To celebrate the end of military operations in Iraq, I suppose it might be apropos to once again offer up the song “Leaving Babylon,” by ER Salo Deguierre, a tale of intrigue set against our troubles in the Persian Gulf. It’s not an anti-America song, as some might surmise on first hearing. It’s more a look at extreme thinkers and how they so easily switch sides. Because, to an extremist, the content of his thoughts is not as important as his extreme feelings. I’m looking at you, Michael Savage, David Horowitz and John Voight.
One of the things you might not know about ER Salo Deguierre is that he’s not just interested in ripping off Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground all the time. No, ol’ Salo has a soft side, too. In fact, he quite loves folk music.
It was 1992 when I first saw a brilliant movie that I highly recommend called Dogfight (starring the late, great River Phoenix in one of his best performances, working alongside the equally phenomenal Lili Taylor). As the credits rolled at the end for this devastating tale of lost innocence in the 1960s, I heard for the first time the dulcet tones of a maestro guitarist named John Fahey and my life has never been the same. I spent the next 17 years not only trying (and failing) to play the way he does but also to figure out how an instrumental guitarist with nobody backing him could sound like a symphony. I wondered for a long time, after listening closely, if his symphonic sound had any relationship to the type dreamed up by Sonic Youth troubadours Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. I was pleasantly surprised later to find that my intuition of a musical connection was not misplaced; Sonic Youth acknowledged at some point that they had indeed used a lot of John Fahey’s alternative tuning approaches to create their own totally original sound. Their debt to him turned out to be so great that they even played shows with him in his waning years (one of which I got to see on my 27th birthday, the best present ever).
John Fahey never sang (he didn’t need to), but until I come up with a guitar sound as fulfilling as his, I have to unfortunately do some croaking on my own material, hoping that if I combine some halfway decent picking skills with a halfway decent vocal, I’ll have something better than both. My results in this pursuit have mostly been a mishmash, but in the last few months I’ve come up with something I don’t mind sharing.
I wrote this song about 10 or 11 years ago but left it unrecorded until this year. It’s about pain, poverty, class resentment. American history, basically. Just click to play.
“Kansas 1921”
By Eric Rasmussen
Copyright 1999
Go inside the house and get our best wooden chair
Before he comes up our porch
And takes off his bowler hat
And sits down and tells us tales of distant Washington
We’ll feed him corn and watch his face
Seems so long
Since dad’s been dead
But how happy he’d be
To have known a president
On a whistle-stop campaign
In this brave new year of 1921
Just to see our land and give us blessing
Oh ho, high wind, high wall
Won’t you take my hand and pull me down
There’ll be warm spring wind comin’ round
Punch another hole inside your old leather belt
You’re as thin as a bean
And your pants are fallin’ down
And you might run into rich folk in town
Don’t you ever stop to think of who you are?
Try to think that you was raised better than
You was raised
Tie that dog up in the wood
Kick him if he ain’t been good
Lick your fingers, push your hair behind your ears
Don’t smile when they look you in the eye
Oh ho, high wind, high wall
Won’t you take my hand and pull me down
There’ll be warm spring wind
Comin’ round
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Dogfight, ER Salo Deguierre, John Fahey, Kansas, Lee Ranaldo, Lili Taylor, River Phoenix, Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore | Leave a Comment »
What can I say? It’s been no fun at all. And yet all horrible things must come to an end.
It was a messy relationship; maybe we shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. You were violent and volatile, ruled by a tyrannical father. We were idealistic and naive and had been hurt before. But still, we were impulsive; we took the plunge quickly. We were addicted to drama. And you had no choice. You just fell for us.
But oh how quickly things change. You became much too hot to handle. You spurned us almost as soon as you welcomed us. First you threw roses at us, and we thought it meant you loved us. But maybe you just meant, “Please don’t kill me.” As soon as our honeymoon ended, you turned schizophrenic. You acted like you didn’t know from one minute to the next what you wanted or who you were or which mosque you should attend. Sometimes you wanted your mean father back; sometimes you just wanted to blow us up. You turned to outsiders who poured poison in your ear and said lots of nasty untrue things about us and offered to help you get rid of us in horrible ways. You craved our stability and guiding hand and mentoring one moment but hated us for it at the same time. A typical Pygmalion relationship. We should have known, you can’t carve the perfect lovers out of stone. You have to let them just be who they are. Even if that means letting them hate you. Or letting them go.
