Questions.

via Questions.

Wednesday, January 02, 2013                1:56 PM

Okay, the world is becoming something else—something it had no conception of, even as little as thirty years ago. Yes, we had PC’s—we even had LANs (Local Area Networks)—but we didn’t have the Internet, wireless tech, or hot-spots. We didn’t imagine that geographic location would become moot. We still thought of machines, and even robots, as dumb compared to us. But the one-ton, nuclear-powered robot on Mars right now puts that attitude out of date.

Now we face the same upheaval of the norm that pervaded the early industrial revolution. They called autos ‘horseless carriages’, they called movies ‘moving pictures’, and they saw morphine and cocaine as ‘tonics’. The idea of young people driving to a secluded spot to pitch woo was a scandalous notion—people used to require a destination for love-making—automobile seats offered a magic carpet of ‘anywhere’ privacy. Crossing the oceans went from a months-long voyage to a matter of days. The concept of laying telegraph cable from one continent to another was as new-fangled as a trip to the Moon.

These changes thrilled the young, intimidated the aged, made some peoples’ fortunes and made others’ fortunes disappear. Factories, which began as urban phenomena, created hundreds of jobs overnight—the children of farmers flocked to the cities to make money, and to enjoy the excitement of cities. Populations shifted. And, for the first time, the exponential changes of technology were visible to one and all—new things, new ideas, new jobs—all were coming faster than was comfortable for the aging scions of the nineteenth century.

And we see similar effects today—the young are thrilled with each new gadget and innovation, and the old are awash in a sea of confusion. Many businesses that were doing fine have vanished overnight, sometimes without their absence even being noticed. New businesses such as Facebook have no visible merchandise, location, or structure. These modern companies are at their most vulnerable when they seek to change from ‘free-to-the-public’ to a profit-based, corporate configuration. This shift usually involves a change in privacy policy, and the hapless users, for whom the assumption of privacy was one of the reasons they began using the companies’ services to begin with, are left with the choice of dropping the app or the site, or allowing themselves to be sold for profit, in a digital sense, without a cut for themselves.

I have gone to the trouble of reading some EULA’s lately—and I was glad I did. Sites that offer a free forum or service these days usually tuck in a quiet little set of terms that basically cedes all ownership and usage to the supposedly ‘free’ website. Dover Publishing’s new ‘Pictura’ website, for example, offers free access to their database of Public Domain graphics—but their EULA specifies that everyone’s artworks, using such graphics, are under the copyright of the Dover’s website—not the artist/end-user’s.

So, is that free? If I create great works of art (I should be so lucky) and use Dover’s free service to add something from the Public Domain of old images—well, that’s not really free if I’ve ceded ownership of the final product to the ‘free’ service, is it? It’s more like becoming an unpaid employee.

Also, sites for online storage of images and videos can get at you if they decide that all the images on their servers are theirs to do with as they please. I don’t have any embarrassment over pictures of me and my family and friends. To be sure, if I wasn’t comfortable with an image, I’d never post it on the Internet, regardless of the site I use. I assume all uploads, posts, comments, etc. –are all accessible to any halfway-decent hacker who cares to seek them out.

Thus, I never upload any personal info, my own or another’s, in the first place. But that doesn’t mean I’d be OK with some third party using my home videos or family snapshots in a commercial, or a billboard, or any other public use of images.

I’m starting to rethink the whole ‘uploading’ business. I’ve posted a book of illustrated poetry on WordPress; I’ve posted one-thousand music videos on YouTube, and I’ve posted countless articles and essays on StreetArticles, plus my personal blogs at XperDunn and OneAspiration.blogspot . Originally, I imagined hundreds of people being curious enough to read, listen to, or look at my posts. But, to my knowledge, very few of the billion people online have washed up on my digital shores over the last four years.

Why? Because a billion people are all posting their own stuff, checking out their friends’ stuff and their families’ stuff, and being led to certain websites by search-engine prioritization and television promos. YouTube asks me every day if I want to ‘Monetize’ my channel—if I wanted to be a commercial artist, I wouldn’t be posting my stuff as ‘Public’, would I?

Poetry has become a loosely-organized ‘social app’ of its own—with contests, and themes, and discussions—so my static little post (even with the lovely pictures) of a book of poetry is just an anachronism. As far as music goes, I usually listen to other music than my own—hey, YouTube has pretty much any piece of music ever recorded. So my piano ditties get short shrift, even when someone is kind enough to listen to it once. And essays like the one you’re reading this moment? Well, people go online to read memes, quotes, and ad copy—they don’t want a five page essay by some modern-day Ambrose Bierce with a chip on both shoulders.

The enormous audience has another drawback—I can’t police it. If someone plagiarizes from me, I may never know it. There is just too much stuff on the internet—only a big corporation, like YouTube, can have a filter to catch duplicates and ‘covers’—and even they have trouble keeping pace with the endless flood of uploaded videos.

The Internet is now the sole focus of many entrepreneurs—anyone, like myself, who still clings to the early idealism of freeware, shareware, and the like—will eventually be taken advantage of by those who are busy converting the Internet into a marketplace.

So, read those EULAs, folks—you’d be surprised at the nerve of some of the terms. And remember, promotion is still necessary for anyone trying to build an audience—no amount of ‘tags’, ‘categories’, or ‘shares’ will bring flocks of like-minded people to your sites. And beware of these self-promotion tutorials—most of them are just a roundabout way of getting ambitious people to compile spam-lists of their friends’ email addresses for the web-site’s parent company.

For the foreseeable future I intend to curtail my various uploadings. It is a double-edged sword—I’m disappointed that people don’t see my works, but I still must be creating something intended for public exhibition. I think I’ll spend some time just amusing myself, without the pressure of wondering if something of mine is ‘good enough’ to broadcast to the whole world—that’s a lot of unnecessary pressure. Plus, if anyone should decide that my digital-footprint’s (‘xperdunn’s) search-results are the least bit interesting, there is four-year’s worth of my best efforts already online.

I should have hit on this idea a while ago—but it was camouflaged by the fact that all my social interactions have been online these past years. I can still hang out on Facebook or YouTube without feeling obliged to contribute to the upload-stream. So, this year, retreat and re-group, get organized, get caught up on all those things I never get to… yes, this will be much less stressful than putting myself ‘out there’ and then worrying if anyone will see it or not. Excellent—OK, so that’s the plan.

Now, back to the topic. What has changed so drastically? Well, top of the list—job security. And that is bound up with business security. When I was younger, the top businesses in the world weren’t going anywhere—and if you got hired to work there, you weren’t going anywhere either. Now we see businesses like book publishing, encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers all dropping like flies. And we’ve already lost businesses such as typewriter and adding machine manufacture, book stores, broadcast radio, and many others. All these segments of industry were assumed to be permanent—and the people that were employed in these industries had no incentive to move from one job to another.

Secondly, our sense of time has contracted—lunch hours are often half-hours; gathering research is expected to take mere moments, rather than the endless man-hours of looking up data in reference books, copying out notes by hand, re-typing it all; buying retail merchandise no longer takes several minutes at a check-out counter—it should take only seconds for the bar-coded items to be laser-scanned into the register and for the customer to swipe his or her credit card through the reader. We aren’t even satisfied to get our news read to us any more—now we have additional news crawling across the bottom of the screen, just in case you want more news than one voice can speak.

Minutes and seconds are bought and sold by phone-service providers billions of times every day—video games require a level of hand-eye coordination and focus that only a youngster’s nervous system can endure—even our slow-motion sequences in ‘action’ movies are only there to show the incredible speed at which things are happening—faster than we can follow by simply watching in real-time at normal speed.

A third big change is the modern adjustment to finding oneself communicating with a machine when calling a business. This includes fringe events like self-check-out at the supermarket, ATM withdrawals, and touch-screen maps in the lobbies of theme parks and malls that direct us to the store we’re looking for. As this computer interaction is used extensively in children’s museums and such, we can expect even more examples as our kids become the adults of tomorrow.

And then there is the ultimate interaction with a machine—Google, and its competitors. Ask Google anything, and it will give the answer—word definitions, wikipedia articles, movie credits, travel routes—from the most trivial to the most obscure, any question is only seconds from an answer. We’ve effectively removed ‘I don’t know’ as a response to any question, and replaced it with either ‘I don’t care enough to Google it.’ Or ‘Nobody knows, not even Google.’

You’d think there would be more interest in this Google phenomenon—and the same effect from Facebook. We once lived in a world where questions went unanswered, where old friends faded from memory and were never seen again. Now we live in a world where all questions can be answered, where we can contact anyone we ever met, from pre-school playmates to grad school alums. And GPS—GPS has made it impossible to get lost—and made it possible to get directions to anywhere—even a given latitude-longitude coordinate.

At the start of my life, I (and everyone else) could expect to wonder about a lot of stuff, possibly for one’s entire lifetime, without ever knowing the answer. And if one had a question important enough that it needed an answer, the best thing to do was go to the public library and ask a librarian’s help in researching the question. And even then, the odds were even that an answer could be found.

And I haven’t even mentioned modern social changes—this stuff I’m listing is just some of the practical aspects of modern change. Here’s a real new-ish one: cell-phones can now hear you speak English and repeat it in another language—then when the foreigner speaks, it can do the same thing in reverse. It’s new enough that it has a few drawbacks—it isn’t perfect yet. But that will come.

One of the reasons the digital age has become such a tidal wave of new opportunities is the infrastructure. When PCs were new, there was little programming other than the operating systems. And there weren’t archives of books and artworks and government statistics and television videos—the great worldwide data entry continues even now—but a lot of the heavy lifting

(        

GuttenbergProject.org,  [everything ever written, except for current]

Wikipedia,           [an encyclopedia that allows any article from any user]

Google Earth,      [a virtual globe that lets you pick a spot & zoom in to street level-magnification—I can look at Pago Pago—or my own house]

the Library Of Congress, [which includes audio recordings and videos]

and the tremendous database represented by YouTube           [this is a video library of nearly 1/3 of the world’s population]   

)

has been done. The millions of things we can now do online generate their own info, their own updates, and their own interconnections with other databases.

There are Ancestry sites that will soon rival the Mormon Church’s research, if they haven’t already. There are Cooking sites that contain instructions for any dish known to humanity. Please note that all such sites started as empty databases—which have since been filled with input from enthusiastic web-surfers over the last 20 years or so.

So let’s try an extrapolation. Assume another 40 years pass. Assume that the search engines, apps, filters, and interconnections between related databases are 40 years more sophisticated than they are right now. Here’s the hard part—what will change? How will the future manifest itself?

We already have the first evolutions in education. One is the posting of videos that recorded a series of professorial lectures in Ivy League schools—to watch these videos (plus doing the reading and course-work, that is) is to get the same course or courses as a Master’s Degree student in a certain field. This means that educational material is available for free now—anyone can access it, thereby receiving an Ivy League post-graduate education that includes everything but the sheepskin and the dorm experience.

A second, more recent change is the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These, too, are free (that’s the ‘Open’ part) but have the potential of crowd-sourcing the education of the future.

Crowd-sourcing, itself, will expand beyond Flash-mobs and Multi-player internet gaming. It’s potential is as huge as is its malleability—which makes crowd-sourcing a two-edged blade—able to do great good and/or great evil.

But what of the life experiences of the college campus? Surely being a part of something, and prepping for exams, and being responsible for your own laundry—surely all these things are as much a part of education as the courses? And, in many ways, more so—leaving the nest may be the largest part of higher education.

So the college campus would still play a part in a thorough education. However, the recorded lectures would be the same, or at least of the same quality. The educational input would not come from a staff of professors, it would come from the internet website that hosts college-lecture videos. And this would make the Bachelor’s Degree earned at Yale indistinguishable from that of your local Community College.

The administrators of tomorrow’s colleges will be souped-up RAs—guiding newly-adult students through the new environment, refereeing the social life on campus, answering technical questions and helping those unfamiliar with the school’s i-pads (or whatever they’ll be using).

Alright, enough already. But, as you can see, the next few decades have an infinite potential for the new, and an ever-accelerating tempo of change, whether economic, social, technological, or systemic, will make for one wild ride! The example above is just one possible change in one specific aspect of our culture.

-Opus1

Once upon a time, in the year 2009, I decided to mail Xmas Cards. Then I thought about it some more and I decided to send Music CDs instead. My initial impulse was to provide the same piano accompaniment for groups of one or more that I am accustomed to provide for my family in our living room some evening just before each Xmas.

Then I thought about it some more and I decided that Xmas Carol music CDs are a dime a dozen, and I could instead send out music CDs of my personal improvisations, the best sounding ones of the year.

I scrupled at doing this because responses to my music have often included the phrase ‘that’s not music’. On the other hand, some folks have embraced its calming, even soporific qualities and have kindly added it to their listening library as a genre unto itself, a sort of silliness that can’t be found among either the studious virtuosi or the o-so-serious performers of pop music.

-Opus2

Its main strength is in not fully being there. I myself have trouble listening to my music without being distracted—by virtually anything else, internal dialogues included. It is, simply, non-silence of a nonintrusive nature. Some people want that as a part of their choice-menu of listen-ables—and some people are repulsed by my obstinacy in claiming it is different music, instead of sub-standard music unworthy of anyone’s time spent listening. And they have logic on their side, I regret to admit.

But it is a matter of taste—lots of different genres include aspects of questionable musicality, or even entertainment-value—and if I am not the King Of The Hill, I can still be in the pile.

-Opus3

So I don’t much worry about my shortcomings—they are unavoidable, after all, and I have to fashion a life from both my good and bad attributes, like it or not. The only regret I have is this compulsion to explain my analysis of my own motivations—I’m sure most of you couldn’t care less why ‘Chris Dunn is reluctant to publicly present himself as an eccentric musician’.

So, moving on, having decided to send, as pseudo-Xmas cards, music CDs of my best-sounding improvs, I began to choose the tracks. This is the hardest part. As I mentioned, it’s hard to really listen to this stuff—yet there are some that are better than others, and only careful listening will reveal the grains amongst the chaff. I’ve been recording myself for a decade or more, prior to 2009, and I had kept the better ones straight in my head because those preferable were quite few and far between. That year I felt confident that I had enough ‘listenable’ music for three CDs. That year I mailed out Opus One, Opus Two, and Opus Three—I had eleven people on my Xmas Card List.

