Suck decade

So my buddy, Tim, must've been high, drunk on Miller Lite or something & he was screwin' off on his iphone from an undisclosed location in Amsterdam or some place of that nature. Shares some shithole of a YouTube music video (circa 1985) on the stupid Facebook. The nasty little man with a guitar pops out of the TV and kicks the cigarette out of the couch sitting loser's hand. Yup, this is good. Oh look, open the fridge and the band of minuscule men are rock'n like you can still rock in America - oh yeah, all right - "Might as well go for a soda, nobody drowns & nobody dies."

What in the hell? Some anti-drug song like that old lady, that "Just Say No" astrology consulting old chick would like?

I hate the 1980s. I think it was a shit decade. Worst of the 20th century.

In an alternative universe, the hostages would've been released early and Jimmy Carter would've been elected to a second term, the solar panels would've remained on the White House roof, MTV would've never been invented and the Minnesota-bred suburban-violently young-sloshed & pissed-bastardly-magnificent Replacements would be heralded as the greatest musical act of the decade.

But we don't live in that world. Never did. The whole godforsaken decade started with my favorite rockstar getting killed and my least favorite "great communicator" getting elected President.

Hall & Oates had a string of hits in 1982. Fuck Hall & Oates.

Anyhow, that's when I had to grow up. I was born when I was born and living my teen years in that ghetto of a decade was my lot in life. My dad got to have adolescence in the '50s, Mom in the early '60s. They had American Graffiti. I didn't even get Dazed and Confused.

There's a sort of plasticity, a phony, non-real quality to the '80s. The social consciousness of 20 years earlier wasn't just out of style in the '80s, it was repudiated, looked down upon, as if it were not only naive, but stupid to be concerned about poverty, nuclear weapons, racism, the "greenhouse effect," or women's rights. Making a contribution was about selling your soul to the corporation. College wasn't about debate and enriching one's self intellectually, but a step-ladder toward buying a Porsche. Instead of a President who looked like a movie star and inspired young people with world transformative ideals, you had a real life movie star President (albeit, a B-lister) winning the affections of would-be Alex P. Keatons by promulgating shallow ideas about greed, wealth, self interest above all others, imperialism and faux "morning in America" patriotism.

Pop culture was a reflection of that fictive conservative chic quality. Pop songs about materialism. MTV image trumping musical substance. Vacuous pop songs all around, the most glaring monstrosities released in the worst year of my life - 1982. Big hair bands that were an ersatz version of '70s hard rock. Movies and TV shows that glorified the lives of yuppies.

I said 1982 was the worst year of my life. I remember one day in seventh grade, I dared sit at the "popular kids" table. This guy - the kind of guy who liked to nickname his dick and trash all the girls he claimed to be banging - told me, "Get out. Take a hike." A girl was sitting there, watching, saying nothing and to this day I can't conjecture whether she approved or not. "Okay, I'll leave." Shit like that, you remember the rest of your life. Any time I had a bad day in junior high or high school, which was often, that son of a whore was always in the mix somewhere. I understand he's a devoted family man now, a good Christian. All reformed. He actually had the audacity to send me a facebook friend request and that'll never happen. It's okay, God'll forgive him.

Am I just projecting my own inner turmoil on an entire period? I concede that may be some of it, but for the most part, I'd say it was just coincidence that the worst year in my life happened to also be the worst year in the history of pop culture.

If you want to go down to the heart and soul, the deepest core of the '80s, I don't think it's Michael Jackson,  the Berlin Wall coming down, MTV, Reagan, Big Hair bands or any of that.

I think it's Rick Astley.

"Never gonna give you up, never gonna say goodbye." Ever been rickrolled? Sounds dirty and it is in a banal, joyless and de-evolutionary sort of way. It's vapid, devoid of soul, disposable, suffused with synthesizers and in its own way, fascist and evil. Rick  Astley, D-list, flash in the pan, nothing but a big annoying voice like grunt  huffing from within a rectally planted microchip lost in moussed, protuberant hair.

Rick (shitting) Astley. The decade deserves no better.

