Which side are you on?

Gaza, Israel, and a despotic petrostate. Perpare for EterNITEY

I hope you have ended another no good terrible week by joining with friends and neighbors on this May Day in protest and labor solidarity, even a general strike—or at least a good meal, in fellowship. Family before fortune. 99.90% vs the.001%

I am overwhelmed by the performative posturing of the Rufous Regime.

Kegseth’s smirks, Xn Nat’list puffery, disrespect, and assertion of “top-secret” when asked to account for the war in Iran in testimony before both the House and the Senate this week was pretty hard to take. A war which he incorrectly asserts has not been running for sixty days, after which Congressional approval of the war is required by law; he says the clock gets reset by a cease-fire—a cease-fire that has not held, but who’s quibbling – and also contra the law, as Sen. Tim Kaine quickly corrected him (and despite that, Congress seems still unable to do anything.)

Pistol Pete said also that it is not a war, more like an excursion – which today they announced “terminated” -- but also that the US has been at war with Iran for “47 years.” Go figure.

The Callow Caudillo meanwhile says something, in another meandering presser, looking like Jabba the Hutt with a skin condition, sitting behind the Resolute Desk with toadies lined up behind him, something like—I don’t have a direct quote, I had to turn off the sound, my shouting at the TV was drowning it out anyway— gas prices are the lowest they’ve ever been, I am soaring in the polls, the Iranians don’t know what they want and no one is home in their government, we do not depend on any oil coming through the Strait, inflation is much lower than it was under Biden, etc.

None of it is true. HCR and Krugman helpfully eviscerated this morning many of the lies fostered by this throne sniffing, mad kingy, illiberal despot.

With that factual right sizing, a kind of corrective reverie, might I also suggest a musical soul cleansing.

Emotional pozole, chicken soup for the soul

Dread remains very much a felt condition. Blues still falling down like hail. But perhaps we can combat it with something other than hard-core natty dread:

· Augustus Pablo was fronting a band playing a melodica decades before performers like Jon Batiste made the instrument hip. Its wheezy, whimsical, sound softens the dread of the reggae riddim—to my ear—in a way that enables the music to serve as a soundtrack for multiple endeavors, from marching in protest to folding the laundry. Jah Dread.

· “Combat Breathing,” composed by Vijay Ayer and performed here by his astounding trio of Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, was helpful to me during the pandemic. In an interview, I heard him say the piece was composed specifically to address the precarity he perceived our nation’s younger generations particularly feel—and this was during the T45 admin; T47 is that much worse.

· I unexpectedly also found welcome comfort in a collection of mountain music I listened to this week. The collection was new to me, though many of the singers were old friends from whom I had not heard in a long time—Roscoe Holcomb, Clarence Ashley, Hazel Dickens, Ola Belle Reed—as well as others completely new to me, but in many cases singing songs I knew quite well. Nothing like a murder ballad, e.g., “Omie Wise” to cheer you up. Or a reminder that when John Henry got sick, his wife Polly Ann, taking his place in the work crew, drove steel like a man. Not a bad message for May Day.

· What stayed with me most was an interpretation of “Oh Death,” titled on the record as “Conversation with Death,” done by Berzilla Walllin. It included a few verses new to me. Her message, in particular, that, facing death, we should perpare for EterNITEY, hit just now. In despair, she pleads.

let me see / if Christ has turned his back on me. Which she then follows with another plaint, a common request. O death, O death, please give me time / to fix my heart / and change my mind.

We don’t have much time now. And we do know there are some hearts and minds need changin‘.

Knowing and not knowing

David Foster Wallace, in Something To Do With Paying Attention, an apt title for this moment, talks of the “Wisconsin expression,” viz., he don’t know enough to lay down, which I find sweetly perfect, and echt DFW, for all the bozos lately thrust upon us. From the bad grammar to the common sense of it all.

A special word among many he uses is Wastoid, to describe someone who is a waste of space. Also wasted all the time. Wastoid describes a nihilist, narcissistic despair carried by someone who is directionless and lost – and romanticizing it. Wastoid and proud of it. DFW spends a few pages on what the word means and whom it describes. In a low trust high walled emotionally numb society, it doesn’t take long to get from there to MAGA.

