Well, let’s try again.
This morning I wrote a piece about the insane push for war with the ancient kingdom of Persia but carelessly deleted it. I won’t be able to recreate the post, but I know what was on my mind, and I can say it again. Short version: my bad disposition is a bigger threat to America than any Iranian bomb will ever be.
Unfortunately, Bush is just itching to be the first frat rat to drop the Big One, which makes us a mighty clear and present danger to the rest of the world and not the other way around. He already goosed the Israelis into destroying Lebanon, a secular democracy I never heard listed on any “axis of evil.” A nice, cute little country, half of which was even Christian, forgodssake. We drove a million people from their homes, and nobody knows exactly why. I hope you’re taking this down.
I grew up with a REAL threat, goddammit, the Soviet Union! We lived with this stuff every day, especially when my dad was with the Strategic Air Command, pilots and support personnel going on alert, sirens, practice drills on base for families, the whole nine yards. The Soviet Air Force had plenty of nukes and the means to deliver them. I was in high school during the Cuban missile crisis: on the worst day of that awful time, everyone I knew was calling each other on the phone, crying, expecting never to see their friends and families again. It was that close…
Iran??? Gimme a break.
Even if they had a bomb, they couldn’t use it, because we’d vaporize them, so this just isn’t going to happen. Hypothetically, a truly well-heeled, technically competent crew of terrorists with a hijacked Russian tactical nuke could send it up the Potomac in a Bayliner, but why bother? We’re losing every war we start! So the notion that these people who don’t go to Sunday school hate us so much that they live for nothing but seeing us all dead is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Unless we give them REASON to hate, however, which brings me back to George.
It’s a sad day when the only thing between us and hell is an asteroid or a military coup, but that’s where we seem to be headed. (Not for the alternatives, just the sad day.)
That hypothetical band of nuke-savvy “suiciders” I alluded to above? Imagine a Pakistani general with tears in his eyes. Why is he crying? We’ve just detonated atomic “bunker busters” across Iran, and the Israelis are helping us. Tens of thousands of Iranians have just died, all pretense of American neutrality and compassion is gone. The Muslim world is utterly threatened. What would you do, suck it up and go to work like always? Try to get a job with the Americans?? Buy U.S. Treasury bonds???
Oddly enough, that’s what the gangsters in charge of the next war seem to believe. Even stranger than that, I predicted it 25 years ago in a song I wrote called “2011” (That link is to a 2 MB MP3 demo on my FarrSound page.) Reagan had just been inaugurated, and I was trying to imagine what life would be like 30 years into the future (2011), after I’d turned 65. Yow! I can’t tell you how unhappy I am to be so prescient:
2011, and I’m on my own, 2011…
2011, got no dog, no bone, 2011…
they said it wouldn’t hurt us
if we spent it all on oil and bombs
they said it wouldn’t matter
if we used a few to nuke Iran…2011, and I’m on my own, 2011…
2011, got no dog, no bone, 2011…
they said it wouldn’t matter
if the forests and the mountains came down
and you really couldn’t see ‘em
for the waving of red, white, and brown…
Here’s that “2011″ download link again. Accompanying me on guitar and vocals is John D’Aquino of Chestertown, MD, who shares an August 9th birthday with me. We recorded on professional equipment in David E.’s basement, and I paid for the session with a gallon freezer bag of high-grade homegrown. (I guess I can say that now, after 25 years.) The man was ecstatic, as well he should have been.
You might like some of the other songs from that same time and session, all available here for free. “El Salvador” is pretty cool: “…so if you don’t like justice and you don’t like nuns, come on down to Salvador and have some fun,” ahem. I have another mix of that one with helicopter rotor and machine gun sound effects, but it’s not posted yet. There’s also the immortal “Anthrax Boogie” and “Piss Test,” the former a darling of Japanese MP3 search engines, the latter featuring crude jerry-rigged overdubbing of multiple tracks (electric 12-string + acoustic 6-string) on a creaky reel-to-reel.
Yes, that’s how I spent the ’80s. I never said I didn’t have any fun.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Ah, John. Prescience is never properly rewarded. Earth Day, 1970, por ejemplo.
You guys remind me of early Country Joe and the Fish. (I helped shlep stuff around for them in Berkeley back in the day, before their first album came out.) I remember my first taste of mole poblano, in a tiny Mexican restaurant on Bancroft Avenue, late one rainy evening in 1967, just me and this wacko East Bay band. Who knew then that they were about to carve a little place in history for themselves? The mole was excellent, by the way. It has never tasted so good since, even when prepared by experts.
Country Joe? That’s high praise (pun intended.
… and quite the personal touch.
OT, but see, this is the kind of thing I think more people ought to know. Our history, our culture. I’m not saying this is true in your case, but too many of us have been subtly or not so subtly intimidated over the years to hide these things away. I’m done with that. I’m for letting it all hang out WHILE WE STILL CAN. Ahem.
Thanks for your comment. How very interesting indeed.
Of course I agree, letting it all hang out is the way to go. We all have these memories, often very poignant ones. We may mess up the details sometimes (The restaurant, upon further reflection, wasn’t on Bancroft; it was about halfway down University, on the right side as you head toward the bay.) but that hardly matters. Memory doesn’t care about the facts, except for the central one that does its engraving on the brain.
We aren’t all articulate about our recollections, and many of us have no one to tell them to anyway. We do have you, though, which is why we hang out here, even when you don’t see or hear us.
John: Thanks for reposting this particular blog. Was that a total rewrite? Geez, that takes more effort that casting the original. More than I’m usually willing to expend. But, in doing so, this written-again version seems even better than the first, i.e., if memory serves me. Thanks for taking the time and effort to repost.
Enjoyed the music interlude as well. Piss Test and Anthrax Boogie being my favorites. (The latter being the most “dada”!)
Oh, and BTW Wm. Timberman, I had the pleasure to spend the last two years of Sixties in the Bay Area. While I didn’t realize HOW MUCH I would hold dear the memories from that place in space and time, I had a sense back then I was in the middle of something *very special* indeed.
Yeah, a rewrite. Turned out differently from the first version.
“Anthrax Boogie,” written while I was a solitary woods hippie in northwest Arkansas in ’71 — expressing existential angst at being all alone and responsible for myself on one level, and who knows what on the others — has been downloaded literally thousands of times. I have no idea what most people think of it.