The Flag of Iraq
We acted like the boss, but we weren’t. We couldn’t even get you to take out the garbage. You were so passive aggressive you put roadside IEDs in it.
You were insecure. And by that I mean your internal security forces were politicized and mercenary and graft-ridden. You were unstable. And by that I mean you had a nasty case of pyromania. It’s never as sexy as Def Leppard makes it out to be. You were proud and had to fight for every inch of property. You wouldn’t get organized. When somebody tried to help you get organized, boom! They were dead to you.
You crumbled into many mental and physical states. We binged (on oil) and you purged (each other of heretics). We were very curious to see your dad’s guns. Turned out he didn’t have any. Later, you did away with your dad entirely, and it wasn’t the victory either one of us thought it was going to be. In fact, it just made our relationship that much more sour.
Sometime in the second year, we knew, both of us that, that our relationship was a mistake. Yet we were too proud and embarrassed to end it. We insisted foolishly that we could make it work. Sometimes we went at each other without having enough protection. Isn’t that America all over–giddy and never properly sheathed.
But it’s silly to ask now what might have happened if we hadn’t gotten involved. That was a long time ago, and the choices can’t be unmade. We’re different people now, and can’t live in the past. Our mistakes are ours, and they make us who we are. Hopefully they help us become better. And hopefully we can end this bad blood on good terms, with no mutual recrimination, without debts and without too much rotting infrastructure. You seem to have gotten your shit together a bit. We went into debt trying to make you happy, of course, but we’ll be OK, because we work hard and have good government jobs to tide us over.
But we’re finally pulling the plug. This is it, Iraq. We’re leaving you. We’ve fallen in love with somebody else and her name is Snooki. She’s a mess, too, but we think we can help her. In the meantime, don’t cry. We hold no grudges toward you. After all, we have to thank you for not lasting anywhere near as long as our horrible engagement with Vietnam. That was probably the worst relationship ever. So wipe the tears from your eyes, Iraq. In the words of Luther Vandross:
We’re so in love but wrong for each other
Each hurt that heals brings on another
Both of us abusing
Both of us using
Darling
It’s time to stop pretending
There’s just no way to rewrite our ending
We’re caught in this game
And we both know we’re losing, but
How many times can we say good-bye?
Posted in Global Affairs | Tagged Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Snooki, Vietnam | Leave a Comment »
There’s no getting around it: America is divided. We’ve become more polarized, less tolerant of one another’s ideas and points of view. Less likely to reach across the divide of discourse, less likely to see the ironies of, seek alternatives to or break the paradigms of our own thoughts, less likely to live outside the echo chamber where we repeat the thoughts of our family and friends without thinking for ourselves, where we can’t synthesize seemingly incompatible political ideas. We’ve moved farther apart than ever, refusing to discuss things in a way that might bring us together.
Of course, I’m talking about the tragedy of last night’s Emmy Awards.
Oh sure, Jimmy Fallon was funny wandering the hall like a minstrel and breaking the proscenium stage to sing with Julianna Margulies and Stephen Colbert. Yes, a lot of quality shows were justly rewarded. You don’t even care that they are still calling January Jones a leading lady when she has gotten less air time on Mad Men this year than some of the extras.
But TV has, like America, become polarized, and when you look past the opulence of this gala event, all you see is cleavage … a wider gap than ever between quality and crap on television. The Emmys now have a category for best reality TV show. For those of you who enjoy oxymorons (or just morons)–here is your category. It must be embarrassing for wordsmiths in a writer’s medium to watch the Vandals, Saracens and Goths with their vulgar, vomiting beasts of burden ride across the red carpet and leave horse turds everywhere.
What used to be called television is today called “scripted television.” These are the things that stir our spirit, fire our imaginations. You might now call them paintings, and reality TV, contrariwise, is a mirror. Is a mirror on society interesting? I guess it depends on how interesting the people in them are. Mostly, I see people on reality TV picking their noses. And when it comes to, say, the Jersey Shore, I find the stuff in my own nose more interesting.
