‘Ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser’ Pete Seeger dies

Posted on January 28, 2014 by oddmanout215

seeger

I was away from the swamp, stealing potatoes at the local Super Fridge, when I heard about Pete Seeger. This will be a rough day, I thought. Swamp Rabbit is an old leftie with a soft spot for New Deal-influenced folksingers, and Seeger, 94, was the last of that breed. Sure enough, the pesky rodent was weeping next to the wood stove when I got back to the shack. He drank Wild Turkey while I put the taters on the fire. Then we surfed for obits and skimmed old books.

The Associated Press used the phrase “ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser” and found a non-musical way to sum up the difference between Seeger and the only other folksinger, pre-Bob Dylan, who would have as big an influence on popular music:

On the skin of Seeger’s banjo was the phrase, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender” — a nod to his old pal [Woody] Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with “This machine kills fascists.”

The record will show that Seeger was as brave and well-respected as he was peace-loving. Dylan alluded to this in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, while describing the day he was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond:

Recently [Hammond] had brought Pete Seeger to the label. He didn’t discover Pete, though. Pete had been around for years. He’d been in the popular folk group The Weavers, but had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had a hard time, but he never stopped working. Hammond was defiant when he spoke about Seeger, that Pete’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, that his relatives had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill, for Christsake. “Can you imagine those sons of bitches blacklisting him? They should be tarred and feathered.”

Seeger had been blacklisted after testifying before the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee. He had politely told the honorables to fuck off:

I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.

Then we read that Seeger “lost his cool” in 1965 because Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival and the noise drowned out Dylan’s words. It was a familiar story, gossiped about many times.

“I forgave him for that,” I said. “Dylan’s show must have been a shock to a guy who was born more than 30 years before rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Well now, Pete’s ghost must be sighin’ with relief,” the rabbit replied. “Who gives a shit who you forgive?”

We read about Seeger’s inspiring appearance at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and wondered whether Barack Obama would mention in his State of the Union address that Seeger’s life and art were exactly in sync with the social democratic policies that boosted the quality of life in mid-20th century America. Policies that have been under constant attack since Ronald Reagan took office.

“Oh sure,” the rabbit said. “Then the Democrats and Republicans is gonna hold hands and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Hold the taters, you twit. Just pass me another bottle.”

Posted in arts, Great Depression, history, humor, mainstream media, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

50 years after ‘Strangelove,’ Gen. Jack Ripper on drugs

Posted on January 28, 2014 by oddmanout215

Sterling Hayden as Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in 'Dr. Strangelove'

Sterling Hayden as Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper

This January marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. From a New Yorker story about the mainstream critics who dismissed the movie’s storyline as implausible:

Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets. [Director Stanley] Kubrick had researched the subject for years, consulted experts, and worked closely with a former R.A.F. pilot, Peter George, on the screenplay of the film. George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove”‘s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara privately worried that an accident, a mistake, or a rogue American officer could start a nuclear war…

The Cold War is over and nobody got nuked, so the chances of a nuclear catastrophe caused by a mistake or a rogue officer are slim to none, right? If you think so, you haven’t been following the recent Air Force scandal:

A US Air Force investigation into illegal drug use by officers charged with overseeing and launching nuclear missiles expanded on Wednesday when the military announced the suspension of dozens of additional officers for cheating on proficiency exams.

The cheating came to light during the investigation of the drug scandal, the Air Force said. The drug probe was first announced last Thursday.

In all, 11 Air Force officers are suspected of illegal drug use, and 34 officers have been implicated in cheating, according to the military…

Brilliant political satires do more than caricature people who wield too much power. They make it clear that a caricature, in some cases, can be the same thing as a realistic portrait.

I’m thinking of all the primary cast members in Dr. Strangelove, but especially of George C. Scott as Gen. Buck Turgidson — “Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines” — and Sterling Hayden as Brigadier Gen. Jack D. Ripper, who is convinced fluoridated water is at the heart of a Commie plot to pollute our “precious bodily fluids.” As if our home-grown coal industry isn’t perfectly capable of polluting us on its own.

