New Story of The Old

 I have decided to launch into my fifth novel. . .

In bright autumn morning sunshine, Noal descended stairs from his little apartment. The daily street-level traipse of nine blocks brought him through a few downtown streets of the Blue Ridge mountain town of  Ultramont. To Inland Press he would traipse, and his office desk, from whence he would conduct business that would change the world, or at least he liked to think so. A journey of a thousand miles, or a thousand years, has to start somewhere. 

  Walking past that familiar old white clapboard mansion, Noal paused for a moment to ponder, for the umpteenth time, the soft stone face of an angel. 

A hundred or so years ago, Elizabeth Finch—enterprising lady that she was— had been supervising the arrangement of her life-project, Mountain Aire Homestead. She had instructed the gardeners to place the angel in the yard, in front of her little mansion project.

Whenever Noal would amble by the angel, he could not help but retrieve in his mind some age-old memory. Whether the flicker was his own imagination, or some ancestral snippet, retrieved from some person, place or thing of long ago, maybe even far away , he had not yet determined. But hey, who knows about such things? Maybe someone, somewhere, understood. He was still trying to figure it all out. 

Maybe the angel, or the idea of an angel, had drifted down from heaven. God forbid that it might have trummeled up from the nether regions. 

Noal had never seen a real angel anyway, so how could he know? He was not even certain that such a thing as an angel exists. I mean, he had been taught, from an early age, that there was such a thing as an angel. It was known to be the celestial being that had stood, with its angel-twin, just outside the gates of Eden after Adam and Even had been banished because they had screwed up when they heeded the counsel of that frickin’ ole serpent who had been hanging around trying to stir up trouble, before he finally managed to bust through the Elohim hegemony with his apple trick.  

The guard angels, outside the garden, had been assigned from on high.   

Their duty--or so it was written-- was to prevent Adam and Eve from getting back into the special venue, wherein they had been birthed into the physical world, but then later ejected,  in a time so long ago and so far away. But this is a delicate subject.

Yes, 't'was so long ago, and so far away, in a garden far, far away from this place.  Moses had, back in the day, given an account of it.  Noal would be perplexed to find the manner in which he would—or even could—contemplate the ancient account of what had had happened in times past. Furthermore, how, now, could he find, or carve out? a niche of his own in this present arrangement. . . as he was strolling to work that fateful morning.

(to be continued)

King of Soul

The Peril of An Emperor

 Napolean Bonaparte had a nephew, known as Napolean III, who was elected President of France in 1848.

Later, in our modern era, 2001,  historian David Ovason gives an account of Napolean III’s accession to power and his later demise: 1848-1870. 

Ovason’s report on Napolean III is found in chapter 4 of  his book, The Secrets of Nostradamas, published through Harper Collins in 2001.

In chapter 5, David  Ovason wrote:

“When elected to the Presidency, (Napolean III) he swore an oath to remain faithful to the democratic Repubulic, even while working to overthrow this by having himself made Emperor. This aim he achieved by stealth, finally by coup.”

Reporting further, in that book mentioned above, on the Napolean III reign, David Ovason explained more in his book about the course of Napolean III’s destructive leadership among the French people:

“On December 2, 1851, after exertions to ensure that his own conspirator-supporters were established in important positions of power, he carried out his coup, and was declared Emperor a year later. after he was raised to a position where he might exercise that absolute by which he was corrupted even more. . . 

“Napolean changed laws to weaken the positions of the republicans and resorted to wholesale deportation of his political enemies, while his cudgel-bearing secret police, the ratapoils, terrorized the republicans. When the Empire fell (partly due to Napolean III’s incompetence at ((the battle of)) Sedan in 1870), the Bordeaux Assembly recognized the extent of the crimes and tyranny of renard Napolean III, declaring him responsible for the ruin, invasion and dismemberment of France.”

My question:  Does any of this sound relevant to our present situation in America, where we have the original—the very first, in 1776— Republic of the modern Age— a Republic that was founded only 18 years before the original French Republic?

