God damn it! I have to forgive Ted Cruz again! For the quadrillionth time!
Why do I have to forgive an asshole like Ted Cruz? (How long, Lord? How long? Why me?)
Because we created him, and everything we can’t stand is a boomerang which we launched.
Also I’m not going to be Them. I’m not a rally bigot, or a Whataboutist or a gun-toting loser looking for his mama. I need no hat to remind me what I am.
No. I’m an American, and we have a better way.
We have a system. We have objectivity. We have collaboration and we have a wide frame of reference going all the way back to Athens, Greece and Constantinople and Magna Carta.
We aren’t some mere doofus in an airport with a stupid IPhone 8 and an attitude.
We Americans don’t wake up in the morning to don fake feathers and holler about incorrect dates in the American Revolution like some rooster drunk on home-made mash. No sir.
We have work to do in this country and Ted is not even slightly interested in doing that work.
But despising Ted as I do turns me into a disgusting minor-league version of Ted- an inferior version of a highly inferior individual.
No! No! Again, no!
I forgive you for being a toxic gasbag, Ted.
You are not worth the powder.
It’s only partly your fault. We allowed media to consolidate. We allowed a total Nazi to be the most popular “personality” in radio history. We allowed elections to be all about cash and infotainment. We proclaimed the ascension of yahoos and buttheads into the chambers of Democracy and rewarded them for bad behavior.
No. I pray to my plastic Jesus to deliver me from the evil of Ted. And there is only one way to make that happen.
And it’s truly gross. I forgive you, Ted.
You don’t belong in government, and we need to set you free to gambol in the fields of corporate enterprise as a highly paid consultant to a useless enterprise or start-up. Free Ted!
Eventually we work together. We have to. So there: my American Dream.
I’m declaring September “Redwood Tree Appreciation Month.”
Did you know redwood trees are aware of your presence and your thoughts?
If you breathe, a redwood tree is, on some level, aware of it.
The redwood can handle it. It’s part of the fog and climate and spiders and critters of every moment.
Redwoods remember everything. And then immediately forget it. In an endless cycle, like the tides.
There is a full moon nigh. For a redwood, moonlight tickles.
Remember the fires? Some still raging. These bring back a lovely memory of a funny thing that happened 20 thousand years ago.
So redwoods are chuckling with the ravens.
Hilarious.
Don’t get too close to redwoods. They like everything just the way it is.
Did you know that a redwood tree actually can hug you? The awe you feel is the redwood’s ancient way of greeting.
My sister has a dawn redwood by her back fence. My sister calls her tree Dawn, in a familiar, fond way. Dawn is in the back garden, a few feet west of the garden spider’s web. My sister will not permit the spider to be disturbed, so tread carefully.
Dawn is from China, originally. That is, the dawn redwood differs significantly from our California Coast Redwood and Sequoia, and the dawn redwood predominates in China.
There’s even a dawn redwood back home in Ohio. I know: coincidence. It’s a young tree but already tall, commmanding a quiet street corner in Broadview Heights. My twin walks her yellow lab Echo around that block. The crisp air must smell of autumn; other leaves, but not those needles of the dawn redwood, are turning, changing color.
Redwood and fern represent the most conservative picture of what this vast continental environment once was. The trees remember. The deer look back at you, too.
Remember: if you don’t like this redwood news go out and make some of your own, as Scoop Nisker used to say.
I was a kid with a rake. In the sun in the autumn.
I would rake and then stand around. Rake a little, stand around.
Is it noon yet?
I had a stick thrust into the scrappy leafy Ohio dirt. When the shadow of the stick got short and thin, it’s noon. Almost done!
While I’m making an attempt at yard work, Mr Reynold’s calico cat, Samantha, walks by with an actual mouse from the Ohio woods out back.
She is going to put that mouse, as she does every mouse-and there were many- on the Reynold’s back step.
Sam walks by with her mouse and casts a glance in my direction.
I’m a standing-still, moody teenager.
I get the hint and get back to raking. The sun high above, the leaves drifting down all about me.
Morning and afternoon, the first day.