Emmy night lays bare this cleavage (sorry, couldn’t resist), where the best of our artists, like Matthew Weiner, who has tickled our fancy with Mad Men, sit cheek by jowl with Kim Kardashian, who tickles just ass men. Where Tina Fey, who writes so many jokes on every page of 30 Rock that she makes the paper turn black, competes against the likes of Snooki, who, inside and out, is just turning black.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests all systems are in a constant state of flux moving toward disorder. If you’ve read the work of Ilya Prigogine, the great Nobel laureate winning chemist, you realize that once these chaotic systems reach a level of polarization, they seek a quick, violent means of finding order again. Volatile chemical states reach disorder and strange things take place. Geopolitical disorder also allows weird things to take place. Imagine the Spanish Civil War. First, the political center disappeared in Spain, and pretty soon you had a breakdown in representative government in which each side refused to recognize the other. Then you had skirmishes, three years of conflict and discord and violence, and eventually a return to stasis and conformity in the form of a 40 year fascist dictatorship. Sometimes, amid discord, strange things emerge (like the paradox of an “anarchist government” in Barcelona).
But I like to think Prigogine could also have been talking about television. In a state of disorder, broadcast viewers flee to cable. Cable viewers flee to TiVo. TiVo viewers flee to the Internet and handheld devices. There is no conformity of quality or censorship. We live in a wild west, where a medium that used to be strictly regulated for the family now features regular nudity and sexual situations because the money people have become desperate. We now hear the word “shit” a lot. JWoww will show you her tits. Desperation can lead to phenomenal art (as it did when Hollywood movies underwent similar change in the 1960s). But it can also lead to people breaking the law to get on television. Sooner or later, the system will seek stasis and one side will win. The exhibition or the exhibitionists.
My fear is that people who want to watch something that aspires to be good are going to seek it elsewhere outside of television. Which is sad, because good television can be seriously great (like it is on Mad Men, 30 Rock, the Sopranos, etc.) When the good shows start to disappear from regular TV, the people who stay behind will turn it into a 24-hour spy camera. The Sony Masturbation Helper.
It’s great to see Mad Men and Breaking Bad and Lost win so many awards for their quality, but the Emmys remind you of this disorder between us–that the good shows aren’t the ones getting the ratings. Most regular people find it comforting for some reason to watch people threaten each other on Hell’s Kitchen, beat each other on Jerry Springer, or screw up their big moment on American Idol rather than try to work out that obscure Dorian Gray reference on Mad Men (Note to Weiner: nicely played!). It’s the same reason that high school gossip is so compelling–it allows you to live vicariously rather than live. It allows you to validate yourself and measure your own worth by the failure of others. It asks you to judge everything and do nothing. Which is very, very, very attractive.
I like to think of this as using TV to live outside of your body. It’s one of the themes of a song I wrote called “TV Head.” Technology is changing our brains, doing the organizing for us so that we can do the intuitive work of life ourselves. But it’s also allowing mankind to follow a spiritual impulse he’s had since he wandered out of the African savannas–to not be himself. When he cannot reconcile the substance that is spirit with the substance that is flesh (and when he can’t see how, as some have argued, that the two are biologically interrelated), he seeks to escape and live inside Jonah’s whale. He becomes obsessed with ghosts. With the idea demonic possession. He seeks heaven, as if there he will find answers as an angel he can’t find now in the encyclopedia. Rather than seeking heroes, he will seek Ryan Seacrest.
So the cleavage is not just within Christina Hendricks’ generous embonpoint. The rift in the Emmys is within us. Life is short and none of us wants to say we spent the entire journey watching Kim Kardashian achieve our dreams for us when she has no discernible skills or talents. The thing I like about a show like Mad Men, for instance, is that it’s so smart it makes me do the work. It makes me live in my head. It forces me to do something other than just sit there. And, unlike most of the other manifestly awful things on television, it reminds me that sitting is exactly what I’m doing. I have to ask myself, “Could I be more interesting than Don Draper if I tried?”
Ask yourself. What’s in your nose?
You can listen to my song “TV Head” here: TV Head
Posted in Film & TV, Music | Tagged Christina Hendricks, Emmys, ER Salo Deguierre, Ilya Prigogine, Jersey Shore, Jimmy Fallon, JWoww, Kim Kardashian, Snooki, Stephen Colbert, TV Head | Leave a Comment »
A song with references to one of my favorite books from high school. My wife likes this song because it reminds her a bit of Pink Floyd. That wasn’t my intention, but I’ll go with it.
