AFL-CIO union president Phil Neuenfeldt speaks at a rally Wednesday at the Wisconsin state Capitol, the second day of protests against the Republican-led legislature effort to fast-track a controversial “right to work” bill in Wisconsin. NOTE: Another protest rally at the Capitol building is scheduled for noon, Saturday, Feb. 28., as is public testimony to the labor committee. Photo by Mike DeVries, courtesy of The Capital Times. Here’ s a link with a photo essay on the protest:http://host.madison.com/gallery/news/local/govt-and-politics/photos-wednesday-s-right-to-work-rally-at-capitol/collection_1476aa0a-bd31-11e4-8575-5fe1191072e7.html#0

The subject of this blog is power. But the first thing to understand about the protest rally I attended on Tuesday at Wisconsin’s State Capitol in Madison — against the fast-tracking of a “right to work” bill for Wisconsin law — is that this was no gathering of leftist agitators.

The day before the rally, Milwaukee ultra-conservative radio talk show host Charlie Sykes referred to the people he imagined assembling as “Unionistas,” implying militant Communist plotting, a typical and dated political fear-mongering.

I must comment on Sykes because he is so influential among Wisconsin conservatives and “Tea Party” members and anyone who feeds off his highly rated WTMJ program.

Talk about power. He broadcasts on the most powerful radio station in the state, by far. Fully aware that right-wing politics feeds off talk radio, radical Governor Scott Walker has a constant direct line to Sykes’ program.

Popular ultra-conservative Milwaukee radio talk show host Charlie Sykes also gets his share of speaking engagements. Photo courtesy courtesy bizjournal.com

I recall the governor’s current radio mouthpiece when I worked with him for The Milwaukee Journal  in the 1980s. Then a cityside reporter, Charlie Sykes would walk around the newsroom with a curiously remote air. He never spoke to me, or to very many fellow reporters that I ever noticed. He just seemed a little odd to me, and this was before I had any notion of his political views.

Now I interpret his newsroom manner as an imperious sense of superiority, and perhaps a sense of political alienation because — although professional print journalists work hard to be objective reporters — most reporters’ personal politics tend to be centrist or liberal leaning.

However, another former Journal colleague who knows Sykes and claims to be friends with him is Joel McNally, the affable and left-leaning writer with the infectious giggle. Back then, Joel was a newsroom star, writing a popular satirical column for The Journal, often about political matters. 2.

McNally commented a few years ago about his friend Sykes, regarding one of his programs that seemed to promote racial hatred:

“There’s nothing satirical about promoting racial hatred,” McNally wrote in The Shepherd Express for which he now does a weekly column. “I’ve written a lot of satire. You create satire by pretending to adopt a point of view you disagree with and promoting it with such exaggerated, ridiculous arguments that the whole idea is exposed as absurd.

“Sykes and his mean-spirited audience do not think the idea of poor inner city blacks living it up while ripping off taxpayers is absurd. That’s actually one of the basic premises of his show.” 3.

Sykes claims that covering some of the urban problems in Milwaukee changed his own politics because he perceived that liberal “welfare state” solutions were untenable. He apparently did a black-and-white ideological flip-flop —  if he was ever a liberal at all. Before too long, he left the newspaper.

It’s been a long time since he’s been a legitimate journalist, in the traditional sense, of serving the public interest with information they can use to make up their minds about a news story or a political development. His program thrives on his right-wing assumptions and biases, just as liberal talk programs do on theirs, to some degree. But none of those are really heard in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, Sykes’ morning show is so often sadly under-informed and under-reported, or selectively informed at best. He operates in relationship to a reality that’s not much more connected than Rush Limbaugh’s to that of an ordinary working or working-poor Milwaukeean, or American. Unless most of their information comes from such radio talk.

The crowd gathered at the Wisconsin Capitol Tuesday to protest the fast-tracking of a “right to work” bill. Another protest was held Wednesday.

Now, to the “right to work” bill protest I witnessed Tuesday. Contrary to Sykes’ glib characterization, the spirit of this event was as patriotic and American as God and country, mother and Apple Pie. Laborers of many different trade unions, some in hard hats, filled the crowd. A group of machinists did their own march around the capital to protest the right-to-work bill (see photo).

The program began with emcee Phil Neuenfeldt, Wisconsin’s AFL-CIO president, leading the crowd in The Pledge of Allegiance. Then the Solidarity Singers sang “The Star-Spangled Banner. “ our national anthem. Neuenfeldt then asked a priest, Father Jim Murphy, to give an invocation, which was a prayer for the gathering.

Several big American flags flapped in the icy wind, along with various union flags, amid the thicket of protest signs. People in the Tea Party, and politicians who cater to them, like to wrap themselves in the American flag and think their extreme aversion and often paranoia about government is what America is about.

This gathering at our state capital was what America is about. Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters Association of Wisconsin, reprised a refrain he used several years ago for the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered here in the summer of 2011 for protests of Gov. Walker’s Act 10 destruction of public sector union bargaining rights.

“We know what democracy looks like, right?” Mitchell called out to the crowd.

“ Democracy looks like this!” the multitude roared in massive and hearty unison on this cold but sunny and crystal-clear February afternoon.

Mitchell was one of a number of eloquent speakers, all associated with Wisconsin unions.

But Neuenfeldt summed the situation up quite well in his opening remarks:

“Right to work in Wisconsin is not the Wisconsin way. This bill is an attack on all Wisconsin families, an attack on our paychecks. It’s an attack on our ability to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. And it’s an attack on our rights as workers.”

“We know it’s out of state special interests pushing this bill.  They want power.

“They don’t care if you had a good job or decent benefits or can afford to spend your kids to college. What they want is more profits and they want to do it on the backs of workers.

“We know, and history teaches us, that a strong union movement builds the middle class and raises all boats. There is nothing more American than workers coming together, through their unions, to stick together. That’s what we’re doing here today, coming together to have each other’s backs, right?

“Unions lead to better trained workers, a safer workplace, and a strong stable middle-class.”

The word that sticks with me amid all this well-put, all-American common sense is the word power.

Neuenfeldt addressed the Republican power issue: “We didn’t send our elected officials to Madison to rush through a bill, to limit the public debates, in an extraordinary way, on important economic issues. We sent them to Madison to make sure every person in Wisconsin has a chance at the American Dream. Not to rush through a bill in an undemocratic way. Right-to-work will put downward pressure on our entire economy.”

The fast tracking of the bill, employs the same strategy used in at least two neighboring Midwestern states which are now “right to work.” The governor’s stated philosophy is “divide and conquer” – build resentment in non-union workers against union workers. Since making that statement to a rich donor,  Walker has deftly played “rope a dope” with the press and the public on the issue during his last term and last election, saying “right to work” was a distraction” and that he would “do everything in his power” to prevent such a bill from reaching his desk.

Now Walker has safely gained re-election for a second term, and is gallivanting around the country to try for presidential bid, and he has changed his tune. His Republican cronies in the legislature worked up this bill, which he now says he will sign when it gets to his desk.

This is yet another oppressive power grab by this gubernatorial administration.

Walker, son of up Baptist preacher, talks about God giving him the blessing to pursue his ongoing quest for more power. Yet, there’s something to learn from a philosopher who studied power. I speak of Frederick Nietzsche, the existentialist thinker and writer but especially as contextualized by the great American philosopher William Barrett, a great interpreter of existential philosophy, especially in his classic book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.

“Irrational Man” book cover courtesy Wikipedia.org

Understand, I don’t consider myself an existentialist, per se. But the philosophy substantially informs my thinking. I was raised a Catholic and today informally call myself a Unitarian agnostic, who still prays in my own ways, just like Father Jim Murphy does, publicly and privately.

Any reflective person cannot ignore modern history which includes the existentialist philosophical movement. It grew out of the experience of World War II, and the horrors of the Holocaust, which drove many people to question whether God was still alive.

Though many people think of existentialism as European, the philosophy profoundly informs the American experience, with our history of The Civil War, The Gilded Age, and especially since The Great Depression and the post-war experience.

That dark “Twilight Zone” sense of dread that life’s uncertainties, unfairness and pitfalls can impose on the celebrated American individual is perhaps an “irrational” fear, but a very real one. Didn’t most of us feel it on 9/11, and perhaps the 99 per cent of us during our Great Recession? Existential dread permeates most classic American crime fiction and the great American tradition of film noir cinema.

But my subject is political power, in this instance. Nietzsche, as interpreted by William Barrett, has plenty to say: “Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself. The will to power begets the problem of nihilism.”

Barrett writes that Nietzsche prophesized remarkably that “nihilism would be the shadow, in many guises and forms, that would haunt the 20th century. Supposing man does not blow himself and his earth to bits,  and that he really becomes the master of this planet. What then? (Barrett’s book was published in 1958 and the paperback edition in 1962 through the height of the Cold War, an even larger existential treat).

Note how relevant Barrett is to today: “Power for power’s sake, the matter of how far powers extended, leads always to the dread of the void beyond. The attempts to stand face-to-face with that void is the problem of nihilism. For the existentialists who felt that the other higher eternal realm (of religious belief) is gone, Nietzsche declared, man’s highest values lose their value. The only value Nietzsche can set up to take the place of these highest values that have lost their value for contemporary man is: Power.

