The Hitler Channel

World War II created most of the twentieth century heroes known by all today. I personally do not worship wars or warriors. I am more of a Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Mother Teresa, William Buckley kind of guy. Each to his own. I will for the moment forget my pacifist views and suggest some of the more viable heroes of World War II. The short list would be Eisenhower, Churchill, Audie Murphy, Charles De Gaulle, FDR. All these mugs were supposed to be “good guys”. If they were the boy wonders, how in the hell did Hitler get his own channel? Churchill was a courageous leader, but he would be hard to look at on a daily basis. Try to take your eyes off Hitler when he is on the screen…impossible. Kind of like 330 pounds of human squeezed into a bikini. Who would not look? I suggest that our affection for Mr Nazi is more than just prurient. I think that he is a supreme example of our love of brutality. Torture, mayhem, atrocity are all savory ingredients for late night viewing. There are plenty of thespians who have made their living being complete savages on screen. Adolf was the real deal.

There is a section of the cable listings that contains The Pentagon Channel, The Military Channel and The History Channel. You can find such gems as “Hitler’s Bodyguards”, “Hitler and The Occult” and everyone’s favorite, “Hitler At Home” on these stations. Mr Uber Alles had a promo man who never slept. He is the most photographed human of all time. It is not for his boyish good looks. He had a terrific film maker, Leni Riefenstahl, who made two of the most fascinating documentaries of all time, “Triumph of Will” and “Olympia”. If you view these flicks, you will see Hitler and his movement as heroic. Combine Adolf’s use of photographic and cinematic images with an incredible graphic arts department and you have historic proof that the most horrible of things can be mass sold if properly packaged. Still to this day, his image is instantly identified by anybody with eyes. During and after World War II, the USA lured many German scientists to our shores. They should have sought some of Hitler’s ad men for our marketing department.

Knowing all this, I still wonder how someone who is a mass murderer and a preacher of apocalyptic hate could be so fascinating to us. You have those who say, “we must not forget”. Others will point out his historical importance. I get the uneasy feeling that we are drawn to The Hitler Channel because he is a well groomed version of our darker side. People love to love a bad guy. I also know that violence, in general, is a major box office bonanza. Nothing sells popcorn like a good old fashioned ass whooping. Hollywood would vanish from the map without blood and gore. The Fuhrer is even more bad ass than Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris and Grace Jones combined. So, sit back on your couch, crack open a Bud and bask in the glow of The Third Reich doing what they do best—bestial acts. I just hope the next big dance craze is not the goose step. Can you see Donald Trump on Dancing With The Stars sporting a Hitler mustache and high leather boots stepping on the toes of some demure Broadway dancer? How lovely it isn’t.

Conservatives and Liberals Versus Individuals

By the way conservatives and liberals attack each other with the same verbiage over and over, you would think that they each held wildly divergent views. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They both cling to the government like some raggedy ass old teddy bear. Conservatives chatter again and again, like psycho Chicken Littles, about the socialist takeover of our government. Liberals are very fond of painting their counterparts as bigots and fascists of the highest order. Now, admittedly, there is a modicum of truth in almost anything that a human utters. However, small truths do not make great ideas. Looking deeper into conservative and liberal political history shows that they are swinging the same hammer from a different angle. That hammer is the government. The nail is the individual.

A democracy seemingly has a foundation of freedom. Freedom is an allusive quality that can only be realized within the individual. Political systems, fixed points of view in regards to the social contract and the proclamations and declarations of governments are not, in any way, related to true freedom. Laws can never guarantee freedom. On the contrary, laws can only inhibit it. Very few free thinkers breathe easier when some new controls are issued by the congressional boys club. We are all born free. It is the institutions that surround us that strive to steal this freedom.

I have been on both sides of the conservative/liberal fence with my vote. Having said that, I admit that I have never felt good about any vote I have ever cast. I always have a sickening feeling when exiting a voting booth, as if I had done something terribly wrong. “What is Dickenson doing in there all this time?” None of my votes has ever echoed my own philosophy. Every election, both sides break out the same old rhetoric that trumpets tired ideas with very predictable language. Part of the blame for the monotone of political campaigns is that almost nobody, but lawyers, ever runs for office. Herbie, the cigar-smoking, gin-swilling, none too shy about plumber’s crack butcher, for president would be nice for a change. Imagine a candidate that would run on a platform of repealing and revoking laws instead of adding to the mountain of constraints that DC is built on. Only a lawyer could believe that a stroke of a pen actually changes society. On the whole, the only change is in the bank of accounts of the already well-healed.

