March 2013 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Rob Portman and Michelle Shocked

I don’t own any Michelle Shocked music, save for one great song on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained.

I’m feeling a bit less churlish than I did initially about the pronouncement by US Senator Rob Portman that he NOW supports marriage equality because his son has come out as gay, even though, previously, Portman usually got zero ratings from civil rights groups on the issue in the past. I know that SamuraiFrog was right:

“I’m seeing a lot of people who are having this very liberal reaction of ‘Well, why couldn’t he have empathy for everyone’s child?’ Well, you know, because humans are like that. They’re self-interested… Sure, it would be nice if conservatives thought about everyone else’s kids, too, but they don’t. That’s as obvious as it is frustrating.

“What I’m saying is, [the kvetching] takes away from the small victory of changing one legislator’s mind about gay people when you say that this victory isn’t big enough… a lot of times it’s just small victories that add up.

“Yes, it sucks that gay civil rights are still being discussed as though they’re privileges and not rights and fundamental to everyone’s equality. But I’m seeing too many people who should know better implying that this doesn’t matter, and I think it does. It’s one more mind changed.”

This brings me to the alt-folk-rock singer Michelle Shocked’s anti-gay screed in San Francisco, a surprising tirade against marriage equality and homosexuality generally. Arthur@AmeriNZ, who, BTW has been documenting the marriage equality fight in New Zealand and in the US in recent weeks, wonders where does that leave her former fans, of which he was one?

(UPDATE: Here’s a bit of the actual audio of Michelle Shocked, March 17 at Yoshi’s in San Francisco.)

There have been a number of these folk, who one might have once admired but end up having feet of clay. For me, Mel Gibson was one. Fortunately, he started making movies I didn’t want to see (Passion of the Christ, e.g.) around the same time he went on his rants. I took Florence + the Machine off my Amazon wish list after a couple of racist videos.

I don’t own any Michelle Shocked music, save for one great song on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained, which I’m sure I linked to in this blog; I’m surely not going to go back and remove it. But, like Arthur, I’d be as disinclined to spend another cent on her, as many comic books fans felt about the homophobic Orson Scott Card writing the Superman comic book, which, I believe, has been dashed.

BTW, I LOVE the paint job across from the Westboro Baptist Church.

Know what IS ticking me off? The damn reports after the two high schoolers in Steubenville, OH were found guilty on Sunday of raping a 16-year-old girl. Media apologists for the rapists, who were the quarterback and star receiver for the football team, were not limited to this CNN exchange. It is as though raping someone were like your house falling into a sinkhole, some random act of nature the young men were victimized by. You know, boys will be boys. Moreover, two teenage girls were charged for allegedly threatening the rape victim. I watched on the news when the victim’s lawyer said the victim feared going back to school “on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday.”

Someone I read recently (can’t remember who) suggested that we have a culture of rape. My US Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand wrote: “According to the Defense Department’s own estimates, there were approximately 19,000 instances of sexual assaults in the military in 2011 alone. Worse still, only 2,439 of those victimized felt they could come forward to report their assault, and only 240 of those cases went to trial.”

In the no-surprise category: Richard Nixon’s ‘Treason’, elements of which I heard about years ago.

While he’s busy harassing [ex-wife Maureen] McPhilmy for asserting the holiness of her second marriage, [Bill] O’Reilly is trying to deny the existence of his first: He is… seeking an annulment of his 15-year marriage, which produced two children. Null and void. Invalid in the eyes of God. Never happened. This hurts my head.
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I’d just better watch Billy Joel singing, accompanied on piano by a student. Some of the snark warriors are making the rounds, but I just like this.

Ask Roger Anything – because you can

The challenge is always balancing the profound from the profane.

Not sure from whom I got the idea of allowing y’all to ask me stuff – maybe it was Jaquandor.

But I sure know WHY I do it. You might ask me something that – maybe – I always wanted to write about it. But perhaps I edit myself because I don’t know if anyone is interested in the topic. Or perhaps propriety gets in the way; I do HAVE some sense of propriety. REALLY. And YOUR requests will assist me in liberating this piece from the recesses of my brain, and my heart.

Last month, I discovered Scottish therapist Heather Bestel, who wrote: “Now my life really is quite wonderful, by design… But it’s not always been like this. There have been times in my life when I have been depressed, alone, confused and suicidal. I grew up with a shameful secret.” I found this in a comment to a blog post, Don’t Cross the “What Not to Blog” Line. I don’t THINK I do, but you can judge that for yourself.

Understand that ALL questions are welcome. I think Jaquandor noted that he’s surprised what he ISN’T asked, and I tend to agree. All questions WILL be answered eventually, within 30 days of the asking. That’s true even if I have to obfuscate a bit, which is always the challenge in balancing the profound from the profane. Hey, you don’t want to come here and find a black page, now do you?

J is for Justice (or the lack of same)

I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

We in the United States like to think of ourselves as a good and JUST people. Like all humans, though, sometimes we fall short. Some examples of the latter, primarily from our JUSTICE system, in recent weeks:

Item: “A recent Department of Justice lawsuit that called the criminalization of school disciplinary offenses as minor as dress code violations so arbitrary and severe as to ‘shock the conscience’ publicized some of the most egregious punishment at Meridian, Mississippi’s schools. But the perpetuation of what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline is not limited to that one city or county, and it’s nothing new, according to a new report by several civil rights organizations. Stories highlighted by the report reveal that school punishment in other Mississippi counties is as bad, if not worse, and exemplify the severity and scope of the problem.