“To the degree that modern life has become secularized these highest values anchored in the eternal, have already lost their value. So long as people are blissfully unaware of this, they of course did not sink into any despondency and nihilism; they may even be steady churchgoers.

“Nihilism, in fact is the one subject on which we speak today with the self-complacency of commencement-date orators. We are always ready to invoke the term against a new book on new play that has anything ‘negative’ to say, as if nihilism is always to be found in the other persons, never in ourselves.”

Nihilism never goes away. Now the gruesome brutality of the Middle Eastern radical terrorist group ISIS seems as nihilistic as anything. Will we start another ground war again? Walker would, he says.

Barrett continues to nail us: “And yet despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refrigerators, American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. It’s final quote ‘what for?’ Is not even asked, let alone answered.”

It’s uncanny that he wrote this in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s, but it is also the era of the TV show “Mad Men” as well.

“Unless our Faustian civilization can relax its frantic dynamism at some point it might very well go psychotic,” he concludes. “To primitives and Orientals, we Western men already seem half-crazy. We need to know what in our fundamental way of thinking needs to be changed so that the frantic will to power will not appear is the only meaning we can give to human life.”  4

At the pro-union rally protest I attended, clearly the head of the AFL-CIO and all the other speakers had plenty to say about thinking that needs to be changed, and about giving meaning to human life.

But what do Scott Walker and the Republicans — by rushing this bill through — have to say other than talking about “freedom.” The freedom, that is,  to work without paying dues, and yet receiving all the benefits and pay rates that a union works hard for all the company’s workers to enjoy? Walker and the Republicans want to outlaw union fees that people who prefer not to join a union might pay for the benefits, the better training, the workplace safety, and wages union provides them.

It’s “peddling a double standard” as Democratic State Senator Robert Wirch said, because Wisconsin chambers of commerce require all businesses to pay fees to them so that the powerful commerce chambers will protect them when they need legal or funding help or otherwise.

But the Republicans want to legally strip workers of that protection. The subject of this sort of government intrusion on private business affairs is worthy of a full public debate and discussion.

Scott Walker has been a career politician since he since he was in college at Marquette University. He allegedly played dirty tricks in running for a school office by removing from on campus news boxes all the newspapers that endorsed his opponent, among other questionable tactics. A short while later he dropped out, far short of his degree. Shortly after that he began the full quest, a will to power that has been driving his life ever since.

Do you have much sense that he cares about Wisconsin today, as he traipses around the country trying to get billionaires and to give him money for his presidential run?

For his occasional son-of-a-preacher pieties, one senses he is walking through a nihilistic void of pure power seeking, with political caginess but heedless hubris, over which even some conservatives shake their heads in dismay. “I wouldn’t bet against me on anything,” he recently boasted to a reporter. 5.

His grandiosity grows. When asked recently how he’d take on the ISIS terrorists he made a distasteful association with Wisconsin protesters: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do that across the world.” 6.

Who does he speak for other than his vainglorious self, in disarming platitudinous rhetoric, except to the extreme right political base, and Republican Party establishment looking for an electable candidate, and most of all to the richest one percent in America. Who else is he really working for?

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Photos by Kevin Lynch, unless otherwise noted.

1. The remarkable story of that huge event, which helped to inspire the Occupy Wall Street movement is documented in the book Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street  by John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine, and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, and another former colleague of this writer.
2. McNally was also the union steward of the first newsroom union to ever grace The Milwaukee Journal in the mid-1980s. I happened to be the first personnel case that the new union stood up for. I was laid off from my job as a part-time staffer in the features section in what amounted to a power move by an editor vying for a high position and trying to show he could tighten up a budget.  The lay-off had nothing to do with my performance.

An independent arbitrator decided that the newspaper had unfairly laid me off without offering to relocate me to another position, although I did apply unsuccessfully for a couple of other positions. Thanks to the new union’s president Jack Norman, steward McNally and others, I got my part-time staff position back, along with nine months back pay.

3. https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-20907.html
4.  William Barrett, Irrational Man: A study in Existential Philosophy, Anchor Books, 1962, 203-205.
5.  Here’s the video of Walker’s comment: http://dailysignal.com/2015/02/01/scott-walker-wouldnt-bet-anything/
6. https://us-mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.partner=sbc&.rand=acrals92f0pdh#mail

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Bill Camplin – Understory (self-released)

Bill Camplin observes and invokes life with unblinking candor on his inspired new recording. This crystal-clear Nashville-recorded session stands as Camplin’s strongest-ever album of original work. Peerless in its naked, high-baritone beauty, his voice employs Dylanesque duskiness and deftly doled drama, often wrapped in rueful irony.

Camplin testifies to human foibles and futility, as personal confession and for those underfoot, suffering exploitation. Therein lie his “understories,” insightful, humane and possessing a perfect pitch of indignance.

“Old Man Sleep” requires little reflection, yet begs for it. Camplin witnesses a street-wandering soul, addressing the elder beyond earshot with extraordinary tenderness. Haunting falsetto phrases recall the great jazz singer Andy Bey. Camplin, a master of linguistic quirk, notes: “in the alley of existence your slur lives on.”

“Seems I’ve Seen This Night Before” attests to Everyman’s flounderings: I’m losing all concept of what I intend/playing the victim and stumbling away.

By contrast, “Fatcats,” is a romping blues-funk protest – with streaming organ backdrop — against the (Wall Street) “fatcats who want it all.”

“Rage Against the Night,” stands as Understory’s masterpiece, high, street-corner poetry worthy of the best Dylan or Townes Van Zandt, whispering Lear-like existential pathos. Sostenuto cello and majestically descending guitar chords soon recall John Cale-Lou Reed scenarios. Camplin’s voice unleashes a sort of threepenny-opera passion. “Rage” summons hearts and minds with time-borne challenges and no easy answers, only faith in perseverance and, in its affirmative key of C, will for justice:

The flood of history as it advances forth among us/

and the drained potentials that the deluge washes from us/

Between our future and our past, let us rage against the night.

Out on a thunderclap, oh, the light is breaking/

children’s voices calling as they are waking/

Spring erupts again to put forth the final fight

Bill Camplin performing with violinist Randy Sabien and guitarist Satchel Paige Welch. Courtesy dwightfpl.wordpress.com

The album bristles with musical variety as Camplin’s son and album producer Satchel Paige interjects pithy, conversational guitar fills and hand-in-glove gestures, especially on the brilliantly arranged “All in the Name of You.” Trumpet, cello, organ and pedal steel help till Understory with spades of fresh vigor. We should hear more from the talented Mister Paige before long.

Yet Understory’s flat-earth CD cover abstraction might also suggest voices rising from graves, and the veteran songwriter addresses, amid our gadget-clogged distraction, the eternal question of finally relinquishing the temporal spirit, “Where Do We Surrender?”

“Take your souls, take them out on the highway…release yourself to a deadly extreme… ….where do we confess we can on longer try?” Here’s Camplin performing the song, at an Earthkeepers Mississippi River Sacred Sites Benefit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mOf7cZ4j5M

But Camplin, the 68-year-old co-owner of Fort Atkinson’s roots music mecca Café Carpe, ain’t going nowhere soon, one hopes. 1 He’ll release a live recording of a renunion of the Cardboard Box band, named for his 1975 album. He plans two more volumes of his masterful Dylan interpretations, documented first in Dylan Project One from 2003, along with another album of originals still unfolding down the dusty roads of his mind, and a “country” album.

Don’t wait for those to catch up with Camplin. Here’s an Understory: One day, he suddenly disappears, like many a mythical or forgotten troubadour-poet eccentric. They bury him in an ungainly cardboard box in a modestly marked grave on the banks of the Rock River. Then his remains wash away in the streams of time. Which, as we know, waits for no one.

Understory is available at Cafe Carpe, 18 S. Water Street West, Fort Atkinson, and at  cdbaby.com: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/billcamplin3

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1. Cafe Carpe, also a fine eatery, has a long history as a Midwest crossroads for great and obscure singer-songwriters and vernacular groups. The Carpe also provided the artistic sowing ground of Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault and the collaborative group Redbird, among others. Among recent acts I’ve seen there include Redbird (Mulvey, Foucault, Kris Delmhorst and David Goodrich) at their holiday season concert series and, last month, Steve Forbert, another baby boomer rudely defying the ravages of age.

For information, visit: http://cafecarpe.com/listening/

This review was originally published in a shorter form in The Shepherd Express: https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-25043.html

New York Times Magazine photo illustration by Andrew B Myers.

As I read the sad and disturbing article “Feed Frenzy” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, something stirred in the belly of my dismay. The story’s subtitle is “the unique 21^st-century misery of the online shaming victim.”

Online, one reads a more blunt headline: “How one stupid tweet blew up Justine Socco’s life.” 1

No, I’ve never been victimized yet, as have the article’s subjects. But I’m interested in finally starting my own Twitter account. As I read, I began to again reconsider plunging myself into the shoot-from-the-hip mentality that dominates this social media.

At least on Facebook, you can contextualize your comments more thoroughly, so that misinterpretations like those that ruined a number of people’s lives don’t explode in their faces, often before for they realize the reactions have spread like a monstrous global cancer.

