I'm not the world's most knowledgeable Eric Clapton scholar, just a garden variety fan, certainly since before I booked 2 of his bands, Cream and the Yardbirds, to play at my college. Later, by some miracle I wound up as the head of the record label that he recorded for. I don't recall him as ever getting too political with his music.
So wasn't I in for a shock this afternoon when a mutual friend took me for a drive and played me The Road to Escondido the new Clapton/J.J. Cale album due out November 7, election day.
The "political" song is called "When This War is Over" and, like most of the album, it is sung by Eric and J.J.
When this war is over
It will be a better day
But it won't bring back
Those poor boys in their grave
I don't have a copy of the CD and I can't recall all the lyrics but I remember asking if they sat down and wrote some lines with Jack Murtha:
Gotta get a plan
Change our ways, you know
The album is chillingly beautiful at times and powerful and vibrant throughout.
Anyone who's ever listened to Clapton's astounding covers of "After Midnight" and "Cocaine," might have guessed these two guys would work together someday. This someday has resulted in 14 songs that defy simple genre categorization. There's rock, blues, country, folk.
.. even a gorgeous children's song I can't get out of my head that Eric wrote for his three daughters.
(Eric also wrote a song with John Mayer, who plays on the album, as do Taj Mahal, Albert Lee and Derek Trucks.)
"This was the realization of what may have been my last ambition, to work with the man who's music has inspired me for as long as I can remember," said Clapton. "There are not enough words for me to describe what he represents to me, musically and personally, and anyway I wouldn't want to embarrass him by going overboard, for he is a truly humble man.
.. I think it's enough to say that we had fun, made a great record, and I for one already want to make another.
"
Maybe next week I'll be able to get some music I can post. Until then, here's a great live version of Eric with J.J.
and his band at the Crossroads concert doing "After Midnight" (which is not one of the Cale covers on the new album).
For anyone who wants the tracklisting: Danger, Heads in Georgia, Missing Person, When This War Is Over, Sporting Life Blues, Dead End Road, It’s Easy, Hard To Thrill, Anyway The Wind Blows, Three Little Girls, Don’t Cry Sister, Last Will and Testament, Who Am I Telling You, and Ride The River.
I read through the clips and digest the daily dose of ever-more raw hatred coming from our nation's capital and directed at the majority of Americans. Then I try to have some breakfast without feeling totally demoralized. But as I look out on the darkness outside, I always remind myself of the famous parable: 'It is always darkest before the dawn.
'"
--David Sirota, from his blog entry yesterday, " "
Disclosure: I am cheating here. I'm sitting at my desk at 10:50pm, hoping to be able to leave in an hour or so and then have only a day's work still on my desk tomorrow, when I will be slipping out a couple of hours early to actually sneak out of the city for the weekend, where a friend is having a barbecue, which it will probably take me a month of diligent gym duty to work off. (Luckily I don't have to worry about wasting time on bathroom breaks, since after 8pm my electronic key card won't get me back into the office.
I don't have such "privileges." It appears that some time back this decision was made by the company's wisest heads, who even though they are never here much into the evening seem to know who else is or isn't.)
Nevertheless.
Now here I am stitching together a QOTD for tomorrow! (This way I can just concentrate on work tomorrow! And maybe I can get through the most urgent pile if I take a batch of proofs home and actually read them tonight.
) And it's plucked from a blog entry that was posted early today (Thursday) and has already been ripely commented on. It was in fact forwarded to me, and when I just paused from my labors to check e-mail I found it, and it somehow suited my mood. It is on the one hand as grimly despairing as one could imagine (and I pass it along on the theory that you don't have enough despair in your life).
At the same time, though, there is the mad gleam of a flicker of hope.
About the limit of my hope is that, weather permitting, on Rosh Ha-shanah I will be eating ribs (my friend Richard, who is hosting the barbecue, makes the best ribs I've ever eaten) and lasagna and who knows what else.
As for the gleam of hope in , it has to do with his merciless lining up of the forces clinging so desperately to the diseased status quo in the country, and his explanation of why they're so freaked out by the storm clouds gathering in the distance.
The theory is that anything that freaks those people out might represent a gust of hope.
Here, then, is the full blog entry:
The tidal wave heading straight for the hall of mirrors
There are times every now and again where you just have to step back and behold the absurdity of it all. You have to step back from the day-to-day trench wars and just marvel at how entrenched power really is in this, the country where we still cling to Horatio Alger fables or "anyone can grow up to be president" myths.
