might be used to better our lives. Silly me.

If that's really how government works, no wonder those more cynical than I (which surely should be a very small number) hate it, wish to drown it.

I wish the drowning metaphor weren't the link to this thought, but it is and I'm stuck with it: If the debacle in New Orleans is any reflection of the willingness and competence of all levels of government to perform the fundamental tasks for which they have been constituted maybe the survivalists and libertarians have it right.

President Bush has promised to rebuild New Orleans without raising taxes.

Excuse me?

If ever there were a time it was appropriate to raises taxes, surely the catastrophic destruction of a major (not to mention historically important) city is such a time, even for a sitting Republican president (who, by the way, cannot stand for re-election).

No new taxes? Ah, so we'll cut more programs elsewhere.

Isn't that now New Orleans got into this mess, at least a significant part of the problem. Weren't Corps of Engineeers budgets deferred which might have given those now-broken levys a better chance of holding? And what of the wetlands everybody seems to agree needed rebuilding outside New Orleans, the crucial natural buffer which has been eroded by man's greed.

No new taxes, and we won't pay prevailing wages (pitiful though they were in New Orleans) for the construction, and the government will be bled still more. Even more so when Rita makes landfall, wherever and however she does these next few days.

Bleed the federal government dry (and, by extension, the states, to whom many of the needs and programs devolve) leaving corporate power absolutely unchecked. Corporations which have no national allegiance, no obligation to morality, and little apparent sense of the difference between right and wrong so long as money ends up in the right pockets.

We liberals have already learned to mistrust the Bush Administration. Somehow a great number of citizens seem unbothered by the fact that we invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation, on the premise that we had incontrovertible evidence they possessed -- and meant to use -- weapons of mass destruction. This new doctrine of the right to pre-emptive action was offered in a complete intellectual vacuum, without any public discussion, bolstered by the fiction that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, a fiction which a great number of Americans cling to. But we didn't have that evidence, none of it, as it has turned out. The fact that Saddam Hussein was an evil man does not give us the right to depose him, at least not the way international politics have traditionally been played. The world is filled with evil men who run dangerous countries. Maybe the people of Iraq are better off now than they were before the invasion, but the point is at least arguable, and hardly settled.

My point is that we were lied to, to what end I cannot guess. To enrich Haliburton? To pursue some utopian vision of how the Middle East might be transformed? For oil, found in Iraq in such quantities that we were initially promised it would defray the cost of rebuilding, a fairy tale long since planted in the back yard and turned to compost.

Taken in aggregate, these are the kinds of reasons citizens of the U.S. don't trust their government, don't believe it will do the right things, wish to bleed it into insignificance. They imagine their lives will somehow be better then, though I don't share their confidence.

This has to stop. Either we believe in the fundamental concepts of the United States of America, or we don't. Either we believe that government can be of, by, and for the people, that its job is to provide for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, or we don't.

OK, so various aspects of government are corrupt. Big surprise, and hardly news, for it ever has been so. Power corrupts, all that. Or, in the words of Deep Throat, follow the money. The point is that as citizens we are supposed to be vigilant, to watch those who work for us, to manage them with our votes and our lawsuits and our shrill voices. If the government doesn't work -- and it clearly doesn't -- let's fix the darn thing. Not starve it to death.

I wish this were all more coherent, but I've banged at it long enough and shall now go back to the work of trying to make a music magazine. Bear with me. I'll write about music again, honest.

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September 13, 2005

Country Politics

In the usual cruelty of such things, the "Meet the Press" panel at the AMA was scheduled for second thing Saturday morning. Having had rather more to drink than to eat on Friday (and not all that much of either) -- and, of course, not enough sleep -- I was reduced to more than the common caricature of myself.

Early on we were asked who our audience was, and Brian Mansfield, the country music critic for USA Today, responded that he always imagined a friend of his wife's who has ended up a producer for the Fox affiliate in Chicago as his reader. I leaned into the microphone and opined, as drily as I could in my convention voice which drops another octave, that I hoped (or thought, or guessed) nobody who watched Fox read No Depression. Well, it was a cheap laugh line and a friendly audience, so most of the room guffawed, but I regretted it almost immediately.