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What ‘non-organic’ meant at Whole Foods

Posted on January 21, 2014 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was complaining about the weather, a pointless and self-defeating exercise. “This here winter is like a roller coaster ride, with temps up to fifty-something one week and a blizzard the next. How we gonna eat if you can’t get out the swamp to rob no supermarkets? Ain’t nothin’ but cold cuts in this here shack, and they’s even worse than wieners.”

“Things are tough all over,” I said, trying to warm up by the wood stove. Then I grabbed the laptop and read for him the headline from a PRWatch story — “Whole Foods Agrees to Stop Selling Produce Grown in Sewage Sludge” — and some of the text:

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) broke the story that the $12.9 billion-a-year natural and organic foods retailer Whole Foods Market had a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it comes to “conventional” — or non-organic — produce being grown in fields spread with sewage sludge, euphemistically called “biosolids.” Certified organic produce cannot be fertilized with sewage sludge, which is the industrial and hospital waste and human excrement flushed down the drains and later — in some cases — spread on some crops.

Since this story broke, nearly 8,000 activists and PRWatch readers have sent emails to Whole Foods executives asking the company to require its suppliers to disclose this information and to label produce grown in sewage sludge so that customers can make informed decisions.

Mario Ciasulli, a semi-retired engineer and home cook living in North Carolina whom CMD profiled in December 2012, blew the whistle on Whole Foods’ don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy. As soon as he found out that shopping at Whole Foods was no protection against this potential contamination unless he could afford to buy only certified organic produce, he worked extensively to engage Whole Foods on this issue…

“You mean they was growin’ my carrots in hospital doo-doo?” Swamp Rabbit said.

I explained to him that it’s the same all over. You don’t even want to know where your food comes from unless you’re well off enough to buy ‘certified organic’ at farmers’ markets or places like Whole Foods, which is run by ultra-rich right-wing vegan John Mackey and frequented by many liberals who probably didn’t know that “non-organic” or “conventional” produce at Whole Foods often was “grown in sewage sludge.”

“Damn,” the rodent said. “Make sure you steal organic this time. And if you don’t, don’t tell me.”

Posted in economic collapse, food, humor, plutocracy, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Why mainstream media kissed up to Christie

Posted on January 15, 2014 by oddmanout215

My backyard in the swamp after the rain

It’s been a long week in the Tinicum swamp. That crack in the roof of my shack that Swamp Rabbit fixed didn’t stay fixed very long, so I stole another bucket of epoxy and put him to work when the rain stopped. “If it ain’t the cold, it’s the rain,” the rabbit whined. Things could be worse, I told him. He could be Chris Christie, trying to patch up the hot air balloon he was hoping to sail to the White House in 2016.

Christie, the prince of paypacks, is still desperately trying to convince people he’s not the jerk behind the jerks who caused major traffic problems in Fort Lee, N.J., whose mayor refused to endorse Christie for governor in 2013.

Good luck with that. The Fort Lee fiasco has focused attention on other people to whom bad things happened after they bumped up against Christie. In fact, it seems bad things happen to most people who don’t kowtow to the gov’ner. He often physically confronts perceived enemies, including women schoolteachers who are one-third his size.

But let’s face it: A lot of people have admired and voted for Christie precisely because he is a bully, adept at deflecting accusations of greed away from his corporate masters and onto regular people, especially teachers, firefighters, and other labor union members. It’s much easier to resent the guy up the street whose income is a bit higher than yours than it is resent billionaire neo-fascists — or are they neo-feudalists? — like Charles and David Koch, who are genuinely ruining your life, but from a great distance.

And Christie got a lot of help from mainstream journalists, many of whom are instinctive ass-kissers, enthralled by the wielding of power and their proximity to those who wield it. Journalists like Joe Scarborough and Brit Hume, for example, like to gush about certain tough-talking politicians who dumb down every issue of import.

A writer at The Nation recently commented on the kid gloves treatment Christie got from most of the MSN. I read the piece to Swamp Rabbit when he came down from the roof:

It didn’t matter that [Christie] lost $400 million of federal school funding, or unilaterally canceled a plan to build a commuter train tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan and presented it falsely as a big savings for his state, or vetoed — five times —additional funding for family planning, directly causing six reproductive health centers to close. Christie has filled the place formerly occupied by John McCain: the straight-shooting Republican “maverick” (a maverick being a Republican who admits the earth is probably older than 10,000 years). It doesn’t matter what he actually did or said.

