Rebecca Martin
"People Behave Like Ballads"
MAXJAZZ
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On Local Politics
It's not a true democracy unless the people living in it get truthful information
in a timely fashion. The weight and speed of the decisions in which our federal
government makes may be overwhelming, I know. But when was the last time you took
a look at your city's website or were really aware of the power you have given
those by electing them in as public servants?
For me sadly, it took my
brother being sent to Iraq. He is a neurosurgeon working in Baghdad until October.
This
has inspired me to take a more active role in my community. Though the focus in
my life has been music, I have recently started to organize my community, and
the result has been really incredible. As constituents, you have the ability to
make enormous change. Call the congress and your senate if you'd like. That's
important. But be involved in what is happening locally. It's a trickle-up effect!
Take the initiative and organize your neighbors. Here is what is happening in
our city of Kingston NY. It's one of 9 wards - and is experiencing big change
- only because we are asking for it: http://groups.google.com/group/kingstonnyward9/.
Talk about a local good deed.
Our
friend and local piano store owner Adam Markowitz is donating a truckload of pianos
to New Orleans area musicians, many whom have lost everything in the hurricane
last year. In late January of 2007, Adam will be driving to New Orleans, Mississippi
and Alabama to distribute these pianos. Recipients are being chosen by New Orleans
Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund and other organizations. He hopes to make this
a yearly event.
Currently, they are accepting donations of solid pianos
to supplement his inventory. All contributions are tax deductible (as the donations
would be made to the NOMHRF).
Visit Adam at: http://www.adamspiano.com
for more information on his place and to be in contact.
Friends, take a minute and read this:
The
Oil We Eat by Richard Manning
...and if afterwards, you want more:
Against
the grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
In this
controversial and prodigiously researched condemnation of our current and past
systems of growing grain, Manning (Food's Frontier: The Next Green Revolution)
argues that the major forces that have shaped the world-disease, imperialism,
colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth-are all a part of the culture of agriculture.
He traces the beginnings of agriculture to the Middle East, where plants were
abundant and easily domesticated in coastal areas; hunter-gathers, who became
fishermen, formed settlements near river mouths. Manning skillfully details the
historical spread of agriculture through the conquest of indigenous peoples and
describes how this expansion led to overpopulation, famine and disease in Europe,
Asia and Africa. Sugar agriculture was supported by slaves and farming by laborers
who grew produce for the rich while the workers ate a high carbohydrate diet (potatoes,
rice, sugar, bread) and ingested no protein. In the U.S., modern agriculture has
evolved into an industrial system where agribusiness is subsidized to grow commodities
like wheat, corn and rice, not to feed people but to store and trade. According
to Manning, agricultural research focuses on just these few crops and is profit
driven. Although he succeeds in drawing attention to critical problems caused
by agriculture, such as water pollution and malnutrition, he is pessimistic about
reform coming from political systems. He romantically advocates hunting animals
for food and hopes that such citizen movements like urban green markets and organic
farms can lead to better nutrition.
I am very proud to announce the arrival of a novel my father spent the better
part of 10+ years researching and writing; THUNDER FROM THE MOUNTAINS. Since his
passing in 2001, my mother labored editing and has finally released their collaborative
work.
It is an Indian history of Maine in novel form as it might have
been written by an Androscoggin Wabenaki who lived in the territory called 'Mayne'
in the late 17th and early 18th centuries (1650-1724) examining in detail the
culture and history of the Maine Wabenakis from the time of it's earliest discovery.
To view and purchase your copy, visit: http://www.dallashillantiques.com.
WKCR fm is an extraordinary musical resource
- not only for New Yorkers but for the rest of the world too (you can stream them
live easily on the web). They are currently in a great deal of financial difficulty
as their broadcast tower was once located on the north tower of the World Trade
Center. For two years after 9/11, WKCR at best reached a small portion of NYC
- while the rest of us waited for their new tower and our beloved musical programming!
WKCR maintains it's commitment (truly) to alternative programming. The recorded
legacy of the arts is preserved, optimized and shared. For free.
Check
out their website and see for yourself...and if you love them like I think you
will, make a donation during this very important fund drive.
http://www.wkcr.org
I was alarmed to read last week that by the
end of this century, 10 percent of all bird species face extinction, and 15 percent
more are on the brink.
Here is a film that is marvelous - and I bet after
watching it, you'll never see another migrating flock of birds in the same way
again.
http://www.sonyclassics.com/wingedmigration/index_flash.html
I had the good fortune to find this documentary
by a wonderful film maker named Stephanie Black.