Are we witnessing historical insurrection, Napoleonic style, being repeated in 2024, trumpian style? 

God forbid! Sacre Bleu! May it never be.

Glass half-Full

Riding the Rails of Time

 Way back yonder in time. . . back in the day, the Brits came up with a thing called a railroad. It was a mighty amazing beast.

I mean, it looked like a beast, huffin’ and puffin’ and blowin’ off steam while rollin’ along on a steel rail like nobody had ever seen before. 

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

As time rolled on, their upstart yankee brethren, cousins and heirs in America, joined the great importation of industry into human history; the outcome was a thing called the industrial revolution. There’s a lot could be said about that, but today I’m a-thinkin’ about the railroad’s impact on even older human invention: music

Way back in the annals and the windmills of my baby-boomer memory there’s a whole a train-yard of trains rollin’ through my Rowland memory.

The first one I can remember is “I’ve  been working on the Railroad, all the live-long day. . . Can’t you hear the whistle blowin. . .” Then there’s the juvenile-sounding “Freight train, freight train, goin’ down the track.” 

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

And I remember, back in the day, 1950's, layin’ in bed at night, with  transistor radio tuned into the darkness and here comes the voice of Brook Benton singing “Rainy Night in Georgia”:  he’s hobo’in’ on a boxcar. . .where

"the distant moanin’ of a train seems to send a sad refrain through the night. . .“so I take my guitar”. . . “It’s a rainy night in Georgia. . . Lord, I believe it’s rainin’ all over the world.”

On a lighter note, there’s the ole “Chattanooga Choochoo” from back in ’30’s or somewhere. . . not to mention (although I will) so many other classics: Wreck of the Old ’97, Orange Blossom Special, Wabash Cannonball.

When my generation came along, we were inspired to hear a highly commendable batch of contributions to the rail-song legacy. . . Peter Paul and Mary’s plaintive voice as she so tunefully lamented . . .

. . ."If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.  .  . you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles."

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

 But movin' right along on the American side, I cherish Steve Goodman’s masterpiece, City of New Orleans,  performed so admirably by Arlo Guthrie, after Arlo’s pappy, Woody, had sung, back in the day, a whole car-load of railroad (and other) good ole songs. Later on down the timeline, the Doobie Brothers cranked up their “Long Train Runnin’”, one of the greatest rock rhythms that ever rolled down a songway rail.

 And I shan’t neglect to mention Casey Jones. And what about ole John Henry swingin’ his way into railway history. . . and Tom and Dick Smothers blowin’ comical commentary hot air about the intercontinental railway being joined up at Promontary Point Utah

, where, as brutha Tommy used to tell it, they "drove a big golden spike" to commemorate the Union of East and West by way of the Railway.

Meanwhile, up at the maple leaf coast-to-coast nation, there’s Gordon Lightfoot rollin’ up his absolutely profound Canadian Railroad Trilogy.

I mean, there were so many of them that, long about 1977, I had to roll my contribution into that long train of rail songs. Listen:

Underground Railroad

Ecliptical Rant

 Here comes the sun

chasing the dark side of the moon.

The joker tried to chase away our American tune.

The joker tried to turn our Dome to Doom!

But Oh say can you see, in the 2121 light?

What we so proudly maintained after your riotous fight!

Why’d you have to screw it all up?

We had a good thing going till you showed up.

Now it’s us v them

what used to be peaceable  repub v  dem

Now we got a elephant throwin’ his weight around

Tearing our American dream down.

Washington prob’ly turnin’ over in his grave

home of the brave now riot for the knave.

Us and them all over again

though we’re just ordinary men.

Now here come the sun chasing the dark side of the moon

Figure it out pal; it time you change yer tune.

I mean why’d you have to get contentious

instigating magas to be so dam vicious?

I mean w’ere trying to assemble a team here

to work together toward  American dream so dear

to us

In God we trust!

