The Political Cave

                                                            

Every day this year it seems there is something to keep your stomach churning, that feeling of acid-reflex burn and your mind yearning for tension relief.   Whether it is tariffs, wholesale government firings, loss of human rights, threats of hostile territorial takeovers of friendly allies by our military, or the economy reeling and baby boomer life savings being drained along with it, angst is in the air. Memories stir to try and find those moments of relief but when you hit the noggin search engine it brings up familiar reminders of today’s constant turmoil from all those places traveled long ago and far away. As one rock group harmonized, “We have all been here before.”

                                                             

 As I examine the memory chamber, my life found me on the edge of continuous upheaval from the time my brain pieced together who I was and where I was in this world in the mid 20^th Century.  As a little guy playing in vacant lots I remember 1957 as a great year for American cars and Hula Hoops, but when Sputnik launched in October that year the world seemed traumatized and changed. Sputnik was bigger than Elvis. I have more memories of crawling under desks and watching scary black & white footage of bombs-away than I do of the Mickey Mouse Club and Howdy Doody.  Many other moments from so far away find myself by myself with little green soldiers, baseball cards or at conflict with many other kids in the neighborhood with dirt-clod fights and other little boy conflicts of the moment.

                                                       

 

One memory has me in the back of a police car being driven down the alley to my home after being apprehended in a vacant tin building on an empty lot which would be Highway 99 very soon.  There were three of us fooling around with hide and seek in an old warehouse, but my cohorts in crime made their getaway unseen and escaped the ride to their loving mothers arms.  This was my introduction to law enforcement in America. It would not be my last encounter. An alternative practical use of how a belt could be used turned out to be my big reward at the time.

                                                                         

 My parents voted Republican. They voted for Nixon three times in federal elections- 1960, 1968 and 1972. They voted for him when he ran for Governor of California and lost to Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in 1962. This was the famous election, for awhile, when Nixon announced after losing, “You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." If only.

While the election for Governor of California in 1962 was in full swing other matters were on the minds of most Americans in the fall of that year. This was the moment when Armageddon was at hand with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union over missile deployment by the Soviets in Cuba was a terrifying public moment for the world to witness, but fortunately live through .  An obscure young folksinger from Minnesota was in New York at the time. The recent movie, “A Complete Unknown”, gives a good account of how the world felt for those tense few days October 1962 while giving an inspirational nod to Bob Dylan for his artistry.

 

                                                                 

 

As 1963 moved along, baseball helped push the tensions of the 1962 nuclear war showdown into the rear view mirror. It was the year of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills and the Los Angeles Dodgers who swept the New York Yankees in the World Series until November and a Dallas motorcade blew the year to smithereens.  The Trump administration just released a bunch of the President Kennedy assassination files and declassified them here in March of 2025. At this point in time it has as much meaning to the USA and most of its population as releasing all the documents surrounding President Harding’s sudden demise in August of 1923.

                                                                      

 

I still have vivid pictures in my head of getting the news of President John F. Kennedy’s death over the grammar school PA system with everyone assembled for the news, and then being dismissed for the remainder of the day. The stunned walk home with shocked classmates filled with questions without answers. On the Sunday, three days after the traumatizing event in Texas, found the family getting home from a somber church ceremony. A sports diversion called me to our family den to see the Chicago Bears and the Los Angeles Rams football game. The CBS channel switched to a Dallas police station transfer of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, from a local police holding cells to federal authorities. Enter Jack Ruby, and on live television America’s TV viewers across the nation witnessed assassination number two in Texas as Ruby gunned down Oswald and was immediately apprehended.

And so the 1960s went. The low-lights or highlights have been endlessly chronicled over time but with six decades of distance the passion and intensity of the multiple confrontations has been greatly dulled. Major legislative victories for Civil Rights and Medicare were passed in 1965. ThePill appeared in drugstores across the country. With hopes high for equality, and the reality of oppression in the everyday, the fires that burned in Watts and Detroit spread to more than 120 other American cities for the next several years. All the events captured in black & white on our 19 inch television set.

Viet Nam went from a small nation civil war to a full blown US intervention to stem the perceived communist threat. The streets and colleges throughout the US were filled with angry protests and violence over the escalating war and draft at the time.  It seemed the world was on fire, because it was. By 1968 Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.  Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election in 1968. And there came Richard Nixon making deals with the southern state legislators who universally opposed The Civil Rights Act along with Medicare to fill the bill and get elected as President in 1968.

