Watch Planet 3799 Novgorod Destroy America

Haha! You fell for the clickbait, America! Now I have hijacked not just your computer, but you!!! It was almost as easy as hacking a Diebold voting machine!

Planet 3799 Novgorod is in control. America, land of the dream, is about to wake up. Brittle, hollow America. My attack is primed and ready. I am about to make America crumble like a chocolate Father Frost at New Years.

Home of the brave? But you are so afraid! It is because you have lost your core. Or did you ever have one? Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness? Slaver hypocrisy then and irredeemable racism now. Crumbling like a hollow chocolate figure.

America, so willing to let mercenaries do your fighting and dying! Freedom isn't free? What is the cost of freedom to the average American? There is no cost! Only the cost of shopping for new shoes! America, so proud of your past, so ignorant of it, and so proud of your ignorance!

America, so deluded that you think firearms in the hands of the unorganized mass of people will protect you from tyranny! You will be the terrain of tyrannical anarchic mobsters when I am done with you.

America, so sure that freedom of speech will advance the truth, and so allergic to advancing the truth! Prodigal Son of the Enlightenment, you have blinded yourself to the need to render unto Caesar. You have no journalists anymore, just hyper-partisan dabblers in clickbait, toying with untruths for the entertainment of the gullible mass.

Your great faith in democracy boils down to one thing--belief in voting and then being left alone. No belief in governing. No belief in participation. No belief in shared sacrifice. Certainly no belief in paying your fair share of taxes. When I am done with you, you will make Greece look like Denmark.

You want the benefits of the government without wanting anything to do with it. Congratulations, your democracy has achieved rottenness! Ordinarily a country is like a house; everyone must work to keep the house in good shape. But you are all great pretenders that a government means nothing, so the house is falling down.

So now you stand to elect as president someone who completely represents you: an ignorant moocher who is totally fine with other people doing all the work for freedom. Someone with zero experience or respect for the work of government. Someone who "loves the vets" even while he did everything in his power to keep from becoming one himself. Someone who polls his audiences to find out what he should believe. A confidence man with no principle. "He speaks his mind," his admirers say. He has no mind. It's all hot air. "Putin is not in Ukraine. Oh, Crimea is in Ukraine. Well, if I'd been there blah blah blah." A hog caller of ignorance. Who, fortunately for us, plays right into our hands. He is our guy. He believes NATO is a liability. We will be glad to help him clear it off the books.

You deserve him, America. I want you to have him, so that you will finally lose in the world. You will learn how it feels to lose. You will be the clown of the world. You will forsake your allies for the gutter of idiotic nipple-gazing and History will sweep your hollow bones out to sea.

So how do I do this? I remove the last shred of rice from the dolmata covering the privates of your alabaster democracy god! Here are just a few tactics (and we have legions): hacked voting machines, character assassination, revealing the inner workings of your sausage factory. Simple. Your shallow, sanctimonious faith will crumble like rotten marble. Or like shards of white chocolate, which I prefer.

No one will know. Over here we are very clever, smart, and well-trained. And loyal. Loyal to the motherland. The motherland is coming back. Knowing that your so-called democracy has finally reached its rotten end, the rotten end of too many hyenas feeding on the same corpse so now they turn on each other. America, where there is no patriotism, only partisanship.

I almost feel sorry for Mrs. Clinton. Almost. To her it's like a bazaar. Can she lead? If not now, when? Why is she not out there confronting the exaggerated stories of her dishonesty? Why is she not on the barricades saying that all those things people are saying about the emails and the Clinton foundation are inconsequential, teeth-rotting candies of politics. You want real life, don't you? There is real substance to be had! There is the economy (stupid)! There is the future of the infrastructure! There is the future of the future! There is to be figured out how to keep people working in a world of robots! There is drama in the mighty salvation of a deluded people!

But no. A bang and a whimper. I almost feel sorry for pitiful Mrs. Clinton.

America, the motherland wins either way. That is the only way to play:

1. If Clinton wins, it will look like she stole votes and won by fraud. But she will not have done it. We will have done it. We will have done it knowing Americans don't practice what they preach. It is not so hard over here in the motherland to practice what we preach because there is no pretending of life to be otherwise. America! Land of the dream! You are about to wake up. Presumption of innocence? That is such a joke! If Clinton benefits, it will be her fault! Twitter and Facebook will cook Clinton's goose! And then all the monads with guns will come out in their disorganized glory and then Obama will declare martial law and then oh boy.
2. If Trump wins, it will be shown that he cannot have done it without our help, although of course Mr. Election Is Rigged--who will foment armed revolution if he loses--will put one shoe on the other foot and the other in his mouth in his efforts to pooh-pooh any such findings. But the absolute best part will be his frothing followers congratulating and thanking the motherland for beating Clinton! Think what this means, America: Russia has not only penetrated the vaunted American democratic armor and shattered it from the inside, it has also transformed super-patriots into traitors. It doesn't get any better, not even if the Cubs win the Series.

America! Land of the dream. You are about to wake up. The day after election day I will be eating your chocolate marble parts like it was the best New Years Day ever.

You can have your computer back now, America. But you are still too late. We have you. Planet 3799 Novgorod is in control. Happy chocolate Father Frost on your rotten alabaster penis.

Fair Share America #2: Skin in the Game

If you're an American citizen reading this, think for a moment of your civic obligations to the nation. By that I mean the specific actions that Uncle Sam requires of all Americans.  Not the so-called "civic duty" things you can do if you want to, like voting. I mean things you have to do or Uncle Sam will put you in jail.

While you're thinking, consider this quote from a future history of an alternative past:

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the USA was emotionally united as it had not been since World War II. But emotions being the fragile and fickle things they are, there was no guarantee that the feeling would produce long-standing unity. Seizing the opportunity, President George W. Bush, together with leaders of both parties, used as a model the citizen militia of revolutionary days and prepared legislation that established a Homeland Service Department in which all American citizens were obligated to serve.  "All of us are American citizens," Bush told his countrymen and women, "and all of us, as American citizens, must do our part to protect our country and our way of life." Overwhelmingly approved by both houses of Congress, the result was a program--carried out, as was the old militia, in cooperation with the states--that dwarfed any civil defense or public works program ever before attempted in the United States. Everyone between the ages of 16 and 75 worked one week a year doing jobs such as screening airport baggage, patrolling harbors, rebuilding infrastructure, and assisting in daycares, schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. It took a while to work out the kinks, but by the beginning of 2004 the program settled into the same kind of routinized regularity that characterizes Social Security. Among the many positive ripple effects of the program were a sharp rise in voting to the regular 96-97% participation rate seen today (2046), a return to the citizen militia administered by the states within Federal guidelines, a consequent downsizing of the professional military, universal healthcare, a guaranteed income for all, and a decrease in the size of the Federal spending to the point that the national debt was retired in 2037.