It is a devastating
film that demonstrates the troubling issue of Globalization and the sickening
power of the IMF.
http://www.lifeanddebt.org
I hope during
the remainder of your holiday months, you might consider supporting a local farm
near you when thinking about what foods to put on your table. Here's why, and
here's how:
http://www.themeatrix.com
I have recently run into two people who are
doing work that is making a tremendous difference in our world. Please visit their
website and make a donation if you can. Volunteers are always needed and greately
appreciated.
I've worked with them both, and encourage you all to support
these beautiful people:
http://www.dogsbestfriend.petfinder.com
Dogs Best Friend
Cindy Mesko
95 McKinstry Road
Gardiner, N.Y. 12525
http://www.projectcat.org
Project Cat
Gail Mihocko
Accord, NY
http://www.kiddofspeed.com
Please view this site when you have a spare 5 minutes. I think it's the most
incredible and powerful website I've ever encountered. It's sad and scary and
all too real - a photo journal of a young Ukrainian woman's motorcycle journey
through Chernobyl and the dead zone around it. Not to be missed. It'll stay with
you for a while.
Cold Turkey
by Kurt
Vonnegut
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible
that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation
used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when
there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the
Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there
is not a chance in hell of America's becoming humane and reasonable. Because power
corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees
who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees,
am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the
Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They
are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have
reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves
middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They,
like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations
and government. I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark
is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup,
straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to
graduate from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering
old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever
it is." So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer,
so you can forget it.
I have to say that's a pretty good sound bite,
almost as good as, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A lot
of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus
liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500
years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus
Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula
for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks.
And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew
that there was another one.
But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus
and my son the doctor, Mark, who've said how we could behave more humanely, and
maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs,
from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this: Eugene Debs,
who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate
for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912,
if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal
element, I'm of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public
schools or health insurance for all?
How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount,
the Beatitudes? Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed
are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they shall be called the children of God. And so on.
Not exactly planks
in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes.
But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be
posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard
one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers"
in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious
Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut
cases want to be president. But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case
would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy,
lying and greedy animals we are!
I was born a human being in 1922 A.D.
What does "A.D." signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we
call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With
him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and
into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even
the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.
Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person? No problem. That's
entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety,
has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind
what Jesus said.
During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of
the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz
again.
Mel Gibson's next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office
records will again be broken.
One of the few good things about modern
times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You
will have entertained us.
And what did the great British historian Edward
Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History
is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes
of mankind." The same can be said about this morning's edition of the New York
Times.
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1957, wrote, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,
and that is suicide."
So there's another barrel of laughs from literature.
Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.
Listen.
All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick,
Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and
Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.
But I have
to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including
the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden,
there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy,
even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going
on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles
and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball.
Even crazier than golf,
though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience
of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a
conservative.
Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people
of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert
and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:
I often
think it's comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and
every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? It's practically
a
law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren't one or the
other, you might as well be a doughnut.
If some of you still haven't
decided, I'll make it easy for you. If you want to take my guns away from me,
and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each
other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you're for
the poor, you're a liberal.
If you are against those perversions and
for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?
My government's
got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and
destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.
One, of course,
is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission,
was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time
from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to
him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other
drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off
at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including
a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are
dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
We're spreading democracy,
are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what
we now call "Native Americans."
How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful
are the people of Baghdad today.
So let's give another big tax cut to
the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget. Hail to
the Chief.
That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy
as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no
say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven't noticed, they've already
cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security
rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt
that you'll be asked to repay.
Nobody let out a peep when they did that
to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution:
The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having
been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.
About
my own history of foreign substance abuse. I've been a coward about heroin and
cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke
a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to
be sociable. It didn't seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never
did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely
a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again
tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.
I am of course notoriously
hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end
and a fool at the other.
But I'll tell you one thing: I once had a high
that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver's
license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.
And my car back then,
a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation
and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most
abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
When
you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly
hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any more of those. Cold
turkey.
Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't like TV news, is
it?
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels
in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about
to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what
little is left of what we're hooked on.
Over ten million animals are abused, neglected or abandoned yearly. One of my
lifetime goals is to create a very large no-kill shelter for animals big and small
in the Hudson Valley. Until there is time and funding for this endeavor, take
the time to visit this website. Just by clicking on it, you can feed a homeless
animal in need. There is no cost to you. Funding for food is paid by the site
sponsors. The animal rescue site was launced in July of 2002 and generated 22.9
million bowls of food for animals in its first year. Visit daily. It's SO simple:
http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com |
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