May Days

From the land time forgot in the Seventeenth Century, Robert Herrick opined in verse:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.


May is the love month for poets and pagans. Fertility is fragile and short. Make the most of  the opportunity, and make that dance around the old Maypole count. I'm a fan of the month, and its pagan principle.

The first day in month of May  has a much different meaning for people in many parts of the world. This is the day to commemorate International Workers Day. As in so many cases, the United States does it differently. In America the homage to labor gets a spot in September. The commemoration to work doesn't even get an official calendar day. The holiday gets the rotating first Monday of the month as just another three day weekend binge for RVers and off-roaders to celebrate the end of summer.  Americans don't seem bothered that summer always has at least two  weeks to go officially before ending its seasonal cycle.  Call it the leaving-the-game-in-the-seventh-inning syndrome.

Another curious element of America, and Canada for that matter, putting the labor holiday at the ninth month  might just go back to fertility in an artificially perverse sort of way. We start every year on the first day of January,  and the American Labor Day times out on the calendar as a ritualized end moment of an annual female pregnancy term, which becomes an odd pairing of what the word labor might represent in the back recesses of the North American mind.  Maybe this helps explains why workers in this country continue get less and less of the economic stick.  

I am reminded again this last month of the terrible price labor in this country has paid over the past several decades with the latest mining disasters in West Virgina and Kentucky, which ended with both the government and the mining union's failure to protect their workers from criminal corporate behavior.

Mt first recollection of any mining disaster goes back to the Sixties, and the Bee Gees. When I first heard the Gibb brothers on the radio in the mid to late 1960s I thought it was the Beatles under the  pseudonym, Bee Gees. The Bee Gees first song to reach North American shores was the New York Mining Disaster 1941.  The song was not about an actual mining disaster that occurred in New York, but was a fictionalized account of one that took place in a small village of Aberfan in Wales. This disaster was particularly cruel in that of the 144 persons who lost their lives 116 were children between the ages of 7 and 10.

A mining disaster has been determined to mean that at least five persons lost their lives in an accident. Just an arbitrary number when you stop and think about. The most recent Kentucky coal mining accident  where two miners lost their lives is not considered a disaster. It is only a disaster, I guess, if you are related to one of those who perished. This April has seen a coal mining disaster in West Virginia and a coal mining accident in Kentucky. Thirty-one miners have lost their lives, and at both mines safety regulations were routinely violated and the labor union was nowhere to be found. It seems the mining union has been driven out of the work place.

Think about racking up 639 government health and safety violations and still doing business-as-usual to kill 29 people at your facility. This is exactly what Massey Energy Co. did for the past year and change. The mine that Alliance Resource Partners from Tulsa, OK  owns in Kentucky where the accident claimed two lives has had more than 40 closure notices from state and federal agencies since 2009. This particular mine also was cited 840 times for health and safety violations. You have to ask what the health and safety rules at this stage of the economic game really mean in this country. Certainly does not mean much to those who lost their lives, or to their surviving family members. Certainly means nothing to the public at large who shrug these disasters off just another crawl on the 24/7 talk TV drone.

Here in Kern County most of the work disasters occur in the oil refineries and wells. Kern Oil & Refining Company recently settled a local lawsuit for $250,00 after having a worker killed and six others workers severely injured over a three year period. The company was also cited during this period for multiple safety and health violations.  The Bakersfield Californian reported the following statement from the company after the terms of the case was issued, “We consider this matter closed and intend to conduct our usual course of business.” No admission of guilt was handed down by the court, which is absolutely what happens in every litigated case brought against every flagrant corporate violator.

None of this is news any longer. Today this stuff surfaces as the run of the mill cycle of "usual course of business" in a country of outsourced jobs and with the highest unemployment levels since the 1980s. Mining disasters get the usual government hacks uttering the more and more hollow words that something will change and how precious every life is, but very little really changes to put corporations on notice that safety violations and death will have major consequences for the corporate criminals.

It is not like we as a culture have just awakened to this reality of corporate-greed-with-zero-responsibility gone-wild. We have watched this shit build for a long time. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject. Pop music has even weighed in on the epidemic. Two of the worlds greatest songwriters pegged the consequences of the corporate business trend early in the game at the outset of the 1980s with separate albums devoted to the wreckage that globalization and union busting were leaving in their respective wakes.

Bob Dylan laid out the reality in song from the wonderful Infidels album with the song Union Sundown. "Well it's Sundown on the Union, and what's made in the USA. Sure was a good idea until greed got in the way." Neil Young  put out a great album, Hawks and Doves, which included the masterful tune Comin Apart At Every Nail with these insightful lines, "Hey hey, ain't that right, the workin' man's in for a helluva fight. Oh this country sure looks good to me, but these fences are comin' apart at every nail."