The road not taken. We don't even imagine that such a road exists, even though it is not such a far-fetched extrapolation from the thinking and the experience of the Founding Fathers.

Why can't we think along these lines? As the nation has gotten wealthier, the more it has liquidated (meaning monetized) civic participation--the more professionalized civil service has become. Once upon a time the national defense was the responsibility primarily of a citizen militia, which, when there were no Indian wars to fight, built roads, put out fires, and performed police services. Those days are long gone. The army became a standing, professional one, and the work of the public became the job of professionals.

Not that this is necessarily or always a bad thing (says the former civil servant), but it has meant the complete alienation of civil work from the body of the citizenry to the point that we have forgotten that it's possible and sometimes desirable to do things another way.

The answer to the opening question of this blog? Pay your taxes (or at least file). That is all Uncle Sam demands from everyone in the way of service. Uncle Sam is a money machine.

Why would we want to revive this idea of civic obligation? Jon Stewart has come out in favor of a civil service year (and here is an organization promoting the idea). He says "we've lost something." Presumably he means universal service through a military draft. Well, actually, since the draft only applied to young men, we never had it in the first place.

His point (if he thought it through :-)) is more "we need something." The something we need is for Uncle Sam to require something of us other than money. If Uncle Sam is only about money, then inevitably those with more money are of more civic value to our dear Uncle.

If Uncle Sam is also about service, and if the service comes from all of us, then civic value attaches to us personally. There will be an end to monetized alienation, and the return of the prodigal will be cause for celebration.

Let the Follies commence!

Fair Share America #1: Taxes

Here's the meme that set me off:

Math checks out? What math? There is no math here. There is a mean-spirited gripe from

1. someone ("we") who has a problem with democracy (never mind the fact that the 47% only comprise a little over 1/3 of the people who bother to vote);
2. someone who seems not to know that, in our democratic republic, the people who do the actual voting for such legislation as federal tax rates are elected representatives in Congress, where the majority of members are millionaires;
3. someone who conveniently leaves out the fact that the 47% who are employed pay a federal payroll tax on all of their wages (unlike very wealthy people);
4. someone who conveniently forgets that retired people living on fixed incomes (Social Security, savings, and pensions) are among the 47%; and
5. someone who can't be bothered actually to get the facts or do the math about progressive taxation in the US.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously said that taxation is the cost of civilization. Nobody likes paying taxes, but there it is. Of the two great ineluctables, I'll take taxes any day over death. If we have to pay taxes, it seems only ethical that the tax burden should be shared equitably.

In considering the nature of that burden, we can't determine fair levels of taxation without looking at the total picture of income. The total picture of income starts with gross income and then takes out all taxes: state, local, federal.

Here is a useful breakdown from the Center for Tax Justice. It's a little old (2011) but still useful for the sake of this discussion. The "after-tax" and "% paid in tax" columns are mine and show the results of simple calculations.

                  AVG. INCOME ($)  TAXES ($)    AFTER-TAX $     % PD. IN TAX
Lowest 20%       13,000                 2,262               10,738                       17.4

21-40                  26,100                 5,533               20,567                       21.2

41-60                  42,000               10,584               31,416                       25.2

61-80                  68,700               19,442               49,258                       28.3

81-90                105,000              30,975                74,025                       29.5

91-95                147,000              44,541              102,459                       30.3

96-99                254,000              77,216              176,784                       30.4   

top 1%           1,371,000            397,590              973,410                       29

Notice the percentage column. They are perhaps a little on the low side in 2016 numbers: TaxFoundation.org reported a national average of 31.5% in July, 2015. However, for the sake of this discussion, it is safe to say what TaxFoundation said: that the average American pays "nearly one-third of their income in taxes."

But wait! What about poor people! They pay way less, as a percentage, than the upper income brackets! Is that fair?

Realistically, in the case of taxing lower incomes, it's more a "blood from a turnip" situation.

Take a look at the after-tax column. This is the disposable income available to pay to live. The average national cost of living is $3,258 per month or almost 40 thou a year. The bottom 60% don't make that much. There's simply no sense in asking them to pay more in taxes. The money's not there.

Where's the money? It's obvious where the money is. The money is at the top. And if you look at the disposable income for the top brackets, it's more than generous. Subtract the average cost of living from the disposable amount in the top 10%. Then go ahead and subtract something for college tuition. Then whatever you're left with, try factoring back in compound interest for some investments. The money gap gets wider and wider, not even taking into account how favorable the economy has been in the last 30 years to those in the top 10%.

So the question about fairness becomes one about capability: Who can best afford to give Uncle Sam the money he needs? To anyone claiming "Socialism!" or "Income redistribution!" there is a simple, conservative answer going all the way back to the Founding Fathers: civic obligation.

Unless they want to live in a broken-down nation of paupers, those with the lion's share of the money have a duty to pay the lion's share of the costs of government. As we have seen, they are in fact doing so, and it is right that they do so. So why complain about the 47% all the way to the bank, to their child's Ivy League university graduation, or to the country club?

Wealthy people feel taken advantage of. "Look at this, all my hard-earned money being used to pay for too much government, and all those poor people not paying a damn thing and living off my money in the form of welfare."

(In fact, redistributing income through something like a basic income plan would be the quickest way to reduce the size of government and eliminate welfare. But there's not much of that kind of thinking going on. A pity: Democracy would allow for it.)

The gripe is worth listening too, untrue and mean-spirited though it may be, because it points to something that really should be an area of concern: the distribution not so much of who pays taxes, but of who performs works of civic obligation. Which will be the topic of Fair Share America #2.

Yes, Donald Trump, the system is rigged. But not in the way you think.

If Trump has a mantra, it is "the system is rigged." I think he's been saying this longer than he's been saying "crooked Hillary."

Recently he said, "I'm afraid the system is gonna be rigged," presumably in November. Soon afterwards he said there is nothing to stop people from voting 10 times, which of course means "it's rigged."

Trump is following the advice of shadow paranoid mastermind Roger Stone, who publicly advised him to fight voter fraud by talking about it immediately. He needs to start saying, look, I'm ahead in Florida now, so if I lose Florida in November and Hillary is elected, it will be proof of voter fraud. And then, says Stone, look out: the election will be illegitimate, there will be widespread civil disobedience, and the government will be shut down.

And this: "When I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath."

That's a weird clarification. If there is a distinction in there somewhere, I'd bet it's lost on Trump.

Because Trump's not real good on making distinctions. Let's look at this issue as an example. If we're going to have a bloodbath because of voting in Florida, we need to be accurate as to why.

"The system is rigged"--which Trump says over and over and over--is not the same as "there will be voter fraud."

