blarney/rubble

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." — Dorothy Thompson's husband, Minnesota native Sinclair Lewis; CNN.com pic found via Pam's House Blend.

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• His style of insult humor is not in the "just kidding, folks" Catskills lineage of Rickles/Lampanelli/Triumph. It's more Dozens, more Dooto.


• He comes from an era in which the W Word didn't exist (this is decades before "black" "behavior" and signifiers became hypercommoditized, my nizzle), and people don't quite understand the notion of a seventysomething wigger, one who's a lot more substantial and sincere than little Dylan working on his N-word inflections, gangsta scowl, and misogyny at soccer practice, or young Amber throwing signs at a kegger to show she's Down Wit Da Bloods, holmes.

There was a period where it seemed like he wasn’t going to renew with Impulse - that he was going to make his own label. And in fact he issued one record himself, the first version of the record called Cosmic Music. There are aspects to that that I would like to talk about. First of all, the cover was Coltrane’s design so, of course, it was not a very slick looking record. We didn’t have Photoshop and all of that in those days so it was pretty funky kind of graphics – a handmade look and design. But the important thing to me was what the design was trying to convey. You had a photograph of Coltrane paying homage to the victims of Hiroshima on the back, a memorial to Hiroshima. So, that speaks enormous volumes about Coltrane’s distance from American official behavior in the world. We want to try and make an analysis of the postwar period, all of that, how that war was brought to an end, but I think there are certainly good reasons to think that it was absolutely unnecessary for those bombs to be dropped. The war was won at that point and the bombs were dropped because it was a good time to test such a thing. It’s an awful thing to think, but that seems to be not an exaggerated interpretation of the history. Coltrane clearly felt the need to make this public prayer for peace. It is clearly important to him because he ties that photograph to his first record for his own label. The other elements, which are very important, very significant, are the elements associated with the major religions – from the Crescent of Islam to the Star of David, the Cross and so on. He is speaking about the need for religious leaders to deal with the realities of where we are at this point. If there’s one God, and they’re all saying there’s one God, but they all think, as Bob Dylan put it “God’s on their side.” I don’t think Coltrane had that naive view of religion. He was interested in what can we do next? Which he believed in some general way, that life on this Earth, has meaning, has purpose. How can we encourage our so-called leaders to behave more responsibly? It seems the very worse people are the ones that decide to be politicians or decide to be religious leaders. Until the people distance themselves from this stupidity – as I said before – 2 million people on the streets of London saying “This war is absurd,” but one man could take the country to war. It’s wrong. And that one man can still be in power. It’s wrong but there’s no mechanism to get rid of him.

IM IN UR DIEBOLDZ
STROKIN MY HARBL
STEALIN UR VOTEZ