The Good Bye Brands

Lots of big news this past week to chew on with my Trader Joe's strawberry breakfast bar. General Motors announced one of their most recognizable brands, Pontiac, was toast. The magic of muscle under the hood combined with sleek design and marketing acumen crumbled away like burnt sides of white dough under the heat of competition and mismanagement at General Motors. It was, for decades, one of the most recognized brands in America. Poof! Rubbed away in a cost savings restructuring to try and save GM.

The fact is Pontiac has been a figment of a brand for a long time. The real innovation John DeLorean brought to this division had disappeared by the mid-1970s. Pontiac became a knock-off of itself, much like General Motors is today.

In my youth I got to see up close and personal what the demise of a brand meant when Chrysler put an an end to DeSoto. It ended the family dealership close to fifty years ago. Mom started teaching, dad got a new job at the local Pontiac dealership and life went on. It's funny but I remember in the early 1970s this same dealership started selling Hondas. Most of the staff joked at how small the cars were (the honda-tonka was the lot's nickname for the new arrival) and that this company would go nowhere in America. The original had a two-cylinder air-cooled engine. Great gas mileage, no creature comforts. This same local dealer has sold only Hondas for more than two decades.

The United States Supreme Court, gets a small makeover in the coming months with the announcement that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will be resigning this June. America's 41st President, George H. W. Bush, nominated David Souter who came to the Supreme Court almost 19 years ago. He was a moderate Republican nominee, and has surely found that the moderate Republican views he still holds are now labeled by current Republican leadership as being nearly socialist in nature. Whatever the reason for the Justice Souter resignation the Supreme Court finds itself swimming backward in time. Last summer the Roberts led court struck down the longstanding Washington D.C. ban on handguns. Gun violence in America still shocks the rest of the world for its size and scope.

Another major issue with a lot of history on the Supreme Court's current argument list is the Voting Rights Act. On the surface the use of the law to ensure voting rights are maintained does seem to indicate that some states are more equal in the eyes of the federal government than others. However, the Republican Party's indifference to the needs of minorities amid the South's changing political landscape might argue that this Voting Rights Act should remain unchanged.

The Republican brand of today is a strange mixture indeed. The great coalition between fiscal conservatives with a libertarian view of less taxes and more individualism (ie: no government oversight for big business) joined to the fervent evangelical amalgam of Falwell and Robertson along with the segregationists who fled the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s appears on the verge of collapse.

Compassionate conservatism is one thing you never hear from Republican leadership today. That principle, or goal, or sales point is dead. Republicans today hate poor people, and there are a lot more poor people in this country than at any time in the nation's history. This is why only 21% of America identifies itself with the Republican Party. Only Republicans would argue that poor people, many who cannot afford a motor vehicle, and hence have no driver's license, must show a photo identification to vote.

Republicans are sinking into irrelevancy. Gallup conducted a poll in January on the State of the State looking at where the political parties favored Democrats, and where they favored Republicans. Republicans showed a double digit lead over Democrats in only four states- Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska. Those are some sparsely populated states, and graphically illustrate the complete demise of the Republican brand. If that is all you have, along with some voter finagling in the South you might be a figment of a brand at this point in time.

Columbine: The Nation Did Go Bowling

It's been seven years since the release of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Mr. Moore a few times in my previous life, and know him to be a stickler for getting the facts straight. On IMDB.com a small point is made that Eric and Dylan did not go bowling the morning before marching into madness on their high school campus. That could be true, but Michael Moore did get corroborating reports from eyewitness who had been interviewed by the police, the FBI and the local District Attorney's office. He also framed his argument on the image of bowling by asking a question:

"So did Dylan and Eric show up that morning and bowl two games before moving on to shoot up the school? And did they just chuck the balls down the lane? Did this mean something?"

But, the small point entirely misses the bullet hole of accuracy.

Sunday April 20, 2009 marked the 10th Anniversary for the Columbine High School tragedy. Twelve students and a teacher shot dead. The two killers shot themselves as well. Total body count fifteen people dead. A lot of people on April 20, 1999 were horrified at the violence on the high school campus, just not that horrified to change anything in the ten years that have elapsed.