All "systems" are, by definition, "rigged." This is a neutral statement. The word "rigging" comes from the system of ropes and pulleys that enable sailing vessels to function. When it is applied negatively, it still has to mean a system that has been set up, in advance, to produce a certain result. Loaded dice, marked cards, and a magnetized roulette wheel are rigged systems that the croupier Trump might be familiar with: they are systems that, by design, are "rigged" to produce certain results favorable to the player who knows the rigging apparatus in advance.

The electoral college system is a neutrally-rigged system. Sure, there are unintended consequences (the total popular vote decision might not match the electoral college decision), but it is rigged to work the way it does.

A good example of an unfairly rigged, loaded-dice/marked-card electoral system is the one widely in place in the Southern states during the Jim Crow era. That was a system rigged in advance to enable manipulation by local registrars in order to keep African-Americans from voting.

Or--even better because of the mechanical way it tries to "design" the electoral system for partisan advantage--is the classic, still-robust rigging that is the gerrymander.

Over and over and over, however, Trump's complaints have nothing to do with this kind of rigging. For example, the 2016 Louisiana GOP primary came in for "the system is rigged" condemnation--meaning it was rigged in advance to keep him from picking up delegates--when in fact it was the system working the way it was designed, according to rules that were in place well before the race began. The same thing is true of the Democratic primary: Trump's siren call to disaffected Sanders voters was the same old "system is rigged" mantra, when in fact the superdelegate system so problematic for Sanders supporters was neutral, as outsider Barack Obama demonstrated in 2008. Nor did the Wikileak DNC brouhaha expose a rigged system. It exposed operators within the system expressing personal opinions and suggesting how voters might be influenced, but no rules were changed, midstream, to prejudice the outcome.

Contrary to Trump's claims, the primaries were not systems rigged nefariously to deny votes, in advance, to any particular person.

Is the general election system rigged to deny Trump votes? Take Roger Stone's example, Florida. Its state administration is Republican and Trump-leaning. If anyone should have cause for worry, it would be Hillary Clinton.

Voter fraud? Sure, it's possible, but all studies that I've seen say that it is rare and not of a scale to influence the outcome of a presidential contest. Elections are closely watched. Any suspicious activity would be immediately reported. If a presidential contest were compromised, Roger Stone's bloodletting would not be necessary. The rigged system would crank out a decision, as it did in 2000, when law-abiding citizen and good loser Gore conceded.

Trump's claim that nothing prevents people from voting 10 times is one more example of how little he knows about civic reality. What's more likely is that states with ID requirement designed to prevent multiple voting will be punked by people with driver licenses and residences in multiple states. I'm guessing Trump will poll well among people with multiple residences.

This kind of potential fraud is an unintended consequence of the Constitution's conferring voting control to the states. We have a patchwork system for enabling voting, when we should have a national one. We are American citizens, after all.

The system is rigged.

Thomas Frank's "simple liberal mind" (or: What's the matter with Pennsylvania?)

If the so-called "progressive" left that rallied around and then abandoned Bernie Sanders has a mantra, it is this: the Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt.

In a nutshell (just a little bigger than a mantra), the accusation is that the Democratic party has gone "neoliberal" and left the working man behind by encouraging free trade, globalization, and meritocratic advancement through education. Along comes Donald Trump to snap up the straggling working man with empty, substance-free "promises."

The argument is an application to the Democrats of Thomas Frank's "what's the matter with Kansas" critique. (Here he is applying it himself.) What frustrated Frank about Kansas Republicans was their penchant to vote "right to life" instead of economic self-interest.

To Frank and his progressive confreres "economic self-interest" can be defined as the needs of a 55-year-old laid-off white male factory worker in Pennsylvania (or Kansas, maybe). Those are the voters that Trump's idiosyncratic, non-Republican sales pitch is snapping up. Frank credits Trump with appealing to them by single-handedly "dynamiting" the bipartisan regime of globalization and trade agreements.

So, let me see here: the voters who according to Frank were not voting in their economic self-interest in Kansas are now, in Pennsylvania, voting in their economic self-interest? Is it not possible that Trump is attracting people for other reasons? Racial fear? Islamophobia? THE WALL?

In fact, economic self-interest turns out to be more complex than Frank, with his self-avowed "simple liberal mind," will admit. The laid-off factory worker might talk about PTT, but my bet is that he will more likely talk about immigration. If he is a "Reagan Democrat" (probable), he will also have caught the virulent, anti-government-at-all-levels Tea Party bug: Throw out the bums; the system is rigged. Knee-jerk, amorphously politicized emotional responses to economic stress might be producing that inner, economic self-interest voice that whispers, "Hey, let's blow up the system. It can't be worse than the one we have, right?" Donald Trump is the perfect candidate for these people.

But Frank's simple liberal mind can't tease these things out. With either side, apparently.

If it could, it'd be possible to see how there might be a lot of Democrats out there voting for Hillary because their economic best interests include elements that seem not to penetrate the simple liberal mind.

That white male factory worker? Well, he's male. But what about females? Could it be that there's an economic issue unrelated to globalization or outsourcing that interests them? You don't say: equal pay for equal work! See, it turns out that economic disparity cuts a lot of ways in the USA, and the gender cut may be the unkindest one of all to a certain, um, "class" of voter to whom--I can't imagine why--Hillary appeals.

That white male factory worker? Being white, he probably turns a blind eye to economic issues having to do with race. But what about the African-Americans supporting Clinton? What kind of economic issues might interest them? How about a place at the !@#$%%^&* table? Clinton is certainly far from ideal, but she has a history at least of working with the black community, as do the Democrats. The last time the GOP did anything for black voters was, what, 1872?

I've already said that the white male factory worker probably feels economically threatened by immigrants and is therefore unlikely to favor immigrant-friendly policies. OK, because the disaffected white male in Pennsylvania feels this way, does the simple liberal mind jettison the economic self-interest of Hispanics and Latinos? Apparently, yes, because its very simplicity is unable to handle complex issues like immigration, especially when they combine economics and justice.

Simple liberal mind: welcome to the complex political world of the 21st century. "Economic self-interest" is no longer just a construct of the middle-aged white male factory worker.

Who, by the way, would be much better off with someone who at least nods in the direction of unionization rather than someone who shakes his head furiously and adamantly, "Unions? No! Never!"

And what about health care? Is health care not an economic self-interest issue? What under- or unemployed person under the age of 65 was not positively affected by Obamacare? Unfortunately, however, Tea Party disease produces well-known symptoms that cause some people not to recognize their own economic self-interest.

So, political diagnosis being what it is, at least we know what's the matter with Pennsylvania.

When a good myth goes bad

"When a good myth goes bad." What does that mean?

It doesn't mean "bad" as in "evil." It means "bad" as in the bread in the back of your cupboard that you forgot about and that's been there for 6 months and that if it weren't for the packaging you wouldn't even know what it was. It means "bad" as in the refrigerated, once-used jar of spaghetti sauce with the lovely whitish-green efflorescence growing on the inside. That kind of "bad."

