The Band & Friends - I Shall Be Released (11.25.1976)

Dean Martin - Bumming Around

My friend Sudz and I were sitting at a back table playing poker at the Senior Center where I volunteer. Sudz, at 59, is something of a volunteer there as well -- holding chairs out for frail old ladies and helping to serve meals from the kitchen. Sure I call him an old man, but to the regulars in their 80s and 90s, Sudz is just a kid.

A happy kid, too. With his family, particularly his wife of 20 years (his third) and his grandchildren, he's all about the best things of life.

He had to take an early retirement from the refinery, lives on disability, goes to the VA for all his medical needs and maintains quite well. A few years back he was diagnosed with the same degenerative condition that took his old man -- a hard, formidable square-jawed 1950s man and the lingering light in Sudz's life. To hear Sudz talk about his dad is to hear him being young and strong again.

After a game of draw poker, I got up from our round table and placed a record on the turn table of the chestnut 60s era Zenith stereo. Dean Martin -- he was a stallion in his day, aw' shucks humor and the quintessence of cool. He sang country songs backed by a swingin' orchestra.

"Is that one song on there," Sudz asked and started singing, "my old top hat?"

I didn't know. I'd just bought the old album a couple of days earlier at Flashback Sound Shack, a used record shop in the Delano district of Wichita and I hadn't had time to listen to much of it. A little while later the needle came to that groove in the vinyl.


I got an ol' slouch hat,
got my roll on my shoulder
I'm as free as a breeze
an' do as I please,
just a bummin' around . . .

Sudz's dad sang with that song on the eight-track tape, sang all the songs with Dino for the three-hour drive to Kansas City office where 19-year-old Matthew (Sudz) would officially sign up for the military.

"My lottery number would be up in a few months so I figured I'd sign up when I could pick the branch I wanted," he recalled over a cup of black coffee, discarded cards before his hands. "A few months later, they discontinued the draft.

"There were a lot of war protesters, but I didn't know much about it. I figured if my country was in a war, it must be right."

He stops and sings with the vinyl. "Just a bummin' around."

Sudz's old man loved that song and "he had one good singing voice." It was a sonorous baritone, emanating from the lungs of a broad man with a gift for pugilism and physical stanima. A veteran homicide detective and police chief, he had been among the thousands -- the young men stomping through the ocean waves on to the shores of Normandy in June of 1944.

It was a fall day in 1971 when Sudz's dad drove him to the induction building. A couple of years later, FBI agents, police chiefs, detectives and seargeants from all across the country would be at the old man's funeral.

Actually, he died young, nearly a year short of his 50th birthday. Sudz, who like most of us, doesn't come close to the strength his father had, has outlived the man by around 10 years.

Sudz recalled different choices he could have made. He's diehard patriotic and respects all men and women who have served, but he can't help but thinking what it would have been like to go another way.

"He could've got me into the FBI," Sudz said, recalling the pull his influential father had.

After his dad drove away, Sudz hesitated for 10 minutes before walking into the building and then there was no going back. The old man drove around for awhile, but came back to see if his son wanted to change his mind. He was already in the building. Gone.

"If I had seen him, I would've turned back," Sudz said.

"My life would have been totally different."

America by the heart

Sure I was a wayward youth, an ACLU loving tree hugger, but I’m older and wiser now. I’ve seen the light and the inescapable truth is that way in the deepest trenches of my soul, I am a hard core Buchanan-Bachman-Limbaugh loving Born Again conservative man.

For some time I’ve been secretly reading books by Pat Buchanan and other such American thinkers and I see that they make sense. Our Christian American way of life – the precepts upon which our Founding Fathers built and blessed this country – is under threat. We have a Muslim in the white house. The Obamanites have instigated a war on white people and Christian values. We have allowed socialistic terms like “diversity” and “tolerance” to incubate and systematically spread genocidal disease upon traditional White Anglo Saxon American, Bible-based, Constitutional American culture.

The unrestrained promulgation of this perverted disease is transmitted by the Liberal Media Establishment. A radical chic East Coast – a Godless Information cabal -- has a throttle choke on The Culture and its agents are raping our sacred values with the perverted glee of a Babylonian whore. The evidence is incontrovertible: Madonna’s satanic ritual during the Superbowl Halftime show; Lowes and Home Depot buying ads during the blasphemous Muslim in America on A&E, the surreptitious promotion of sexual impurity in the High School Musical movies and the war on heterosexuality waged by ESPN. Look at the liberal-instituted crucifixions of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the emergent --high-tech cultural suicide -- “hipster” status of left wing propaganda vehicles like PBS, NPR and the BBC and is it not a clear sign? Public radio? Public television? More like public toilets. Oh well, satan is ruler of the airwaves and he’s stinking up the crapper.