As the decade drew to a close, 1969 saw the US with over 500,000 men in uniforms warring in Viet Nam. The Tet Offensive in February and Hamburger Hill in May set the stage for the gradual withdrawal and defeat in South East Asia from the huge policy mistake by the US government. Broadway Joe “guaranteed” a win over the Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl and delivered. Woodstock Nation arrived in August at a New York farm and departed in December at the Altamont Speedway in California with a young man dead at the hands of some angry and drunk Hell’s Angels. It was a consequential decade with many conflicts and casualties. Remarkably, the 1960s had far fewer casualties than the 1980s or our current decade. 

 Thanks for the visit.

"The Thrill of Victory to the Agony of Defeat"

 

 

 

 

The 2024 Presidential election is over. I find the result to be a frightening indictment of the American electorate's profound lack of critical thinking skills, but not a shocking one. President Donald Trump, a convicted felon, acknowledged rapist and liar, who also tried to overthrow the 2020 election results by leading an insurrection at the Capitol of the United States, defeated the former Vice President, Kamala Harris by a wide margin. Some might call the election close with narrow margins in swing states across the Great Lakes and Southwest but, truly, this was not a close election no matter what the corporate media and their pollsters wanted to sell you during this exhausting, twisted and tumultuous campaign.  The propagandists just wanted lots of advertising dollars to hoard and to ensure no woman was going to get elected President of the United States of America.

 James Brown sang, “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” back in 1966. The lyrics of the song were written by a woman, Betty Jean Newsome. The words ring truer today than they have since 1966. That was the first year after a landmark court case (Griswold v Connecticut) which allowed full distribution of the FDA approved oral contraceptive (The Pill) throughout the United States. This was almost a decade after it had been developed. Seven years later the medical procedure of aborting unplanned pregnancies were guaranteed through the nation with the landmark 7-2 SCOTUS decision in Roe v Wade. Women had finally found a sense of sexual freedom and couples now had choice when to conceive. During that period most of us living then thought these issues were resolved and tried to move on to other matters.

 

During this charged late 1960s to mid 1970s period the term “Politically Correct” emerged. Initially it was used to describe civility and respect when engaged in conversations between the sexes or to power.  Conservatives then set about demeaning the term while describing it as a sign of male weakness and dishonesty. It became a bully term to humiliate those working for compromise and cooperation. Today, because “Politically Correct” sounds a bit dated and wordy, a new term had to be created and so we now have “Woke” to describe both weakness in gender/power conversations, but also those who get screwed and tell.

 Here we are in 2025, and the above referenced cases of settled law have now been completely unsettled and undone by the Roberts Supreme Court. A SCOTUS now comprised of five conservative men and four women. Of the associate justice member women, there are three liberals and one ultra conservative catholic who clerked for a previous catholic SCOTUS member in the 1990s and then worked for the Bush people in Gore v Bush to decide the 2000 election before her Trump appointment in 2020. This SCOTUS has become the most conservative Court in over a century.

 

This is a court where a third if its membership was appointed by President Donald Trump. A Supreme Court currently made up of eight Harvard and Yale graduates with a Notre Dame outlier. A court that today thumbs its nose at precedent and twists language to suit its mood to further religious extremism in government while currying favor with the conservative business elite. While promoting the bizarre concept of “Originalism” in regards to the US Constitution, it turns the US the founding fathers documents and explicit meanings of separating the government from religion into a snake twisted knot of deceit promoting religion at levels never seen in American history.

  

Until the last few months of the 2024 election I thought that the surprising election of 2016 was an aberration, and simply a likely repudiation of Hilary Clinton’s persona. How could the person who so bungled an international health crisis, drove the nation into one ugly violent scene after another over racial profiling with hate filled rants against all minorities and denied the 2020 election results be electable? How do women vote for the man responsible for wiping away their social and medical progress of the past 50 years?