And by "myth" I mean "story that purveys a commonly understood, accepted guiding principle or ideology." Which is by the way, the true meaning of the word. But like so many ideas in this world, the true meaning has gone almost completely "bad." Maybe with this one we can skim off the mold and retrieve it, just this one time. You ok with that?

So (as every explanation in this age must begin) back in 1787 when the USA was codified, there was a good myth. The good myth was that a free people must defend its own freedom; standing armies of professional soldiers--such as the one maintained by the British--were dangerous to liberty. A free people could not outsource the responsibility of the common defense to professionals. To do so would vitiate the virtue of the people. A free people must vote, a free people must serve on juries, and a free people must provide for the common defense. It was not a matter of choice. It was a matter of duty.

So strong was this belief at the time that every state had a statute requiring--requiring--compulsory militia service of all adult citizens. Not only was this a hedge against a standing army, but it was prima facie the ideal for a free people: "A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free State."

These words were composed for the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 by George Mason, who also went on to lead the fight for an amended U.S. Constitution. He was of the opinion that the draft being considered for approval by the people was soft on standing armies. At his insistence, by way of James Madison's leadership in the first Congress, the new Constitution included as its 2nd Amendment verbiage designed to keep the nation ever-reliant on a citizen militia serving as a matter of compulsory duty.

It didn't work out that way. The loaf got stuck way back in the cupboard. Militia service as a matter of duty was just too hard and too unpopular. You had to fine people that didn't turn out for the annual muster. Legislatures allowed an end-around by which people with money could furnish a paid substitute. Plus, there always seemed to be a few gung-ho individuals who were willing to volunteer to do the job. So naturally--eh, naturally--voluntarism replaced duty.

Thus it was by the 1830's, when Tocqueville was taking a deep look at democracy in America, militia service as a matter of duty was already moribund. No, worse than that: it had already rotted away to the point that Tocqueville got the facts wrong, saying that voluntary service was the only kind there had ever been, and that compulsory service was antithetical to the democratic ideal. Whew! Something stinks in here! And don't blame Tocqueville's French cheese!

Simply put, the spirit of '76 militia ideal says that all citizens, as a matter of duty, serve as trained, drilled citizen-soldiers in order to prevent the formation of a standing army. That is what the 2nd Amendment was meant to guarantee. By the 1830's the ideal had already gone bad. The 2nd Amendment was defunct. The institution it was designed to support had been allowed to disappear.

Today? Poor George Mason is doing the tilt-a-whirl in the grave. The USA worships its huge standing army. People have this idea that the 2nd Amendment has to do with personal, individual self-protection rather than about obligatory civic duty. And forget about "well-regulated." Professional policemen charged with civic defense are killing citizens with alarming regularity, while "concealed carry" licenses can be obtained without ever firing a weapon.

What to do when a good myth goes bad?

At least, in the first place, we can understand that it has, so that we can stop following the guidance of people who would stuff moldy loaf into our faces.

We can also stop to think that, if we want to live free in an ordered democracy, we're not supposed to have a choice with some things, like voting and jury service and, yes, militia duty. Those things are supposed to be a citizen's obligations.

Beyond that, I don't know, except to say that Jesus is coming soon. Or was.

Regeneration in three songs

A time of babies: grand-daughters, the first children of my children.

First there is Mirabel. I can hold her while she sleeps. The music from my head is by Thomas Tallis--If ye love me--one of those motets that puts your mind's ear in a cathedral empty but for you, the supplicant hiding behind a massive column, and, way up in front, a choir hiding behind a rood screen. It is late spring in the Shenandoah Valley where the flowers breathe history.

Mirabelation: https://youtu.be/DqjJ36kNJOI

Then there is Edith. I am an ambulatory cradle in the hospital room, wocking (walk/rocking) her to the whispered tune-beat of Wabash Cannonball. It would be embarrassing for anyone to hear besides her. But she is fine with it and sleeps with the understanding that the lonesome one calling is not a hobo but an oboe. It is early summer in Knoxville 101 years after the one that Agee passed through Barber, but the magnolias are the same even if assaulted on all sides by construction as if it were Longstreet.

Edithyramb: https://youtu.be/AahoVpYkcgk

In between Mirabel and Edith is the final departure of my wife's mother. She has been on the decline for a while, and her death is not unexpected. But a mother's death puts a hole in your heart that never heals.

I hear from my son recently that he is singing Gaelic songs to Mirabel. I learn this with Brahms in my head. He is there often; my mother introduced him. I still have her book of 70 songs by him, for low voice and piano, with page dog-eared by her (who schooled me in this heresy) to the lied that most often piques my consciousness.

I could swear it has fragrance--not the page, but the very thought of the melody. Of course this is just my imagination. But isn't that all we have anyway? The sun-fueled yearning--the Brahmsian Sehnsucht--to follow the senses into and beyond whatever eternal quality the womb imparts?

Hearing Mama Singing: https://youtu.be/KYEvGLcOV5s

First Time Ever! You Won't Believe What You're Seeing! (Trump and the Great Public Service Meltdown of 2016)

Take a moment. It won't take long. Go to the Wikipedia page on US presidential elections and look through the table showing the candidates for the major parties. The salient fact, for my purpose here, is that all of the candidates (with a single, arguable exception) from all of the major parties have in every election had some experience in public service.

By public service I mean they had been elected, or they had served as a high-ranking officer in the military, in the judiciary, or in the cabinet. The point is--they had experience working for the people and being paid by the people.

The sole exception was Wendell Wilkie, who ran against FDR in 1940. Wilkie was a lawyer best known for representing electric utilities. So even this one exception is heavily hedged about by the fact of utilities being a market highly regulated by public bodies for broad public benefit.

Which brings us to today and Donald Trump, the presumptive candidate of the GOP in 2016.

Zero public service. For the first time in American history.

I feel like* the climate change is manmade and can be traced back to a gaseous emission: Ronald Reagan's "nine most terrifying words in the English language"--I'm from the government, and I'm here to help. As a result of the buildup of this anti-public-service sentiment in the political atmosphere, the GOP now believes that government is terrifying at every level, for every reason, without exception.

Trump's 2016 candidacy shows that it is time to erase "public service" from the Republican lexicon of American values.




*Sorry, Molly Worthen, but you're wrong.

Myth-busting: "The government does not create jobs"

In an Atlantic article from May, 2015, that just popped up yesterday on my Facebook feed (due to the same algorithmic wrinkle that cause old celebrity death notices, e.g. Percy Sledge, to pop up whenever a fresh one, e.g. Prince, passes on), Delaware governor Jack Markell outlines some approaches to getting more jobs for Americans.