-Opus4

The next year, I managed to match that, producing and mailing Opus Four, Opus Five, and Opus Six—I had twenty people on my Xmas Card List. And last year I was indisposed and only came up with Opus Lucky Seven—which I mailed to thirty-two people on my List.

-Opus5

This year I’m hoping to manage another three CDs—I feel that my music has progressed slightly, and has become more listenable than last year’s CDs. While I am nervous about creating a huge project with less than a month to go, I would like for people who haven’t heard my recordings to send me their mailing addresses. (My days of ‘direct marketing’ are long ago over, so don’t worry, I’m not going to sell my Xmas Card List to advertisers—plus, it’s not big enough to matter, anyway).

-Opus6

Send your name and address to xperdunn@optonline.net and I will add you to the list.

If you can, send me a stamped, self-addressed CD-Bubble-Pak-Mailer at:

Chris Dunn

PO Box 343

Croton Falls, 10519

(It’s a lot easier if I only have to burn the CDs and stick’em into your mailer envelope.)

Anyone who has gotten my past CDs will get the new one(s) also—no need to email or anything.

-Lucky Opus7

My plans for this year aren’t complete, but I’m leaning towards Opus Eight being a series of improvisations recorded during the recent Hurricane Sandy storm and power outage. I was able to video piano-improvisations from the “the Calm Before” the storm, to “Hurricane Winds”, then “Black-Out”, “Dying Camcorder Battery” (which ends abruptly on the third day of power outage) and “Power Restored”, at last. There are seven pieces in all, the better part of a CD’s storage—and I am conveniently left with two more CDs, at most.

Opus Nine should include “Noblest of Daughters” (A recording I made as a birthday gift for Jessy) which may be the best thing I recorded in this last year. There is also a “Cathedral” series that I was proud of, including “Cathedral Arch”, “Cathedral Dome”, “Cathedral Pews”, “Cathedral Glass”, etc.

Older Mailing (2008)

So CD Opus Nine will be the yearly ‘best-of’s CD. I may need Opus Ten for overflow—but I might also want that last CD to present improvs that show some of my more experimental efforts. Either way, if I don’t get to Ten this year, it will only be due to lack of time. I’ve been very busy at my piano bench this year.

I ordered supplies from Staples on Wednesday, and the Staples truck dropped off the wrong stuff and I asked the driver “Isn’t there supposed to be a case of paper?”, but he came back later and said, “You’re right.” And dropped off my real order and took away the wrong stuff.

This is what a CD Xmas Card project requires:

1.          A list of people’s addresses
2.           A bunch of recordings
3.          A CD burner
4.          A 100-pak of blank CD-Rs
5.          A ream of ‘Presentation’ paper (fancy finish, BOTH sides)
6.          A pack of Sharpies (to write on the CD with)
7.          Seven 12-packs of ‘Bubble-Pak’ CD Mailers
8.          A box of Self-Adhesive Labels (ink-jet printer compatible)
9.          An “Album Cover” graphic for the front side of the jewelcase insert
10.         A Playlist (with track#s, Titles, durations, and dates recorded) graphic for the back side of the jewelcase insert
11.         Replacement Printer Cartridges
12.         Lots of free time

So, if you want to join the few, the proud, the ones I mail CDs to—get to steppin, ‘cause I’m already started working on it and Christmas is a-coming….

Wednesday, November 07, 2012             5:21 PM

Claire’s dad, John Erling Anderson, PhD, CSF, a great person of great kindness, intelligence, and wit, has finally passed on—Parkinson’s disease is as terrible a thing as there is. Our sadness for his passing is leavened with relief that his illness can no longer reach him. He is survived by his wife, Karin, his son, Mark, his daughters Lynn, Kristin and Claire, his eight grandchildren, and his two great-grandchildren.

He was an experimentalist and inventor, responsible for hundreds of Union Carbide’s patents in the field of industrial combustion. One of his greater inventions involved replacing or retrofitting air-fed furnaces with a pure oxygen feed, allowing greater temperatures, and quality and precision of burn. At least that’s what I think he told me.

As in-laws go, I have loved John and Karin—they were the nicest parents I’d ever met when I first visited their old family house on S. Pine St, Katonah and have remained my favorite ‘old people’ friends (seems funny to say that at 56).  I intend to get ‘Nana’ (Karin) on social media so we can keep in contact—it’s surprising how little we connect, seeing as how their Heritage Hills condo is barely more than a mile away.

There was a brief, private service before the cremation. Spencer joined us and Lynn’s and Kristin’s tribes—Mark came down from Cleveland and Nicholas came from the city. For a few days, we hardly noticed our power was still out…

At last! Our electricity wasn’t just some strange dream of paradise—it really exists. Claire is pleased with developments—she has been watching the thermostat. It was at 37 and now our valiant furnace has raised the ambient to 41! It’s funny how the little things matter.

Things I am suddenly thankful for: candles, matches, batteries, flashlights, down sleeping bags, fast food, coffee to go, sunlight (excellent for reading), a wife, who thought to fill the bathtub the night of the storm, a daughter who brought me mcgriddle and lecafe—while still healing from her emergency appendectomy, a son who is everything we could ever hope he would be, a post-surgical dog who kept us smiling (especially with that big, white plastic neck-cone thing and her geometrical-shaved patches of naked dog-skin).

I’m kinda sore about freezing my butt off for a week and change—especially because I missed the Election Returns TV coverage last night. But the important thing is—my hero, Barry Two-Times, is still on the job for another 4—thank you, Ummurickuh, I knew you wouldn’t let a fellow down. Sucks we didn’t get the house—6 billion bucks and 18 months later: same old same old. Maybe there’s something wrong with that—but I ain’t no expert.

Wow! I just looked at my Outlook emails : 238 Unread, 381 Junk Mail—I knew it was gonna be something crazy like that. Still, I’ll be surprised if more than 3 or 4 are from actual people I know, trying to communicate with me—not just me and everyone else on the sender’s emailing list.

Xmas at the Anderson’s – 2004

I was able to get a coupla recordings out of my camcorder, mid-black-out, before the recharge light shut me down, but it’s gonna take time—I posted “Here Comes Sandy” before the hurricane hit, but I had another one, “The Calm Before” that is still waiting for processing—plus the two I’m planning on calling “Powers Out” and “Powers Still Out” (original, right?) and I guess I’ll be playing a “Powers Restored” tomorrow morning, when the piano keys have had a chance to thaw. But that’s all theoretical—first we have to wait and see about tonight’s snowstorm. (What the NYSE&G lineman give, the Precipitation may snatch right back again!) Maybe I should succumb, and get a generator like all my neighbors have….

There ain’t Nothing worse than Art

Cause Art’ll break your Heart

Even if you’ve Never Fallen

Deeply down in Love

An unpaid Actor plays a Part

Interrupted by a Fart

Just before Sweet words have Fallen

Sneezer gives’em a Shove

A Starving painter forms a Tart

Of Colors rich, Of Dawn’s first Start

But all the Beauty painter’s Drawn

Is repossessed Ungently of

The Keepers of the Shops and Carts

Who, without Coin, will ne’er Part

With Tools or stuff of Inspiration

Naye Food or comfort’s Cove.

My post, “President At A Loss Arguing With Idiot”, has been slapped with a warning: ‘reported as “abusive” by one of Facebook’s “partners” (whatever that means)’ ..per my friend, Chris K. I think that means my aggression was palpable—I can get that way (and the funny thing is I feel quite dispassionate and logical as I write those kind of essays).

I read this one back to myself, partially to verify that this was a Republican tactic, vilifying their opposition’s more-rational public supporters. But I did, in fact, find it very abusive. I was insulting, facetious and just plain mean—So, does that mean the GOP have won? Have they taken a peaceful person like myself and pestered me into crazy-talk? Was it that easy?

It was the same with WWII. Before then, the idea of bombing a city was unthinkable to civilized folk. Before that war ended, America and the Allies had virtually carpet-bombed Germany, Japan, and a few other places—all in defense of liberty and equality. And ever since WWII, dropping a bomb on a city has been considered par for the course when at war—as can be seen today in Syria.

We also learned to use propaganda on ourselves, just to fight off anyone else’s—and now we expect our government to lie to us, and the government should expect lying right back. There’s also the coup de grace, atomic bombs—we use them twice and spend the next half-century (and counting) worrying about using them and having them used on us.

The GOP, as portrayed in the news, has been something of a sensation of late. Their entanglement in gayness, as an espoused evil and as a scandalous truth about many of their elected officials who most viciously attack the gay community, was hard to keep from laughing over. Human nature, so conspicuously on display, is hard not to laugh at.

But, my first thought was of sympathy. I can only imagine the difficulties of a gay person who fights politically to marginalize gay people. You couldn’t pay me to live in that skull.

But in other forums, the Republicans have become masters of the deconstructive. They realize that fear is their friend and there sure are plenty of fears to pass around. They brought up Obama’s having crossed paths with some radical, many years ago, and used it to try labeling him as ‘dangerous’—which is odd since those most endangered by Obama nowadays are the terrorists.

They began by criticizing his long-term church minister of being anti-American—and when that didn’t get any traction; they started whispering that Obama was a Muslim. They spent months after the election trying to convince people that the President wasn’t born in Hawaii. And even though this may sound ridiculous, there are a lot of conservatives who still swear that Barack Obama is a foreigner, a Muslim, and a threat to ‘real’ Americans. While that makes me feel impatient towards such people, it makes me even more upset with a party that could undermine the President so, in time of war.

They realize that losing faith in one’s religion is nearly inescapable for the educated, thoughtful people of our day—and so they champion it. Their detractors are, thusly, either ‘godless’—or they are just as pious as the GOP’s platform, i.e. insincerely.  But this is an entirely manufactured schism. Plenty of people choose to belong to a church, to pray to a God, to live by its tenets, and seek fellowship with other church members, including social support programs for the locally disenfranchised. Only a tiny fraction of those people, however, insist on the myths of the Bible being set above scientific inquiry. Only a tiny slice of Americans are actively expecting an End Of Days in the near future. Just a few knuckleheads try to separate the various other ‘Single God’ religions from each other—to make Christians war against Muslims war against Jews, etc. and so forth. Extremism is a synonym for unbalanced. I can’t see much difference between an extremist zealot and an unbalanced mind. They’re both capable of killing themselves and others, they both reject the importance of civil obedience over ‘spiritual mission’ and they both do a terrible job of raising well-educated, emotionally well-balanced children.

With certain mid-eastern nations giving a perfect demonstration of how to ruin everything with dogmatic theocracies, there couldn’t be a worse time for us in the USA to break our long and hallowed tradition of separating church from state. There is a reason why Americans made that ideal a part of our heritage—and it should not be called into question by those who feel picked-on when asked if they read a newspaper now and then.

Our freedom of speech is now being questioned by some because of naysayers whose language is slaughter and burning of US diplomats, consuls, their staffs and buildings. Well, two wrongs and all that—What Would Allah Do? -is perhaps the best approach to this. Besides, America does not modify its rules whenever they annoy other nations—we know how strong our freedoms make us and we know how wrong it is for one person to have complete control over another’s thoughts and words.

But back to me. Have I been turned into a monster merely by witnessing the bile of Todd Akin claiming a difference between victims of ‘legitimate rape’ and, well, ‘illegitimate’ seems redundant when used with the word ‘rape’? The succession of crazies that were the GOP primary racers sensitized me to the fact that stunningly drastic changes in our country’s character were being threatened by the Republican party, many of them having no qualms about the continuing chasm that spreads between the rich and the poor. And it has been pointed out that many of their staunchest supporters, lower-income families, would clearly be hurt, financially and legally, by the GOP agenda.

Then there’s the audiences at these ‘rallies’ of extreme right-wingers such as Sarah Palin—they have the sound of a hungry mob. And the GOP speechifiers do this great little dance wherein they get these folks all lathered up without actually raising their own voices—but they also don’t ‘correct’ the crowd when they go too far—and that is a problem when it might be taped for the cable news channels.

Maybe the mid-westerners think all the folks who live on the coasts on either side are a bunch of spoiled intellectuals who think they know better because they went to college. To a certain degree, they’re right—the average person graduates from college knowing a lot more than they went in with—and college graduates of the mid-west have been known to return home and make great contributions to their state and their community. Besides which, smart is smart and dumb is dumb—only bullies try to minimize the value of education and only snooty brats think their diplomas make them better than someone else.

In short, every time the GOP is presented with a challenge, they go by the low road—to the point where some of their worst tactics (like strangling the legislature for four years) can seem downright unpatriotic, to put it mildly. They never answer a single issue with “we are in agreement with the opposition on this, except for a few details”. They never say, “We recognize the importance of settling this matter, and we’ll be bi-partisan on this bill’s passage because of that urgency”. And if one of them did, the rest would ostracize the traitor—I’m thinking here of the courageous Olympia Snowe—she suffered loud criticism of her attempts to create a middle-ground for the two parties.

These are only a few samples of what we’ve seen paraded across our TV screens for four long years—and every year they are emboldened to blame Obama for our economic troubles. They couldn’t do it on election day 2003, because it was still quite clearly Bush(W)’s spilt milk—but they only waited a few months before they began speaking of the economy as if Obama had made the mess to begin with. And according to several indices, Obama has had surprising success at pulling us up from the nose-dive the GOP left him. And so another claim is made to paper over this hole in their wall, “Obama isn’t fixing the mess quickly enough—Obama doesn’t know enough about business to fix this thing”. Well, employment is up, job losses are down, business is improving (although slowed by the EU crisis and the slowdown of China’s economy) and it is hard to justify kicking out a President who has so masterfully turned our economic frowns upside-down.

So, then the debate. I guess I blew my top on that one. When Mitt accused the President of ‘wasting time’ on health care reform when he should have been fixing the economy(!) –well, I tell ya, if I coulda crawled through that screen and got at’im—I’d be locked up in a sanitarium for the criminally insane by now. The GOP showed us foot-dragging as high art throughout their struggle to block health-care—if they’d really cared about getting Obama focused on fixing the economy, why’d they waste so much of his time, and the time of the hundreds of Democratic legislators?

I just can’t imagine that they’re fooling anyone with this whole ‘create a crisis, draw out a crisis, and blame the crisis on Obama’ strategy. It is very much of a piece with Mitt’s betrayal of every promise he made to the Neo-Cons during his primary race. It also answers the question of why Mitt hasn’t given details on his ‘plans’—he reveals his plans, as needed, during the debates to rebut any accusations against his older positions. I think it’s kinda funny that his supporters are all saying ‘He won the debate—and that’s that’. That’s because they don’t like the sound of ‘Yes, he made a great huff-and-a-puffing—too bad he made up his answers as he went along.’

