The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
Thirteen (out of dozens) Songs by Mose Allison Covered by Other Artists.
A lot of people haven't heard Mose, despite the fact that he's been in the business for 50+ years! I'll bet each and every one of you knows at least one of these versions, though.
1- I'm Not Talkin' - The Bangles
2- Look Here - The Clash
3- Your Mind is On Vacation - Elvis Costello
4- Young Man Blues - The Who
5- Stop This World - Diana Krall
6- No Trouble Livin' - Van Morrison (He's done a BUNCH of Mose's tunes.)
7- Top Forty - Robert Palmer
8- Your Molecular Structure- Maria Muldaur
9- Everybody's Cryin' Mercy - Bonnie Raitt (among several others)
10- Parchman Farm - Hot Tuna (Mose's site lists 14 covers of this tune. Johnny Winter, Rick Derringer and the Kingston Trio also did it)
11- I'm Smashed - Leon Russell
12- Middle Class White Boy - Roy Rogers
13- Foolkiller - Johnny Rivers (He's the guy who sang "Secret Agent Man")
Meanwhile, I'm psyched because I'll soon hear many of these tunes sung by the original artist. Can't wait!
And as I have made abundantly clear, modern rock stopped commanding my attention at least a decade ago. There's only so long people can feed you shit about Nirvana being meaningful and Pearl Jam being original before you seek originality and meaning in other forms. (And no, this is not an opportunity to convince me how great that stuff is. This is an entirely subjective matter, after all, and I have listened too recently - thanks to friends- for fresh ears to make a difference, which they sometimes do.) Therefore, there could be plenty of young artists singing angry, indignant songs for a target audience who are at an age where studies show they won't bother to vote anyway. She seems to have found an example or two to post since then.
She reminded me of a couple of things, though, so I figured I'd share.
First, she reminded me of a video clip I downloaded a couple of years ago. It was from the Tonight show, and featured a fellow named Bright Eyes (not to be confused with Charlton Heston) and attracted my attention with the song title - When the President Talks to God. I'll reverse my usual "the music is more important than the lyrics" attitude for this song for two reasons. One, the lyrics are truly spot-on in their criticisms, and two, the music isn't much at all. It's basically there to keep this thing from being a poem.
Although I have it in storage, I'm posting the YouTube clip because it's the same clip and it's way easier to post this way.
The second thing I remembered is the fact that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young toured last year with a couple of new protest songs. Man, it's nice to know that some of the old-timers can still be counted on, eh? The songs were Shock and Awe and the more subtly titled Let's Impeach the President. As I didn't actually have anything from that tour (my CSNY pro-shot DVD from the early 70s was quite satisfying overall) I went in search of it. It didn't take that long to find an audience recording that the people in the comments were raving about, so I climbed on board the torrent, which turned out to be without a doubt the slowest download of my collecting career. If not, I'd have posted this last weekend. I finally got it, though, and ended up with a listenable audience recording to share. It is nowhere near deserving the raves it got (if this is truly what these folks call a stellar aud. recording, my collection could enlighten them quite a bit) but I have a lot of recordings in my collection that are a lot worse. When listening to these songs, just close your eyes and pretend that you're listening from a naked heap of hippies in one of the rearmost mud puddles at Woodstock. I've had some happy moments imagining that.
For accuracy's sake, however, these cuts come from the Tweeter Center in Camden, NJ on July 6, 2006.
I can hear the Asst. D.A. addressing the grand jury now. "An onion is considered a deadly weapon if and only if the grand jury determines that an onion can cause serious injury or death when used as a weapon."
Yeesh.
Don't get me wrong - this is certainly a poor way to treat your half-your-age trophy wife. Is it worthy of arrest, however?
There was little doubt about it this time. Most of you were in synch, and pointed right to August's American Asshole like a compass points to north. Pedophile blogger Jack McLellan is our man!!!
Jack has made a lot of news by taking perfectly legal pictures of children on the street and posting them on his blog with a lot of perfectly legal nasty talk about what he'd like to do to them (which really makes J.K Rowling a little more of an asshole in my opinion - I mean, she thinks her kid has a media problem?). He never actually does anything about it, which is why he's an asshole rather than a criminal, but he's rather vocal about it and wants us to know that instead of photographing these kids he could be grabbing them. And he perpetuates the stereotype of the blogger that lives out of his car and can't keep a job.
There's really not much more for me to say about this waste of sperm. Let your comments do the talking.
And of course, it reminded me of this post. Now, some folks disagreed with me then, and that's okay. They brought up valid points and disagreed in a respectful tone. But a lot of right-wing bloggers were tossing all sort of insults toward the editors of the papers who cut the Opus cartoon. Cowards, they were called. Islamic lapdogs. Anti-American. Terrorist apologists.
And those were the nice ones.
As I pointed out at the time, however, none of these people have a masthead on their blogs saying who and where they are. It's easy to be brave when no one is paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
Are any of these bloggers willing to come out of the closet, or are they only brave when no one knows where to find them? What risks are they willing to take for their right to say whatever they want whenever they want to?
Are they willing to risk death for free speech?
Are they willing to risk the lives of people around them for it? The people in their office? Their carpool friends? Total strangers on the bus who don't know what they said, or why?
Their own families? Their tiny boys and girls who don't even know for politics and terrorism yet, bless their innocent little hearts?
You know, I'm skeptical about that. Maybe because these same people aren't willing to back the right to be free from unwarranted search and seizure. Maybe because they won't even speak up to their employees in Washington for their own right to privacy. Perhaps because, despite the hot air of nine years ago, they won't demand the truth from their government. And why is all this?
Well, because they are afraid.
