“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”--Martin Luther King
Country giant Merle Haggard, who celebrated outlaws, underdogs and an abiding sense of national pride in such hits as Okie From Muskogee and Sing Me Back Home, died Wednesday at 79, on his birthday. Haggard’s manager, Frank Mull, said the country icon died of pneumonia in Palo Cedro, California. A masterful guitarist, fiddler and songwriter as well as singer, the Country Music Hall of Famer recorded for more than 40 years, releasing dozens of albums and No 1 hits. Saw Haggard in concert at the Oregon Zoo two summers ago. Masterful show, too.
I was a baby when Social Security saved me and my siblings from starvation and kept a roof over our heads. Believe me, we did not live in a welfare castle or contrive to hoodwink the system. Or become social pariahs or fake out the rich, or overturn the government. Or attack the Rockefellers or the big banks. Or make a nuisance of ourselves or deny our Americanism. What FDR did of course was introduce a form of socialism to the body politic, giving our nation Social Security and other elements of the Second New Deal (1935), including a powerful mandate to put artists and writers to work. His administration worked against all odds. He was successful because the power elite feared a massive revolt was near and that the only way to save capitalism was to acquiesce to a new social reality that said Americans needed security—or else.--TS
One of the best political journals on the planet, CounterPunch, picked up another of my stories today.
I can't get over how much Cruz looks like an evangelical, like one of those sleazy, greasy preachers back in the day who were busted for their affairs and million dollar empires built on their corrupt fleecing of the flock. Their awful "sins." Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard and Jimmy Bakker come to mind.
Actually, Cruz looks a little like Tammy Bakker. And must you have a double-consonant in your surname to be a fraud?
I understand he, Cruzz, is quite the Jesus-loving hound dog, if you can believe the equally sleazy celebrity press and rumor manufacturers.
CD's wife, Harriet, reads his latest memoir, or his "reflections on the personal roots of narrative."
Whole Cloth: The Quilt of Literature is a fine addition to CD's canon, a book detailed in the telling of his writing process, and how the writer has, over the course of a long career as playwright, novelist, short-story writer and educator, shaped meaning, wonder and substance from living.
Here’s the reality: Sanders is shooting up in the polls, and Hillary is trending down. The gap between the two has all but disappeared at the halfway point of the primary season. Sanders main opponent isn’t Hillary Clinton, however, it's the combination of time and an Establishment media the steadfastly refuses to cover the movement that is feeding his ascendancy
An optimistic view.
I think Sanders would have to pull the remainder of the states, not likely unfortunately. The first Wisconsin returns are scheduled for a 6:15 (PT) release.
The NCAAMB championship game starts in a couple of hours. Don't know whom to pick, and don't really care. Should be a good game, though.
I watched San Francisco crush Milwaukee earlier today. A big crowd for opening day in what looked like miserable weather, though it didn't rain.
The Giants hit back-to-back-to back home runs off some poor loser named Pena. He wasn't too happy with himself when the manager yanked him after he gave up a couple of more hits in the inning.
Three homers in a row doesn't happen a lot, so the game had that going for it.
Alas some games were rained out elsewhere. Dammit, I say, they start the season too early and end it too late. It's all about the money. Google the Giants' payroll some time. The numbers those guys earn is shocking and obscene.
Buster Posey hit a home run today, one of the trio. Buster Posey is a very rich catcher. As in $167 million in his latest contract. BTW, the greatest Giant, Willie Mays, never came close to that figure, even in fifties and sixties dollars.
I like baseball in the summer best, and that can't get here soon enough by my reckoning.
My face hurts. For some reason the neuralgia is a little worse today. It is very difficult to stay focused...what was I just saying?
I may have to try a Mary Jane therapy here shortly. I don't normally have pot around and rarely indulge. That may change.
I want the pills if I can get a medical card. I've never been much of a pot smoker, but a friend once gave me a few of the pills and I liked those.
Very mellow. I'm sort of running out of options with my condition. I'll try anything short of heroin.
I had some whiskey over the weekend. The problems with whiskey come the next morning after the delusions of grandeur you have while drinking it.
Speaking of the money in baseball--here is John Oliver riffing on the absurd stuffiness of the Yankees:
The Final Four. I'm not as enthusiastic about it without my team, but I'll make an effort to watch at least some of it.
You've got to be very good to make it this far, and Oregon just didn't have enough. I think Coach K got in Dillon Brooks' head a little after the Ducks beat Duke in the Sweet 16. Well, maybe not, but Brooks had one of his poorest game against the Okies...
Maybe the Sooners had something to do with that, I admit grudgingly.
I'll root for Syracuse, a team that proved the critics wrong when many of them argued the 13-loss Orangemen didn't belong in the tourney.
The last team to win it all with so many regular season losses might just be the late Jimmy Valvano's N.C. State team of the early eighties.
Sanders has helped take a long-time movement from the radical left and bring many of its issues into the mainstream. If he turns around and chooses to support Clinton, much of that work will be undone and his legacy as a revolutionary candidate will be gone forever.
Thank you, Terry. I am overwhelmed and I am moved by the fact that in March alone, our campaign received more than 1.7 million individual contributions from working Americans, and that it was our most successful fundraising month of the campaign. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that so many people would come together in a way that is not only unprecedented, but is transforming American politics. Since we started building this political revolution together, we have received more than 6.5 million individual contributions. And do you know what our average contribution is? Just $27. What we are doing through our campaign is proving that you don’t have to go around begging Wall Street, fossil fuel lobbyists, and pharmaceutical executives for outrageous sums of money in order to run a winning campaign. I am very proud of that fact. You should be as well. And building this kind of broad-based, grassroots movement is important because this moment in our history requires transformational change that no candidate for president, not Bernie Sanders or anybody else, can achieve alone. That is why we are building a political revolution that is bringing millions of people together. Working people who have given up on the political process. Blacks and whites, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, straight, gay and transgender, female and male, people who were born in American and people who immigrated here all joining with each other. And what we are saying loudly and clearly at every volunteer event, every rally, and with every contribution is that we believe this government belongs to all of us, and not just a wealthy few campaign donors. That is what this campaign is about. That is the political revolution.
In solidarity, Bernie Sanders
Ithrew a few bucks Bernie's way, and now I feel like a high-roller. We're gonna change this culture, goddamn it!
“Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X,” by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, is the first book to examine the relationship between two of the most volatile lives in the most volatile era of 20th-century America. Truthdig’s Allen Barra talked to Roberts, distinguished professor of history at Purdue University, from the United States Military Academy, where he is teaching this winter.
The interview.
Terry Simons is the founder of Round Bend Press Books and Round Bend Press Detritus. He has worked as a day laborer, dishwasher, factory drone, community organizer, journalist, media consultant and freelance writer. He attended the University of Oregon and Portland State University, where he read journalism, politics, literature and history. He is the author most recently of "Third and a Mile," a fan's notes about the University of Oregon's football travails, 2010--2017.
RBP books are available from Amazon and Lulu.
Write to: roundbendpress@yahoo.com
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