I read the Cranberries’ “Zombie” as a tribute to Fela’s 70s song with the same title. I also imagine it gets both at Wastoid angst and the idiocy and pain of war—though I don’t think the Cranberries song resulted in anyone getting thrown out a window.

An assassination attempt is “unfalsifiable”?

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) said, “I’m not calling the Butler assassination a hoax, but there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers”. After the WHCD shooting, one can say the same: the shots fired reportedly might have been by the Secret Service; the over-armed assailant might not even have got off a shot.

Don’t hold your breath on ever getting a straight story. Satirist Andy Borowitz commented that it is too soon to run the assassination arc from season one.

Meanwhile—and this is sadly not satire—you can buy a “Fight Fight Fight” Trump-branded watch for $499 in the WH gift shop, with payment accepted in the president’s meme coin. As the president said,

“I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most ... they’re the ones that they go after,” he said. “And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.”

WRONG WAY

A common polling question is “right way or wrong?” Sherrilyn Ifill wrote an excellent piece on Chief Justice Roberts’s career-long effort to dismantle the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) that clearly answers that question.

Roberts has been chipping away at the VRA his entire career. He began as a young Reagan admin lawyer, working to circumvent the 1982 amendment to the VRA, the so-called “effects test.” Once on the Court, he shepherded Shelby County to verdict, which was the first major nail in the VRA coffin. And now with the Callais decision, the lid might be firmly fastened. Scalia, its author, and the majority of the Court, are asserting, with regard to voting rights themselves, that the Constitution is (finally) “colorblind ,” “as the Framers intended.” Ech. Sadness

As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

“The constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

The Strange Boys have some thoughts on the poetry of that statement.

Ich komme ich komme ich komme

File this under alternative futures. Brad Mehldau, a working piano player who has been in my Top Five for a couple decades, is also a writer. He has started making SubStack posts, some of them pretty good -- even funny. In a long Sid Caesar-ish falsch Deutsch piece recently, Mehldau professed his love for Chrissy Hynde, das Ewig-Weibliche, (or, the eternal feminine, from Goethe’s Faust, in 1832.) Du bist das, Chrissy, he says, immer für mich. Can’t say I disagree.

As outcasts in a fascistic culture (either actual or perceived,) the Pretenders’ “Tattooed Love Boys” stands next to Blur’s “Girls and Boys” next to the Heartless Bastards’ “Out at Sea.” Chrissy is undoubtedly das E-W. We must make do with our own girl rockers in more recent decades.

When I first saw Erika Wennerstrom, I had one of those moments. She was wearing a checked blue gingham dress, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. A small cute blonde woman with a voice that ranged from whisper to growl to glass-cutting, shredding on an old Les Paul, backed by a thumping bass and tribal beat. HB’s Live at Austin City Limits record got me up the hill on my bike more than once coming home late from work.

Voices in a crowd. Traveling musical theory

Another group I heard for the first time on the Smithsonian Folkways mountain music collection was the Old Regular Baptists. Not the special Baptists, nor the slightly different Baptists. The Old Regular Baptists, singing shape note-ish melodies following a leader with call and response in a kind of swirling, directionless chorus, sung mostly without harmony, in unison (almost.) I don’t blame you if the 5+ minutes of this vid is TLDL, but I encourage you to give it at least 30 seconds. Witness that Holy Ghost Feeling. You might end up wanting more.

I posted a year or so ago about Edward Said’s traveling theory. I tried ham-fistedly to make a similar argument with music, showing how the same song could move across cultures and rhythms and continents. It happened to me recently as an ear worm. Unable to get Mark Knopfler’s solo from “Sultans of Swing” out of my head I went looking for another version of the song I might use to wash my brain clean. I remembered an obscure ukulele duet I ran into a couple years ago. I looked it up, and wouldn’t you know they now have had 13MM views.

Finally, on this May Day, this International Worker’s Day, here is a sweet version of “Which Side Are You On?”

Peace, y’all