I know better, and I do apologize for the flippancy. I am enormously pleased to have found that our pages attract readers of all political stripes, for there are too few places where we might all meet these days, and too few ties which bind us together as a nation. But I also know that a 45-minute panel discussion does not admit much more depth of discussion than does a TV show. And though I was tired enough to go for the cheap laugh line, I am also thinking about and reading about and somewhat intimidated by the prospect of delivering a lecture this October at William & Mary on just this subject. And I had rather hoped to use that laugh line to push the discussion toward a broader investigation of the politics of music. Laughs washed over the room and the moment passed, and one or two people buttonholed me afterwards to continue talking.

Already, and not unexpectedly, somebody has written to suggest tartly that politics are inappropriate to this site, as has been argued about the print magazine as well. So let me be clear about what I intend to go on here, in this space. Here I intend to write about whatever the hell interests me. I'll post some news items along the way, but I reserve -- insist upon -- the right to digress into any subject which catches my fancy. Put plainly, I have to write more than I do these days. There is no longer time (nor opportunity) to freelance, there is only so much space within the pages of ND to accommodate my ramblings, and if I am to improve as a writer I must do what I tell other, younger writers to do: I must write.

And so here I shall try to regain some of the discipline necessary, to regain some of the balance I may have lost devoting this last while to the design of the magazine. This is an odd way of writing, this blog thing. It's a bit primitive, to be honest. One cannot compose, I'm told, in MS Word and then copy the file, for all manner of bizarre characters will intrude. And so I have to consult the dictionary, not spell-check, and only a few lines show on the screen at any given time (rather like the old days when I sat at a typesetting machine, the old blue Compugraphic 7500 with its 8-inch floppy discs). So this particular exercise is, for the moment, rather like imagining a daily newspaper column. For whatever that's worth to those of you who have found this page.

Now, as to the politics of music, and of country music (or roots music)...I do fear that some of our writers have taken those digressions in print as more of an invitation than they're meant, but having actively opened the door I am most uncomfortable (too laissez faire) to close it. Besides, music worth writing about is ABOUT something. And it is what an artist's music is about is the thing which interests me, which engages me. The sound first, and then its context. Mind you, I do like my share of disposable pop, but I have no interesting words with which to address that kind of music. It's like fashion. I like nice clothes now and again, but can't be bothered to buy them nor to study the subject. I started out to be a writer (well, I started out to be a politician, but we were all 16 once), not to be a music writer, and certainly not to be a participant in the music industry. For me, good music offers a way -- a common ground, perhaps -- to talk about....well, life. That's what this is, in the end, a discussion about how we shall choose to live, what our lives might mean, and how we might cope with the inherent difference between what we want and what we have.

Or, put differently, EVERYTHING is political on some level. What you wear, which identifies the tribe you choose to belong to when moving among strangers, that is a political act. What you choose to do for a living, even if you have few enough choices, is a political act. Where you choose to live -- in the suburbs, on a farm, in an emerging urban neighborhood, wherever -- is, in the end, a kind of political statement.

So, feeling as I do, I am somewhat baffled by those who insist we speak only of music within these pages. It often feels as if there is an attempt to shout me into silence by those who disagree, rather than a willingness to engage in discussion. Most of what I do is ask questions, of myself and of others, after all. The illusion that one has all the answers is fomented by the marketeers who now do battle under the guise of democracy.

Here, we all know each other to some degree; we have chosen to come here, to listen to these musics, to exist in a kind of virtual and real community. We nod familiarly across clubs all across this country.

I don't seek to impose some kind of orthodoxy on our readers, nor on the artists we cover, nor, as certainly, on our writers. But we have to listen to each other, laugh with and at each other, hoist pints of beer or hot mugs of coffee in honor of our agreement and our disagreement.

I understand that no small number of readers wish music to be a respite from all that. With all possible respect, I suspect (or at least would suggest) they misunderstand the nature and processes of art. For that kind of respite I have sports to watch, a house to work on, a garden to try to figure out, a daughter to chase, and middle-brow novels to read at the very end of the long day.

