Evolution of American Protest

 (also known as Don’t do this; don’t do that.)

1774:

“Don’t Tread on Me!”   

 Patriot Christopher Gadsden designs a serpentine symbol to depict--and protest--the tyranny of the British king, George III.

1863:

Don’t Destroy our Union!

President Abraham Lincoln commemorates the brave sacrifice of soldiers at Gettysburg who gave their lives in the cause of keeping our United States united.

“. . . we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  

       President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg battlefield dedication.

1881: 

Don’t fling me in dat briar patch! 

Southern author Uncle Remus documents the struggle--the desperate plea of B'rer Rabbit as he pleads with B'rer Fox not to inflict a most dreadful fate. 

  "Do anything you want with me – roas' me, hang me, skin me, drown me – but please, Br'er Fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch"

    B’rer Rabbit, as reported by Uncle Remus, later consecrated as classic myth by Walt Disney's crew of cartoonists.

1920-1930:

Don’t take away our booze!  George Cassiday 

1953:

Don’t mess with my blue jeans!  Marlon Brando

1955:

Don’t mess with my blue jeans.   James Dean

1956:

“Don’t Step on My Blue Suede Shoes” 

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uke1B0FpIZ8    Elvis Presley

1969:

“Don’t you know its gonna be all right.”   John Lennon

“You say you want a revolution; well you know, we all wanta change the world. You tell me that it’s evolution; well you know, we’d all love to change the world; but when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out. Don’t you know it’s gonna be allright!

1972:

"Don’t mess around with Slim."  Jim Croce

“You don’t Tug on Superman's cape
 You don’t spit into the wind
 You don’t pull the mask off that ole Lone Ranger, and
 You don’t mess around with Slim”

2000:

Don’t mess with my jeans! 

2021:

Don’t mess with my genes!  

Glass Chimera

That is the Question

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

to be a law-abiding citizen of our USA,

or a rebel at the Capitol insurrection?

to be constructively active in our American way,

or to wreck our Capitol on a trumped-up suggestion?

 

To do, by riot, what ought not to be done?

No! let them do the right thing and repair our Union!

To assault our Capitol in another riotous run?

No! but by orderly governance cast out the confusion!

So on August 18 the trumpers didn’t come

for another riotous Capitol run.

Selah.

Glass half-Full 

The Nucleotides of Life

 The story I wrote about genetic engineering and buried treasure in New Orleans is found in Glass Chimera, which I published in 2008.

In the novel, Robby Davis is student of microbiology at Theseus University in the year 2000, four years after Dolly the sheep had been cloned in Scotland. Under the tutelage of Dr. William Theseus, Robby is studying DNA, and the nucleotides of which its double-helix strand is composed.

Robby has also recently developed a fascination with a certain young lady, Rosa. On one particular evening, Robby and Rosa are strolling along on the levee in New Orleans. Here's the scene in chapter 12 of Glass Chimera: 

            “Life is incredibly complicated,” said Rosa as she watched, across the river, the West Bank shimmering from daytime browns and grays into nightly jeweled darkness. Then she turned, looked at her new friend.  Reflections from the cityscape were like sparks in her eyes. A breeze whispered.

            Ever the dork, Robby downshifted his own musings into a credible follow-up: “You know how complex a computer is?” It was half question, half answer.

            “Yes.” 

            “As incredible as it all is—what people can do with computers—its all based on memory systems of only two characters: zero and one.”

            “Uh-huh. They make up bits and bytes.” She pulled the band off her pony-tailed hair, and it cascaded gloriously upon her shoulders.

            “As seemingly infinite as all those combinations are, based on only two characters—the composition of the biological world is based on four characters.”

            “Oh yeah?”

            “Yeah.  G, A, T, and C.”

            “The T is thymine.  I remember that one.”

            “Thymine, cytosine, guanine, and adenine: building blocks of DNA. So, while artificial intelligence is constructed upon a base of two, original  intelligence of the natural world is built upon a base of four.”

            “As if the possibilities of a two-based system were not great enough to do everything that needed doing.”

            “Yeah. Whatever multiplicity of permutations can be assembled, or even conceived, with the two-base system is then squared and cubed exponentially by the expansion into a system built upon four.  It’s mind-blowing, isn’t it?”

            “Like I said, life is complicated, . .”

Glass half-Full

The Mournful Sound

An Attack of Volcanic proportions Erupted through New York City skyline 

The two-jet Assault inflicted a Crash of Earthquake proportions, which collapsed the World Trade Center into a heap of smoking rubble: the deadliest 911 emergency in American history, on the morning of September 11, 2001, a day that lives in infamy.

9/11

More than 3000 dead.

But our dreadfully mournful sound goes back much further in time.

We had more than 2400 dead at the Pearl Harbor attack 60 years earlier, December 7, 1941, a remembered date that has persisted in infamy. The mournful sound on that day arrived as  whining engines of Japanese dive bombers. 

One appropriate way to ponder the tragedy of such immense death-events is to listen to the  sound of tragedy, as it has been rendered to music. On this 20th 9/11, I recommend Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, as performed by the Detroit Symphony:

Barber Adagio

Another military attack comes to my mind when considering the panorama of tragedy in this country’s history.

On June 25, 1879, our 7th Cavalry, commanded by General George Custer, attacked Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho people in the battle of Little Big Horn, which was fought in Montana, June 25-26, 1879.  700 American soldiers died. The death toll among the victimized natives is not known.

