Category Archives: Politics

What’s the Deal with Oliver Anthony

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Picking up an old acoustic guitar I’d had for 20+ years, I began playing every single day back in late 2018, This became a cathartic escape from a deep, dark hole prompted by the tragic death of my only son a year before.

When I started playing three or four songs at open mics in 2019, I never thought I’d end up writing nearly 40 songs over the next three years, while releasing music regularly on Bandcamp. I especially never thought I’d have the guitar skills to play professionally, often carrying three-hour sets of covers interspersed with my own songs.

My goal was never to become a popular musician. First, the musical influences I have are obscure indie bands and singers—performers like Guided by Voices, Swearing at Motorists, and some bigger name performers like Wilco and Car Seat Headrest.

At the same time, I honestly thought I might manage to gather a niche following of music fans, similar to what I’ve been able to cobble together over the last 20 years as a writer. My Moxie book still sells steadily because I’d found a nostalgic topic that came with a built-in cult following.

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Words Don’t Matter Anymore

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When I launched this blog in 2012, I was passionate about blogging. At that time, I still believed in the power of words—that words truly mattered. I no longer hold that as a truth.

Back in 1995, after coming to the end of another job and place of employment, I took the summer off. I read, I ruminated, and I planted a garden. There was a particular richness to that brief respite from work and busyness.

In many ways, that summer changed my life at the time. I made a transition in my thinking and outlook. I also read Neil Postman for the first time. What Postman taught me about the world is something I’ve carried with me ever since, especially in terms of how I view technology.

In 1995, there was no Facebook. News and presidents didn’t take to Twitter to make proclamations. I would not learn of the internet for another year. It was the perfect time to come to Postman’s ideas and live amidst the wreckage across the following 25 years, watching a world altered by technology.

Unlike 2012 when I’d spend copious amounts of time researching and organizing my thoughts in order to write a lengthy post that would ultimately be read by very few, these days, I simply present some truncation of a greater truth, or the more detailed ideal that I am working from. I am reading less these days than I did in 1995, but I still read. I’m probably reading and writing less because I’m playing guitar more. Since words matter no more that’s a worthwhile trade.

I don’t believe science and technology will save us, greatly improve our lives, or bring about anything particularly special to how we currently live. That thinking comes from internalizing Postman 25 years ago.

Here is Postman on technology, in five points:

One, we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price.

Two, there are always winners and losers—the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners

Three, embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes the bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on.

Four, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates (or Jeff Bezos).

Five, technology tends to become mythic; i.e. perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us. …. When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control. Continue reading →

Holding More Than One Idea (The Err of Caution)

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What week of lockdown is this? I’ve lost track.

I hope everyone’s holding up, well. I’m guessing many are not. Actually, I know many aren’t.

My daytime job involves taking calls in a healthcare setting. Since early March, I’ve listened to people cry, melt down, and I’ve experienced and uncomfortable level of fear being projected my way for the past weeks and now, months. This has got to stop!

As a parent coping with the loss of a son, I’ve been struggling with the feeling of sliding back into that “deep dark hole” that’s taken me months to get to the lip of, and then, up into the light of living again. Why has this pandemic triggered these former emotions that were more painful than any human should be forced to endure? I’ve asked the question “why me?” so many times I can’t even come up with a reasonable guess.

I’m not sure why, but often following Mark’s death, I was so fucking angry. I simply wanted to hit someone or worse. Rather than acting out on this urge, I simply turned inward. I remember a former radio psychologist, Dr. Joy Brown, saying that depression was “anger turned inward.” I’d concur. I was so depressed that I contemplated suicide.

Picking up the guitar saved me nearly two years ago. I’ve played my old acoustic (or my newer electric) nearly every single day since August 2018. I’m amazed that two guitars (and a Vox amp) could have made such a difference, but they have. Still, the past 8 to 10 weeks have been difficult as hell, even playing and writing songs and performing via the interwebs. There’s only so much shit that even my guitars can deflect away.