Yes,we have come apart at every nail. It is something we can no longer afford to deny. Haven't people in America and throughout the world had enough of multinational corporatism, and the cheapness principle of lowest cost for the masses to maximize the highest profits for the few?  Let us celebrate this first day of May with renewed energy to mend all those fences, and to build a better tomorrow filled with love and respect for all working people. Maybe the latest Mayday-Mayday-Mayday cries from the Gulf of Mexico over yet another corporate caused natural disaster will be the final major turning point.

To better May Days in our future.

The Blues- Bringin' 'em Back-

I snap the remote clicker this afternoon and finish another brilliant look at the American experience captured in an awesome box-set, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues. This documentary was created for PBS and first broadcast in 2003. Seven filmmakers put their unique stamp on the search for, and pulse of, the Blues.

All the films offer a loving tribute to the Blues, but I most enjoy seeing the Red, White & Blues documentary that Mike Figgis directed with so many of the British blues greats talking and performing a variety of songs. You cannot go wrong having Tom Jones, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Eric Burdon, Chris Farlowe, Steve Winwood, Albert Lee, John Mayall and Georgie Fame give you the low-down on what the Blues scene in England during the Fifties and Sixties was all about. The striking thing is the pride each feels ( and justifiably so IMO) in rescuing the Blues from obscurity and making it a vibrant art form for an entirely new worldwide generation. By the end of the 1950s Americans had discarded the Blues, and all the great black artists of the time in search of Elvis Presley clones and Sandra Dee look-alikes to drive the white society's pop music train. B.B. King, to this day, continues to thank those young English lads for making his long lived career possible.

I'm not sure what happened to our culture here in this country, but the Blues are once again hiding out these days. You have to look for them on little shiny discs, old black vinyl, or on obscure websites. I view the disappearance of this medium, this feeling, this beat as a sad culmination of instant gratification coupled with 24/7 marketing for just-in-time distribution.

This cultural retreat has nothing to do with the Internet.

Some bright artistic creative people who love music have created the ARChive of Contemporary Music. Keith Richards, the world's greatest rhythm guitarist, is an adviser, donor and curator of the Keith Richards Blues Collection for the organization and its website. He just helped get an incredibly rare Robert Johnson recording "Me and The Devil Blues"/"Little Queen of Spades" for the ARChive organization. A cool little obscure Internet site devoted to music and the Blues.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, people reflected before they acted. Maybe a marketing guy with an engineer at some cellular phone division inside some telecommunications conglomerate found the frequency needed to uncork the great id from the bottleneck that restrained total consumption.

How many people do you see in your current day-to-day life are marked with sadness? Sadness takes on a variety of shades but, always takes some time to quietly examine loss and isolation to come to certain realizations of the situation. Sadness, or the Blues, takes a long time to develop.

A lot of emotional feelings take nanoseconds to get expressed. Rage happens instantly. Depression occurs the moment your son son describes dying his hair black and blue to impress the girlfriend of some other guy.

I know today a lot of people are depressed. The economy, the wars, the housing market, Wall Street, the banks, gay marriage, not enough Jesus, blah, blah, blah depress great hordes of society. These are sad people but they do not suffer from sadness. They have been bamboozled by the Pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry into swallowing heavy doses of anti-depressants to combat their ignorance in challenging times while ingesting infotainment as a daily news source. Charles Barber wrote a book, Comfortably Numb, which was published last year detailing the meteoric rise of these mind altering drugs. In 2007 over 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants were given out. It's hard to experience the Blues when you're medicated out of your mind.

Blues is a sober feeling with a splash of 80-proof fast moving liquid in a slow moving liquid for companionship. The Blues has no place for anger. Anger is red-hot and immediate. Anger generally finds litigation, or law enforcement close by. Judging by our prison population there might be as many angry citizens as medicated ones going around. And these angry ones now make up more than 7 million people serving in some form of incarceration here in the land of the free. The United States has five percent of the world's population but has twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world. That is not a misprint. Click here for a recent CNN story.

I'm a creature of habit. I still subscribe and read the local fish wrap, The Bakersfield Californian. Today the paper had a fine Blues-worthy column by Lois Henry on the state of the parolee population in Bakersfield. It turns out Bakersfield has a little higher percentage of parolees per 1,000 residents than Fresno, and almost twice the percentage of parolees than Sacramento. Of course, Kern County is the prison capital of California with a big prison in almost every little town. Kern County is home to CCI in Tehachapi, the Kern Valley State Prison and the North Kern State Prison in Delano, the Wasco State Prison in Wasco, a federal prison camp in Taft that is privately operated. And then there are the several county jails located in Shafter, Mojave and Ridgecrest. A barbed wire salesman can do pretty well in this county.

All these little cities now live off of what the prisons provide. You know, the jobs that come from maintenance and construction along with the positions securing the prisoners. And those guards will live close by where they work and will get their gas and food and have kids who might work there or be guarded there and so on. Reminds me of medieval castles and a feudal economic system of serfs subsisting on slave labor.

The thought of growing gulags in America could bring back a full case of the Blues, if people would only stop and think about it.