Hop on the bus Gus

Drop you plans for Capitol bust!

in land of free,  home of the brave

not the battleground of the knave.

I mean there we were with one small step for a man and

you perverted the leap with  your command

So we don’t have a decent country any more

cuz you busted open that insurrection door!

You violated the liberty of our open door;

you dragged in that babylon hoar

cuz you just had to put on your 5th ave suit

and step out there and shoot

our Rule of Law

now with open wound made raw

yeah, you, with your elliptical rant

But we be insisting you can’t

get away with it!

We shan’t let you do it any more

cuz this aint 5th Avenue with busted golden door.

This is America!

not heretica.

You aint in jersey shore no more donnie boy.

This nation aint your casino toy!

Oh donnie boy the pipes the pipes are calling

while your insurrection gangs are falling!

In our Courts they be going down

cuz you took your shot from downtown.

The rioters be goin down like flies

as maga Court defenses  dies

They be squirmin in them prison cells

They be repenting from their rebel hells.

So you think the mouth shall rise again?!

Think again my friend.

Cuz Jack Smit he be jump'in o'er your cannon trick

after your failed rendition of  worn-out plan like tricky dick.

No not here this ain't no watergate re-run

sneakin 'round with fakey delegate plans undone!

Its all over but the shoutin’

Yeah yeah yeah hush yer pountin'.

Glass half-Full

Good Ole Mel

 Mel Brooks? Mel Gibson? Mel Torme? Melchizedek?

Yeah,that’s it. Melchizedek. It all goes back to good ole Mel, Melchizedek, whoever he was.

When you’re an ole guy,72,  like me, you have all these unidentifiable names, images, phrases, vaguely remembered snippets of this, that and the other floating around in your head. 

Maybe the cinematic recorder in my babyboomer head was ringing up some neuronic association of a hollywood producer who had floated images into my head, or maybe some necktie-bound, old-school nightclub singer who had crooned  love-song hopes into my brain while I was watching Ed Sullivan show, back in the day before we had the Web, back in the day when we had a boobtube in the living room.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that’s what I was thinking of . . or 

Maybe it goes back further than that. . . Melchizedek?

Who was that guy anyway? Some important guy that Abraham had met back in the day, back in the wayback Torah movies. You know, the ones where Moses parted the waters so his enslaved people could escape slavery and enter the promised land. 

Promised land? Good luck with that. I mean, you can’t take this stuff too seriously. . . you’re liable to get flung into the concentration camp, or worse, the gas chamber,  or neglected at the oscars or neglected at the grammys or maybe just pass into mediocrity, the veils of history, forgotten forever like your granny, or maybe remembered in some museum somewhere.

Did I say “promised land”? Yeah, that’s the place that Moses caught a glimpse of before the Lord took him to the real promised place. That’s the place that Dr. King caught a glimpse of before the magamaniacs shot him dead the next day. 

Wait, I remember now. That’s the place that Abraham went to when he left the old country, when he somehow managed to escape Auschwitz and jump on a boat that took him to New York harbor where he caught a glimpse of Lady Liberty, who was, methinks, Abraham’s cousin, and then he got off the boat and settled in the lower east side for awhile.

And then I think he headed west again, all the way to the newest version of promised land, California.

Yeah, that was it; that’s what I was thinking of. . . Mel in Hollywood. It all comes back to me now. How can I forget about good ole Mel? I catch a glimpse of his work every time that promised land crosses mind, every time I sit in my easy chair and look at my back yard, my own little promised land, my own little acreage that I was bequeathed, having driven a stake in the ground and declared that God and the county.gov granted it to me, after I had paid my dues and taken a few turns on the great mandala.

I mean, we paid for it, me and my wife, back in the day. Maybe one of these days I’ll leave it all behind and go see Abraham, Martin and John and. . . and Mel. Maybe I’ll meet Plato and we’ll talk about the shadows on the wall. Maybe I’ll meet Pythagoras and we'll talk about triangles and Trinity and the good ole days back in the old country. Maybe I'll catch up with Mel himself. We'll sit in chairs and reminisce.