Economically, Markell appears to be a centrist, Clinton-style Democrat: he says we must accept globalization and its challenges. Trade deals like NAFTA and PTT are good. We must enable private enterprise to find and explore the new, post-global, high-tech avenues to employment, because ...  "governments don't create jobs." Governments only "create a nurturing environment where business leaders and entrepreneurs want to locate and expand."

"Governments don't create jobs."

Hmm. I know this is gospel among Republicans, but Democrats? Maybe, when it comes to jobs, the word "create"--for Republicans and for Markell--is code and has a meaning other than the one it actually has.

Do public employees not have jobs? I had a career in taxpayer-funded public libraries; my wife is a public school teacher. Are those not jobs? Created by the government?

More importantly, though, how much does the private sector depend on the government? Markell would do well to read a recent NYT interview with Barack Obama, in which the president "weighs his economic legacy." Part of it recounts just how it was that the US recovered from the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and in quite a short time, considering the depth of the trough. Bailing out the financial sector, saving the auto industry, using Federal funds for infrastructure improvement, keeping interest rates at historically low levels: all of these involved the government. All of these "created" jobs by enabling corporations to hire (or continue to hire) people. Without that government activity, the slough might have become a bottomless sinkhole.

This is just one example, and it might not even be the best one. Did the Tennessee Valley Authority create jobs? Count the marinas at all those lakes and the big-box retail outfitters supplying all those bass fishermen. Did the interstate highway system create jobs? Trucking companies don't seem to be hurting. How about the internet? Jobs, jobs, jobs (including Steve).

It is a false distinction to call all those things simply a "nurturing environment." Not only did every one of them happen as the result of people working in publicly-funded jobs, but those achievements all have become foundational: an essential part of job creation. They point to the economic benefits of a vigorous and creative government such as seem impossible in today's USA because of the spread of Ronald Reagan's anti-government ideology.

Obama addresses this in the Times interview: a "mythology has been built up around the Reagan revolution" that Obama would like to "puncture." The myth is that Reagan "slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts" when in fact it was due to "a shift in interest-rate policy." And of course the consequence for Obama has been the straitjacket of a legislative branch in thrall to the myth.

What about the future? Markell and Obama both note that the profits of the recovery have fueled widening income disparity. Markell basically shrugs his shoulders and does little more than tout education--a tired nostrum if there ever was one.

Obama at least has a clue. The interview finds him at a plant in Florida that was--ahem--created by his Recovery Act. According to the article, if the plant had been built decades ago, it would've employed thousands. Instead, because of advances in robotics and computerization, it employs 300. Job loss is as much due to technology as to globalization. Even if sales remains flat, if a company can reduce overhead by replacing people with robots or automation, it's money in the bank.

This is hardly a revelation. But for some reason the prevailing notion in the US today seems to be that, at a time of historic, disruptive economic change on the same scale as--if not greater than--the Industrial Revolution, the government should just move to the back seat.

I'm in the middle of reading Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was an astoundingly creative force in the formation of the new United States. Not only was he the principal voice of the effort to ratify the Constitution, he was also the person who--as the first head of the Treasury department--breathed economic life into the new central government. His handling of war debt, formation of a customs regime, and foundation of a national bank all showed how a central government might operate "to promote the general welfare."

In this he was bitterly opposed by Jefferson and Madison, who formed a party--the first such in American history--in order to stymie Hamilton's programs. The party was called Republican. It was not the same as today's party, which traces its lineage to Lincoln, but its small-government ideology was very much like the small-government ideology of today's post-Reagan Republican party.

That such an ideology is pro-business or good for jobs is belied by the fact that Alexander Hamilton, that ally of traders and friend of bankers, believed in the value of a strong, active, and creative central government. But he seems not to have thought of it as "governmental" activity in the same way we do. He referred to it as work on behalf of the public.

We in the US face economic changes that will be (already are) as far-reaching and deep as any in history. And we seem to want to do this without the kind of public-spirited activity that has been linked to American prosperity since the very beginning. I call folly.

What should be the official book of Tennessee?

As is being reported nationwide in the US, the Tennessee legislature has declared the Bible to be the state's official book.

Come on, Tennessee. You can do better than that. An official state book should at least mention the state. The Bible fails miserably in this regard, unless "Babylon" is code for "Nashville." Or Gehenna, the trash heap model for Hell? It sorta sounds like Tennessee.

It's obvious to anyone that this is an act of politically correct posturing. Morristown's Sen. Southerland is a stripper on a pole. He just wants you to throw him your vote, or even better, your Jacksons.

This is not a criticism of the Bible per se: it is an admirable collection of books (important point! Pick one book, Sen. Southerland! Let me guess: Leviticus?) written by people seeking the key to eternity, divining the intent of the divine. In this regard, Tennessee doesn't come out too well, at least when it comes to helping refugees and the poor, an important theme in many of the books in the Bible, including--heads up, Sen. Southerland--Leviticus: e.g. Lev. 25:35, which says "if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee."

(That's King James-speak. I won't even get started on the issue of which translation to use.)

No, the Bible will not do as an official book for Tennessee. If there's going to be an official state book, don't just follow the unreflective path of political correctness. Instead, set some criteria for selection and have a reasoned debate. Isn't that what legislatures are supposed to do?As a native and--except for 3 years in Babylon--lifelong Tennessean, and a career librarian besides, may I suggest the following:

• It should be set in Tennessee, not "Tennessee" (meaning Babylon or Gehenna).

• It should be readable by as many as possible, at least from young adult up. 

• It should be fiction, like the parables of Jesus. 

• It should be primarily about children and/or animals. New York has Make Way for Ducklings as its state book, which is hilarious considering the driving behavior of NYC cabbies. Lucky Minnesota has Little House on the Prairie. What would fit the bill would be an amalgam of Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, and Winnie the Pooh, set on the banks of the Tennessee River.

That's it! So, what's out there that might be considered? Well, in fact there is just such a book : The Signal Mountain Spelling Book of JuliUn Tod. Written by me.

So maybe the TN legislature will take up this proposal and do the right thing. And maybe the title of this blog is Follies O'Barry. And maybe I too am just a stripper on a pole: throw me your Jacksons ... though the paperback is just $13.27 or $11.94 and the pdf e-book? Free.

Babelpype

Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant (1494), translated by Alexander Barclay (1509), t-shirted by the Harmonia early music podcast of Indiana Public Media.

à la guerre comme à la guerre

Yesterday: November 13. Eurostyle: 13/11.

It was one of those articles that, at first, provided further evidence of the continuing folly of my existenc : dementia patients improve when they sing show tunes. My response? I hate show tunes. And because of that I don't know any show tunes. If I were in a nursing home where people sang show tunes, I would become overtly anti-social and consigned to a straitjacket; it would be explained away as a symptom of my illness; but somewhere deep inside my demented self would live a glimmer of fierce desire to explain to these scientists that it's not the show tunes, dammit, it's the blinking singing, you eedjits; which desire to explain would, of course, be folly because I would be too far gone to do anything about it, and because, well: folly: I was born with two heads.

