We Can't Make it Here (including the iPhone)

By James McMurtry

Sometimes my song, "We Can't Make it Here," seems a bit naive. It's still a pretty good song, and songs don't have time to be fair and balanced. Songs are mostly about emotion. So I still sing it. But I read the New York Times a couple of Sundays ago, and I now understand why we can't competitively produce iPhones here. It seems that Steve Jobs was not happy with the easy to scratch plastic screen on his prototype iphone and demanded that the screen be made of scratch resistant glass. Making good glass is not a problem in the U.S., Corning has been doing it forever. Cutting glass to specs at a competitive pace is a different matter. After the meeting at which Jobs expressed his dissatisfaction, one of his execs booked a flight to China, where he knew there was a factory that could mobilize three thousand workers on a moments notice, by which I mean, waking them up in their dorm beds, putting them on the production line, and training them to cut the glass for the iPhone screen. Corning did get the contract to produce the glass and a Corning plant in Kentucky was revived. But now, Corning is building plants in Asia to save on time and shipping costs. It takes thirty five days to ship glass from Kentucky to China - not competitive.

The Times article did a good job of detailing the intricacies of modern production. Cell phones employ materials from around the globe. The article mentioned, but did not dwell on, "rare metals from Africa". A memory rose from my mind like a pre-historic fish, long thought to be extinct. I was in a bar in Austin. The guy to my right was some kind of computer person, a nice enough fellow, but most of what he talked about was incomprehensible to me. Yet, he told a story that I at least partially comprehended. He told me that there is a rare metal in the Congo. This metal is necessary for the miniaturization of circuitry, without which, there would be no cell phones of any kind. People dig large chunks of this metal out of creek banks and carry it out on their heads, at gun point. The people who harvest this metal are slaves. So are the Chinese workers who can be forced to wake up at any time of night, paid though they are.

We can't make iPhones in this country because we don't want to tolerate slavery within our own borders. We tolerate it within the borders of other nations because, without slavery, there would be no cell phones and cell phones have come to be seen as necessary by every culture in the world. So we outsource our slavery.

People love to talk about fixing our country. The Tea Party wants to "take our country back," from whom, or to what, I'm not sure. Such talk is as naive as my song. The manufacturing jobs aren't coming back here as long as, elsewhere, there are people willing to enslave and masses of people desperate enough to be willing to be enslaved. Fixing the country would not be enough anymore. We'll have to fix the world. It could take a while.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. Full details at his official website.

Occupy: "It's common feeling and common conviction that makes a movement."

By James McMurtry

About a week ago, at the end of a short solo tour of Southwest Alaska, I wandered down to Occupy Anchorage. The camp was only a block from my hotel.

The temperature was in the single digits with a light snow. There were three tents, the first of which was wide open. Inside were four young men, two white and two native, a dog, and a propane heater.  I offered them some smoked salmon and some CDs. They took great interest in the salmon and it was quickly consumed. The white guys introduced themselves. The natives did not.

I guess I should have introduced myself to all of them, but I felt sheepish and shy, like an interloper or a tourist. They all seemed to handle the cold pretty well. I asked them if they had any tips to help Occupiers in the lower forty eight get through the winter. They shrugged. John, the dog's owner, said, "It's pretty simple. You need shelter, heat, and food." About then, a nice woman named Wendy, who lived in the neighborhood, came in with a crock of hot soup. Morale improved instantly. Wendy struck up a lively conversation with a young man named Matt, who seemed like he could become a spokesman, if the movement wanted a spokesman. He had something of a thousand yard stare from, I guessed, fatigue and constant cold.

Matt considered himself lucky to be protesting in Anchorage rather than Portland or Oakland, because the Anchorage Police were not bothering the protesters, and some officers were openly supportive of the movement, stopping by to chat and to gripe about departmental budget cuts. Matt said he thought he preferred sub zero temperatures to pepper spray, horses, and batons. He offered me some of the soup. I'd had plenty to eat and had to catch an early flight, so I declined, wished them luck, and left. I was struck by their generosity. I liked the salmon, but they needed that soup.

Historically, it's always been pretty easy for the powerful to get poor people to swing sticks at other poor people. The powerful simply have to pay the stick swingers just a little bit more than they used to pay the strikers or the protesters or whatever group is causing them annoyance; divide and suppress. Police officers may not live in abject poverty, but they're certainly not rich. They need their jobs and they're trained to follow orders. They are not paid to care whether or not they belong to the one percent that gives the orders, though I don't doubt that some of them do care anyway. I'm curious about the origin of the orders.

With regard to Occupy and Law enforcement, mayors and college presidents seemed to be charged with giving the orders, at least officially, and they are subsequently charged with taking the heat when the execution of any of their orders goes terribly wrong and produces violence, physical injury, and embarrassing YouTube videos. Politicians and Administrators don't generally like controversy, it's bad for careers. I don't think such people would give orders that would likely result in some really messy controversy, unless enough pressure were brought to bear on them that they would fear for their careers anyway. I think there are bigger forces at work here.

In October, the New York City Police Department arrested over seven hundred Occupy protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. Some were held for hours without charge. Earlier this year, J.P. Morgan/Chase, one of the recipients of the government bailout, derided by both Occupy and the Tea Party, donated 4.6 million dollars, partly in technology, patrol car laptops and such, to the New York City Police Department. This was the largest single donation ever received by NYPD. You can't tell me there were no strings attached. City Budgets are strapped. Departments are underfunded. A direct donation from a major corporation must be like manna from heaven to a police department. But of course, the department will need more in the future, and it won't get more if it turns on its new benefactor.

No one gives away 4.6 million expecting nothing in return. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is quoted as saying, "These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe, we're incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work." I wouldn't argue that NYPD, or any police department, is not worthy of such a donation, but I must question the motive and the timing.  I wonder if Mr. Dimon actually lives in the City. The few New York CEOs I've had the pleasure of dealing with all lived in Connecticut and rode limos down the Merritt Parkway to work and back. Wherever Mr. Dimon lives, I doubt he fears for his safety.

 I hear complaints that the protest is unfocused, that the protesters' rejection of traditional hierarchy renders the movement ineffective as a political force, that it has no clear message. But I don't see a problem yet. Occupy has been effective simply by coming into existence. No one organized Occupy ahead of time. A call went out and people showed up.

They're still showing up and their numbers and tenacity do have an effect. They get noticed. As for the message, one can Google Keith Olbermann and hear the message, well written by Occupy and well read by Olbermann. Basically, occupiers want to take their country back from the banks and lobbyists. Their demands aren't that different from those of the Tea Party. The two groups should join forces. They're mad about the same conditions, though they disagree on where to put the blame.

