Street Jazz

The frantic fringe of the right  has been salivating over the killings at Fort Hood. "This is what we get for political correctness!”is the rather ungainly battle cry heard on TV, websites and Facebook.

Cuz, dude, Christians, expecially American Christians, would never behave in such a way. Well, true, sane American Christians would never behave in such a way. But like many a social movement before it, there are growing signs that mentally unbalanced people with their own deeply unbalanced agendas are using Christianity as a cover for  their own violent tendencies.

The latest grotesque vision to come from the minds of the disturbed right is the new “Prayer for Obama: Psalm 109:8" which can be found on many bumper stickers, mouse pads, Tee-shirt, hats and probably even coffee cups. It reads, in part:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office

 . . . Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow

These simple-minded buffoons talk and joke - and make a profit! - about the death of the president of the United States, and make references to a coming “American Revolution.” I’ve even had guests on my show who have casually alluded to this.

For these people, this is the height of intellectual discourse. They wave their tattered copy Constitution around, invoke the “Founding Fathers” as though they were using a Ouija  Board to communicate with them, and sneer at everything and everyone who is different from them.

They praise, and raise money for men who gun doctors down in places of worship. They demand that political candidates pay homage to their narrow view of the universe.

And while they mock those in the Muslim world for demonstrating against editorial cartoons, in this country we:

Demand that television series be taken off the air

Demand that films not be produced or shown

Demand that books be banned from libraries

Hold book burnings

Demand to know if those running for office are Christian, and whether they believe in the literal account of the Book of Genesis

Maybe, just as mentally disturbed and violent people are drawn to other social and political movements, we need to ask ourselves whether or not psychotics are drawn to religion not because of religious fervor, but because they sense an outlet for their own violence.

Every time an act of violence of committed is by a Muslim we have pundits and letter writers demanding to know why Muslims of all stripes are not standing on rooftops, denouncing these acts.

Well, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for gander.

******

Quote of the Day

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past. - William Faulkner

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A few weeks ago, Heather Drain of Fayetteville’s Community Access Television did something that is almost morally unconscionable - she went to YouTube and pulled up the Richard Harris version of the Elvis Presley hit, “My Boy," and showed it to those of us who were in the office at the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfrs11h5KEM

For a day and night of sheer hell I could not get this song out of my head. I have long wondered how many people have stayed in bad marriages after listening to horrific songs like this, where a man stays in a bad marriage because of his love for his son.

That’s a lot of crap to put on a kid’s shoulders!

 There is something glorious about truly bad music.  Not just bad singing, ala Leonard Nimoy, but truly bad song-writing  - a class that “My Boy” goes into.  There are songs that stir folks, whether they be patriotic songs, or love songs,  or even semi-religious tales about taking on the devil in a fiddle concert.

There comes a point that you really listen to the lyrics, and think, “Oh my god,! What was I thinking?”

I also know this:

There are truly religious people who would rather you made fun of the Bible than a song - no matter how sappy or stupid - that has brought them some measure of happiness.

But for the rest of us - those who have had those moments of Grand Awakening, their feelings don’t much matter, nor should they. Otherwise, we’d have to nod in agreement  every time they try to tell us what a great singer bobby Goldsboro (“Honey.” “Watching Scotty Grow”) really is.

Ah, “Honey” - Bobby Goldsboro’s peon to a simple-minded child-bride and the creep who married her.

See the tree, how big it's grown
But friend it hasn't been too long
It wasn't big
I laughed at her and she got mad
The first day that she planted it, was just a twig
Then the first snow came
And she ran out to brush the snow away
So it wouldn't die
Came runnin' in all excited
Slipped and almost hurt herself
And I laughed till I cried . . .

Okay, well. Today, I suppose, this is the kind of guy who’d be getting himself a mail-order bride.

And the kid who played the fiddle contest with the devil?

Very religious folk - and who may not know a damn thing about music - will swear to this day that Johnny beat the devil. Anyone else in the civilized world will scoff at that, much to the confusion of the faithful who cling to the myth of Johnny the Exalted Fiddle Player.  In John Moe’s excellent book Conservatize Me, he performs an admirable job of deconstructing this mess of a song - which is pretty much an insult to both music lovers and the truly devout.

He also raises the fascinating question:

Once Johnny reaches Heaven, just how is going to explain this contest to God?

It’s sort of amazing that Charlie Daniels has gotten so much traction out of this wretched  song, being lionized by the right so much. Well, whatver pays the bills, I suppose.

I’m sure that you have your own list of really stupid songs. And we never even touched on poor Lee Greenwood or the Captain and Tenille!