It didn’t matter, not even when Christie was accused of using “money that was intended for victims of [Hurricane] Sandy to promote himself in a series of TV ads.” It only started to matter when the Christie administration got caught in an act of retribution so mean-spirited that it wasn’t possible to justify Big Boy’s style of governance by calling him a “straight-shooter” or an old-fashioned practitioner of “hardball politics.”

There are many exceptions, of course, but what is it about people in the media — usually men — that compels them to kiss up to politicians who are inflexible and vindictive, and to equate these flaws with leadership qualities?

“I ain’t sure,” Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Maybe Christie and them other blowhards remind them journalists of the guys they work for. Or maybe they just ain’t got no balls.”

Same thing, rabbit.

Footnote: Notice Christie always makes sure he is flanked by a squad of cops when he confronts someone. What a maverick. What a man.

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Beware the polar Gore-Tex… or is it cortex?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit before dissipation spoiled his looks

Swamp Rabbit before dissipation spoiled his looks

It seemed I might be able to change my socks two days in a row, but then Arctic air crept in on big bear claws and pushed the swamp back into the deep freeze. Swamp Rabbit, flipping out from cabin fever, chugged Wild Turkey and ranted, convinced the new ice age had arrived via something called the solar cortex, or the polar Gore-Tex. The name kept changing, but whatever he was going on about sounded ominous.

“I’m telling you, it ain’t natural,” he shouted from next to the wood stove. “This here roller duplex gonna be the end of us.”

Noticing he’d been online, I checked the screen:

…Arctic air is normally penned in at the roof of the world by a powerful circular wind called the polar vortex, said Dim Coumou, a senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) near Berlin. When the vortex weakens, the air starts heading southwards, bringing exceptional snow and chill to middle latitudes. The weather shift is also helped by changes in a high altitude wind called the jet stream…

The phrase “polar vortex’ was all over the Internet, like a new pop star or a contagious disease. “Reminds me of you,” I said to the rabbit. “You’re sort of locked in the same loop, round and round, but then you hit the Wild Turkey and start meandering south. You’d be in Georgia by now if you weren’t trapped by the cold.”

“Ain’t no sense to it, the rodent replied. “How come the cortex is so weak, and why ain’t the jet stream doin’ its job?”

I tried to explain that scientists aren’t yet sure of exact cause and effect, only that extremes of temperature down here are becoming more common as the Arctic grows warmer. Then I told him to fetch more wood for the stove while I went outside the swamp to steal more food.

He guzzled bourbon and said, “Why bother? It’s the end of the world.”

“Then I’ll just get food for me,” I replied, opening the door of the shack.

“Git me some veggies or somethin’,” he said, after an apparent change of heart. “Just don’t bring back no more swine.”

Posted in apocalypse, climate change, down and out, fiction, globalization, humor | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Bread and water beats jail food

Posted on January 7, 2014 by oddmanout215

new swamp

Pig meat gives me bad dreams; I don’t eat it unless there’s nothing else. Philosopher and Animal Liberation author Peter Singer would tell me there is always something else, that “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet — for the sake of hamburgers.” And hot dogs. But Singer lives at Princeton, not in Tinicum Swamp, where I make my home.

“Why didn’t you swipe soyburgers for yourself and leave the swine for me?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit asked me today.

He’s no Singer fan and he’s still angry about having to split a pack of wieners with me on Saturday, when the temperature in these parts plunged to near zero. He was angry on Sunday, too, but the weather was better. Warm air flowed in so fast the whole swamp fogged up as the ice melted.

I woke up Sunday night — or dreamed I woke up — and saw dead people floating out of the fog toward my shack. One was my Great Aunt Nan, who used to give me candies and warn me to stop being a bad boy. This time she issued her old warning in a ghostly tone. “Bread and water. That’s all they feed you in jail.”

