All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Turn it on, the radio.

No, no, Lincoln. You need to pull harder on the string. Hold it up, like this… see? That’s right. That’s… wrong! The storm cloud is to the east, man, to the east!

Hoo, man… You got me at a bad time. Just here with the Big Green posse on this bizarro version of the planet Earth – one on which different historical periods co-exist like folks at a multicultural retreat. Our traveling companion, Abe Lincoln (or is it anti-Lincoln? They both tagged along and I’m having trouble telling them apart), is trying to work out how to fly a kite. He got the idea from fellow prominent historical figure Benjamin Franklin, who arrived on board the Lusitania to participate in a little recreational kite-play here on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. I’m encouraging Lincoln to take in a little slack on that kite line, and he’s just not getting it. Ben Franklin has offered a few helpful tips, but he keeps getting distracted by his Blackberry. (Guy just can’t put it down, for chrissake. Hope he doesn’t drive.) What the hell… you’d think Lincoln would trust me after all we’ve been through together. Sheesh.

I don’t want you to go away thinking we’re just blowing time down here. Actually, it’s probably been about as productive from a musical standpoint as any tour we’ve been on since we began our interstellar barnstorming some ten long years ago. For one thing, it’s easy enough to find a town on this time-challenged planet that hasn’t heard any of our songs, let alone those of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and so on. There’s this one village up the road that is stuck in 1957. We can go there, set up, and play a bunch of Elvis Costello numbers, pretend they’re our own, and people eat it up like free pizza. Amazing! And when we introduce Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the crowd goes wild. It’s almost as though they’ve never seen a brass, electrode-encrusted robot before. Seriously, it’s tempting to just stay here and bask in something that at least looks like success, but…. that’s not what we’re about. No, sir… Big Green never takes the easy way out. If we stand for anything, it’s for doing things the hard way. Praise, money, critical acclaim, the love of millions – that’s not for us, man.  Am I right, boys? I SAID, AM I RIGHT??

W.t.f. – they must be over in the next town, soaking up the praise, money and critical acclaim. No matter. I’ve got Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, and the man-sized tuber to help me get our crate back in the air and off this too-congenial-by-half globe. In fact, it’s quite fortunate that Ben Franklin ambled along at this juncture – he with his kite flying, static electricity generating trick. Mitch Macaphee tells me our solar batteries are dead and we need a jump from somebody. However, the automobile is nowhere in evidence here. (I’ve seen oxcarts, chariots, skateboards… no cars).  So here we are, kite in the air, key on the string, hoping for a lightning strike. Futile, you suppose? Perhaps you’re right. Times like these I always turn to the wisdom of brother Matt:

You can if you believe you can, you can
You can surely believe
That you can fly
Over the ocean in blue sky
And you can land
Onto the atoll, on the black sand

Must be true, damnit. It’s on the freaking album.

Political Rants

Quiet killer.

1 Comment

A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health provided us with a useful portrait of the true cost of our current health care system. The study found that uninsured Americans have a 40% higher risk of death than those who have health insurance. Based on current levels of uninsured – somewhere around 45 million people – they estimate the annual death toll of our profit-focused system at around 45,000 lives lost. Lack of insurance is now one of the most deadly medical conditions in this country, ahead of kidney disease in the number killed. That is to say nothing of the number sickened, disabled, and bankrupted in addition – many of the last category, I’m certain, immediate kin to the dead. I would imagine this would be shocking news anywhere else in the world. Here, it merits perhaps a brief reference on the evening news… then it’s time to move on. Yep, 45,000 dead from lack of health insurance. Man, that’s a lot of bodies, Ken! Up next, here’s Brad with tonight’s sports, then it’s over to Kristen for our weather forecast.  Only in America.  