As far as that goes, I think the President would have performed better if someone had told him he was playing liar’s poker—he thought he was there for a debate.

Now, there I’ve gone again. I simply lose all sense of propriety—I think it comes from a fear that more than 50% of my fellow citizens might disagree with me. I fear that the majority of Americans will say, “Hey, lying’s okay—all politicians do it” or they’ll say “Hey, women don’t really have the right to control their own reproductive choices.” Or they’ll say, “Yeah, we grow faster and go faster with fossil fuels—let’s drop all this ‘hybrid’ nonsense until the gas runs out—then we’ll worry about it.” Or they’ll say, “Climate change? It’s a hoax, the ice caps melt all the time—what are you, a big sissy?”

And I guess my fear that you all might find the GOP acceptable, when they have (to my eyes) conclusively proven their unfitness for office, makes me too excitable—I’ll try to calm down and write something less ‘abusive’ next time.

Romney has an unfair advantage in these debates—all he has to do is collect the facts and figure out how to twist them in favor of himself.

Obama has to work twice as hard—he has to put away his knowledge and facts, and waste valuable time to gain command of the ‘ideas‘ Romney’s cotton-candy world has so few of, memorize all the lies the Republican’s candidate has been telling for over a year, and then memorize the truths that refute those lies. Then he has to defend himself against this mountain of horse-dung without seeming dismissive. I understand how the President must feel—I’ve never felt anything but ‘dismissive’ towards our little Mittley-Droid—well, I take that back. When I heard about his high school bullying of a gay kid, I felt pure disgust. But then I went right back to ‘dismissive’.

Obama didn’t want to look him in the eye. Damn right—Romney, the ‘Grand Old Idiot’, doesn’t have a case for winning other than his demonstration that he’ll bend in the direction of the strongest wind—without pause or scruple, lying and flip-flopping. And, if he did win, he would continue to lie to us all for the worst potential four years of Republican mismanagement that will have ever been inflicted on the USA (And I say that knowing just how badly we were misled by his predecessor, Bush W). If I had to look that goon in the face while he made stupid jokes about our 20th anniversary, I’d have lost my mind. So I, for one, can attest to Obama having way more self-control than me. How about the rest of you? Could you really stay on that stage for 90 minutes without spitting in Romney’s eye and calling him a big, fat liar?

To pay attention to the words that come out of Romney’s rictus is to give him the same accord as an honest person. It’s like showing respect for that clown in Stephen King’s “It”. It is hideous, its presence may fill us with fear, but we do not ‘respect’ it any more than we respect Cancer. We just wish we were somewhere else.

I would feel much safer if everyone wasn’t so impressed by his ‘energized’ lies and reverses during the first debate. The Republicans, in courting the Fundamentalists and Big Business, have become an ugly bunch of folks. They are expert in lying because they haven’t stopped for twelve years and practice makes perfect, I guess. They have also been unforgivably brick-wall-like in putting all our legislative needs, including budgets, on hold so they can blame the President for this legislative deep-freeze. They want to replace the President and put those disastrous agendas back in place which caused the collapse that Obama has been digging us out from under, these last four years.

What gets me is the incivility. And that is not solely because I could be described as a ‘pansy’ when it comes to civility—it is, rather, for the same reason I favor it so—it is the only sane response in a modern nation’s leader that will win through when facing the savagery still found in much of the world, including quite a few places right here at home. Civility is the responsibility to lead a nation without letting oneself get swept up in childish petulance, passive-aggressive obstructionism, or resentment over personal slights.

Our current President has that civility. He didn’t let it stop him from taking down Osama, or from taking out those pirates off the coast of Somalia, and he didn’t let his civility get swept away by the contrarian nature of the Republican campaign. Obama is strong—as strong as any President—but not in his impulses, only in his dedication.

A man can’t control a nation if he can’t even rule himself—and we see that lack of resolve in the pasted-on grin of the President’s debating opponent. Mitt Romney would do better to return to honesty and plain-speaking (if, indeed, he has ever stopped there) rather than outshout his President in a respectable, public debate.

It burns me up that the GOP is trying to worm their way into power, rather than challenging Obama and the Democrats with forthrightness and sensibility. Even if GOP platforms made sense (and they don’t) I would be loath to support their candidate on the sheer effrontery of their campaign. It isn’t just their showing a disrespect for responsible Government, or a disrespect for our sitting President—it is a disrespect for the intelligence of the citizens they hope to win over.

Lying has worked well for the GOP in the recent past—one can see where they might start to accept it as ‘good tactics’—but the lies are so tired, so roundly disavowed by third parties, so blatant and ludicrous, that we would have to be brain-damaged to offer them any credibility at all. God forbid the GOP ever told the truth—at this point, whatever they said, I would believe ‘the opposite of that’ to be true for years before I could afford to grant them any credence at all.

Eftsoones the Nymphes, which now had Flowers their fill, 55

Ran all in haste to see that silver brood,

As they came floating on the Christal Flood;

Whom when they sawe, they stood amazèd still,

Their wondring eyes to fill;

Them seem’d they never saw a sight so fayre, 60

Of Fowles, so lovely, that they sure did deeme

Them heavenly borne, or to be that same payre

Which through the Skie draw Venus silver Teeme;

For sure they did not seeme

To be begot of any earthly Seede, 65

But rather Angels, or of Angels breede;

Yet were they bred of Somers-heat, they say,

In sweetest Season, when each Flower and weede

The earth did fresh aray;

So fresh they seem’d as day, 70

Even as their Brydale day, which was not long:

Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song.

*[Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. “The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900”.]

Monday, September 24, 2012          1:53 PM

Dear Daniel Mayes:

I’ve just been reading your excellent article  “Are We Heading Towards A Big-Brother World?” regarding the use (or over-use?) of Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) camera systems in modern cities.

By and large I must agree that this is a ‘balancing act’ issue, with security and surveillance on the one side and an invasion of personal privacy on the other. But there is a larger issue being overlooked here. The once-a-decade National Census (an attempt to get an accurate-as-possible head-count of all US citizens) is written into our Constitution. It, along with voting (another data-sampling activity) are both minimal attempts at determining some information of the people’s presence and wishes with regard to ‘self-governing’.

Self-governing is an ideal that cannot be realized—even working towards an exact head-count is an attempt to determine how many people are in which location, so that their congressman can represent them in numbers proportional to the number of people in the state, for example. But no tabulation can count all the people in the United States at one instant of time—even if we had the manpower and resources to physically count every person in the country, people would be born, people would die, in the time it takes to tally the numbers, they will have already changed. So the ideal of self-governing, of a government that responds to every want and need of every single citizen is, like all ideals, something that can only be imagined.

In the voting process, we encounter ‘hanging chads’, voter suppression, voter turnout (especially ‘voter turn-out’–there are only 20% or 30%, at best, of eligible voters participating in any election). So this, too, is an ideal that we should not hold our breath, waiting for its realization in reality. Fortunately, we have mathematics.

Sociology is the study of humans as groups–the smaller the sample, the less accurate the results–and even in large-sample studies, the results cannot be expected to predict the behavior of a single individual. But as a group, humans are incredibly predictable–and whenever huge samples of data-sets are available, they can predict with uncanny certainty the percentage of the group that will go this way, the percent that will go that way, and how many are left undecided and standing pat.

When polls first came into everyday use, in the 1950s, most of the applications were commercial–sales and marketing jumped right on the new miracle science, and have stayed riveted to consumer-testing, market research and back-end analysis ever since. Both politicians and news outlets soon saw the inherent entertainment value of releasing survey results on current trends in the opinions, politics, and tastes of the masses.

But there were other, more sensible, uses to be had. Traffic surveys in high-traffic urban arteries allowed for more efficient design and maintenance of freeways and intersections. Foot-traffic surveys of mall-shoppers changed the designing of malls and parking lots. Supermarkets use their inventory turn-over to determine future shelf-stock purchases. Lawyers use medical-symptom-mapping to prove high-risk ‘cancer cells’ located near places of pollution. The list goes on.

Many are the benefits to business and commerce—but even so, the individual also benefits from some sociological data-sampling. In a world of terrorism, radiation, and bio-safety concerns, a data-set of every pedestrian within a particular ten-block-radius might hold vital clues to emerging threats or illegal activities. But it can also aid in the search for a lost child or pet (if the pet doesn’t already have a sub-dermal LoJack device), or rescue operations during a natural disaster.

Many people seem to think that only ‘bad-guys’ require surveillance—when the truth is that, as we become a faster-moving society using synthetic signposts to organize the flow of us, the provisioning of us, the educating of our children and the protecting of our weakest, we need to keep tabs on what’s happening. Is blanket coverage of CCTV cameras the right method for collecting this data? Perhaps not. But, is there a built-in need for record-keeping in our high-tech, high-speed global village? I’m afraid so.

I find something strange in the waves of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. Where were these outraged Muslims when the Soviet Union banned religion throughout Eastern Europe? And what is all this talk of ‘respect’ without respect for life? If we were to ask the Syrians or the Libyans or the Egyptians for ‘respect’ we’d be accused of high-handedness; ‘the Great Satan demands respect, does it?’ We give billions in financial aid to some Mid-East nations, well, most Mid-East nations. Isn’t that respect for our fellow Peoples? Does the money not count, all of a sudden, because we built an Internet that allows the Middle Easterners to forget that we are an ocean apart?

This so-called movie (that is actually a ‘trailer’ (a preview) for an imaginary movie) was made by one person, maybe two. The armies of Islam have no beef with those individuals–if they did, they should have gone after those people in particular. Instead, they thought, what a great excuse for murdering the American closest at hand, the one with the best reputation–just so the whole world would know how ‘angry’ these folks are. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was in Libya to help the newly democratic nation transition to a more settled, less chaotic installation of an elected government. I assume he was also there to oversee the transaction of billions in aid. He wasn’t naïve–he knew he was risking his life to be there and to help.

He was not some puppeteer trying to coerce Libya into becoming a pawn of the United States–the world knows this. In all the fighting our armed forces have ever done, we have never taken permanent possession of any real estate–that is our tradition and it hasn’t changed in over two-hundred years. He was there to help, period. Likewise the three other innocent Americans executed by the mob that stormed our embassy.

Respect? We have a tradition in America, a common cause that many Americans have died to protect–it’s called free speech. The protesters say “We never insult Jehovah or Christ, why must you insult our prophet?” Well, first of all–Go ahead. I can call Christ a Pig. I can call Jehovah a Geezer in the Sky–we don’t CARE. Sticks and stones will break our bones but words will never hurt us. Or our gods, or our government. No. What these protestors are against is Free Speech.

They were nice and quiet all through the Cold War, many of them siding with the Soviets in exchange for arms or funds–working hand-in-hand with an enforced-atheism government. Syria still does it today–well, I shouldn’t say Syria, Syrians are being blown up in the streets by their own government–but that Government is still dealing with Communists, just like the good ol’days–as is Iran.

What do they have in common? Repression. They believe in repression of public dialogue–they prefer to keep political discourse as a blood sport. They want their governments to retain the ability to cow their citizens, instead of serve them. Why? Because Islam (again, perhaps not Islam, but it’s figureheads, the ones with the ability to rustle up some gang violence among the population) has a tradition of repression–they repress their women, they indoctrinate their young, and they punish people for speaking their minds. This is not a healthy format for a major religion. We will come back later to the issue of their longed-for dream of committing genocide in Israel.

There are Muslims in the United States–their lives are no different from us non-Muslims–they understand that Free Speech takes precedent over religious dogma, they don’t attack passers-by on the street every time someone takes a swipe at their religious traditions. There are Jews in America–hell, last I heard, there are more Jews in the New York metro area than there are in Israel. But the Muslims here understand that religious freedom takes precedence over some feud the Imams have been stoking the fires of for a millenia.

In America, we know that freedom is more important than dignity. We know that dignity is an illusion, that the Emperor is buck-naked, and that ‘fervent prayer’ is the limit of how far one citizen’s religion can impose its rules on another. When I was a kid, Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays–but there was no pressure from Catholics to close the butcher shops on Friday by law.

And there is another bit of childishness to this Mid East violence–have they no faith? Can one sick guy’s post on an obscure web-site really touch their prophet? Is their faith truly encumbered by this arbitrary input from one stupid foreigner, half-way round the world? Don’t they see that their magnification of this one guy’s bad attempt at satire makes him a world-renowned figure? If they had an ounce of sense, they would have let this guy and his ‘trailer’ fade away like a billion other tasteless web-posts.

The way I see it, all these embassy protests have been orchestrated by Imams jealous of the power they wield in the Middle East that they enjoy nowhere else. They see repression as a necessary tool for their survival as leaders of their society. They see religious freedom as a death knell to their world order. They think that anyone with the nerve to face up to them, and tell their own truth, ought to be put to death.

Well, the terrorists have become very sophisticated. One can hear and read in the media of a new ‘discussion’ over freedom of expression. There is nothing to discuss. If we adopt any new legislation amending the freedom of the press or freedom of speech–I swear I’ll make a hundred videos ridiculing Islam. I’ll devote my frickin life to it.

Ancient Egypt Arts.

via Ancient Egypt Arts.

Trumpeter Hornbill..

via Trumpeter Hornbill..

The thing everyone overlooks is that Karl Marx was right. The desperation of the revolutions that are thought of as Communism were half-baked, seat-of-the-pants efforts to rectify the evils of Capitalism. There is no better example in human history of good intentions leading to a hell here on earth than the Socialist and Communist regimes that transformed into police states before the dust of overthrown palaces had settled. But that doesn’t make Marx wrong—it simply means that the struggle to recover humane principles from a Capitalist world is a complex and difficult thing.

The apoplexy that erupts whenever ‘Socialism’ is mentioned is part of this misperception. Let’s imagine we did something humane, that we paid for it with tax revenue because it is our responsibility to see to it that our country is a decent, human place to live—and we forgot to label it ‘Socialism’. Would that be so bad? We accept the rightness of keeping kids from going hungry—if our government can bring a more consistent and standardized effort to bear on the problem than local charities and churches, we are all for it. Then, as soon as someone calls it ‘Socialism’, we decide it’s better to let people suffer than to risk our great nation becoming a ‘socialist nightmare’.

