Click On Title To Link To Erato (Greek Muse Of Poetry, although she may be blushing) Wikipedia entry.
The “Age Of Obama” Talkin’ Blues
I don’t know if the music of this message comes out the same on the page as the music in my head as I write it but I send my thanks to Mr. Woody Guthrie who made an art form out of the talking blues, and to Mr. Bob Dylan for continuing the tradition.
A Talkin’ Blues, Of Sorts
I’ve got the blues, and I’ve got ‘em bad.
I’m out here ramblin’, scamblin’ and far from home.
Not from the wood and brick shelter that has never failed to provide some sustenance in good weathers, or bad.
Nah, not that home.
No, I’m talking about being far from my American home that I have long loved.
And, at times, had to hate.
The home that I have fought to change since my youth.
To fight for that social utopia that always seemed to be just over the next mountain.
The one that our forebears long ago fought to create by a revolution and preserve by civil war.
And that we now need to update.
Yes, that one.
Today, though, I feel like an exile on Main Street.
And I’m starting to feel a hating spell coming on.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Strange, not that long ago I thought I smelled a sweet, fresh wind drifting across the political oceans.
Hell, it seems like just yesterday that it cooled my brow after some forty or so years of being out in the wilderness condition.
That was sure a strong little breeze that I had not felt since my youth back in the days of the fight for “new frontiers” and the times of “seeking newer worlds”.
I thought, at last, I was finished with my exile on Main Street.
But, damn.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Back then I never got tired of saying, to all who would listen, that this breeze that went by the name of “Hurricane Obama”.
It swamped all before it and although I knew it was not the breeze that would lift all boats it was the one that would bring the next breeze that would.
I kept my own heart still easily enough because I knew that this was not, after all, my breeze.
But the people I wanted to reach, the ones that will create that social utopia that I have longed dreamed of, did have their hearts fluttering.
And, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, still like what they see in Washington.
As for me though,
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
That was then and this is now.
Now we are saddled with Obama- sized wars, “good wars” we are told in the Af-Pak (or is it Pak-Af?) theater where more money, materials and manpower are going down the drain.
I need hardly mention the “bad war” in Iraq.
To even speak of that little mess in this Age is so very passé among those in the know.
It is no longer mentioned in polite society.
Yet again we are being asked to pay the piper for the errant dreams of the American imperium.
And a compliant, complaisant so-called anti-war Congress is ready to grease the skids.
When the right answer, just like when a sated kid asks for more, is to “just say no”.
I am ready to scream to high heaven against these war budgets.
No, there is now no question now.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
And there is more smoke and mirrors.
This regime is fully committed, and gladly, to putting major triage on the moribund capitalist system that got us into this current mess in the first place.
We are told that somehow if capitalism fails the very low bar stress tests imposed on it then all of us will go to hell in a hand basket.
I say, rather, if your system failed then move on over and give the rest of us a chance to breathe. Let our dreams get an airing.
But the Commander-in- Chief of the American enterprise and his cronies don’t get it.
And so I need not wonder about the why.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Day by day it becomes clearer that the people in charge are clueless about what to really do on the pressing needs of the day.
Healthcare proposals that will not produce health.
Education that does not educate.
Jobs that are not jobs but makeshift.
Hopes tied in ribbons that turn out be merely press releases.
And the elephant in the room.
Black faces in high places or not,
Blacks and Latinos are still at the back of the bus.
This is the age of the technocrat, the bureaucrat and the chattering class.
Tomorrow they say.
After this, that or the other thing is done, they say.
And then tomorrow, tomorrow.
I may be alone today confronted with this agenda.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Know this though:
the blow back is coming.
Substance will out over style.
Here is the real deal.
A man like Malcolm X spoke more “truth to power” in one day than Obama ever did in his whole sorry life.
I am embarrassed to even mention their names on the same page.
Yet there is hope.
I see some small signs even now.
People are starting to wake up, just a little, to their still empty wallets,
to their very much here today-gone tomorrow jobs,
to their constant struggle to keep a roof, any roof, over their heads and
… to question the why of their shattered dreams.
If I was wrong to think that last year’s breeze was the breeze of my youth, damn, I do not want what is happening now to be the breeze of my old age.
Hell, I am ready to fight for that next new breeze right now.
Then I will not be adrift in the Age of Obama.
Today, though, I’ve got the blues, and I’ve got ‘em bad.
