"The lines at Hyatt Guns, his shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, snaked out the door. The deep, green-walled warehouse bills itself as the largest gun shop in America, but even then Hyatt had to stretch to meet the demand. At one point, he dispatched 37 salespeople to man the cash registers. He put up velvet ropes and hired a police officer. He even put a hot dog stand outside. It was just after the Sandy Hook massacre -- and customers were lined up to buy AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, like the one the shooter Adam Lanza used." (David Heath, Elise Hansen and AJ Willingham, CNN, 12/14/2017)
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Saturday, June 19, 2021
The Haunted Ballads of Robert Hunter
The Grateful Dead are either the most overrated band of all time or the most underrated. I go with the latter. Here is one reason why: You could hate all of their live music and what they were doing with their space jams (I don't... because Jerry Garcia is capable of improvising guitar solos that shimmer in beauty like a mountain valley encountered on a morning walk), and still rate them as brilliant based upon the song collections "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead." These are albums of 3 to 4- minute songs with tight arrangements, exquisite but not overindulgent musicianship (unlike much other music of the era), and a marriage of lyric and melody that is among the best in American popular music.
Lyricist Robert Hunter knew how to inhabit the world of the "weird, old America" (to use Greil Marcus' term) -- haunted landscapes described in country blues lyrics and other Ovid-in-America metamorphosis-style tales of the sort featured on experimental filmmaker and 78 rpm record collector Harry Smith's 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." Ballads that were weird in Scotland got considerably weirder in their American incarnations. Meanwhile, Delta and Piedmont blues artists were singing about the inexplicability of living in a land, the Jim Crow South, where the apartheid system made everyday living a very unstable affair, where white terror could be lurking around the next corner and the next one. These artists used the knotty irony and wry humor of African folktales and folk wisdom to evoke what felt like permanent exile.
To bring it back to Robert Hunter, the words to his song "Dire Wolf" are striking in how they deposit the listener immeditely, in the first line, into an unsettling zone that feels half-remembered and half-forgotten, half-dreamed and half-lived. The singer/narrator sits down to a game of cards against the 600-pound dire wolf who was grinning at his window. The tale the singer tells takes place in someplace called Fennario - probably a place in Scotland that was mispronounced and ended up staying that way, in the old ballad, "Pretty Peggy-o."
In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round
The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
I sat down to my supper, 'twas a bottle of red whisky
I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
When I awoke, the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
The Wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game
I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades, but the cards were all the same
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
In the backwash of Fennario, the black and bloody mire
The Dire Wolf collects his dues, while the boys sing 'round the fire
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
I beg of you don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
No no no don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
More Thoughts on The Society of the Hustle
We were born into a society with a reward system that is inverted, ethically speaking. The personality types that are most heavily discouraged and censored in cultures with long-standing wisdom traditions are those that are most lavishly rewarded in this society. To me, this indicates that there is really not all that much to be done to revolutionize (thereby offering some kind of salvation) this system, in the absence of a complete abandonment of its founding system of values — a system of values that historian Morris Berman summarizes as: “the hustle.“ Under a system built around the hustle, the great objective of the individual life is wealth accumulation - generally speaking, by any means necessary. I would like to emphasize the crushing and tragic sadness that I and others experience as a direct consequence of being born into an ethically inverted culture. The value system is a type of hell that thrives upon producing other hells — hells of war, addiction, chronic mental/emotional crisis, mass species extirpation, ecological devastation, human displacement, the vanishing or at least the banishing of the sacred, the monetizing of everything possible.
And it is a society born of a glitch, an aberration. Most people are not as broken and venal as Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos, for example. However, as mass scale agriculture took off in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution, such sociopathic personality types made a play and started to amass power built on surplus food and wealth. The remarkable thing is that such people were successful in acculturating others into their own illness. In the case of the Americas, truly demented souls like Chris Columbus crossed the sea, but, most significantly, he and similar British marauders were able to then acculturate others into their value system. It really is a striking achievement, considering the value system assimilated by otherwise normal people is one based on the proliferation of misery – both internal and external. Maybe we will live to see the day when the other story reasserts its power and people leave behind the greatest mistake in human history.