I, for one, don’t give a damn about Socialist or non-Socialist—all I know is that we let our country become littered with former human beings who are now something less, something broke (in both senses of the word) and who deserve to be taken care of. This business of criticizing the unemployed for not being employed is total rot. For one thing, these people all had jobs up until the financial crash at the end of Bush’s second term. And our economy may recovery completely—with the one detail—that unemployment will remain.

This makes sense—nobody uses people in factories any more—automation is providing better precision, better quality control, and higher production capacity than sloppy humans who get tired, or sick, or have to sleep at night. Who needs’em? But with great automation comes great responsibility. If we are creating a world of robotic activity then we must deal with the other side of that coin—we have to stop judging people by how tired they get. If an average worker stays home all day because the old job has been automated, that worker has no money to participate in our consumer society.

So, owners who remove any need for human workers are, whether they realize it or not, saying No to consumerism. And without a consumer society, who’s going to buy any of the stuff that gets made at the factory? We can’t pretend that economic action has no equal, but opposite, reaction. We will only survive the robotic revolution by subsidizing unemployment. I’m sure someone can show me all the facts and figures proving that it’s impossible to subsidize the 1/10th of the human race that we simply don’t need labor from anymore. But we should anyway—billionaires don’t just keep a disproportionate amount of the fruits of prosperity, they also get off on being top dog.

But they shouldn’t think of it as something being done for others—that 1/10th of humanity will someday be ½ of humanity, 2/3rd of humanity, all of humanity! Someday in the not so distant future, even board chairmen will get the boot from our robotic AI overlords. Then won’t they be glad they started a systematic separation between employment and consumption!

We are very subjective about employment—we don’t see it objectively. We tend to discount the jobless as people who are too lazy to find work—unless we’ve been subjected to that massive degradation of ego that losing a job inflicts upon us. I have been on disability for years—but I’d do just about anything to have a job—and the sense of self-worth it bestows. And we tend to assume if the economy is healthy, then jobs are plentiful. This is a baseless assumption. It was true back in FDR’s day—a worker could be made useful digging a trench or paving a highway or building a bridge, a dam, a skyscraper. But masses of laborers are no longer the norm at construction sites. We have huge cranes, trucks bigger than houses, earthmoving vehicles and tunnel-digging machines. We still need workers to keep a hand in, but nothing like the mobs of laborers that built everything in those older times.

And what’s so ‘lazy’ about pounding the pavement every day being rejected from job after job, while the employed sit at PC keyboards, talk on phones, and decide about lunch. There are plenty of lazy people with jobs—they don’t add a whit to their employer’s business success, they do just enough to keep themselves from being fired, and in many cases are actually drags on the company’s bottom line. The owner would do better paying someone else to stay home than to support this viper at the breast of their business. What do we do when there are simply no more jobs and plenty of unemployed? Do we continue to blame them for a situation they are victims of? I think (and it’s surprising how often this is true) that charity is good business. If people are being reduced to desperate criminals or ghastly non-persons because our economy has no place for them, it is better to make a place for them.

In the sixties, Americans became aware that, after centuries of throwing trash over our shoulders, there were simply too many of us doing it now and we have to either stop littering or live in an ugly place, piled high with refuse. I believe that now is the time to stop throwing ‘useless’ people over our shoulder—they are capable, we just have no use for them right now. If we don’t take responsibility for all the people in the country we’ll see a decline of empire, and a well-deserved one, at that. If all those people become disaffected, or criminalized, then the super-wealthy will ultimately be surrounded by hungry wolves—and that’s not a very nice neighborhood.

Capitalism is sacred only because the more powerful a person is, the more that person’s security depends on the status quo. Ask a hungry person how they feel about Capitalism—I’m betting they couldn’t care less, unless Capitalism is code for ‘a hot meal’. Bill & Melinda Gates endowed the largest charity ever with half the personal fortune of the richest man in the world—but the poor abide. We have to make charity a part of business. We have to start moving away from the assumption that money must be earned. Lots of people have tons of money they didn’t earn—I hardly think it would be a crime to legitimize government support of the poor.

However, the implementation of such a change has at least as many pitfalls and risks as old-fashioned communism—we would need new perspectives and new approaches to even begin such a process. So, that won’t happen. Still, I think it is a sensible direction, compared to the alternatives.

Two-thousand years ago Christ addressed the problem of the poor. There are no doubt hundreds of institutions in operation today with the sole aim of feeding and caring for the poor. The number of poor has reached such heights that an entire country can be at risk of starvation for years without end.

How has this simple problem continued to grow and thrive in a world with so many people (and lots of them wealthy) trying so earnestly to end famine and homelessness and sickness and misery? Christ proposed that when someone asks for your coat; give him your cloak also. After decades of people giving away free turkeys on Thanksgiving and blankets to the shivering homeless on Xmas Eve, we see no reduction in poverty—but rather expansion, as if our very civilization were a culture for its growth.

So many people are digging wells in drought-ravaged communities. So many people are trying to spread literacy to the third world. So many doctors and nurses, clergy-persons and philanthropists strive to alleviate the preventable diseases and hunger pangs of the needy. What makes the situation an unshakeable constant in our global community?

There is no obvious answer—third world famine is a starker illustration of the problem than the developed worlds’ own citizens—but we can see poverty and homelessness in Appalachia, a not-so-long drive away from the center of commerce, the Big Apple itself. Even on the streets of that city, and most others, we can find deprivation and suffering.

By this we can see that the poor are not from some well-spring deep in the poorest, least-developed nations—the poor come to be everywhere. The sophisticated man-about-town, leaving his Fifth Avenue townhouse, will only walk a few blocks before he must step over someone who is sleeping on the sidewalk.

So the poor are always with us. Despite centuries of well-meaning charitable activism, the poor abide. Why?

They are the price we pay for having the luxury of becoming millionaires. The design of Capitalism is to compete in the marketplace, to outsell, to outdo, to win at all costs and thus become a ‘master of the universe’. That 99% of us are not millionaires (and have no foreseeable prospect of becoming millionaires) yet remain loyal to the idea of dollar-Darwinism is a marvel of misdirection. We are raised to be proud of our nation’s openness to a sharp operator’s victory against the established businesses—the iconic entrepreneur who plows through the marketplace unopposed due to our amazement at an unprecedented operation’s swift encroachment on established culture. A new marketplace to sell a new something that we poor sods didn’t even know we had to have!

But marketing is a side-issue, a symptom rather than a cause. For Capitalism to retain its power to elevate the odd Titan of Industry, it must have an environment of competitive struggle. Ideally, Capitalism would control the elevation of the few through a series of economic levels that never fell below subsistence. In that happy dream-world, the poor would simply be the least rich, the least pampered—the last place finishers in a sporting event, rather than the wasted, diseased, and tortured casualties of all-out, bleeding warfare. But that is an ideal that only the Canadians have manifested in our real world.

For economics to be stable enough to allow such immense disproportions as there are between billionaires and homeless starvlings, it has to be a blood sport. If any legislation were ever enacted that overruled the rules of finance in favor of humane re-distribution of some of that wealth to the ‘inactive players’ of the sport of Capitalism, the rich would simply block the legislation, or shoot the legislator, or (most likely of all) besmirch the bona fides of the proponents of humane reform of Capitalism. We have been victims of lazy thinking—the triumph of the Free World over the Soviet Union is not proof of the unleavened goodness of Capitalism—it only proves that you catch more flies with the honey of personal liberty than with the coercion of a police state.

Das Kapital is just as merciless and bloodthirsty as it was when Karl published his precious treatise. That soviets and red Chinese were perhaps guilty of trying to implement idealism with all-too-human humans does not change the fact that Capitalism is still the foot on the throat of human civilization it has always been, since it replaced monarchies (the only stupider form of society there is for comparison).

The solution, poor, naïve Karl supposed, was to give power back to the people—in the Iron Curtain countries this was ‘collectives’ and non-currency oriented culture; in the United States we thought labor unions had succeeded in stemming the predation of the owners upon the workers that made them rich. In neither case did any real change result. The soviets lost the majority of their internal economy to the black marketers (who had no objection to cash payment for goods). But here in the States, we had the illusion of equity among workers and owners/management—and union workers’ salaries, benefits and working conditions began a steady climb. But there’s more than one way for the Fat Cats to skin the Hoi Polloi.

And the most successful one was Lobbying. When WWII ended, the nation strode towards what we hoped would be a new age, with Fascism vanquished and the Communists content to regroup from the War’s devastation—and with civil liberties growing to include Social Security, Medicare, the right to form unions and to strike, the right to travel the country from coast–to-coast—and the shiny, new means to travel it.

Our country’s laws reflected a sense of fairness and protection from abusers of personal rights. But now the money began to roll in—and not all the hundreds of federal legislators in both houses were sterling saints of their offices. Eisenhower’s valediction to the people, as he left his presidency, was a warning against the ‘military-industrial complex’—a cadre of business moguls who saw huge riches in keeping our country on a war footing, just to create the demand for the arms manufacturers, and every army base, and all the boats, jets, and bombers we would need to ‘make the world safe for democracy’.

So, cutting military funding is the most unpopular idea for a politician to mention aloud. Second to that is speaking in favor of regulation of Capitalism. Those two ideas together will get a politician zero votes—in any state or county in the nation. I am suggesting that our rabid, knee-jerk response to either of those concepts is an attitude that has been carefully cultivated by our Capitalist media-moguls. Hitler, famously, invented Kindergarten as a way to reach his citizens with propaganda at their earliest possible age. And in our schools we have traditionally indoctrinated our American children with the ideals of the United States of America. But now we live in a time where policy-makers and tycoons have discovered that Skinner’s behavior-modification techniques continue to work on people of all ages, not just the innocent tykes of Kindergarten.

Competition is so much a part of who we are that the idea of turning our backs on it seems outright psychotic. But my thought is that competition exists all by itself—and we will always have to struggle to have the lives we work towards. If we placed some regulatory boundaries—not on a cap for fortune-makers, but a minimum for Capitalist-last-placers—then the players could all knock each other around all they liked. But the ones who have lost, the ones who are unable to function in that rough-and-tumble, could be assured that their society would not make them starve to death because they failed at the American Dream. Is the American Dream any less a dream if we admit that it doesn’t always come true?

Why should we? I hear ya. Who says we have to build decent housing and give free food and clothes and furniture and plumbing to a bunch of lazy, no-good goldbrickers? Who says we need to educate their children and give everyone free medical care? Well, the answer is—you do. Think about this—when you go out for a walk, is it nice and clean and peaceful and decent? If you had a choice between giving that up to live in a commercial ‘war zone’, or paying extra to keep everybody’s suffering to a dull roar, which would you pick?

If we want this country to be a nice neighborhood, we have to spend some money on maintenance. The rules of Capitalism insist that winners win at the expense of the losers—so, do we want our society to operate like a casino and try to take everyone’s last dollar before they leave? Or can we adjust Capitalism, as we did, after much violence and struggle, when we realized that it is only fair to let workers unite to protect their interests against the owners?

We should take that concept a bit further and resolve that Capitalism is only suitable for a decent society when it draws a line beyond which we will not sink, a line that guarantees no one will die from being poor—that losing in the marketplace doesn’t condemn a person, or an entire family, to slow, miserable death. We like to look back in horror on the old practice of keeping a Debtor’s Prison—but are we any better for letting our poor starve in broad daylight?

Once there was an expression that went: ‘they’re set in their ways.’ This expression would often be used to describe individuals, nationalities, and cultures. When describing an individual who was ‘set’ in his or her ‘ways’, it denoted a maturity that, having been reached, allowed him or her to settle into their knowledge-base and neither add nor subtract from that gestalt for the rest of that person’s life.

I personally experienced this in the form of my (late) paternal grandmother, who insisted on denoting African-Americans by the term ‘darkies’. Many were the occasions when I’d attempt to explain that hate-speech was no longer acceptable, even at the dinner table. My gentle reproaches fell on deaf ears—grandma was ‘set in her ways’ and after eighty years of using her own vocabulary with no problems, she was not about to modify her speech, at her advanced age, to please others.

I would love to be ‘set in my ways’, if only it were still an option. I have been ‘set in my ways’ a hundred times in the last fifty-something years. I became a minicomputer expert—they were replaced by desktop PCs; I became an expert in MS Basic—it was replaced with dBase—and dBase was replaced by object-oriented, WYSIWYG, windows-based GUI Visual-dBase (and C++); I got used to pin-feed, multi-part ‘green-bar’ printer paper used by matrix- and band- printers—they were replaced with sheet-fed, ink-jet, color printers. Each half-year, at least one of my skills became obsolete—and a new manual, or guide, or user-instruction needed reading—and many of those early support documents were awkward, opaque translations from the original Japanese!

From standalone, to LAN, to DSL-internet, to Broadband—from point-to-point-Modems, to ‘bulletin-board’ file transfers, to dial-up web browsing, to HTTP/FTP over a T-1 via ISPs—from free-for-all systems design, to off-the-shelf apps with differing file-formats, to ‘Suites’ of Office Applications that permit shared-online documents and spreadsheets, etc.—all these things happened in tiny increments, sold as enhancements, upgrades, new versions, standardized versions, beta versions, and more powerful, smaller hardware with exponentially greater capacity and speed.

After twenty years of riding that wave, I had been kept too busy to go to college and get a bachelor degree. But as I left that job, the world suddenly decided to overturn the old wisdom, the notion that a college degree wasn’t necessarily a proof of intelligence—or even of education. Now I found myself, a capable office-manager, customer-service manager, and systems administrator of nearly twenty years, unemployable because I had no degree!

I still have no degree. My atrophied brain, my frayed CNS, and the PTSD that, in office drones, is called ‘burnout’—all these changes make a degree, at this present moment, a futile goal. But I tried the Continuing Ed. Courses, back before my liver transplant. And I tried the online-courses, afterwards. In every case (and this was also true throughout my first seven colleges/universities, from before I joined the workforce) I ended up becoming an extra study guide or TA, the person who sometimes helps bridge the gap between the teacher and the denser students. Invariably the teacher asks me something along the lines of, “You seem to know more about this class than I do—why are you taking this course?” When I explain that I’m trying to get certified with a degree, and I need the credits, or the mandatory courses, whatever—then the profs would usually ask if I wouldn’t mind tutoring the other students. I even earned my tuition for two years at one Castleton State College, in Vermont, by doing work-study as a calculus tutor.