Maybe one day! Yeah, that’s it. I believe it could happen, at least that’s what Mel’s great-great nephew said after he walked out of the tomb on Sunday morning. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. 

Hope to see you there! 

Glass half-Full

George Harrison's Weeping Guitar

 When you get old, like me, you reminisce a lot. . . or, as Sonny Bono, sang it: remonisce.

I mean, I can still remember the day I was out in our Baton Rouge yard, mowing our lawn in 1967, racing through it so that I could get back into—as the Beach Boys had so perfectly harmonized it—“in my room, in my room”—where I could listen to the Beatles’ brand new Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We had no idea what it . . .

When I had finished the mowing, I retreated to the inner sanctum, cranked up the ancient “record-player”(about the size of a suitcase, dark wood casing with a dark fabric panel in front to soften the sound) and suddenly there’s Ringo singin’. . .

“What would you think if I sang out of tune, if I stand up and walk out on you?   Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song and I’ll try not to sing out of key. I get by with a little help from me friends. . .”

It all comes back to me now. Who the heck is Billy Shears? What is going on here? Whatever happened to:   "She was just seventeen; you know what I mean, and the way she looked . . ."

And for that matter. . . who is Sgt. Pepper? (. . . we were wondering, at first. If you’re not a baby boomer, don’t worry; you’d have to have been there. . .) Even so, stay with me. There's a media/cultural history lesson to be learned from us old folk.

Paul McCartney expressed the feeling well on that Sgt. Pepper album, even though he was a young dude at the time:

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering. . .”

But now,  in this case, I'm going to fix a hole by allowing my mind to wander a bit. Wander with me.

So now, 57 years later, I’m getting a few answers. They’re out there in the 21st-century version of boobtube/idiotbox. . . the internet. Here’s some guy telling me all about the contentions that those fab four guys were going through back in the day. Turns out, it was no  walk in the park, certainly no Hyde Park, no strawberry fields forever. It was, in fact, most of the time, a hard day’s night for Beatle George, tolerating the power-tripping (ha! tripping, get it?) manipulations of John and Paul, but mostly Paul. 

I mean, I always knew—or at least I had figured out by, say, the 1980’s, that Paul was the real spark plug of that band. He was the real music guy, the real control freak, which is why, I suppose,  John could start a highly contagious rumor that Paul was. . . barefooted, or no longer of this world or. . . something like that. Paul and John had this quite effective good guy-bad guy public melodrama going on; it rendered them a powerfully productive public image that ultimately took them around the world and back. 

Well, as it turned out, in 1967, Ringo was opening that first Sgt. Pepper invitational anthem with the “if I sang out of tune” soliloquy (see lyrics above) by belting it out so bravely on behalf of his fellow-Beatle, George, because—come to find out—George was, all along, and for all fab-four time, the beaten-down Beatle.

I just watched an online behind-the-scenes exposition of that sad-but-true, chronic Starr-Harrison, shared rejection scenario.  It ain't easy backing up the dynamic Lennon/McCartney duo: one song-writer genius and one working class hero with a flair for outrageous poetry and showmanship. ( In one performance, while performing for the Queen, John had released the audience from any obligation to clap by explaining they could just "rattle your jewels.")

Anyway, getting back to 2024, the musician/documentarian James Hargreaves pulls back, online, a time/media curtain to reveal the sad-but-true saga of George with his faithful drummer friend Ringo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEKwAv3cKYU&t=601s 

 As it turns out, George really was the neglected genius, a guitar wizard hidden behind the curtain, among that fabulous four genii.

". . .with every mistake we must surely be learning."

I mean, we always knew that George was the quiet one, possibly even the neglected—the unappreciated— one. As it turns. . .  he was. He was the tortured soul who really meant it when he later sang the hauntingly  beautiful, profound—even Shakespearian-level tragedy—musical lament :  While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJDJs9dumZI

". . .with every mistake we must surely be learning." Thank you, George, wherever you are.