The Tea party blames the government; Occupy blames the corporations that now own the government. Is there that much difference? Ultimately, we will all have to join forces if we are to call ourselves a nation. Right now, we are too polarized to be effective. We no longer recognize each other as Americans. The mayors and college presidents who call out the riot squads apparently don't know that those are their fellow Americans getting beaten and pepper sprayed. Those are American sons and daughters. Those are American students, American librarians, American grandmothers, and American veterans, and when they get hurt, we all get hurt. The stick swinging has to stop. It serves no useful human purpose.

I've taken part in very few protests. I attended one No Nukes march in Washington D.C. in the late seventies. It seemed to be conducted mostly by old hippies who wanted to do it again, and younger people like myself who thought we were sorry to have missed the sixties. My son and I attended several anti war protests in Austin at the start of the Iraq war. Our fellow Americans screamed expletives at us as we stood on the street, but we didn't get arrested. There were some "protest for fun" types there too.

I think Occupy is different. I'll have to go to New York and check it out. I'm pretty sure the guys in Anchorage weren't out there for the fun of it. They seemed to feel that they needed to be there, that they had no choice. It's common feeling and common conviction that makes a movement. And it seems that more and more of us feel that we have no choice.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. Full details at his official website.

What Happened to the Border?

By James McMurtry

     Late in the summer of 1992, my tour manager and I crossed into the United States from Emerson, Manitoba, after a tour of Western Canada. We were tired and disheveled. The U.S. Border Patrol agent at the gate was a big man with a handle bar mustache and a big nickel plated revolver, with nice custom stag horn grips, hanging from his hip. He wore the green uniform of the era, and had a sense of humor, though a rather twisted one. He told me to pull into the bay on the left and park on the orange tarp. I did as I was told, he had a gun after all. Another officer, I think from U.S. Customs, met us at the open bay, took the customs form on which I had listed descriptions of our instruments complete with serial numbers prior to entering Canada, and told us to go into the building while he performed the inspection. The building was full of students yelling about their rights as American Citizens and silent, leather clad bikers. The bikers were not the insurance man, brand new Harley riders of today, their leathers looked live in, and they wore no helmets.  My tour manager, Danny Thorpe, now deceased, was led off into another room because he had the money. He came back only a few minutes later because there wasn't much money for Customs to count. He informed me that there was a biker by the door who wanted to kill me for parking on his tarp.

    I crossed from Emerson with my band two days ago. The place looked a little different than it had nineteen years before.  There seemed to be cameras mounted everywhere, one of which flashed brightly as we approached the booth. The woman at the window and the big man behind her both wore the blue uniform of the Department of Homeland Security. I handed her our four passports, as is now required. The woman asked the usual questions, twice asking me how long we'd been in Canada. Twice I answered that we had entered on the twenty-sixth of September. We hadn't counted our cash, so we didn't have an exact figure for the woman's queries regarding the state of our finances, but we were pretty sure we had less than ten thousand dollars. If you cross with over ten thousand dollars, you must declare it or Homeland security can seize it all. Since 1995, our only border crossings had been at busy crossings, Buffalo, Niagara, and Detroit, where we were never inspected, so we hadn't anticipated much scrutiny. The woman told us to pull up to garage door number one, and that we could have our passports back after the inspection. Where the open air parking bays had been in 1992, there was now an enclosed garage. I pulled the van up to garage door one and killed the motor. Garage door two opened and we were ordered to pull around. A stern looking woman waved us forward. There were several fast looking Japanese motorcycles parked to our left. I handed the woman the customs form and she ordered us to stand over by a stainless steel table and empty our pockets. A male officer told us to turn our pockets out so he could see that they were empty. They both wore the blue uniform, with light body armor, carried night sticks and modern, polymer framed, semi-auto pistols and neither seemed to have a sense of humor. The male officer asked me what we were bringing in from Canada. Usually they ask if we bought anything in Canada. The usual question was so ingrained in my mind that I replied, "We didn't buy anything in Canada." The male officer repeated, in a more intimidating tone,

     "What are you bringing in from Canada?"

     "Our gear", I replied.

     The woman kept grilling Tim, our current tour manager, about the money, tapping the declaration form with her index finger and telling him to answer the question of whether or not we were carrying more than ten thousand dollars cash. Her tone was that of a middle school teacher who had had enough of a disruptive student. There were two bags of cash. Daren, our drummer handles the merch money, Tim handles the gig money. We don't sell merch in Canada because the Canadians tax it too heavily for us to profit, so all the merch money had been earned in the states and carried through Canada, but there was no way to prove that. Tim counted his cash and Daren got out his paperwork and checked his figures. Now, it looked as though we had somewhat over ten grand. The officers took Tim off to another room to fill out forms and recount the money, refusing to give back his pocket knife, saying they would leave it in the van. I realized then, that I had a multi-tool in a belt pouch on my hip. They hadn't seen it under my shirt tail. I thought about offering it up but didn't. They hadn't asked if we had anything on our belts. After Tim left, the rest of us were told to wait in the waiting room, really more like a closet with a one way window through which they could see us. From the inside we could see our own reflections in the bright glare of the fluorescent lighting. The walls were cinder block and painted yellow. I didn't try the door to see if we were actually prisoners. A woman in two tone leathers sat quietly in the corner. There were two helmets on the chair next to her. In a while, a man in two tone leathers, her husband I guess, was led back into the room. She asked him if he had been treated nicely. "Oh, you know, third degree", he replied in a British accent. They were summoned shortly. As they left, I thought I heard someone say "English people are not allowed to enter this way . . . now, you're not under arrest . . . we'll have to move the bike . . ."  After thirty minutes or so, The male officer came and told us he had completed his inspection of the van and told us to pull it outside and wait for Tim. As soon as I pulled the van out, the formerly ever so stern female officer came up and asked to see Daren. There wasn't as much cash in the merch money bag as he had reported. He had forgotten to subtract credit card sales from his total, so it turned out that we had well under ten thousand dollars. We were proven innocent after only having been assumed guilty for forty minutes or so, not bad as border hassles go, but it left a bad taste. I haven't traveled the world extensively, but I've been in and out of the country a few times. I've never been treated like a suspect by officials of any nation other than my own. Sure, they have a tough job and we didn't have our shit together. But they were nasty from the get go. I don't know how such an attitude helps them do their job.