The “Age Of Obama” Talkin’ Blues
I don’t know if the music of this message comes out the same on the page as the music in my head as I write it but I send my thanks to Mr. Woody Guthrie who made an art form out of the talking blues, and to Mr. Bob Dylan for continuing the tradition.
A Talkin’ Blues, Of Sorts
I’ve got the blues, and I’ve got ‘em bad.
I’m out here ramblin’, scamblin’ and far from home.
Not from the wood and brick shelter that has never failed to provide some sustenance in good weathers, or bad.
Nah, not that home.
No, I’m talking about being far from my American home that I have long loved.
And, at times, had to hate.
The home that I have fought to change since my youth.
To fight for that social utopia that always seemed to be just over the next mountain.
The one that our forebears long ago fought to create by a revolution and preserve by civil war.
And that we now need to update.
Yes, that one.
Today, though, I feel like an exile on Main Street.
And I’m starting to feel a hating spell coming on.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Strange, not that long ago I thought I smelled a sweet, fresh wind drifting across the political oceans.
Hell, it seems like just yesterday that it cooled my brow after some forty or so years of being out in the wilderness condition.
That was sure a strong little breeze that I had not felt since my youth back in the days of the fight for “new frontiers” and the times of “seeking newer worlds”.
I thought, at last, I was finished with my exile on Main Street.
But, damn.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Back then I never got tired of saying, to all who would listen, that this breeze that went by the name of “Hurricane Obama”.
It swamped all before it and although I knew it was not the breeze that would lift all boats it was the one that would bring the next breeze that would.
I kept my own heart still easily enough because I knew that this was not, after all, my breeze.
But the people I wanted to reach, the ones that will create that social utopia that I have longed dreamed of, did have their hearts fluttering.
And, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, still like what they see in Washington.
As for me though,
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
That was then and this is now.
Now we are saddled with Obama- sized wars, “good wars” we are told in the Af-Pak (or is it Pak-Af?) theater where more money, materials and manpower are going down the drain.
I need hardly mention the “bad war” in Iraq.
To even speak of that little mess in this Age is so very passé among those in the know.
It is no longer mentioned in polite society.
Yet again we are being asked to pay the piper for the errant dreams of the American imperium.
And a compliant, complaisant so-called anti-war Congress is ready to grease the skids.
When the right answer, just like when a sated kid asks for more, is to “just say no”.
I am ready to scream to high heaven against these war budgets.
No, there is now no question now.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
And there is more smoke and mirrors.
This regime is fully committed, and gladly, to putting major triage on the moribund capitalist system that got us into this current mess in the first place.
We are told that somehow if capitalism fails the very low bar stress tests imposed on it then all of us will go to hell in a hand basket.
I say, rather, if your system failed then move on over and give the rest of us a chance to breathe. Let our dreams get an airing.
But the Commander-in- Chief of the American enterprise and his cronies don’t get it.
And so I need not wonder about the why.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Day by day it becomes clearer that the people in charge are clueless about what to really do on the pressing needs of the day.
Healthcare proposals that will not produce health.
Education that does not educate.
Jobs that are not jobs but makeshift.
Hopes tied in ribbons that turn out be merely press releases.
And the elephant in the room.
Black faces in high places or not,
Blacks and Latinos are still at the back of the bus.
This is the age of the technocrat, the bureaucrat and the chattering class.
Tomorrow they say.
After this, that or the other thing is done, they say.
And then tomorrow, tomorrow.
I may be alone today confronted with this agenda.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.
Know this though:
the blow back is coming.
Substance will out over style.
Here is the real deal.
A man like Malcolm X spoke more “truth to power” in one day than Obama ever did in his whole sorry life.
I am embarrassed to even mention their names on the same page.
Yet there is hope.
I see some small signs even now.
People are starting to wake up, just a little, to their still empty wallets,
to their very much here today-gone tomorrow jobs,
to their constant struggle to keep a roof, any roof, over their heads and
… to question the why of their shattered dreams.
If I was wrong to think that last year’s breeze was the breeze of my youth, damn, I do not want what is happening now to be the breeze of my old age.
Hell, I am ready to fight for that next new breeze right now.
Then I will not be adrift in the Age of Obama.
Today, though, I’ve got the blues, and I’ve got ‘em bad.
Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon
By Seth Garth
I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.
Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)
In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.
The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.
I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.
For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.
So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.
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