I've been sulking in my cave as I follow the news avoiding anything about Presidential Politics that isn't outright hilarious, so obviously Bobby "Alligator Gar" Jindal and Donald "Singing Bass" Trump and Ted "Hey, I'm an asshole, all right" Cruz are amusing the hell out of me. Unfortunately, the rest of the world sucks.
The Mother Emmanuel killings were horrible, and the relocation of the Confederate Battle Flag to the the Statehouse Museum in Columbia was so overdue that the joy seems as sad as the tears and anger. I was slightly enraged about all the nonsense with the faces on the dollar bills, since I am a fan of Andy "By God" Jackson, the first true Democrat and elected man of the people as opposed to aristocrat who would have handled things a bit differently than Lincoln. Since he threatened to hang his Vice President, John C. Calhoun for sedition with his nonsense about "secession" and "nullification" I suspect he would have been very nasty to the south early on in the secession kerfluffle, resulting in a lot less death and destruction. I also think there's no reason to have the permanent fixtures on the bills anyway...rotate them with bona fide distinguished Americans and heroes who were not politicans; have multiple faces on the bills.Let each new Secretary of the Treasury usher in new placeholders on the Bills.
Then David Brooks wrote some nonsense about removing all the monuments to Confederate heros from the public byways and locations in the South. In a way, Brooks is advocating something a lot more draconian than just moving one flag and possibly changing a couple of others. Of course, his big focus was on Robert E. Lee which was silly. Lee made one ethical error that resulted in the destruction of his beloved Virginia, the loss of his estate, and the death of friends, family members and close associates including more than a few Yankees. It was an ethical judgement that he struggled with; had Joseph Jackson not been seriously wounded and forced to spend a couple of years recovering, Lee had been asked to fill and had agreed to fill a non-combatant job advising Jefferson Davis, whom he disliked, and who was not so fond of him. Lee also refused to be buried in his uniform and famously told his soldiers to go home. He was one of the first of the Southern generals to request that he be granted his citizenship back.
So, Brooks -- the smug, wealthy elitist who writes the same Capitalism is the answer/Globalism is great drivel as Tom Fiedman although less hysterically -- pissed me off. I mused over that article, but before I could get my teeth into it, the Cosby thing blew up. And continued to blow up.
Now, possibly alone in my generation and subsequent ones, I never liked Bill Cosby. His last original stuff was in the first couple of albums, and the rest of his body of work has been jejune and marginal. I never watched the show, and think anyone who goes out of his way to wear some multicolored vomit looking sweater needs help. I had no problem with his diagnosis of many of the problems in the Black community; I did think he was pretty smug about it and very good at blaming victims.
But, I'd never picked him as a serial rapist. Surprise! At the same time, it appears that Kim Fowley whom I've written of recently with a certain amount of respect, raped at least one and possibly more of the members of the Runaways...when they were minors. He wrote in one of his memoirs that he had never "made love" to any of the Runaways. Well, the HuffPo article bears no resemblance to a description of love making...he drugged her, ripped her clothes off and fucked her in front of a room full of people including some of the other members who were so intimidated that they never spoke of it.
Ok, the Kim Fowley I got to know a little and whose Underground Garage Show on SiriusXM that I enjoyed was the guy 40 years later. He was a rock and roll auteur; most of the stuff he produced and did himself was pretty awful dreck and he admits it. The Runaways were probably his greatest success after getting people to light their lighters to show John Lennon how much they loved him as he made his first Plastic Ono Band appearance and I shouldn't forget Alley Opp which was actually his first record and probably his biggest hit.
So, Cosby and Fowley were both reprehensible men. The difference between them is that Cosby held himself to be a role model; Kim Fowley never held himself up as anything except a rock and roll animal. One is a hyprocrite; one far less so. I know which I prefer.
With that, my most recent article over at Veterans Today, on the problem of Sex, Ennui and Hubris. I hope it lets you think.