Work Chapter 2.
Bud’s Cup and Saucer
A little place with a slant roof, like a Dairy Queen.
My first job!
Washing dishes. So cool!
All the townspeople (and there weren’t many) went to Bud’s for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.
I don’t remember the work part at all, mainly because doing/being a dishwasher is so much a part of my soul.
And later drugs interfered with memory function and the processes involving the left/right hemispheres.
-But not in the Eden of those early days.
My most exciting memory was when my piano teacher, Miss Snow, came in (as she did every afternoon at exactly the same time) for coffee and a piece of pie.
She didn’t recognize me, I don’t think, in my dishwasher regalia of apron and rag.
Or maybe the social divisions of society- some quite arbitrary, it would seem- and some instilled over the centuries since the guilds and crusades- demanded a compliance from workers and a humble demeanor that one understands instantly as ones’ role.
It was a shock to see people in an entirely new context. Worker, student, teacher, citizen!
I figured it out myself.
A tip in those days was probably 35 cents.
Work Chapter 3.
The glue line.
American factories are all the same.
They have flat roofs and cold floors and machinery and mountains of dust that begin as little golden flecks in the dead air.
I worked for a summer in Dad’s box shop. That cardboard box company was part of a pulp and paper company that was part of an older company, recently bought and then owned by a Texas oiI corporation.
Now both are defunct. Time. Buy and Sell. The three components of Life in America.
Anyway, I worked with a printer at a huge press. He looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln, this printer.
Except: he was only five feet tall.
He had the same nut-brown complexion, the same squinched-up wrinkly face. The same dull expression which would suddenly change to sunshine and mischief.
He would always talk about how, if anyone crossed him, he would get him back. I believed him. And he would give a crinkly grin. With malice for all. He was full of wiles, from West Virginia.
He was concerned that Black people were going to take all the jobs.
There were no Black people anywhere in sight.
When working he would often admonish me. “Whoa, slow down, there.”
He didn’t want the Front Office to think the job was too easy.
There were mumblings around the factory, too, that people from West Virginia were migrating to Ohio, to take all the jobs.
And there were rumblings around the plant that since the energy corporation from Texas took over, the future of the company was at risk.
Most of the factory workers were young family people. I had a crush on the woman way over on the glue line.
So that’s the social organization, as far as I could see.
The only reason I got that job was my dad worked for the company. I’m grateful.
It was tough for him because his young son, just starting out in the world, was a complete clueless nerd.
And that’s ok.
But the guys around would just shake their heads. Sometimes with spontaneous chuckles.
I can take it. I can see how work changed me.
I made $1100 dollars- a fortune at that time- and moved to California. 1977.
I can’t remember doing any work at the box shop, my dad’s place of business, but one day the roof flooded, so they sent me up to check it out. I went up and found the drains and brushed the leaves and crap aside and saved the company from the roof caving in.
Perhaps.
So that was morning and afternoon, another day.
Work Chapter 4.
I don’t get to work with a diverse population until UPS. High school senior.
Cleveland had huge population of African Americans as well as people from Eastern Europe.
So we were all there loading trucks in the middle of the night.
After all the late sixties/early seventies build-up about race, nothing happened. We just worked and got shit done and went home in the darkness. Shift ended at 2 am.
Teamsters Union too. Four hour shifts as loaders. Good money.
Off to Howard Johnson’s for huge plates of eggs.
So in sum:
Dad retired and got a watch. Miss Snow had coffee and pie everyday for twenty more years in the town in which she was born and raised, a short walk from her house on the hill across from the library overlooking the cemetery by the water tower. I made a fortune and moved to the West Coast. And the energy corporations took over everything.
So, happily ever after, am I right?
Labor Day, and all my fellow citizens are on the bus with me on the way to work. All the essential workers are here, driving, serving, healing, answering the call.
And here am I leaning on my rake, seeing it’s almost noon.
Don’t read this, maybe. I have to write it though.
I had a friend who served as an army ranger, special forces, he said that he was stationed in many places “we weren’t supposed to be“ and he told me a story about Afghanistan.
