“Too Much Time” sounds like a tribute to the Stax/Volt sound, straight out of 1960s Memphis. (Beefheart wouldn’t have liked the word “tribute.”) The song is from Clear Spot (1972), one of his more “accessible” albums. Should have been a Top 10 hit:
Memorable spoken-word interlude from the desert-dwelling Beefheart:
Sometimes when it’s late/And I’m a little bit hungry/I heat up some old stale beans/Open up a can of sardines/Eat crackers and dream/About somebody to cook for me.
Ayn Rand wasn’t a good enough fiction writer to create protagonists who were anything more than mouthpieces for her cartoonish, elitist “philosophy.” However, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan is the word made flesh — a real-life monster of selfishness and, fittingly, a long-time worshiper of Rand.
Ryan’s budget plan, which is backed by Mitt Romney, is a tribute to Rand’s ability to inspire mean-spirited people to elevate their meanness into law.
The Ryan-Romney plan would cut taxes to the affluent and corporations, increase arms spending and cut expenditures for almost everything else, including environmental programs, child care, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, aid to college students and funding for transportation, which includes air traffic control. Medicare would be cut, the health care reform law repealed. If you think the health reform law is too kind to insurance companies, you’ll be amazed at the way Ryan-Romney lets big insurance really run things.
“In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse—on steroids,” said Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times and possibly in the nation’s history…”
Taking from the poor and giving to the rich, how noble. If implemented, Ryan’s plan would be a big step toward creating the neo-feudalistic America that Rand envisioned, and the America that the Republican Party has been working toward for decades.
How long before the general public realizes the scope of the plan, and the depravity of those who think it’s a good thing? One can only hope the November elections will be a turning point, but don’t bet your house on it — if you’ve still got one.
Bill Maher can be a bore when he brags about being an atheist, and when he beats the war drum for Israel. But sometimes he makes a good point, as in this piece about misdirected outrage:
The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.
When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don’t like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don’t declare a holy war on ham.
Indeed, who cares what Limbaugh says? He’s an expensive stooge for the super-rich. If it wasn’t for “outraged” liberals, I wouldn’t even know the blowhard exists.
We should save our outrage for the discreet predators who have bought both major political parties and put millions of people out of work. The modern-day robber barons who are turning America into a feudal society — a place where the poor needn’t bother even dreaming of a better life.
I’m talking about the scum who rise to the level of the Koch Brothers, and the scum who float on ponds that are only slightly less exclusive. For example, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, whose compensation was recently tripled — from $7.2 million to $23.1 million a year — at the same time the company was trying to cut health care and other benefits for workers. Why is Limbaugh in the news but not McAdam?
As Kevin McCarthy said in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, “Look, you fools, you’re in danger!”
Last month I made fun of the new breed of Republican governors by posting something headlined “Federal Government for Dummies.” But the governors aren’t really dumb. They’re sly yahoos who know they can demonize “big government” as they make massive cuts in jobs and services for the poor, and in taxes on the one percent. But they can only work their con game until catastrophe strikes. From Rolling Stone:
Sometimes you stumble on a case where politics, ideology, and reality collide in a way that provides you with a strikingly clear view of the contradictions that threaten America today.
[A recent] Washington Post described a situation in the state of Louisiana where a global trend—climate change—is leading to a situation—rising sea levels—that YOYO (you’re-on-your-own) economics can’t solve.
Sea levels have been rising in Louisiana and they’re threatening to wash out a highway that’s a supply route for – wait for it – oil and gas…
…Officials in a state with an aggressive tax-cutting governor – Bobby Jindal can boast of having pushed through the largest tax cuts in the state’s history – one who consistently inveighs against government spending, are “demanding” the Feds send money.
Photo by TONY WOOD
tony@anthonywoodphotography.com
The sun is beginning to shine on me,
But it’s not like the sun that used to be.
– Bob Dylan, “Highlands”
Overheard on South Street, outside the city’s worst supermarket: “Yeah, but most South Philly people, they’re really rude and psychotic, I’ve talked to them.” Good thing he didn’t talk to this South Philly person, I hate people when they’re not polite…
I guess the beautiful weather is making me ill. A storm is blowing through my head — I’m paraphrasing Tom Waits’ “Emotional Weather Report” — just ahead of a slow-moving cold front. I’m trying to push past the storm and avoid the cold front. I feel the sunshine on my face as I ride my bike past blossoming dogwoods and blocs of sluggish pedestrians. But it’s not my sunshine; I’m in it, but not of it.
Do I feel off-kilter because the winter ended with a long stretch of sunny 70-degree days? Have I blown the internal fuse that normally makes me feel good in such weather?
The world is only a projection of how well the mind is functioning. The mind isn’t functioning well if the present feels remote and the past doesn’t feel past.
I remember moments of bliss in bad weather. Sipping coffee with a friend in 14-degree weather, waiting for an early-morning bus ride to a bad job. Carrying a futon through snow-clogged streets to a cold fourth-floor walk-up the day after my son was born.