******

Quote of the Day

“ . . . As an avid reader, I ask people what they’re reading and then push them a bit about the book - why they like it, what character, what scene. Some people give a general response: “I liked it” or “It was awful.” But sometimes the question is a launch pad for a conversation about ideas. Reading, writing, and life. Most people are hungry for meaningful conversations and just need a nudge to make them happen.” - Kim Allen- Niesen: Letters, Utne Reader, July/August 2009

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D.R. Bartlette - The Worst Movie I’ve ever seen

Our new blog question: What’s the worst movie or book that you have ever read - or at least within recent memory, and why? This may be a real public service! Today we present D.R. Bartlette, a writer living in Fayetteville.

think the worst movie I've seen in a while is Twilight. I suppose if I were 12, that movie would be awesome. But I'm not.

It was just horrid - it totally played on the gender/sexual stereotypes, inflating them and romanticizing them: The dangerous, hungry man who can barely control his appetite, and the innocent, "pure" girl who only thinks she wants what the man is in control of.

I was forced to sit through the whole thing because I was at someone else's house. Ugh

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I wrote this story in the 1990s, after the Washington County Republicans, after so many years literally crying in the wilderness, managed to gain dominance in on the Washington County Quorum Court.  Though I disagreed with their stances on just about everything, I felt it was important to write about how they had gone about how they had gone about achieving this.

As an aside, this took place during those wonderful times when the Hilton ballroom was full of candidates, theie supporters, and the media on election night. I always enjoyed that. I’m sorry - election night watches for individual candidates just pale in comparison to the excitement that one found in the Hilton on those occasions.

That the Republican majority on the QC brought with it much controversy pretty much goes without saying. Just several years later they voted to strip gay and lesbian county employees of their job protections - which they had enjoyed for almost a decade.

The World Turned Upside Down
Property Rights, Talk Radio Benefit Local Republicans
Written by Richard S. Drake

Election Night, 1996: Amid television cameras, sweat, alcohol, tears, smiles, gaudy American flag ties, cigarette smoke, and the constant ringing of cellular telephones, a mass of people once again gathered in a ballroom at Fayetteville's Hilton Hotel to watch election results being announced. For many people, 1996 will mark the year that Washington County threw off the onus of being a one-party county.
 
For the first time, Republicans hold a sizable number of seats on .the Washington County Quorum Court, a victory which Take Back Arkansas member Mary Denham claims is due largely to the power of talk radio.
 
While true that many of the winning candidates had appeared frequently on KFAY (an AM radio station which has been seen as championing some of the causes which conservative voters have made their own) the victories can also be also be attributed to a new strategy used by the Washington County Republican Party this year.
 
New Approaches
 
Ralph Hudson, Chairman of the Washington County Republican Party since 1994 (and winner of a seat on the Quorum Court) has largely been responsible for much of the success enjoyed by the party this year.  In an interview conducted prior to the election, Hudson talked frankly about why he believed the Republicans would do well on election day.
 
In years past, Republican would run someone (whether qualified or not) for a seat whenever one came open, leading many to make jokes about those who, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, would salivate at the thought of an election. Candidates ran automatically, often with the forlorn knowledge that they were running doomed, ineffective campaigns.
 
This year, the Republican party has chosen a different approach. Using a formula known as Optimum Republican Voting Strength (based on past election results) the county committee targeted specific political seats. Some races they passed on (such as Quorum Court member Lyell Thompson’s) because it was felt that the Democrats in those seats might never be displaced.
 
Property Rights Key to this Election
 
Several issues have propelled the Republicans this year. One of the strongest issues for rural areas has been the property rights issue. In fact, it is one of the key items in the “Pledge to the Voters of Washington County,” a document that all party county candidates signed.
 
This past summer the public became aware of just how deep the feelings are over this one issue when the Washington County Quorum Court was witness to an angry confrontation over the so-called “sign ordinance,” when environmentalists came up against rural property rights advocates.
 
The changes in the Republican party have created a sort of minor schism within party ranks. Some of the older members were described by one source as resembling “punch drunk fighters,” who were just going through the motions. Hudson says that there “was no cohesion in the old party structure,” and there was a lot of infighting.
 
Trying to get party members away from a losing mentality, Hudson says that he began using a “motivational” style when heading meetings. He says that he put out a lot of positive
feedback, trying to build up their self-image as much as possible.
 
Hudson says that the general conservative message the party is putting out is what is appealing to voters, much of which is reflected in the “pledge.” The pledge puts emphasis on fiscal responsibility, less government regulation, less taxation, and a strong emphasis on personal property rights.
 
The catalyst for including the property rights pledge (besides “grassroots” efforts across the country) was the battle over the billboard sign ordinance last summer. Hudson say that land ownership issues are very important to rural residents. Often, after all, a person's land is all they have and those in the country are “offended” at the thought of those they consider outsiders telling them what they can do with their land.
 
