Sunday Rumination

Summertime, you wouldn't know it. We have hardly had a hot day, at least not the unbearably hot days we get sometimes. This morning the sky is cloudy, it might make it up to the eighties but you're not going to sweat, there will either be rain or a breeze. Yesterday we had moments of drenching rain -- hey, we saw a double rainbow yesterday, did you see that?

This isn't going to be an issues-related post, I guess I'm a little burned out on issues. Well there almost aren't any. The right guys got elected, they're doing a good job, trying to put the government back into sensible order again. But you know, for some reason we have people who just want to stop that. Say health care. The president, the Democrats, have a plan, and what can you say, the idea is that sick people should be able to see a doctor, and the other side is against it. They don't have a better idea, there's no principle or intellectual difference of opinion, it's just that the Republicans don't want the Democrats to succeed. For us that are mostly healthy it's a chess game, people betting Monopoly money, but for a lot of people it really matters, you're going to live or you're going to die depending on how they resolve this. The Republicans are against it because they don't want the party that was elected to accomplish anything.

There are three big, interesting stories this week, it seems to me.

First, the Harvard professor who was busted trying to get into his own house. I saw a show once where they had a guy try to break into a car with the alarm blasting. His horn was honking, you know how that sounds, and he was standing there sliding a coat hanger down into the door trying to trip the lock. Did I mention it was a white guy? You know what people did, they did what you and I would do, they came over and tried to help him. But up there in Cambridge, a black guy couldn't get the door of his house to open, and he got a little upset about it (you and I never would) and the neighbors called the cops and they arrested the guy. For trying to get into his own house. And being uppity.

This is a beautiful story, it has everything. This wasn't just a black guy trying to get into his house, it was the Ultimate Black Guy, the W. E. B. DuBois professor of black studies at Harvard, an African-American brainiac and expert on how black guys get screwed by the cops. And perfect, the cop is giving him a hard time, and this professor comes back with "yo mama."

I was on a jury a few years ago where a black kid was busted in Rockville. He was driving down Rockville Pike in an old car and the cops stopped him for a cracked tail light. Jumped out, ran away, threw his dope on the ground, a respectable (e.g., white) citizen saw it. The kid's witnesses all wore orange jumpsuits. When was the last time you got stopped for a cracked tail light? In the jury room, a lady said, "I work in a hospital, I see this every day, he's guilty, let's get this over with." Poor people. I made them stay there all day, going through the evidence. Literally, he broke the law, he did have drugs, but he was only caught because the police stopped him for the very slightest violation. How many cars on Rockville Pike do you think have a baggy with something illegal in them? You don't know, it only matters if the cops decide to hassle you. Certain people get hassled more than others, let's say, and a large percentage of a certain demographic is in prison and on parole. This is a perfect news story to get a certain discussion rolling.

Now the President has invited the professor and the cop over to the White House for a beer. Is that cool or what? The last guy couldn't do that, if he'd had a beer he would've ended up chugging a case and then he would have, you know, played Truth or Dare with The Button or something. Here you got a professor who understands the fundamentals of racism in America, a cop who sounds like a good guy who got called to intervene in a bad situation, and the President who is black and might have a thought about it and said the whole deal was "stupid" and now has to be cool about it. So -- come on over, guys, let's have a beer and watch the game. That is actually the perfect solution.

Second story, C Street. Aunt Bea has been commenting in detail on the blog about this, Rachel Maddow has been following the story, there is something really important and creepy going on. There is a house on Capitol Hill where a number of politicians live and others visit. It is a Christian group, but not in any sense I ever heard of before. These guys believe they have been chosen by God to be leaders, and anything they do is all right as long as they retain power. A bunch of them are having sex with somebody who is not their wife, they have a budget of gazillions of dollars, all undocumented, they go around to foreign countries and make deals they have no business making. This has been going on for decades. You can say, there's nothing wrong with that, they're private citizens, they have freedom of religion, but ... it is creepy, the country's business is being conducted off the record by people that you just wouldn't trust. A guy joined the group and wrote a book about it. Here's what he said about Doug Coe, the leader of the group:

Doug Coe, David Coe’s father and leader of The Family fellowship going back to the mid ’60s, likes to call The Family “The Christian Mafia.” I knew Coe when I was part of The Family. He explained what it means to be a chosen politician.

Talking to another man, he said, “Let me explain to you the concept of ‘chosen.’ Suppose I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?”

The man says, “You would think I was awful, a monster.”

And Doug Coe said, “No, I would not, because you’re chosen, and when you’re chosen, the normal rules don’t apply.”

These are people who believe that God has hand-picked them to run the world. the Divine Right of Kings has been granted them. I'm sorry, post-Magna Carta I don't think that works. People should not put up with this.

Third story this week: birthers.

People hear this and they will either laugh at it or buy it. There is some kind of story that the President is not an American. He was born in Kenya, or Indonesia, or something. It is impossible to imagine what the actual plan was, who is in on the conspiracy, how this works. True, the President is a black guy with the middle name "Hussein." He ain't your stereotypical President of the United States. And some people are having a hard time swallowing that. But really, people, get a grip. We voted, he won. This time there wasn't even any argument over the number of votes, everybody agrees he got a lot more votes than the other guy. He's smart, he's got six-pack abs, his wife is beautiful, he can hit a three-pointer on the first try. Everything hasn't gone perfectly in his first term, but come on, the guy is an American, he qualifies for the office. I watched Gordon Liddy on a TV show trying to question Obama's citizenship, and it was sad, there is simply no reason to believe he's not what he says he is. Liddy looked depressed, he's trying to believe something that there is no evidence for. But it's all these poor people have to cling to, they desperately want to believe he is not a natural born citizen. It would make their whole nightmare go away, we could get an old white guy in the White House again like we're supposed to have. This is just weird to watch, but you see there are a lot of them, a lot of people think with something other than their brains.