Just click to play.
Ford 632
Performed by ER Salo Deguierre
Music and Lyrics By Eric Rasmussen
Copyright 2010
And I won’t speak the truth to you
When the jackboots come I won’t say my name to you
The daylight came up faster than our eyes can meet it
When the morning comes it’ll tell you who you really are
And when I looked into your eyes the look was the same
From the dawn of time lovers look away in shame
But when the daylight came up that morning
And the thugs broke down the door
Now I won’t speak the truth to you anymore
And when they hauled you away you were wearing my new jeans
And when you stuffed your legs and belly in between
I saw right away how my jeans fit you
And my shoes and my shirt and my coat
And I won’t ever wear those hated clothes anymore
Two lovers fall to the garden from the skies
And they clean that garden’s beauty with their eyes
For any kind of love they could beg or steal
In a world that they can touch but they can’t feel
And I won’t say your name to the officer
And you won’t say my name to me anymore
Your face it looks like mine does in the daylight
And when I looked across the bed to my surprise
A policeman’s daughter you only brought him shame
That’s why you couldn’t bring yourself to say his name
But if I tore my eyes out completely,
I could still hear it in my brain
You brought me joy but you only left me pain
And you’d take my name if it weren’t already yours
And I won’t speak the truth to you anymore
Posted in Music | Tagged Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, ER Salo Deguierre, Ford 632 | Leave a Comment »
One of the best movies you've never seen.
I don’t usually review movies I haven’t seen. But there’s a lot of hype surrounding the release of the new horror movie The Last Exorcism, directed by Daniel Stamm. You might have seen ads for it and advanced press calling it this year’s Paranormal Activity, which, you might remember, was last year’s Blair Witch Project. The film claims to include “found footage,” and has a home movie feel. Supposedly,we’re going to see a real possessed person get purged.
Or are we?
Pseudo-documentaries have reinvigorated the scary movie genre (you might even call them a genre themselves, depending on how finicky you are about naming new categories). They underline what good scary movies are–an appeal to that part of your brain that fears secrecy, disorientation, alienation and a lack of context–and thus makes you most open to manipulators. Did you ever notice that there is very little actual visual and sound information in the Blair Witch Project? That’s part of its genius (or its hustle). Whoever made it (or marketed it) knows that your brain was doing all the work and imagining awful things when actually nothing was happening (and I’ve watched it twice. Really. NOTHING happened). The real geniuses were the guys at Artisan Entertainment (I like to think it was a Don Draper type) who told the filmmakers at the festivals to shut their mouths and not do any more interviews. The mystery was part of the artistry.
When I saw the poster for The Last Exorcism in the subway, I wasn’t as horrified by the picture or the gnomic tag line “Believe In Him,” as I was by the names on the credits: writers Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland. These two guys are already responsible for one of the best films you’ve never seen and it’s not a horror film at all but a comedy. A sublime comedy called Mail Order Wife, which they directed together. If you haven’t seen it (and the current IMDB numbers suggest that you haven’t) then I’ll give you the best recap I can without too many spoilers. In it, a documentary film crew (with Gurland himself) follows a doorman from Queens as he uses a mail-order bride service to track down and marry the girl of his dreams, a catalog wife from Burma named Lichi (Eugenia Yuan). The doorman (Adrian Martinez) has no social skills and no charm. He turns his new bride first into a maid, then a sex slave. This is all too much for the film crew and Gurland, who gets personally involved with the story (and Lichi).
The first reaction you have watching Mail Order Wife is vile discomfort. Adrian has a crippling lack of social skills and is bereft of elegance. Watching him turn from a schlub into a monster is, in fact, kind of like watching a horror film. But then something happens. The plot turns really bizarre about 30 minutes into it, and we’re no longer sure if we’re watching a documentary at all. Everybody turns into an asshole, including Lichi and the filmmakers. It’s all so funny, though, you stop caring.
It might sound smug or cute or annoying, when a director suddenly suggests he’s pulling your chain, but in this case, it’s really cool. I have watched this movie three times and it never bores me. Even if it is just a ruse, the behavior of the people on the screen is familiar, and you oddly feel refreshed thinking maybe you’ve been delivered from the pain of the reality. Real life is always more awkward than fiction. Maybe that’s why a well-directed mockumentary can also make you feel disoriented the same way a horror movie can. Maybe the two genres are more related than we think.