What I find particularly fascinating is the intricacy and careful calibration of the propaganda system that holds this whole structure up. Like a hall of mirrors, our political debate is, in every way, designed to perpetuate the status quo. But no hall of mirrors can withstand the impact of a big enough tidal wave, which is why those inside the hall are freaking out.
Consider, for a moment, the frothing, fulminating bile now being spit from the highest reaches of Washington, D.C.'s media establishment.
A few months ago, we saw one major columnist at the largest newspaper in the world say voters should not have the right to decide elections in America anymore. Not only was he not shunned for his screed, he continues to appear regularly on television as an objective, god-fearing patriotic American. Soon after that, in the face of polls showing the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iraq War, a top Washington blowhard from one of the largest television networks in the country appeared on TV to label every Democrat who has questioned the war "as weak, Jane Fonda-type Democrats.
"
But really, that was only the beginning. Since then, as voter discontent with the war, stagnating wages, job outsourcing and the general direction of the country has escalated, Washington has battened the hatches, and gone from spitting bile to firing tank ordnance at the oncoming battalions of ordinary people who, goddamned them, dare to think they should be able to have some say in their own country. Washington Post columnist David Broder - the so-called dean of the Washington press corps - called voters who want change "elitist insurgents" - a not-so-subtle attempt to conflate American voters with terrorists.
Then there was my personal favorite - David Brooks sitting there in his pink shirt with a smarmy half-grin in Northwest Washington telling the country "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Brooks breathed a sigh of relief that "the Clintonite centrists are reasserting their intellectual, financial and political supremacy" and that Hillary Clinton gave a speech that scholars at the fringe-right-wing American Enterprise institute "called remarkably centrist." Thank god, said Brooks, that the "renegades who rail against the establishment are being eclipsed by the canny establishmentarians" because, according to him, "They're the ones who know how to use the levers of government to get things done.
" Ah yes, with war raging in the Mideast, poverty rising in America, people struggling to pay their bills, Clinton-backed free trade deals shipping jobs overseas - thank the lord that the same old crew was supposedly reasserting itself because that record shows "they know how to get things done."
He's not 100 percent wrong, of course - these people do know "how to get things done" - but only exclusively for the fat cats who pay to get a seat at the table - the fat cats that people like David Brooks feel most comfortable with; the fat cats that way too many Democratic officials are more than happy to go brag to reporters about shaking down even as they deride the GOP's culture of corruption.
Incredibly, however, none of the establishment's old tricks seem to be working anymore.
All of the Jedi mind tricks, all of the false storylines, all of the Clockwork Orange-style indoctrination efforts just don't seem to be sticking. And that's why it's gotten so ugly of late.
Today, we see David Broder quite literally losing control of his faculties on the pages of the Washington Post.
You can almost see the veins popping out of that shiny white forehead you've gotten so used to seeing on Meet the Press. Like the bad, overdone stereotype of the crotchety senior who is angry that the world around him is changing, Broder declares that there needs to be "a new movement in this country" to "resist "the extremist elements in American society." Who are these extremists?
Why, people who use the Internet to politically organize and engage. Yes, according to Broder, "bloggers" are the moral equivalent of "doctrinaire religious extremists" - yet again, another not-so-subtle effort to portray anyone who dares to excercize their democratic rights as an Osama bin Laden supporter. He then fires off a screed about various politicians such as Rep.
Sherrod Brown. He calls him "a loud advocate of protectionist policies that offer a false hope of solving our trade and job problems." Right, becaue in David Broder's cloistered world, the "free" trade deals Brown has opposed have done such wonders for places like Ohio.
In David Broder's world, those hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers who have been thrown out onto the street thanks to NAFTA and China PNTR are the filth of the earth that high and mighty elite Washington journalists like him cannot be bothered with. In David Broder's world, any request for our trade pacts to include restrictions on child slavery, environmental degradation, and pharmaceutical industry profiteering off desperately poor people, positively un-American. Why?
Because David Broder lives in a place where all of these critical issues are merely just more fodder and gossip for a newspaper column - not real challenges in his life, nor in the life of the people he spends his time with in the Washington Beltway.