On Dec. 20, 2014, Justine Socco — in flight on a plane trip from London to South Africa before she discovered she was being globally pilloried — insensitively joked on Twitter: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

She preceeded that with sassy tweets about a “weird German” with body odor, and “bad teeth” Brits. And before snaggle-toothed Austin Powers could say “Oh, behave!” countless quickly intrepreted that, being white, Socco thought herself above AIDS — too privileged — to get it in Africa.

The author of the article, Jon Ronson, admits to his own share of online tweet shaming, and I have done some of my own but never on Twitter, and only of persons fair game as a public figures, ie. politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  The odd defiance and hubris of someone like Walker, which even some conservatives admit about him, virtually begs for online reproach. 2

But swift judgment is contagious on social media and especially on the forced glibness of Twitter’s 144-character virtual reality. That virtual quality insulates the Tweeter who lashes out. Readers viciously pecked Socco’s personhood and her career to death (flashes of Hitchcock’s The Birds, but such tweeters displayed the crows’ same pack-attack mentality). The pain and damage to a person’s psyche and a life are quite real. Justine remains, a year later, still “wracked by PTSD, depression and insomnia,” after she lost her job as a senior director of communications at IAC (a leading online consumer service company).

Ronson recounts a few other “tweet frenzy” victims’ sad stories, and then something clicked with me when he started digging into the history of public shaming in America. He found, on microfilm in the Massachusetts Archives in Boston, an article about how, on July 15, 1742, “a woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, had been found  ‘naked in bed with one John Russell .’ They were both to be ‘ whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.’ Abigail was appealing the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid. She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke.  ‘If Your Honor pleases,’‘ she wrote, ‘ take some pity on me for my dear children cannot help her unfortunate mother’s failings.”

At the time, crowds of people flocked to public shamings and continued berating with relish, just as they did in 1692-3 at the notorious witch trials and hangings in Salem, Mass. 3

A dramatization of a Salem witch trial. Courtesy www.thehorrorzine.com

Right then, it struck me again, why I had been so fascinated by the Italian painter Titian’s painting “Christ and the Adulteress,” which I had seen in person recently at the Milwaukee Art Museum and which now I have as my computer screen saver.

The painting was a centerpiece of Heaven and Earth: 500 years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums, now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, through May 3 under a somewhat more secular title: Botticelli, Titian and Beyond: Italian Masterpieces from the Glasgow Museums.

“Christ and the Adulteress” by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 1508-10. Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum

The brilliance of Titian’s daring and evocative formal handling of his subject matter fascinated me, as I discussed in a previous Culture Currents post:https://kevernacular.com/?p=5704

Justine’s and Abigail’s stories helped me understand that this painting’s alluring and sculptural tangle of figures says even more about social matters than I had first inferred. Like Abigail, the woman in the famous Bible story appeared guilty of adultery and, with a swift judgment, the Pharisee drags her to Christ, actually with the duplicitous intention of trapping him into defying established Roman law by defending her. Working in suspicious shadows, the self-styled messiah does just that, helping seal his own fate as a dissident radical.

But the artist Titian has societal fish to fry with all those busybodies crammed into this compositional pan. You can count five other people standing nearby as the Pharisee baits Christ to become the sixth, or become a criminal himself. On the left, the man with his foot on a tree stump addressing another woman on his left while aiming the proverbial pointed finger of blame at the poor woman. The woman listening, as a credit to her gender, looks on balefully, as if questioning the quick condemnation. Titian also inserts two men in the background, explicitly to show two smirking men gabbing, clearly indulging their own clucking opinions of the woman.

The original painting actually had another man on the far right, whose knee remains still visible against the accused woman’s white skirt.

Look at the copy of the original uncut painting below. Titian probably cut the canvas because his better sense decided this large figure made the composition too busy. The self-consciously dandy he eliminated seems more interested in posing than in the dramatic moment. Nevertheless the figure further underscores Titian’s original point of how public the woman’s shaming felt to her.

Copy after Titian, “Christ and the Adulteress,” Accademia, Carrara, Bergamo. Photo of catalog reproduction by Ann Peterson.

Further most of the people don’t seem to hear Christ’s response to the Pharisee which, of course, became historic wisdom: “Let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone.”

The man on Christ’s left shoulder, perhaps the disciple Peter, seems the only one paying attention to Christ. Yet the elder man puts his hand to his chest as if taken aback by Christ’s bold defiance of the Pharisee, and of conventional moralism.

So Christ is essentially alone in this crowd taking the stance. Yet, of course, even though he speaks to defend her from a stoning, the woman must feel more alone than anyone, as her abject countenance makes utterly clear. Her head, legs and feet still recoil and resist her apparent fate while the Pharisee drags her arm and upper torso forward.

So the painting brims with politics at several different levels — the “gotcha” entrapment of Christ himself in defying the law, and of the caught-in-the-act woman. And Titian highlights the naked self-righteousness of political correctness even as he hides the hero’s face in the shadows. Christ clearly dwells in a different realm of spirit, understanding and insight.

Now Titian’s painting and Christ’s message seem more timely than ever. We see a mere handful of people indulging in the latest gossip. On Twitter, literally millions can quickly pounce on such an admittedly insensitive tweeter like Justine. Her life quickly crumbles into a shambles.

Sam Biddle, then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog, re-tweeted Socco’s post to his 15,000 followers and posted on Valleywag. He says he would do it again and that ”she’d be fine eventually, if not already.”

Socco is far from “fine.” Most of us know at least something about depression, insomnia and unemployment. Poorer understood is post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s far more common than people think. We hear a lot about soldiers suffering from it, but I know at least one friend who has suffered with the diagnosis for years after her boss repeatedly abused her. She eventually lost her job, in a staff downsizing.

Ronson’s article and this painting help me to understand my friend’s situation, even though she was hardly guilty of anything — rather she courageously stood up repeatedly to a bully boss.

So I think I’ll probably think once yet again about whether I’ll enter the still-strange-to-me-me Twitter world even though — as the insightful, recently deceased New York Times media writer David Carr noted — Twitter is good discipline for a writer to boil down his statements. But I strive to do that on Facebook because I know most people scroll and read quickly.

And as the article points out ironically, Sacco’s “tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took (her) down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own– a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow (Airport), hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.”

In the article, Justine argues that her joke didn’t signify her reveling in white privilege. Rather she was making fun of how “living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making fun of that bubble.”

Biddle eventually apologized to Socco. Her story, and the story Titian tell us in his painting, show how we still have much to learn from very old history, and from old art, and from both great leaders and the anonymous players — like the unnamed adulteress woman — who suffer in their tortured symbolism. Today “smart” phone photo images of her might saturate the Internet, smeared in electronic shame.

Would that the “fallen” Biblical woman, like Justine Socco, live on as a symbol of a flawed person whom the great humanist Christ valued — beyond her real or perceived “sins” — for struggling along life’s up-and-down path. Most wise storytellers or artists give their protagonist a fighting chance at redemption, before a mob-rule sentence is passed. Why not tweeters, too?

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1 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0

2. The nation’s most polarizing state governor continues to get mostly roses thrown at his feet by national and even local media, surprised by the Teflon quality he shares — so far — with his innocuous rhetorical role model Ronald Reagan. Yet Walker continues frequent ideological overstepping, trampling not only on the roses but the pursuit of education and knowledge and social equality, among other worthy goals.

3. No women were burned at the stake in Salem. They were hanged or jailed. The myth derives likely from European witch trials, where execution by fire was disturbingly common. The Holy Roman Empire’s medieval code “Constitutio Criminalis Carolina” stipulated that witchcraft should be punished by fire, and church leaders and local governments oversaw the burning of witches in parts of modern day Germany, Italy, Scotland, France and Scandinavia. Historians estimate that the witch-hunt hysteria that peaked between the 15th and 18th centuries saw some 50,000 people executed as witches in Europe. http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/were-witches-burned-at-the-stake-during-the-salem-witch-trials

The image of the larger uncut version of the Titian painting is actually a painting done “after Titian” by staff Academia Carrara, in Bergamo, Italy.

Oh, what I would’ve given to have stood this close to the volcano Cotopaxi, as did my sister-in-law Kris Verdin.

The hydrologist — with the US Geological Survey in Boulder, Colorado — took a wedding anniversary trip to Ecuador with her husband Jim last summer. I was so struck by her photographs that I invited her to be a guest photography blogger for Culture Currents.

The shot above, of a shepherd with her flock in a field, beneath the great volcano Cotopaxi, has been my computer desktop screensaver for the last several months. As I’m a sucker for landscapes and cityscapes, I love the undulating even sensual form and depth-of-field in these marvelous views.

Notice the sumptuous natural beauties of this land, as well as the ways the local architecture configures with the landscape.

The native inhabitants appear colorful, friendly and rich with family tradition. The final photo is of Kris herself, taken by Jim Verdin. Here are Kris’s comments on some of her photographs.

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Quito, Ecuador.

Hats for all these residents in Ecuador, in August? This must be in a high mountainous altitude.

These Ecuador families came down to wave to the train carrying Americans Kris and Jim Verdin. Kris also saw women pressing juice from the sugar cane stacked in the back ground.