     Entering Canada was different this time, too. The U.S. officer who gave me the customs form in Sweetgrass Montana, actually insisted on looking in the van before stamping and signing the form, a first. Then, Canadian immigration charged us four hundred and fifty dollars for work permits, another first. The immigration officer folded the permits, stapled them into our passports, told us we were good until the fifth and to have a nice trip. I just took my work permit out and read it, here in Iowa. Apparently we were supposed to have stopped at the port of exit to tell the Canadians we were leaving and give the permits back. The immigration officer didn't say a word about exiting, and we'd never run into this requirement before. The last time we'd been in Canada, a couple of years before, one could simply leave Canada without a word. We'll have to get on this situation right away if we want to work up there in the future, mole hills just seem to want to turn into mountains these days. We mused on the changing world as we rolled toward Lethbridge, Alberta. Wasn't NAFTA supposed to make it easier to do cross border business?

     I spent a week in Canada and watched the news a time or two. Their news is different than our news. The Canadians are alarmed, to say the least. Apparently, we now have gun boats on the Great Lakes, drones and Blackhawk helicopters patrolling the land border. There's talk of building a fence or perhaps even a wall. What terrible threat is coming at us from Canada, I must ask? And how will we get enough Mexican Nationals to the Canadian border to build a wall? Canadians don't sneak into our country. They're doing pretty well up there, by the look of the place. Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg all looked prosperous. In none of those sprawling cities did I see the signs of poverty so often evident from crosstown freeways in the U.S., and I suspect their health care system works better than the elder George Bush would have had us believe. No doubt many of us can be fooled into thinking a wall would make us safer, keeping out drugs and terrorists, but I file such arguments under "Yeah Right". Where there are walls, there are tunnels and bribes, and most walls are built to keep people in rather than out, food for paranoid thought, given that Canada's economy is holding up relatively well, and they have the majority of the world's fresh water which will soon be the world's most precious commodity (If you doubt this, note that T Boone Pickens, former oil and gas tycoon, is now in the water rights business).  Big Brother paranoia aside, any real threat is most likely to arrive in one of the countless shipping containers I see piled up on our docks and piggy backed on train cars all over our nation. I don't know the current figure, but I remember that during the rough tough Bush administration, Home Land Security was allocated enough funds to inspect four percent of inbound shipping containers. There's no way to inspect them all. There are simply too many. So, the politicians clamor for walls, to make us think they're doing something to protect us, pad the pockets of a few construction firm and high tech CEOs, and keep the DEA funded to the gills. Meanwhile, a once friendly border grows more and more militarized and unfriendly. This can't be good for business.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. Full details at his official website.

Keeping Tulsa safe.

By James McMurtry

Why is it that small Midwestern airports have all the most up to date passenger screening equipment, while some of the busier airports do not? Do they think Al Qaeda is planning to hit us from the heartland, or is the fear index just higher out there, prompting the local politicos to bring home more homeland security dollars? Of the three times I've been ordered into the full body scanner, a cylindrical device resembling a see through version of the orgasmatron from Woody Allen's "Sleeper", one was in Tulsa, one in Green Bay(I think it was Green Bay, pretty far north and more or less up the middle), the third was somewhere east. Tulsa was a trip.

I flew to Tulsa from my home town of Austin, Texas. The Austin airport is small but often very busy. Sometimes, if one of the three checkpoints is mysteriously closed, it can take one nearly two hours to complete baggage check and security screening. I've grown used to it. I haven't noticed if the Austin airport even has one of those clear orgasmatron like machines. If so, I've never been in it.

My tour manager and I made it to Tulsa, played the gig, got paid, well, most of it, spent the night, and were back at the airport two hours before our return flight was scheduled to depart. It was Saturday, and the Tulsa airport was practically deserted. There was no line for baggage check.

There was no line for security. In the screening area, there were about fifteen TSA employees and maybe five passengers. Seemed like a bit of overkill.  After I 'd done the ex-ray conveyer dance, shedding belt, necklace, cell phone, change, shoes, pulling the lap top out of the bag and setting it in its very own bin, I noticed that I was being barked at. It was ten in the morning, the voice might have been human, it sounded like a higher pitched version of the teacher's voice from the Charlie Brown holiday specials from my childhood. I held up my boarding pass to signal that I was familiar with the procedure. The voice became more shrill, I had to focus.

"You have something in your cargo pocket!" yelled the woman behind the voice.

"Yes ma'am, that's my wallet", I yelled back.

"Take it out or they will search you."

I noticed then, that the only lane that was not taped off lead right through the orgasmascanner. Hmm. . . I wasn't familiar with the procedure after all.

The woman with the voice approached. "You have to take everything out of your pockets". I clutched my wallet, boarding pass and baggage claim checks.

She motioned me through the machine and I obeyed, but neither of us had noticed that the woman on the other side of the machine had her back turned, I realized too late that I had walked up behind a large woman with a Glock pistol on her hip. She didn't startle, her hand didn't reflexively go to her gun. She just seemed tired and slightly annoyed that I wasn't familiar with the procedure. I should have remembered from Green Bay, but Green Bay was so long ago. I was beginning to get irked. Snappy comments were bubbling their way to the forefront of my half consciousness. It was still two hours until flight time and I was wondering if I could get in some serious trouble and still get out of it in time to make my flight. What would've happened if I yelled out something on the order of "No I don't know this procedure because real airports don't bother with it and if any of you ever flew you'd know that."?

Not nice. And the woman with the Glock actually did seem professional and pretty much lacking in delusions of self importance.  She ordered me to step back into the machine, put my feet on the yellow footprints and raise my arms over my head while keeping my hands together. I did as I was told, while the ghost of Evelyn Waugh whispered, "The pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous . . ."

The machine made a rather loud noise as the scanning device circled me. I was aware that some poor soul staring at a TV monitor was seeing a good deal more of me than any of us got to see of Diane Keaton in "Sleeper". I was told to step out. The woman with the Glock (come to think of it, I guess they all had Glocks, or some such modern polymer framed hi-cap semi auto) went through my wallet and told me I was cleared. I walked to the conveyer and reassembled myself. I felt jarred somehow, more so than after the usual screening ordeal, and more jarred than I remember feeling after any of the few times that I've been bodily searched. Why is it assumed, in our culture, that an individual would rather be visually spied on than physically touched? I'm not sure which act is more invasive.