At the very least, Broder realizes that the American public is outraged at the twisted moral compass that govern him and his buddies. That's why he is freaking out.
But there are still some who are prancing around, spewing happy talk, making a fast buck, totally unaware of what's really going on out here in the real world, and perhaps even more insulting, totally unconcerned about their own naked hypocrisy. For instance, just this week, we see former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now the head of Citigroup, standing on a stage with a straight face and holding a seminar about the best ways to alleviate international poverty. That this man was the top architect of the international trade policies that have exacerbated both domestic and international poverty is an afterthought.
That this same man holding this seminar still refuses to acknowledge the culpability of the trade policies he has jammed down the world's throat is not to be mentioned. All that matters to the fawning media and political establishment is that this much-worshipped moneyman is on stage saying we need to help poor people. It makes you wonder if at some point soon, we'll be seeing Jack Abramoff holding a seminar on ethics and morals in the political arena.
Simultaneously, courageous reformers like Sen. Byron Dorgan (D) who has written a serious, bestselling book about how to really fix our economic policies are shoved to the side, barely getting mentioned in the press, while financial-industry-hack-turned-congressmen Rahm Emanuel and his buddy Bruce Reed who heads a corporate front group are given oodles of press attention for publishing a barely-selling pamphlet of warmed-over hollow talking points perpetuating the status quo and reinforcing negative stereotypes about those who want real change.
At this same conference, we see images of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman laughing it up with Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf.
That's right, the columnist who piously champions his supposed commitment to spreading democracy is happily, publicly hamming it up with a brutal central Asian dictator. Ah yes, because it's all just so goddamned hilarious to a New York Times columnist who can sit back in his 12,000 square foot Bethesda mansion, count his $2 billion family fortune, tell the world how much he really truly cares about freedom, push American soldiers into the Baghdad shooting gallery, advocate destructive trade policies that he brags about not having even read, and blaming Americans whose economic lives have been decimated by those trade policies for not better educating themselves. It's all just so goddamned funny for Tom Friedman, because he gets to do all that, yet still also gets to ham it up every few weeks on national television with Tim Russert, and gets to be on stage with his good friend Bill Clinton and pretend to be serious.
Of course, Clinton, who convened the conference that featured Rubin and Friedman, was recently the recipient of a 20,000 word New Yorker article that was the journalistic equivalent of what Monica Lewinsky did to him in those steamy Oval Office days. In the article, New Yorker editor David Remnick proclaims from the mountaintop Clinton's supposed devotion to solving the African AIDS crisis, but never once - not once - bothers to take a moment in between lavish banquets and starfucking exchanges to actually ask Clinton why, if he was so committed to stopping this awful plague, he insisted on passing trade deals that included provisions specifically designed to allow pharmaceutical companies to inflate AIDS drug prices in the developing world? But then, if you are David Remnick and all that really gives you a professional hard-on is getting to eat barbeque in Bill Clinton's private apartment in his palatial presidential library, why would you ask such a question?
Because really, the only ones who care about the answer to such a question are the millions of impoverished peasants who were never able to afford AIDS medications thanks to those trade provisions - and those aren't the people David Remnick hangs out with or is writing for.
The same disconnection from reality is prevalent among many politicians - which might explain why some of them now are reacting so angrily to the fact that yes, they do have to face voters for reelection. Take Joe Lieberman.
When confronted with the fact that he skipped more than half of all U.S. Senate votes on the Iraq War and most of the votes on the destructive Medicare bill so as to attend fundraisers for himself, he angrily claimed there is a moral equivalence between him as a full-time, $160,000-a-year U.
S. Senator skipping decisions on the most pressing national security and health care questions in American history, and his opponent missing 6 votes on a part-time town council 15 years ago. He also says with a straight face that the reason he worked so hard to stop health care reform in the 1990s was because he cared about small business - but then he conveniently forgets to mention that he authored legislation to raise taxes on small business health benefits.
Then there is Rep. Nancy Johnson (R) who is now airing television ads saying that asking President Bush to obtain search warrants after he's wiretapped phones as the law requires would dangerously slow down the original wiretapping. Put another way, she's actually asking audiences to quite literally believe that the basic laws of space and time do not exist.
Meanwhile, chickenhawks who refused to serve in the military when they had the chance continue to sit comfortably in their Washington think tank offices and transform their sick insecurities of personal weakness and frailty into screams for more American soldiers to be sent to die in Iraq.