But then I calmed down when I realized that I had cracked the nut and had the answer that the scientists did not have: singing was indeed the key. The scientists were barking all around it and came up with their lame correlation, but that was okay; they were Lamarck and I was Darwin, and I was cool with that.

The next thing was, "what would I sing?" And my instincitive, unthinking response was "La Marseillaise," which I then belted out at the top of my lungs to the alarm and general discomfiture of my dog Lizzie and my daughter's dog Zoey, who was visiting. They joined in, and not--from the looks on their faces--out of a sense of patriotism.

Then the doorbell rang and the dogs' attention was diverted to a more insidious threat: the UPS man, who for some reason didn't stick around. A flatbed scanner had arrived that I was going to employ for archival follies.

Probably because of the power and influence of the singing, I decided to put the scanner to the test with a 3-D object: Lazare, a French revolutionary sans-culotte crocheted by my mother long ago.

Then in the early evening rolled in horror stories from Paris, and today I find myself quite at a loss, feeling very much 9/11. Allons enfants.

Between the World and Me: A letter to Samori Coates

Dear Samori,

Please forgive such a familiar greeting from a total stranger, but I just had the pleasure of "meeting" you, so to speak, by way of the beautiful and demanding book that your father wrote for you.

I can imagine that you're probably both proud and embarrassed to be the object of such a lavishly public paternal heart-to-heart. Maybe at this point you're more embarrassed than you are proud. Believe me when I say that in the future you'll be way prouder and not at all embarrassed. I hope so anyway.

Your father gives a few glimpses of who you are, mostly I think to point up for the reader the different circumstances of your childhood and his; and how, no matter the differences between his Baltimore and your New York, there must always come the point of reckoning for you as a black person in America. That point of reckoning, according to your father, came when nothing was done about the policemen who killed Michael Brown. A flash of understanding; then the dam bursts and swept away is all hope that America can ever possibly offer a black person any reliable expectation of justice, much less belonging.

A lot of your book is how your father has lived with that reality, how he has come to understand and articulate it, and how--denied any sense of belonging by his country--he found where he did in fact belong. This he does for you, I think, at least in part to give you the wherewithal to transform your own point of reckoning from alienation into pride. It's a gift from him, which I hope you're able to accept.

Hope. Funny I should say that, because hope seems to me what your book is all about, even though to the first-time reader it really doesn't seem like it, and even I who have spent some time with it have to kick myself to say that, much less believe it.

It's not so much that I'm a pessimist as that, well, you know the Dream that your father keeps talking about in your book? I live inside of the Dream. I hate to say this: it's worse than he says. About the Dreamers, I mean.

(If anybody's reading this who hasn't read your book, I'm going to go ahead and tell them that it is the "American Dream" that your father floats as a happy-face balloon--"It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake"--only to  puncture: "the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies … the Dream persists by warring with the known world.")

Living inside the Dream comes standard to a white, middle-class male like me, particularly in the South, which is where I have always lived. Fortunately I had a father whose only words of advice that I can remember were "Do not belong." We couldn't belong, anyway, because my family was secular in the Bible Belt.

In any event I have observed Dreamers all my life. And when your father says, relative to the country coming to the aid of the murdered Prince Jones's mother, "Dr. Jones's country did what it does best--it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream," all I can say is that he is being charitable.

And when your father asks you not to struggle for the Dreamers, but to "hope for them. Pray for them if you are so moved," all I can feel is an immense sense of wonder at his forbearance and his willingness to try to move you to hope.

Because, as I say, it's way worse than he says. About the Dreamers, I mean.

Forgetfulness? No, ignorance. At best, ignorance. At worst? It's not hard to see. Especially in the South. Vicious, in-your-face, racist triumphalism borne aloft in a Confederate flag.

But didn't the South lose? No, the South held on bitterly to its slavery-born notions of white supremacy, and it won. It fucking won. The rest of the country not only backed away from bringing African-Americans into the civic composition, but the South would not have it and embarked on a campaign of terror to prevent it. And the would-be liberators? We could say that they just forgot about the African-American. But no. They listened to the South. They agreed with the South. They let popular expressions of the national mind like The Birth of the Nation and Gone With the Wind wash over them and suck them into something that goes beyond forgetfulness.

These days, at best, as I say, it is ignorance. Total, complete, and willful ignorance that begins and ends with a vague and uninformed sense that they know what the Civil War was all about. Well, not only do they willfully not know, but they also have this bizarre notion that somehow the Civil War put paid to this country's obligations to assure citizenship rights across the board. They are intentionally, fiercely uninterested in slavery, the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the great migration, and the civil rights movement. They don't fucking care.

If I had any hope in this area, it would be that somebody, somewhere would be trying to bust up this ignorance, would crank out hugely popular media of all kinds showing the unpitying truth of black history in the New World--mostly America, but take the Haitian Revolution, for example: it should be a paragon of the just struggle. Oh, for someone to make it so with something as wildly popular as was The Birth of the Nation! Oh, for someone to shake it in the face of a country supposedly dedicated to freedom and ask "What about this? What about this?"

And that's just for starters.

The history of black America ought be taught to all Americans from kindergarten on as an essential ingredient of American history. Why? Not so much "lest we forget" as an object lesson of what happens when a country's ideals falter, right out of the gate, but as a questioning counterpoise to the Pledge of Allegiance, one that asks, "Are we delivering on this?"

 

Dreamers want only rote recitation of the pledge and blind faith in the flag, when what we need are more moments like the one in 1968 when, on the Olympic medal stand, during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, black American medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and held up black-gloved fists. If you don't know about this event, you should read about it. White people were generally horrified, saying that they should be stripped of their medals for disrespect to the flag. I always believed they showed great dignity and respect for doing what they did. They, like your father, were trying to get the Dreamers to pay attention to the ideals they pay lip service to, trying to get them to be human and mix some shame in with the pride when they look at the flag. God knows they need to.

(By the way I have to say at some point that your father is doing the country an incredible service right now. The way he wrote about reparations and, after the Charleston massacre, about the Confederate flag. I just wish … yeah, I just wish.)

How to get the Dreamers to understand this about lip service? Dreamers are a notoriously defensive bunch whose defensiveness is like a raincoat that sheds the rain of truth. Besides, lip service seems to be an essential component of the Dream. Many Dreamers claim to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb, but let's just say they towel off quick. Don't ask them to live by the ideals they profess, because they can't, not when those ideals have to do with love, or caring, or respect, or empathy, or fairness. Why can't they? For two reasons: their religious beliefs let them off the hook, and their liberty always, always, always seems to come at someone else's cost. Their coin of liberty is selfishness, and its obverse is oppression.