A striking view of Basílica del Voto Nacional or ‘basilica of the national vow,’ which lords over Ecuador’s capital city of Quito. “The vista with the basilica in the back is of Quito, taken from a restaurant that had great views of the city,” Verdin commented.

A detail of armadillo gargoyles on the façade of Basilica Del Voto Nacional. The armored, ant-eating mammals, indigenous to the Americas, still live in the wilds of South America.

Kris photographed this beautiful young native woman with her stunning garb exiting the basilica, after she performed at a service or celebration in the church.

Kris Verdin (foreground), making friends with a llama, took all the photographs reproduced above. This photo is by Jim Verdin.

___________

“Cotopaxi,” Frederick Church, oil on canvas, 1862 (I recommend zooming onto this image to get a better sense of this huge painting. Notice details such as the birds flying in the lower right corner and, in the lower right, a native with a llama, which seems to  peer at the birds far across the abyss.)  

Review of art show including Frederick Church’s epic painting of Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador: https://kevernacular.com/?p=5459

part 2 of review jpg.:

part 3:

Trumpeter, bandleader and Monkophile Jamie Breiwick will lead Dreamland in a concert of Thelonious Monk music at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts at 8 PM Friday, January 23.

Dreamland will perform at 8 p.m. January 23 in The Dawes Studio Theater of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, 19805 W. Capitol Dr., Brookfield. For information and to purchase tickets, call 262-781-9520 or visit Wilson-Center.com.

Was it all just a dream? Mystery still shrouds “Dreamland,” but Racine trumpeter Jamie Breiwick is convinced it’s a Thelonious Monk composition, though its provenance remains hazy. Monk is a closely-examined jazz composer, by musicians, writers and scholars. In his exhaustive 2009 biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Robin DG Kelley calls the tune “a bit of a mystery,” as an “old-fashioned ballad that sounds as though it could’ve been written in the 1920s. Monk never copyrighted it, rarely performed it, and only recorded it once…he never spoke about it or explained whether it was just an old song or his old composition.” 1

Thelonious Monk, early in his career, when he composed many of his most fascinating and enduring compositions. Courtesy allaboutjazz.com

Unsatisfied with the recording, Monk refused to release it. Monk’s 1971 live solo piano version is listed as “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” a 1904 song by Leo Friedman and Beth Slater Wilson, which doesn’t resemble what Monk plays. “Perhaps it is a sketch for a song he never quite finished,” Kelley speculates. 2

The intrigue led to immersive investigation by Breiwick, one of the Milwaukee area’s most intelligent, gifted and resourceful musicians. The trumpeter’s Dreamland group — pianist Mark Davis, bassist John Price, and drummer Devin Drobka — plays mostly Monk, and hopes to make a live recording later, at Milwaukee’s intimate Jazz Estate.

“I realized there is something deeper to Monk and I had to study him further,” said Breiwick.  “Dreamland” is uncharacteristic Monk. Not that the pianist — deemed a radical and atypical bebopper in his early years — was incapable of reaching into the past or romance. His most famous composition, “’Round Midnight,” broods deeply in romantic loss. His playing draws on stride piano, an anachronism to boppers.

“Almost any musician who has depth in their playing has investigated Monk,” asserts Breiwick, also a talented educator. He teaches at Maple Dale School and UW-Milwaukee, and was a semi-finalist for the first-ever Grammy Music Educator Award in 2013. He also co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, which advances and promotes jazz and creative music. Among, those directly fueling Breiwick’s Monk obsession were drummer Drobka, who deftly executes Monk’s hole-in-the staircase rhythms; former Milwaukee pianist Barry Velleman, and former Monk sideman Steve Lacy.

Breiwick also gigs regularly at the Mason Street Grill with Mark Davis, who studied with pianist Barry Harris, who lived with Monk toward the end of the reclusive musician’s life.

“Then, I found in the bowels of the Internet, 20 pages deep into Google, a discussion in which someone said they saw Paul Motian play it at The Village Vanguard,” Breiwick relates. “The chart just said ‘Dreamland.’ Then it said ‘Monk played this.’” Motian recorded “Dreamland” with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano on the album I Have the Room Above Her.

Paul Motian recorded one of the few known covers of “Dreamland” on this album.

“I was drawn to (Monk’s music) because of how it made me play,” Breiwick says. “It takes you out of your comfort zone in dealing with the harmonies. But the tunes are timeless and modern. I can’t imagine what people thought about them back in the ‘40s.”

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy understood them, by the 1950s. Breiwick also delved into Steve Lacy: Conversations, a book of interviews with the musician who — after learning, performing, and recording with Monk — dedicated much of his career to the man’s music, starting by making the first recording of it by anyone besides Monk, the album 1959 Reflections.

A crucial recording for trumpeter Breiwick was Lacy’s 1962 album Evidence with trumpeter Don Cherry and the marvelously musical drummer Billy Higgins. Breiwick feels that Cherry had as good a grip on Monk’s slippery rhythmic and harmonic turns as any brass player. This is partly because Cherry, who came to fame with Ornette Coleman, is amongst the freest of jazz trumpeters, so he’s not hidebound by the fast, linear bop conventions that Monk’s sly, mad-scientist structures tend to undermine.

Like Cherry, Breiwick’s thinking and improvising in Monk’s music works more off of motives — or melody fragments — rather than the chord changes, he says.

But conceptually many of his cues come from Lacy, one of the most interesting and allusive thinkers in jazz, who often collaborated with poets and painters.

 Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy made this recording with Monk, and became one of the most probing investigators and interpreters of the man’s sometimes mysterious music. 

In a sense, a typical Monk composition seems dreamlike. It consistently takes odd, seemingly illogical turns, and often uses shadows of silence. Yet it invariably coheres, and sometimes haunts the listener, as a captivating — if strange and often humorous – tale of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic intrigue.  One tune is called “Misterioso.” Another,  “Evidence,” with more silence than notes, sounds like a zombie skeleton, slowly gaining speed. Though reflective-sounding, “Dreamland” obliquely fits the Monk scenario.

When Breiwick refers to “any musician of depth,” I think he has foremost in his mind saxophonist Steve Lacy, whose incisive, spatial horn approach to Monk he is studying intensively.
Lacy was a student of jazz, of the arts, of philosophy and most especially of Monk’s music. During a short stint with Monk in 1960 he became a functional acolyte, and used a ring-bound notebook which he filled up with Monk’s wise, sometimes pragmatic and sometimes enigmatic utterances.
Departed Pianist Barry Velleman, the best Monk interpreter I’ve ever heard among Milwaukee musicians, not only influenced Breiwick but gave him a copy of Lacy’s Monk gleanings, which are now widespread on the Internet. (see Lacy’s hand-written page below).

Before even joining Monk, Lacy recorded two challenging Monk pieces on his own album The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy. He followed that with the all-Monk album Reflections: Steve Lacy plays Thelonious Monk In 1958. That album includes Mal Waldron on piano, whose sensibility and mentality hewed as close to Monk’s flinty sort of rhythmic cubism as any of that generation of pianists. 3

Evidently, Reflections impressed Monk enough that he hired Lacy, who had previously played with the extremely challenging and liberating avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Taylor once took his entire band, including Lacy, to see Monk group perform, according to Monk biographer Kelley.

By the time Lacy went in to the studio to record Reflections, “he had learned about 30 monk tunes and listened to Monk records hundreds of times.'” 4 

Lacy continued investigating, playing and knowing Monk’s music in so many ways, throughout his career including several striking recordings with a piano-less quartet with the great trombonist Roswell Rudd, notably School Days, which Breiwick has discovered and examined.

Lacy seemed to pursue a studied inference, suggesting that you can never fully master the music, just get closer to it, to approach Monk’s almost Buddah-like presence as part of your body, hands and spirit. Lacy also intensively studied the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, and the philosophic process of the Tao, which is “an active and holistic conception of Nature, rather than a static, atomistic one.” 5 The Tao or “The Way” is circular in its formal sense, best signified by the frequently reproduced symbol, called Taijitu:

As Lacy said to interviewer in April 1965: “I’m a big one for words. I’ve read a lot, especially by and about artists. So I have a head full of notions, and that isn’t always good, you know. The instinctive silent life is beautiful too. It has advantages that the other doesn’t.”

Interviewer : Is this Monk’s life?

It’s funny that you should say that, because I was thinking about Monk, although he’s more articulate to himself than most people realize. He doesn’t feel it’s necessary to verbalize, and he’s right. If you got him at the right time, you’d get a lot of meaningful words with a lot of silence around them. You’d have to leave the silence around them, or you would spoil the proportions.” 6

So Lacy understood that the pursuit it is both a formal study, and an intuitive one. Breiwick, who listens to a wide range of creative and popular music, seems to understand that balance as well.

In fact, Lacy’s pan-cultural study, at one point, turned on Monk himself.
During a big-band rehearsal of Monk’s music, Lacy once informed him “that he was listening to ‘Eskimo music … the wildest African shit you’ve ever heard, Chinese music… even the music of porpoises.”
Monk then explained to the group, “They say if you can ever make a tape of a porpoise and played it back, down slow enough, it is the same as the human voice. They are so close to the human species. Because they had the same box here (pointing to his throat).”