I have also had great success as a tutor for high school mathematics, English, and science—but that was long ago. I can only brag about past proficiencies—I have accomplished nothing of note in over ten years. But even unemployed and virtually house-bound, I still can’t become ‘set in my ways’. TV becomes Cable/Satellite becomes VOD becomes “hulu”. Windows goes from “Windows NT” to “Windows 2000” to “Windows XP” to “Windows 7”. Laptops become PDAs become I-Phones, I-Pods, I-Pads, etc. My old ‘dictation’ digital audio recorder has been replaced with my ‘newish’ digital-camera/video/audio recorder with USB connector and a charger that only takes three hours (I remember when it was 24-hours and still didn’t hold the charge as long). I have a 1 terabyte external drive no bigger than my wallet. And all these handhelds and peripherals come with another User’s Manual. Still, I’m lucky I’m not a gamer—my 24-year-old son has been gaming since he was a toddler and the changes and evolutions of both online gaming and social apps are even more frequent and arcane.

But forget about the electronics—let’s just look at their collateral effects. There was a time I dreamed of owning a bookstore—now, they are nearly extinct. When our children were babies, we bought an Encyclopedia Britannica, which took up more than a yard of shelf space. Encyclopedias are no longer printed on paper—and for good reason: (1) That’s a LOT of Paper, and (2) Changes happen every minute, every second in our present lifestyle—far too quickly for the deliberate and exacting scholarship of the old encyclopedias to keep up with. Phonebooks, also, are rarely used—as are retail stores. I saw a sign at the A&P last week, offering delivery of one’s online-shopping-list postings! Actually, that is as much a step back as a step forward—groceries were often delivered by the grocer’s stock-boy in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

The immense changes, the obsolescence of so much of Americana, the removal or transfer of old businesses and services to online sites—the cultural changes that occur almost daily make this life a far more changeable one than that of our parents and grandparents. Plus, at the other extreme end, our children are spinning off into internal, digital worlds that make our changes seem like clumsy pokes at the new texture and complexity of the Information Age.

The scurrying to keep up that most people my age are doing is only just enough to keep us from losing the thread of progress—and we know that if we let it all get too far ahead of us, we may never participate in modern society again! Doctors, Lawyers, all professionals are required to take ongoing, continuing education courses in their field—and read a great deal of professional journals, besides—just to stay current in their field. Our legal system is perpetually digesting new crimes into legislation in a valiant, but perhaps doomed, effort to keep the law current with each new day’s opportunities and advances.

Many a geriatric has had to flip-flop on the issue of ‘computer stuff’—where once they swore they were too old to start learning all this new-fangled-ness, they are now flocking to the internet to talk to their grandchildren, download pics of their new-born great-grandchildren, play bridge with distant friends, find out about the latest medicinal breakthroughs, and re-connect with people that would have stayed, in the old way, mere memories (for good or ill).

And when I consider what pressure must have driven them to the internet, to email, to Facebook or MySpace or Google+ or Twitter—I shudder to think how much new stuff I’ll be forced to cram down my brain-stem at their age (I should live so long).

Thus, I am of the first generation for which there will never be an age ancient enough to allow us to become ‘set in our ways’. The alternative (i.e. apocalyptic collapse of the developed countries’ economies and governments) is no rosier, particularly in the case of senior citizens. So society has taken on aspects of the ‘moving sidewalks’ found in transport hubs and airports—we move forward even when at rest and, when walking, move at a run.

The old ways of civilization were much more integral with nature. As we aged, we became slower and duller, but more respected for our greater experience and wisdom. Now, our experiences are obsolete data, and wisdom—well, that was always as hard to come by as it was easy to ignore—nothing new about wisdom. When we wanted privacy, we simply took a walk around the block. When it got late at night, the mass media ‘signed off’ until tomorrow. When it was the day of rest, all the stores were closed and the streets were deserted. All these things were organic to a natural life. We move away from that integration with every new chipset-invention and global phenomenon. We are in danger of making civilization ‘user-un-friendly’. All this progress and change is of questionable value if the trade-off is increased stress and discomfort added to each individual’s lifestyle, or the splitting off of a new class structure, discriminating the tech-savvy from the digitally-illiterate.

And there is the basic activity of our old ways—walking, working, building, self-amusement, siestas, mid-day naps, and after-dinner constitutionals—almost gone already. How much joy will we squeeze from a world that sits at a keyboard and stares at a screen all day? I think I’d rather grow old getting ‘set in my ways’.

Okay, first there was the way Bush ‘elbowed’ his way into office while more rational people still had questions about the actual vote tallies. Then there was the way 9/11 was used by Bush to create a department of Homeland Security (cops without rules) and pass the ‘Patriot’ Act (a rescinding of the Bill of Rights) and use the political climate to declare war on Iraq under false pretenses. Then, having destroyed Iraq’s government, he allowed chaos to rule Baghdad, which led to the destruction of the infrastructure of the city we were supposedly ‘liberating’ (with severe loss of irreplaceable museum pieces–anthropological artifacts from man’s earliest civilizations—there’s something vast and sweeping about that BIG a screw-up).

Then he bumbled his way to a complete, global economic meltdown just as the country elected Bush’s opposite–a thinking, sincere, and respectable President, Barack Obama. And from the very first, the GOP behaved like a spoiled child–swearing that no matter what else happened, they would discredit our newly-elected president. And, true to their word (for once) they have spent the last four years trying to distract us from Obama’s sterling performance, from their own bankrupt, disproven policies, and from their religious zealotry. They have forestalled important legislation for four years to give themselves something to blame Obama for (how they expect the public not to see through that is beyond me–I call it treason, plain and simple).

Confederacy of Dunces

The richest people on earth ‘own’ the GOP–there’s no other way to explain their psychotic strategies and insufferable ignorance. I could fill page after page with a list of their incoherent behavior all through this dawn of a new millennium–some of it just stupid, some of it almost comic in its clumsiness, some of it terrifying to see held up as ‘family’ values. Whoever is touting Family Values in a country with a 50% divorce rate is living in a fantasy world, a world where we still haven’t seen through the pompous pieties of ancient religions, revived anew by good ol’ boys who willfully turn away from proven science, and use 21st century hi-tech communications and marketing techniques to snow their supporters.

I am speechless on the subject of the Tea Party. I shall hereafter refer to it as the Em-Tea Headed Party. I cannot fathom how Mitt Romney supposes we can support tax breaks for rich people–does that man actually know arithmetic? I don’t think he does. And his efforts to stay within the bounds of insanity delineated by his Republican base are hilarious. Apparently, even a blockhead like Mitt can’t support the more extreme idiocies of his party’s majority. If you lie down in a trailer park, you’re gonna get up with white-trash fleas–sorry, I couldn’t help it.

I’m not trying to be snippy. It’s just so hard to discuss some neo-con positions with a straight face. Are we supposed to have forgotten that the legalization of abortion was first hailed as an end to back-room abortion horror stories, and an end to centuries of men interfering in women’s rights? We men don’t even know what it’s like to have a single menstrual period! Yet we feel justified in telling the other half of the population how they should have unwanted children for the sake of some biblical mumbo-jumbo about an old man in the sky.

The most cherished ideals of the United States of America have been ‘separation of church and state’, religious freedom (which includes the right to not have one), and all people being born equal. By those lights, the GOP should be renamed the Anti-American party. Or maybe just the ‘death to all who refuse to bow down to the almighty dollar’ Party–but that name’s kinda long. Well, you know what I’m saying.

Because most Republican agendas for the last ten, twenty years have all been attacks on what were once touchstones of the American Spirit. They try to ignore–and get us to overlook–their trampling on our Constitution and our Bill of Rights–except when they want to distort it to their own advantage, as with this Chik-fil-a garbage being ‘religious freedom’ and ‘free speech’, when it is clearly hate speech dressed in red, white, and blue bunting.

It has me dazed–I cannot handle the volume and frequency of their desecrations of our way of life, or their purposefully and knowingly lying about Obama, the Democrats, and a host of other middle-to-liberal regular folks who got in the way of their vituperation. They have made celebrities of people like that druggie radio-nut and the former Governor of Alaska (you betcha). This is a woman who complained about Katie Couric innocently asking her what newspapers and magazines she read–because her answer was ‘none’. Now, whose fault is that, really? The anchorwoman who assumed anyone vying for executive office would read at least one gol’durn newspaper–or the pit-bull with lipstick on?

Sartre comes to mind. Are just about half of this country’s voters really behind these evil people, and their views and plans? These are the same people who fought slavery in the1860s, who supported anti-Semitism in the 1950s, who fought integration in the 1960s, who railed against the women’s lib movement in the seventies—the same people who still, today, want us to hate all homosexuals, when homosexuals clearly don’t hate us. Aren’t all those deluded people as ‘out of work’ as the rest of us? Can they really blame the guy who took office virtually the day after the ‘economy-bomb’ exploded on Wall Street—instead of the party that spent eight years getting us into that crater?

That new guy, btw, has been doing wonders with our economy, especially since he’s had to drag the Republicans kicking and screaming towards some kind of stimulus, regulation, and recovery. The GOP-led House of Representatives has carped, obfuscated, and turned up their noses at any attempt to restore this country, simply because it would be a Democrat President who would sign the legislation. Treason! There’s no other word for it.

But the past is prologue. They have crossed a line now. Now, they are trying to keep Democrats from voting, using the same old ‘Jim Crow’ bull that they used to use only on the African-Americans! How naked. How obscenely overt. How definitively reactionary. I must be going crazy. This is not the USA that I grew up in. That USA was far from perfect, I can’t deny that–but this nightmare landscape of devolutionary Social Justice, this macabre festival of Spin, Lies, Racism, Sexism, Evangelicalism, Greed… –and their lust for Power overriding any sense of responsibility to the ‘Land of the Free’. Ha. Not if they get their way…

A political party that purposely makes it more difficult for the poor, the elderly, and any-other-demographic-that-skews-left to cast their Votes! If they can manage to obstruct enough of the disenfranchised, they think they have a shot against a second term for Obama. I’m hoping this election will break their hearts as badly as they have broken mine, not only for the eight years their ‘W’ind-up Monkey trashed our nation, and its reputation, but for the last four years of their unabashedly irresponsible behavior towards the most dis-respected President that ever was. They should be ashamed of themselves, but I’m not sure they know what ‘shame’ is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tILrmSMjmAs&feature=context-chv

An intrepid astronaut, a champion of the little guy during both the shuttle-crash investigations, a natural teacher and role-model for every American—if you heard a talking head start out that way, you might be forgiven for assuming the media-speaker was talking about a man. After all, most of our brave soldiers and daring explorers, so far, have been men. They fit neatly into our delusions about ourselves, and our country, being brave, noble, and caring.

Once you heard ‘Sally Ride’, though, you’d think, ‘aha! That’s the female astronaut! Such a great role-model for girls…’ And again, you’d naturally assume that Ms. Ride did nothing in her life other than be a female astronaut—after all, such a great achievement is enough for anyone to have as their legacy. Oddly enough, however, Ms. Ride didn’t see herself that way at all—she always preferred others to think of her as the youngest astronaut ever-which she was.

Our foolishness, as a group, can’t help but see her as a female first rather than a youngest first. Ms. Ride focused, quite correctly, on the fact that she was the youngest person ever to go to space—man or woman, she had more forward thrust than any other ‘naut. We’ve become used to these kinds of paradoxes, because human nature is very stubbornly biased towards the outer appearance of a man or woman as opposed to their strength of mind or will or soul.

Ms. Ride was a nationally-ranked tennis player and earned a Bachelor’s in both English Lit (Shakespeare) and Physics before she ever saw the newspaper ad calling for astronaut-volunteers (Yes, that’s really how she began her NASA career). Her Stanford Masters and PhD degrees for astrophysics and lasers were just the first stepping stones on her journey into our history.

The two women who preceded the first American female were the Soviet Cosmonauts—Valentina Tereshkova (in 1963—six years before Apollo 11 went to the Moon) and Svetlana Savitskaya (in 1982, the year before Sally’s ride). Again we Americans show a twisted kind of pride in our first female American in space, while pretending to ignore that it took the US decades longer than the supposedly-more-restrictive Soviets to include women in the flight program.

But this is just a sample of the gripes I have about what’s happening in the USA right now—I was moved to write about Sally Ride because she represents many of the mistakes we make as a society. Firstly, she was a great person and an exceptional one, yet media attention went to scandals and scams and the latest little fad—before her unfortunate leave-taking five days ago, no one had mentioned her name in the national media since the day after she disembarked from her second, final flight in 1984.

Ms. Ride’s contributions to the Shuttle Robot Arm’s development in the years just prior to her first flight were rewarded by her being the first person to ever capture a satellite with the Robot Arm. Despite eight months of training towards her third space flight, the shuttle, Challenger ‘s deadly accident (her vehicle for both prior flights) stopped all scheduled flights—and—she was chosen to be part of the Rogers Commission Report and to head that inquiry’s sub-committee on Operations.

Roger Boisjoly, the whistleblower who warned of the O-ring problem before the flight, had been sent to Coventry by both Morton-Thiokol and NASA as a ‘troublemaker’. He experienced first-hand Ms. Ride’s hugeness of spirit when she publicly embraced him during that media firestorm. She easily saw through the short-sightedness of sacrificing safety to financial and political pressure. She also knew how important the man’s honesty was, and how important it was for the USA to get behind that kind of selflessness.

In 2003, Ms. Ride was asked to be part of the Columbia accident investigation—making her the only person to sit on both Shuttle disaster inquiries. In between those two, horrible events, Sally Ride arranged for cameras to be set-up on the ISS—allowing schoolchildren across the nation to take their own pictures of Earth from space (something I’m quite sure was left off my school’s curricula, back in the day). But that was just another good thing of all the good things this tremendous lady tossed to the rest of us on a nearly daily basis. I’m tempted to just cut-and-paste her entire Wikipedia article—just one page, but each line a piece of history and proof of Ms. Ride’s ennobling of our nation’s history, and of the women who live here.

How disappointing her last years must have been—America becoming so low-ranked in Science education, our media more interested in covering some damaged young lady flashing her privates leaving her limo for a night-club’s front door, our politics become a good impression of a Three Stooges act, our economy being destroyed by the people who most benefit from it! Her starry-eyed dedication to a nation that was once less proud, but much more worthy of pride—a place where science would do more than generate revenue, where science would be a factor in our noble search for a more perfect union. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she cried for this country, at some time, in her last years.