I'm up a little early today, listening to WPFW, drinking coffee. My mind is still a little blurry. Santana is ripping it up on the radio, this is good. Oh, now it's Stevie Wonder, "Isn't She Lovely." Back in the day I used to play the harmonica on that one, a chromatic harmonica, we played in the key of E. There are a couple of guys who play chromatic harmonica, Stevie Wonder being one of them, it is a great jazz instrument.

The band I'm playing in is doing pretty well. Every time we play people like us and we get booked back. We are a three-piece band, we play old rockabilly songs that everybody knows, mostly. This week we learned one that I wrote, and I think I will bring another one to rehearsal this week. We play restaurants and bars in Montgomery County, mostly up here around Rockville where we all live, and it really is fun. But here's the thing: I want a Wammy. I don't want to just be another band of old guys doing old songs, I want to be the best. We are booked pretty solidly, we have a couple of weeks off starting now but we have gigs every weekend, just about.

I'm glad to have this weekend off, people, I'm going to go fishing. I used to fly fish every day, then kids came along and I would fish with the little ones but it's not the same thing. We're going to go up to Pennsylvania where there are some of the best trout streams in the world, and I'm going to whip a fly-line out there and see if I can manage to catch one or two. Most of my fishing was in California, and out here the streams are smaller, you need lighter tackle, so I got a new rod and line. It's going to take some getting used to, I stood out in the parking lot at the Orvis store in Bethesda casting and I think it will come back to me.

I fish because I have always had a recurrent dream of fishing. There are many variations on it, but always there is something in the water that I can't quite see, and I try to catch it, it is something deep, dark, mysterious. I never catch a fish in my dreams, I only know they're there. Sometime in the eighties I decided to follow the dream, and I began fishing for bass. Then, I can't explain this but my beard turned gray and so I shaved it off and decided to fly-fish for trout. It all went together, I used to tie my own flies and I went out every day back when I was single. Fly-fishing is different, the fly has no weight so you cast by waving the line back and forth in the air, you hope the fish -- usually trout -- will think your lure is a bug that they like to eat. It takes patience and is frustrating, you lose a lot of expensive stuff in trees and bushes. There is something low-tech and primitive about it, and elegant. I am eager to catch a nice fat German brown trout in Pennsylvania. I'll pull the hook out of his mouth and put him back in the water, and maybe somebody else will catch him another day.

This week I had surgery on my guitar. This might not mean much to you, but I play a certain model of Fender Stratocaster that was only made in 1983. It was an experimental model with a lot of different features, including a new kind of wammy bar. If you don't play, I'll tell you, a wammy bar is a lever that you can press to reduce the tension on the strings, so the pitch will drop. Sometimes you can raise it, too, but you don't usually do that, you can bend the strings to raise the pitch. The original wammy bar on my model of Strat, called the Stratocaster Elite, simply didn't work. The instrument wouldn't play in tune. So like everybody else I replaced it. Well, this year the replacement part wore out, and I have had a problem staying in tune. I did some research on the Internet and picked a new one, ordered it, went to Chuck Levins in Wheaton and talked to the guys, and they installed it. Partly it means routing out the wood of the body of the guitar, and actually I don't even want to know about that. It's like when they draw blood from your arm and you look away. They did a beautiful job on it, I played it Friday night in Rockville and did not have to tune up once. It has changed the sound and feel of the guitar, though, and I'll have to get used to it. The sound now is more percussive and maybe it has less sustain, and the strings are a little lower than they used to be but I can get used to that. Most guys like the action low, I tend to like it higher where I can grab the strings and bend them.

There are all kinds of ways to approach the guitar. I'm a rocker, I guess I have a little country side to me, I like to play fast and loud. Out in California I used to have some friends that played together, they had a lot of Les Paul and Chet Atkins things worked out, fast harmonies. Sonny was a little older and had arthritis when I knew him, he was in his last days of playing, but Chris was my age, and we even had a band together at one point. Chris and Sonny played together like one person, their twin guitar parts were fluid and complex. Sometimes people would come over and Chris and Sonny would play for them, you know, five or six people, and those two would tear it up, How High the Moon, Honeysuckle Rose, some old Bob Wills things. Chris and I got tight, he was left-handed so we couldn't switch off but we had a band where I played bass, we had a house gig near the beach. At closing time, packing up, he knew these nasty songs, corruptions of tunes everybody knew, man they were funny! I have known a few country guys like that, they'll sing Waylon and Willie while they PA is on, but they have this alternative repertoire that you'd never guess, they seem like such nice guys. Chris and Sonny had a whole different approach to the guitar, they played pretty, subtle, it was countryish, jazz-ish, they didn't care much about blues or any rock and roll, they simply loved to play music. I wonder what they're doing now. I tend to bang on it, I like to get people on the dance floor, if people are dancing I play better. Chris and Sonny just played because they loved that music and they loved playing together. They didn't want to get paid for it or anything, Chris and Sonny just liked playing.

Hey, it was raining a little bit ago and now the sun's out. Yesterday we saw a big double rainbow, did you see that? When I moved to the East that was something I missed, we used to have rainbows in Arizona all the time, at least in late summer, in the monsoon season, but out here you hardly ever see them. This week I have seen rainbows twice, including the double one yesterday. Nice.

I've got chores to do, I need to get some polarized sunglasses and there are a couple of other things I want to accomplish today, bills are piling up, you know, stuff. It is a beautiful day out there, clear sunshine, the slightest breeze, I'm going to hop in the car and get out there.