If we cannot talk to each other about things which really matter, this country will not survive. If we cannot do that, the entire notion of a participatory democracy has failed. If politics are simply another team sport and we are to go about defacing the cars and homes of our opponents, instead of listening carefully to what they REALLY have to say, and not the slogans with which we all begin...then we have failed our responsibility as citizens.

And so I shall here continue to write about politics and music and probably sports, and maybe the declining quality of pro wrestling, possibly religion, and almost certainly I shall bore you to tears with stories of little Maggie, who has so thoroughly embraced the joys of being two these days. Maybe even biodynamic gardening, about which I presently know almost nothing.

But I cannot read the news and hear the music and listen to the talk around town and not come to politics now and again.

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September 12, 2005

Gatemouth Brown, RIP

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, long one of my favorite musicians precisely because he was capable of about anything, finally succumbed to cancer on 9/11. He was 81. The story in the Houston Chronicle says his home in Slidell, LA, was destroyed and he was staying with family. Another casualty of the hurricane, possibly.

What I have to say beyond that will take more time, and will find its way into the next issue. Just now, I think I'll go dig up a record or two and put the headphones on.

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In Praise of Kenny Vaughan

On Friday night last Kenny Vaughan dressed in his uniform as a member of Marty Stuart's well-named Fabulous Superlatives and played two songs on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium as part of the Americana Music Association's awards show. That show is to be broadcast and replayed on Great American Country September 26, as I recall.

Then he put his guitar back in its case and loosened his tie and walked across the alley, as have so many over the years, into the backroom of Tootsie's. There, joined by the legendary Greg Garing (with Chris Scruggs on pedal steel, Jimmy Lester...or is it Lister?...on drums and a first-rate doghouse bass player I didn't recognize) played an hour-long set for his share of the tip jar and an audience that mostly had no idea who was on stage.

Then he put his guitar back in its case and walked across Broadway to Ernest Tubb's Record Store, where fried chicken and waffles were being served and Elizabeth Cook was about to play. Vaughan was to play about 2 a.m. with Gary Bennett, the former co-leader of BR-549 who now, I hear, works at Ernest Tubb's. Alas, I missed all that, for exhaustion had set in, but I didn't even see a tip jar there.

I seem to remember reading that Michael Jordan had something called a "for the love of the game" clause inserted in his multi-million dollar contract when he was a Chicago Bull. It is probably unnecessary hyperbole to suggest that Kenny Vaughan is the Michael Jordan of Nashville guitarists, but I'm not sure. He's rather more like the recently retired point guard John Stockton, for his role is to support the lead singer, gently to push when the song needs emotion, to lay back out of the way, and to play with supple fire in tasteful bursts. Lucinda Williams has played with a number of brilliant guitarists, but nobody was more sympathetic as an accompanist than Vaughan.

All that said, I wasn't stalking Kenny. I didn't know Garing was playing that night (though I'd heard he was back from New York, plotting what nobody seemed to know, maybe a return), and had never seen him. So I went, in part because it was a short walk. I was lured next to Ernest Tubb's not by the music, but by the promise of dinner, at last.

Garing, incidentally, has a voice which is eerily like that of Paul Burch. I suspect those two men have a history, and mean not to stir up any trouble by mentioning this. While Paul (whose music I am also quite fond of) is a quiet, restrained fellow, Garing is carefully wild, respectful, I think of those with whom he played that night, still angry at the music made in music city. Though what answer he would offer to all that, I can only guess. Both, in any event, care deeply for the sounds of classic country music, and write new songs in that old vein that are rooted both in that past and our present.

Somebody else noted that these kinds of evenings are among the reasons it is so difficult to promote shows in Nashville, such a struggle for musicians to make a living there. Perhaps so. But is also a reason I left Nashville once again with fond memories. Some of the best musicians in the world live there, and they play -- still, some of them -- for the love of the music.

Which is what we all came for.

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September 4, 2005

Cowardice

A reader wrote late last night to complain that Bill Friskics-Warren's Freakwater review accuses both Presidents Bush of cowardice. She wrote not to defend the incumbent president, but his father, a decorated World War II pilot.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the habit elements of the Republican Party have developed of attacking and denigrating honorable -- heroic -- military service (see: George McGovern, Max Clelland, John Kerry); leaving aside, then, the idea that one's military service is not fair game for political opponents (and, by no means apologizing for the hagiography surrounding JFK), something else about this exchange strikes me.