And now we come to the most pitiful part—Sally Ride was a lesbian. She spent that entire, amazing life keeping secret her most private self—because we are too stupid to let it go. People are gay, some of them—can’t we just move on? No, we can’t—just a few days ago a greasy-spoon fast-food franchise announced that their position on gays was that ‘homosexuality was ungodly and wrong’, period. Then, when more sensible people got upset about it, this company leader accused his critics of trampling on his freedom of speech!

Someone I know called this ‘family values’ today. I couldn’t help but point out that ‘family values’ had no definition, and was code for ‘My hate speech is okay, because I read the Bible’. This bothers me no end. First of all, the corporate executive who promotes this public support of bigotry is, by inference, including all his employees and franchisees in that policy. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I think that there could well be at least one clear-minded, civilized person in that group that would much prefer to speak for his- or her- self.

The trouble with an ideal, such as ‘liberty and justice for all’, is that one lone scumbag can screw up the entire thing—by taking advantage of everyone else’s good intentions. Lies are also harmful to a free society, as are graft, corruption, sexual harassment, gay-bashing, evangelical fascism, and Ponzi schemes.

When the far-right tries to defend its position against pluralism by citing ‘freedom of religion’, they know as well as we do that it’s nonsense—keeping one religion from defining our legislative guidelines is not an offense against the ideal of ‘separation of church and state’. It is simply accepting the fact that, even if it were true that our country began as an English colony talking about different Protestant sects, the rules don’t change when you don’t like the other person’s religion. Just as when we accepted ‘all men are created equal’, in spite of a clear inequality by both race and sex in 1776, we continue to refine our society toward following the truth of our words, rather than the truth of our baser traditions.

Much like the embrace of commercial success by televangelists, today’s religious institutions seem to have put aside their scruples over the means to their ends. Violence, propaganda, and obfuscation are good weapons to use against a society under pressure—not that we’ve never seen pressure before, as a nation—but we never expected our ‘spiritual institutions’ to lead the charge against honesty and good will, mercy and compassion.

I could type forever and those who hear me already know and agree, but those against my position will find sloppy connections between my words, here, and something ‘evil’, they will still speak with forked tongue on the subject of social justice. It’s impressive, really, in a way—who woulda thought that talking non-stop bull and shouting slogans, instead of being straightforward, was a good way to convince one’s followers that one has an open mind? It’s insane.

I can only suppose that these people are ignorant or just plain lazy-minded—just tell them what they want to believe and ignore the facts completely, and they’ll support you with such malice and venom that, in the end, the rest of us will be near despair, on the cusp of futility. And if it’s breaking the heart of this foolish typist, I can only imagine how badly it pained one of our great, though mostly ignored, heroes, the superlative Sally Ride.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Okay, same drill as last time–click on a video title to hear my music.

It is recommended that the window be minimized and the music play in background while you play Snood or do Paperwork or whatever. I have tried to make some of them with interesting video effects and subtitled ‘factoids’, but even then, it is a video of myself at the keyboard–if I could have uploaded the Windows Media Player’s Alchemy visualization, you could see what I like to have on-screen while I listen to my stuff (It’s much better than the piano video, it has more motion and color–and the way it changes in time with the music is great.)

I post less and less of my sheet-music stuff–I can’t seem to sight-read as well as last year, and none of it ever seems worthy of sharing, since it is boring and annoying at the same time. Those few that I have posted recently will give ample evidence of what I’m talking about, unfortunately. On a happier note, my improvs seem to be ‘thickening’, if that’s a thing (?), and getting longer, too. It may be that my bag of tricks is big enough now to support these 10 to 20 minute improvs, without running out of new material. And another benefit of the increased ‘figures’-pallette is I have more things to mash together, rarely allowing me to make new ‘tricks’ even I wasn’t expecting….

XperDunn plays Piano (UpDate) for July 14th, 2012

Improv – Banquet Hall (2012July13)

Improv – Fanfare (2012July13)

Improv – Curlique (2012July13)

J.S.Bach “The Well-Tempered Clavier – Book II” – Prelude-Fugue in g Min__Fugue in G (2012Jul09)

Improv – Burnoose (2012Jul09)

Improv – Novella (2012Jul07)

Improv – Independence Day (Fourth of July! – 2012)

Improv – Independence Eve (2012Jul03)

Improv – Bouillabaisse (2012Jul01)

Improv – Long Lonely Wait (2012Jun25)

Improv – The Long Break (2012Jun24)

Improv – Sunny Summer Day (2012Jun19)

Improv – Noblest Of Daughters  (2012Jan26)

“Imagination” (By Van Heusen and Burke) (2012Jun18)

Improv – Morning Bright (2012Jun08)

Improv – Take That, Piano! (2012Jun07)

Improv – Melodious (2012Jun07)

Improv – June Bride (2012Jun07)

Three(3) Jazz Standards (2012Jun07)

J.S. Bach’s the Well-Tempered Clavier Book II – Preludes & Fugues Nos.10,11,12 (2012May30)

Improv – Frying Pan  (2012May18)

Improv – Flee From Fleas (2012May30)

Improv a La Exercise (2012May30)

Five (5) Jazz Standards (2012May24)

Improv* In 2 Parts (2012May16)*(w/apology2HrmansHermits”For Your Love”)

Improv – Rooster (2012May07)

Improv – Dr. Zeus (2012May04)

Improv – May Day! May Day! (2012May01)

SILLY SUPPER (2012Apr29)

A. Vivaldi -Concerto – transcribed for Keyboard by J.S. Bach (2012Apr26)

Improv – Peeps (2012Apr26)

There are a group of talking points that recur in every election which have the dislikable quality of being a complete waste of time. They are the issues that boil down to a personal courage. We can include the ‘War on Drugs’, the Dangers of Socialism, and the Financial Regulation problem on this list, just to name three. In some ways I suppose a case could be made for the entirety of government’s legislation and policies, and every other aspect of a political campaign, being a case of people’s courage (or people’s lack of same).

Nonetheless, my focus at this point is on issues for which a moment’s thought would easily replace hours of speeches, statements, and proposal’s regarding the various sides of the argument. Let us begin with my favorite—more properly, my pet peeve—the criminalization of marijuana and the War on Drugs.

To start, I know that being in favor of marijuana’s legalization marks me as a pot-head—to which charge I plead guilty, if anyone cares—and that anyone agitating in favor of even medical marijuana suffers from the same assumption. By and large it’s most likely true, but my heart bleeds for any poor, straight-arrow person who tries to argue the facts while under such prejudice. Still, this assumption by society has another component, in demonstrating that a huge percentage of everyday Americans are trying to enjoy this weed in spite of its potential criminal consequences. If our society really felt that the law banning pot was a benefit, there would be a lot less successful comics using it as a punch-line—not to mention the birth of a new media genre—the ‘stoner comedy’.

In that sense, what we are really up against is the notion that enjoying the effects of smoking weed is irresponsible behavior. ‘Irresponsible’ has become a dirty word to us lately. The old-fashioned attitude that a person has the right to maunder through life’s experiences, without taking much of it too seriously, has given way to our present attitude—that irresponsibility is a crime against the community, endangering others and showing contempt for one’s own reputation.

I think I can pinpoint the exact moment this shift began—it was an episode of Dragnet which told the story of a young, newlywed couple becoming forgetful about the baby in the bathtub and letting the little angel drown—while they got high with their stoner friends in the very next room. I was horrified (I was also still too young to be personally familiar with the drug sub-culture of the 1960’s). But even children (as I was back then) would draw the real lesson from this episode—don’t forget the baby. This common understanding of life’s priorities has been keeping young parents from overindulging in anything, including sleep, since the beginning of time. They don’t get drunk at baby’s bath-time. They don’t let their baby drown in the tub because they’re in the middle of a real good story. They don’t do anything, because they’re taking care of the baby.

To begin with, one doesn’t give a baby a bath in the grown-ups’ tub—certainly not one filled entirely up. Neither do parents place their baby in any bathtub and walk into the next room! For ‘Joe Friday’ to sum up this case as ‘baby-slaughter by parental high-ness’ is stupid.

In truth, not every person given responsibility for an infant is a parent—some of them are too beset with personal demons, or poverty, or disability, to be good parents. And those poor souls will occasionally allow a baby to come to harm. However, smoking pot is only one of a thousand ways to neglect and endanger a child.

By suggesting that marijuana is the catalyst in such tragedies, we are not only scapegoating human failings by blaming the herb—we are also coloring society as some picture-perfect landscape of caring and selfless people, marred only occasionally by fiends—rude, violent fiends, driven insane by their pharmaceutical excesses and lack of respect for authority. The truth is something more nuanced, in which fear, greed, rage, and jealousy are far more likely to be the triggers for all violence, most felonies, many accidents—and a lot of so-called ‘white collar’ crimes.

Also nuanced is the effect of Cannabis on a person’s behavior—it makes one happy, it makes one dopey, and it makes one more sensitive and less responsible. If being an irresponsible dope is a crime, we must immediately begin building more jails than homes. Neither do I see ‘chemical enhancement’ of one’s mood to be an escapist notion. Many people have hard lives—if they can soften it with a nice buzz, how is that a crime? I see the crime as our society being a place where many people’s lives are made so hard to bear.

I won’t spend a lot of time on the hypocrisy of allowing alcohol and not weed, when smoking weed is a safer, healthier and less debilitating experience than drinking. We all know by now that there are no recorded deaths due to smoking weed—a statistic unmatched by even over-the-counter drugs, like aspirin. We know that Prohibition was a bad idea, and that Prohibition was repealed when the troubles of a ‘no-drinking-allowed’ society were clearly seen as far greater than the drinking troubles Prohibition sought to prevent.

And in the end, Repeal was a good thing. Now, instead of outlawing drinking, we have AA, Al-Anon, Rehab Facilities, enforcement of ‘domestic violence’ laws, child services, and therapy. Instead of preventing something that many people enjoy safely, we have a system that assists people in mental or emotional distress, whether their problems stem from alcoholism or not. Plus, ironically, we have these safeguards for people suffering from drug addiction, as well, in spite of those hard drugs remaining illegal (more on them later). But there are no pot rehabs, are there? No, there aren’t, because pot is safe, mild, and non-addictive. Let me assure you that if anyone you know claims to be a ‘pot addict’ what they’re really saying is that they’re unhappy or maybe lazy, possibly even thoughtless, or careless— but not addicted.

I should know—I’m an addict. I’m addicted to nicotine. If I go for more than an hour without smoking a cigarette, I’ll start climbing the walls—it’s no joke. But if I don’t smoke weed, the only result is my inability to watch TV. Present day television is so clogged with commercials, reality programming, skewed news channels, talk shows, and sit-coms that I can’t stand it—I turn it off. But when I’m high, I really enjoy television. Sometimes being dopey is just the correct choice—something important to remember in a society obsessed with leisure activities.

One of the darkest reasons behind our present laws on pot is the reactionary attitude most grown-ups feel towards having fun. Whether this is part of a fundamentalist religious screed, or simply the after-taste of this country’s long-standing Calvinism, the automatic dismissal of anything fun is a bad habit we’ve developed.

DEA administrator Michele Leonhart alleged: “[T]here are no adequate and well-controlled studies proving (marijuana’s) efficacy; the drug is not accepted by qualified experts. … At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.”

Last month, Ms. Leonhart testified before Congress that she believed that heroin and marijuana posed similar threats to the public’s health because, in her opinion, “all illegal drugs are bad.” This seems like a chapter from “Alice In Wonderland”!

 “Why is marijuana illegal?” “Because it’s bad for you.” “How is it bad?” “Well, all illegal drugs are bad.”

Moving on… our laws against weed remain unchanged, even though no one has suffered any ill effects from it in the sixty years this debate has ground on. We are afraid to legalize pot—the politicians are understandably loath to address legalization—their role as ‘leaders’ is a fantasy (they seem more like ‘grasper’s to me) that will become impossible to maintain if their opponents can describe them as ‘party animals’. And this is in spite of the fact that there is nothing wrong with an occasional party. Somehow, a party is okay, but wanting to go to a party is the sign of the hedonist.

We are afraid to admit that we want to have fun. We are fearful of being laughed at—or worse yet scorned—for unabashedly enjoying ourselves, even on a Saturday night. We cannot accept the notion of an adult who can work hard and still have a little fun at the end of the week. Weren’t we, as children, told that we weren’t old enough to have a drink, to go dancing in clubs, or to smoke cigarettes? Was that our elders’ way of telling us that growing up meant giving up the whole idea of enjoying oneself?

I believe that a good mix of hard work and fun is a healthy life-style. Most people seem to have a mindset that makes alcohol a threat, not a treat; a mindset that makes going out at night a lapse, not leisure; a mindset that makes ‘recreational’ drug use a mental illness, instead of an innovation in leisure. I believe it is unhealthy, especially for people that have a lot of free time to spend, to focus exclusively on the negatives of most vices.

The trouble with vices is not in their negative effects, it is in the challenge of taking responsibility for ourselves. People who are afraid of their self-control being the only monitor between them and a good time, are people who don’t trust themselves to make their own choices—and this is cowardice of the worst kind. It is a cowardice that declares, “I can’t trust myself to make choices—so let the law state that I’m not, and everyone else isn’t allowed to have those choices!” It’s all very snug and charming, like a baby blanket. Its only drawback is its being the opposite of liberty—something we like to pretend we have.

Another nuance concerning marijuana is its unique-ness. A good part of our criminalization of weed is due to its being classified as a ‘hard drug’, along with Percocet and heroin. But that is just lazy thinking—authorities just selected a category for cannabis from those already extant—when it is quite clear that cannabis is as different from hard drugs as it is from vegetables. Granted, pot does make a person high—and pot is edible and grows in the dirt, but it just isn’t a vegetable or a ‘hard’ drug. People like to forget that the term ‘hard’ drugs was coined just to distinguish drugs with the potential to kill someone outright from drugs that have a more benign character (such as a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a couple of aspirin, or a joint). The law may confuse pot with heroin, but an ER doctor doesn’t have the luxury of willful blindness to the practical facts.