The lady with the Charlie Brown's teacher voice sure seemed to think that the threat of search would snap me into line, but I'm not sure it will next time. I don't relish being frisked but I don't like that jarred feeling the machine left me with. I doubt that the machine increases one's risk of cancer more than does life in the twenty-first century, with its constant bath of electromagnetism from cell phones and all our other necessities, but I don't like the machine. Still, I might be hesitant to request a bodily search for fear that to do so might place me under extra suspicion and increase the hassle potential in an already hassle filled day of travel.

Tim, my tour manager, was waiting in the hall when I finally got myself back in order. "Glad they're keeping Tulsa safe," he said.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. Full details at his official website. His latest album, Live In Europe, was released last year on Lightning Rod Records - read the Blurt review here.

Fear of Flying

By James McMurtry

Yesterday, I flew on Southwest Airlines flight 420 from Tampa Florida to Austin Texas. I sat in a window seat on the left side of the plane. I watched the blue waters of the gulf go by thirty five thousand feet below. I saw ships kicking up a white froth at their sterns. I saw a few oil platforms.

An hour or so into the flight, the platforms increased in numbers and so did the ships. Then the water turned, in a knife's edge, from blue to brown and boats and ships were visible everywhere. In normal times I would have thought the water was brown from silt pouring out from the Mississippi into the Gulf, but this brown stain went on further than I could see. Now the ships and boats left strange dark wakes with no white froth at their sterns. Even a Mississippi River tow boat kicks up a white wake. Some of these boats' wakes showed them to have been turning circles and triangles in the brown stuff. The brown went on for minutes, hundreds of miles, and, a ways to the west, I began to see black streaks in the brown stuff.

The captain didn't point out whatever it was, and none of my fellow passengers seemed to notice, most consumed with whatever was on their laptops and telling their life stories to all of us. Ho Hum.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. Full details at his official website. His latest album, Live In Europe, was released last year on Lightning Rod Records - read the Blurt review here.

Junk Shot or Money Shot? BP Fiddles While Rome Burns

By James McMurtry

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - BP conceded Thursday that more oil than it estimated is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico as heavy crude washed into Louisiana's wetlands for the first time, feeding worries and uncertainty about the massive monthlong spill.

Let's get something clear. BP knew, from the beginning, exactly how much oil that blowout was capable of spilling. BP is a modern oil company. Modern oil companies conduct extensive seismographic tests before committing the resources to actually drill. They can't afford a dry hole under a mile of water. They knew what was down there before they drilled the well. They had already successfully drilled several wells in that field and they know what each well produces.

Equally troubling, is that all of BP's efforts since the accident have been geared not towards plugging the leak, but rather towards recovering as much oil as possible. They talk of maybe trying a "junk shot", filling the non-functional blowout preventer with golf balls or old tires, but they haven't tried it. Perhaps they're afraid the junk shot could make matters worse, a valid fear. But it is interesting that the only procedures BP has actually tried have involved tankers. The recovery boxes froze up and failed before the oil reached the tanker. Now they've managed to insert a skinny pipe into the fat pipe that's leaking and siphon off a fraction of the oil. I guess they figure that's better than nothing. Meanwhile, the livelihoods of people who've worked the Gulf for generations are being ruined as BP officials stall and evade in a vain quest to save face and profit.

Republicans are trying to lay blame on Obama. The "drill baby drill" crowd says Obama should have imposed tighter regulations on offshore drilling. Imagine the shit storm they'd have kicked up if he had tried such a thing before the spill.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. Full details at his official website. His latest album, Live In Europe, was released last year on Lightning Rod Records - read the Blurt review here.

     Capitalism is dying, boy. It's dying of its own internal contradictions.[He was, after all, a Wall Street financier, so I listened carefully.] You think the revolution's gonna take five years. It's gonna take fifty! So keep your head down and hang in for the long haul, because I'll tell you something. The sons of bitches running things don't give a shit about their children or their grandchildren, and they certainly don't give a shit about you! They've paid their dues, and they want to get out with theirs! They're gonna sell off everything that's not nailed down to the highest bidder. Don't get crushed when it topples down. Take care of yourself and your family. If you can make a difference, do it, but there are huge forces at work here, and they have to play themselves out according to their own design, not yours. Watch yourself.     
 
       Wall Street Financier, Morris Cohon, to his son, Peter Coyote---Winter of 1969/1970

     The above passage is from Peter Coyote's excellent memoir, "Sleeping Where I Fall". In the next sentence, Coyote adds,
   
     As far as I can determine, everything he prophesied has come true.

   Sure enough, last year, 2008, balls out free market capitalism stepped on its dick and fell on its ass. We had lived a fantasy for nearly thirty years. In the interest of short term gain, Reagan peeled back New Deal banking regulations designed to avert thirties style crashes, Clinton peeled them back some more. The elder Bush knew Reaganomics was folly, he called it "Voodoo Economics" when he ran against Reagan, but by the time he got in, there was no stopping the allure of the fantasy. To step out in front of it would have been political suicide, so he didn't try. Greed was seen as a good thing, markets were deemed to be infallible. We failed to see Enron's implosion as the  microcosm for the global economy that it proved to be. Suddenly we witnessed an economic crash, the scale of which us forty somethings had been raised to believe we would never see. We had always been told we were safe now, the daddies were in charge, and they had learned from the Great Depression, they had put in safeguards . . .

Oops, they took the safeguards out, too cumbersome and restrictive of the free market.

     Yet we cling to the notion of capitalism as if it were the only thing that keeps us American.  We still demonize any form of Socialism. Long ago, the term Socialism was, in our country, linked to Soviet Communism, which was reciprocally linked to the devil. It's very easy for the right to get their base stirred up, because the buzzwords have been in place for nearly a century. All that mean little parrot, Phil Gramm, ever had to do was start squawking the words "Socialized Medicine! Socialized Medicine!", then throw in a dash of Harry and Louise and the Clinton Health Bill's threat to the private insurer and pharmaceutical corporation dominated status quo was over and done with.

     My paternal grandfather railed against the prospect of Socialized Medicine and always hated Lyndon Johnson, but he took his Medicare just like everybody else. Socialized Medicine is ok as long as we call it something else, like "Medicare". Johnson was for sure a genius, folks. Yes, he was also crooked, but he got some good things done.

