"Lida Rose" and Then Some

Been to a barbershop singin' lately? If not, are you in for a surprise. Today's groups are WAY past "Lida Rose" and "Hello my Honey, Hello my Baby." You can still hear the traditional stuff, as my pal James (a real barber) and I did at "Festival of Harmony" in Jackson, MS tonight. But the novelty groups, tunes and arrangements--complete with comedy and choreography--are the ones to write home about.

Two guest groups wowed us: LUNCH BREAK, based in Nashville, and RED LINE, based in Portland, OR. Both are new. They've been together for less than a year and are already out there howlin', complete with fans and websites.

The Nashville guys are quirky and hilarious. They include a fat man preacher, a bald man teacher and two neighborhood guys of unnamed occupations. They do rock-style parodies and putdowns that update and upstage "barbershop" by miles. In excellent pitch and voice, I might add. With traditional barbershop backgrounds.

RED LINE is more decorous but still funny while harmoniously styled in silk suits AND soothing sounds. They could have been well dressed senators or airline pilots. As it turns out, they're a building contractor, a banker, a national v.p. of sales and a nonprofit guy. Rehearsals? Every six weeks, they get together in Portland for practice. Two of the guys live there; the other two fly from Denver and Nashville.

Least surprising? All the groups made jokes about wives who complain of their husbands' near obsessive singing and traveling. Fortunately, tonight the audience got to hear only the men's side.

Desperately Seeking Scott

Poor Scott McClellan can't seem to get it right. I refer to his effectiveness, not to his facts. I don't for a moment doubt what he claims about the Bush White House in his new book, which, thanks to an errant colon, isn't even effectively titled, i.e., "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

Alas, I see in the former Bush press secretary an outsized need to gain acceptance of whoever's in power. Right now, that's not the Bush crowd. It's the American people and those who're voicing their views, i.e., the press, broadcasters, bloggers and those of us who're telling pollsters we want the louts thrown out.

Thus, I would say Scott's book comes less from a need to line his pockets or to clear the record than to reinvent himself in ways that make him more palatable to powerful insiders. Right now, the power players are Thee, Me, Opinionmakers and the Anti-Bush Majority--not the George, Dick, Karl and Condi crowd. McClellan knows this and is knocking at our door in hopes we'll admit him to the hearth of professional respect he so obviously lacked while warming himself at the White House fires.

I maintain McClellan has miscalculated. He can sell a million books, and he'll still seem ineffective, still come off the outsider. Why? Because strivers and wannabes lack "it." Sadly, Scott comes off as a striver-wannabe who lacks "it" bigtime. As if we needed more proof, even while the man is out there making news, he's also spinning his own headlines. Serving as his own Second Life avatar, apparently.

Short Vacation

NN&V is on hiatus this week. Back at it Wednesday, May 28. See you then.

Gay Marriage: Predictable Rights

When I taught American history at Sentinel High School in Missoula, Montana some 30 years ago, my first department chair was a wise, maternal, conservative mayor's wife named Rose Hart, then close to retirement. Rose's family of origin somehow combined ties to Minnesota and to Iceland. I remember thinking how blue skies, shining lakes and frozen climates must be in her genes, as she had a clarity and range of vision that was almost shocking at times.

"Every few generations," she told me, "the American people determine it's time to grant another group a bold expansion of rights previously enjoyed only by men of privilege." She cited the end of slavery and the start of property and voting rights of women before asking me to speculate on the next big leap.

Saturated with long-haired teens and their wisecracking, profanity-laced language and tee shirts back then, I instantly said, "Children? Seems to me they're getting away with more and more, so maybe we'll start granting more and more rights to them."

"No," said Rose, "you're speaking of social rights; I'm speaking of the law and a breaking of bonds that are prohibitive to large groups of people." Eventually we got around to her "correct" answer: homosexual property and marriage rights. I was flabbergasted. Not offended, but shocked to think my friend Jack might someday be able to marry his partner Jim and share all the privileges and problems of heterosexual relationships under the American legal system. Such rash prospects had never occurred to me.

Yesterday the State of California followed the State of Massachusetts in catching up to Rose Hart's predictions. I'm sorry Rose isn't here to appreciate her prescience, wisdom and clarity of vision. She died knowing she was right, though, I'm sure. Not boastful, just clear. Like the lakes in Iceland, I'm thinking.

1980--A Watershed Year

When historians evaluate the 20th century, I suspect many of them, if not most, will cite 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan as a watershed year and a watershed event. Why? Because it marked the end of FDR's America and the start of Reagan's "supply side economy," i.e., a massive shift of power and wealth from the American middle class to the American rich, super rich and their international friends. Not even Reagan, though, took it as far as Bush II did.

Bush and friends took it to unimaginable extremes 20 years later by stealing the 2000 presidential election and doing to America what W did to Texans when he used their tax dollars to buy the Rangers professional baseball team and walk away without having to use his own money to pay the bill.

Credit David Cay Johnston of the New York Times for investigating the evidence of the last 30 years and showing it in a book entitled FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMSELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE (AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL). He cites example after example of "welfare at the top" and "corporate socialism."

