Who is the hillbilly?

The Entry Is A Test

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:13:39 -0400

Here is a little bit of test copy.

Why Barack?

Sun, 3 Feb 2008 13:31:11 -0500

I worked hard for Bill Clinton in 1992. He inspired me, yes. But there was something more that made me want to back him: his toughness. The Republicans by this point had dirtied up national politics considerably, and unlike any Democrat in recent history, Clinton seemed willing to hit the GOP as hard as it hit him. If someone aimed a toe at his nuts, he kicked back. Hell, he didn’t mind kicking first. I liked that a lot.

Maybe it’s my age (I was 31 then and 47 now), but I’m sick of going for the nuts. I’m sick of the filth. I’m sick of the extremism. I want the middle. Badly. And I see one candidate with balls big enough to find it. (And it does take balls to buck the Accepted Wisdom of modern American political consultants.) That’s Sen. Barack Obama.

When friends lately have asked me why I’m backing him, I’ve just said it’s because he inspires me and the others don’t. I’ve wanted more powerful words to make the case, but they’ve failed me. Then today I picked up last week’s issue of The New Yorker and read George Packer’s great piece attempting to parse the differences between my party’s two groundbreaking candidates. In it, I found a much better articulation from Greg Craig, a Yale classmate of the Clintons (and a part of Clinton’s impeachment defense team) who had decided to support Sen. Obama this year. Here’s how Packer sums up Craig’s choice:

When I described to Greg Craig the Clinton campaign’s skepticism toward the idea of transcending partisanship, he said, “You’re getting to that five per cent of Hillary that I don’t like—which is to see in every corner a conspiracy or an opponent that must be crushed. Look at her comment ‘Now the fun part starts’ ”—Clinton’s announcement in Iowa that she would begin attacking Obama’s record. “There is a quality of playing the embattled, beleaguered victim that I find unappealing and depressing.” He added, “I want a President who is looking to move the country with positive inspirational ideas rather than to fight off the bad guys and proclaim victory by defeating the forces of reaction. I would like us to inspire the forces of reaction to join us in treating people better, and lifting more vulnerable people and people in jeopardy out of their vulnerability and jeopardy.”

That last line is powerful: ” … inspire the forces of reaction to join us … .” That’s what I want. I want to sit down with my Republican friends and talk. I want to find common ground. I want to live, as Sen. Obama suggests, in the United States of America.

Sadly, the Clintons this year have lost their appeal to me. In an age when the American people clearly want more, they see conspiracies and opponents to be nut-kicked everywhere they look. In a career that included a lengthy stint in politics, I’ve done a lot of kicking myself. I’ve browbeaten strangers, friends and beloved family members who were on what I believed to be the wrong side of any issue, whether it be abortion or the environment or the Middle East. Frankly, I’m sick of myself. I want something different, something more. I want to be better than I’ve been.

Sen. Obama inspires me to do precisely that. And that’s why he’s my choice. If he fails to win the nomination, I will absolutely support Sen. Clinton. She has the skills to be an excellent governing president. She will be light years better than what we have now or anything the GOP is offering us this year. Perhaps she will, as the campaign progresses, figure out the zeitgeist and look for ways to unite instead of divide.

But the desire to achieve a new unity is standard equipment in Sen. Obama. He seems to be made for the job.

Back in Beige: Two Songs

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:15:01 -0400

Well. Here we are again.

It’s been damned near a year since I last posted here. About two months ago, a good fellow named Will sent me an e-mail that said he’d stumbled on the site and “just wanted to say ‘Hallelujah!’” That made me feel good, but it wasn’t enough to get me going again.

But over the last week or so, I heard two songs, and I wanted once again to start writing to the few, we happy few. The first song came last Saturday night at a concert in lovely (and I say that with every bit of sarcasm I can muster) Duluth, Georgia. The bill: Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Amos Lee. For the very last tune, Mr. Zimmerman pulled out “Masters of War.” For those of you who have never heard -- or really listened -- to the tune, here are the lyrics.

It just struck me, while listening to Bob croak out this song, written about the masters of another war 30 years ago, how timely it still was. It made me think that maybe we ought to be sending that link to those lyrics to all our friends. Because the people behind this current war have proven, even more so since I last wrote (something I would have thought unimaginable a year ago), that they are, as Bob wrote three decades ago, “ain’t worth the blood that runs in your veins.”