Bill's charge of cowardice stems from actions taken by the first President Bush more than 40 years after his military service.

Surely admirble and decorated conduct under fire does not make one immune to charges of cowardice later in life -- of behaving with ignoble fear and timidity. Surely life is more complicated and nuanced, more fully lived than in those long hours under fire, surely...

Surely I am in thick brush here, which is why I find the thicket worth grappling with this morning.

Let me be clear, then: I am a pacifist, ferociously competitive in sports, combative when ideas are being exchanged. But a pacifist. Never, ever, even as a small boy, did I fight, not even among the playground rituals which attend those years. I have never hit anybody in anger, only, very occasionally in clumsiness, or, perhaps, a stray elbow crossing the key trying to shake free for a pass that never came.

Others speak and write of scars accumulated during junior high or high school. Me, once I got through grade school it was all pretty easy. My voice changed early, I had the vocabulary of a professor's son, I wore glasses, read books, and thought differently, even then. And so some of the other boys found it fun to challenge me in different ways. Occasionally they tried to provoke fights. Somewhere I had learned, probably from my brother, that the groin, throat, and eyes were vulnerable and lethal spots. I held to that knowledge, and refused to fight. Somehow I knew, even then, and the knowing of it surprises me even now, that if pushed too far real damage might be done, that there is within each of us a capacity for violence, that if really pushed to fight I would not obey the unwritten rules of our playground, but would reveal the capacity to do real and atrocious damage, disproportionate to the ritual then at play. This, I think, is how pacifism came naturally and unbidden to me, though it was in the air as Vietnam was opposed by the young men who wished not to die there.

I just finished reading a collection of Wendell Berry's first essays, which includes an eyewitness account from colonial times of the excruciatingly violent play of his ancestors in northern Kentucky. Berry, too, opposed Vietnam, and violence, and with more eloquence than I shall today manage. But here is his response to the account, in part: "...it is only necessary for me to confess that I read the Reverend Young's account...with delight; I yield a considerable admiration to the exuberance and extravagance of their fight with the firebrands; I take a certain pride in belonging to the same history and the same place that they blong to -- though I know that they represent the worst that is in us, and in me, and that their presence in our history has been ruinous, and that their survival among us promises ruins."

Only because I had some vague recollection of its spine was I just now able to find a book I rescued from a thrift shop decades ago, called The Last Parallel: A Marine's War Journal, by Martin Russ (Rinehart & Co., 1957). I believe this to be autobiographical, though I accept the possibility that it may be a novel. I have been able to discover nothing about the author in the years since I found and read this book, and I've no idea why I chanced to open and read it, but I did.

Russ, as I recall, was an Ivy Leaguer who volunteered for Korea, who loved combat, who loved the high danger of being at point on patrol, who loved that danger so much that, when peace was in the offing, he had one of the medics shoot him up with morphine to enhance the pleasures of being on point.

I spent a lot of my growing-up time (less than I remember, but plenty) at a certain set of cabins in the North Cascades. I have vivid memories of a few moments of play with my best friend. We were alone in the woods, silence all around, the sun gleaming off a foot of fresh snow, the north fork of the Skykomish startlingly clear blue, and we were chasing and hiding from each other. The game broke off quickly, perhaps (this is, admittedly, memory talking) because we both recognized the wild, feral pleasure in what we were about. I know that I did, anyhow.

That's as close as I've come to combat, that book and that moment in the mountains; and more than a few movies, perhaps, as special effects have brought the horror a little bit more home.

I do not mean to dishonor those who have served or will serve in combat. My father is a World War II veteran, and I am of the lucky generation who was never called to serve in war, never forced to choose between what I believe as a human being and what is expected of me as a citizen. In Granta, I think, three or four years ago, I read a fascinating essay from one of the early Vietnam resisters who went to prison rather than serving, expecting a flood of other resistors to join him, to clog up the system as Civil Rights protesters once did. There was no flood, other prisoners thought him (perhaps rightly) a fool. But there was, it seems to me now and it seemed to me in junior high when the draft was still afoot and combat operations in the jungle were at least a possibility for my older brother's friends, at least honor in going to prison for what one believed, and surely more honor in that -- more citizenship -- than in crossing the border to Canada.