Veterans Day 2014

U.S. 23rd infantry. 37 mm gun in action. France, 1918.

There's a scene in the movie, Born on the Fourth of July, that really sticks with me. It's early in the movie when Ron Kovic is a boy watching veterans in a Fourth of July parade. He stares into the eyes of an old man wearing his World War I uniform, a sad look on his face. I've always wondered what kind of life shattering experiences from youth must have haunted this man in his old age. There have been millions of people with such stories. PTSD wasn't invented after the Vietnam War. I'm sure it's existed since war began. Thousands of years since primitive man started fighting with sticks and stones. The weapons are now multiple times more potent and lethal. Young men and women a generation younger than me are now coming home irreparably damaged from war.

It's interesting that Veterans Day, Nov. 11, is also the birthday of one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut. He was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. Vonnegut was imprisoned in an underground meat locker, which spared his life during people who survived the Allied fire bombing of the historic city of Dresden. During the tumultuous '60s, he would go on to incorporate the horrific event  in his novel, Slaughter House Five.

I've thought about war a lot this year with it being the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the 100th anniversary of the first world war. I've read Cornelius Ryan's journalistic account of the D-Day invasion, The Longest Day and I hope to at least start reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August about the start of World War I.

It must have seemed like Armageddon.

Lately, I've been thinking about a quote from former President, Commander-in-Chief and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. It's something he said upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002. 
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

I'm tired of seeing the world devastated by war, tired of seeing lives shattered and shortened. It's a crime that there are impoverished, homeless, jobless, drug addicted veterans in this country. They shouldn't be so removed. On the whole, Americans don't have enough skin in the game. War is a crime, a murderer. Hopefully, one day - I'm sure I'll never live to see it - America and the world will give it up.

I talked to a couple of Korean War veterans last week who recently went on the Kansas Honor Flight to Washington, D.C. They recalled crowds applauding them at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. A boy about 8-years-old and smiling from ear to ear eagerly shook their hands.

"I sure hope he never has to go to war," one of the old men said.

Show me that smile again

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Moonshine, teabillies and inbreeding

7:30 p.m.

Dead silence. Darkness except for a single light bulb shining dimly over my early '60s model Royal typewriter, paper nestled blankly inside. I'm sitting here at the kitchen table, a glass of Jim Beam and Coke to my side. Jim Beam - distilled in Clermont, Kentucky by seven generations of the Beam family, ceasing for a brief moment during Prohibition as if stopping to pee at a pit stop. Wife and kids are gone. At her mother's, I guess. Loneliness is palpable at such moments when I feel like Don Draper in the last episode of season 3 from Madmen, sitting solo on a stairstep, children's noise only a dream, Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, it's All Right" rolling over the closing credits.

5:32 a.m.

I walked into my job at the paper company at 8 a.m., the morning after the mid-term elections. "Well, what do you think, Matt?" I said to my supervisor, resignation in my voice. He turned his chair away from the computer in his cluttered office. "I think they can all go fuck themselves," he said, then proceeded into a long diatribe as Matt is prone to do.

"I'm gonna move my family out of Kansas so my kids can get an education," Matt said. Pictures of smiling boys, ages 3 and 4, dotted the wall behind his desk. His Iowa Hawkeyes jacket laid on plastic-cushioned chair beside the trash can.

"All they saw was the R." Scorn filled his face as if written with a permanent marker. Matt's wavy hair is receding. He wears humongous Dwight Schrute glasses. His head is considerably smaller than Dwight Schrute's, babyish fat hanging over his cheeks so that when his mouth is closed - that familiar horizontal line - his sense of righteous indignation is accentuated by characteristic jowls. How many times have I seen that look?

"Just because a guy went to a strip club 16 years ago."

"Do you really think it carried that much weight," I asked.

"Yes, I do because it's all they fucking care about."

Election night jitters

Maria and I sat on the couch, eating leftover meatloaf as we'd been doing all week. Gabby was at the far end of the couch, playing with Pinterest and Max was in his room, playing wii. We don't have cable, the antenna is for shit and therefore we were spared all the campaign commercials, Netflix, Hulu and those kinds of things being our resources. All our news was coming from our phones.