Conservatives have been the cause of growing the size of government at the cost of the individual more than any other faction since the birth of Reagan politics. Dear old Ronald gave us the greatest gob of spit in the eye of democracy with The Iran Contra affair. He let Ollie wipe his ass on the Constitution. The savings and loan scandal of the Bush Senior era managed to completely destroy the only banking system that ever cared about the average wage earner. The final affront of the new conservative era was The Patriot Act. Every hair on my back bristles just hearing the title of this law. A true individual would never fall to the depths of patriotism, but a pundit will.

Liberals attack democracy with their fondness of war. Kennedy and LBJ in Vietnam and now Obama in Afghanistan. There is nothing more opposite of freedom than the wholesale murder we worship called “war”. Nobody wastes money like the Pentagon. Nobody kills more people than the Pentagon. It is one building I would like to see turned into a giant day care center. “Oh General So and So, could you please pour the Juicy Juice and change a few diapers for us?” Liberals were falling all over themselves to bail out every large industry from cars to car loans in the face of our current economic failure. In a free market, you don’t reward thieves, scalawags and abysmal failures with the money of those who continue to work day to day.

I envision this great experiment called The United States of America as a call to all those in this world who value themselves, and therefore others, enough to give most political power to the single soul who stands despite the machinations of our poorly run government. One person standing on his own, forming his beliefs on a day to day basis, is worth more than millions repeating the newest liberal or conservative cliche.

Corporate Rock

My biggest disappointment in modern civilization is the destruction of any kind of American culture by our corporate system. To see this first hand, just look at where we shop. I remember the day when one knew the merchants that we purchased our goods from. I always enjoyed chatting with our local grocer when my family made its weekly pilgrimage to Delpino’s groceries to procure our share of American agricultural abundance. In the summer, the vegetables would come from local truck farmers. We would pass our future meat on the road to town. The shops where we spent our money were owned by the people who waited on you. There was an excellence in service, a quality of goods and a pleasure in the experience which cannot be matched in a mall. We all buy our clothes from the same haberdashery run by a suit in some far off office building. Every American mall is populated by the same ticky tack stores. One nation under one brand for all.

Ray Kroc changed the American diet along with our farming system. McDonalds gave birth to the prepackaged nonsense that folks call meals today. He had a great hand in burying the American family owned farm. We now buy our food from a food industry armed with hypodermic needles and chemicals to speed its tasteless tidbits to our table. How could so many jaws gnash Big Macs unless the cattle themselves were somehow engineered to get from the pasture to the table in the blink of an eye? I have never had a burger at McDonalds, Burger King or Wendy’s for one reason. When you drive by one of these clip joints to admire their extra big flags waving in the breeze, take a deep breath. Do you really want to eat something that smells like that? I don’t mind that corporations run our government or that they destroyed our taste buds or even that they produce a race of workers more tired eyed and dull with each passing year. I have little love for these culture vultures because they changed one of the most important elements of our heritage—our music.

As a musician, I have been watching and wincing at the hostile takeover of our music for years. It most certainly started when large record companies realized that, although Elvis shook his hips in sexual frenzy, sang songs that were from the murky southern black culture and was not the brightest bulb in the box, he was cute enough to sell and Little Richard was not. Suddenly, Pat Boone, Bobby Rydell and countless other purveyors of tasty paste were leading the charge to sell rock and roll. There were a few years in the sixties, seventies and eighties, when rock and roll refused to be a slave to fashion, but these years no longer have any relevance. The birth of MTV and synths started to make musicians irrelevant also. What you saw became as important as what you heard. Seeing a concert now is like watching an exercise class at the local YMCA with the music turned up to a deafening level. The first one to realize that you could produce record sales from the tone deaf was my favorite frozen icon, Walt Disney. He started with The Mickey Mouse Club. He knew that if you could put the same smiling faces on the tube at the same time every day, you would have the first artistic assembly line. Design it. Manufacture it. Sell it. Over and over and over. Even my first wet dreams were products of Uncle Walt. Annette jumping from the roof of my parents house floating gently through the suburban sky buoyed by her flesh balloons directly onto my love lap. Fresh from the freezer, Walt has recently given us the most overvalued piece of musical furniture of all time—Brittany Spears.