Monk then continued to expound about how porpoises have the rare sonar ability “to sense everything around them,” biographer Kelley writes. 7

One of Monk’s koan-like utterances was “always know,” a play on words which you can read as “all ways know.” That notion opens one’s mind up to new angles and, it would seem, all the spaces and silences between them.

In his under-appreciated 1997 biography of Monk, Laurent de Wilde wrote:
“Monk is everywhere at the same time. His mastery of time is such that he seems to be emancipated from it. And the silence that he uses with such finesse is not really the suspension of time, as it is for that other master of understatement, Ahmad Jamal, nor the supreme and minimal form of elegance it is for Basie. On the contrary, it is a necessity which dazzles the ear. No, the silence is only a portion of his total music, all the more striking because it is unique. It is a creative tool, sort of audible and quantifiable phenomenon which is assigned a much rarer riskier enterprise: that of inventing time.” 8 

Is Monk’s saying “all ways know” merely the kernel of a bud of circular reasoning, or something else, that reason knows not of? Like the Tao? Or the sonar mind of porpoises?

Or did he set out to reinvent time? Just maybe, Dreamland will reveal some answers. Welcome to the waking dreams of Thelonious Monk and Jamie Breiwick.

Steve Lacy’s written notes documenting Monk’s advice, courtesy Jamie Breiwick and 1heckuvaguy.com

________

Photos of trumpeter Jamie Breiwick (top and bottom) by Bryan Mir, courtesy of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts.

Image of The Tao or Taijitu courtesy chriscorrigan.com.

1 Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Free Press, 2009, 243

2 Ibid. 515

3. Lacy’s first Monk album, Reflections, is now available on a two-fer CD titled The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy, coupled with Lacy’s third album as a leader, on Solar Records. Among other Lacy recordings that investigated Monk are: Evidence with Don Cherry on Fantasy/New Jazz; School Days, with Roswell Rudd on Emanem; Monk’s Dream, a  2000 quartet recording with Rudd; Only Monk and More Monk, all on Soul Note; and We See: Thelonious Monk Songbook on HatOLOGY; and a live 1962 duet album I Remember Thelonious on Nel Jazz, with Mal Waldron (who’s stuck with a bad piano).

4. Kelley, 291

5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao In 2004, Lacy’s group recorded a two-CD “free jazz” interpretation of The Tao called The Way, on HatOLOGY.

6..Jason Weiss, ed., Steve Lacy: Conversations, Duke University Press, 2006, 30

7. Kelley, xvi

8. Laurent de Wilde, Monk, translated by Jonathan Dickinson, Marlowe & Company, 1997, 212

A shorter version of this article was published in Shepherd Express at https://expressmilwaukee.com/mobile/articles/articleView/id:24755

Titian, Christ and the Adulteress, 1508-10. courtesy Milwaukee art Museum

My good friend Ann had me pegged as a pure modernist partly for my obvious interest in
abstract art, which she saw in much of my own artwork done largely during my
undergraduate years.

But my art interests, as with music, range far, and I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum’s
recently closed Of Heaven and Earth: 500 years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums, 1 with great anticipation. Well more than a
handful of paintings impressed me, but notably Sandro Botticelli’s The Annunciation, Cavaliere d’Arpino’s Archangel Michael and the Rebel
Angels, Salvator Rosa’s magnificent paired historical landscapes
St. John Baptist revealing Christ to the Disciples and St. John the Baptist
Baptizing Christ in the Jordan, Carlo Dolci’s Salome, Antonio Mancini’s The
Sulky Boy, and Vincenzo Camuccini’s Death of Julius Caesar, each showing the artist’s depth of involvement in his art, wholly compelling as a historical and cultural story.

Botticelli, The Annunciation, oil, 1490-95. Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum 

However, one painting utterly captivated me, above all.
And it has prompted more contemplation than any single work of art I’ve seen in quite some time: “Christ and the Adulteress” (c. 1508-10) by Titian (Tiziano
Vecellio).
It possesses great intellectual challenge for what it depicts and great
humanity and beautiful mystery, for how it depicts.

The show appears to have been curiously undervalued by Midwestern critics, from what I’ve read. I imagine resistance from the show’s extensive Christian subject matter especially in a time of such religious and secular polarization. Or perhaps the desire was for more contemporary and “relevant” art. One reviewer even commented that
the extraordinary painting by Titian provided little more than a
showcase of fine fabric.

First of all, it’s hard for me to imagine this great artist taking on such a subject as this painting without striving for all the power, human
drama and beauty he could muster.

Titian’s work does radiate an array of warm and cool textural splendor. But those
qualities reflect Titian’s sense of truth in beauty, or beauty as truth.
As a composition, this brims with eccentric form, in the figures’ situation and
interaction, and in how the shading and shadows create uncertainty and even muffled
tension.

Christ is seemingly seated, perhaps almost on the ground and he reaches out from a dark
corner to grab the arm of the Pharisee who has apprehended the woman.The official had
tried to trap Christ into refusing to support Mosaic law and demanded that the woman be
stoned to death.
We know the story for the pointed eloquence of Christ’s challenge:
‘Let he who hath not sinned, cast the first stone.”
This crucial moment helped seal Christ’s human fate. Yet, he exhibits, among other
things, an enlightened feminist perspective because we know that an adulterous man in
Jerusalem at the time hardly would be treated so.

I see Christ as one of the great humanists of his race, of history.
Frankly part of my motivation for writing this is also disappointment in my
having invoked Christ in a couple of recent blogs which received no responses, even given
their political subject matter — the notorious recent police killings of unarmed
black men, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent “voice from God” telling him he must run for president.
I fear that too many of both my close and casual humanist friends — secular humanists
more precisely — resisted the contextualizing of socio-political matters
that invoked such a religious figure as Christ.

But I believe, as I think Titian does in this painting, that Christ was as great a human as
modern history provides, regardless of whether he was “the son of God.” A trope perhaps, but true nonetheless.
More to the point, he exemplified a human engaged in his time and society, the political zealot, the determined dissenter.
That’s the man I see in this painting, even though Titian cannily cloaked him in the
sublime shadow he still deserves.

For me, this was the single highlight of my art-viewing year. And this painting is such a stunning experience because of how it radiates in
human breath its beauty and verity. “Let he who hath not sinned cast the first
stone.”

One of the clearest pronouncements the man ever made also provides pause for
anyone reflecting on judgment of others. It is not, however, saying “cast no judgment
when it is due.” Christ pulled the woman aside and told her to “go and sin no more.”
He judged her a sinner, but forgave her and administered the most fundamental of
penances.

Another intrigue: This foreshadows Christ’s relationship with Mary of Magdalene, whom the
gospels characterize as a harlot, thus doubling up on his evident mercy towards
unholy women, which certainly could have been partially carnal attraction, on his part.
Mary Magdalene is the archetypal human sinner in Christ’s personal life and she’s so
overcome with gratitude for his mercy and love that she returns it, following him to his
crucifixion and grieving there with his mother.
Of course, pop culture’s most recent “bible,” The Da Vinci Code, bases its story on the
premise that Christ not only married Magdalene but survived the crucifixion and
raised a family. The evidence for this still appears quite dubious.

But who’s to say today? He may have given his life for Mary as much as for all. He was a man and I think most heterosexual men need a woman to inspire them, to make them better, as women like to think. The delicious irony is that a sinful woman could inspire such a holy man.

That partly explains the inspired moment in Titian’s telling of this painting’s story. The
adultress has no idea that this mysterious, kind and political man might spare her execution, as the painter shows us in her abject, despairing face and hands. Her true
judge determines she has suffered human-administered penance enough, unlike those
responsible for the Great Recession, who received “absolution but no penance”, as
Charles Pierce wrote in a January Esquire article about Barack Obama and America today.

Finally, as I’ve alluded to, the depiction of Christ himself is a masterpiece of deft
understated evocation. His arm is oak-branch firm, as if reaching out
from heavy undergrowth — to stop the Pharisee in his tracks, a sort of force of
human nature. Also the entwining extension and contortion of Christ’s body adds up to a
superbly paradoxical configuration, a way of balancing composition that is filled with
grace and yet forthright and assertive. His head is magnificently shadowed and he
remains a man of abiding mystery. The painting’s asymmetry and peek-a-boo handling
of space are quite modernist.

Most of all, I see Christ the road preacher as a great humanist. If the painting has the
hint of romance, it speaks to a question that Leon Wieseltier addressed in
his essay in the January 18 book review of The New York Times titled “Among the
Disrupted.” He began by commenting on how “the greatest
thugs in the history of the culture industry have destroyed our bookstores and
record stores” and refers of course to “all the miracles of electronic dissemination,” and
how “writers hover between decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing.” And “all the technological
miracles somehow do not suffice for compensation, either the fiscal or the
spiritual kind.” Weiseltier bemoans, in a cool, almost Olympian manner, the
quantification of quality, among other problems that the digital revolution has
engendered.
But his greater subject the looming fate of humans. He asserts that, “For a start,
humanism is not the antithesis of religion,” something Pope Francis is now superbly
demonstrating.
Defying much rusty dogma, the current Pope is doing a pretty damn good impersonation of Christ, as any Pope should strive to. And he does it with the unlikely humility that
Christ exhibited.