Werner Herzog, the German filmmaking genius, has recently had a lot of fun with this idea by delving into mockumentaries that are purported at first to be real. Herzog, who has admitted that a lot of his ’70s “histories” were made up, likes to remind the audience that they are the ones doing a lot of the work of narrative. The filmmaker is just laying the tracks.
The first time I saw The Blair Witch Project, I was dating a very brainy woman with an advanced degree, the kind of person unlikely to get fished into a dead camper yarn. And yet she went for the movie like catnip. The funniest thing to me was that she was too afraid to even look at the screen most of the time and instead looked down into her lap. In other words, she didn’t see the Blair Witch Project, at all. She only heard it. What did that do? It made her even more frightened. Having less information made it more effective.
I have high hopes for The Last Exorcism because it might have more in common with Mail Order Wife than the names on the poster. It’s shrouded in mystery, for one thing. The filmmakers will say very little about the story and critics are playing along. The producers have already started a brilliant ad campaign that has their minions going into demonic spasms on Chat Roulette.
I don’t necessarily want Botko and Gurland to launch a new horror film career. I would prefer they make me laugh. Instead I secretly hope this movie continues the career they already started of movie deconstruction. Something that will shake up viewers who have become numb watching Snooki and The Situation fall into alcohol blackout and somehow accept it as reality. In other words, I do hope there is a real exorcism going on in The Last Exorcism–and that it’s the audience that’s getting it.
Posted in Film & TV | Tagged Andrew Gurland, Artisan, Blair Witch Project, Huck Botko, Mail Order Wife, The Last Exorcism | Leave a Comment »
I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Malinche, or Marina, the Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast who was sold as a slave to Cortez, became his translator, his mistress, mother to his child, one of the first mestizos and therefore the symbolic mother of Mexico. I’m obsessed with her story because nobody in literature seems to be as exalted and at the same time maligned. She’s considered a forerunner of her new country on one hand and a traitor to her people on the other, a motherly whore. Even her nickname “Chingada” means literally “a woman who is fucked.”
Cortez & Malinche
Her legend is such that she’s been referenced everywhere from Laura Esquivel and Octavio Paz novels to Neil Young songs and even Star Trek.
I myself have been so intrigued by her tale and this legendary beauty of hers, one so great it supposedly undid a culture and bewitched statesmen and warriors, that I’ve named at least two different characters after her in my fiction. I also wrote a song about her when I was 22, which I’m sharing with you now in an updated version.
“La Chingada,” by ER Salo Deguierre is either further exaltation or further insult, depending on how much you think the song sucks. The good news is that, if Malinche were here, she would no longer have to listen to the song on MySpace. That’s right, I’ve upgraded my Word Press account and embedded the song on the blog. Just press to play.
I hope to post (and repost) more music here in the next few days.
La Chingada
By Eric Rasmussen
Copyright, 1992, 2010
Marina they trade you for horses
And swift galleasses that slice through the seas
Marina, they trade you for flowers and meat
And took you away from me
When you came back you had learned a new language
Were decked out in colors, a mistress to kings
But do you remember at all
When we sat all alone
and knew none of those things?
Marina, caught up in intrigue
You helped the invader to bring down a king
Sat by while his own people stoned him to death
For the shame that he brings
Marina now some fish swims inside of you
What kind of child will you be mother to?
Will he hate your impossible beauty and body
As much now as I do?
Posted in history, Music, Uncategorized | Tagged Chingada, Cortez, ER Salo Deguierre, Malinche, Montezuma | 1 Comment »
Snooki is overtaxed. MTV
One of my favorite shows on television (let’s be fair, 50% of what I watch on TV) is “The Soup,” with Joel McHale, the kind of show that the brilliant (if right now sadly ill) cultural critic Christopher Hitchens might call “low humor,” but one that actually gives its viewers a way to deconstruct the shows that currently pass for cultural communication–mainly the malady of reality TV for which there seem to be no antibodies. For some reason, these shows fulfill a need in our psychology to watch a lot of emotionally limited and brutish people fight, fuck, fall in love, and get drunk without ever having to balance a check book or pay the cable bill. Why do we watch? Maybe it’s because we know that the sloe-eyed, pneumatic, contumacious and inebriated Snooki is slowly (very slowly) gaining the path to wisdom. This makes her picaresque journey useful to us in invisible ways. We now know how not to behave and hopefully not to hit a lady in the face, even if we think she has it coming.
