Ramblin' with Roger

John Fogerty is 70

Just last year, I wrote a lengthy piece about Creedence Clearwater Revival, a fine band. In it, I mentioned the continuing strife between lead singer/songwriter John Fogerty and the other living members of the group, plus his brother’s widow. As of December 2014, the lawsuits continue.

So I’m just going to link to some solo John Fogerty for his birthday number three score and ten:

With the Blue Ridge Rangers: Jambalaya (On The Bayou), #16 in 1973. This was #1 country hit in 1952 for Hank Williams.

Rockin’ All Over The World, #27 in 1975.

Almost Saturday Night, #78 in 1975.

The Old Man Down The Road, #10 in 1985.

Rock And Roll Girls, #20 in 1985. Its B-side,
Centerfield, #44 in 1985, was
honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010.

(All chart citations refer to the US Billboard pop listings.)
***
John Fogerty and Sawyer Fredericks on The Voice finale, May 2015, singing a CCR medley. BTW, Sawyer is the area kid who won the competition.

40 years ago: cleaning up after the cops

In light of all of the recent incidents involving young black men and the police in America, it got me wondering how I managed to luck out and largely avoid confrontations with them. Growing up, I have no specific recollection of dealing with police much at all. Of course, I was a “good” kid, but that didn’t always inoculate one from confrontation.

There a Facebook friend of mine, who’s about a decade older than I, who went to my church when I was a youth, who tells an ugly tale about him and cop, a doughnut on the ground not dropped by him, and the abusive language from the cop. And he was surely a “good” kid.

During some antiwar demonstrations, I do recall moving quickly to avoid teargas, or police on horses, or the like, but those were in mass demonstrations.

As an adult, most of my dealings with the police have been as a victim of crime: bicycles stolen, boom box stolen from work, my credit card compromised. Then there was that time when I found someone’s checkbook, called the guy, and had police at my door; didn’t like that.

The only police officer I knew personally, albeit peripherally, was a guy from my former church; I knew his parents far better. He seemed to be a nice guy.

But I spent the most time with police officers was when I was a janitor at Binghamton (NY) City Hall from about April to August 1975, after I had temporarily dropped out of college. I was pretty much invisible to the detectives, although there were a few snarky remarks, which I attributed less to race than my lowly position. And I swear some of them missed tossing things into the garbage cans, so they could make more work for me.

On the other hand, I was very fond of the captain. Sometimes, when my work was done, he’d invite me to sit in his office and chat. We’d talk about current events, how the city had changed over time, my plans for the future, and even how the police were perceived in the community. He seemed to appreciate my POV, and recognize that I actually had a working brain. I wish I could remember his name.

I like talking to the police in the right environment. A few months ago, three other Albany school parents and I talked with one of the assistant chiefs about the problem with the crossing guards near the schools; it was a productive chat.

In a few months, I’ll write about riding with some police officers.
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When I think of the police, unfortunately, I always think of two not-so-affirming songs:

What Did You Learn In School? – Pete Seeger (written by Tom Paxton)
Police on my Back – The Clash (written by Eddy Grant)

The Lydster, Part 134: Opting out

Neither my wife or I want to have our daughter become a tool to our own sense of activism, ESPECIALLY when it affects her directly.

There has been a great deal of controversy in the state of New York about the school tests tied to something called Common Core. It is more complicated than I wish to get into here, but I wrote about it a bit in my Times Union blog.

There was a statewide movement to get students in grades 3 to 8 to opt-out of the test, which was somewhat successful in many districts, including in my area.

The movement has been around a few years, but I had not paid a great deal of attention. The Daughter took the tests the last couple of years.

This year, however, the framework and the rhetoric changed, with Governor Andrew Cuomo specifically tying education money to teacher performance, based on these tests, and practically ignoring their classroom effectiveness, in the budget passed at the end of March 2015.

Here’s the thing, though: neither my wife or I want to have our daughter become a tool to our own sense of activism, ESPECIALLY when it affects her directly. Moreover, she’s generally a compliant child, eager to please others.

The Sunday before the tests began, on a Tuesday, we FINALLY broached the topic, quite gingerly. I said something like, “You know there are those tests coming up this week. Some people are opting out. Whether you take them or not is entirely up to you.”

She said, rather quickly, “I’m opting out. They’re using the test to grade the teachers, not us.” This is largely correct and astute.

We hadn’t specifically talked about this, certainly not directly to her, although we’ve been watching news reports. Most parents would say they chose their kids to opt-out, but The Daughter made her own decision. I happen to agree with it, but I’m more pleased that she’s become this separate, thinking person.

For the periods of the test, a total of 18 hours over a few weeks (!), she was assigned to help the kindergarten teacher read to the kids, and the like. She liked it.
***
Here are some anecdotes about the English language test. There are many out there.