The final coup that killed American music was American Idol. “Idol”…an object of excessive or blind adoration. This show should be titled, “Screeching for Dollars”. They are pretty. They are young. They are vapid. Just yesterday I got to view the newest in the line of prepackaged musical pimples, Justin Bieber. This kid, dressed in clown sneakers two sizes too big for him, was doing his best to be white ghetto. He even grabbed his hairless crotch a few times. He is a wonderful example of the genius of modern orthodontics, but a root canal without pain relief for the treble clef. He had about twenty buff black men in back of him doing jumping jacks as he swam around each note trying to settle on his favorite. Where or where were the musicians? Either hiding in shame behind a curtain or captured in a can to be turned on and off by a grizzled sound man. Drums are machines. Pianos are computers. Strings, horns and background vocals are bits and bytes. The musician has been abandoned and the aerobics instructor has taken his rightful place on stage. This dreck is so dull it hurts.

I would rather have a good story teller with no physical beauty seated on a stool singing from his heart than a pretty face spewing drivel as he grimaces his way into millions of sales. So if you want to participate in a process as undemocratic as a general election, here are your instructions. To cast your vote, text 911 for musicians and 000 for entertainers.

The Ism Schism and War

The two basic failures in the collective of mankind are politics and religion. Why else would most people be afraid to speak on these subjects without turning red in the face and spewing invective? Those who do speak of these taboo subjects hide behind the guise of group thinking, the isms. For the moment let’s abandon the utter failure of religion to bring us close to God and focus on our more abysmal lack of success, politics. Is it just me or does the world seem exactly the same whether conservatives or liberals rule the day? Mankind embraces one large political solution on both sides of the political spectrum, war. Yet history proves, from the Old Testament to our current ridiculous involvement in blood letting in Afghanistan, that war has never been and never will be the solution to anything except a localized population problem. Every teeth grinding, air chewing pundit, whether liberal or conservative, loves to embrace the righteousness of a standing army. A human has the right to die for anything they choose. They have no right to kill for anything at all. Under the fire of weapons, all moral stances are brought to their knees. Liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, communism, fascism, socialism, militarism, all come together to rejoice behind a waving flag and a well heeled armed force. Such diverse political views as Hitler and Stalin, LBJ and Strom Thurmond, JFK and George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Mao, all loved war as a just and necessary action. They embraced their soldiers and elevated them to heroic stature. How can a country worry about “health care”, when they send thousands of their sons to foreign lands to end the health of strangers forever?

The very first political step to higher ground is the absolution of armies, rebels, terrorists and other people who bring liberty to millions through death. Those who use the armies of the world for their only purpose, destruction, are usually cowards of the highest order. Obama and Bush were never soldiers. Glenn Beck was too busy getting high to join the army (probably the only sane period of his life). Osama did not fly a plane into the world trade center. Reagan played soldiers in dreary movies, but never killed an enemy himself. America, you want your money back? Go fleece the pockets of the well dressed, fat asses in the Pentagon. There is no pride and no bravery in war, only shame, tyranny and oblivion. Without “Thou shall not kill” as the bottom line of your political philosophy, you have no philosophy at all.

Monticello, Home of the Great Dinosaur Hunter

I am a great lover of American history. I see American history from a different perspective than most. I consider the real history of America to be written by the common man. Those who the writers of great history books would deem insignificant. All the important moments of our brief national existence have been created by the individual, unrestrained by the shadow of historical importance, acting with millions of other like-minded single souls. This country has been made strong and just by small, not great man. In turn, when presented with the story of any of our forefathers, we are always given a picture of a saintly, hallowed man who put all of mankind on his back and lifted them to heights they could never imagine for themselves. Kind of like Daddy Warbucks with wings.