There is another conversation going on in America that’s not on cable TV, but you are likely familiar with it if you have a living grandparent with access to e-mail, a back channel of communication where Americans buy their penis creme as well as similarly specious topical anodynes from anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Often these e-mails are spiced with the names of legitimate news organizations so that they look like properly vetted journalism. But they aren’t. In reality, they are usually written directly by special interest groups and are meant to fool the rank and file into making Chicken Little decisions about their money. My late mother, a tax preparer and bankruptcy attorney, told me that people were coming to her asking to irresponsibly liquidate their holdings because of what they read in these e-mails (and saw on Fox News)–decisions that could have destroyed them financially.
Thursday an e-mail came across my desk talking about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011. The e-mail informs the reader that marginal tax rates are set to rise and that folks at all income levels will see increases next year, that their family farms will all of a sudden be subject to a 55% estate tax, that normal folks will see penalties for being married, having children and owning businesses. In other words, we’d be going back to the tax schedules of the Clinton era. Advertised as one of the largest tax hikes facing average Americans in U.S. history, these increases promise a new recession because they will overburden U.S. businesses, murder stock prices, kill investment and strangle innovation.
In other words, all the stuff that happened during the Internet boom. And who should you blame for the new recession? That’s a no-brainer. Democrats! They tax and spend, after all.
Or do they? The Democrats actually have a bill to continue the Bush era cuts–at least for 98% of us. It would keep marginal tax rates at the same level for all but the top two brackets, the highest of which will go back up to 39.6%. In fact, the rich will still see a small tax benefit because of the way income margins are staggered (they see the cuts at the lower rates, too, until they reach $200,000).
The Republican version of this bill extends the cuts for everybody, of course, which increases the deficit by more than $36 billion and relinquishes almost that entire amount to millionaires, according to a report by the Joint Committee on Taxation. If you are a millionaire, I respectfully say to you that you are sitting on this money these days anyway more than you are investing it, and you don’t need it.
You don’t hear much about the Democrats’ extension from your grandparents because Americans tend to hew to the prevailing political narrative the same way they do to Snooki’s progress through the vomit-skinned hot tubs of Jersey and Miami. It is much easier to repeat the meme that Democrats tax and spend. It is a story line that writes itself in our heads and thus we fail to break down the numbers, even when they show the story is patently false. The Democrats are your mother. They want to save the world but can’t. They are idealists who will spend your money for failed ideas of the public good. They are the reason for the recession. (Hopefully you don’t remember back that far.)
Storytelling is one of the quickest ways people learn. But it also allows people to program us. What if I told you that I knew for a fact Snooki, in her darkest moments, turns to quiet contemplation and reads Baudelaire; if that were true, you would likely not accept that news, and MTV would fire her. We all need her instead to be drunk, vulgar and provincial because then it feels better when somebody hits her in the face. Two thousand plus years ago, we were the same way, only we wanted to hit that smack-talking bitch Antigone. These days, we want to smack Barack Obama in the face. We want to punish him for his eternal ideal of commonwealth. The desire is so strong we aren’t even smart enough to notice that the freakin’ taxes haven’t even risen yet. We argue smugly that the stimulus package failed because that fits the welfare mother storyline but we don’t acknowledge that obscenely low tax rates haven’t helped either.
The truth of Grover Norquist’s statement, cramped as it is, is that the Bush tax cuts, if left to expire, would indeed bring us back to Clinton-era tax levels. What he won’t tell you, obsessed as he is with chimeras, is that Bush’s tax cuts mostly helped the wealthy in the first place. What he won’t tell you is that Clinton-era taxation helped us balance the budget. What he also won’t tell you is that most of what we have to pay for is two wars that Americans overwhelmingly approved in 2001 and 2003. The U.S. government is not taking YOUR money. The U.S. government is asking you to pay for something you already bought. OK, to be fair, maybe it has put one other item on layaway–better health care. Why? You said for years you wanted that too.