If a similar battle is played out in 1997, progressives will have to be more sensitive to the feelings of those who actually live in the country.
 
GOP Net Surfers
 
The pledge itself came about as a result of one of the local party members surfing the Internet and discovering a similar attempt by a Republican county group in Georgia. Obviously seen as an attempt to ride the coat-tails of the much debated “Contract with America,” which the Republicans in Congress pushed through after their 1994 victories, the pledge is an attempt to make sure that they have something solid to connect with when thinking of local Republicans.
 
Republican James McDonald, losing his second race against County Judge Charles Johnson, says the pledge is not so much a contract as a “statement of intentions.” He says it means that they will try to accomplish what is on the pledge.
 
Ultimately, much of the Contract with America crashed, because the Republicans who authored it were not only arrogant, but insensitive to the feelings of the average voter. It remains to be seen whether the pledge will meet the same fate.
 
Ralph Hudson also says that moral issues are important to voters, an attitude which is
surely echoed by the local branch of the Christian Coalition, which sent out its own questionnaire to local candidates. Though not dealing with any issues which the candidates would actually have to deal with, it dealt largely with personal values.
 
There is a danger that this particular approach might lead to candidates who are heavy on the moral side of the equation, but are not qualified for the seat they are seeking. Ralph Hudson says that this is something the local Republicans are going to guard against
 
Along with targeting specific seats, the Washington County Republican party has attempted to reach the unabashedly conservative voter, a strategy which seemed to be paying off on election night.
 
Hudson also says that “Democrats have left behind the conservative Democrats who live in the South,” with a national agenda that is perceived as being liberal. This has the effect, Hudson believes, of helping local races. He says that they are all intertwined. In fact, Bill Pritchard, who faced off against Sue Madison for a seat in the state legislature, made the campaign pledge that he would represent all “conservative” voters, be they Republican or Democrat. There was no mention of whether he was aware that he would also be the representative of voters who were not conservative.
 
As Chairman of the Washington County Republican Party, Hudson has had to shepherd along sixteen separate races, including his own Justice of the Peace campaign.
 
The Future?
 
What does the future hold in store with a county government dominated by Republican JPs? In addition to efforts to “streamline county government,” Hudson says that, even though Republican Dean Melton failed in his attempt at the Sheriff's office, voters can “expect an accountability that is not there now,” as far as jail operations are concerned.
 
James McDonald says that he feels that the average citizen will have more input now than previously. He says that due to new people coming in (not only to the Republican Party but to Northwest Arkansas itself) that the party is going to be even stronger in the future.
 
Election night, when it appeared that GOP officeholders had won a majority of Quorum Court seats, Hudson indicated that there would no doubt be an immediate repeal of the sign ordinance which prompted so much debate last summer. The resulting firestorm may well be an indication of how the new Washington County Quorum Court deals with issues and public debate they are uncomfortable with.
 
Ozark Gazette - November 11, 1996

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I have been watching the Tea Bag movement this summer with a definite sense of Deja Vu. While some may be wringing their hands together and whimpering about the damage to the democratic process done by these astro-turf groups, we’ve seen this sort of thing before. And no, not in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, either.

The property rights movement of the 1990s (and which still exists today) was sort of the embryonic form of the current Tea Party free-for-alls. The paranoia, the fear of government take-over, the calling down of God’s wrath on the socialistic forces threatening this country - just look at any newspaper from the 1990s where property rights were a big issue.

Then, as now, the folks on the front line - red-faced, voices raised, eyes wide - were often mouthing the same lines, and being financed by the same sort of industry groups.

Property rights.

Health Care.

Climate Change.

There are a thousand and one issues that people can be manipulated into storming the Bastille over. I want my country back? How about, I want my brain back?

You start with a healthy - or unhealthy - depends on what side of the room you are on - distrust of government, educated people and anything that isn’t homegrown Americanism.

You give everyone copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to wave around, as if they were talismans warding off the creatures of the night.

You convince them that their “rights” are being trampled upon -just bring up socialism - and set them loose.

If you were to suggest - or even prove - to these shock troops of the right  that their efforts were being funded by huge corporations who did not exactly have their best interests at heart, it would drive them into a rage. I know, because I have seen it happen in the past. Somehow, they have actually come to believe that the corporations are their friends, and that they are all on the same page.

Hi, I’m from a corporation and I’m here to help you. 

Cue laughter from studio audience.

And yet, while that line may seem like a translation from the Klingon Bible to most Americans, for the Tea Party fanatics, it is accepted on blind faith. Which is truly ironic, because when push comes to shove, those who follow the Tea Party line will find that they will the first pushed under the bus when it comes to corporate profits.