I just went on an American road trip with my family.  On the way from the Shenandoah Mountains to Williamsburg, Virginia we decided to take a break at Charlottesville and visit Moniticello, home of our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Our group was large and included members of three generations of the family. We paid our twenty dollars per and were led to an undertaker-like figure on the porch of Monticello for our guided tour.  This was a tour of the word “lie”.  We had all the variations presented to us in profusion: the stretching of the truth lie, the obscuring the facts lie, the straight-faced bold as hell not a speck of reality lie, the lie of omission and of course, the mythic lie.  There is no better figure to guide this tour than the disdainful, arrogant professor in a black suit filled with white puffiness smirking his stories to we, the twenty dollars poorer, masses. Our guide has this in spades.

Of course, he hit us with “we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” quote right away. At that precise moment, my little voice within said, “you are shitting me”.  I agree that the words are inspiring and “the endowed by their creator” follow up is a classic, but what good are words from a man who refused to live by them. All men were created equal to Jefferson except black skinned humans, women and any individual who did not own land. You had to have to get. My mentoring guide explained this away with “he was caught up in an agrarian society”. He owned other human beings that did all his work for him. That old “he didn’t know any better” line is limp and ineffective. Even Moses, thousands of years before Jefferson, realized that owning another human was wrong. The only black people that Jefferson ever treated near equal to himself were the ones he created with his slave lover, Sally Hemmings.  He did not mind having sex with a negro, but God forbid he would have to eat with one.

My guide was so involved with creating a Jefferson that everyone could admire that he called him the first American paleontologist. Ole Tom sent Lewis and Clark on one of the most significant hikes in the history of walking. They came back with a present of the jaw bone from an animal that Jefferson considered the American wooly mammoth. To my turd polishing tour guide this made Tom a paleontologist.  He had as much to do with the study of ancient fossils as he had in actually building Monticello—nothing.  Agreed, he was a brilliant man who designed his digs and wrote a beautiful introduction to The Declaration of Independence. (The rest of the Declaration is just a list of grievances that were agreed upon by committee). He did say that “all men are created equal”, but it took two centuries of effort from the average American to make it so.  Making a man like Jefferson seem faultless and giving him credit for forming a truly democratic nation denigrates the sacrifice made by so many men and women who had no statues built for them as they completed the struggle for a free American individual.

Mothers and fathers, paint the picture with all the colors, not just the ones that give glory to a few.  To hand lies down from generation to generation is a dismal way to insure our democracy.

The White O.J. or How the Rich Man is Judged

On occasion, I allow myself to fall into the comfort of believing that all is right with the mind of man. The ridiculous little box we call television often rescues me from this illusion. Today I watched a religious, social ritual in sheer horror.  They had a ceremony in a palace of God. A palace that God himself would never inhabit, but mankind loves to fill with bloated piety, a terrible sense of mortal doom and, of course, great monuments to the rich and famous. Ted Kennedy lay breathless in a fine ivory casket as prayers for his soul poured from mouths of the silver spoon fed. This was a man who upon being responsible for death of another decided to hide from his deed and obscure the truth. Ted drove Mary Jo into a pond, let her drown, left her lifeless body in 12 feet of water, went home, showered and went to bed without telling anyone of her demise. If the local butcher had done this, it would have been life in prison. Because Ted is a bona fide member of an American royal family, he received no jail time. Millions of dollars for expert witnesses, a glamorous family name and a legal system which constantly lets the privileged get away with any sin imaginable, gave Mr. Kennedy a suspended sentence of two months.  

Today as the television screen gleemed into my living room, it showed rich men paying tribute to their treasures. A sickening sight for those of us who do believe that all men are created equal and pray for a legal system that will someday make it so. The Senate has always been the American House Of Lords. Barbers, steelworkers, dirt farmers and grocery store owners do not walk the halls of the Upper House. Lawyers, directed by the millions of dollars it took them to get to this sacrosanct place, are the asses in the seats of The Senate. Nothing that this man could do under the guise of law could erase the fact that he used his name and money to manipulate the legal system he represented to his own advantage. The next time the major television stations decide to broadcast a funeral, maybe it will be one of a man who gave his community love, not money.

An end to war. A start to prosperity.