King of Soul

What Violence Descends Into

 Long about the 1600’s, and into the 1700’s, the Western world began to change in very big way. People started to think a lot more, ponder new economic ideas, revise old philiosphies, and invent new devices. 

We are talking here mostly about Europe, as the New World was still at that time, mostly wilderness, although we Americans were certainly destined to ultimately play a huge role in all the changes that brought about the modern world. 

That period of time is called the Enlightenment. The ideas of Life, Liberty and the  Pursuit of Happiness represented a progressive development in the conduct of governments and industries. Our American version was represented in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the steady development of our American government. 

A very important development in Europe was the industrial revolution. This progress brought into plain view a certain characteristic of civilization that has always been true, but became even more intense in the Industrial age: the rich get richer and the poor take a while to catch up, if they ever do.

Back in the 1830’s, Karl Marx noticed this and pointed out that, in the new order of things, this widening differentiation was intensifying into a confrontation between the people who do the work and the people who run the show. The workers he called proletariat; owners he called capitalists. 

Well, this philosophical/economic division has, since that time, evolved into a major identity differentiation that is oversimplified in the terms, the Left and the Right. Another loosely categorized expression of it has evolved to Democratv. Republican.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I really want to write about here is use of violence of either side to try to impose their program on the rest of us.

Looking back again to the Marxian analysis: as that developed, history witnessed the issue of violence used as a means of imposing progress. 

In early 20th-century Russia, the Bolsheviks harnessed some wild ideas to the extreme economic and military extremities of that time. There was a dispute about tactics in which, ultimately the strong man won the whole kitnkaboodle.

Josef Stalin, with his ruthlessness, prevailed over Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was sent packing; Stalin took control and set up trials in the ’30’s which led to an oppressive system of gulag prisons.(which Solzhenitzen wrote about) Josef Stalin was a bully who grabbed the Marxist idealogues by the balls and twisted Communism into authoritarian Fascism. So Stalin was a bad-boy dictator.

Meanwhile, down in Germany, an even more bruthal badass was mustering up a wehrmacht to out-do the Russian bully-bear.

Hitler was cunning, even more cruel that Stalin. He didn’t think twice about telling lies; he was the father of 20th-century strong-man fascism, a master of deception. He set up the most massive killing administration that the world have ever seen—the final solution  of the third reich, a Holocaust to kill all the Jews and other critics of nazi extremities.

Hitler made a deal with Stalin in 1939, not to attack Russia. Good luck with that, thought the civilized people of Europe. Then hitler reversed himself two years later. and attacked Russia anyway.  

That’s what bullies do. This gets around to my main point. As these Left v Right confrontations intensify—and then degenerate into real enmity, the tough guys are always behind the scenes waiting for their opportunity to turn civilized politics into violent overthrow. The stalinists took over Russia; the nazis took over Germany. The maoists took over China. The Viet Cong took over Vietnam. blah blah blah. . .

 Violence, in 20th and 21st century infrastructure, ultimately descends into violent insurrection, if not—dare we say it—civil war.  God forbid it doesn’t happen here. 

I mean, (wake up!) it already did . . . on January 6 2021.

Never again!

All ye Constitution-abiding Americans, do not allow the magas to follow their chief insurrectionist (see our 14th Amendment, Section 3) into a violent overthrow of our Constitutional Republic. They already had one failed attempt. The so-called Right-wingers are disposing of their classic conservatism (which was legitimate) and permitting the loudest bully on the block to incite them into a (blahblahblah) abuse of 2nd-amendment rights to foment of fascist rebellion. 

As we used to say back in the Deep South, where I was born in 1951 and grew up, Never Again! A few years ago, I wrote a novel about it:   King of Soul

Listen to my new third-verse for our National Anthem:  

Star-spangled Capitol