Sometimes there’s no bliss, even in beautiful weather. Laughter sounds sad. Good food tastes bad. Memories feel like regrets.
Monday was St. Joseph’s Day, my mother’s birthday. She’s been dead a long time, but time has no meaning when the mind plays tricks. Joking about her birthday, my mother used to sing “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” recorded by the Ink Spots in 1940 and written, as Wikipedia puts it, “as a tribute to the annual springtime return of the cliff swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano in southern California.”
She would speak of wanting to be present at the mission when the birds returned, but she never actually considered doing this. I should have put her on a plane and sent her out there.
Update from Climate Central:
The March heat wave continues to shatter longstanding records from the Upper Midwest to the Northeast, with more than 2,200 warm temperature records set during the month so far.
Obama’s war propaganda sounds like Bush’s. Put another way, the Obamabots are as eager as the Bushies to put a good face on disaster, if that’s what it takes to keep their candidate’s poll numbers from slipping. And they get lots of help from the mainstream media. From Robert Parry:
As the Afghan War grinds toward another U.S. military defeat – on the heels of the forced departure from Iraq – Official Washington remains in denial about these failed neocon strategies, still preferring to embrace happy myths about “successful surges” and ignoring the actual outcomes.
I encountered this cognitive dissonance again Saturday morning when I was flipping the TV channels and landed on MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes,” with substitute host, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. There was a panel of bright and attractive pundits again praising President George W. Bush’s Iraq War “surge.”
One had to wonder: Did these seemingly smart people not notice that the U.S. military was sent packing from Iraq at the end of 2011, less than three month ago? Do they not know that the giant U.S. Embassy, once meant to be a command center for imperial domination of the Middle East, sits mostly idle?
Were they oblivious to the fact that Iraq, still a shattered society afflicted by terrible sectarian violence, leans closer to Iranian foreign policy than America’s because of Bush’s invasion?
Forget the surge. Hit squads and bribery arguably had a lot more to do with the decrease in sectarian violence in Iraq than the large increase in combat troops:
A more serious analysis of what happened in Iraq in 2007-08 would trace the decline in Iraqi sectarian violence mostly to strategies that predated the “surge” and were implemented by the commanding generals in 2006, George Casey and John Abizaid, who wanted as small a U.S. “footprint” as possible, to tamp down Iraqi nationalism.
Among their initiatives, Casey and Abizaid deployed a highly classified operation to eliminate key al-Qaeda leaders, most notably the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. Casey and Abizaid also exploited growing Sunni animosities toward al-Qaeda extremists by paying off Sunni militants to join the so-called “Awakening” in Anbar Province.
If you can’t beat them, pay them off.
Call the music police!
When I’m assaulted in a public place by the sound of bad music, I shout “Somebody call the music police!” But I’m joking at such times. I don’t really expect anyone to dial 911 when Madonna is blaring from the speakers of a passing car, or when Billy Joel is soiling the sound system at my local CVS. Cops have better things to do, right?
Not true, it seems, on St. Patrick’s Day at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, where hundreds of protesters staged a rally to mark the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. From Firedoglake:
The mood in the park was light and celebratory when the sounds of bagpipes were heard, approaching from the west. Hundreds in the park moved toward the noise, only to witness NYPD officers preventing the pipers from entering the park, arresting at least one. Some on the scene said that the pipers were not affiliated with OWS; they had come to NYC from Brittany to participate in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and later decided to play for occupiers.
According to The New York Observer, police became more aggressive soon after confronting the pipers. They entered the park en masse and began clearing it.
Was it the maddening sound of the pipes that set them off? The fact that the pipers were French? We know only that scores of nonviolent protesters were arrested and, in some cases, beaten up. And that this was Michael Bloomberg’s way of reminding the world that his Praetorian Guard is ready to resume kicking ass and ignoring Constitutional rights, whenever they can get away with it, wherever OWS gathers.
It’s a good day to listen to “Will Ye Go Lassie Go” by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. It was also recorded by Joan Baez, and by the Byrds, as “Wild Mountain Thyme,” and has been sung for hundreds of years. It’s not really a sad song, not unless you’re already in a sad frame of mind… OK, it’s a sad song.
Who said Ireland is “a land of happy wars and sad love songs?” It was Richard Sheridan, writer of The School for Scandal and other famously convoluted Restoration plays.
Footnote: How ironic is it that the Irish fought to throw English armies out of Ireland for hundreds of years and then, after all was finally going well, allowed themselves to be enslaved by a bunch of bankers?
Leave it to the Irish to write a song in which the miracle of resurrection is achieved through spilled whiskey (from the Gaelic for “water of life”). This version of “Finnegan’s Wake,” by my deceased mother’s favorite band, brings back memories of the many resurrections I witnessed as a child.
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