When the Covid-19 outbreak ramped up, there were conflicting reports of its severity. Initially, some said that it wasn’t any worse than the common flu and that “people were overreacting.” Then, protocols were established as cases exploded, especially in the large, urban population centers like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

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Let Them Eat Ice Cream

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During the run-up to the 2016 presidential election that would deliver Donald Trump as our 45th president, I wrote several posts about the neoliberal Democrat Hillary Clinton, like this one. That followed Bernie Sanders’ first bait-and-switch, where Bernie “I’m going to deliver a revolution” Socialist Sanders turtled, dropped-out, and endorsed a corporatist in Clinton.

We all know the end-game, don’t we? And yet, duped progressives again threw significant support behind Bernie’s faux revolutionary rhetoric and Democratic Socialism once more. Is it any surprise that the result was basically the same yet again?

Blame it on the Orange Man.

Because most Americans are binary to a fault, they can’t get their brains around the idea that Sanders was a Socialist sham. I mean here was a 78-year-old white guy who hadn’t held a job outside politics since 1980, when he was elected for the first time as mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

Democrats have one narrative trope and one only: blame it all on the Orange Man. Actually that’s become a Democratic cliché.

Question: Who caused the coronavirus pandemic?
Democrat: The Orange Man.

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Move Beyond the Usual (Politics)

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After last week’s debacle in Iowa, where nearly a week later, we still don’t know if the results are in fact valid, the chattering classes are asking, “why Iowa?” and even, “why New Hampshire?”

The horse race to November’s presidential election has begun in earnest. And as it’s been done now since 1920, presidential wannabes, political insiders, and self-appointed front-runners are forced to trudge through the cold and chill of a New England winter writ large. Running the gauntlet of retail politics is still being done in the age of Twitter—as it should be—in a very white state that doesn’t always mirror the rest of America. But to New Hampshire they all come.

During past campaigns, both my wife and I have traveled to Maine-based events together or on our own. I’ve seen Democrats like the Clintons, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich in-person. When I was a Republican, I attended events for George Bush. There’s something about seeing candidates in live settings that surpasses merely seeing them pixelated on a television screen.

On Saturday, we decided to make the 35-minute drive from Southern Maine and cross the border into neighboring New Hampshire to hear a long-shot candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. She was hosting a town hall in Rochester, at the Elks Lodge.

Why Gabbard? Both of us have been intrigued by her commercials running on the Portland station where we consume our morning news and get our weather from. Like other candidates I’ve supported: Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and in 2016, Jill Stein, Gabbard projects something different than the typical business-as-usual politics common during DNC-influenced dog-and-pony shows passed off as debates. Continue reading →

Countering Contempt

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I’ve heard Arthur C. Brooks before. I apparently didn’t pay close enough attention.

Perhaps I saw that he was president of a think tank that tilted away from my ideological proclivities. Or, like often happens in life when you first encounter something that will later possess greater meaning—you pass on it once, or several times.

Book TV, which broadcasts on C-Span 2 each weekend, is what the network bills as “television for serious readers.” It’s 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors discussing their works. For someone like me who gravitates towards that genre, it’s a place I usually end up at some point each week.

After Words is a feature where one author interviews another nonfiction writer about a book they’ve written and it usually has a thematic orientation. This week, Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) interviewed his friend Arthur C. Brooks about his latest book, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. Actually, I think the show was taped earlier and likely, I was viewing the rebroadcast.

Arthur C. Brooks’ new book about countering contempt.

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Democrats Plus One

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Yesterday, the crowded field of Democrats grew by one. This morning, the pundits had more energy than I’ve seen in months. Amazingly, they were talking about someone other than Mayor Pete (still having trouble with “Boot-edge-edge”).

American culture is strewn with the iconic. In terms of popular culture—especially music and rock and roll—there are few icons bigger than Bruce Springsteen. Everyone knows what you’re talking about when you say, “The Boss.”

On our Easter Sunday drive into Maine’s western mountains, I had Springsteen on Spotify shuffle. I was holding court with Mary about why his music mattered and how we need to make a point of seeing him before he hangs up his Telecaster.

Yesterday, I had some late afternoon time to fill. Like I’ve done countless times before in my life with unstructured time, I ended up at a library looking for books.