One set of facts in particular is easy for many of us to remember and relate to: the facts that show how often over the last three decades we've watched our tax dollars go to build giant new venues for professional sports teams. That's at the same time we were slowing or outright denying needed tax support to public services, e.g., parks, schools, libraries, highways and bridges--to name just a few.

Another set of examples--less well known, perhaps, but as or even more offensive to those of us who think public money should stay in the public sector--shows how federal sales taxes at the major "box stores," e.g., WalMart, Target, et al, are NOT going to the U.S. treasury but rather to the companies themselves. They're using our tax dollars, awarded as tax subsidies to pay for their stores.

Not sure about you, but I loathe seeing my tax dollars go to subsidize payments to billionaires and not to the American poor and middle classes. We can't even be sure the big guys are paying ANY taxes. Under the corporate welfare state, they've become masters at going offshore, relocating overseas and god knows what all to keep you and me from cutting into their profits by demanding they pay their fair share. They've robbed us blind, frankly, and have laughed all the way to the island banks where their opulent yachts have carried them.

Johnston also cites "institutionalized corruption" in the American housing industry. He especially shines a light on darker practices that mean homebuyers
get stuck with excessive costs exacted by land title companies. Too many of them have been caught in kickback schemes that amounted to outright crime. Crime that no one sees fit to prosecute, now that the government and the courts are sympathetic to anti-taxpaying schemes of big business, certainly, if not of you and me.

To friends who grew tired over the years of my citing 1980 as The Worst Turning Away from American Social Responsibility in my lifetime, please read David Cay Johnston's FREE LUNCH. He's gathered far more real evidence than I was ever willing to. I honor the man for his patriotism!

Should Hillary Quit?

No. Not by my account. Sure, the road to nomination is steeper for Hillary than it is for Obama, but no strong woman I know has ever shied away from steep hills. It goes with being female, frankly.

As to the business of splitting the Democrats and weakening the party's chances to win the presidency in November, I say balderdash. Once the choice is presented--either the Republican stand-in for George Bush, or a Democrat who'll try to reverse massive debt, two wars and an economy in shambles--I expect the majority of voters will say, "Give me the Democrat."

If that's Obama, so be it. We'll find out soon enough whether he can govern after we've heard (no doubt) his inspiring, history-making Inaugural Speech. If the Democrat elected is Hillary, we'll find out fast whether her long years in government and public service actually translate into effective governance under extremely difficult social, political, economic, military, environmental and global policy circumstances.

Given those choices, I say the more experienced Hillary is the Democrat I want in the White House. To get us out of the mess we're in, the next president--whoever it is--cannot, must not be A Quitter.

Why I Love the Internet

In a word: "discovery." Never a day passes when I'm on the internet that I don't find something compelling to read, ponder and sort out for myself. Today's discovery still has me smiling.

Until a tab here and a click there, I knew not that Annie Dillard of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" fame and Eudora Welty of "The Petrified Man" fame had even the remotest connection. Thanks to a 1999 article by David Bowman, discovered at salon.com today, I fancy I have new and amusing insights into both ladies.

Understand, I'm a big fan of both writers. Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," which I marveled at in the mid-1970's, ranks near the top of my nonfiction favorites. "The Ponder Heart" and other Welty tales keep me in touch with my Mississippi self. So how do the ladies interconnect? Writing for "Brilliant Careers" at salon.com, David Bowman puts it this way (paraphrasing):

Eudora once wrote a piece in the NY Times commenting on Annie Dillard's prose. Voluntary or solicited--David doesn't say--Eudora confessed that she had no idea what Annie was talking about when she wrote such as this: "You cannot have mountains and creeks without space. And space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death."

"Dillard's personifications baffled poor Eudora," wrote David. He then quoted this line from Eudora sugesting she sympathized with Dillard nonetheless: "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled." My take? Polite Southern female's way of saying, "Damn! This bitch is crazy!" But Eudora was Far Too Gentle for such words to escape. It is we card-carrying, 21st century, practiced Southern females who prefer the uncoded language yet easily resort to coded cooing when necessary.

So here's the bottom line:

Having recently toured Eudora's home, gardens, bookshelves, and more of her writings, AND having eagerly revisited Dillard and her biography on the internet today, I'm amused at the distance between the genteel, perceptive Welty and the imaginative, creative, self-described "insane" Annie Dillard. Theirs is the distance between Earth (Welty) and Sky (Dillard). Both women contemplated both realms, for sure, but one was decidedly more earthbound and the other decidedly more metaphysical. Without the internet, I doubt I would've discovered such amazing, amusing mileage between this pair of prized women writers.

Fat Moms, Fat Dads, Fat Kids

Mississippians have the unenviable distinction of being the fattest people in the USA. So say recently published statistics on obesity. After visiting the "Jerry Clower Festival" in downtown Yazoo City today, I must agree. Practically everyone at the festival--including kids--was seriously overweight and eating something over the top in calories. It was a bold reminder of how many salads we aren't eating and preferring instead all the bad stuff.

MEMO TO SELF: Throw away the M&M's and pay more attention to the front and rear images in the mirror. Don't be the super fat lady with the super tiny poodle that struck such a laughable sight at the festival. Tragicomedy on a beautiful, sunny Saturday in the Delta.