The second song arrived on Tuesday, when Steve Earle’s new album, “Washington Square Serenade,” came out. After I got my ass out of Appalachia as a teenager, I’ve spent my whole adult life living in big cities -- and for seven years, the big city was the biggest: New York. Mr. Earle has moved there now, and he lives in the same neighborhood where I used to live. The album is about, at least in part, how NYC has affected Steve’s soul. Living there sure affected mine. And I got this “you’ve come full circle” feeling while listening to the record, because I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard a Steve Earle song. It was “Someday,” from the “Guitar Town” album, released back in 1986. I was living in New York City then (for the first time), and I’ll never forget listening to the first line of that song: “There ain’t a lot that you can do in this town/You ride down to the lake and then you turn back around.”

It was as perfect a description as I’d ever heard of my youth in a small Southern town. There I was, 25 years old, living in New York City, listening to a guy in Nashville describe my childhood in Georgia. And now, here I am, 46 years old, living in Georgia again, listening to the same dude describe the same sense of wonder that I felt upon moving to New York City back then. He juxtaposes the wonder of living in that town with the terror of living in the modern world best in the second song on the album, “Down Here Below.” And he does it by writing from the perspective of Pale Male, the famous red-talked hawk that lords over Central Park. Check out these words:

“Pale Male the famous redtail hawk performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan,
“Circles around for one last pass over the park,
“Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons,
“They got no place to run they got no place to hide,
“But Pale Male he’s cool, see, because his breakfast ain’t goin’ nowhere,
“So he does a loop-t-loop for the tourists and the six o’clock news,
“Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys,
“He looks up and down on Fifth Avenue and says, ‘God, I love this town,’
“But life life goes on down here below,
“And all us mortals struggle so,
“We laugh and cry and live and die,
“That’s how it goes,
“For all we know,
“Down here below.”

Indeed, in today’s world, all us mortals struggle so.

We read the papers, and we see the masters of war from the old song who, “like Judas of old ... lie and deceive.” But the beauty of this world redeems us. As the new song reminds us, it’s possible to “struggle so,” every day, and still look around and say, “God, I love this world.”

Keep pushing, y’all.

Enough Already

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:55:58 -0500

If any of you have Republican friends, I’m sure you’ve fallen victim to their waves of right-wing spam. One of the recent one, which started going around before Tuesday’s Great Awakening, is a mock “program” for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. I won’t repost it here, but suffice it to say that the first line is this:

7 p.m. — Opening Flag-Burning Ceremony

You get the idea.

Anyway, this morning, this bit of crap arrived yet again in my in-box, from an old friend of mine who resides on the different side of the political fence from me. He sent it with a note that said he got it from another friend and he thought I “would enjoy it.” Yeah, right.

But I suppose I feel emboldened by what happened on Tuesday. I have, truly, had enough. “I have had a belly full of this,” as former Democratic Speaker of the Georgia House Tom Murphy used to say.

So I didn’t just delete the thing and move on this time. I wrote my friend back. Thought I’d share it with y’all.

“And what, dear friend, would make you think that I would enjoy yet another round of the same kind of crap I’ve put up with from every Republican I know over the last six years?

“I and my fellow Democrats have been belittled and abused for our beliefs for years now. Our Republican brethren never seem to want to talk about the issues. They only want to find new ways to call us pussies and bleeding hearts. I am truly and thoroughly sick of it. It’s not funny. I mean, it would be easy enough for me to put together a similar ‘program’ for the upcoming Republican convention, replete with references to — oh, I don’t know — a “Tribute to Mark Foley, featuring live, on-stage buttfucking of teenage boys” or some such. It would be satisfying, briefly, but it would be a waste of time.

“My point is this: Belittling is easy. Doing something isn’t. Name-calling is easy. Reaching out across our political differences to find workable middle ground is not. But it’s what we need to be doing.

“So I want you to know that you are my friend, and I love you. But when we talk about politics in future, it needs to be a constructive discussion. Not this crap. Because I’m through with it. And judging by Tuesday’s election results, I am far from alone in that way of thinking.”

It made me feel better to write it. Maybe it’ll make y’all feel better to read it. People all over the place are fighting back. Let’s keep it up. But let’s do it constructively.

Rock On, Olbermann

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:16:07 -0400

Who’d have thought that the guy we used to watch on “SportsCenter” would rise to these heights?

Five years ago tonight, I laid in my bed in my apartment three quarters of a mile north of the smoldering pile that had been the World Trade Center, wondering what else could happen tomorrow. Five days from now, it will be the fifth anniversary of the day I got on my bicycle and somehow got by the police barricades and rode to within one block of the pile to see it all for myself.

And today, I wonder why our country still has no true leadership. I wonder why so many of my countrymen have mistaken the president’s lies for leadership. And I think I’m sadder tonight than I was five years ago tonight.

But I’m damned grateful for the courage that Keith Olbermann showed in his commentary on MSNBC tonight. And I hope my friend Bobby is wrong to wonder just how much longer General Electric will let Keith continue.