Not true, I thought, recalling a piece last month in Truthdig by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges about Aramark Corporation, a Philadelphia-based professional services company that supplies food for inmates at 600 jails and prisons nationwide — food that, according to Hedges, sometimes isn’t fit for your dog to eat, or maybe even your Swamp Rabbit:

…In February 2009 a Camden County, N.J., health report found that the Aramark-run kitchen in the county jail had “mice throughout kitchen and storage area.” Mouse droppings were discovered in butter. Several food items, including grits, chicken, rice and beef, were not stored at temperatures low enough to protect against contamination. Prisoners at the county jail in Santa Barbara, Calif., went on a hunger strike last summer to protest the Aramark food, and inmates at Bayside State Prison in New Jersey went on a hunger strike in October for the same reason…

I’ll stop there, in case you dear readers are about to dine. Hedges’ piece is reminiscent of passages from The Jungle and addresses some of the ways big corporations are cashing in on the fact that incarceration rates in the United States are the highest in the world.

Hedges is an unabashed foe of corporatism, so it’s no surprise he wrote a negative piece about Aramark. But I’m wondering why The Philadelphia Inquirer or some other prominent mainstream news entity hasn’t done an “objective” report on the many complaints about the kitchen facilities and jail food served up by this services giant, a Fortune 500 company that has its own high-rise office building in Philly and generates $12 billion a year in revenues.

Maybe I just answered my own question.

Footnote: See Prison Legal News for more on prison food services.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Poverty gets more expensive every day

Posted on January 5, 2014 by oddmanout215

A view of Philly from my shack before the weather changed

From my shack, a view of Philly when the weather was good

Yesterday at the shack we woke to bone-chilling wind and a blanket of ice. Swamp Rabbit was huddled in a corner with a bottle from the case of Wild Turkey I stole to help him get through his post-holiday funk. I told him to fetch wood from the swamp so we don’t freeze, it would be two below zero soon.

“That booze won’t warm you for long,” I said. “I’ll find you stiff as a board tomorrow morning.”

“It won’t be my fault,” the rabbit said. “You ain’t nothin’ but an enabler, don’t ya know?”

While the rodent fetched wood, I chopped ice off the roof and surfed the Net for more weather and news and so on. I saw a letter to the Naked Capitalism guy that I read to the rabbit when he got back with some dead branches that looked like bones:

My expenses are beginning to get the better of me and month’s end is stretching beyond my dollars. Next year is looking the same. So, yesterday I was pointedly reminded how expensive it is to be poor. Instead of buying a lot when something I use is on sale, I have to buy what I have dollars for. No savings for me! And instead of buying by unit price–I’m a ferocious unit price shopper–I have to buy whatever size I have dollars for. And now I have to make more trips because I can only buy small dollars worth at a time.

“Amen to that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I used to buy carrots at twelve bucks a carton when I worked for that magician, gettin’ pulled out of a hat three shows a day. Now I can barely afford one of them two-dollar bags that don’t hold no more’n a half-dozen carrots.”

The lying varmint never worked for a magician but I could feel his pain, especially now that our reactionary Congress is cutting food stamps and unemployment, and secessionist governors in 25 states, with help from our neo-Confederate Supreme Court, are denying Medicaid to 4.8 million people who aren’t eligible for Obamacare. I read to the rabbit from something by William Greider:

The Supremes have done quite a lot in the last fifteen years to mess up our already weakened democratic system. They stole the presidential election in 2000. They cut loose Big Money to swamp elections by destroying lawful restraints. They are trying step-by-step to restore hoary old legalisms that favor capital over labor, corporations over individuals. Shouldn’t we be talking about how to stop them?

“No, we should be talkin’ about gettin’ somethin’ to eat,” the rabbit said. “I’m too hungry to talk politics.”

I told him to get a fire going in the stove so I could unfreeze the pack of wieners I pinched from Pathmark.

“What you take me for, a heathen?” he said. “I don’t likes me no swine.”

“You’d better get used to it,” I said, “or start growing your own carrots.”

Footnote: Uh-oh, now I’ve got playing in my head Captain Beefheart’s “A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond.”

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The ill logic of the lower classes

Posted on December 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

Lone marsh tree

It’s the Eighth Day After the Solstice, and I’m back at the shack after checking up on my old house, which stopped feeling homey after a tree fell on it last year. Some of my old neighbors are doing OK, judging by the number of houses with Christmas decorations. Some of the those who weren’t doing OK have died. Others — the ones who, because of joblessness or a catastrophe, couldn’t make their mortgage payments — have simply disappeared.