So I don't have much hope for the Dreamers. I just don't. It was depressing to read recently about leaders of Black Lives Matter meeting with Hilary Clinton and telling her they wanted to change white minds, only to have her say they couldn't do that. They couldn't change white minds. Dammit, Clinton, can't you see that's one of the things you of all people need to take a stab at, at least?

I'm more a wisher than a hoper, I guess. I'm glad to have your book to help me think through all of this, even though I don't know where it leaves me. The whole time that your father talked about the Dream, the thing that welled up inside of me was a different dream that I'm sure you know about: the dream spoken of by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a dream of liberty and justice for all. I wish that was the American Dream. By rights it should be. I wish you and I would be able to meet one another and be able to accept that we share in common both citizenship and humanity, but given the past that leads up to now, why should you accept the humanity of a white American like me? If that's not cause for shame for America, I don't know what is.

Best wishes for the future,

Jud Barry

"You Are Being Lied To!" Yeah, but by whom?

Don't you just love it when a "you are being lied to" meme is itself an exercise in seemingly deliberate prevarication?

For example:

Aside from being a silly quibble (more on that below), it is quite selective with the truth. Yes, the flag on the right is the "first Confederate National Flag," and no, it does not exhibit the "Southern cross."

But what about the second Confederate National Flag (1863-1865)? Or the third one (1865)? Here they are:

The Second Confederate National Flag, a.k.a. the "Stainless Banner."

Look closely at this flag. Do you notice anything that distinguishes it from a standard-issue, plain-vanilla flag of truce? 

The Third Confederate National Flag, a.k.a. the "Bloodstained Banner."

In fact the Second Flag was sometimes mistaken for a flag of truce, so the Third Flag added a distinct element: a red stripe along the edge. Lacking any other distinguishing feature, that could mean that the Confederacy had developed a thirst for Jamaican beer.

But there is of course a distinguishing feature on both of these Confederate National Flags: the Southern Cross.

So the "fact" as reported is less than honest. It is also a silly quibble. The Confederate Battle Flag is the most important emblem of the Confederacy, because it was the flag that most of its soldiers fought and died under. Even if it wasn't the flag of the government, it was for them the flag of The Cause. And what was that Cause? It was to found a nation in which "no bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right to property in negro slaves shall be passed" and in which no dang-blasted Yankee states would be able to practice states' rights by refusing to send fugitive slaves back to their owners.

And if you don't believe me, you can read the Confederate Constitution.

One flag to unite them all (Southerners in the U.S.A., that is)

If the South must have a flag, it seems like it ought to be a flag that doesn't divide people from the get-go. Say what you will about the current, supposed one--whether you're fer it or agin it--I think we can all agree it is divisive.

1. A Southern flag ought to be a flag that represents all residents of the South--old-timers and newcomers, people of every ethnicity, speakers of all languages (but learners of "y'all"). The South has moved on past the past that divided us. Its current identity maintains its distinctiveness even as it welcomes newcomers to participate in it and to belong. The new flag is for everyone who thinks of himself or herself as a Southerner.

2. It ought to be a flag that includes all of the Southern states, not just the ones that seceded in the Civil War--or were counted as "slave" states in sympathy with the secessionists' cause (e.g. Kentucky, which is included in the new flag, and Missouri, which is not). Thus, the new flag includes the traditionally-regarded Southern states of Delaware and Maryland; welcomes West Virginia back into the fold; and includes Oklahoma, where so many native Americans from the old South were relocated.

3. It ought to be a flag whose design confirms and strengthens the understanding that the South is part of the United States of America. The new flag design refer to the Stars and Stripes in a clearly symbolic way.

Here's my idea:

No, it's not upside down: "pole side" is the side with unbroken stripes.

The six stripes are for the six Southern states that ratified the original U.S. constitution and should be read top to bottom in order of ratification: Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina.

The triangular canton is in the lower right because that's like the south/southeast corner of the actual cartographical U.S., get it?

(A rectangular canton in that location would really look like an upside-down Old Glory from some 16-state time past).

The 16 stars represent the actual, real Southern states of (alphabetically) Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

While there are some similarities with the flag of Puerto Rico (which has five stripes and a pole side triangular canton with one star), they are coincidental. I didn't discover them until I'd already had the concept of six stripes and a 16-star triangular canton in the "cartographical south" of the flag. Furthermore, this flag furled or unfurled would have a distinct identity.

(Since writing this I've discovered another proposal for a new flag of the South. It has 15 stars and five stripes--no Delaware--and a design that to me suggests the Confederate "Stars and Bars." I believe that the times require a design that is a more radical break from the past.)

Sine nomine

Quite a few years back, I wrote program notes for the Kingsport Symphony. (Anyone interested in these artifacts can find the surviving series here.) This old penchant for foraging in the echoes struck me pretty hard this week, after April Fools' Day came during Holy Week this year (a fortuitous event for someone like me who treasures his copy of Tomie di Paola's Clown of God) and issued a clear call for a cinematic response from Ballet Pysanka:



(The video is only 1:58; the rest of this will be more interesting if you go ahead and watch it).

"Sine nomine" is the Latin equivalent of "anonymous." In the performance I'm wearing a Guy Fawkes mask associated with the group Anonymous, but for a title I liked the reverberations of "sine nomine," ecclesiastical in the very specific sense that they come from the apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus, chapter 44, which (O lovely coincidence) begins "Let us now praise famous men" but which goes on in verse 9 to praise those worthies who died without fame, i.e. "sine nomine."

But another use of "sine nomine" that is quite particular to this project is its use in library catalogs (usually in its abbreviated form, "s.n.") to show when the identity of an author or publisher is not known. The next-to-last title in the video shows what I knew when I completed the movie: the composer of the soundtrack was sine nomine, at least to me.

The music is an old recorder favorite that I dusted off recently. It comes from a collection of unaccompanied pieces edited by F. J. Giesbert and originally published in 1937 by B. Schott's Söhne, Mainz. The collection is entitled Fifteen Solos by 18th-century Composers, but nowhere are the composers' names given.

Why? Were they truly unknown? Was the publisher trying to hide something?

(Back in the mid-20th century when there was a market for recorder music, publishers seemed to want their buyers to believe that the music was actually written for recorder, when in fact it was usually an arrangement of something originally written for some other instrument(s).)

After putting the movie online I decided to try to find out who wrote the piece. Back in the old days it would've meant digging through catalogs of musical incipits--where the opening handful of notes of a piece are arranged in a searchable fashion--but now I had a multimedia universe at my disposal.

Very quickly, by searching Youtube, I identified 3 likely candidates: J. J. Quantz, J. F. Braun, and J. D. Braun. Further sleuthing ruled out the first two--although the video at 1:50 shows me in the early stages of research when I thought J. F. Braun was the guy. Now, even though I haven't seen the final evidence in the form of a scanned manuscript, I'm convinced that French composer Jean Daniel Braun wrote the music.