And Wieseltier’s closing speaks superbly to this question of humanism which articulates
itself as romance, in the subtext of Christ and Mary Magdalene, or in his ready grace-
giving to the adulteress.

“Is all this — is humanism — sentimental?
But sentimentality is not always a counterfeit emotion. Sometimes sentimental is
warranted by reality. The persistence of humanism through the centuries, in the face a
formidable intellectual and social obstacles, has been owed to the truth of its
representations of our complexly beating hearts, and to the guidance that it has
offered, and its variegated and conflicting versions, for a soulful, sensitive existence.
There is nothing soft about the quest for a significant life. And a complacent humanist
is a humanist who was not read his books closely, since they teach disquiet and
difficulty.
“In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill
the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter.”

And in Titian’s wondrous painting, Christ the great humanist dwells in subversive shadows, an authentic dissenter against hidebound, oppressive morality.
As he was throughout his public life, which Reza Aslan makes abundantly clear in his
provocative book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus Christ of Nazareth which I
recently referenced a couple of times, apparently to the dismay of some silent humanists. Aslan is not alone: an unacknowledged prototype for his book is Jesus the Heretic: Freedom
in Bondage in a Religious World by Douglas Lockhart. That book offers a more in-depth
reading of traditional Christian teachings but identifies Christ’s as a man who told the
most uncomfortable religious and political truths of his time.
The Romans crucified him as a heretic. In his time, this disrupted man disrupted right
back.

_______________

1.  I regret not having seen and written about this show earlier. But it will run from February 6 to May 3 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, under a somewhat more secular title: Botticelli, Titian and Beyond: Italian Masterpieces from the Glasgow Museums.

The show catalog is available at the Milwaukee Art Museum www.mam.org

Courtesy MTV.com

Okay you doubting culture vultures, I post this post to prove that Aaron Rodgers knows how to play the comedian, even right in the middle of a big game. But he doesn’t have to do it with buffoonish, look-at-me displays of himself (though some TD dances are pretty cool, I’ll admit).

Of course, we know he’s gotten plenty of shit back about his (“Hey Rod-gers, discount double check!!”) champion belt move.

“courtesy” freerepublic.com

However his “pump up” commercial with “Hans and Franz” is one of the funniest ones on TV right now, ya!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxjCJxfECD8

A-Rod “pumping up” for Hanz and Franz with his “puny arms.” Courtesy article. wn. com

Nevertheless, he’s now much more subtle, the sign of a deft comedian.

The first video, from Sunday’s divisional-round win against the Dallas Cowboys, shows Aaron Rodgers’ unsurpassed coolness, even in the middle of a huge, tough game — so he can have fun. Earlier in the season, he slyly mimicked Bears’ QB Jay Cutler puffing a cigarette while lining up for the hike, because cameras have caught Cutler smoking cigs on the sideline during a game. (Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your starting position.)

Here, Rodgers pretends to change the play call at the line by shouting out “New York Bozo! New York Bozo!” I’m sure he’s aware that TV mikes now pick up all of these line-of-scrimmage QB check-offs. So he’s being entertaining — he knows he’s got a few seconds to play around with. I laughed out loud when he did it. Of course, the Cowboys didn’t know he’s not changing the play — the true functional beauty of his goofy inspiration.

https://vine.co/v/OD7rzO0am1F

Afterwards, Rogers said that “obviously (the phrase) didn’t mean anything at all.” He’d be a slick bluffer in a poker game. Actually, you’ll notice Eddie Lacy and John Kuhn switch to new positions when Rodgers says it, so he may be bluffing the public, to not tip off a real signal, methinks.

Sportswriter Jason will be has the best interpretation so far: New York bozo is cravenly political New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was Dallas cowboy owner Jerry Jones’ big-faux good luck charm, up in his luxury box. “New Jersey bozo” was too obvious so Rogers slipped into the ether of incantation. Plus logically New Jersey and New York are the most symbiotic states in America. So to put it in African terms, Christie’s “juju,” turned into a big pile of juju bees, and just added another inch to his rotund waistline. The Cowboys sort of lost the game by an inch when Dez Bryant bobbled the ball. We all know it’s a game of inches.

http://www.nj.com/giants/index.ssf/2015/01/watch_chris_christie_hug_of_dallas_cowboys_owner_reenacted_by_green_bay_packers_fans.html

Chris Christie in red, Jones is the sandwich meat. twz.com

The second video shows Rogers’ actual football artistry at its peak. While rolling to his left on his injured left leg — he rifles a stunningly pinpoint pass between the converging hands of two Cowboy defenders — to Richard Rodgers for the game-winning touchdown. The play kills me every time. (On these highlights, scroll down to “A. Rodgers threads the needle to R. Rodgers.”) http://www.packers.com/news-and-events/article-1/Full-Highlights-Packers-defeat-Cowboys-26-21/d6e6f1a2-bc6d-4ee6-a0e8-b3b8de673384

I doubt he could’ve zipped that pass in there without all of the “pumping up” he did with Hans and Franz. We know about all the tough, strong Germans in Wisconsin, especially in Brewtown.

To me, that pass is comparable to Sam Shields’ amazing recovery interception — after being “beaten” — of Tony Romo last year against the Cowboys, which you might recall.

________

Thanks to my friend Eric Shumacher-Rasmussen for FB posting the video of A-Rod’s “New York bozo” routine.  That lucky bozo was at the game yesterday with, in due time, about 1 million other people.

Edward Curtis’s remarkably humane portrait of a young Mohave woman named Mosa helped inspire financier J.P. Morgan to underwrite the photographer’s documentation of the plight of Native Americans at the turn of the 20th century. Johnny Cash did similar cultural work in the latter part of the century. Courtesy Museum of Wisconsin Art.

Once the hunters and their tribes and families roamed and thrived through the plains and deep woods of America. Then the white man came, and eventually, after many bloody physical and political battles, would come what Johnny Cash called “bitter tears.”

I gained a graphic sense of this in 2013 when I saw, at the Museum of Wisconsin Art In West Bend, the stunning and heroic work of the great photographer Edward S. Curtis. He documented the demise of America’s native culture from a governmental genocide that led to a tribe reservation system largely segregated from American society.

The powerfully transporting exhibit revealed indigenous peoples all across America still hanging on to their natural habitat and way of life, before it was destroyed and partitioned out by the white man.
Below is a portrait Curtis took of a warrior named Bear’s Belly or Arikara, wearing a bearskin that served perhaps as camouflage in battle with cowboys and soldiers. Then, in 1908 he re-enacted the Ceremony of the Bear Medicine Fraternity, for Curtis’s camera.

“Bear’s Belly — Arikara” by Edward L. Curtis, Courtesy Museum of Wisconsin Art.

The Curtis photo exhibit prompted me to read Timothy Egan’s fascinating biography of Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher. His life story provided great insights into Curtis’s accomplishment and what our Native Americans endured, lost — and sustained as a society and culture — despite all odds. 1

In 2014, I read Robert Hilburn’s powerful and probing biography Johnny Cash: The Life. It told of how Cash became the first major popular music artist of the era to address the ongoing plight of Native Americans, in his pioneering 1964 concept album, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. It was partly inspired by Cash meeting songwriter Peter LaFarge, a man with mixed Native American blood, who was writing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and other compelling songs. Hayes was the Native American who was among the Marines who hoisted the iconic American flag at Iwo Jima in World War II. Then, after a celebratory return home, Hayes died in tragic circumstances. Native American Marine Ira Hayes is on the far left in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima, near the end of World War II. Courtesy californiaindianeducation.org

The album’s cutting-edge emerged almost immediately in the lack of promotion from Columbia Records whom Cash termed “gutless.” In his biography, Robert Hilburn captures Cash’s own bitterness: “They found a lot of resentment from country DJs over the subject matter; they feared their conservative listeners would tune out, so they buried the record, and Columbia just rolled over.” 2.

In a way, Cash was my generation’s Edward S. Curtis, telling the truth in songs with their own images.

Since his death in 2003, many roots musicians have extolled Cash’s vision and artistic power notably in the live album and DVD,. We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash, a high-spirited, poignant and sometimes magical live concert evocation of the man’s legacy , which was my choice for No. 2 roots music album of the year in 2012, both on this blog and on NoDepression.com. 3.

Then last summer, 50 years after the original release, came the deeply moving tribute album, Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited, on Sony Legacy. That label has belatedly redeemed the reticence of Columbia Records when the original album essentially disappeared at its birth, like a small Indian burial mound, standing alone and windswept in a remote prairie. Johnny Cash (upper) touring the site of the 1890 massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee with survivors, in December of 1969.  And Cash (lower) near the time that he recorded “Bitter Tears.” Courtesy (respectively) of salon.com and latimes.com

As it happened, this year I experienced, especially in an October road trip to San Francisco and the world-class SF Jazz Center, a focus on the pan-cultural vitality of America’s original art form, jazz. So I didn’t write about Look to the Wind, in any detail. But I heard its solemn power and stirring pertinence, and chose it as my number seven roots music album of the year, without comment.