"Davis is winning!" I posted on Suzanne's facebook wall. I've known Suzanne since 7th grade.

"You're kidding," she answered back.

"No, that's what they're showing. Of course, I won't be convinced until it's confirmed. I'll believe it when I see it."

I was smart to be cautious, to keep my enthusiasm in check.

When Maria told me, sadly, that Brownback had moved ahead, there was no going back. Just a short time later she said, "Davis is about to give his concession speech." Gabby was disappointed, having internalized her parents' distaste for Pastor Brownback.

"It'll be okay, Jeff," Maria said, her hand warmly over mine.

"Yeah."

"It's not like they have your salvation in their pockets or something."

Kentucky bourbon

News reporting Mitch McConell had clearly won Kentucky. A day later a right-wing friend of mine whom I've known since 7th grade would post on fb: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell. I like the sound of that." And a bunch of jerks would robotically press "like."

"What's wrong with these people?" I posted from my phone to Suzanne as the news of McConell's victory speech arrived. "Is it the moonshine? Too much fucK ing inbreeding?"

Driving down the highway. Morning. NPR in my car.

"I'd enjoy having some Kentucky bourbon with Mitch McConell," Pres. Obama said.

Me, I'd have to be shitfaced beyond recognition. But Barrack Obama has more class, more social graces than I do. Besides, he can say it, knowing it'll never happen. He was being conciliatory and still the right-wing whackos would be littering social media. "Unbelievable!!!" "Arrogant socialist." "Half-breed Muslim communist." "Narcist (sic)" "How can a dictator be humble?"

No, I wouldn't want to drink with that turtle head. McConell - little head emergent as vacation-esque ground hogging.

I say bye to Maria in the morning. "Thanks little girl." Life will still go on, believe me. And I can still pray before I walk into the old building for another work day. I mean - yeah, I do pray, not to this repressive, Republican god they created (Maria says I don't fit in much with church people), but to someone like your dad, you know, oh and I never prayed to God about the damn election. I figure He's above all that fray.

just - wasn't there some pop song in the '60s - Burt Bacharach or something? God Give Me Strength

"You even snuck a country song in there," Johnny Cash said to Neil Diamond when he was a guest on The Johnny Cash Show, referring to a track from Diamond's Brother Love's Travelin' Salvation Show album. Kentucky moonshine, no teeth. That's what ol' Neil was singin' about.

Politics, religion and free tampons

Last Saturday, I arrived home from Wichita where I'd had my Suzuki car repaired at Firestone. It
was approximately 1:46 p.m.

"So what are your plans today?" Maria said to me as I ate leftover meatloaf warmed in the
microwave. "I know you have something up your sleeve."

I told her I planned to vote early. All Longmont County voters could put in advance ballots at
Our Blessed Virgin Catholic Church in nearby Dovedale until 4 p.m. "Wanna come with me?" I
asked.

"Yeah, but I gotta take a shower first."

While Maria was showering, I did last minute research on the internet about the candidates &
issues so I could make informed votes. Of course, where Pastor Sam Brownback and Kris Kobach
were concerned, I didn't need to do any research. It was clear where I stood on Mr. Onward
Christian Soldiers.

But the two Kansas Supreme Court judges who people wanted to remove for the way they ruled on
the Carr Brothers - I had to research them. I wasn't going to be like all those hotheads who
voted solely on being pissed about something they knew little about. Law is an intricately
technical area.

Maria and I took the kids - Max & Gabby - with us when we voted. Two years ago, they "voted"
with their schoolmates for president. Shortly before the school election, Max, who I think knew
I was for Obama, said, "I think I'm voting for the other guy 'cuz I'm sick of portions." Both my
kids had heard that Michelle Obama was behind their school lunches being served in smaller
portions.

When we went to vote, the poll worker made a big deal about my name on the voter list being listed as Jeff, while my driver's license said Jeffrey. Wasn't sure if I'd get to vote, but I made it.

