Abbey Road, Helter Skelter, and Woodstock

For my birthday in 1969 my brother gave me Abbey Road, the Beatles next to last album. In the intervening years my children and then my grandchildren have become Beatles fans. My twenty-one year old daughter (yes, I have a child that young) has many Beatle tunes on her MP-3.  

I became aware of the Beatles in 1964 when they burst upon the American scene with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. After that I heard their songs again and again on the radio and especially at work on the ship’s entertainment system. (I had been in the Navy about ten years by then.) I heard the songs so often I still know most of the words.

            At that time I was (and still am) a jazz enthusiast but I always loved rhythm and blues and then its offspring, rock and roll, but I looked askance at the Beatles. Who were these unkempt upstarts in ill fitting suits who needed a good barber and a competent tailor? But then the tunes won me over.

In the strictest sense the Beatles were more British music hall than rock and roll, especially by the time Abbey Road came along. “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and “Octopus’s Garden” are more music hall and novelty than blues or rock and roll. (“Come Together” now underscores a TV ad.) Earlier albums like the very imaginative White Album, from which “Helter Skelter” comes (more about that below), and beautiful songs like “And I Love Her” and “Yesterday” established the Beatles as important 20^th century popular music composers.

            Also in 1969 American Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, giving Americans reasons to feel patriotic, especially with the anti war and racial turmoil that then plagued the cities. The year before, 1968, (the year the White Album appeared) had seen assassinations and riots in Chicago. 1969 was a slight improvement. Even Woodstock, that demonstration of mass debauchery still celebrated by aging flower children, was better than the hate America, anti establishment sloganeering that characterized earlier years of the decade. If I had to choose between stoned, mud-wallowing hippies and angry, rock throwing anti war demonstrators, I would take the former.

            That same year my brother, who gave me Abbey Road, was a recovery swimmer on Apollo 11, the shot that put an American on the moon. After a couple of deployments to Vietnam with the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, he went to work on Apollo, participating in three recoveries, 6, 10, and 11. He then left the Navy and with two others bought a thirty-six foot ketch and sailed the Caribbean for a year.

            Additionally, 1969 witnessed the murders of Sharon Tate and the LaBianca family, which were masterminded by psychopath Charles Manson, who claimed to have been inspired by the White Album’s “Helter Skelter,” the name Manson family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi gave his book about the murders and the trial.

            Manson’s fevered reading of “Helter Skelter” made him believe that the current national turmoil would culminate in a race war between black and white. That didn’t happen, but the 1960’s greatly accelerated, if they didn’t begin, the moral and cultural rot that has given the nation increased promiscuity, increased out of wedlock births, decaying central cities, the decline of respect for marriage and the family, the dumbing down of education, a popular culture that is an open sewer, and a President and a White House full of advisors whose ruling philosophy is informed by the decadent 1960’s.

            Except for Tate/LaBianca 1969 was festive, but forty years later we see the ugly result of 1960’s nihilism. I doubt the nation will ever recover.

This was originally published in the Crossville Chronicle, Crossville, Tennessee, on September 9, 2009

           

           

             

           

           

Traveling the World Searching for the Meaning of Life

     

In my youth I traveled widely across the world, most travel courtesy of the Navy. A jazz and blues enthusiast, I cultivated friends with the same interests. When our ships made port visits, we looked for clubs that played jazz and we found them everywhere. In Japan, for example, we heard musicians who could copy exquisitely the sounds and phrasings of American jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, not to mention the big band jazz and swing music of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Stan Kenton. And we enjoyed similarly talented jazz groups in other places.

            In October of 1960 my ship stopped at New York and I went to 52^nd and Broadway, to Birdland, a jazz club named for Charlie “The Yardbird” Parker. I saw two groups, one headed by drummer Buddy Rich, the other headlining Max Roach and Clifford Brown. I nursed a beer, bought a pack of stale Pall Mall’s from a pretty cigarette girl, and listened for hours to great jazz. That evening I was the only sailor in the crowded club and I had a great time.  

            I recalled all this after recently reading Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road, which became a cult novel for the Beat Generation. Why the book attained cult status escapes me, but I recommend it because it is well written and entertaining, a story of Sal Paradise and his immoral friend Dean Moriority, who travel back and forth across the US and down to Mexico City.

            Using the argot of the times Sal and Dean visit jazz clubs and cities to “dig” the music, the musicians, and the people, which for Dean is a search for a “pure sense of being,” in reality a religious search for truth and meaning in life. The improvised jazz solo provides this kind of experience. These solos, the kind one can hear only imperfectly on recordings – they must be experienced live – if done well by gifted players can carry listeners along from one point to another the way speaking in tongues carries Pentecostal listeners to their Beatific vision. G.K. Chesterton says that everyone is looking for God, even the man entering a brothel, and Dean and Sal do that too.