So I’m grateful that my former colleague at The Capital Times, John Nichols, and The Nation’s Washington correspondent, assessed the album as succinctly as anyone could in his recent “2014 Progressive Honor Roll” in the January 12/19 issue of The Nation. Here’s what Nichols wrote:

Most Valuable CD:  Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited

There’s an argument to be made that Johnny Cash sang the most adventurous protest songs of the 1960s. Exhibit A: his 1964 concept album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. Cash was a top-of-the-charts singer, but radio wouldn’t play it. So he bought a full-page ad in Billboard, decrying a “gutless” music industry for refusing to consider the plight of Native Americans and linking it to broader questions raised by civil-rights campaigners and a then very small antiwar movement. Yes, he declared, his songs were “strong medicine…. So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam.” That strong medicine would influence a new generation of singers who jumped at the chance to reintroduce Cash’s Bitter Tears to America. Steve Earle captures the spirit of the project’s demand for a rethinking of history when he sings, “I will tell you, buster, that I ain’t a fan of Custer….” Bill Miller, who heard the original album as a kid growing up on the Stockbridge-Munsee-Mohican reservation in Wisconsin, offers a brilliant take on the project’s title track (written by the late Peter La Farge). And Kris Kristofferson, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings capture the passion of one of the greatest protest songs ever written, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” Fine music. Fine politics.

Native American flutist Bill Miller, Courtesy billmiller.com

Miller, a guitarist and master of the Native American flute, underscores Nichols praise: “It has a deeper respect for Native Americans than any other project I’ve been involved in,” he says in the album’s promotional video (below). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAEuN_j_cnM

Sony contacted Miller and he left his mother’s deathbed in Shawano, Wisconsin to do this project. “We are people with gifts and blessings and we can still bless this world, something that history and Hollywood has overlooked,” he says.

A tour of artists involved in recording the album is in the works, Miller says.

“It’s meant to happen,” he says.

Singer-songwriter-author Steve Earle (upper photo) and singer-songwriter Gillian Welch (lower) are among an all-star group of musicians who reinterpret Johnny Cash’s 1964 “Bitter Tears” album as “Look Again to the Wind.” The lineup also includes Mohican flutist Bill Miller, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Norman Blake, and Carolina Chocolate Drops’ lead singer Rhiannon Giddens and others. 

________

1 Edward S. Curtis preserved America’s Vanishing Race for Posterity, art exhibit review:https://kevernacular.com/?p=2133

2 Johnny Cash: The Life, by Robert Hilburn, Little, Brown and Company, 2013, 265. See book review:http://nodepression.com/article/robert-hilburns-johnny-cash-life-reads-definitive-biography

3. We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash, album/DVD review: https://kevernacular.com/?p=1134 4. Here is John Nichols’ complete article on his “2014 progressive honor roll::http://www.thenation.com/article/193617/zephyr-teachout-hands-united-and-john-oliver-made-our-2014-progressive-honor-roll-who

Cartoon courtesy blog.seattle.pi.come

I noticed Scott Walker has hired consultant for his presidential run. But he says his real presidential consultant is a guy named God.

“I feel that there’s a reason God put me in a spot to do the things that we’ve done and take on the challenges we’ve done,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. ww.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/scott-walker-hires-consultant-for-possible-presidential-run-b99422075z1-287856481.html

Sounds like the same godly voices in his head another wrongheaded governor heard when he decided it was time to play president. Of course, George W. Bush did have a college degree, unlike Scott Walker. Maybe God conferred an honorary college degree on Walker in one of his whisperings. And seeing as Walker has apparently “done” lots of “challenges” without facing them, we can look forward to more delicate Bush-like turns of phrase, or is it turns of mind?

Or considering how good he was as a “job creator” Wisconsin, maybe Scott does think he is God.

Before he starts waltzing around the country with visions of the White House dancing in his head, maybe Walker should hire some unemployed or underpaid Wisconsin folks to build a big scaffolding, and then hire an artist (or 20, or 200!) to paint a ceiling fresco of him, like the image above.

My point is partly that I have the greatest respect for anybody who works hard on a job and does it honestly, especially people who work with their hands.

We know the guy named Jesus Christ thought God spoke to him, too, and Christ was just a carpenter, without a college degree. And even without a high school degree, Christ was a lot more eloquent about things that mattered, or about the challenges he honestly faced.

He didn’t need a consultant. He died on the cross.

Who would you vote for — Christ or Scott Walker — for president, or for governor?

Also, with all the good news about hiring and job creation around the country, it’s worth noting that in December average employees wages rate went down by five cents.

http://www.latimes.com/business/jobs/la-fi-december-jobs-20150109-story.html

Companies are hiring young people and people desperate for a job. Qualified baby boomers are retiring or often on the outside looking in, at their old jobs.

In fact, December also represented a big drop-off in job creation. http://www.npr.org/2014/01/08/260796385/whats-behind-the-drop-in-unemployment

It might sound like the spirit of Scrooge isn’t dead. But Scrooge was a small business man. And small businesses do need to survive amid increasingly global competition. Who’s really responsible? And who’s ready to answer to the ghost of conscience who haunts them?

We still need a lot of work from people willing to be accountable — among employers, corporate heads, government bureaucrats and politicians — to make his economy fair for both workers and employers.

Unfortunately those underlying statistics show that private-sector workers have very little bargaining power. Scott Walker did plenty to damage bargaining power in Wisconsin for workers.

Give me a candidate who cares about everyone who’s trying to keep their head above really cold water, even if the economy is getting better. Plus, that big-picture growth — and its struggles — has happened under the current president.

What is Walker’s big picture? Is it the mock-Michelangelo one above?

Bobby Fuller Four Courtesy eil.com

Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, bury the rag deep in your face, for now is the time for your tears. — Bob Dylan, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

Some people think it’s foolish and even immoral to “fight the law.” That may be true often enough. But America’s First Amendment is crucially about the freedom to dissent.

Political or social dissent is old, at least as old as Jesus Christ, or Socrates. Both were executed for embodying it. Remember Christ rampaging through The Temple to chase out the sellers and moneylenders (who worked in a temple section deemed legal for commerce)? Christ defied the Roman law and, as we know, the law won — over his corporal, crucified body. But he hastened immeasurably the demise of the corrupt and oppressive Roman Empire, inspired a new world view building on The Golden Rule, and inspired a major religion (which many powerful men over time have too often turned into repressive power).

Fast-forward to 1965: Bobby Fuller records a hit version of Sonny Curtis’ song “I Fought the Law,” which to me was among the most compelling and fascinating songs on the cusp of the ’60s youth revolution. It conveyed a troubling and intriguing ambiguity in its moral stance. Despite the apparent finality and concession of the refrain,” I fought the law, and the law won,” one sensed a strong streak of defiance and sorrow in the song performance and the overall lyric.

As we should know by now, just because a law is legal doesn’t mean it is morally right or just.

In light of Christ’s defiant, zealous act of law-breaking, 1 we might consider the cases of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Dontre Hamilton. Sure, there was no apparent high-mindedness in their resistance to the police, by contrast to Christ’s trashing the temple market to clean out the filthy lucre. But they all reacted and somewhat resisted. The most law-and-order-minded say, “That’s what you get when you don’t obey to the police.”

But what of civil rights and dissent? Wasn’t their reaction also the fatigue of 200 years of American oppression of its own people of color, which virtually all black persons, no matter their station in life, seem to endure at some point in their life?  The modern fatigue unto death hearkens to, among many others, the killings of Hattie Carroll, Emmett Till and to three young girls in a bombed Alabama church in 1963. The stats on unconstitutional racial-profiling tell the sad story:http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/racial-profiling2011/the-reality-of-racial.html As African-American Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial columnist James Causey noted recently: “I’ve been stopped numerous times for DWB (driving while black).”

In other words, you could say Michael Brown was approached for “jaywalking while black.” Garner for allegedly “peddling while black.” Police approached and frisked him about selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. “I’m tired of this,” an agitated Garner says on the video of his killing. “I didn’t do nothin, I didn’t sell nothin, I’m minding my own business. You’re harassing me…Don’t touch me… (and finally) I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe…”

And the depth of pathos: Dontre Hamilton was guilty of “sleeping while black,” in a Milwaukee park.

I understand the element of self-defense in the argument for police response. But in all three cases, the police violence far exceeded “self-defense.” They should’ve disarmed or controlled their victims without killing them, with injuring shots or, better, martial arts techniques. Brown was repeatedly shot after fleeing 150 feet away, then surrendering.

Michael Brown’s body left for hours in the Ferguson street. Courtesy dailykos.com

The New York police officer’s choke hold on Garner was illegal, by the department’s rules. And yet he remains uncharged with any offense.

Yes, Hamilton — startled from his sleep — allegedly got a hold of Officer Christopher Manney’s billy club and hit him once in the neck. 2 But then Manney slaughtered him with 14 close-range shots, half of which the cop emptied into Hamilton’s body after he had fallen.

Nanci Griffith’s 1997 cover of “I Fought the Law” (in which songwriter Curtis arranged and sang harmony), which I first heard this year, got me thinking about the lyric again.