They have good reason to be, too. After all, it isn't as if we're any safer than we were six years ago. It's not as if INS suddenly became competent. It isn't as if cargo is being checked on out docks as it enters America. It's not as if a damn thing has been done about the southern border except some more guys on horseback. And it isn't as if the fundamentalist whackjobs they're afraid of are anything close to rational.
So while the idealist in me condemns to the very core this attitude of death for insult, this my-religion-is-the-only-true-one-and-I'll-kill-you-to-prove-it mentality, the pragmatist has another view.
That is, until we have a government that IS concerned, really concerned, for making this a safer country, those with a responsibility for the safety of others, like the editors of major newspapers, just might want to pick their fights a little more carefully for awhile. Of course, I do not mean copping out on verifiable, true news stories no matter who looks bad in them.
But really, when it comes down to it, whose life is a cartoon worth?
And here I would have bet that Giuliani would be the first to concede that he has nothing of substance to offer.
But as long as we're going to play the "pretty-wife-as-a-reason-to-vote-for-me game", allow me to present Elizabeth Kucinich.
I mean, yummers. Big yummers. Great bolshy yumminess.
She seems intelligent, too. Too intelligent to let her husband strap the family dog to the top of the car for a long trip, at any rate. Which puts her ahead of Mrs. Romney by quite a margin.
Remember, a vote for Kucinich is a vote for wifely hotness!!!
Well, I have a few things to say in response to that column.
First of all, let's not pretend that this isn't a stacked deck being presented here. This is an obvious example of cherry-picking. I don't believe for a second that Vick was the only guy caught abusing dogs this year, and many other examples of violence against humans do make the news. We see them every day, on every media outlet, do we not? I can easily replace these examples with the guy that chopped off his neighbor's dog's head and left it on her porch in a gift-wrapped box and the Laci Peterson case and draw the exact opposite conclusion. My neighbor's sweet dog Hito was stabbed last year. That certainly didn't make the news. If he bit someone, though, it would, because of his breed.
Secondly, it really begs the question of how not being aware of an event means that we don't care about it. Don't we have to be aware of something before we can have a real opinion of it? Can I love or hate someone whose very existence I'm oblivious to? So if something isn't in the news, is that because I don't care about it? Doubtful, at the very least.
Furthermore, there are examples of both that get justice done, and examples of both that do not, just like any other crime. Not every robbery is solved. Not ever car that is stolen is recovered. Murderers do get away with it sometimes. Does it follow that because Michael Vick was caught and punished while a particular murderer is not that no one cares to find the murderer? If the murderer is caught while a dog abuser like Vick goes undetected, does that mean that those particular dogs are suffering due to a lack of concern on the public's part?
You see how easily this unravels. And he's the one getting a paycheck out of it.
Let's play devil's advocate, though, and pretend this guy is actually making a point that would be strong enough for a high school debate team. I still have answers.
First, we tend to consider helplessness in choosing what victims to care about. If a child is assaulted by a grown man, that concerns most of us more than if that same man assaults a 6 foot 240 pound weightlifter. Why? Because we figure the weightlifter is more capable of taking care of himself. If Vick had killed a bear that was on his property, instead of dogs, there wouldn't be a problem because few people would look at a bear coming at them and see it as helpless.
Dogs are, though, even pit bulls. Hito might take someone else apart, but he sees me as an authority figure, and is genetically predisposed to submit to me, as was Angus. I could, if I were scum, kill him by walking right up to him and doing it. I might have to do it fast, but Hito would let me get close enough to do it, and allow me whatever contact it took to do it. He trusts me. That is what makes it so bad. It isn't so much that we value dogs more than people, it's that we're appalled by such a gross violation of an innocent creature's trust. For the same reason we would want an adult to be imprisoned for assaulting a child, but would be inclined to let the weightlifter deal with his attacker and go about his business once the aggressor is properly folded, spidled, and mutilated.
That is not to say that adults can never be helpless. Of course they can. In general, however, people will always be considered more capable of taking care of themselves than domistcated animals are.
But beyond that, aren't we basically inured to violence against other people? We see it on the news every day. We understand that we don't see ALL of it because it simply would not be feasible to give every single act of violence against people media attention. There are only twenty four hours in a day, after all, and who has the constitution it would take to absorb it all? Even the most callous amongst us would eventually say "enough!"
We dismiss a lot of what we do see, anyway. Dead children in war zones are called "collateral damage." Every time there's a rape case in the media you can bet that someone will say she was asking for it by dressing or acting the way she did. Excuses are made for police that shoot down unarmed men that later turn out to be guilty only of not being white. Sympathy is given to kids that kill their parents because they claim to be abused. We are, on the whole, quick to find excuses for people that use violence, and quick to use violence in response.
If we weren't we wouldn't jump so quickly to war, and there would be no one downplaying the need for diplomacy prior to war, as we have in our country now. We wouldn't have the death penalty, either. We might, without the inuring, follow our oft-brandished religions and seek redemption for the guilty, rather than death.
We play violence, too. It's in our movies and TV shows. It's in our video games. Hell, it's in some of our board games (and I LIKE "Risk"). We teach it to our kids with toy guns and toy soldiers and games like "Cowboys and Indians", where there are no reasons, just one group of kids pretending to shoot another for no other reason than "They're the Indians."
I'm not saying these things cause violence, so unruffle those feathers. I'm saying that they blunt the edge of our attutude against it. Violence against people is something we live with every day, starting at a very young age. We become inured, to an extent. Those of us who don't eventually crack up.
We don't have such a daily exposure to violence against animals, however. Kids never play "Cows and Butchers." Children caught abusing animals are normally punished for it. And we don't see dogfights and cockfights in the news every single solitary day.
And yes, we love dogs, because their loyalty and love is so much easier to count on than another person's.
Does that answer your loaded question, Mr. Martin?