What you see here, folks, is that all of it - the elections, the public policies, the future of the country - is one big joke to the people in power, and they are willing to lie, cheat and distort anything to protect the integrity of that joke they are so happily enjoying. They don't want anyone asking questions of them.
They don't want anyone thinking they have a right to use democracy to change things. They are fat and happy and putting the pedal to the metal in their sleek sports car on the great American highway overpass - and anyone who tries to slow them down, run them off the road or make them just glance at the blight below gets the big, road-raged middle finger.
When I get up everyday at 5:30am to start working, it is still dark out.
I read through the clips and digest the daily dose of ever-more raw hatred coming from our nation's capital and directed at the majority of Americans. Then I try to have some breakfast without feeling totally demoralized. But as I look out on the darkness outside, I always remind myself of the famous parable: "It is always darkest before the dawn.
" Win or lose, November 7th isn't going to change everything. But win or lose, it's clear that things are already changing. The rising anger coming from the halls of power are a reflection of the establishment's deep understanding that change is coming.
The screams from the angry pundits and the desperate politicians and the paying-to-play lobbyists are like the early warning sirens at a beach. And just over the horizon, they see that tidal wave coming.
Remember the old zaniness of Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy"? The Republicans have revived it as "Morons vs.Morons"
With regard to this great "compromise" reached by warring Republicans on military tribunals, how do I know it sucks?I don't have to read a New York Times editorial, although as it happens there's a good one (" " [note: the editorial is appended in a comment]). I know it sucks because, well, look at the people who agreed to it.
Not least the Bush administration. I hope at this late date I don't have to rehash the thousand layers of illusion, delusion and garden-variety authoritariansm at play in the administration's "thinking" in this area. Surely by now it's enough to say that if they're for this "compromise," it has to suck.
Sure, it's fun to watch Republicans squabble, but it's useful to remember the overwhelming likelihood that they're all wrong. Look at the immigration mess, for example.
In today's paper Julia Preston reports (" "):
LAKEPORT, Calif.
--The pear growers here in Lake County waited decades for a crop of shapely fruit like the one that adorned their orchards last month.
"I felt like I went to heaven," said Nick Ivicevich, recalling the perfection of his most abundant crop in 45 years of tending trees.
Now harvest time has passed and tons of pears have ripened to mush on their branches, while the ground of Mr.
Ivicevich's orchard reeks with rotting fruit. He and other growers in Lake County, about 90 miles north of San Francisco, could not find enough pickers.
Stepped-up border enforcement kept many illegal Mexican migrant workers out of California this year, farmers and labor contractors said, putting new strains on the state's shrinking seasonal farm labor force.
Labor shortages have also been reported by apple growers in Washington and upstate New York. Growers have gone from frustrated to furious with Congress, which has all but given up on passing legislation this year to create an agricultural guest-worker program.
Last week, 300 growers representing every major agricultural state rallied on the front lawn of the Capitol carrying baskets of fruit to express their ire.
This year's shortages are compounding a flight from the fields by Mexican workers already in the United States. As it has become harder to get into this country, many illegal immigrants have been reluctant to return to Mexico in the off-season. Remaining here year-round, they have gravitated toward more stable jobs.
"When you're having to pay housing costs, it's very difficult to survive and wait for the next agricultural season to come around," said Jack King, head of national affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
Now I don't know what the solution to the pear-picking problem is. I know it's not just: "Well, just let 'em hire all the cheap illegal labor they can.
" However, I do know that the chances aren't good of an intelligent solution coming from packs of squabbling morons. On the one hand you've got the moron faction that salivates at the thought of endless supplies of sub-minimum-wage labor, and on the other hand you've got the drooling-xenophobe morons who just know that it's them damn furriners that's ruinin' the country--that and them lib'rals and homos.
Shall we add a dollop of irony?
As the NYT editorial reports, even what little ground the administration may have conceded to Senators Warner, McCain and Graham will probably disappear once the House weighs in, thanks to the administration's loyal point man there, Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter--the Man from E.A.R.
M.A.R.
K. As DWT readers know, ol' Dunc should be spending his time sweating over the fusilage of corruption charges he should be facing. Instead, he's going to be the man who helps the hoodlums and psychos of the Bush administration turn military justice into an arm of the campaign of terrorism that is making this country the world's most hated.