Sitting on the shelf, calling my name was Peter Ames Carlin’s, Bruce. Not the only bio of The Boss, but one of the better ones, I’ve already read nearly 200 pages in less than 24 hours. Students at tutoring wanted to know what book I was toting around with me last night and I got to give them my own Springsteen story, of “Glory Days,” and what that song means in terms of my own smoldering baseball embers.

Bruce bio by Peter Ames Carlin (2012)

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Stealing Your Hamburgers

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We’re living in a country where it seems like everything is broken and no one knows how to fix it. Hyperbolic? Yeah, a little bit. But, there’s a sheen of truth in that opening salvo, too.

Donald Trump ran on a slogan of “Make America Great Again.” MAGA speaks to an idea that we’re not what we once were, as a country. While I might disagree with President Trump and his prescriptions for “fixing what’s broken,” I can’t disagree that we’re not where we ought to be, either.

On Friday, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes went to the Bronx, the NYC borough represented by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (she also represents parts of Queens, too). The town hall, taped in the afternoon, ran during Hayes’ usual 8:00 p.m. slot on the left-leaning cable news network popular with “lefties” like me.

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Women Won’t Save Us

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We are living through “the year of the woman.” Following the mid-term elections that delivered a female tsunami, naive believers have glommed onto the myth that depositing a wave of women on the steps of the capitol—simply assuming that swapping the gender of those who prop up our power structure will change everything. This is akin to believing in the magic of fairy dust.

Some of these “new” women actually believe that if they had been in power, bad things wouldn’t have happened. I say, “dream on.”

When I roll out of bed, I usually do my stretching in front of the television. I want my weather beamed from a 32-inch flat screen, not a phone sitting in my palm.

Before switching the channel to our local news affiliate, I caught the last five minutes of this morning’s MSNBC’s First Look. Their final segment had yet another variation of “the woman have arrived to save us” narrative that’s in vogue with lazy journalists.

Generally, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the screenshot of a group of about a dozen women, but one name “jumped out” at me, identifying her photo. That would be Gina Raimondo, the new head of the Democratic Governors Association.

Yes, Raimondo is a woman. I’m also aware that men have done more than their fair share of damage to the planet. But she is not a woman I’m cheering for in her role leading an organization that’s “dedicated to electing Democratic governors and candidates.” Oh, glory!

Women in power suits, making plays for power.

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Feelings Not Facts

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After a welcome break from tutoring, I was back at for the first time in two weeks. I’m not sure why—maybe it was just that I’d gotten used to having my evenings back and under my own control—but I was exhausted when I rolled up on the cove around 9:45 Wednesday night.

When I get home after 2 ½ hours of trying to get 25 high school-age students to put down their cell phones and do some homework, I’ll often sit-up for an hour or so with a beer (sometimes a snack) and more often than not, I’ll watch The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. Because I tune-in just prior to the 10:00 p.m. segue between hosts and shows, I’ve come to enjoy being there for the “hand-off” that takes place between the brilliant Rachel Maddow and O’Donnell, a savvy political veteran of DC’s internecine combat.

Wednesday night, though, for some odd reason, I switched on CNN. When I am home at night, I rarely miss Ms. Maddow’s special blend of research, commentary, and the way she weaves each evening’s storyline, coaxing viewers along for something other than the usual soundbite journalism that’s all-too-common in this post-factual era.

It’s unfortunate that the only two left-of-center news networks force us to choose: pitting Maddow against Chris Cuomo (over on CNN), and then, O’Donnell goes head-to-head against worthy rival, Don Lemon. What I often end up doing is channel-surfing between networks during commercials, which works at times.

Cuomo, in addition to being a journalist is also a licensed attorney. He draws on that  legal background to “make his case” in whatever story he’s covering on a given night. Wednesday night, it was President Trump, and how the Orange Menace opts for feelings over facts, time-and-time-again. This is nothing new to anyone who doesn’t source their information solely from TrumpTV (better know as, Fox News). But for the Kool-Aid crowd of Trump toadies, this is an interesting flip-flop. Continue reading →