He said that before 911, one of the most charismatic leaders In the northern part of of Afghanistan was rising in popularity. I guess he would be considered a warlord- but kind of a combination of war lord and Bruce Springsteen, for the militias in the north. Yes. Popular national leader, potentially. (It was Ahmad Shah Massoud, of the Northern Alliance.)
He may have been the most significant challenger to the Taliban- and the Taliban too was on the rise.
We’re talking early 2001.
My friend explained that, just days after 9/11, this charismatic leader was visited by journalists, at a time in which he was poised to gain some control of the country and prevent the Taliban insurgency from taking over.
He was beloved, revered, admired- politically significant within the country.
The journalists who visited this leader were Al-Qaeda. This militia leader was assassinated. Murdered.
My brilliant, thick-skinned special forces veteran was practically in tears when he told me the story. A veteran frustrated with the ironies of fate. He knew the man, Massoud. He knew that it was a hidden turning point in history.
September 11th happened. A power-vacuum left ignorant young Taliban kids to negotiate the removal of Bin Laden with the United States of America. I’m not saying they’re innocent- but naive, clueless, as well as violent fanatics. And Bin Laden was a Saudi. An “unwelcome guest”.
He could not be removed without violent insurgencies igniting throughout the region.
And Bush/ Cheney were going to bomb the shit out of Afghanistan.
My army ranger friend was already hoping to return, to rebuild infrastructure, electricity, roads society. A failed state breeds terror.
But the hope was crushed by the assassination of what could have been a national leader with international support.
He explained that history is not always what occurs – it’s what opportunities are taken off the table even before what we think of as history begins.
A charismatic leader with influence in the country could have prevailed against the Taliban but, once assassinated, that opportunity was destroyed forever.
I’m just telling you what a veteran told me, although it is true that a militia leader was assassinated after September 11, and it was known in the region how significant it was that he was killed.
Then the war came. We drop the mother of all bombs, we carpet-bombed the villages, the targets, donkeys and weddings, we chased in jets above unknown terrain looking for Osama bin Laden in a cave, not knowing our chance of prevailing was zero.
Our chance of success was nill.
If you don’t believe me, consider this : in the beginning of the invasion of Iraq by George W Bush, an international effort was being put in place by Sergio DeMello, and with that came hopes of truly international collaboration in the ensuing war against Sadaam Hussein Dictator of Iraq.
In the early days of the invasion the United Nations installation was just being put together in Iraq.
The initial invasion was complete, and the blueprint for the next stage of the conflict was just being begun.
And in charge of the UN effort, De Mello, brought diplomatic flair, objectivity, experience, and the possibility of truly building a coalition that might spare Iraq an endless war.
And the international effort was seen as crucial and would certainly be a necessity when combat ceased and rebuilding ensued.
The site was bombed- by what became ISIS, DeMello was killed and the international effort was destroyed forever.
The day of that bombing, president George W. Bush was on the golf course. It was a sunny day and he was informed on the cell phone- blackberry, back then -that the international effort was over- the bombing of the UN site in Iraq had occurred-
and, as I thought at the time, the true import of that phone call was that the US incursion was a lost cause; the international effort was over, and that the mission of George W Bush was doomed forever to failure – in the first months of the invasion.
It was over before it began. 100,00 casualties. Now perhaps a million. Who knows? They refused to count.
What was needed was removed from the table even before history began- and the reasons, the causes for that, are so complex, so tragic, so heartbreaking- we may never know all that has been lost, beyond the millions of deaths in the wake of this initial catastrophic pursuit of empire.
You don’t have to believe the story- you don’t have to Google anything I say- but I can tell you that this September 11 is going to be a deeply troubling reminiscence of more than what happened on that day – but how much lead up to that day – history we haven’t even begun to process.
Not just three thousand deaths.
Not just a plane turned around at Cleveland, my home town, loaded with passengers returning to San Francisco, my home town – crashed by heroes in a field to prevent the intended destruction of the White House.
Not just those. But millions. Millions of deaths.