    I personally, have no problem with Socialized Medicine, even when called by its proper name. To me, Socialized Medicine means the lady that checks me in at the hospital doesn't first ask me how I intend to pay for services rendered, but rather asks me, "Where does it hurt?" I know people who have had such an experience, people who live in countries that we now call Socialist, places like Britain and France, NATO allied nations who stood with us against the "Evil Empire" during the cold war, nations that were considered to be part of the free world then, Socialist attitudes toward medicine notwithstanding. True, citizens of France do pay high taxes, but they get something in return, universal free health care. Our tax money mostly goes to the military, half of it anyway. We Americans don't want our government all up in our business, so rather than pay for government health care, we prefer to pay private insurers who do everything in their power to keep from honoring claims, to keep from actually providing the care that our insurance dollars are supposed to guarantee to those few of us to whom they actually grant policies.  I don't have insurance. My insurance company was bought out by another. The new parent company staggered the premium schedule and I missed a payment while on the road with my band. I came home to find I was uninsured. That particular insurance company was lame anyway, so I didn't much care, but I dicked around and didn't get aggressive about finding a new insurer until after I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. Sure, you can argue that in this environment, my predicament is my own fault. Fair enough, I did know the rules here. But I have friends who are much worse off than I, friends for whom "this environment" is poisonous. One has a child with a bone disease. He had insurance, but his insurer was allowed to go bankrupt, leaving my friend's child uninsured with a serious pre existing condition. Texas High Risk Pool is his only option, ten thousand dollar deductible, I believe. My friend's experience is just one of many examples that illustrate the pure immorality of our healthcare for profit system.

     Healthcare for profit capitalizes on illness. To profit on drugs and surgeries one must have a steady supply of sick people. We have some very sick people among us and we seem hell bent on keeping them sick. Every time I go to the supermarket, I see fat people, and I don't just mean regular old fat, I mean grossly obese. Many are diabetic amputees in electric wheelchairs. Soft drinks seem to be a popular item with them. I don't remember seeing such people when I was a child, when I pretty much lived on Dr. Peppers, which were then sweetened with cane sugar, rather than the high fructose corn syrup used to sweeten nearly everything today, a sweetener that our bodies just don't know how to handle. I don't know if the corn lobby is in cahoots with the makers of those electric wheelchairs, but I would say the times are good for both. I make my living driving across the country, occasionally stopping at Walmart for fresh socks. I see obese people in the Walmart and miles and miles of nothing but corn from eastern Nebraska to eastern Ohio, one big cornfield. Correlation does not imply cause, but one does notice.

     I don't understand the preoccupation, fanciful or not, of the angry white people at the town hall meetings, with the notion that the government might tell them which doctor they can see. Even if the fear mongers were right this time and the government really was going to dictate to us our choice of doctors, so what? If  I could see a reasonably competent doctor for free, I'd be perfectly glad to see the doctor of my government's choice. Most of us can't really choose our doctors anyway. If we don't want to pay out of pocket, then we must find a doctor who takes our insurance. And as for the  "death panels" hysteria, we already have death panels. We call them private insurers. Insurers decide who gets coverage and who does not, in effect, who lives or dies, and they base their decisions on potential profit.  And in the arena of potential profit, white people still tend to fare better that the rest.

     I believe that our chief objection to any form of socialism is, and has always been, rooted in racism. Thirty years ago, the specter of the Cadillac driving black welfare mother was the A-Number One bogeyman for the angry white man against socialism crowd. The notion that that same Cadillac driving black woman might receive federal dollars to pay for an abortion would really get the bibles thumping(funny how fathers are always left out of the abortion equation. No one blames the irresponsible male who knocked up the Cadillac driving black welfare mother. And the same people who want to ban abortion don't seem to favor open discussion of contraception. weird).

     Now, it seems that the illegal alien has eclipsed the black welfare mom as bogeyman du jour. Our bigots have progressed. Fearing a backlash of political correctness(and subsequent loss of funding), they no longer engage in unabashed racism. Now they cloak their racism in nationalism, the second string motivator of the paranoid moron masses, easily spun as patriotism, a supposedly more noble virtue. But what sort of illegal aliens do they fear?

     I once employed an illegal alien, a tour manager from New Zealand, white fella. Once, while traveling East along interstate 10 back in the pre-Homeland Security days, we came to a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint. When the man in the green uniform asked if everyone in the van was a U.S. citizen, the tour manager simply answered, "Sure mate". The man in the green uniform was eyeing our San Antonio born and raised Hispanic bass player rather suspiciously and didn't seem to notice the tour manager's Kiwi/Aussie accent. He eyed the bass player for a second or two longer and then waved us on.

     I don't think the town hall hooligans are worried about Kiwi tour managers receiving health care on their dime. When they say "illegal aliens" they mean "brown people".

    Why would it be such a terrible thing for a brown person from another country to receive free healthcare here in the U.S.? My current bass player was recently treated for a bad flu while touring in Germany. I think the doctor visit cost about twenty-five dollars and they didn't mind that he wasn't a German citizen or that he didn't pay German taxes. He was sick, so they tried to help him.
     

We don't seem to have any trouble finding the money to fly planes halfway across the world to drop bombs on brown people. That gets pretty expensive you know. I'd be willing to bet that socialized medicine is cheaper than war. Maybe Iraqi oil revenue could pay for our healthcare, just like it paid for the invasion of Iraq . . .   right, it didn't pay for the invasion, our great grandchildren will have to do that, but when Rumsfeld put forth that wonderful piece of fiction, did any future town hall storming, bible thumping, constitution waving pissed off red faced white guy question Rummy's logic? Nope

     Europeans can be racists too. They don't necessarily like it that the dark skinned natives of their former colonies came home to them when the great colonial empires collapsed, but they grant them citizenship and extend to them the requisite benefits of citizenship while occasionally grousing about the dilution of their national character. They have their extreme nationalist factions and lunatic fringes, but they recognize them as such and for the most part behave sensibly. They're not afraid of big government, because to them, governments are service organizations designed to aid the people. And when they don't like their governments, they throw them out. Remember W's "coalition of the willing"? It consisted  mostly of our troops, a good many British, a few Aussies and Italians, and a hundred or so Spaniards. The Spaniards all went home after their people caught their government in a lie. Bombs had gone off in the Madrid Metro. At the behest of our government, the Spanish government blamed the bombing on ETA, the Basque separatist movement. The Bush administration didn't want anyone to think the bombings could have been done by Al Quaida, so they talked the Spanish government in to blaming ETA. But Spaniards aren't stupid. They're sick of ETA, but they know that ETA does not indiscriminately bomb subway stations. They saw through the lie, tossed their government out on its ass, and brought their troops home from Iraq. Spain, it seems, is an actual democracy. Perhaps we'll be a democracy someday.