Who knows, maybe ol Dunc can find a way to make torture pay, the way he's made everything else that passes through his committee pay--for him.
When I asked one of my friends to come see an advance screening of yesterday, he said he had to catch a plane somewhere. It took a few calls but I finally found someone to go with me, although he warned me that it was a Christian triumphantist movie that he read would be scary. I had been invited with People For the American Way; it couldn't be straight triumphantist.
It almost was. I mean, it's a documentary that follows a few very young kids from middle class homes in Missouri as they go off to get evangelicized brainwashed for the summer with a grotesquely fat lady pastor, one of the film's "stars," who starts the film-- with no sense of irony-- screaming about how Americans are fat and lazy and don't have the strength to fast..
. like Muslims. She also bemoans the fact that Muslims instill their young with the power to die for their religion.
Clearly psychotic, the movie revolves around this mentally deranged lady, who should be spending time at Weight Watchers group therapy, instead of preparing young children for a life of severe delusionalism who, she hopes, will become suicide bombers for J.C. "I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places," says the fat crazy lady.
"Because, excuse me, we have the truth."
When she has nothing to say she starts bellowing "in tongues." She encourages the poor kiddies to do the same.
The fat lady, by the way, loves the movie and is helping to promote it. Delusional people, obviously, don't realize they are delusional.
The kiddies in this movie are taught to worship George Bush-- or at least a cardboard cut out of him.
They are taught to hate abortion. They are consciously brainwashed with a while vocabulary of perversion of the essence of Jesus Christ's message to man. Nowhere in the film is there anything about Christianity, just a lot of hate-filled bullshit about how self-professed "Christians" need to take over the country for J.
C. Their enemies are scientists talking about global warming, anyone who favors public education or, of course, legalized abortion.
Last November I wrote about how the in Pasadena because a guest pastor preached an anti-war sermon.
The harassment seems to be turning into , ironic in light of what comes out about Bush's relationship with the militant Christian right, more a political movement exploiting classic cult dynamics than anything to do with legitimate religion. One of the film's looniest characters is an hysterical, high-ranking, so-called "minister" named (who consults Bush every Monday). He's more like a Republican ward healer than someone with something to do with Christianity but if there's anything to Jesus Camp and the super-churches like Haggard's sprouting up all over suburban America, this is the "religion" the Republicans want to enforce on America.
Haggard, perhaps a mad man, but a powerful one with direct access to Bush, brags in the film that "If the evangelicals vote, they determine every election." A scary, even unlivable, prospect indeed.
UPDATE: SURE THERE ARE RELIGIONIST EXTREMISTS, BUT MOST PEOPLE OF FAITH AND NOT INSANE FASCISTS
Today People For the American Way released a .
It refutes
refutes some widely held assumptions about how Americans’ religious views and values influence their political behavior. The survey, part of a multi-year research project, was released on the eve of a and featuring a who's who of religionist wingnutia, from neo-Nazis like Ann Coulter and Marilyn Musgrave (KKK-CO) to the kinds of delusional cult leaders in the Jesus Camp documentary (Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Don Wildmon), and the hypocrites, scoundrels and political charlatans of the extreme right (Sam Brownback, Mike Pence, Macaca, Sean Hannity, Gingrich and, of course, Bill Bennett).
"There's been a lot of talk about values voters, and a lot of that talk is just plain wrong," said Dr.
Robert Jones, executive director and senior fellow of the Center for American Values in Public Life. "Most Americans do not think restricting access to abortion and keeping gay couples from getting married are the most important issues facing voters. When Americans think about voting their values, they're thinking primarily about candidates' honesty and integrity.
" Uh, oh-- even with Cunningham in prison, Ney and DeLay headed there and investigations on-going for dozens of Republicrooks associated with the Republican one-party state, even values-voters may be forced to think instead of react when they get to the voting booths in November.
Even among evangelicals, issues like addressing poverty and providing affordable health care handily trump restricting access to abortion and banning gay marriage.
The study claims "that hasty conclusions about the size and permanence of a partisan 'God gap' have been premature.
While the most frequent church attenders are still most likely to vote Republican, the gap has shrunk dramatically, and it appears that Democratic candidates have an opportunity to attract majorities of every other group, including weekly worship attenders. 'It is simplistic and inaccurate to suggest Democrats have lost their ability to win support from religious Americans,' said Jones."
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