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the Great American Spring
Wednesday, December 18 2002
Here's what I'd like to tell Trent Lott about the flack he's receiving for his comments in support of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats (a political party that advocated segregation): suffer. The Great American Spring that always strives for the political center has been pushed mighty far rightward of late, completely for anomalous reasons. And once the press actually gets around to examining the crazies now in charge, I have a feeling that spring might just snap back dramatically. Here we we are, in 2002, and the Majority Leader of the Senate in the most powerful nation on Earth is talking about the superiority of a political party whose one issue was to keep black people from mingling with white people. If nothing else, it's a national embarrassment. Hopefully now the press will start exposing all the other insanity inherent in the perturbed political equilibrium. One wonders how long the American people will continue supporting a president and a party who, for example, take the political license of patriotic support and then use it to hand their corporate sponsors the last of our clean air, clean water, and wilderness. George W. Bush might be delighted that Osama bin Laden saved his administration, but I'm convinced the terrorism distraction is merely a gift of political credit, a credit which one day must be paid back with interest.
As you know, I'd been rather impressed initially with WDST (the non-robotically-operated pop-rock radio station based in Woodstock).
After listening to it for hours on end, though, I'm starting to realize it has its own tics and annoying obsessions. How come that one Tori Amos song is in such rapid rotation? Why do I have to hear Dido and that "please punch me, I'm annoying" dude from Matchbox 20 singing songs written by Carlos Santana? What the hell is wrong with the guy from the Counting Crows? Does he have a brain tumor? What else could explain the moronic series of "OH!"s in his new tune "American Girl"? Meanwhile Gretchen wants to know if the world really needs another watered-down version of a reheated tune inspired by a Janis Joplin song, as sung by Cheryl Crowe. Then there's the little matter of the completely unknown whiteboy blues outfit, the Jim Weider band, which (for some reason) WDST is promoting aggressively. Actually, I find the promoting of unknown mediocre bar bands a quaint and refreshing thing, even if the resulting airplay is unlistenable. Suffice it to say, WDST isn't turning out to be a good radio station to have on all the time.
Meanwhile, Darren the drywall god has turned me on to another station, WKZE. While they play far more blues, Bob Marley, and the Grateful Dead than a man like me can stand, I'm not noticing any of the irritating over-rotation typical of pop radio. If you listen to WKZE long enough, eventually you'll hear all sorts of treasure that normal radio has forgotten. The other day they played a Paul McCartney tune I'd never heard in my life and before I knew who it was I found myself thinking, "Who is this guy? He's great!"
In the evening Gretchen and I drove to Lowes for moulding and then stopped on the way home at the Hurley Mountain Inn for a dinner of pizza and french fries. Also at the Hurley Mountain Inn tonight was a large contingent of adults in wheel chairs. [Later I learned that this was a cerebral palsy group on a short roadtrip up from Ellenville. On the way back south on 209 later tonight, one of their vans overturned and two people were killed.]
Tonight the power went out as I neared the end of sanding the upstairs bathroom drywall, so I completed the job by candlelight. Just as I was wondering what I could do next in the absence of power the juice came back on again. Later on Gretchen helped me paint the bathroom with primer. We worked nude so as to avoid getting paint on our clothes. Indeed, all the spackling I've been doing lately I've been doing in the nude.
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