The real star of this experience was Our Blessed Virgin Catholic Church, an Ivory colored cathedral. I was raised Baptist so this is a world I've just been a guest in a few times. I loved the brutal, poignancy of the painting at the head of the sanctuary - a pained, sorrowful Jesus Christ on the cross. Catholics don't mess around. Suburban white bred Protestants, on the other hand, will give the kiddos candy crosses with their chocolate Easter bunnies.

                                                     

Maria and I completed voting. We had to pee. The lavatories were rough carved stone structures of Romanesque quality. Stall doors encrusted and painted with dark evocations of St. Thomas of Aquinas hues. I could only imagine Vatican City. All of it, the Roman in Roman Catholic.

"This is nice," I said to Max who stood back against the wall as I pissed between the partitions.

"I don't think so," Max responded.

"Come on, this restroom - I can hardly call it that - rivals the restroom at Von Marr," I said as I washed up at the marble sink, referring to Wichita's clothing store with its hand crafted ties and tailored suits.

Back in the Santa Fe, Maria brought out the hand sanitizer she'd acquired. "There was a row of them on the counter of the ladies room," she said. "They were stacked. Free maxi-pads, tampons."

"Let's go to Goodwill," she said and I moved the SUV gently along the spacious and vacant parking lot, just thinking.

Gov. Brownback converted from that liberal Methodist church to join the Baptists, then converted to Catholicism. Like his conservative Catholic buddy, Rick Santorum, (the right-winger who nearly puked at Irish Catholic JFK's speech on the separation of church and state), Brownback crosses the divide, fitting in as much with jokey, sterile white evangelicals as comfortably as he does with pre-Second Vatican Council Catholicism.

He's been linked with the secretive Opus Dei  cult as naturally as he's been connected with The Family on Washington D.C.'s C Street - you know the place where the leader has cited Stalin and Hitler in relation to Christian power.

You'd think Pope Francis would be on Brownback's Enemies List. Gay? "Who am I to judge?" Evolution? "God doesn't have a magic wand." The environment? Yes, there is climate change. Next, he'll be playing guitar and singing, "The Times, They Are - a Changin.'

We went to Goodwill where Max and I sauntered to the used book section that unlocked politics, theology, philosophy - somewhere by this rough scuffed tile floor - world.

Vote like your country's on fire

The first election of any kind that I can remember was the 1976 presidential election. I was in second grade and there was no question who I was voting for in my school's mock elections. Grandpa Guy was making Jimmy Carter donkeys to sell in his woodshop.

"Be a Democrat all your life," the old man told me. I can still hear his high-volume, sawtoothed voice.

Voting was a given with people of that generation. I've read how college educated people are more likely to vote, but it wasn't like that with the old crowd who saw the Depression and World War II. My grandma Mac only had an eighth grade education, but for her, not to vote would have been unconscionable. She worked at the old Ben Franklin store in my hometown of Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 then). When an 18 year old girl Grandma worked with and trained, said she didn't think she would vote, Grandma told her, "Honey, you not only owe it to your country. You owe it to yourself."

I had a 1976 bicentennial book full of pictures of the presidents that my Dad gave me. He'd gotten it at the bank for free, along with a car visor calendar. Grandma Mac pointed to the picture of FDR and said, "That's my favorite president." What? I thought. Not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

Today, I'd have to concur with Grandma Mac about the importance of voting. I study candidates from both parties, but I'm a registered Democrat, which Grandpa Guy would like. (Maria is unaffiliated.)
In the past six years, I've seen voting become a more urgent need than ever and that urgency has reached an apex this mid-term election year.

Ten years ago, the folksy public radio personality Garrison Keillor, in his book, Homegrown Democrat, wrote, "This is a year for passion." That is all the more true right this moment. The acceptable thing for me to say is, "It doesn't matter who you vote for as long as you vote." But it's never been more important that Democrats get out and vote. Mobilized Republicans have had that mastered into a swift art for more than 30 years and Democrats have to work hard to roll back the damage these Reagan worshipers have done - corporate carte blanche, massive economic disparity, increased poverty and decreased safety nets, endless wars, institutional racism, a breakdown in that safe wall separating church and state and hate-filled toxicity.