In that tragic battle, we white-privileged attackers were the aggressors.

44 years ago, this was the  mournful sound that I composed while pondering that tragedy:   

Sitting Bull’s Eyes     ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u71LxQ4YDb0)

Smoke 

The Manipulation of Dissent

 Stalinist Russia’s oppressive control of eastern Europe lasted for about forty-five years. The Czech and Slavak dissent that ultimately succeeded in driving the Soviets out of their region was a long, clandestine groundswell of popular discontent.

After the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989, a prime motivator and spokesman in that freedom movement, Vaclav Havel, was elected President of the first post-communist Republic of Czechoslavakia, A few years later, the new nation split into two separate republics.

 

From 1975 to 1986, Czech writer Karel Hviždala conducted an ongoing clandestine autobiographical interview with Vaclav Havel, who was already an internationally recognized playwright. 

Their interview was later published in a book, Disturbing the Peace,  by Alfred A. Knopf in 1990.

 

The contents of that periodic exchange between two dissident Czechs provides  profound insight into the interaction—sometimes constructive, sometimes confrontational— of conservative and activist resistance factions under the weight of a repressive regime.

 

But strangely, the internal strategic disagreements between those Czech groups reminded me of recent disagreements in our American cultural and political scenario.

 

Vaclav Havel describes the conditions that would be required, as stated by a certain bureaucrat, to allow a compromise between dissidents and the Party bureaucracy. This dispute was regarding a confrontation that came up in 1965. 

 

Havel explains the situation this way:

 “ . . . we (dissidents)  (would be required) to come out and say exactly what we were. But such a thing can only be suggested by someone who subscribes to an ideology and believes that anyone who doesn’t subscribe to it must therefore subscribe to another ideology, because he can’t imagine anyone not subscribing to an ideology.”

 

So the bureaucrat's proposal was more about identity politics  than about the actual issues that the discontented Czechs were trying raise.

 

This description of communist politics in 1965 seemed, to me, eerily similar to our present American political and cultural skirmishes. Nowadays in the land of the free and home of the brave, you have to declare yourself one identity or the other. There is no more in-between.

No more middle in America. According to our 2021 way of practicing politics, you’re either a socialist democrat or a trump republican. 

 

 

I don’t like it one bit.

 

Glass Chimera

Up on Cloud Nine

Somewhere back there in time . . . I think it was long about ’67 or so, I went to The Who? concert in my hometown. Right in the middle of the event, as they were singing raucously about the existential crisis of growing up in my g-generation, suddenly Pete Townshend’s up there swinging his guitar around like an axe, tearing up amplifiers and microphones and actually wrecking the whole stage.

It felt like a wild dream. Maybe the ’60’s were a dream; I don’t know. As to whether they were a good dream or a bad one, I guess it would depend on whether you had to go to Vietnam, or not.

This Who memory returned to me yesterday, along with a host of other old episodes, drug up from the vaults of time. 

A few days ago, my friend Fred loaned me a book, Richard Perry’s autobiography, Cloud Nine, about his life and his many years producing records with famous and and infamous rock stars.

There was no mention, so far, in his book of the Who’s infamous in-concert destruction, but the trail of memories that Richard retrieves from those halcyon days is quite a trip, if you catch my drift.

After putting the book down for a few minutes, with my mind full of those old rock memories, I felt like Guy Noire, pondering life’s persistent questions. 

Questions like . . . who the heck was Billy Shears?

Well gollee, y’all. Richard Perry answers that question in his book! 

So I was reading Cloud Nine while whizzing through a cloud at 30,000 ft. This musically trained kid in Brooklyn had, during the course of his lifetime, finagled his groove through Brooklyn and Detroit, Los Angeles and beyond, into a high-flying career, the recollection of which makes for some interesting reading.

The guy started his career before Elvis even  had a hound dog. Through his retelling of those long-gone days, I learned who was responsible for naming the new musical trend,  rock ’n roll. . . where the new vibes had originated (Cleveland) and the DJ guy who coined the phrase that Freed our g-generation to go hog wild with the twist and the frug, the watusi and the whatsittoya, instead of us being confined to the ancient foxtrot.

It pays to read books, y’all! You can learn stuff from them.

This world is about much more than what’s gleaming at you through online pixels and phony phone spells.

Remember my  prediction here, kids. There will come a day when you discover that ancient manuscript, the Book!

Richard’s book turned me on to the backstories of Dave Brubeck changing the world with 5/4 time, how Streisand got her groove back when she came to a stony end, how Fats Domino made a comeback, the struggle that Nilsson had with his quest for love, which is tragic but I guess that’s just the way the story goes.

And there are so many stories out there, y'all!

In the mists of Cloud Nine we catch backstory glimpses of a half-century of grooves and boob-tube whooswhos . . . we hop on an irregular  magical mystery tour, including the behind the scenes breakups, shakeups and wakes of that Act you’ve known for all these years and . . .  who the heck is Billy Shears?

But seriously, so much happened back in the 20th-century and you may remember a lot of it with a little help from your friends. 

We might even all get up and dance to a tune that was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long, long time ago.

If y’all catch some ole rock ’n roll memory trails,  you  can thank Alan Freed for rock ’n roll, and before him there was Bo and Satchmo, Fats, BB, Chuck, Sam Cooke   and Dave and  Barbra and even Ed Sullivan and the act you’ve known for all these years, along with the lovable Billy Shears!

So go read a book! Learn some stuff.

Any book.

King of Soul