   We have recently made bold strides towards democracy. We flipped the majorities in both houses of congress and voted in a President from the previously underdog party because a vast majority of us were sick of the status quo.  And I did say "vast majority".

     Obama won by a fucking landslide, people. Unlike Bush's two elections, Obama's election was nowhere near close enough to steal. We, the vast majority that voted for Obama, knew he would try to reform healthcare. So, why are the town hall mobs getting so much media attention? They can't constitute that much of the electorate. Probably, the media needs a story to sell, and they can sell it more effectively if they add suspense by making the playing field look even. Republicans aren't acting like the field is even. They are snarling like cornered wolves, booing and hissing at the President during his address to the joint session of Congress. People get mean when they feel outnumbered. Joe Wilson and his ilk can still stir up their base, but their base is shrinking.

     Still, they might block healthcare reform one more time. The drug companies and insurers have so much money with which to combat common sense, that we may have to go another round. But universal health coverage will come to the people of the U.S. and its opponents know it. The only question is, how broke will Americans have to be before they no longer care whether or not their health care system would once have been considered Socialist and rise up and demand the reform that should have been theirs long ago? It's true that when it is ultimately implemented, our newly socialized healthcare system will be an unholy mess for a while, because we don't yet know how to do universal healthcare. If we'd let President Truman have his way, and implemented universal health care sixty years ago, when the rest of the free world did it, we'd probably have our system worked out by now.

     I've noticed that some of the people who don't want healthcare reform are also upset by Obama's stimulus package. They were also upset by Bush's stimulus package, and I don't blame them. I'm upset too. I don't like it that we have to bail out the people who ripped us off, but that seems to have been the only viable course of action. Paul Krugman seems to think it worked, at least for now. From my hotel window in downtown Cincinnati, I don't see any bread lines. I'll pose a question to those who's greatest fear is socialism. Those bankers that you hate so much, those bankers whose bailouts your grandchildren will be paying for while they're also paying for the wars and maybe a bit of healthcare, those terrible evil banker people . . . are they socialists?
 

On Friday, September 19th, 2008, there was no gasoline to be found in most parts of Nashville Tennessee. The gas pumps sat eerily abandoned, their nozzles shrouded with plastic bags. The few stations that did have gas, including the Exxon across the street from our hotel, were surrounded by lines of panicked motorists that stretched for blocks. Home of the Brave. I walked over to the station. There was a news van out front. Police and station staff were directing traffic to and from the pumps and explaining to people that they couldn't just turn in because the line started three blocks to the south.

I was a bit uneasy, because we were to play in Harrodsburg Kentucky the following night and I wasn't sure how widespread the gas shortage had become. I had noticed in the preceding days that some stations in both Athens Georgia and Chattanooga were out of regular. Was the whole South out of gas? I called an acquaintance in Bowling Green who said that if I could make it that far I would have no problem. There was plenty of gas in Kentucky. We had nearly a quarter tank, just about enough to make Bowling Green.

The next night, from the safety of Kentucky, I googled "Nashville gas shortage". Not much came up, mostly blogs from Nashvillians. I didn't see any sign of national coverage. The only TV news clip I found was from the Nashville Fox affiliate. The clip reported some violence including a drive by shooting in East Nashville, and widespread hoarding. People were topping off their tanks like okies in the dust bowl. There was a shot of a woman filling a gallon plastic milk jug with gas and putting it in her car. Real smart. She didn't even bother to duct tape the cap. At least she knew to set the jug on the ground when she filled it so a static charge on the plastic wouldn't blow the whole place to Jesus.

Then came a clip of Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn repeating McCain's shrill mantra "Drill here, drill now" and blathering on about how we need to find more oil "under American soil". I guess she hasn't noticed that we are drilling here now, and have been drilling here for some time. I have cousins who work in the oil field in North Texas and they're quite busy these days. They can't keep up with demand though.  Blackburn also called for increased refining capacity. She's right on that one. We do need more refineries, and we need refineries that can handle the low grade "sour" oils  that we're mostly finding these days. It seems that, while we're still finding plenty of oil, the "light sweet crude",  that's easy and inexpensive to refine, is growing scarce. The lower grade oils have sulphur that must be removed and long molecules that must be "cracked" into shorter pieces to make gasoline.  There have recently been some promising natural gas discoveries in North Texas and North Louisiana. Why is no one advocating that we convert cars to run on natural gas? Some public transportation companies run their buses on natural gas, so the conversion shouldn't be that hard. Natural Gas burns clean and requires minimal refining. Or, of course, we could limit our driving, conserve gas? Un-American, I guess.

I noticed in one article I read that Knoxville Tennessee had had a similar shortage the weekend before the Nashville shortage. Interesting, two major shortages in two Tennessee cities on two consecutive weekends, with minimal news coverage. No one seemed to know what exactly caused the shortages. Some theorized that the hurricanes had taken Gulf state refineries off line and that evacuees had burned up a lot of gas. I know what caused those shortages, someone at the back end of the pipeline cut off the flow. Maybe the reason for the shut off was indeed that they had no more gas, but, whatever the reason, someone had to make a decision to push a button, turn a valve, or key in a command. Someone decided which town wasn't going to get their gasoline that weekend. The result was an interesting social experiment that exposed our vulnerability. I'm not referring to the vulnerability of our infrastructure, but rather, the vulnerability of our collective psyche, a much more dangerous vulnerability. Our hysterical fear of not being able to go where we want when we want renders us powerless to any force, natural or human, that would attack the physical infrastructure, and some very unscrupulous politicians are itching to exploit that fear. You can bet they were taking notes on Nashville.

We think we'll die if we can't drive. Some of us might, but most of us won't. Pipes can be fixed, rides can be hitched. We'd better learn to relax. There will be more shortages in the future and we'll have to help each other get through them.We'll have to learn not to fight over a place in a gas line. We'll have to quit hoarding and just take what we need. It's really the only way.

P.S. In my last blog, in my fumbling attempt to channel H.L. Mencken, I referred to Chuck's Fish in Tuscaloosa as a world class restaurant. It isn't world class, the flat screen TV's and SYSCO seasoned fries disqualify it from that category. And the waiter, when listing the desserts, pronounced Creme Brulee, "Cream Brulay". However, the grilled Mahi Mahi was excellent. So was the Malbec.}

HAGLER VS. SUGAR RAY, BIDEN VS. PALIN

Don't give her any more room to dance.