Memorial Day 2015: war is failure

“It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60.”

There was a time when I thought there were bad guys and good guys, and they were very easily distinguishable.

But now I think war is failure. Even a “just war” may be, at very best, the least bad outcome. And usually, just a bad outcome, with war profiteers (Blackwater, or whatever they’re calling themselves now). Pope Francis got it right this month: “Many powerful people don’t want peace because they live off war.”

Any American born since 1984 has spent at least half of his or her life with the country at war. My life percentage is only about 40%.

We go to war in Iraq. Some of us thought it was a mistake at the time. Others discover it later, realizing we were lied to. Now, the calls by some to go war with Iran ring hollow.

Unintended consequences of war: My Lai in Vietnam, Abu Gharib in Iraq, to name just two during my lifetime. I highly recommend Graphic Novels About Consequences and Horrors of War by Meryl Jaffe.

On this Memorial Day, I also suggest Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement; I.F. Stone, the urge to serve, and remembrance of wars past:

Among the eeriest things about reading Stone’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia coverage, 14 years into the next century, is how resonantly familiar so much of what he wrote still seems, how twenty-first-century it all is. It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60. [Compare, for instance, Laos and Iraq.]

But if much in the American way of war remains dismally familiar some five decades later, one thing of major significance has changed, something you can see regularly in I.F. Stone’s Weekly but not in our present world. Thirteen years after our set of disastrous wars started, where is the massive antiwar movement, including an army in near revolt and a Congress with significant critics in significant positions?

If, so many years into the disastrous war on terror, the Afghan War that never ends, and most recently Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0, there is no significant antiwar movement in this country, you can thank the only fit of brilliance the national security state has displayed. It successfully drummed us out of service. The sole task it left to Americans, 40 years after the Vietnam War ended, was the ludicrous one of repeatedly thanking the troops for their service, something that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s or 1960s because you would, in essence, have been thanking yourself.

T is for Twitter and Too fast and Thoughtlessness and Trouble

Will it improve on the silence?

I joined Twitter in July 2007, I’m told. I tried it out for a few weeks but didn’t “get” it and frankly forgot about it for at least a couple of years.

Now I post my various blogs to it automatically through Networked Blogs. I only have about 7,100 tweets. I follow about 1,850 people and am followed by almost 1,300, but I am genuinely unconcerned about the numbers.

Whereas Twitter, for some people, seems to be the lifeblood for their connectedness to the world. Unfortunately, because it’s so easy because the message is necessarily so short – like people’s attention spans – folks have made bad choices on the platform:

In accusing someone of inappropriate financing, a woman shows how she flunked basic arithmetic.
Bloomsburg University’s Joey Casselberry, a junior first baseman, was thrown off the team after making a racist and sexist tweet about 13-year-old Little Leaguer Mo’ne Davis. To her credit, she asked that he be reinstated to his team.
SamuraiFrog pointed to a heartbreaking Canadian PSA “where homeless people read mean tweets about the homeless. Those are some heartless tweets written by people who don’t see other people as human beings.” And how much thought was given in the composition of their venom?
A tweet about AIDS and race gets a woman fired from her job.

In these, and many more examples, the problem is that it was too easy to attempt to be clever and snarky. The key to going viral, I’m told, is to say something everyone is thinking, and say it in a way no one thought of. The above examples were widely seen, but not in the way they would have wished.

The blog post Do We Know We Aren’t Really Thinking? speaks to this:

I am guilty of rushing to form an opinion without thinking through the various sides of the issue, without digging into the details, without remembering that an opinion is just that… This happens both in our personal interactions in our narrow domains as well as in the wider context when we are engaging with larger issues related to… the world.

Perhaps this tendency to form an opinion without thinking is exaggerated today thanks to the 24×7 information-overload we all experience through mass media and social media. But perhaps there is a bigger reason for why we don’t really think properly, why we believe we are thinking when we really are only experiencing thought-sensations.

It seems to me that most of us aren’t even aware that we are not really thinking when we believe we are. It is perhaps because we don’t know how our mind works. We don’t know what it takes to truly think without allowing any interference from other parts of ourselves. For the most part we don’t even know what those other parts are, parts which have a tendency to interfere and influence our thinking process.

There’s a trend in cooking called the slow food movement, designed “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat.” One appreciates the flavors more when one takes time to savor the food. That tomato sauce you put on the stove for hours tastes better than the stuff you heat up on the stove for seven minutes.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for a slow social media writing movement, about actually spending a moment or three assessing the IMPACT of one’s comment before clicking. Actually, there IS such a mechanism; ask yourself, Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

This is not a new notion. It has been attributed to Sri Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian spiritual leader (b.1926): “Before you speak, think -Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?” In the digital age, digital silence – or at least a respite – is often in order.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16