In the 1990s, Washington County saw Take back Arkansas fighting for the little guy’s right to do whatever he wanted with his property, never quite realizing (or willing to admit) that they were were actually pushing the interests of logging companies and their ilk.

Today, we have screaming men and women defending corporations which have created such havoc in the lives of their friends families. It’s a thing of beauty, in a really, really cruel way.

******

Quote of the Day

Temper, if ungoverned, governs the whole man. - Anthony Shaftesbury

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Leonard Nimoy’s Ballad of Bilbo Baggins: A Crime Against Humanity?

There was once a time in high school when I was fascinated by the musical adventures of Leonard Nimoy. I never actually thought that he was a good singer, but it was obvious that somebody did. He did, after all, bring out at least two albums.

But I was totally unprepared for this bit of sadism that Nimoy thrust upon the world in the 1960s.

Why, Leonard, why?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC73PHdQX04

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Okay, I don’t miss John Terry - and Anne Britton was seriously creeping me out. But I know that they had their share of faithful readers.

Since the merger of the Northwest Arkansas Times and the Morning News, it’s difficult to find anyone who actually has anything nice to say about the new paper. I guess I could try. What did the guy say to Peter Fonda in Futureworld?

“It’s gonna wrap a lot of fish!”

Of course, I don’t even think they do that, any more. But, while we’re on things of a fishy nature, let’s look at the “new and improved” Northwest Arkansas Times.

Stylistically, it’s a mess. They could fix this, I suppose, if they were of a mind to. But since they are, essentially now the only game in town, why should they bother, unless they were going to give some UA students something to do?

Basically it’s the Morning News we are all looking at. Let’s not kid ourselves.

The letters to the editor column, long my favorite part of the paper, seems to have no letters at all from Fayetteville in any more, but instead seems to favor writers from Bella Vista, Rogers and Bentonville. How many letters are being culled from the herd?

People are complaining about this, though the powers-that-be at the paper probably don’t care too much.

What has most folks upset is the sudden disappearance of local columnists such as Fran Alexander, Grady Jim Robinson, Lowell Grisham, Art Hobson, and even the dreaded John Terry, and regular  “guest columnist” Anne Britton.

They all provided viewpoints on subjects that were interesting (even if you didn’t agree with them) and many readers responded to them. They have been replaced with - oh, they haven’t been replaced! Who are we kidding? The writers we are reading now have been with the Morning News for a long time.

They’ve been deep-sixed. It’s a short-sighted business decision  that shows just how little the owners of the paper respect and care about the sensibilities of their readers.

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Tales of Valor, or the Vanishing of News?

While many no doubt appreciate the stories of bravery on the part of troops fighting overseas on the front page of the Northwest Arkansas Times, one can’t help but notice two things:

This ongoing series actually pushes local reporting  from the cover.

Some of the stories (at least so far) have focused on folks who are aren’t even from Arkansas.

It’s a page-filler.

*****

Quote of the Day

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, and eventually poisonous. I have no desire to make my own toxins. - Neil Kinnock

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Art Hobson’s “lost” column

Well, you probably won’t see it in the Northwest Arkansas Times any time soon, so here is columnist Art Hobson’s latest column - which never saw the light of day, thanks to the merger. You can read all of Art’s older columns at his website: http://physics.uark.edu/hobson/.

Discovering our evolutionary roots

Her genus and species name are Ardipithecus ramidus, but you can call her "Ardi." She lived 4.4 million years ago (4.4 Mya). Her fossilized remains were discovered beginning in 1992 in the sediments flanking the Awash River in Ethiopia when paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa of Tokyo University spotted a tooth root among the pebbles of the desert. He immediately knew it was a molar from some long-extinct human ancestor.

Team leader Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, Suwa, and 45 other scientists pieced Ardi's partial skeleton together from bones that also included parts of at least 35 individuals of the same species. Although early reports appeared in Nature in 1994, it took 15 more years of painstaking searches and analysis before the entire discovery could be assembled and published. For example, Suwa spent 9 years mastering the computer technology needed to carry out a digital reassembly of the smashed fragments of Ardi's skull into a virtual skull. And what a story emerged, as published in an inspiring special issue of Science on October 2.

Ardi is the oldest full human skeleton yet discovered, and represents a new kind of direct ancestor, a new genus. She is quite distinct from the genus Australopithecus, represented by the famous "Lucy" skeleton from 3.2 Mya. She thus gives us a clearer picture of the complete human, or hominin, line of development. "Hominins" are ancestral to modern Homo sapiens but not to other apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees). Both hominins and apes branched off from a still-undiscovered "last common ancestor." It's now clear that there are at least three distinct hominin genera, related by evolution: Ardipithecus, followed later by Australopithecus, and finally Homo. Hominins date back to at least 7 Mya, as testified by a hominin cranium (top of the skull) from about that time.