Item: “Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? It happens so often in Chicago, defense attorneys call the city the false confession capital of the United States. Chicago has twice as many documented false confession cases as any city in the country. One reason may be the way police go about questioning suspects. And 60 Minutes has learned the Chicago Police Department is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its interrogation practices.”

Item: From this call to repeal the death penalty in the state of Maryland: “Race and class decide which defendants are sentenced to death. Maryland prosecutors pursue death sentences ‘significantly and substantially’ more often for Black defendants accused of killing white victims than for any other offenders. Despite the fact that 76.4% of the state’s homicide victims are Black, every person Maryland has executed since 1978 — and everyone currently on Maryland’s death row — was prosecuted for the death of a white victim.” There is no reason to believe that Maryland is particularly dissimilar from other states in this regard. Glad to see that the death penalty will be abolished in the state.

But the “justice gone wrong” story that I found most surprising is from a few years back. The less I explain, the more effective it will be. Please watch this 60 Minutes Special: Picking Cotton, about Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton’s best-selling story of truth, injustice, and redemption. Here is author John Grisham explaining why he supports innocence projects.

I’m reminded by a still-relevant verse in a song by Tom Paxton from the early 1960s, What Did You Learn In School Today, made popular by Pete Seeger; LISTEN HERE or HERE. The lyrics, appropriate to this post:

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

Book Review: Who I Am, by Pete Townshend

Townshend foresaw a day when music would be delivered digitally long before it happened.

I was a fairly big fan of the band The Who. I never bought any of their singles – I wasn’t much into 45s – and the first album I picked up wasn’t until Tommy (1969), but I purchased every studio album since, the earlier The Who Sell Out, as well as Live at Leeds and a couple compilations.

The lead guitarist of The Who, Pete Townshend, has written an extraordinary book, Who I Am. Part of the great strength of the book is based on Townsend’s fortunate habit of keeping journals.

The first part has amazing detail about his parents and grandparents even before he was born. I’m jealous; I wish I had such information about my recent ancestors. Then he talks about the development of the band. I’ve read a number of rock biographies, some of them quite good. It’s different, though, when one hears the story from the point of view of one of the participants, especially one who writes so well and so thoroughly.

The development of the rock opera Tommy is fully explained. It utilizes, as a jumping-off point, some of the actual abuse Pete experienced while in a grandparent’s care. He added the pinball motif fairly late in the game, in order to get a better review.

Teenage Wasteland

He explores the stresses on the now successful band, after Woodstock, Live at Leeds, and the Who’s Next album. In some ways, the pressure was just as great as when the band struggled to find an identity. The smashed guitars were an artistic expression, not just random mayhem.

Somewhere in this period, particularly after Who drummer Keith Moon died, I was hoping that Pete would stop with the sex and drugs, and stick to the rock and roll. His (now ex-)wife Karen must have been a saint. He could not quit the booze until 1994, though he had tried as early as 1981.

Townshend summarizes, right before his successful abstinence: “Although my marriage was failing, I had a beautiful son as well as two beautiful daughters who were doing well at university, I had fallen in love, and the girl I had found was slowly falling in love with me too. And I was rich. So what was messing me up?

“It would be easy to point to alcohol, but the problem wasn’t the booze; it was the fact that it longer worked as a medicine to fix the dire consequences of my self-obsession, overwork, selfishness, and manic-depression.”

I enjoyed watching his interaction with a variety of musicians, from the evolving relationship with Who singer Roger Daltry to folks such as Joan Baez, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon.

A great read, which he started way back in 1996, and once Pete got his head on straight, I wanted to read more. The false accusation that he was dealing with child pornography wounded him greatly. He foresaw a day when the music would be delivered digitally long before it happened. An interesting feature, mostly in the latter half of the text, are footnotes to The Who website, probably in part a function of having to reduce the manuscript from 1000 pages to 500.

Highly recommended.

Links

Rolling Stone book review.

Pete Townshend receives 2013 Les Paul Award.

Lefty Brown reviews Quadrophenia.

Everyone wants to be Irish, now

It seems more likely at that time that an Irish woman, who was of lower social standing, would marry a black man than an English woman would.

I go through this periodic rushes of interest in my genealogy, stifled primarily by life getting in the way. When I was growing up, I was told I was, in addition to being black, American Indian, probably Iroquois, on both sides; having seen my maternal grandmother, it was quite evident at least in her heritage. I was Dutch on my father’s side, though it COULD have really been Pennsylvania Dutch, which was actually German.

On my mother’s mother’s mother’s side, there is a picture – a daguerreotype, I think – of a white woman who is an ancestor. She came from the British Isles, but was she English, or Irish? I rather fancied the latter, especially after having read the book The Sweeter The Juice, a true story about an Irish woman and a mulatto man marrying after the Civil War. The Irish had not achieved “whiteness” in the United States right away; it took a couple of generations before beginning to assimilate.

So it seems more likely at that time that an Irish woman, who was of lower social standing, would marry a black man than an English woman would. The particulars of my specific past, however, remain a familial mystery until that purported “free time” I seek allows a greater investigation into this matter.

One thing I could easily do is take one of those DNA tests that I got from Ancestry.com several weeks ago. It wouldn’t likely distinguish between German and Dutch, or English and Irish, but it would be broadly informative.

As you may recall, it was discovered that Barack Obama had Irish ancestors; lots of O’Bama jokes ensued at the time.

I’ve always been Roger O. Green, or Roger O’Green, if you will. Some day, maybe I’ll discover whether I come by my faux designation legitimately.