            I never found the Lord listening to jazz but I had a lot of fun hearing great music, much of which is now available on CD, and I had good friends like Kerouac’s Dean Moriority who took me from one near disaster to another until I finally decided to quit pushing my luck. I then found a good woman, got married, and had a family, becoming the kind of bourgeois conformist that Beat Generation writers and artists disdained and that spoiled 1960’s baby boomers ridiculed.

            In On the Road Kerouac does not celebrate the Beat life of immorality and nonconformity and does not write with the self congratulatory tone so common among baby boomers who go on and on about the debauchery (to them the great causes) of the 1960’s; he just tells his travel story.

            In fact, Kerouac, who died at age forty-seven in 1969, did not like the emerging 1960’s counter culture. Today, of course, a new counter culture has emerged consisting of religious conservatives who value tradition and the wisdom of the ages over Beat Generation and baby boomer hedonism. They know that Dean Moriority’s road to a pure sense of being and the baby boomers’ road to Utopia are roads to nowhere.

This was originally published in the Crossville Chronicle, Crossville, Tennessee on November 10, 2008 

           

           

Worse than Watergate

It looks like the Anointed One has changed himself into an ordinary hack politician (or else he always was one) like Chicago’s legendary Mayor Dick Daly, who helped steal the 1960 Presidential election for JFK and away from Richard Nixon. Nixon got even in 1968, of course, but that was only temporary. Although it took them almost six years, the red diaper babies who drank in Nixon hate with their mother’s milk finally destroyed him in the Watergate imbroglio of 1974. JFK’s plurality in 1960 was about 100,000, about 50,000 less than Algor’s 2000 margin, but Algor lost to the despised W. Bush when he was unable to steal Florida. Daly, on the other hand, was able to open the cemeteries of Cook County, Illinois, to provide JFK with enough votes to carry Illinois and thus to win in the Electoral College.

            But the hack politician, let’s call him the Real Obama, likely stole the 2012 Presidential election using methods more nakedly corrupt and flagrantly tyrannical than Dick Daly, who after all was just following old tried and true Democratic traditions dating back to the Founding. Real Obama discovered the IRS (for those who just got a job: IRS stands for the Internal Revenue Service, which collects taxes and puts you in jail if you don’t pay. They can take your income, your property, and your freedom, so always file and always pay what you owe. They are probably the most powerful and most intimidating agency of the Federal Government).

            Protected by an age-old tried and true Presidential stratagem called plausible deniability, Real Obama discovered that IRS functionaries can do just about anything they want with impunity. His agents found that Real Obama’s most effective political enemies – Tea Party activists, pro-life workers, conservative political action groups, and even people seeking the legal tax relief available to those adopting children – could be severely handicapped when their tax exemption applications were delayed with detailed, exhaustive questionnaires, some even asking people what books they read and even if they prayed and to whom.

            These IRS actions delayed fund raising for these groups until after the November 2012 elections. At the same time liberal groups with the same tax status were immediately approved. Had the IRS actions been even-handed no one could have accused Real Obama’s agents of political chicanery, but they weren’t. In this way the Romney campaign was denied the benefit of massive get-out-the-vote efforts of the kind that won Congress for the Republicans in 2010. Had the Tea Party and other groups been able to mount the same efforts in 2012, the outcome of the election would have been different and a President Romney would have been doing his own brand of political damage, which many of us prefer to the Democratic variety, even though neither party is anything to brag about.  

            In the wake of Fast and Furious, the IRS revelations, Justice Department harassment of AP and Fox News reporters, and the Benghazi scandal, Real Obama’s operatives have adopted tactics used by children in the cartoon series, The Family Circus.   In that cartoon whenever the children are caught in some mischief and asked to account for their actions, for example if something is missing or broken and their parents want to know who is responsible, they reply, “Ida No.” Experienced parents know that “Ida No” is a fiction. She doesn’t exist, but to Real Obama’s functionaries who testify before Congressional committees she is very much alive.

            For example, asked about who signed off on Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder replied, “Ida No.” He added that Ida No had recused herself from the case.

When asked if they knew anything about the IRS investigating only conservative groups during the 2012 campaign season, IRS officials Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller answered, “Ida No.” Then we had the alliteratively identified Lois Lerner (who had learned little) who headed the section that investigated tax exemptions: she took the Fifth, but before that said, “I didn’t do nuthin’ wrong, I ain’t seen nuthin,’ and I ain’t sayin’ nuthin.’” She doesn’t know Ida No.

            One of the charges against Richard Nixon listed in the articles of impeachment was misuse of the IRS.

During the Watergate brouhaha I occasionally saw this bumper sticker: “No one drowned in the Watergate,” a reference to Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne’s 1969 drowning, and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Unfortunately for loved ones and for the nation, Real Obama’s scandals have produced four deaths from the mishandling of Benghazi. 

            So, the Anointed One has lifted his disguise to reveal the Real Obama. Do his star struck supporters recognize him?