Big Green mails in its last show of 2019 with an encore musical episode of Ned Trek, some seasonal songs, and a wan attempt at celebration. Bring on the new decade, people … this one sucked!
This is Big Green – December 2019. Features: 1) Put the phone down: A brief intro from that mother Joe; 2) Ned Trek 33: The Nimrod Seven (an encore presentation); 3) Song: If You’re Listening To This, by Big Green; 4) Song: Commander I’m Dead, by Big Green; 5) Song: Doctor In The House, by Big Green; 6) Song: Wait For You, by Big Green; 7) Song: Nimrod, by Big Green; 8) Song: Neocon Captain, by Big Green; 9) Song: Nixon Is Saving Us All, by Big Green; 10) Put the phone down … again; 11) Song: Pagan Christmas, by Big Green; 12) Song: Bobby Sweet, by Big Green; 13) Song: Christmas Spirit, by Big Green; 14) Song: Vital Signs, by Big Green; 15) Exit, all.
No, we’re not doing that this year. Why? Because I said so, damn it. Last year it was a freaking disaster, and I’m not going through THAT again. Right, now … where were we?
Oh, right … penning another blog post. Yes, friends, our longtime companion here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, antimatter Lincoln, was making a crazy suggestion, and I just had to shut it down. Yes, we live with a mad scientist. Yes, he does turn the gravity on an off occasionally just for fun. Yes, I do have permanent injuries that resulted from that kind of horseplay, and rightfully so. But there’s a point at which even people as tolerant as the members of Big Green have to draw a line, and this is it. NO SECRET SANTA. PERIOD.
I mean, I don’t know why people do stuff like that, let alone why someone who is the anti-matter doppelganger of perhaps our greatest president would want to indulge in such a bankrupt and troubling holiday tradition. Now if Anti-Lincoln were Anti-Buchanan or Anti-Johnson (the first), I could understand. But jumping Christ, does the man not remember even one thin year ago? We drew names out of a hat one frigid afternoon … and it was all downhill from there. Our mad scientist Mitch Macaphee drew my name, as luck would have it, and so he gave me the gift for the man who has everything and doesn’t mind losing it all – weightlessness! (He’s had this thing about gravity over the last few months. It’s a little troubling.)
Who did I draw? Anti-Lincoln. I found an old fashioned two-man saw and gave it to him. He proceeded to use it on our best shade tree. I guess I should have saw that coming. It’s a bit like buying beer for your neighbor without giving a thought as to whether he or she might have a drinking problem. (He does.) Then of course, all of our names were drawn by the city elders, who sought to evict us from this drafty old mill. We outsmarted them by coincidentally being out of town on the day they came to get us. But then came the nasty upstairs neighbors, and well … from there you know what came next. I won’t draw you a picture. (Unless that’s what you want for Christmas.)
Hey, suckers … our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, is celebrating its 20th birthday this year. Great time to check it out, particularly if you’ve been cased in aspic since 1999. Give it a listen right now. Or not. Totally up to you, man.
Last week, Attorney General William Barr gave an address to a gathering of police at an awards ceremony held by the Justice Department. Much was made, and rightfully so, of his comments about “communities” that do not show enough respect for law enforcement possibly finding themselves “without the police protection they need.” This is a remarkably lawless comment by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer – police are sworn to protect the communities they serve, regardless of their political views, attitudes, etc. But what’s even more troubling is Barr’s lead-up to these comments, which I’ve only seen reported in any detail on by the Majority Report.
He began with a long rant about the fabled widespread vitriol and contempt shown to veterans returning from the Vietnam war, and how the public sentiment about members of the military turned around during the Gulf War, when Barr was serving in the first Bush Administration. His point with respect to policing was that officers are no less at war than soldiers on the battlefield; that police endure a daily conflict with “predators”, and when they come home at night, there’s no parade, no celebration, and their “war” never ends. This extremist, adversarial view of policing sounds like that of an unreconstructed Reagan-era ultra conservative, in favor of mass incarceration and heavy-handed police tactics. But Barr’s worldview draws from a much deeper well.
When Barr was a freshman at Columbia University in 1968 during that year’s massive protests against the Vietnam war, he followed his father’s example in criticizing the protesters. Of course, Barr was draft age. Before his confirmation last year, he had said that he wasn’t required to register for the draft, but later retracted that statement as it obviously wasn’t true. Barr was draft age in 1968; I don’t know, but my guess is that he had a college deferment that year, then drew a high number in the first draft lottery at the end of 1969. According to Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner, Barr hated the protests because they kept him out of the library. He saw them as anarchic – a view his conservative headmaster father shared. Barr’s father lost his job at the somewhat progressive Dalton School for his right-wing views. Brenner suggests that may have contributed to his contempt for liberals. Hard to say … but he seems to embody some of the same nastiness you find in other chicken-hawks.
Of course, the line he spreads about Vietnam veterans returning home to a land ruled by ungrateful hippies is nothing new or unique. Old-school conservatives have been repeating this trope for years, and those of us old enough to remember those years know that it’s mostly hogwash. My family was full of anti-war people. We had friends who went to Vietnam, and we loved them to pieces. They were as against the war as we were, and I hasten to add, it was an era when nearly anyone could end up in Vietnam via conscription … so today’s hippie was often tomorrow’s infantryman.
Barr is a menace to justice in America. He is also a shameless front man for a crackpot president … and, dare I say it, more dangerous even than Jefferson Sessions. Frankly, we can do better than either of them.