On my way back to the swamp I ran into one of the disappeared — a big, blustery guy who used to remind me of a circus strong man, probably because of the striped tank tops he wore in the summer. Today he was wearing dark glasses and a ratty coat with a big hood, and he seemed about four inches shorter, but I recognized him and said hello as we crossed paths on the sidewalk. He returned my hello but didn’t stop walking. I got the impression he was homeless but I can’t be sure, because I didn’t stop walking either.

At the shack I asked Swamp Rabbit, an amateur psychotherapist as well as a closet bibliophile, why my former neighbor and I had shied away from each other. He spit into the Tinicum swamp and said, “Your ex-neighbor feels like a bum. He’d feel even more like a bum talking to you, because you knew him when he had a house. And I reckon you didn’t want him to know you feel like a bum, too.”

I reminded the rabbit that I’m a fiction writer, not a bum. He asked me what the difference was. It was noon, but he already smelled like he’d finished off a bottle.

I said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me a bum, all you do is drink Wild Turkey and spit in the swamp.”

“Think about it,” he replied. “It ain’t just them hyper-capitalists and their lap dogs in Congress that blame poor people for being poor. The poors blame themselves. They don’t even raise hell when food stamps get cut and unemployment benefits get killed after six months. If they do raise hell, it’s agin each other.”

“You don’t understand the fear, you dumb rodent. I’m all for raising hell, like I said last week, but I have to be careful. The New Deal is done, the rich have the whip hand until things change again.”

I read him the tail end of a column by Paul Krugman:

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

The rabbit twitched his nose and chuckled. “Whose agenda? Jobs are on your agenda if you’re jobless, but they ain’t if you’re in the owner class. The owners don’t need more workers, they’re making bigger profits without them. Who’s gonna make them start hiring?”

I threw one of his empty bottles at him. It’s annoying when the varmint makes more sense than that guy in The New York Times.

Posted in Congress, down and out, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Karl Marx gets a makeover

Posted on December 23, 2013 by oddmanout215

Just for a laugh, I read aloud from a Guardian UK article in which David Simon expressed qualified approval of some Marxist ideas. Sure enough, my friend Swamp Rabbit called me a commie before I was halfway through the piece.

Simon is the fellow whose well-regarded TV series The Wire depicted life in the other America, the one where there is no law and order and no tangible connections to the so-called economic recovery that we hear about in mainstream news reports. The Guardian article, an edited transcription of a talk Simon gave in Australia, made plain what was implicit in The Wire — that the growing divide between rich and poor is a consequence of policies forged by free-market zealots who decided it was safe to throw the poor under the bus once it was clear that communism was no longer a viable threat to the status quo.

“Big words and ideas,” said Swamp Rabbit, who used to be a commie himself. He waved his old, battered copy of Marx’s Capital: Volume I and added, “We was hopin’ for heaven on earth, but all we got was Joe Stalin.”

But Simon doesn’t say Marx’s communist dream wasn’t deeply flawed; he merely reminds us that Marx, who became the butt of countless jokes when communism failed, was right about unbridled capitalism:

…Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess…

Don’t let capitalism “work entirely” or you end up with a plutocracy, in which the wealthy thrive at record rates while the earning power of the middle class dwindles and the poor are deep-sixed. In which corrupt Democrats join Republicans in dismantling the New Deal, a force for change that involved a pragmatic mix of ideas meant to serve egalitarian ends, the first of which was to put people back to work. The overall goal was the triumph of social democracy.

Not so in our time. As economist Dean Baker recently noted, “At the moment, no prominent politician in national politics is arguing the case for a government budget that could bring the economy anywhere near to full employment.”

“That’s because the politicians are all owned by the skunks who profit by putting people out of work,” the rabbit said. “It don’t take no Karl Marx to figure that out.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but if we don’t start pushing back against the skunks, like Marx did, then the joke’s on us.”

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, globalization, history, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A ‘Blue Xmas’ with Miles

Posted on December 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Miles Davis at his most demented coolest, with Wayne Shorter (sounds more like John Coltrane) on tenor and lyricist/singer Bob Dorough, the vocal equivalent of a funhouse mirror. (You might want to smash the mirror before the song is over.)

Full title: “Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern).” Cool, daddy-o.

Footnote: Thank you, Hobson Tarrant, wherever you are, for your “pipecleaner-based’ animation.

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