I have no insight into this beyond books, conversations, and, like many Americans, I make up my own reality- and yet there’s a deep sorrow involved this time for Americans. We have a lot to think about, and there are no easy answers now -the easy answers were never there.
What was desperately needed – even for that fucked up mission in Iraq, which never should have occurred, was removed before the history we know even began.
Friends, can I say one more thing? It is true we have a Taliban in this country.
We have our warlords, we have militias. We have desperate uneducated people, angry, rejected, enraged.
We have cynical, well-educated people too, using them as pawns -As Osama bin Laden would do, as George W. Bush would do, as Donald Rumsfeld would do.
In Abu Graib, a war prison during Iraq, during the term of Donald Rumsfeld, it was the low-ranking servicemen and women who were accused of acts of torture- even while the secretary of defense played word games, denying the orders from the White House, denying culpability.
Bush /Cheney / Obama /Trump threw our servicemen and servicewomen under the bus.
Our kids were sent on a hopeless mission to remake the map, just as always, to get it down on paper, no matter what the cost.
And, by and large, most Americans said ok. They must know what they’re doing.
Wrong.
“It’ll only take six months, and then we run for President the next year, on a great quick victory over terror” -That’s what they said, anyway.
That’s what they always say.
A failed state is the cause of terrorism, they tried to tell us.
We need to make certain OUR state doesn’t fail.
Tragedy is not knowing the answer to that.
***
Ok. Take a breath, James. Here goes nuthin’.
This is the narrative. (Not what I’m hearing.)
Republicans calling for the resignation of the President and his cabinet in the middle of the largest airlift from a combat zone in history, with American lives at risk, and the support of our allies critical, is completely unpatriotic and, worse, gives aid and comfort to our enemies, and emboldens our adversaries.
The Republican Party has no program, no platform, from which to criticize President Biden.
The Republican Party proposed nothing- nothing- during the election cycle, to enhance global security, or address the critical issues facing our country today.
Further, Republicans impaired the national security of the country by refusing a peaceful transition of power and failing to collaborate with the incoming administration on global conflicts- at a critical time in modern history.
Theirs is a complete dereliction of duty.
While touting a domestic libertarian free-for-all at their National Convention, Republicans ignored the actual issues, leaving a chaotic and dangerous mess behind.
Shame!
Shame on the Republican Party! Shame!
And added to that, the further absolute dereliction of duty by Republicans, in not safeguarding the public from Covid-19 and the deadly Delta variant, is inexcusable.
At the very minimum it shows a willingness to place the most vulnerable citizens at risk, including their own children!
Shame!
The preamble of the US Constitution is clear:
“insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare.”
Shame on you, Republicans:
The “general welfare” is not served by a failure to respond to a deadly global pandemic, especially as such a failure causes an exponential increase in the virulence of the disease besetting the entire population, without exception.
Americans must stand together in support of our troops! Americans must stand together against the Delta variant, through vaccination, effective masks, and physical distance!
Support our troops, Republicans! Including the Commander-in-Chief.
Damn. Shaking my head.
I stand at the door, ready to welcome Republicans back to Reality- A reality they themselves espoused for generations!
***
Mini-rants so I don’t totally lose my mind.
(I know- too late.)
Americans: war is FUBAR. War is SNAFU.
It just is.
…Arguably this horrible war started with the attack on the USS Cole -17 Americans killed in a suicide attack by Al Quaida. 21 years ago.
Yesterday I heard Americans say they’re horrified by the attack at the airport -13 Americans killed, suicide attack.
So it’s exactly come full circle. The end is identical to the beginning.
If that’s not a definition of tragedy I don’t know what would be.
I can’t believe some Americans don’t get the horrible irony of this situation and want to begin this all over again.
It’s agonizingly frustrating to hear Americans thinking there’s a right way to lose a war – a war WE started – against an enemy we would not recognize on the street.
They are completely confused about who or what the enemy is. It’s terrifying and immoral. It’s sets up the next horrible war.
And this crap about the munitions left behind.
Yes. That’s what happens when you lose! You lose your shit!