And then I came to read more about prison and to understand what horrors one might be sentenced to there -- understand, this was an important issue for me to sort out as a young man, and remains so -- and I came to wonder if, perhaps, it would have been possible to explain to the military that I would serve but not carry a weapon. Probably not, eh? And then to wonder how one would behave under fire, unarmed, for the enemy certainly does not care for my personal, hard-won ethics.

This, I think, is my point though: Killing people is horrible work. It is a kind of work we ask of young men because they have the physical fitness to endure the challenges of combat, and, I suspect, because their critical faculties are not so fully shaped as to see the many shades of gray which make the political and ethical issues of that killing more troubling. Anyway, they kill to save themselves, and their friends. As would we all, I fear. Only lately have I come to understand the antipathy of military families to those who oppose war; we should be on the same side, by some logic. Only...only their men (and women, but mostly men, mostly poor men with no better job prospects; or men born to the tradition of service)...are over there, wherever there is, with live ammunition. And they need certainty that what they are doing is moral and necessary, or it is undoable. I think that's how it works.

So we are culturally accustomed to honoring the bravery of young people in combat. I understand the necessity. But...how many choices that you made in your early twenties would you wish to be held to in middle age, say? My crowd used to have great, long conversations about never selling out, and then, like every generation before and after us, life intervened and compromises of some kind -- not so many, in my case, but -- became necessary to support self and family.

But exactly how is one's courage under fire translated into life after? Surely those medals do not give one a free pass for the rest of one's life, and surely any number of Vietnam veterans incarcerated in our prisons would have a variety of answers. Surely there are other kinds of courage, quieter daily events for which there are no medals, tough moral and ethical decisions that are deeply private, matters of public policy which demand leadership and receive something less. All kinds of things.

If we define courage only in its military sense, if we elevate those who have demonstrated their courage there, what kind of society do we embrace, and why?

And then, because I cannot bear to watch New Orleans become the set for another bad Kevin Costner movie...what part does the current President Bush's military service play in his administrations' response to the single worst humanitarian disaster in the history of these United States?

There I will stop, for the moment.

-- g

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September 2, 2005

R.L. Burnside, RIP

One of the things we hope to do with these new-fangled blogs is make this site a little more timely. This isn't the sort of news I relish posting, but it's part of the tapestry of life, and a good reminder to enjoy the moment -- if any of us needed that reminder.

Here's the Fat Possum press release:

R.L. Burnside
November 21, 1926-September 1,2005

We at Fat Possum are sad to announce that R.L. Burnside died today at his hospital room in Memphis.

Blues artist R.L. Burnside, who redefined the blues genre by incorporating indie rock acts and hip-hop production, died September 1, 2005, at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Burnside was born November 21, 1926, in Harmontown, Mississippi, and spent most of his life in the north Mississippi hill country, where he worked as a sharecropper and a commercial fisherman and played guitar at weekend house parties. In 1968, noted folklorist George Mitchell recorded Burnside for the first time. In 1991 Burnside was the first artist signed to then-fledging Fat Possum Records in Oxford, Mississippi. His debut, "Too Bad Jim," was produced by former New York Times pop critic Robert Palmer. Along with his friend, neighbor, and label-mate Junior Kimbrough, Burnside was one of the most popular and important blues musicians to emerge in the last two decades. He recorded the crossover collaboration "A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey" with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in 1996 and became a cult hero. In 1998, music from "Come On In" was featured in several movies and television shows, including "The Sopranos." Burnside sold hundreds of thousands of records in his lifetime. He is survived by his wife Alice Mae, twelve children and numerous grandchildren.

Those wishing to help should send donations to:

Freeland & Freeland Trust Account
Burnside Memorial
P.O. Box 269
Oxford, MS 38655
(662) 234-3414
All proceeds will go directly to RL's widow, Alice Mae.

Now, there are one or two things in that press release with which I might disagree on another today, but just now let's leave that be.

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