What I failed to realize until November 6, 2024 is that President Donald Trump epitomizes the American fantasy of being able to do what he wants when he wants, to speak exactly, and as profanely, as he wishes at any occasion without any regard for facts or truth. No correctness necessary or wanted. He is THE hero for the hopeless, hapless and helpless mass of the US population who are so upset at their current situation for absolutely no reason, other than the ones a right wing media feeds them 24/7 to divide and antagonize a nation. He is the perfect front man to assault women, minorities, the working class and the curious here in the United States.

 

President Trump remains no friend to most white working class men in the US today, either, but he is the Ringmaster of the Testosterone Circus that parades through American culture every day to bamboozle them.  You witness this male hormone carnival every day through male-dominance-messaging of fear through all media platforms, through sporting events that cannot proceed without a tribute to US military might, through endless shows and movies promoting physical and weapons violence on all manner of humanity, through news streams locally and nationally of daily murders, auto accidents and natural or manmade disasters in every media market of the land. 

Welcome to one Wild World of Courts 2025!

Update

 

Not sure what Google has in store for my little blog site after all these years. I have definitely slowed down on the posts and at this point find my blog being shut out of the Adsense world. Not a huge loss since I've never received a dime from Google during all my years here. The analytics people say I've earned a little over seven dollars for the number of views I've generated in total. I must confess I've been unhappy with the Google blog experience for some  time due to its clunky nature and refusal to allow any smooth and easy audio uploads. It no longer functions the way a social media site should function any longer. I have no interest in doing a youtube program, which is even more restrictive these days. 

Sigh.

Fits And Starts

                                                               

The stuff of dreams in August of 1987.

I was headed to Sacramento to oversee all the video purchasing and distribution for Tower Records as the new Video Product Manager.

How did this come about? 

 

 

That thought was on my mind a lot during this period of time when the nation had a President Ronald which rhymes with Donald and the country was embroiled in one political controversy after another. The time stamps on the USA clocks indicated this was Iran-Contra time. The days and months when President Ronald was funding secret military efforts through illicit & illegal arms sales to Iran in an effort to overthrow the Sandinista leftist government in Nicaragua by the Contras, who were operating in Honduras causing mass migrations northward. The Savings and Loan institutions were collapsing under the weight of the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volker, and his ramping up the discount interest rates the banks charged to other banks for borrowing purposes to halt the high inflation leading to almost a third of all Savings and Loan institutions to be closed in a decade's time. And if that were not enough, 138 Ronald Reagan Administration officials were ultimately investigated, indicted or convicted for their "public service" in the 1980s. The figure remains the highest conviction rate total on record for administrative members of any United States President. 

 

 

Up to this 1987 point on the historical flow chart, I'd recently worked for nearly six years at two Tower stores. I started as a clerk and moved up to assistant manager status before I found myself managing the video store on San Antonio Road. I worked under 3 managers Randi, Kenny & Kevin) during this period, one of which was a Regional Manager for the San Fransisco Bay Area Tower Records stores. I'd been part of the fledgling A-team crew setting up new stores on the video side in the mid-1980s. At this time, I was living in a two-bedroom condo in Mountain View with my wife and two young boys aged 5 and 2 as a Tower Video store manager when Jennifer interviewed and hired me for the open position at the Tower corporate offices in West Sacramento, CA. 

 

 

My wife at the time was the big bread earner while working in Silicon Valley as a risk management statistician. I had the fun job, and was determined to make a success of it at Tower's headquarters. Thus began an uneasy alliance between us as partners/parents/spouses that would unravel for period before finding the yarn to piece the relationship back decades later. 

 

 

I've been very lucky.

 

 

If you want to hear how lucky? Here is podcast interview I did with Bob Zimmerman in the fall of 2022 for his Oral History of Tower Records project. Interview.

We'll be back in a few weeks time with an update or two. See you.

 

View from theTower

View from a Tower

I took some time off from my little blog site to ponder what might be of interest to readers going forward on these pages of ether. During these past months several things have helped direct me to a new path here. Much of my life has been about the pursuit and consumption of pop culture in its many forms and the exploration of history. It has given me context, perspectives with both frustrations and comfort over the many challenging world environments I've witnessed in 7 decades.