It’s an incalculable loss all around.
Americans. Oh my god.
USS Cole Oct 2000.
By the way, Taliban wasn’t our enemy. WE targeted the Taliban. They wanted to negotiate 20 years ago.
Again, full circle. The end is identical to the beginning. We are right back where we started.
Tragedy again.
Instead of negotiating at the beginning we bombed them instead to get the “terrorists” -who were not Taliban.
Please yell at your tv when correspondents call the Taliban the terrorists.
Now Afghanistan may be an ally. That changes the geopolitical thing completely. We actually might be able to assist. Not bomb- but be helpful.
I support the US effort. President Biden is taking more action on more issues than any President in my lifetime.
He took full responsibility- even though his critics are completely ignoring reality.
a public service announcement from Florence Nightingale!
“What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they know nothing and think they know a great deal.”
From way back in 1918! When the nurse and pioneer of public health, Florence Nightingale was in the field. Time travel!
So it’s flu season.
Put on your apron and grab your lamp and let’s take a walk with Florence.
So the flu virus transmission is by droplets. They get sneezed into the air, but drop to the floor almost immediately. Collects on surfaces.
So easy.
You can wash your hands and wipe down those surfaces with household disinfectant and bingo, no flu!
Don’t touch surfaces or rub your eyes, of course, and hand-washing really knocks it out.
Sanitation and education and vaccination are the mitigation.
When Americans argue “hey, it’s just the flu, and it’s hella deadly and so why get excited by Covid? it’s here to stay” and etc and blah de blah blah-
They are admitting that they have no clue about flu.
It’s a medieval attitude. It’s a deadly attitude. And it’s ignorant too. So it checks all the boxes!
One has to say no! We don’t have to put up with flu!
What did Florence Nightingale just say?
“If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient, ‘because it is not her business’, I should say that nursing was not her calling.”
To which Florence Nightingale added,
“Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day.”
***
Florence Nightingale was trying to tell us, way back in 1918, one hundred plus years ago: Sanitation is key.
But it is an indication of what a low priority we give to the health and education of the American worker, that we have no clue about flu.
The health and education of the American worker is obviously a low priority.
If Americans washed their hands and practiced good sanitation and got vaccinated and were all educated-
(and if Americans were not compelled by the culture to show up at work when sick and infectious) -those flu statistics might drop through the floor.
Then pathetic Americans wouldn’t have flu to compare with Covid-19.
But the libs (libertarians) don’t give a darn about you, workers.
Blame: The oligarchs and plutocrats and authoritarians and libertarians and American/neo-fascists and the alt-right and corporations, for the flu.
(I used to get flu from money. Yes. Money is filthy! -So will that be credit or debit?)
So the boss can’t afford to give you time off every time you sneeze, without help from us, the US government- and that would be Socialism!
So instead of Socialism, we have deadly virii. Viruses.
Your choice.
We don’t have to “put up” with flu! Or bad education or lack of sanitation! Or war, for that matter.
But the plan always was to let the flu do what the flu will do- and Covid, too!
That should make Americans fightin’ mad, and demand education and sanitation and vaccination! Oh, hell yes!
But nope. We have to “put up with it”.
Endure. Die. Hope to meet Jesus and don the heavenly wings and comfy sandals they got up there. Free harp lessons. Rapture.
But last year we learned to our horror that Covid-19 is aerosolized.
That is far worse than droplets.
It’s insidious and virulent and deadly and it permeates the air indoors. And therefore it is many times more transmissible and deadly than flu.
(And shouting about tyranny helps in the transmission of Covid-19. Tip: Stand 30 feet away from Covid Hot-Spot Mothers that scream about tyranny.)
Even the former guy was struck by how insidious Covid is.
“It’s in the air.”
It’s tiny particulate matter that just floats in the air for a prolonged time.
Droplets drop; Covid floats around for an hour.
Here we have the need for what Florence Nightingale one hundred years ago called “good ventilation.”
If only we had effective vaccines! We do.
Don’t be a Covid Hot Spot- get the shot!