Here in Kansas, we have to kick that autocratic, oleaginous corporate jerking theocrat out of the governor's mansion. The secretary of state - let him go deer hunting with Ted Nugent and Jesus (I mean, their own personal Republican Jesus).

This battle is being played out in governor and senator races all over the country. Experts are predicting a Republican controlled Senate will be the aftermath. Think of what that would be like. These are people who would let the debt ceiling collapse and impeach the president on dubious, trumped up charges.

Right-wingers, with the help of a conservative Supreme Court, are negating constitutionally guaranteed voting rights and other civil liberties, leaving thousands of people who would vote to protect the peoples interests - and not the corporations - disenfranchised.

We need egalitarian-minded voters more than ever today. If you haven't been kicked off the registries, I hope you make your voice heard. If we need more single women and African Americans voting to achieve Democratic victories, I say bring us more single women and African Americans.

I remember a picture I saw of an 89-year-old World War II veteran, his walker in front of him, a sign around his neck: "Main Street not Wall Street," it said.

Defending what FDR gave him.

Right-wingers want to keep women from voting, same as they do, birth control. It's been a long, hard fight. I hope women and minorities make it out.

Shut down Brownbackistan

Bible thumpers in the state board of education trying to strike evolution from science textbooks for crackpot  psuedo-science about the earth being 6,000 years old. State representatives emailing crude racial caricatures of the Obama family. That's the kind of thing my home state of Kansas has been known for in recent years.

This is the state where Rick Santorum - Rick fucking Santorum - won the Kansas caucus in 2012, while trying to become (mother of God) President of the U.S. Santorum - imagine if that name does enter the dictionary as a slang for gay sex?

Another state embarrassment? Have you watched the freaking Daily Show lately? It's Pastor Sam Brownback. Come on, the guy's buddies with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the loyal American who's flirted with the idea of secession and used to go shooting at a rifle range with the word, "nigger" on its sign. Brownback was the only governor to attend Perry's prayer spectacle a few years back when he was trying to be (holy Stonewall Jackson) president of this Evangelical Christian Nation. From the pulpit, the gentle spoken Sam read quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr. and I was like, "C'mon, who are you kidding?"

Brownback's first action as Kansas governor was to disband the state arts commission, leaving Kansas as the only state without an arts commission. (It's since been brought back.) But I wasn't surprised. Hard core conservatives, on the whole, don't like art anyway, Dubya's paintings of Putin and Poppy Bush, notwithstanding.

There's a warmth, a congeniality to Brownback's personality that Thomas Frank described as almost "(Bill) Clintonesque" in his 2003 book, What's the Matter with Kansas? True, Brownback doesn't project the slimeball smug arrogance of Fox "News" heads, but make no mistake, he is a scorched earth radical.

It's unprecedented for a Kansas governor to oust members of his own party as Brownback has done. It was a massacre. Those bad Republican senators, those RINOS who differed with Brownback on cuts to taxes, education and social services - they got their heads chopped off by the Brownback Machine. The Koch Brothers, who have backed Brother Sam for around 20 years, put their money behind getting the liberal commie bastards - calling themselves Republicans - ousted in the primaries by hardcore conservatives.

Dick Kelsey, an evangelical preacher-senator, pro-life with high ratings from the NRA. Liberal pussy. Wouldn't play ball with Sam and got his ass thrown on Brownback's Enemies List - you know, like Tricky Dick Nixon had - and got his ass handed back to him in the primaries.

I would think a good leader would welcome dissenting viewpoints so he could look at issues from all sides and make informed decisions. You know, that's how Abraham Lincoln did it.

But Brownback is an ideological purist, a True Believer. He says his experiment in Kansas is going to work, given time, and I think he believes his own bullshit.

He turned down free money from the Federal Government to expand Medicaid to cover the people who made too much to qualify for the program, yet not enough to qualify for the Affordable Care Act. A true pragmatist wouldn't care where the money came from, wouldn't consider it tainted. If it helped raise all ships, he would take advantage.

