How can a photograph be copyrighted when it’s confined to the public domain by definition? A song comes out of nothing. A painting is as much the hand on the brush as it is anything inherent. Movies manipulate atmospheres and the medium simultaneously. A camera’s image becomes art only when interpreted in the aftermath. Could it be that photographers are more critics than artists? Could it be that there are no artists at all, only reviewers?
I don’t get too tossed about this political correctness phenomenon. After all, when I was around twenty, I said “Groovy” and will still say “hey man” as a greeting, particularly to black people.
My father yelled at me when I was twelve when he overheard me on the phone with an adult speaking disrespectfully. He demanded that I say “Yes Sir or No Sir,” always. I still do this to this day, and I am older than everybody.meir
These rules can be learned.
I stumble clumsily over the speech regulations of today as though they are nuclear intrusions on my civil liberties. Hands always get a little burnt when passing torches. I know I am wrong, but I am stubborn so they can all go fuck themselves.
I have a theory about why these kids see slights that would have seemed not so grievous to my generation. Our millennials are the consummation of three generations of more and more targeted and cautious advertising. When the world does not behave the way it does in commercials, they are fearful and wary. They are suspicious of any gathering that does not accomplish fair representations of races, sexual identities or female /male neutrality. Words are paramount because they are accustomed to dialogue that has been worked and reworked by copywriters and advertising executives not to offend. One poorly placed word can result in the destruction of a Five-hour Energy drink or an Apple iPad. The stakes are huge.
I have two kids in this new generational cluster. I think they are better than me at that age. They, of course, roll their eyes when I behave deliberately in ways that will embarrass them. They forgive me for that, I know. They don’t know yet they will do exactly the same to their children. Nor should they.
I love everything about America.
I don’t believe that every veteran is a hero. I believe that some are.
I don’t believe black people are all good. But I know there are enough good ones to solve their problems.
I know that wearing pink at football games does not make me more aware of breast cancer. My mind rarely wanders far from breasts.
I don’t believe children, academics or pretty girls on TV should try to tell me how I can avoid insulting them.
People should understand that I want to offend them. It is the only way I have to find out if they are idiots.
That is how I pick my friends.
It is why my life is so funny.
I was standing at the mixing board with the manager of a blind country singer named Ronnie Milsap. It the first of two shows to test a format for the sponsor, Phillip Morris. All of their executives were there. It was a twenty thousand seater in Houston. The artists on the show were Ricky Skaggs, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Milsap, Barbara Mandell, and Alabama.
It went well, and I naively wanted all the acts to come back on the stage to close the show with a song or at least a bow, to impress the client.
It was my first show in country music.
I whispered to Milsap’s manager, a lizard of a man if he felt he could arrange them all coming out. He said no to me in the way that meant at a price. I handed him a thousand dollars in hundreds. Off he slithered. True to his greed they all came out and sang together at the end of the show. It was what I needed. These shows became an important series that night.
After the show, I asked my partner Fred Caruso to personally hand each of the artists a thousand in cash with my thanks. Letting them know that Milsap had taken the money.
I learned later that at country shows the audience expected everyone to come back on stage for a finale. It could never have not happened.
Beyond even that, these performers would sit on the side of the stage as the show was breaking down around them to sign autographs and to talk to their fans every night.
Hanging around backstage afterwards and feeling pleased with myself. Each of the artists came to me, one by one, and handed me the money back. Everyone but Ronnie Milsap. I forgave him this as I doubt he ever heard about the money at all’
The happiness we all long for begins with one fewer child at a time.
Kids are more routinely medicated now in their twenties than we were recreationally in the sixties and seventies. Drugs companies have a prescription for every psychosocial blemish that gets in the way of perfection. The “cures” for acne are now more power and dangerous than casual heroin. The preventions for skin cancer from the sun are slathered on with paint coats so thick children can barely move at the beach. God help the family that is encouraged to medicate their kindergartener because they are too active or fall behind in their learning of the alphabet.
Some kids are smarter than others, some are more active than others, and Lord help us some are even fatter than others. We are a vain and a profoundly competitive culture. We have concocted a generation that believes they are perfect or conversely if they are obviously not so it is somebody else’s fault, never theirs.
These beasts who share the world with us.
Why do they sing when they can not compose?
How can they love
without ever venturing to cherish?
How can they speak but never care
to say things new?
Why is it that we wish?
And they can not.
Somehow the fear of weather patterns connects us comfortably with the early primates from which we came.
It might be time to start filming every classroom and allowing parents to watch the tapes of their children’s average day. We could then reveal what is disturbing to the media.
Unionized public school teachers are public servants just like the police. Incompetent educators are equally indictable in my eyes. Police sometimes do terrible things, but they rarely rise to the destructive levels of schools that destroy whole classrooms at a time.
November 16, 2015
Perhaps this is what God would do if he really cared.
It is time for another Israel in the Middle East only much bigger. Perhaps in Mexico as well. Life in these two geographic regions has been a miserable proposition for a long time. The West did not cause it. The Kings, Mullahs, and oil-rich chieftains kept their people in poverty and allowed them only God as comfort for hundreds of years. In Mexico, the poor were supported only by our tourism, our insatiable need for drugs and the Catholic Church.
Bringing these people here is moronically ill-advised.
We should use our weapons and military to carve out new Edens for the suffering instead of destroying everything to catch a few.
Perhaps this is what God would do if he really cared.
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