Tell your fellow Americans they don’t have to get the flu or Covid-19.
These are choices we are making.
And turn your righteous anger toward those that wish you harm.
That movement toward improvement we would call…
The Progressive Era!
And it’s full of education and sanitation and inspiration.
re Florence Nightingale, front line worker:
“She is a “ministering angel” without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.”
The Life of Florence Nightingale 1913. E.T Cook
Wear an effective mask. Wash hands. Don’t touch your face. Get immunized. And educate and then shun those that tell you otherwise.
I’ve corrected my notebook here. It’s just the history we’ve witnessed, from afar. Through a glass, as they say.
I’ll tell you a story that someone told me.
That’s the nature of news anyhow.
I had a friend who served as an army ranger, special forces, he said that he was stationed in many places “we weren’t supposed to be“ and he told me a story about Afghanistan.
He said that days after September 11, 2001, one of the most charismatic leaders in the northern part of of Afghanistan was rising in popularity. I guess he would be considered a warlord- but kind of a combination of war lord and Bruce Springsteen, for the militias in the north. Yes. Popular national leader, potentially. (It was Ahmad Shah Massoud, of the Northern Alliance.)
He may have been the most significant challenger to the Taliban- and the Taliban too was on the rise.
We’re talking early 2001.
My friend explained that, just days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, this charismatic leader was visited by journalists, at a time in which he was poised to gain some control of the country and prevent the Taliban insurgency from taking over.
He was beloved, revered, admired- politically significant within the country.
The journalists who visited this leader were Al-Qaeda. This militia leader was assassinated. Murdered.
My brilliant, thick-skinned special forces veteran was practically in tears of frustration when he told me the story. A veteran frustrated with the ironies of fate. He knew the man, Massoud. He knew that it was a hidden turning point in history.
September 11th happened. A power-vacuum left ignorant young Taliban kids to negotiate the removal of Bin Laden with the United States of America. I’m not saying they’re innocent- but naive, clueless, as well as violent fanatics. And Bin Laden was a Saudi. An “unwelcome guest”.
He could not be removed without violent insurgencies igniting throughout the region.
And Bush/ Cheney were going to bomb the shit out of Afghanistan.
My army ranger friend was already hoping to return, to rebuild infrastructure, electricity, roads, society. A failed state breeds terror.
But the hope was crushed by the assassination of what could have been a national leader with international support.
He explained that history is not always what occurs – it’s what opportunities are taken off the table even before what we think of as history begins.
A charismatic leader with influence in the country could have prevailed against the Taliban but, once assassinated, that opportunity was destroyed forever.
I’m just telling you what a veteran told me, although it is true that the militia leader was assassinated after September 11, and it was known in the region how significant it was that he was killed.
Then the war came. We drop the mother of all bombs, we carpet-bombed the villages, the targets, donkeys and weddings, we chased in jets above unknown terrain looking for Saudi-born Osama bin Laden in a cave, not knowing our chance of prevailing was zero.
Our chance of success was nil.
If you don’t believe me, consider this : in the beginning of the invasion of Iraq by George W Bush, an international effort was being put in place by Sergio DeMello, and with that came hopes of truly international collaboration in the ensuing war against Sadaam Hussein Dictator of Iraq.
In the early days of the invasion the United Nations installation was just being put together in Iraq.
The initial invasion was complete, and the blueprint for the next stage of the conflict was just being begun.
And in charge of the UN effort, De Mello brought diplomatic flair, objectivity, experience, and the possibility of truly building a coalition that might spare Iraq an endless war.
And the international effort was seen as crucial and would certainly be a necessity when combat ceased and rebuilding ensued.
The site was bombed- by what became ISIS, DeMello was killed and the international effort was destroyed forever.
The day of that bombing, president George W. Bush was on the golf course. It was a sunny day and he was informed on the cell phone- blackberry, back then -that the international effort was over- the bombing of the UN site in Iraq had occurred-
-and, as I thought at the time, the true import of that phone call was that the US incursion was a lost cause; the international effort was over, and that the mission of George W Bush was doomed forever to failure – in the first months of the invasion.