Ardi adds to an already-rich human fossil record. Some 22 separate hominin species (a "species" is reproductively isolated, i.e. two individuals from different species can't have offspring together) have now been discovered. Ten of these are different species of Homo such as the famous Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, nine are species of Australopithecus such as Lucy, and now we have one species of a distinctly new genus, Ardipithecus.

If you look at the careful reconstructions shown in Science, Ardi appears ape-like as compared with modern humans. But surprisingly, she is anatomically quite distinct from the apes. Although it's true that our closest living relatives are the chimps, Ardi now demonstrates that we didn't evolve from anything like chimpanzees. The last common ancestor was much more akin to modern humans than to modern apes, but very different from both.

Ardi stood 4 feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had arms hanging down to her knees. But she didn't knuckle-walk or swing through trees like modern apes. Instead, she had a decidedly un-ape-like foot that could walk or run along the ground, and an opposable big toe (similar to the opposable thumb of humans and apes) so she could grasp tree limbs with her feet and hands and thus move on all fours on top of branches in the trees. So she could travel and gather food on the ground, while using trees to escape enemies and to nest. Unlike monkeys, she wasn't really built for climbing or jumping from branch to branch. As one scientist remarked, "These things are very odd creatures."

Ardi lived in lightly forested woodlands, refuting the once-popular hypothesis that humans first stood on two feet in grasslands where tree-climbing was irrelevant. Humans must have evolved the ability to walk while living in woodlands, or there would be no reason for Ardi to retain an opposable big toe. And Ardi's spine was long and curved like a human's rather than short and stiff like a chimp's, suggesting that Ardipithecus had been two-footed for a very long time. As seen in footprints dated 3.7 Mya at Laetoli, Tanzania, humans lost their opposable big toe by the time of Australopithecus, reflecting an irreversible commitment to life on the ground.

You can learn a lot from a few teeth. Ardi probably ate nuts, insects, fruits, and small mammals, a conclusion that follows mainly from the sizes and shapes of 145 teeth gathered from 20 individuals. The large upper canine tooth in modern male monkeys and apes is important in male aggression, and its smaller size among the many male Ardipithecus teeth indicates human sexual selection for less combative males.

We evolved our big brains long after we stood on two feet. Our large brain capacity distinguishes modern humans from other hominins and apes. Brain capacity depends on the brain's volume relative to total body volume, and also on brain convolutions. Ardi's brain occupied just 350 cubic centimeters (cc), similar to a modern chimpanzee's brain. Lucy's Australopithecus brain 1.2 million years later occupied 500 cc, still only one-third as big as Homo sapiens' brain. The earliest member of the Homo genus was Homo habilis, with an average brain size of 650 cc, followed in time by other Homo species having average brain sizes of 700 cc, 1000 cc, 1200 cc, and finally 1350 cc for modern Homo sapiens beginning 200,000 years ago.

Science has been called an endless frontier; each confirmed hypothesis brings up further questions, while each dis-confirmed hypothesis opens entire new vistas of possibility. And so it is with human evolution. We shall forever thirst to know our roots, and forever thrill to new insights into what makes us human.

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This week the Benton County Quorum Court slashed their spending dramatically (by half) for the Washington County HIV Clinic; Benton County has no clinic themselves.

Last year, the court agreed to pay $34,000 to the clinic, and officials said this was to be a one-time payment only - they wanted the clinic to be a self-sustaimning non-profit by this time.

Benton County JPs were shocked - shocked! - to discover that the HIV Clinic was not self-sustaining.  Reluctantly they voted to give them $17,000.

Paul Smith, a member of the Washington County HIV Task Force, made assurances to the JPs that non-profit status would be achieved by the end of 2009, and that the rest of the task force were hard at work finding funding.

Not good enough for the stalwart JPs. “No soup for you!”they cried, and cut off their funding after this years’s allotment.

Members of the general public, who aren’t familiar with non-profits and the constant chasing for dollars, may think this to be an entirely reasonable stance on the part of the Benton County Quorum Court.  On the face of it, it makes all the sense in the world.

But anyone - as I have, for example - who has worked with non-profits knows of the constant battle to stay afloat, especially in today’s troubled financial world.

After all, that’s why we have United Way.

But JPs aren’t members of the general public; we expect them to be more knowledgeable about such things when they open their mouths.

Unless these men and women are complete morons, there well may be something else at play here. Something too dark and dank to to be talked about in open meeting, but exists nonetheless. After all, it's pretty clear that Benton County won't take care of  their own residents who are HIV positive.