Near as I can glean from YouTube, The Marvin Hagler/Sugar Ray Leonard fight took place on April 6th, 1987. No one I knew at that time could believe the outcome. It was supposed to be a bloodbath. Leonard was supposed to do the bleeding.  Hagler had over fifty KO's under his Middle Weight belt. Leonard, a pumped up Welter Weight, had twenty three. Somehow, Leonard won on points.

 A couple of months later, June nineteenth, or Juneteenth , as they say in Texas, anniversary of the day in 1865 that the Texas slaves were finally told they were free, I was hanging out backstage at the Navasota Blues Festival . My lady friend, at that time, was a real good interviewer and had secured an interview with Johnny Clyde Copeland, the headliner at that festival. She and I constituted two of the four white people in attendance. Navasota is a black town in a black East Texas county. Turned out, Copeland's manager made most of his money managing boxers out of Houston. The ranch on which the festival was held was owned by a boxing promoter. The talk back stage went from music to reefer to boxing. Johnny and his guys ribbed me for not being much into pot. I remember Johnny saying, "You got fifteen dollars, you need a hair cut and some reefer, which one you gonna buy? I know which one I'm gonna buy." None of them were at all surprised by the outcome of the Leonard/ Hagler fight. They knew how it had gone down. Johnny's manager explained it very slowly. Hagler's handlers had lost the fight for him long before the first bell. They had rolled over to the Leonard camp's requests for a larger ring and heavier gloves, thus giving more room for Leonard to dance, and taking the sting out of Hagler's punch.

And now the Democrats have agreed to treat Sarah Palin with heavier, softer gloves. The Vice Presidential debates are to be question/answer, not debates at all. YOU MORONS. Palin is deadly when she has a script. Without a script, she's a Valley girl on St. Joseph's Baby Acid, unable to put together a sentence even worthy of Dubya. Had you "vetted" her any better than McCain did, you would have known this long before Katie Couric chased her back into the shadows from which she will only emerge, fleetingly, trout like, to snatch the occasional choice fly off the surface before the election. You are afraid to be accused of roughing up a woman. She's not a woman, you idiots, she's a candidate, and a very dangerous one. She's dangerous because she so . . . so . . . stupid, and she will be President if McCain is elected. McCain is about a million years old and has had four malignant melanomas, the most dangerous type of cancer. It will recur and it will kill him. The stress of the oval office would not be likely to postpone the inevitable.

I can't say I know Palin's personal beliefs, but fundamentalist Christians tend not to differentiate between acts of man and acts of God. They tend to see acts of man as acts of God through man. Man made global warming is just God's plan.  This world doesn't matter anyway. Jews are to be resettled in Israel, so they can die. Democrats are willing to let Palin get her hands on the Armageddon switch rather than risk being seen as bullies. YOU MORONS.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.

One can not order a glass of wine with one's meal on a Sunday evening in Tuscaloosa Alabama. Well, one could order a glass of wine, but the wine would not be served because it is illegal, in Tuscaloosa, for a restaurant to serve alcoholic beverages on Sunday. We drove up from New Orleans this afternoon, stopping in Tuscaloosa in the hope that we might have a fine lunch tomorrow at Chuck's Fish, a world class restaurant, before proceeding on to Birmingham. Chuck's Fish is not open on Sunday, but this evening I ventured downtown in search of a passable supper and a decent glass of wine. I was stunned to learn that I would not be served any wine, due to an archaic law of a type, referred to in my childhood, as a "blue law", a most barbaric form of legislation, designed to remind us that, despite all the freedom of religion rhetoric spewed out by most of our elected officials, we actually do have a state religion, Protestant Christianity(I say Protestant,because I've never known Catholics to care when or where one drinks). These laws make a big deal about the sabbath, but only the Christian sabbath, Jews and Muslims can defile their sabbath, Saturday, perfectly legally.

I Googled blue law and came up with an article by one David J. Hanson Ph.D. Hanson claims that the first blue law in the American colonies was enacted in Virginia in 1617. The law required church attendance and authorized the militia to force colonists to attend church services. Later, laws were enacted to regulate what one could or could not do at home on Sunday. One could not wear lace or precious metals or engage in recreation. (It's still illegal to hunt on Sunday in Virginia. So I guess Jesus was an anti hunter. Go tell the Republicans!). Sexual intercourse on the Sabbath was also banned, and since Puritans held the belief that a child was born on the same day of the week on which it was conceived, parents of children born on Sunday were often punished for violating the blue law nine months before. At some point, the main focus of the blue laws shifted to alcohol.
 
In Texas, we have dry counties, where one can't purchase alcohol on any day of the week, but they are usually pretty far out in the sticks, where anyone accustomed to a fine Barbera is not likely to be ordering a meal in a public place. Compared to these places, Tuscaloosa is Paris. It's a major college town, home to the University of Alabama, with at least one fine restaurant, yoga classes, all the trappings of reasonably refined modern culture, but it is still under the thumb of the nine hundred foot Jesus. I suppose it's not the end of the world that I couldn't get my wine, but I surely hate being denied something in order that others might get to continue to believe they're going to heaven. 

We now have a Vice Presidential candidate who, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, inquired of the librarian of the Wasilla Public Library, how to go about getting certain books that offended the mayor's Christian sensibilities pulled from the shelves. Here's my suggestion to Sarah Palin, and anyone else who likes to legislate the morality of their fellow humans. Move to the dry county of your choice and live your life as you see fit. Refrain from activities that you think Jesus wouldn't allow. Let the rest of us drink and read what we want in merry anticipation of fire and brimstone, if you believe in that sort of thing.    

WHITE MEN AND THEIR TOYS

I don't think the super rich are evil, but I fear they are out of touch--and that's dangerous.

Car traffic on the interstate highways has thinned out a bit in recent months, but the number of privately owned Prevost tour buses seems to have remained constant. The Prevost, squared off and boring looking, long ago replaced the more flamboyant looking Silver Eagle as the preeminent mode of band transportation, but most of the Prevosts I see on the highway don't appear to be hauling bands. Bands don't tow cars behind their buses, and most of the buses I see have some sort of SUV in tow. No, these buses, burning $4.50 a gallon diesel by the tanker load, are hauling rich people, and there are a whole bunch of them. One of these guys is a fan of ours who likes to drive his bus up from Lake of the Ozarks Missouri to Kansas City whenever we play at Knuckleheads. Our stock rises when he shows up because he parks his bus in front of the club and everybody thinks it's ours. Once, he came up towing his BMW. Somewhere in the blackness south of Jeff City, the driver noticed an orange glow in the side mirror and pulled over to find that the BMW was on fire. The owner simply unhitched the Beamer and they left it burning by the road.