But nobody can deny that your taxes will definitely rise if a gridlocked Congress cannot come to agreement. And it’s not because of oppression but because of game theory. Republicans themselves have a vested interest in killing the Democratic version of the tax cut extension. Because then they can claim it was an example of Democrats taxing and spending, which you know, is as true as the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Jesus walking on water. They only want you to go along with the Republican version, which will require the government to keep borrowing from the Chinese to pay our teachers, repave our roads and keep former employees of our nation’s manufacturing base from living in Hoovervilles. Why do Republicans want to keep borrowing? Because they like unsustainable short term solutions and because Americans don’t really understand what their economy is made of right now: credit based on past economic strength. Sooner or later, Peter Luger is not going to take our white credit card.
If you don’t believe, you have only to realize that some roads in this country are going back to dirt, teachers are being laid off, and unemployment benefits are being threatened.
If you do understand this, you must be able to fight this storyline wherever you encounter it (from Republicans or “centrist” Democrats alike): “Your tax bill is not going up under Obama, Grandpa. But frankly, it should.”
If you don’t understand this, there’s a crab lice infested hot tub I’d love to sell you in Little Silver.
Posted in Business and the Economy, Essay | Tagged Barack Obama, estate tax, George W. Bush, Grover Norquist, Jersey Shore, Joint Committee on Taxation, marginal tax rates, Snooki | Leave a Comment »
I must apologize, dear “Beauty is Imperfection” reader. I posted six new songs the other day, and advertised one that I don’t think was quite ready for air time. Though I won’t bore you with technical details, suffice it to say that I do the final mixing of these songs in my headphones to make them sound the best I can (with my limited technical ability). “TV Head” is a song I like a lot, and though I worked hard to make it sound good in actual speakers, I didn’t realize how much the song would be hurt by the thin bandwidth of an MP3 and the even more horrible degradations of the MySpace player, didn’t realize how the diminishing sonic returns of such formats would make my ditty sound really rank by the time it reached your tender ears. I should have given it an extra listen, and I didn’t. I’ve tried to fix some problems, but I might well take it down and futz with it a little before reposting. Sorry if you heard it and it made you sick. I guess it’s too much to ask you to imagine how it should sound.
Just when I was most disillusioned, I had dinner and wine with a new friend last night, an excellent musician named Christian who has really got music production down and understands audio engineering in ways I can barely fathom. You can check out his work with his band Montalfish here and see what I’m talking about.
Christian was very gracious to give my music a listen last night and tell me that, despite its flaws, it has some promise, and I’m grateful for some of the tips he gave me, mostly about my drum parts (not tight!)
But since that will take some time, and since I’m not as disappointed with some of the other songs on here, I’ve decided to share the next one with you anyway.
This one is called “Leaving Babylon,” and is a short story of political intrigue set to music. I should add that I created an alternate version of the melody sung by cats that, as far as I know, is the only recording my wife likes.
Leaving Babylon by ER Salo Deguierre.
“Leaving Babylon”
By Eric Rasmussen
Copyright 2010
He was just right out of college
On his first tour of Baghdad
Working for a private concern, a no-bid contract for his dad
His first assignment is to carry a suitcase filled with pounds and gold
A payoff for some Baathist Army to keep the locals in the fold
He was disguised inside a convoy when they hit an IED
He was blinded and left bleeding, an Arab boy helped him to see
For two months in a cinder block cell, the Arabs retrain him as their own
To hold the standard of the Sunni, fighting for the pan-Arab home
But he was carrying special orders, with that million dollar check
Embarrassing to the multi-nationals, the M15 marks him for death
He doesn’t even know his father
He doesn’t even know his name
He just wants to find some morals
In a world where there’s no blame
In business handshakes there flowers money
On CNN there flowers fame
But only purity of purpose
Can keep the borderline man sane,
He’s caught downwind of fair Bathsheeba,
her ablutions drove him mad
And he lost his moral compass
Lay her body in the sand
Swimming in her shallow kisses,
don’t know which God to call by name
So he raced out into the desert
Sackcloth ashes and a cane
Have you come to throw a boulder
And to strike Goliath dead?
Or could you wake up back at Dartmouth
With a co-ed in your bed?
Someone take me to the Green Zone
Call the Congress if you please!
Let me just talk to my mother
I throw myself upon my knees
As you lived among the Pagans
Did you lose your mother tongue?
Did you eat the heathen idols
As Bathsheeba drew her gun?
Someone take me to your leader
I don’t want to die alone!
How I weep as if for Zion
And for my imagined home
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