******

Quote of the Day

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life but that it bothers him less and less. - Vaclav Havel

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Health Care Vote - It’s the end of the world!

It's amazing how one side can see losing a political battle as a sign of the End Times, and settle into what can only be described as an incoherent panic.

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On the Air with Peter Tooker

This week on my show I sit down with Peter Tooker, a man who should be bronzed - or at least given the Key to the City. Peter, former editor of the alternative newspaper Grapevine, was also on the first board of directors of Fayetteville Open Channel, the city’s first public access provider.

In addition to all of that, he also ran the Fayetteville office of ACORN in the 1970s.

Sometimes you just have so much fun doing a show.

Show days and times:

Monday - 7pm
Tuesday - noon
Saturday - 6pm

****

Health Care: Whose Side Are You On?

Several weeks ago health care reform advocates held a rally in Fayetteville - Health Care: Whose Side Are You On? - outside the office of Senator Blanche Lambert Lincoln.

Among those who spoke at the rally was former Fayetteville mayor Dan Coody.

Producers from Fayetteville’s Community Access Television went to the event and taped both the speakers and comments from most of those in attendance.

The program will be shown on C.A.T. this week.

Show days and times

Sunday  - 2:30pm
Monday - 4:30pm
Wednesday  - 8pm

C.A.T. is shown on Channel 18 of the Cox Channel line-up in Fayetteville.  

Those outside the Fayetteville viewing area can see the program online at:                                                                            
http://www.catfayetteville.org/

Programs online are shown in “real time,” meaning that they are shown at the same time as they are shown on C.A.T.

rsdrake@cox.net

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I have been watching the cable news channels for some years now, and have watched the professional  standards being gradually tossed away away like the ballast from a balloon.

I’m not talking about journalistic standards, though volumes have (and will continue to be) written about that.  I’m talking about the current need for professional anchors to suddenly behave with all the smarminess of local TV anchors, practically weeping over every sad story, and becoming giddy with joy over every heart-warming story to come down the pike.

A British journalist told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart this a couple of years ago concerning what we get get for news:

“If I had to watch American news I’d shoot myself in the head.”

Granted, she was talking about how much news we don’t get, and the filter we get it through, but I understand her feeling. My wife can easily testify as to how many times I have literally snarled at the TV screen, “Just give us the damned news!”

Well, I pretty much have to go to BBC or CNN International for that. For the most part, there is largely little difference between local anchors and their national counterparts.  Where once we have straight news readers, now we have music hall performers, showing sadness and mirth on cue, and urging us to feel the same.

We snicker when they snicker, we gasp when they gasp, and we smile with joy at the same moment that they do.

No stone is left unturned to grab at the viewer’s emotional heartstrings.

The intellect, meanwhile, is another matter altogether. Like on an ancient mariner’s chart, anchors stay away from those uncharted waters.

Here be dragons.

Eschewing the opportunity to make the viewers a smarter - even if only a little bit - CNN goes in the opposite direction, going for the least educated among us at the drop of a hat.

Did I actually hear weekend anchor Don Lemon refer to historian Cornel West - to his face - as “a big time Harvard guy”???

Just because there are ignorant people out there doesn’t mean that the people who provide the news have to ignorant, or pretend to be, in order  to be on the same level as some of the viewers, in order to get more ratings.

There are anchors on MSNBC guilty of the same thing. Fox, of course, is beyond redemption.

******

Quote of the Day

Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other. - Martin Luther

*****

Frank Serpico’s Blog

One of the early heroes of my younger days was Frank Serpico, the cop who dared to blow the whistle on corruption in the NYPD in the 1960s. A while ago my wife and I watched the great film with Al Pacino, and after it was over I Googled Serpico to see what he was up to these days. To my delight I found his blog at:

www.frankserpico.blogspot.com

You can find his poetry (he writes poetry!) and comments about politics. It’s like Christmas come early.

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With the news that B. Dalton is about to close its doors in the Northwest Arkansas Mall in January, one is faced with the sobering fact that, for the first time in decades, there will be no bookstore to liven up the “Mall Experience.”

We have even had periods when there have been two bookstores in the mall at the same time. While many many recall the period when Waldenbooks occupied a space in the mall, not many may remember Heritage Bookstore, the first bookstore in the mall, which was so severely  impacted by the arrival of B. Dalton, and in its mad efforts to compete, inspired the Great Bookstore Protest.

There weren’t that many bookstores in Fayetteville in those thrilling days of yesteryear. One on Dickson and one in the mall. Okay, there there were several were you could buy used books, but new bookstores? They were a rare species.

Heritage Bookstore was a good sized bookstore, and was popular with lots of folks in Fayetteville. But once B. Dalton opened their doors in the mall, things changed quite a bit.