Heroin can kill you. If you show up in an ER and tell the doctor, “Save me! I just smoked some weed!” the doctor will be furious—and he’ll tell the cops to eject you from the building. That’s what the real world has to say about weed—‘don’t bother me with silly nonsense—we’ve got serious stuff to worry about’. In the meantime, respectable folks risk jail-time whenever they choose to indulge in this victimless felony. Shouldn’t increasing stresses in society be matched with improved ways of relaxing?

Now, before you dismiss me completely as a self-serving psycho, let’s review: Pot has proven safe to use—even for people who aren’t on chemo. Pot is wrongly categorized as a schedule-one controlled substance—more dangerous than codeine—a schedule-three narcotic. Pot is milder and safer than drinking.

 And let’s tie up some loose ends—yes, of course driving-while-high is dangerous and should not be treated more lightly than a DWI offense. I’m not suggesting that we ignore Marijuana’s effects, just that it shouldn’t be a felony to smoke it on your couch while doing a crossword puzzle. Likewise, I am not saying that kids should be allowed to smoke—again, like drinking and tobacco, it should be legal only for twenty-one-year-olds and above.

Marijuana should also have the same restraints placed upon it that alcohol has. It should be taxed up the whazoo, as well—just like cigarettes (another drug that is more dangerous and addictive than weed). Licenses for pot stores should be required, just like alcohol. I wouldn’t be in favor of ‘pot bars’ though—as with alcohol, what’s the thinking behind driving to an establishment that serves liquor? Is there some magic power in ‘bar’ alcohol that makes it safe to drive home? I don’t think so—and by the same reasoning, there’s no point in a place one drives to, to smoke pot and drive away again… ridiculous.

You can see that I’m not proposing we turn the USA into a hippie commune—I’m just proposing that we see Marijuana as it is, not as an alternative to Heroin. Why should you care—wouldn’t it be better to just leave  it be? After all, you don’t smoke. It’s no skin off your nose. I can’t argue that point, really. However, there are a few possible benefits that could come of legalized marijuana—and they would benefit everyone, not just me and my buddies.

Tax revenue. A lot of tax revenue. New businesses—small start-ups in every town with a traffic light at the crossroads. Increased employment required for the new businesses. One or two people in every town and every city block—it’d add up, and it’d be new jobs everywhere, not just in Detroit or Los Angeles.

How about ending the black market for weed? Legalization would almost instantly bring the black market to an end. That would make it more difficult for minors to purchase marijuana. It would bring quality control and an honest marketplace to those of us who would much rather not be committing a crime every time we acquire our favorite past-time. And we would all enjoy TV shows that much more.

So, legalize it—what else can I say? 

Now that we’ve settled that, I’d like to address the War on Drugs. I have no skin in this game, all my drugs are prescribed by doctors. But I do feel that one could just as easily call it the War on Human Nature. Place as many obstacles in their path as you want—if you can’t get people to stop wanting drugs (and I think that’s QED at this point) you can’t win a war on black-market drugs. Drug laws like ours only serve to create a criminal environment. And a significant number of citizens are not rooting for the police—they can’t, because the law puts them on the other side of the line.

I know it’s part of America to scruple at ‘coddling the weak-willed’. And, in a country founded on the strength of each individual’s will, that makes a lot of sense, at least at first glance. But if we look again… is it possible that we are fighting the image of drugs, rather than drugs’ reality? When taking drugs began, it was part of a ‘counter-culture’—it wasn’t just reckless, it was a characteristic of the hippy, peace-protesting, anti-establishment movement that really came close to churning the whole nation into anarchic chaos.

And from that moment on, drug-abuse became an important criticism upon the counter-culture—something bad that these crazies were guilty of, and responsible for. But even if that was true at the time (which is debatable) it is certainly not the reality of present day drug use. Nor is our society as unyielding towards emotional confusion and mental derangement, addiction and compulsion, as it was in the era of ‘free love’ (ha!-that phrase still makes me laugh).

No, we recognize the reality of drug abuse—and we respond to it with rehab centers, half-way houses, counselors and new drugs, such as methadone. And employment policies of most corporations provide for addicted or alcoholic employees—seeking to get them back to work, not to throw them in prison. And throwing people who use drugs in prison, in general, is pretty stupid—we swell the prison population, our taxes go to keeping these helpless victims housed, fed, and abused by their fellow inmates, real sociopaths that belong there.

So drugs are real, abusers come from every demographic of society, drugs have no political agenda, and it costs a sackful of money to maintain the DEA and that percentage of the prison population comprised of unfortunate drug-abusers. Keeping drugs illegal keeps black market gangs and terrorist groups in the money. Keeping drugs illegal keeps addicts, especially minors, from seeking help with their addiction—which keeps many of them from dropping their addiction before it kills them.

Again, I’m not in favor of hard drug use as recreation, or life-style, or habit. I am only in favor of decriminalizing drugs for the exact same reasons we repealed Prohibition eighty years ago. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were a team of lobbyists fighting to keep drugs illegal—funded by the drug lords who get rich beyond measure on the status quo. But if everyone else thinks that a drug user should be arrested and thrown in jail—because that is the best way of dealing with the issue—then I guess I’m wrong.

These drugs—meth, H, crack, Percocet, LSD, E… are dangerous. They’ll kill you quick—or leave you wishing you’d died. I don’t want to popularize hard drugs. But I think it would make a lot of sense to offer unconditional relief to addicts, to remove the revenue-stream that floods the coffers of organized, international criminals, and to save the revenue we now spend on the DEA’s hopeless, impossible task.

It’s like terrorism, in a way—the USA has fantastic armed forces—in conventional warfare, we kick ass. But terrorists don’t attack on a battle field. More complex and sophisticated responses have to be implemented—sheer force is useless. So now we fight a different way. In like fashion, it was once considered reasonable to try to prevent drug-abuse with the threat of criminal prosecution—all law-abiding citizens would surely stop. Today, we know that is too simplistic. Drug addicts are far more victims than criminals—and it’s time we saw the truth in that.

But, bottom line, the greatest loss here is ‘the bottom line’—all the money wasted, all the potential tax-revenue ignored, all the productive citizens sidelined by their moment’s lapse in judgment or control. We are talking huge amounts of money—and drug use continues to grow, in spite of decades of trying to hold back the tide—it’s a tragedy from several points of view. And our present policies, also, are stupid and ineffectual in more than just one sense.

So I guess my main message is—think about our drug laws, think about them rather than reacting emotionally to the issue. Try to look past “Drugs are Bad” and see that the problem is more one of human nature than of outlawry, and its solutions should focus more on the humans, and less on the outrage. Let’s all choose to face facts. Let’s all choose to have the courage to face the truth, and face the challenges of the human condition. Choose courage.

‘Hypertext-ization’ of Randy Bell’s

[IN THE AIR TONIGHT – PROMPT #58] entitled: “I’m On Hiatus”:

I’m On Hiatus

Through the atmosphere

somewhere between Indus and Orion

Boötes tends the herd led by

Apus, Pegasus, and Monoceros

when Pavo isn’t showing off

The Hunting Dogs are kept on tight leash

lest The Greater Dog outdo The Lesser Dog

or worse, The Arrow from Sagittarius find it’s mark

*****

I seek the unseekable

I crave the unknowable

I reach for the unreachable

I dream the undreamable

*****

I call the Milky Way

hearth and home

just a side street

off the road

of the Gods

&

The Constellations are just

mere lawn ornaments

in my front yard

~ Randy Bell ~

Saturday, May 12, 2012

What’s the Big Tragedy?

The great tragedy in life is that meaning is individual

The things we assign meanings to are ours alone

And we are often surprised when someone close gives

No meaning to what we treasure or will obsess over what we ignore

The great divide between parent and child is made of meaning

The accrued meaning of the adult against the whims of youngsters

Our children simply cannot see things we see, or understand what

We have lived through, perhaps fought through, but still

These meanings they can never know, until time passes

And even then, though they be separate from their own kids

They will still see differing meanings from our own, because

So much of our understanding comes from our trials, our milieu,

Time is a gap that can never be bridged logically, only by heart and blood.

Even in the pews on the Sabbath, we pray abreast but never

To an identical god—our meanings define our concepts our priorities

And our values—my creator is not equal to yours and yours is not a

Duplicate of anyone else’s, what we each care about and how much we care

Can never be exactly the same. To quote T.S. Eliot: “Words reach..”

And we all do likewise, reaching towards each other from within

Our separate universes, which differ by being centered in my head or

in yours. Do you scoff? If you’re thinking that the differences are tiny

And insignificant, ask yourself how you can be certain—question

Why conversations take so long, why we argue so often, why we cry.

I’ll never know precisely why you love me, or just exactly why you

hate me so—you’ll never feel the hammering of my heart when you

Are close; you’ll never know the sadness you bestowed-you

Cannot know, me neither, we can’t know. We’ll never know each other

Only marvel at the thrill of love that binds us and shake our heads

At cruelty and at blame. Is there no way we ever touch, mind to mind?

Perhaps not, but this call is about the trying, the will we use when

We try to see things their way, the sacrifice that makes all of us a

Part of one, the charity that shares with others, the tenderness

That keeps our children safe, the honesty that never hires a lawyer

The ignorant, the cheaters, make it harder, but their bile has

A reason, they weren’t newborn cruel, and so their troubles come to

All of us, they need mercy more than to be caught, their violence

Calls for restraint more than torture. And that is why the civil of us

Keep on going—because there is no other way.

– May 2012  Xper Dunn

‘Tension’ by XperDunn

Saturday, May 12, 2012  Prose Version:

So, What’s the Big Tragedy?

The great tragedy in life is that ‘meaning’ is individual. The things we assign meanings to are ours alone and we are often surprised when someone close gives no meaning to what we treasure, or will obsess over what we ignore.

The great divide between parent and child is made of ‘meaning’—the accrued meaning of the adult against the whims of youngsters. Our children simply cannot see things we see, or understand what we have lived through, perhaps fought through. But still, these meanings they can never know, until time passes. And even then, though they be separated from their own kids, they will still see differing meanings from our own, because so much of our understanding comes from our trials, our milieu.

Time is a gap that can never be bridged logically, only by heart and blood. Even in the pews on the Sabbath, we pray abreast, but never to an identical God—our meanings define our concepts, our priorities, and our values—my creator is not equal to yours and yours is not a duplicate of anyone else’s.

What we each care about and how much we care can never be exactly the same. To quote T.S. Eliot: “Words reach..” And we all do, likewise, reaching towards each other from within our separate universes, which differ by being centered in my head or in yours.

Do you scoff? If you’re thinking that the differences are tiny, insignificant, just ask yourself how you can be certain—question why conversations take so long, why we argue so often, why we cry.

I’ll never know precisely why you love me, or just exactly why you hate me so—you’ll never feel the hammering of my heart when you are close; you’ll never know the sadness you bestowed-you cannot know, me neither, we can’t know. We’ll never know each other, only marvel at the thrill of love that binds us and shake our heads at cruelty and at blame.

Is there no way we ever touch, mind to mind? Perhaps not, but this ‘olly-olly-oxen-free’ call is about the trying, the will we use when we try to see things ‘their’ way, the sacrifice that makes all of us a part of one, the charity that shares with others, the tenderness that keeps our children safe, and trying to keep to the honesty that never hires a lawyer.

The ignorant, the cheaters, make it harder—but their bile has a reason—they weren’t new-born ‘cruel’, and so their troubles come back to all of us. They need mercy, more than to be caught; their violence calls for restraint, more than torture. And that is why the civil of us keep on going—because there is no other way.

But that doesn’t make it any easier—do you know what I mean? (Probably not.)

No more reportage, fie upon thee, Journalism! Do I look like a talking head? I don’t think so! No, I have a head- and heart-full of living inside me and the last thing I want to do is look ahead to the further complexity, the greater degeneration, the crimes we visit upon ourselves, and the acts of nature that wipe away a whole shoreline’s population.

What I want to do is listen to music from 1968: “Sunday Will Never Be The Same” as performed by ‘Spanky and Our Gang’—or 1962: “Green Onions” recorded by ‘Booker T. and The MGs’.

Spanky and Our Gang singing Sunday Will Never Be The Same”

I want that miasma of sentiment to choke the hell out of me—to stop me in my tracks and recall to me the feelings of my six-to-twelve-year-old self—that wonderful ignorance that enshrouds the young mind with possibility and potential, unknowns and discoveries awaiting. I was good then—I hadn’t really recognized the possibility of wrong—fairy tales were my texts, Santa was the story I was told, not the lie I told my own toddlers.

A beautiful glow appears in my backwards-cast glance that I couldn’t have felt back then, only now with the added perspective of tawdry, adult reality. It’s an emotional shock, to me, not too different from the physical shock of plunging into frigid waters, makes my heart ache and yearn and almost explode—but not regret (that I save for my forebrain) just a wistful longing for that long-past sweetness of times when I saw the world more optimistically.

And I don’t know why I knock my head against the wall trying to convey the feeling—it can’t be described. My emotional works are so tightly enmeshed with music that a certain feeling accompanies all music for me, this 60s solid-gold hit, that 70s Carol King classic, this Brahms symphony, that movie-soundtrack from my favorite movie of its day…. It’s all tangled up in my school days, my love life, my family, my days and nights, my feelings, my politics, my challenges and achievements—they all had a sound track. I have never held a job where music is forbidden—that may have been chance, for all I know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by not-so-accident.

I always read with music on—it’s just not the same without music. I always studied (in my school years) with the radio on—and not just any radio station. In the olden times, radio was its own thing—TV couldn’t compete with one thing that radio offered—the option of doing something else while it played music for atmosphere. Radios were portable—and popular! I remember childhood day-trips to Jones Beach when all the portable radios all up and down the beach would be tuned to the same station—and rock and roll followed one through the crowds and the waves—it can’t be described and, unfortunately, will probably never happen again. People were so communal back then—in our isolated and isolating 21^st century we go without that—sometimes for good, but sometimes for bad, too.

People generally disapprove of the teenager with the ear-buds permanently implanted in the ears—but they forget what it was like when FM radio hit its peak—and punk-rockers would share their cacophony with the entire, unwilling neighborhood, carrying their boom-boxes with them wherever they went.