The Elite Media Establishment is in cohoots with a Godless educational system that outlawed school prayer and will place your children in concentration camps for reading the Bible. Remember when schools were just promoting “safe sex” and condoms even though thousands of evangelical teens have signed an abstinence pledge? (To hear the failed prophecies of “safe sex”, if Custer had been wearing a condom during the Battle of Little Bighorn, he would’ve lived through it.) NOW, our children are being taught how to masturbate and have perverted homosexual sex in the satanic laboratories known as the United States public education system.

Is it any wonder that my Christian voter friends in South Carolina are concerned that Obama is the anti-Christ? Barry Hussein Obama is the worst president we’ve ever had, even worse than that gay loving, socialist Clinton and his lesbian wife. Secretly Muslim? Hell, Obama-bin-laden has made no secret that he’s a jihadist-racist-Adolph Hitler loving Muslim. Why did he apologize to the Afghans when our God-fearing men burned the Koran? No gonads. If it were up to me and the right conservatives of this land, we’d see a Hiroshima-saki conflaguration of Islamist verses scorching every day.

I remember having a beer with my right-wing buddy Mr. Grissmachy at the Backwater Bar and Grill. (This was before I became a Christian and quit drinking.) Osa – oh, I’m sorry Obama was giving some Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.

“I bet Ol’ Obama’s burnin’ up inside ‘cuz there ain’t no crescents on the gravestones there,” Mr. Grissmachy said, right before he raised his right leg to fart.

Also, like my good friend Glen Beck said, Obama has a “problem with white people.” They’re so thin-skinned, so bitter and desperate. If you have the slightest disagreement with Obama, you’re a racist. I love all my black brothers and sisters in Christ, but Barry Osa – sorry, Bama is horrible. Why do the black people keep falling for this liberal crap? Do they want a gangsta government headed by a food stamp prez who wants to turn their children into pimps and crackwhores? Maybe if the black people would pull themselves up the bootstraps, stop the illegitimacy and low education rates – perhaps through janitorial work by black school children as Newt Gingrich so brilliantly suggested --they would see through the black godfatha’ superfly’s liberal brainwashing.

We’re all one in Christ and we need to show our black brothers and sisters toughlove instead of giving them other people’s money. Like Gingrich, I also don’t believe slavery was a good thing, but that was along time ago. Get over it, Brother. Get off your welfare ass and stop bitching.

If Bachman, Rick Perry or Newt can’t be president, then Rick Santorum is our country’s only hope for salvation. It could trigger instant destruction if that non-Christian, moderate, Obama-light Romney gets anywhere near the White House. Our hope rests in a true Christian American whose looking out for real Americans.

Santorum is the only one telling the truth about the politically correct, liberal indoctrinating factory systems known as the United States university system. Obama wants every child in America to be able to go to college. Freakin’ snob! Why can’t some children be sent to trade schools and education camps where they can be taught the tenets of America’s fundamental values? Why the liberal breeding grounds known as college? It’s socialist dictatorship 101. Obama wants to take your children and re-make them in his Kenyan image. And why would he want to do that? It’s because he doesn’t value God’s creation and is dead set on pushing life-killing contraceptives on people who aren’t even married.

Why would fuehrer Obama care about lives? Instead of my personal Jesus, he proselytizes an environmental theology, an orthodoxy with seeds in animism. Makes me want to vomit like a sick, yalping dog at a JFK orgy-fest.

Americans were born here by Divine Providence and proclaim God throughout the world. Jesus has elected representatives to have dominion over the Earth as they morally see fit. So we need to get the government out of our lives, let the invisible hand work its divine magic over industry and if you’re a soddomite, Islamo-facist or non-English speaker, you can go to jail.

Yes, I have disavowed my Godless liberal youth. I’m a gun wielding states’ rights lovin, Old Testament thumpin', Confederate flag wavin’, lay- the-smackdown Hard Core Conservative. All you monkey lovin’ Obama lovers , illegals, welfare queens and Cadillac pimps, Muslims, sodomites and other sandlot infidel cannibals of the devil’s world, watch out. Somebody might take up Michele and Sarah on seeking some second amendment remedies and I’d love to smoke a napalm-laced camel and send you back to the Garden of Eden.

By the way, April Fool.