When the flow of money comes to a grinding halt, as it has presently in the USA, one must look to lessen the greatest expenditures and increase the best assets.  It doesn’t take a prophet or an economic genius to realize that the biggest spender in the group of institutions that ride on tax payers backs is THE ARMY.  I know that war is the most popular solution to any number of problems that arise among nations.  Only a cursory glance at history will reveal that it is a dismal failure as the catalyst for positive change.  Our books paint our story from the date of one war to another.  We celebrate our blood letting nature with holidays, parades, anthems and awards.  The simple fact is that war is an act that lowers whole societies to the bottom of the human moral ladder.  One cannot do anything worse than kill another person.  Having a good excuse does not make the act of war acceptable.  Besides the fact that bellicose actions make us monsters, it is expensive to kill thy neighbor.  In my lifetime, I have seen my country start two wars that had no purpose and led us to bestial acts that made us no better than amoral butchers, Vietnam and the current War on Terror.

It has always seemed that people are far more interested in keeping their wallets healthy than leading lives with true strength of character.  As each wallet shrinks more every day, maybe we can rally our country to do something that would stop some of our useless spending and make us examples of right for generations to come.  As someone who lives their life by the simple ethic of non-violence, I would personally recommend abolishing our armed services completely.  They drain our economy more and more with each new conflagration.  I know most citizens would cringe in fear without missiles, tanks and bully boys guarding our borders, but I do believe that the same youthful energy that leads people to join the army could be used for constructive, not destructive ends.  With no Pentagon, no overpaid armchair generals, no yearly budget for instruments of murder, we could put the money into our pockets, our families futures and pay back the debt that hangs over us eternally from the atrocities of war.  The end of the act of war would not only benefit our money supply, but would make us better as individuals and in the collective.

A Step Forward

I have always felt that the difference between liberals and conservatives is miniscule.  What conservative would produce the biggest deficit spending in history?  What liberal would vote for a premeditated aggression against a senseless target?  In the end, Washington makes liars out of both sides.  The election of Barack Obama is not a victory for Democrats or liberals.  It is a victory for our collective history.  The value of the USA in world history is that we are the great social experiment.  Can people from every background actually live in the same nation and make that nation function properly for all?  A failure in this regard is a failure for all mankind.  Men have a history written in their neighbor’s blood.  It seems far easier to dispatch someone who does not agree with you or look like you to heaven than deal with them in the here and now.  With the election of a man of color to the White House, the United States has broken new ground.  This is a rare moment of political faith that has made our social family more inclusive.

Gas Bags Anonymous

There was a time when politicians opened their mouths, their own words spilled out.  Speeches were actually written by the person who uttered them.  Some of the best speeches in the history of mankind, either political or otherwise, came during this glory period.  The Gettysburg Address is a beautifully constructed, moving piece that is as relevant now as it was when Lincoln first stumbled through it on that sad autumn afternoon in 1863.  Abe wrote the speech himself.  It contained his real emotions and his own words.

Today’s political ramblings are group efforts that are more concerned with being acceptable than exceptional.  None of the well-heeled politicos currently running for office sit and write their speeches.  There is no creativity to them.  They are filled with jargon and cliche.  How can we know what a candidate really believes when his proclamations are phrased by others?  God forbid that a candidate should give a speech with nothing written before hand.

Now we are immersed in an ocean of speeches filled with meaningless, sugary phrases such as “real change”, “I am a maverick” and “I fought for you”.  I wonder if the gas bags who wrote the speeches and serve as the brains behind the beauties should be the ones who sit in high office.  At least, they will remember what they said.

Dear Senator Specter…

Please, in the name of all that is holy in the lexicon of the free market, do not vote to pass the “Bail Out”.  In general terms, a free market must be able to eliminate those products, companies and institutions that are not healthy or no longer provide the services that they were created for.  The practices of all the financial institutions that led to their demise in our current situation must not be allowed to continue.  How can you even think of rewarding practices that, by a healthy free market economy, should be eliminated?  Upon the fertilizer of failure, the success of the future is built.  Let these fall and better ones will rise.  We, the people, can handle the suffering that will ensue.  We cannot abide by a government that rescues poorly run banks, investment firms and mortgage companies at the expense of the individual.  I have no debt myself and hope to never incur another.  I learned by being able to fail.  Let the strength of the individual build our future, not the halls of government.