“Hey, hey, Wood Guthrie, I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that’s a-coming along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dying and it’s hardly been born”
Bob Dylan
This has got to be a first for me for two reasons. One, I have never sat down without a single idea in my head. Two, I like the letter writing format I used in the last piece. In a way, they go together and may be our story.
You know, reverting to a letter style might not look any different to you, but it feels more personal to me. Maybe, that’s what was bothering me, a very slight aroma of officiousness. I started this whole writing business as one long, love letter for my young grandson, something I’ve mentioned a few thousand times. Once I kind of got current, filling in my history, I innocently got sucked into a kind of reportage. Every one had a title, a quote and an accompanying image.
The idea of being more personal is a kind of interesting thing to me. There is so much going on, it is virtually impossible to keep track and rest assured, we’re victims of a hardcore strategy. By numbing one’s adversaries, they are more easily taken advantage of.
So, it’s funny. There is so much more to write about and I feel less inclined to keep track of it all. The facts don’t really matter, nothing more than gaseous excretions by paid corporate puppets. Rules are subject to use by those with the most power over them. For the rest of us, they are merely words and we are its victim.
I don’t know how many times during the course of the day, I think I must be living in a fantasy world, primarily because the shit that’s happening can’t be happening in a real world. Let’s say you’re a late night comedian, having done hundreds of monologues and your show gets cancelled, because you implied that a recent political murder was motivated by like minded people. Next thing you know, your show has been cancelled, because of a one sentence comment.
In 1972, George Carlin blew peoples’ minds with “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” You couldn’t even argue context, because these words were never to be used, regardless of intention. It was the hypocrisy that got him going. Today, it seems to be OK to call anyone by any name you feel is appropriate. I remember name calling was a popular past time in elementary school and for years after. It was a sign of immaturity and it still is.
In this “new” style of mine, I get to say things I’d say anyway, but I can make them feel special. I have been staring at the above paragraphs for a few days now and I keep coming up empty. It is not that I don’t know what to say, it is that I don’t knew where to begin. In around six months time, this country has become a place I don’t recognize. I remember always thinking that presidents can’t ever get very much done, no matter what they promise campaigning.
This guy came into office with a meticulously laid out plan about what this country was going to look like. It was all there in Project 2025. The election was like going into the Super Bowl, knowing exactly what the opposition planned to do. When you have two teams with very similar core values, you actually have no opposition. You have an over the hill, orange skinned quarterback, who cares only about his personal freedom, predictably changing the rules of every play to his advantage.
I got on my stationary bike this morning, creatively constipated, looking to disappear into my music for around 25 minutes. The first song that came up was Dylan singing, “ Song To Woody.” Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were folk singers and lovers of America. The Dust Bowl, which began around 1930, lasted for ten years and just like today, it was our fault. We farmed the land and sucked the life out of it, leaving parched fields, because greed blinded us to the consequences of our actions. Back then, there was a vacuum in the government’s presence in our lives.
The government really gave birth to itself in reaction to the devastation created by whole depression era of the 30’s. It put people to work on all sorts of projects from national parks to highway infrastructure, not to mention social security. The GI bill put so many people through college that never could have gone. I wonder what screwed up the machine. I think equality is a great concept, but I suspect the money was keeping its eyes on this modern unfolding.
I was born in ’45, America emerging victorious from WWII. All of those programs and the rise of unions helped build a growing middle class in this country, increasingly ethnically diverse. Aside from having to periodically duck under my desk in case of a nuclear explosion, it was a very optimistic time. The American Dream was to live in a home with a white picket fence, two children, the loving house wife and the guy who stayed at the same company until he retired. Just think, they made sitcoms about this enviable lifestyle.
I was too young to appreciate the Army McCarthy Hearings in the mid ’50’s. There was a growing fear of too much government, as if communism was its evil off spring. It was carried over into the Johnson Goldwater election of ’64. Goldwater’s conservative politics was considered crazy. Clearly, the political pot was being stirred up. The John Birch Society came to life in the late ’50’s and is likely an off spring of those hearings. A hundred years before that, we fought a Civil War and in some ways it never ended.
Now, that I am close to ending this note to you, I am not sure how much I like it. I am the last person in the world to be teaching about history. Actually, I am the worst person in the world to be teaching about anything. It is also the challenge I have been facing in writing to you and it feels like it has gotten worse.
I am pretty sure I have a first for you. Somewhere up above, I wrote that it often feels like all of this can’t possibly be happening, but it is. This coup is directly related to the Citizens United case around 15 years ago. In an instant, the dam holding back the big money simply disappeared. It destroyed our political system, because Washington is filled with people with price tags.
We have a cheap ass huxter as president and in a way, he has done us a favor. He has shown us exactly what happens when the ultimate authority is a showcase for greed. He is the billionaire’s very own Frankenstein, with some of the same control challenges that came with the original.
You know, I wasn’t going to put up a story this week, but I changed my mind. The letter business I wrote at the top seems a little dumb, viewing it from the bottom. All of these damn things are letters, from me to you, written by one person and for one person and that would be you.
There is so much crap floating around these days, a lot of it on platforms I have never heard of. Today, you can make a saint out of a guy, who said some of the most awful shit imaginable. The dialogue in this country has become very violent and accusatory. Promoting division weakens the country and provides a wonderful diversion, while the reins of this great experiment are placed in the hands of a select few, who only care about themselves.
I just can’t keep my mouth shut. Sorry
LISTEN TO IT HERE:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/17881279-song-to-woody