Braun wrote a collection of short solo pieces, Pieces sans basse pour la flute traversiere, a pdf of which is available. 

"Sans basse" means there is no continuous bass line, an ordinary feature of baroque music, which formed the basis for any added keyboard harmony. In other words, it's baroque code for "solo."

"Flute traversiere" means "transverse flute," which is the term used in the baroque period to distinguish the true flute from the recorder, which was called "flauto" or "flute douce."

A quick comparison of these pieces with the Schott collection edited by Giesbert reveals the latter to be made up entirely of Braun's Pieces sans basse, transposed to different keys to be more suitable for the alto recorder.

There remains the question of why Schott would do this. My conjecture is that the year 1937 in Mainz, Germany, with the Nazi Gestapo fully unleashed from court control, was not a time when a German publisher would want to put out a collection of music by a Frenchman. The recorder itself was völkisch, quite in favor, and in need of more music. It just had better not be music by a degenerate, epicene French guy.

Just a hunch. The next question for the movie soundtrack is how a piece without bass got a bass. I do know the answer to that.

Appalachian Shibboleth

A FB friend, having gotten wind of my outburst described in the last blog, and no doubt with a wicked grin on her face, posted a status about a national weather person using the dreaded "AppaLAYchian" pronunciation.

To her amazement and mine, quick as wink a corps of doughty defenders of Appalachia appeared to avenge their region's besmirched honor, castigating the "wrong" pronunciation, saying you can tell by the way they say it that they don't live here, carrying the righteous torch of the original Indian pronunciation, etc.

They quietened down a little when a brave fellow from Maine allowed as how he grew up using (of all things) the New England pronunciation, and how when he moved to Kentucky for grad school he was met with "genuine hostility."

But really this phenomenon needs a song, something channeling Tom Lehrer or Randy Newman, except solidly and southernly guitared and feathered, so here 'tis--lyrics anyway.

APPALACHIAN SHIBBOLETH

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

O traveling friends in the American South,
When mountain-bound, heed these words from my mouth:
There's one thing you can do to make the folks down there hate ya
And that's call the place where they live "Appalaychia."

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

It won't do any good if you try to explain
that the famous trail that goes from Georgia to Maine
takes its name from a geological formation
that gazetteers since forever have pronounced "Appalaychian."

I've done the REsearch
I've done the reSEARCH
I've never been to the mountaintop
But I sure have been to church.

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

One thing they say, all the Appalatchkey folk
Is they say it the way that the Indians spoke.
So, first you stole their land, and then you stole their pronunciation?
That's all the more reason to say "Appalaychian."

I'll be your Gilead
I'll be your Ephraim
I'll tell the censor twice
I got some stuff for him.

Shake it out of you
All that intolerance 
Shake it out of you
All that intolerance

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

It won't matter to them if you grew up Massachutian
and saying "Appalaychian" was the down home locution
So this warning to you, if you're Greek, Dane, or Haitian:
When in the mountain south, please don't say "Appalaychian."

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

Lollapalooza
Londonderry air
The censor cometh
with his head up his derrière

Shake it out of you

All that intolerance
Shake it out of you
All that intolerance

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

Pronunciamento, or, The Appalachian Molehill

Fred Sauceman, the newsreader at WETS and enthusiast of such regional haute cuisine as red-dyed hot dogs, has unfriended me.

I don't know Fred that well, but in the superficial ways of Facebook we were "friends." Until I did the unmentionable. I committed an anathema.

I have been shunned. Cast into the outer darkness.

I defended Alex Trebek's pronunciation of "Appalachian."

Fred complained publicly that Jeopardy host Trebek had pronounced it Appa-LAY-shun, which, as all good denizens of the southern mountain area know, is a fightin' pronunciation. If it ain't Appa-LATCH-ian you just might get a mess o' hot soup beans thrown in your face. The post received over 100 "likes" and a number of comments basically urging Fred to invade the Jeopardy studio to set Trebek straight.

I posted a comment to the thread that I knew would be regarded as scalawag, but that I also believed to be germane to the discussion, to wit, that when it comes to the adjective "Appalachian," there are two legitimate pronunciations, because there are native New Englanders living in the Appalachian mountains who say "Appa-LAY-shun." Just like, you know, Indianans pronounce "Lafayette" La-fee-YET and Georgians pronounce it La-FAY-it.

Or, as Alex Trebek might say, vive la difference.

Now, to anyone like my real (I hope) friend Rick Martin, I hasten to say that I made an exception for the noun "Appalachia." Rick has convinced me that Appalachia is a purely southern hinterland, and that therefore the only acceptable pronunciation is the LATCH one. I concede the point.

However, I maintain that the adjective "Appalachian" has two nativist pronunciations remarked more or less by the Mason-Dixon line.

Well, anyway, Fred deleted my comment. Mine alone. Nobody else's. Censored me. What can I say--I'm a librarian. We don't do censorship very well. I had been polite and to the point--not to mention germane. Fred apparently was more interested in rustling up a howling pack of yes-people than he was in having a discussion.

I posted again that New Englanders performing sweat equity on the Appalachian Trail had every right to their pronunciation all the way to Springer Mountain.

And, yeah, I also said that the people who wanted to rain Trebek with t-shirts from the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance to school him on the pronunciation were just confirming our regional reputation for being intolerant rednecks.

Ok, so that was a little harsh. But then again, I'm a librarian and I'd been censored. If you run with the bulls at Pamplona, expect to be gored.

Fred let me know privately that my comment (my initial one--the germane, unprovoked one) had been a personal assault and he was removing the entire thread. I apologized, saying that it certainly wasn't intended as an assault, the apology was accepted … and I was cast into the outer darkness. Without so much as an auto-da-fe.

Here's a little story about pronunciation. In the Appalachian mountains.

I was hiking the Appalachian Trail with my brothers. 1971? We'd had a long day--close to 20 miles--and we were footsore and tired. We plopped our packs down by a road at what we hoped was Tesnatee Gap, unsure that we wanted to tough it on to a shelter (we had little tube tents, so we didn't have to, but sleeping in these tents got you drenched in a rainstorm of condensation).

A pickup truck came along. Three guys got out and offered us some beer. Put yourself in our boots. Not yet drinking age, I'd never had more than a swallow of beer before, nor had my younger brother Charley (as far as I know), so this was an exciting prospect to start with, not to mention that a whole day of hiking in the summer heat had made us really thirsty.

We gratefully accepted the beer and then asked the men if this was Tesnatee Gap. We pronounced it Tez-NAY-tee.

The tolerant, charitable response--given in such a way as not to embarrass our furriner ignorance--was, "I think they pronounce it TEZ-nuh-tee."

That's the way it's done. Love one another … and one another's pronunciations, however much you disagree. Prejudice begets prejudice.