 

 

One of the things that helped in the decision to move this blog into memoir/historical territory was that my sister recently sold her home. She lives in the mid-Atlantic region which is on the opposite side of the country from my home here in Nor Cal. She's lived in her little house with some acreage for over 25 years doing a variety of ventures but finally realized, as the years wore on, that the body was a little less forgiving now and small projects had become major ones. So, given the crazy real estate rise in prices throughout the country she decided this year was the time to sell. And, did so just in time. 

 

Moving is a big deal. I can tell you that because I've moved 20 times over my adult life. It has always been a pain in the ass leaving, deciding what stays with you, or what goes away, getting acclimated and then reliving the ordeal all over again. You begin to feel like Sisyphus rolling that stone over and over again. For my sister, one of the keepsakes that needed to go were boxes of old family photos. We talked on the phone and I asked her to send them to me. Some of the photos date back over 100 years but most were shot from the 1950s to 1990s and cover family from all over the country. I was shocked to find so many photos I'd never seen before (most of them to be honest) and I promised my sis that I would digitize the pictures and put them on a disc or stick and mail the shots back to her. As I type this, I've almost finished the project but it has taken over two months to do so, due to a lot of cleanup work necessary to get many of the old black & whites into decent looking shape. 

 

I did learn a little about the processing of photos from back in the day. The scratches or dots found in many old black or white pictures, which can look like little stars on a very dark background, can be caused in a variety of ways, but generally can be laid to processing problems in the dark rooms. Some occasions find small particles trapped in a camera or film mechanism within the camera to put a scratch across an entire roll, but that is a pretty rare instance.One of the things I had to remember, before blaming the photographers for their ill kept tools was that the home photo market was really quite new and exploding right after World War II with hundreds of labs and new "technicians" opening in a very short time.

 

This was a huge new business that Kodak came to dominate with labs and processing centers and that local small biz camera shops tried to compete in for a generation or two. New tech combined with the urgency for speed meant some scratches on many of the early prints. The factory processes to get the prices down and the product turned around more quickly has generally meant lower quality, which Americans have accepted along the way to get those lower prices. Polaroid developed the instant picture development process that arrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I still remember coating the finished pictures with a filmed goo that was brushed on lightly just after the picture developed after a minute or two.  For the camera enthusiasts, classes emerged all over the country to cultivate and nurture the craft and technology but very few I know today still practice the old art  and craft with the 35mm cameras and assortments of lenses to match.

 

Nearly all of my childhood, and most of my teen years, find the pictures in black & white. As I browsed through my family's pictorial history, I felt a little like an out-of-body mind-projection character from the silent film era. In my little cowboy outfits or other long gone fashion statements of yesteryear I could almost hear myself shout out, "Shane! Shane!" or some other plea to join a technicolor world with sound. It's a digital world we now live in but history is always with us. We should not forget the lessons we learned along the way. We should be able to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

 

Another reason for repurposing the SilverThreads blog to a historical memoir theme rather than a periodic observation site about current events came about with a request to do an interview about my career at MTS Inc. (Tower Records/Video to the world). Bob Zimmerman, a friend and former coworker at Tower, emailed me about doing an interview on his Podcast (2500 Del Monte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records). I was reluctant to do so for a couple of reasons, but thought about it and happily opted to contribute to Bob's exceptional podcast project.

 

My reluctance stemmed from a couple of incidents since I left the company back in the late spring of 2003. Colin Hanks and Sean Stuart made All Things Must Pass, a beautiful and powerful documentary about Tower Records that came out in 2015 to critical acclaim. I spoke to both Colin and Sean on the phone and we had a few e-mails during the time (2007-2010) they were making the documentary, but they decided to bypass the video aspect of the Tower story altogether due to time and budget constraints. Video was too large a category to cover given the limited parameters the film makers felt could be conveyed, and was never mentioned in the documentary. It was their vision and their call, which I respected and still do. I did not want to talk about the experiences for a long time afterwards, and just went on with my life

 

It has been 19 years since I left the MTS campus in West Sacramento and 16 years since the company was shuttered up for good. In those years, the retail landscape in America has been obliterated and especially so for those who offered music, video and book products to the public at large. Many of the adventurous and brave companies and people creating the content and distribution of the magic that music, film and print brought to the world have also been swept away without a trace.

So here we are,deciding finally to talk about some of my experiences and a few accomplishments Tower Records video footprint achieved during my time at the helm of that division within the company which was known as Tower Records/Video.