But not Brownback. Between 79,000 and 150,000 Kansans have been denied healthcare coverage, but at least the simon pure Sam Brownback hasn't dirtied his hands with the federal government and that nasty Obamacare that needs to be repealed even though it was voted on fair and square.

Not expanding Medicaid will cost Kansas hospitals between $2.6 billion between 2013 and 2022, according to an Urban Institute report. But listen to Brownback and the Tea Party. They know best about fiscal policy. They're true conservative Republicans.

In 2010, Brownback campaigned on reducing poverty in Kansas, which seems like a lot of cheap talk now since he's done his damndest to keep the poor down.

He let a federal grant expire - again, turning down free money - that would have kept foodstamps available to unemployed people without dependent children. An estimated 20,000 Kansans were thrown off the program. Brownback wanted to give the filthy freeloaders the incentive to find jobs.

TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) was drastically reduced and accessibility for the poorest of the poor has become a lot more complicated.

Remove the safety net from the least of these and spend $1.8 billion in tax breaks and incentives for businesses. Eliminate income taxes for 100,000 Kansas businesses. No other state in history has taken such a radical move.

Then there's the slashing of education funding so drastic, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled it in violation of the state constitutional requirement for adequate education funding. One would think Brownback would have more respect for the state constitution. After all, he's so intent on upholding the state's gay marriage ban.

But then Brownback signed into law a bill passed by the legislature, saying firearms are immune from federal legislation - a law deemed unconstitutional by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Brownback and his right-wing friends have destroyed a more than 100 year tradition of moderate, progressive Republican policy in Kansas, pandering to their government hating, ammosexual, "fag bashing," "family values" teavangelical army of Christian Sharia zealots.

Democratic candidate for governor - Paul Davis

But hey, it's the rough and tumble world of politics and Christian Sam has no problem going down the sewer to attack Democratic challenger Paul Davis for being in a strip club 16 years ago. Hell, all I want to know is whether the lap dance girl was good looking.

Shameless? He connected Davis to the Carr brothers. (Davis knew one of the victims.) All I could think of when I saw the ad was "Willy Horton."

I'm sure Brownback would dismiss me as part of "the left" or "liberal media." He was on CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) getting interviewed by pseudo-journalist David Brody, who has his balls in the white sheet of the Republican Jesus. Does the "mainstream media" want to "craft a narrative" and play "out to get you?" he asked.

In a dead heat race, the media is now reporting Brownback to be ahead of Davis. Obviously, the Koch brothers have been going balls out in these final days before the election. I'd like to be able to say they're not going to be able to buy this election, that David will beat Goliath, but we won't know until Nov. 4. Between 15,000 and 20,000 voters - many of whom would vote for Davis - are being disenfranchised by the Kris Kobach Crackdown. And it's happening all across the country - brown, back and liberal voters getting shut out. If Republicans can't win fairly, they'll cheat and when the election's stolen, they'll call it a "mandate."

 Kris Kobach & Ted Nugent

On today's date in 1948, Pres. Harry Truman proved all the experts wrong and beat all the odds to win the presidential election. Imagine seeing history repeat itself in all these hot races around the country, in which the "liberal media" is predicting massive Republican wins. Unfortunately, the only history being repeated so far is Joe McCarthy and Jim Crow.

I'd like to see Paul Davis win the governorship in Kansas and the totally cool Wendy Davis (no relation) take it in Texas, but things aren't looking good for her. The majority of Texans, it appears, support the candidate who pals around with that diaper shitting, racist, ammo-fanatic Ted Nugent. I wish it was all Willie Nelson and Austin City Limits down there, but it's not.

There's not much hope for Texas, but I'd like to see Kansans live up to their strong history and send Brownback packing. Maybe that will give him incentive to find a new job. Hell, he'd just get hired by Fox "News" anyway.

I didn't get around to mentioning the people from Brownback's own party (the old school Republicans he screwed over) who are trying to shut him down. But you can see it in this hilarious clip from Jon Stewart's Daily Show.