It's amusing to hear about such extravagance in isolated incidents, but when I see all those buses pulling all those cars, burning all that expensive diesel merely for the amusement of the owners, I can start to go full-on Commie. Why do they get such big toys, and at what cost to the rest of us?

Meanwhile, back in Austin, the downtown skyline changes daily. We return from a six-week run to find that yet another high-rise condo, units all sold before construction commenced, has been completed. Where is all this money coming from? The economy is bad right? The condos are messing with the music scene. Condo buyers don't want to live near music venues, even here in the city that bills itself as “Live Music Capitol of the World,” so the developers are pressuring the city to lower the noise ordinance to 70 decibels at property line, way quieter than your lawyer neighbor's new Harley, and crippling for a music venue across the street from a construction site. Some clubs manage to get grandfathered in. Some don't. Those that do can expect the rules to change.

I was at a party in one of those new condo units once. The place turned out to be a sort of urban retreat for a couple who mostly lived on a high fenced ranch out in the hill country. The condo was one more toy. When you get that rich, is anything essential? I asked the fellow what he did for work. He said he was a cedar chopper. File under “Oh, please.” Cedar choppers were flinty, wiry fellows with gnarled up hands from gripping axes who, in the time of my grandfather, supplied ranchers with cedar fence posts. They rarely chopped cedar off their own land, as they generally had none. Now, in the era of mass produced metal fence posts, cedar chopping is an endeavor reserved for presidents on a photo op and rich guys whose wives want them out of the house for a while. I never did find out where his money came from.

The guy who left his Beamer burning by the road owns a club on Lake of the Ozarks. We played there once. I would never have guessed that there were so many 50-foot yachts in the middle of Missouri. The Mississippi Gulf Coast was once referred to as the Redneck Riviera, but I think that title now should go to Lake of the Ozarks, a vast manmade impoundment on the Missouri and Osage Rivers, which I'm told, has more navigable coastline than California, due to all the feeder creeks and secondary rivers that it backs up. But the yachts, My God they're everywhere. Most are wrapped in white plastic, perched on trailers in the lots in front of the dealerships that line the roads around the lake. Many more are lined up in slips down in the marinas, and quite a few are floating around in the coves, their owners and their friends lounging on the decks, drinks in hand, eyeing one another across the brown water. I asked why no one seemed to be fishing and was told that the fishing wasn't much good around there.

So the main sport seemed to be one-upmanship. The talk was all about who had the biggest boat. Someone pointed across the cove to an amphitheatre where some big touring act had recently played. The amphitheatre faced the lake, and there were slips where, for a fee, one could pull one's 50-foot yacht in and watch the show from one's very own deck chair. Virtually no one came to our show, but the club owner paid us well and provided the right wine back stage, a rare occurrence. He said he was sorry we hadn't gotten there in time to go out on his boat. This guy looked like he could have actually been a cedar chopper. By his wiry build and hillbilly twang, I guessed he had been raised in poverty, busted his way out of it in a big way, and was now proceeding to have himself a time.

I don't think the super rich are inherently evil, but I fear they are out of touch, and there is a danger in their being out of touch. Everyday, I see the physical evidence of extreme wealth sliding into the hands of a few. My fear is that those condo owners and Prevost drivers, despite the fact that they make up a very small percentage of the population, will be calling the shots for all of us—elites always do somehow, even in more or less democratic countries. How do you convince people who can afford to leave their burning cars beside the highway to care whether or not the rest of us can afford health care? Can they be made to understand that the price of the diesel they pump into those buses on their way to Disneyland affects the price of food, catastrophically for some. It's a hard sell, especially here in the States, where we still have enough room to isolate ourselves from people we believe to be different from ourselves. It's easy to pretend that other people's problems won't effect us, as long as they're out of pistol range or over a wall.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he’s not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.

SEE THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Good luck, Senator Obama.

What am I to make of this place? In the words of Eliot, “How shall I presume?”

I am driving to Madison, Indiana, a ways off the interstate. The two-lane winds between lush farms. The livestock looks healthy and well bred and the machines all look brand new, pickups, cars, tractors, balers, bush hogs, riding lawnmowers—especially the ones which are ridden exclusively by older white guys. Some of the lawns exceed the four acre mark, but every inch is mowed. One of my bandmates remarks that these are some lawn-cutting sons-of-bitches out here. My friend, Leslie Silko, once referred to Texans as, “The People of the Lawn,” but Texans would have to do some serious irrigation to get lawns like these. Nice place they got here. And, they've got the necessary mowers and the gas to put in them.

They're prosperous, and, judging by their billboards, they're also religious, and they're… pissed off. One sign reads, “Your New Age Christ according to Oprah, will not save you.” Another says, “Heartbeat: Eighteen days after conception.” Yes, I'm sure most mothers’ hearts are beating eighteen days after they conceive. The next day, on the way down to Louisville, I see a billboard that reads, “Saturday, the true Sabbath, changed by the Antichrist.” One pickup has a “Terrorist Hunting License” window sticker with a picture of Osama Bin Laden, or maybe just some anonymous A-rab in the crosshairs.

These were my people once. I was never a Hoosier, but I was, and still am, related to middle Americans. They weren't always so angry, or so violently Christian. Someone has convinced them that they are in danger and that only Jesus and George W. Bush can save them. With Senator Clinton bowing out, Senator Obama will now have to try to win these people over. Good luck, Barack.

Of course, Hillary would have had a hard time with this lot too. Her husband, an Arkie, could talk the talk, but even he was branded by the gun press as “Handgun Control, Inc.”

Just you watch. No one will want to be called racist, so many rural Midwesterners, economically strapped from eight years of Bush policy, will still say they can't vote for Obama because he's a Democrat and therefore not totally committed to preservation of the second amendment as we now know it, as if any president would have time to mess with the Second Amendment in the current economic climate. No, when they say they can't vote for Obama, their real reason is that he's black, plain and simple.

Now, the Republicans get to run a former POW against a black man, and we all know they're rejoicing. I know Clinton shot herself in the foot when she "misspoke" about the sniper fire in Bosnia. The Republicans didn't have to engineer her downfall as they did Edmund Muskie's in 1972. But, I'm still haunted by the words of the Deep Throat character in All the President's Men: “They didn't want to run against Muskie, they wanted to run against McGovern, so look who they're running against…"

Look who they're running against now.

Good luck Senator Obama. You now have my vote.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he’s not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.