It was over before it began. 100,00 casualties. Now perhaps a million. Who knows? They refused to count.
What was needed was removed from the table even before history began- and the reasons, the causes for that, are so complex, so tragic, so heartbreaking- we may never know all that has been lost, beyond the millions of deaths in the wake of this initial catastrophic pursuit of empire.
You don’t have to believe the story- you don’t have to Google anything I say- but I can tell you that this September 11 is going to be a deeply troubling reminiscence of more than what happened on that day – but how much lead up to that day – history we haven’t even begun to process.
Not just three thousand deaths.
Not just a plane turned around at Cleveland, my home town, loaded with passengers returning to San Francisco, my home town – crashed by heroes in a field to prevent the intended destruction of the White House.
Not just those. But millions. Millions of deaths.
I have no insight into this beyond books, conversations, and, like many Americans, I make up my own reality- and yet there’s a deep sorrow involved this time for Americans. We have a lot to think about, and there are no easy answers now -the easy answers were never there.
What was desperately needed – even for that fucked up mission in Iraq, which never should have occurred, was removed before the history we know even began.
Friends, can I say one more thing? It is true we have a Taliban in this country.
We have our warlords, we have militias. We have desperate, uneducated people, angry, rejected, enraged.
We have cynical, well-educated people too, using them as pawns -As Osama bin Laden would do, as George W. Bush would do, as Donald Rumsfeld would do.
In Abu Graib, a war prison during Iraq, during the term of Donald Rumsfeld, it was the low-ranking servicemen and women who were accused of acts of torture- even while the secretary of defense played word games, denying the orders from the White House, denying culpability.
Bush /Cheney / Obama /Trump -and much of the media, by and large-threw our servicemen and servicewomen under the bus.
Our kids were sent on a hopeless mission to remake the map, just as always, to get it down on paper, no matter what the cost.
And, by and large, most Americans said ok. They must know what they’re doing.
Wrong.
“It’ll only take six months, and then we run for President the next year, on a great quick victory over terror” -That’s what they said, anyway.
That’s what they always say.
A failed state is the cause of terrorism, they tried to tell us.
We need to make certain OUR state doesn’t fail.
Tragedy is not knowing the answer to that.
But now we’re out. This part is over. Thank you, President Biden. Gratitude for the courage of our armed services at this critical moment.
Campo Santo From the book An American Genocide: the United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by MadleyAdjacent to the Mission Campo Santo 1870s houses. A brick alley between storefronts near the Mission
The boy wasn’t allowed to go down to the river, but on summer nights he could hear the music all the way to the house. It wafted in- calliope music, of all things, from the steamboats. Band music on the river. Early jazz in the early pre-dawn of The Jazz Age.
Music on a summer night.
There was more. There were the woody sounds of the family piano- his mother played and taught him a little. That was the music in the air.
Bix was a teen in the nineteen-teens, with his ear to the windup phonograph. He knew music by ear, note for note, though he learned jazz numbers rather laboriously, finding each note and chord on the piano. He was building the tunes, like a lot of teenagers since, ears to speakers, slowing revolutions of vinyl, to capture a tune they could run with.
So music on the piano would be heard in the air. The familiar, salutary sound of piano lessons in the neighborhood on a hot summer night, pre-World War One, Davenport, Indiana.
His piano teacher says he was hopeless.
A native genius from the start, he easily learned and remembered the music as he saw it and heard it, but learning by ear-and not by note from the printed sheet music- is the great stumbling block of piano students, for the super-precocious.
It would be the cornet, for Bix.
That was the instrument he brought to the Gennet studios in Richmond, Indiana, in 1924, with which he played the shining, clarion “bell-like” tones of great jazz recordings.
But as long as other musicians knew him, they would recall a piano composition he would often play. Stunning harmonics, a jaunty displaced rhythm, bright, yet restrained; thoughtful yet too brief- the piece might not have had a name at first.