For one thing, you could order a book from B Dalton, and it would get there a lot faster than they could get it there at Heritage Books. They also had a wider selection of books and magazines.

What’s a bookstore to do? Well, the first thing they did was to literally shrink the store by half its size.

If you thought B. Dalton had a better selection before, it was doubly true now.

Not to worry, though. Heritage had a trick up their sleeves, one they were sure that would boost their business and restore them to heights to glory. In the mid-1980s they added a porn section in the back of the store.

No, really. Not just Playboy and Hustler, but the types of magazines and novels  that get passed around in gym class.

While I’m not sure how much this boosted their business, it certainly got the attention of one local church, which decided to mount its own protest.

You really can’t protest at the mall, so they had to go about this in a more cunning way than simply standing on the street, holding signs and chanting.

A group of church-goers would park themselves on the benches outside the bookstore - just folks sitting around shaving a Coke, officer! - and wait for someone to go in and saunter into the dirty book section, after which someone from their group would go into the store and ask the store clerk in a loud voice:

“Excuse me, does this store sell Bibles?”

I suppose the theory was that, upon haring that, whoever was looking at the dirty pictures would have a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment, and rush out and into the arms of their nearest spiritual advisor.

Not sure if it worked, but the added porn section didn’t help Heritage. They shut down in the 1980s, only to be mentioned as the butt of jokes.

******

The Mall without a bookstore?

What? The Northwest Arkansas Mall with no bookstore at all? I’m not pretentious. Sometimes I like going to the mall. But with no bookstore?

I don’t think so.

*****

Quote of the Day

My approach to learning how to write screenplays was to watch the best movies. I tried not to watch lousy movies, because I didn’t think I could learn anything from them. I didn’t take any classes. I just kind of dreamed it. - Michael Blake

rsdrake@cox.net

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I’ve been carrying around this article from the Northwest Arkansas Times recently.  The headline reads:

Man accused of breaking wife’’s arm

According to the article:

When questioned about her injuries, the victim told police that she drank too much and talked too much. She said her husband didn’t like it when she talked excessively so he “taught her another lesson.”

Another lesson.  Probably not the first that he has administered to her during her marriage, one assumes after reading those lines.

Another lesson.

Noted British comics writer Alan Moore once wrote a haunting story for the Swamp Thing series about domestic abuse. He described a man who, piece by piece, demolished a woman he professed to love. He ripped apart her self-respect, he abused her body, he shattered her heart, he made her afraid.  In the end, as Moore put it, “He had broken all the bones of her soul.”
 
I have nothing pithy, or wise to add at this point. I am just thinking of that woman offering up that horrendous line to the officers that night, afraid of things I can only guess at. And I think of the other women I’ve met in the same situation, or worse.
 
And I think of all the ones I haven’t met, but that I know are out there.

Lessons.

The lessons start early.  Every time a child - boy or girl - sees a woman manhandled by a man, and no one steps forward to say that no one has a right to treat another human being like that, a lesson is learned.

Every time a child hears adults make excuses for abusive behavior in others, a lesson is driven home.

Every time they see that the adults around them don’t want to “interfere” in the family matters of others a lesson is delivered  in large  neon letters.

Lessons all taken to heart, even if never discussed openly around the family hearth.

And when it comes their turn to be abused? When all the bones of their soul are broken?

When questioned about her injuries, the victim told police that she drank too much and talked too much. She said her husband didn’t like it when she talked excessively so he “taught her another lesson.”

http://nwat.nwanews.com/news/2009/oct/23/man-accused-breaking-wifes-arm-20091023/

******

Domestic Abuse Registry

I’m going to keep harping on this. We need a public registry of those who have been convicted of domestic abuse, so that one can check online and see if a potential spouse has ever been convicted.

All too often, these monsters move all too easily from relationship to relationship, their past a comfortable secret.

*****

Quote of the Day

Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. - Germaine Greer, “The Female Eunuch”

rsdrake@cox.net

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I wrote this piece in 1996, about the property rights movement in Northwest vArkansas. Some may find interesting similarities between then and now, when the Tea Bag folks and the Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck Orcs seem to dominate conservative thought.

Then, as now, a lot of people were manipulated by forces much higher than their pay grade - corporate forces which really much didn’t give a damn about freedom, or the America that these people claimed to care so much about.

Notice the gutless Washington County JP, who caved to pressure after his initial vote.

This is included in my book, Ozark Mosaic: Adventures in Arkansas Alternative Journalism, 1990-2002, which makes a a dandy holiday present.