Nanci Griffith By Collin Peterson, popmatters.com

Of course, iconic punk bands — the brilliantly political group The Clash, and Green Day — had covered the song previously. But Griffin showed that the song’s complex sentiment or defiance could be shared by a performer who can’t be accused of copping a lawless macho guy stance. 3

The Clash Cortesy musicstack.com

Then, when I read recently about a comedian-songwriter who wrote and performed a racist send-up of Michael Brown’s death, based on the old hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” I felt even greater pain: Staged laughter in light of Brown’s death and by extension Eric Garner’s and Dontre Hamilton’s, in my hometown of Milwaukee.

Michael Brown Courtesy dailymail.com

The comedian-songwriter showed how art can be abused in a way that is at least morally questionable.

So I’m trying to redo the role of lyric writing as topical adaptation. The other morning, while washing the dishes, “I Fought the Law” began running through my mind and I thought of Brown, Garner and Hamilton, who all ” fought the law” to an extent, in defending their civil rights in seemingly unwarranted aggressive police confrontations (for Brown, due to a petty jaywalking infraction). And the “law won.”  The young men lost their lives. (Weirdly enough, singer Bobby Fuller also lost his life at age 23, shortly after recording the song.) 4

Eric Garner and family  Courtesy mediablackoutusa.com

Dontre Hamilton. Courtesy bet.com

But in Curtis’ song, the protagonist ends up only “breaking rocks in the hot sun.” These days, that’s what a black man often ends up doing if he is caught with a few joints of pot, in most states.

More and more, if a black man objects to overly aggressive police profiling or frisking, he ends up riddled with bullets or strangled to death.

What makes Curtis’s song fair-minded as much as morally questioning, is that the refrain repeatedly acknowledges that the prisoner (or victim, in my version) crossed the line of resisting police — regardless of how justified the confrontation — thus opening the door to violent police action.

So the beginning of my new lyric — recasting and updating the song — began filtering through my brain. Before reflexively politically correct readers start twitching, please understand this is all written in the spirit of pure irony. There’s no making light of these deaths here. I carry a deeply heavy heart over profoundly troubling legal decisions — of three possible homicides by police officers on unarmed young black men — that were never allowed to go to trial, after being tightly controlled by prosecuting DAs with compromised positions, as regular representatives for police officers vs. alleged criminals.

The pertinent reminder — of the questioning gadfly Socrates in an established democracy — is the role of dissent by a citizen, by moral stance or ballot box or, of Christ, by protest.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shrewdly toned the protest principle down to non-violence. Entwine this with the principle of “do unto others…” (none of these moral leaders would condone revenge looting, destruction, or killing). Otherwise, oppressive power will dig in its heels, and ride the status quo to maintain control or profit, on their terms.

For far too long, this nation has become increasingly like Kafka’s Amerika, where the victims of “official” violence and their families never receive full due process or clarification on their deaths or incarceration. This is not the people’s America, of liberty, civil rights and democracy-inspired due process, which we know and strive to still love.

Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, Courtesy dogeardiary.blogspoy.com

Here’s a new song lyric, to be read or sung, to the melody of Sonny Curtis’ “I Fought the Law”:

“I Fought the Law (Brother Dead and Done)”

Part 1. The Ghost of Michael Brown:

My corpse gushed blood in the hot sun.

I fought the law and the law won

I fought the law and the law won.

I reached for the cop; wasn’t smart I know,

I fought the law and the law won (repeat line)

I left my family and it feels so bad

Guess my life is done.

This was the best life I ever had

I fought the law and the law won (repeat…all ensuing ellipses indicate a line to repeat.)

We walked in the street just for damn fun,

I fought the law and the law won…

I lost my future when I sur-ren-dered.

I fought the law and the law won…

Me and my blood on the hard mean streets

They let-the-red run and run.

What do they care what’s under their feet

I fought the law, brother dead and done

I fought the law, brother dead ‘n gone!

Part 2. The Ghost of Eric Garner:

He choked me to death in the hot sun

I fought the law and the law won…

I needed money cuz I had none

I fought the law and the law won…

I sold a few cigs to feed my brood,

I lost my breath, and he knew.

My life drained out and cops stared and stood

I fought the law and the law won…

Resist a cop and they snuff you out

I fought the law and the law won…

I lost my life, they say what’s done is done.

I fought the law and the law won …

But play that video back,

Strong-armed death, no gun.

Dead father thrown on a rollin’ rack,

I fought the law, brother dead n’ done.

I fought the law, brother dead n’ gone.

“There’s a very decent chance that his life could have been saved if he had just been thought of as a full human being.” — New York Daily News Columnist Harry Seigel (see footnote 5 below)  

 Part 3. The Ghost of Dontre Hamilton:

Dreamin’ of food in the cold park night

I fought the law and the law won…

Deep in sleep, I woke with a fright

I fought the law and the law won …

A cop grabbed me, and it felt so bad

I got his club and swung,

That’s the best life I ever had

I fought the law and the law won…

I’m sick in my head do anyone care?

I fought the law and the law won…

I lost my dream, just the little I dare

I fought the law and the law won…

I done nothin’ the other cops they knew

my corpse with fourteen holes,

The best life I ever could have?

I fought the law,  brother dead and done

I fought the law,  brother dead n’ gone! 6

***

Here’s my song lyric inspiration:

I Fought the Law by Sonny Curtis

Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
I needed money ’cause I had none
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won

I left my baby and it feels so bad
Guess my race is run
She’s the best girl that I ever had
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the

Robbin’ people with a six-gun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
I lost my girl and I lost my fun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won

I left my baby and it feels so bad
Guess my race is run
She’s the best girl that I ever had
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won

I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won…7

____________
1 Jesus Christ’s zeal for dissent is brilliantly explored in Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, recently published in paperback.

2. The Shepherd Express reports that, according to Hamilton’s family, “Dontre’s DNA — not Manney’s — was found on the short end of the baton, where the handle is located. The state Crime Lab report offers no information about any DNA found on the long end of the baton. “We’re thinking that if Dontre had hit Christopher Manny, his DNA would be on it,” Nate Hamilton said.https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-24657.html

3. Sonny Curtis, of Buddy Holly’s band The Crickets, first recorded his song “I Fought the Law” with the band in 1958 shortly after Buddy Holly’s death. The Crickets’ original conveys the rawest rock ‘n’ roll edge, though the version by The Clash rivals it more self-consciously, on an EP and on the American version of their eponymous debut album. Beyond the heyday of the punk era, The Clash version has had a long and diverse life, in video games, movies and even used by US military to bolster troop morale.

Nanci Griffith’s freshly-resonant and under-noticed cover of “I Fought the Law,” with composer Curtis, is on her album Blue Roses from the Moons.

That all said, Fuller’s 1965 re-make catches a rollicking dance groove (check out the go-go action), and the band nails the “six-gun” effect. Here, it sounds like Curtis wrote it for Fuller’s anthemic voice. You can hear and feel why it was the biggest hit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgtQj8O92eI&list=RDOgtQj8O92eI#t=54

4 Just six months after the song made its first appearance on the Billboard Top 100 chart, Bobby Fuller was found dead from asphyxiation in his mother’s car in a parking lot near his Los Angeles, California apartment. The Los Angeles Police Department declared the death an apparent suicide, but others believed him to have been murdered. Fuller was 23 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Fought_the_Law

Watch this program on Fuller’s death, officially changed by police from a “suicide” to “accidental” (allowing a big insurance policy to be collected on). The case stinks to high heaven of murder, the mob and L. A. police cover-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w29I_-1OElQ

5. Watch this video of Eric Garner’s killing from the program “Democracy Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-xHqf1BVE4#t=105

My first thought in watching this was, why didn’t any officer or EMT give Garner CPR? As the prone Garner loses consciousness, you watch the police standing around or holding his hands behind him even though he’s handcuffed. Another officer ineffectually pokes at his side and shoulder. At one point, the officer who choked him waves to the camera. After five minutes, an EMT arrives but only feels Garner’s pulse and determines he’s still alive, but does no more. I wasn’t the only one wondering about CPR. A woman on the video asks the police about CPR. They shoo her away. New York Daily News columnist Harry Siegel addresses the CPR issue in this transcript from Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” program. Goodman says that — after the choke-hold take down — watching the police do nothing while Garner’s life ebbs away brought her to tears:

AMY GOODMAN: They were saying, “Why don’t you give him CPR?” That’s what she was saying.

HARRY SIEGEL: Yes. And they’re saying, “Back up. Back up.” You know, they’re controlling the perimeter. “He needs air.” But they’re not doing anything to help this man breathe or determine if he needs that help. They’re just letting him lie there. And he doesn’t die on the ground. They put him in an ambulance, and he has a heart attack there and then dies. Like, after this chokehold, after that whole part of things, there’s a very decent chance that his life could have been saved if he had just been thought of as a full human being. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27867-did-the-nypd-let-eric-garner-die-video-shows-police-ignored-pleas-to-help-him-after-chokehold

6. Lyrics to “I Fought the Law, Brother Dead and Gone,”  by Kevin Lynch, c. 2014.                                                                                                                                              

7. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/c/clash/i+fought+the+law_20031691.html

By the way, the Zuus documentary on The Clash which accompanies these lyrics on this website, reveals the band’s urgent and remarkably well-considered political consciousness and activism.