Before either of those remarkable eras, however, radio was a part of life. On Bethpage, Long Island, New York my single-digit years were a continuous ear-scape of AM 60’s Pop Hits. “Cousin Brucie” spieled the hit list and spun the 45s containing early-everything: early Beatles, early Stones, Diana Ross while she still had Supremes, the Bee Gees before they turned Disco, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Booker T. & the MGs, Simon & Garfunkel when they were still ‘Folk’ singers, et. al. Rock itself was new—the ‘dinosaurs’ that were still Elvis fans, including my dear Aunt Lois (Honey), were only a few years older than my oldest brother, James G.—who was only four years older than me.

At night, when we were sent upstairs to our bedrooms, we four boys (my sister, Kathy, was still a baby) would work on the perfect ‘tuning’ of the radio’s station knob. It changed with the weather, you see—AM radio had a great reach, because it could bounce the signal up off the ionosphere and down off the ground—if the signal was strong enough, it could reach well over the horizon. But the process required a carrier tone (a fairly high-pitched tone that was only audible during dead air—and that didn’t happen much) and the bouncing through the atmosphere made tuning-in a variable thing. At times of inclement weather we could even be forced to listen with a hand on the knob, to re-tune as conditions warranted—oh, yes, you earned your music back then.

So that was early ‘sonic’ life for me—the radio in our room, the radio in the car, and the occasional appearance of a band on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. By the time I got to high-school age, I had developed a strong interest in classical music—not in place of popular music, but in addition to it. We lived in Katonah by then and the Katonah Village Library had a listener-area with two record-players—I spent a lot of time there, head-phones on, listening to just about every record they had (quite a collection, but nothing compared to my own).

My dad used to get angry at me for lying on the floor of my bedroom (we all had our own bedrooms in the new Katonah house!) with the lights out, listening to really loud classical music—like Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”, for example. It was all wrong—I was lying on the floor instead of sitting in a chair, I was in the dark instead of turning the light on like a normal person—and the damn music was too loud! O, he hated that. He’d fling open the door, flash on the lights, and yell—needless to say, he ruined the mood. But, being a hard-working commuter who took the train to Manhattan and back every workday, my dad wasn’t around for large parts of the day. So we bugged each other, but only for short periods of time, usually.

When FM came into its own, it was a wonder—no carrier tone, just hi-fidelity broadcasts of hi-fi LPs—when ‘dead-air’ occurred with FM, there was nothing—no sound of the radio itself. It was like listening to a record playing without worrying about skips, scratches, and bumps. You who haven’t lived through the Hi-Fidelity Stereophonic Record-Player Era cannot imagine how we agonized over our turntables. A heavy tread of someone walking across the room could make the player go nuts, the tone arm jumping up and down onto the grooved surface instead of being carefully dragged along the grooves (which was actually one very big groove spiraling from the outside edge of the LP to the blank spot at the center).

Before the tech explosion, I owned a metric-ton of LPs—Deutsche Grammophon’s “Complete Works of Beethoven” and Time-Life Sets of “The Baroque Era” and “The Romantic Era”, etc. are just two examples of the many free LP-sets my dad (the Madison Avenue ad-man) brought home as free samples of the products his clients provided him. Later, I would go through 8-track cassette players (a mercifully short period before audio-cassette tapes blew them away). Then I had stacks and piles of audio-cassettes during the audio-tape interlude, and have, today, a huge amount of audio CDs. I have been behind-hand on my I-Pod Nano and my purchasing of digital downloads for same, but I’m 56, dammit—life changes faster and I adapt more slowly. And I already own most every piece of music that I want to hear—Pop Music will have to do some serious changing before I feel compelled to follow its ins-and-outs like I used to.

Still, I have uploaded over 800 videos of my own music onto YouTube-channel: xperdunn, and I am only having trouble with my Nano because I’m still getting my ‘sea-legs’ on the Win7 OS (which seems to dislike even older Apple products, in addition to the new monitors, printers, scanners, etc. one is forced to buy to be compatible with MS’s latest-version OS) and also by virtue of being so busy with my various computer projects, mostly involving again, my own musical recordings, that I have trouble finding time to listen to my own playbacks, much less fuss over an I-Pod I never need because of my house-bound life-style. But I keep it plugged into the ‘Port’ Claire got me—it was a welcome bit of still-working tech during last year’s week-long power outage!

But I’m just an old codger—my fascination with music has become a comfort that I keep playing in the background, not really hearing it anymore because of my over-familiarity with all of it. Music that once made me emotionally fluoresce is now a part of me, so much so that I hear it even in silence. Plus computers ruin everything. I use to wish I had enough money to buy all the great stuff that a real painter needed to work with—easels, pallettes, palette-knives, hi-quality brushes, stretched canvases—then, one day, CorelDraw is released and it offers an infinity of options—over one million colors, easy copying and duplicating of any image—making things so easy and so unlimited that, to this day, I have trouble using it—it’s too much. And music is much the same—for a lousy $0.99, I can have a recording of any piece of classical music or swing-band classic—no more haunting record shops, hoping to find an actual artifact from that historical period, no more worrying about records getting old or scratched. Heck, I could listen to my I-Pod while I jackhammer my concrete driveway. And not only would the music be guaranteed not to skip or scratch, but the noise-suppression headphones would drown out the sound of the jackhammer!

Ask any artist. Creation is a struggle—it should be a struggle, that’s what gives it substance and meaning. Computers take away all the trouble of the arts, as if artists were accountants, overjoyed to be done with adding machines. If you gave Michelangelo a CAD-CAM sculpturing machine, could he still create the Pieta? Without holding a chisel, without feeling the stone? Maybe, but I doubt it. How many writers still write by hand? There are still a few left—they just can’t think up their stuff while sitting at a computer station. It doesn’t make it easier for them—it makes it impossible. Then again, if everyone in Renaissance Florence had a CAD/CAM program, how many sculptors would have been as good or better than big Mike, but went their whole lives long without the resources or the strength to do what he did, carving art from rocks?

So saying ‘computers ruin everything’ may be a little reactionary. We ‘transitional’s always get messed up. Those who came before had their lives in a world where writing was done by hand, calculations were done on a blackboard, messages had to be carried from place to place, and finding out one’s location in degrees of latitude and longitude was a tedious process that only ship’s navigators and bombardiers had to fret over. Those of our children’s age will spend their lives in a world of digital media and laser-guidance—they’ll be perfectly happy with things they’d had around and about them since infancy.

But we ‘middler’s have to be satisfied that the world of our childhood is gone and will never return; and that the future will only become more disorienting as we age. It’s exciting, yes—but it isn’t comfortable.

That old music: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You”, “I’d Like To Get To Know You”, “Mony Mony”, “Opus 17”, “The Rain, The Park, And Other Things”, “I’m A Believer”—they weren’t trying to become rock stars, they were spilling out all the non-conformist thoughts and feelings that needed to be repressed to please one’s parents and teachers. They were glorying in the freedom to say right out loud exactly what they wanted to say. Even though Free Speech was just as recognized then as now, it wasn’t practiced. Etiquette could be said to trump Free Speech—and Etiquette had the strength of steel in those times.

Imagine being a girl wearing a t-shirt and getting thrown in jail for indecent exposure. Imagine being a boy getting beaten to death for holding hands with another boy. It was a tyranny of silence. Good Manners not only had a stranglehold on society, they also included the magic ingredient for their ‘eternal life’—that is wasn’t ‘proper’ to discuss sensitive topics. And don’t forget, ‘sensitive’ can be read as ‘important’ in this context. It was an age when Americans would tell each other that, with free speech, ‘we can even criticize our President’—but no one dared to actually criticize the President, or the Pope, or the Mayor, Governor, Senator, etc. Authoritarianism had been bolstered by the idea that our authorities had recently saved us (by getting a lot of us killed) from the horrors of Fascism—and were in the process of saving us from Communism.

Rock and Roll gave voice to the young people who were about to scream at the prissy, laissez faire, up-tightness of their elders—the veterans of WWII and Korea. But without the catastrophe that was the Korean Conflict (you know the BS is really flying when armies face each other, but the people in charge scruple at calling it a ‘war’!) we would not have had that tiny minority of disaffected veterans who had taken a different lesson away from their time in Korea. Youth was so helpless and ignored back then, they never could have pushed the culture so far towards rebellion unless a few grown-ups sympathized and abetted their drive towards a new kind of freedom.

So it isn’t the drive of the lead guitar licks, the pulse of the drums, or the suggestive, even rude, lyrics that set us all aglow—it was something few people mention in the recalling of the 60s: it was eclectic. Nothing was excluded, everything was, instead, pronounced ‘interesting’. What was new was Cool—even it was as old as Bach’s Fugues for Organ played by E. Power Biggs, or the Eastern-tinged harmonies of the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus as they sang songs their ancestors had sung working in the fields. My taste for Classical Music made me, for an oh-so-brief period, kind of cool as well. I turned people on to Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Bach, etc. and I was, in turn, turned onto Glenn Gould, Wendy Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach”, George Winston, and Tomita.

But almost immediately came the change from eclectic to cool for cool’s sake—properly faded jeans, the fad boot of the week, kerchiefs, head-bands, and really loud music—it’s true, for a time the volume was the cardinal criteria for party music!

That early eclecticism gave me a charge, sent me on a path towards honesty and caring and savoring life and finding the greatest pleasure in the most challenging work (the opposite of what I’d previously assumed). And now, in the year 2012, having seen all that followed on up until today, I’m lost at the end of time, the leading edge of the future, a foreign land whose language escapes me. Is it any wonder that I can slip happily into that hammock? The warmth and earnestness of the early music from the dawn of, let’s call it, ‘intellectual freedom’ brings up not just my own youth, but what, for me, was the youth of the USA, the youth of the entire modern world.

We don’t realize, or perhaps we forget, that the past, before the 1960s, was a time when you had to watch your tongue. One incautious observation could get a person fired, imprisoned, thrown out of university, barred from a country club (not that that was a bad thing), or excommunicated. And I’m not talking about ‘doing’ anything, I’m saying that just to raise a certain topic in public (and there were far more than you can imagine) was as bad as being bad, or doing bad things. The things that people discuss on TV today are almost exclusively the topics that would have gotten their shows cancelled in those older years—that’s because, once we allowed ourselves to discuss these issues, we found that they were not only fascinating, but crucial matters—sex education, for example.

And having taken part in that grand shift of perspective towards openness and honesty, it breaks my heart to see a guy like ‘the Newt’ work so hard at dragging us back to those dark and ignorant times.

Be advised:  Nothing in the far-right’s platform hasn’t already been addressed and found wanting by the majority of this country—about fifty years ago! We’ve come so far, it makes my blood boil when that idiot opens his mouth—to me, he’s saying, “Our last fifty years of social progress was a mistake—I’m gonna fight to drag us backward into the darkness of yesteryear.” The only thing that upsets me more? People listening to his pious ravings…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxxmSHin2c

O, for a harp of light and a song of love!

Spring be springy—what tookya so long?

My nose besotted, senses all a-tripped—

The crocuses dancing, the breezes burst with

Sex.

O, if one, sole hour returned youth

And let me gallop ‘cross the grassy swards.

Yards upon yards my ten-league boots should fly,

Once more the air would bellow through my throat on

Fire.

Cruel April, Leonine March, and Stormy May—

The ground ferments, all sap and blood will flow!

And newborns with their clumsy joy engaged

While mothers mind them, giving a mothers’

Love.

– Xper Dunn – Friday, March 09, 2012

Just some clarification regarding these 766 uploads on the xperdunn channel–in case anyone was wondering…

Blues/Jazz/Broadway/Swing/Pop/etc. songs I post:

I’m no Michael Feinstein–I know because I saw him on PublicTV recently-incredible!–I only post these old standards from the ‘American Songbook’-ish category as an opportunity to hear how they sound as an at-home, around-the-piano, maybe-sing-along-ish-type pastime.
If anyone finds them so, there are all these and more, available as piano sheet music–or more often, the popular ‘3-way’ songbooks for piano, voice and guitar chords. I usually go to Bramson Music in Mt. Kisco–but I sometimes order online from sheetmusicplus.com.
It seems felicitous that, where once every parlor had a piano, I grew up in a world where pianos had nearly disappeared from homes–and, today, the keyboard is once again a familiar site in the home, in the form of Casios, Korgs, etc. These new-fangled-pianers are also nice because they can be moved–even thrown in the trunk of one’s car.

As for the lyrics:

I rarely include any of these songs’ lyrics as sub-titles in my videos. It is very time-consuming and too much trouble for me. If I ever get a microphone, I’ll be able to make my voice audible over the piano. (Plus, adding lyrics seems to be a bigger infringement, copyright-wise, than playing and singing the actual sheet music — don’t ask me why, I just play here…)

But not to worry– Lyrics are easily Googled–and, once you’ve located your preferred ‘Song Lyrics’ WebSite, you can just search Song Titles on that site for any subsequent songs–try making the two windows on your desktop, side-by-side–and you can sing-along–even when you’re on your own…

The Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and assorted classical pieces:
These are execrable, I know that — but I have to record them, when I can, just in case I someday play one all the way through without making any mistakes.

Finally, my Improvs:
These are just doodles but, sometimes, one comes out real nice–and I can’t tell without listening a few times, so I record all of them that I can.

here’s the URL list for February 16th, 2012:

Three (3) Standards (2012Jan26)
Improv – Splitsville (2012Feb06)
Improv – Cherry Pie (2012Feb06)
“Sugar, Sugar” and “Tequila” (2012Feb06)
Improv – Rousing Adventure (2012Feb07)
Improv – Roundhouse Right (2012Feb07)
Improv – Bold and Brash (2012Feb07)
Nine (9) Miscellaneous Standards (2012Feb07)
Improv – My Zippo Is Guaranteed (2012Feb10)
“You’re A Sweetheart” (2012Feb10)
“You Gotta Be A Football Hero (To Get Along With The Beautiful Girls)”  (2012Feb10)
“Ragtime Cowboy Joe” (2012Feb10)
“Racing With The Moon” (2012Feb10)
J.S. Bach’s English Suite in A minor (2012Feb11)

Improv – Steamship Pilot (2012Feb14)

Improv – Stentorian Floatations (2012Feb14)

J.S. Bach – English Suite In G Major (2012Feb13)

 Improv – Transfer Of Power (2012Feb13)

To contact me on Facebook: Chris Dunn

If you’d like to hear the music for these poems, goto: XperDunn plays Piano (on YouTube)

or, use the quick-menus at: Xper Dunn

To see “Bearly Bliss” ( An e-book of  30 Poems written and Illustrated by Xper Dunn):

use Bearly Bliss