Flexing their Muscles?
Property Rights Advocates gaining Visibility and Influence
Written by Richard S. Drake

“Recognize forestry as a private industry to be managed by private owners. Avoid pressures by  third parties to ascribe “sacred” status to trees or to any other agricultural commodity" - Sustainable  Development Coalition Council, Draft Recommendations, 1995
 
“I love to see a log truck going down the road with a load of logs to  get sawed up to make a home for someone. It looks good to me. The ranches, the cattle, the homes . . . I love to see Tyson trucks . . .” Ivan Denton, address to monthly meeting of Take Back Arkansas, Inc., April 4, 1996
 
On April 4, artist Ivan Denton addressed the April meeting of the property rights group, Take Back Arkansas. Denton, whose column “The Cowboy Whittler,” runs in the Northwest Arkansas Times, gave a talk warning against what he termed as “false environmentalists.”
 
In his half-hour address to the small group of less than 30 people, he claimed environmentalists “have their own agendas,” and that the battle raging over property rights in much of the United States is “where it is all centered.”
 
In addition to members of Take Back Arkansas, several candidates for Washington County Quorum Court were in attendance. Also on hand were several sitting members of the Quorum Court, including Darius Mullins, who voted the next week to repeal the controversial billboard ban ordinance, which the group had opposed on the grounds that there were no provisions made to provide property owners with recompense for the lost income that they claimed the sign ordinance would cause.
 
Mullins had originally voted for the ban.
 
Market Forces Best Able To Protect Environment?
 
Denton was appearing before the group in part to report on a recent trip he made to Kansas City, Missouri, to attend a meeting of  the Sustainable Development Coalition Council. This coalition formed partially as a response to the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD).
 
Created in 1993,  the PCSD attempted to balance industry and the environmental community. The Vision Statement of the PCSD states in part, “Our vision is of a life-sustaining earth . . . We believe a sustainable United States will have an economy that equitably provides opportunities for satisfying livelihoods and a safe, healthy, high quality of life for current and future generations . . .”
 
The goals of the PCSD have come under sharp attack from some who see a deification of nature in their goals, as well as an anti-industrial bias. In response, the Sustainable Development Coalition has emphasized private property rights, free markets and individual freedoms.
 
Those in Fayetteville may remember similar battles in the last several years, with a Planning Commission whose most outspoken members claimed that “market forces” must be the determining factor in city planning and growth management.
 
The Coalition was organized by several conservative organizations that claim to be environmentally oriented. One goal is to “Promote the understanding that ‘Sustainable Living’ means to provide for one’s self and for those whom he/she is responsible, integrating awareness that individual freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution make ‘Sustainable Living’ possible.”
 
Struggle Local/National
 
Mary Denham, one of the founders of Take Back Arkansas, says she is probably in agreement with most, if not all, of the Coalition’s goals. Take Back Arkansas is a local group of citizens concerned about their private property in an age when environmentalists and governing authorities are placing tighter controls onto property owners.
 
Like many such groups, Take Back Arkansas claims to be concerned about so-called “hidden agendas” that place restrictions on property rights. They claim that property rights will be the civil rights issue of the 1990s.
 
Prior to Denton’s address, the group watched a videotaped interview with Michael Coffman, affiliated with the Sustainable Development Coalition. He was featured discussing the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in 1992. He claimed that some in the environmental movement were inspired by their involvement with pagan religions, in which all life is considered equal.
 
The Cowboy Whittler
 
This sentiment was echoed by Denton in his talk, in which he claimed that religion was very much a part of the environmentalists’ agenda.
 
Among other issues that Denton discussed were the ban on DDT (at which point he made the claim that more people were actually harmed by the ban than were helped by it), and recent criticism of his newspaper column, to which he seemed particularly sensitive.
 
He said that, “Property owners are the true environmentalists. Property ownership makes people proud and they take care of it.”
 
After Denton’s talk, more of the video program was shown, followed by a question/answer period.
 
Battle Looms over Billboard Ban
 
On Thursday, April 11, the Washington County Quorum Court took a first step in repealing a controversial billboard ban for four specific highways in the county. Placed on its first reading, it will be taken up again at the regular Quorum Court meeting on May 9.
 
Mary Denham feels that the next go-around will be more difficult, because she is sure that the local Sierra Club and representatives of Friends For Fayetteville will speak for the ban. Essentially, she claims, their message is a simple one:
 
“We want your rights.”
 
Denham says that she has no desire to sit down with members of the above groups because she believes that their agenda is set in stone.
 
While saying that she didn’t want to get into an ugly war of words, Denham claims that a “propaganda machine” is running groups such as those she suspects will be out in force to speak against repealing the ban. Denham has been at odds with members of the Friends For Fayetteville before, most notably with Fayetteville Alderman Len Schaper.
 
She is confident that the repeal will stand, however, because “we have the constitution and law on our side, and they don’t.”
 
Ozark Gazette - April 15, 1996

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