Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 964 Editor's Choice: 127
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"God Never Listened to Charley Parker..."
[Read the article: Beyoncé Knowles, freedom fighter]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"..Charley Parker died in vain..." So wrote (and sang) British Muslim rock genius Richard Thompson, who has made Santa Monica his home base and who said, in a post-9/11 interview that "Barbie dolls, Las Vegas, The Price Is Right--they're all superior to anything under the Taliban."
RT is right, and he's also one who should know. The lyrics quoted above are from his "Outside of the Inside", an in-character, venomous musical denouncement of Islamic fanatics and, I'm quite certain, of all religious fanatics as well. At least the shoe fits.
Thaddeus Russell is also right, despite protests from the obvious and predictable sources. Black American culture, through the musical medium of jazz and moving right on through the evolution of backed-up blues, R&B, rock and roll, really heavy, hard rock, alt rock, etc., first overthrew the puritanical, Black and White (but mostly just white) world of American provincialism and rapidly went on to destroy what the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction could not. Now it has already begun to work on the Arab street. Actually this phenomenon wasn't born yesterday. My daughter, while studying in Egypt in 2000, happily discovered the debauched American Ghetto culture of music had already found its way into the back-alley clubs of Cairo and much of the rest of the middle east, spawning James Dean-inspired punkdom with all its attendant sex-and-violence. My kid discovered her home away from home.
Upon her return to Georgetown, The Kid wrote a paper on the effects of American hip-hop culture on middle eastern society, and it was hailed as a "bit of genius" by the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Yes, I raised my kid on the streets of DC and the nearby funky Maryland suburbs, and she has been an ambassador of sleaze to the Muslim community, having found it to be more open and receptive (at least among many of its younger members) than our own, inherited, Christianist one.
Next will come basketball, Georgetown jackets, Nikes and drive-by-shootings. Oh. Oh yeah, they already have that last item pretty well mastered. But, warts and all, the American Ghetto is still a far more free, healthy and potentially great place to live than under the Taliban. Thanks to Richard Thompson I have a new appreciation for Barbie dolls (like the ones that same daughter of mine used to pull the heads off of and, using magic markers, create new faces on the tiny, bald ball-joint heads that are left when the heavenly honkey head with rayon hair is removed).
In that same ironic song quoted at the beginning of this screed, Thompson also has a verse containing the words:
"Colour is the fuel of madness
That's no way to praise the lord;
Grey's the color of the pious,
Knelt upon the misericord."
Precisely. Hail, hail rock and roll and all its bastard children!
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Texas Republicans Deep in Denial
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Word to my fellow assholes I mean Republicans in Texas: you know as well as I do that plenty of people would want to watch a filmed fantasy assassination of one of the most roundly disliked and useless Presidents we've had since Garfield. I know I'd watch it with a newspaper on my lap. Bad taste? Perhaps. You can always not attend a screening. It's come to this, brothers and sisters, and so have you. When are you gonna wake up and smell the burning flesh? We've fucked this country royal(well not me, but a lot of us, if only for not saying anything, and you can't accuse me of that).
Even the Germans eventually apologized for their little indiscretions of the Third Reich. Least we can do is eat a little of our own excrement. Again, not me. Don't blame me, I didn't order a plate of shit, nor did I vote for this moron. But then I have recently come to the realization that I am an apostate. Fire up the ovens, guys, there's a few more of us you're gonna need to burn if you want to keep this attrition contest "on the march." Meanwhile, let's all go see a movie.