I scan a biography of Bix Beiderbecke, and I find that the musicians around Bix- also true masters of jazz and orchestral performance- showed a spontaneous interest in being acknowledged by history as being among those who first heard the composition, and said it stuck with them, how impressed they were.
It was “In A Mist.”
“In A Mist” reminds one of Ravel. The title signifies jazz composition as modern art. It’s the art of compression, saying a lot in a short time. Its rhythm, an underlying walking tempo, but with a touch of Picasso; parallel phrases ever so slightly displaced; a lighthearted exposition, as easy as conversation, all with the fluency of the artist thinking aloud.
It’s just three minutes alone with Bix. That’s “In A Mist”.
He demonstrates the art of writing, the improvisatory and spontaneous, with the carefully worked-out.
The beguiling puzzle of jazz: the practice, the mastery, of an art that defies note-writing- and yet, there it is on the page eventually.
You can’t write out ragtime, musicians used to insist. And the jazz that came after, which Bix himself played, of arrays of horns and banjos and percussion sections, with live recording paraphernalia, in primitive recording studios through the twenties, with the Paul Whitman Orchestra…
However intently that music attempted to write itself into sheet music charts, covering pop tunes and waxing light classics- it became something quintessential and unrepeatable in the hands of Bix.
There must be a copy of “In A Mist” in a piano bench somewhere. Have you heard it on a summer night? Like a rare bird alighting on your backyard bird feeder, you run to get binoculars and in a moment it’s gone.
It’s the close harmony that must have captured the attention. The bass, the parallel blues chords rising step by step, climbing the blues stairs, as the melodic voice sings lightly above; those mirroring dissonances sounding perfectly right, bemusing his fellow musicians who listened with a grin of interest and appreciation and delight.
What’s that called, Bix?
The biographer tells us they looked for a title and thought of “In A Fog”? “In The Air”?
No: In A Mist.
The piano piece has its place in the history of Jazz. Beiderbecke himself performed it at the pivotal historic Paul Whiteman performance debut of “Rhapsody in Blue” back in the twenties- a century ago,
Bix himself walked onstage alone to play the solo, a prelude to jazz, before an audience that included Rachmaninov.
The event represents a sort of official beginning to jazz as a form of classical music, which it now is. “In A Mist” is so inscribed into the very moment when the jazz era went BC to AD, entering its modern age.
The Beiderbecke piece was included in a program for the status quo, along with Gershwin in a premier which in retrospect perhaps threatened to legitimize jazz out of existence, to consign it to the brittle sheet music in piano benches everywhere, along with ragtime and the saccharine-sweet songs of the previous decades. But the modernism of the Twenties prevailed. And inspired.
Jazz had ever relied on the conventional and written, as well as the ingenious and brilliantly improvised, and the Gershwin rhapsody perhaps had found a sibling in Beiderbecke’s pioneering little prelude “In A Mist”.
Programs like the Whiteman concert are a summertime phenomenon. Orchestras will play the American music into the air on summer nights, in fairgrounds and amusement parks and on the Fourth of July in a bandshell, in a park by a lake- somewhere.
The tunes will waft over forest and river bluff and parking lot and cornfield.
And piano recitals coincide with the end of spring and the coming of summer. The neighbor kids may be practicing their pieces- at the last minute before Summer. It might be a bagatelle or invention. Or it might be a knotty Gershwin prelude, or a “theme” from “Rhapsody in Blue”. Maybe some ragtime. If your teacher will allow it.
Even sometimes one could hear a carousel with a refurbished calliope or orchestreon aboard, pumping circus carnival tunes- it’s still possible. Cotton candy still exists, and pastel and pin-striped salt water taffy. Summertime. Ice cream trucks and pinwheels.
All that will be so familiar, so nostalgic.
But it may happen that you’ll hear a harmony you’ve not heard before, or a musical idea will jump out, as on a cornet, bright and clear and new and rising quite above the fanfares and overtures, in a humble but ingenious individual voice. And you’ll remember it, and when you get home you’ll want to run to the piano and find that piece. Or find your own.
That was the beginning of the artist’s life, Bix Beiderbecke, in the early days of jazz.
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