Imagine for a moment what would happen if, instead of lack of health care, a terror attack took 45,000 American lives. Think about it. We lost 3,000 lives in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and it nearly cost us our constitution. (In fact, I’m not certain it didn’t… the jury is still out on that one.) Much as political pundits seem to recall this time of unity and mutual support, it was in fact a time of public panic and governmental authoritarianism. And just as the attacks opened a sickening hole in lower Manhattan, they also created an opening through which some of our worst tendencies as a people crept on all fours. I heard people openly discussing the use of nuclear weapons on… well, on just about anybody. (Some of that came from Franklin Graham, purported “man of God”.) We curtailed civil liberties for whole classes of people, we invaded and occupied two countries, and we made torture an integral part of our military culture, instead of something done only in the shadows. It was a shocking and terrible time, and it resulted from the murder of 3,000. Now… imagine if such an attack killed 45,000.  And if that attack took place every year.

What would happen? As a nation, we’d turn ourselves inside out to respond. We’d transform ourselves into a police state, no doubt, completing the terrifying odyssey we began eight years ago when those planes struck the twin towers. And yet, think about it – that magnitude of loss, and all the additional pain that proceeds from that, is occurring right now. Not as the consequence of some catastrophic terror attack, but of something much more easily prevented. To my mind, that makes this all the more insidious. We are allowing tens of thousands to die, hundreds of thousands to suffer, and millions to lose their shred of prosperity just to preserve the profitability of the health insurance industry. We are allowing a narrow segment of corporate shills to shut out the interests of our entire nation by preventing us from having the kind of public health system that every other industrialized nation enjoys. What the hell does that say about us? Much as I hate to channel Bob Dole, where is the fucking outrage? 

Bin Laden doesn’t need planes, suicide belts, or truck bombs. All he needs to do is stand back and let our dysfunctional privatized health insurance do the job for him. 

luv u,

jp 

Usual Rubbish

All stop.

No WPIX? That’s odd. Okay, then. Try WRVO in upstate New York. Nothing? Well…. that may not mean anything. Still…. you’d think there’d at least be static.

Hello, friends of Big Green. Now, I’d like to be able to tell you that we managed to break out of the strange inter-temporal space warp we zagged our way into a couple of weeks ago. (Has it been a couple of weeks? Bobbing through a time warp, I tend to lose track of time.) And I’d like to be able to tell you that we flew our way over to Neptune for a string of highly successful and lucrative – yes, LUCRATIVE – performances to adoring crowds of seven-legged leviathans from the nether reaches of our solar system. I mean, what band wouldn’t like to be able to tell you that? (Can’t think of a single one.) Alas, it was not the case. Yes, we did emerge from the time warp… but apparently not in the right place at all. (I just hope sFszhenKlyrn is having a good time in our absence, playing those cushy gigs and collecting all that cool, cool, money.  Sonuvabitch.)  

Okay, so we come out of this weird-o space void, right, and we’re someplace that looks kind of familiar: general vicinity of planet Earth. You know, the ‘hood for us Earthlings, right? Only something’s funny…. very funny. No satellites. No space junk. No television signals. This was strange. Another thing, too – we could clearly see the city of Los Angeles from an orbit of 150 miles. That’s totally not right. (Aside from the fact that it was little more than a Spanish mission church with some stables and a well.) Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) communicated through his aldis lamp light-flashing code something that roughly translates to:  “This is totally freaking me out, man.”

Hey, look… we’ve been in tight spots before, we of Big Green. (And no, I’m not talking about some spandex-wearing 80’s hair-band permutation of the group). We’ve gone back in time, forward in time, even sideways in time. But this is different. I mean, okay… if we saw, say, Genghis Khan signing the Magna Carta (think back to your elementary school history, boys and girls), that would be unnerving enough. However, Genghis Khan riding a moped across the newly-completed intercontinental railroad as he signs the Magna Carta – that’s just wrong in so many ways. (Take that, Hammermill Days graphic arts department, a.k.a. man-sized tuber!) And yet there he is, before our very eyes. How can it be? Well… the nearest we can determine, Mitch Macaphee’s reckless driving has thrown us into the equivalent of a “time blender” – as if the monumental forces of time and space are rendering history itself into a multi-temporal smoothie. Drink deep, friends.

So, we’ll be putting down on this bizarr-o planet Earth to get our bearings. My guess is that we’ll see, oh I don’t know, dinosaurs wrestling with ocean liners as volcanoes spout renaissance paintings. (Take that, Tubey! HA-HA!)