In 1965 with race riots across America, Junior Walker and the All-Stars rang on radios "Shotgun, shoot 'em fore he run." Shotgun, big hit.

1968 was a big year for America in terms of gun violence. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated that year. The same year The Beatles released their White Album, which contained Happiness is a Warm Gun and Bungalow Bill. The two songs contain two very radical and opposing looks at the American preoccupation with guns. The Rolling Stones had Street Fighting Man come out in 1968 with "I'll kill the king and rail at all his servants." Jimi Hendrix took off on Hey, Joe and Machine Gun for audiences that year.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse came with Down by the River in 1969, and a few years later would pen Ohio with his other group of friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. Even Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd with Saturday Night Special implored in song some sanity regarding the gun. Nothing changed.

Over the years thousands of songs have been recorded about guns and gun violence. Violence, and our fascination with the ultimate period maker, sells.

Even though gun violence is highly marketable, it is tough making sense out of the continual carnage, tougher still finding a way of reducing the arms race in America. Barack Obama gets elected as an agent of change for America. Americans flood gun stores to stock up thinking one change might be limits on guns.

Remember the crazy girl who didn't like Mondays? Big hit for the Boomtown Rats and Bob Geldoff.

That incident would barely register today. It barely registered in 1993 when Colin Ferguson, deranged but armed boarded a Long Island Rail car at Penn Station and decided some people had to die. Six people died and nineteen were injured that December evening. The wife of one of the dead victims, Carolyn McCarthy, ran and was elected to Congress due in part to her son's amazing recovery from the wounds suffered and her tenacity in putting together a campaign to stop senseless gun violence. After twelve years on the job Representative Carolyn McCarthy has learned guns are a much larger third rail than even Social Security. The only legislation of note Representative McCarthy can show for twelve years in Congress was a fairly watered down background check bill passed last year. In fairness this was the first gun reform legislation passed in Congress in over fourteen years. It came on the heels of the Virginia Tech slaughter that claimed thirty-two lives. We still remember that one, but the memory has softened over the two year fade of time.

How could it not? After all, in this era of the gun let us just recount the brutality of American existence from the growing list of death. In September of 2008 on the roads of Skagit County, Washington six people shot and killed before the shooter turns himself in to authorities. For celebrity sake, we have in Chicago, Illinois Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother shot and killed in their home in late October of 2008. In Arkansas, two days after the Hudson killings two people are killed and another wounded on the campus at the University of Central Arkansas. November 2008 saw an eight year old in Arizona shoot and kill his father and a family friend with a rifle at close range. Right after Christmas in Covina, California Santa Claus shot and killed nine people (family members and friends) before killing himself. Outrage? Not in 2008.

Thus far 2009 we have witnessed a real ramp up of gun carnage. An eleven year old boy shot his father's pregnant fiancee in the head while she slept and then took the bus for school. Seven people were shot, but amazingly no one died at a Mardi Gras parade in February this year. March in Samson, Alabama saw a man shoot and kill nine people before killing himself. According to reports there were ten crime scenes for the Alabama rampage. Also in March, bullets flew into a nursing home where eight people were killed by a middle aged man. And in Oakland four police officers were slain along with their killer in a shootout. This April we have already gotten thirteen dead innocents at an immigration help center in New York state plus the shooter dead from a fatal suicide shot. And two more dead college students at a community college just west of Detroit. Three police officers died this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It's hard to get press in Iraq and Afghanistan these days when we're in the middle of bowling people down with carbines.

"Have A Nice Day."

New Doc Prescribes Anvil- Spinal Tap turns 25-

After gurgling down the hot black aromatic morning mouthwash, better known as Trader Joe's Fair Trade french roast, I booted up my computer. I always look at my selected online newspapers first thing in the morning. Every day I wonder, and worry, when I'm actually going to have to pay for my information. All this free Internet, after paying the connectivity to the coaxial pipeline or satellite, reminds me of the old days when broadcast television was free, and cable was really cheap. There are still a lot of cheap shows on cable these days, but all of it costs a bundle. Since I'm on a satellite hookup even broadcast television dings me for my dough these days.

Low or no cost reeled us into the giant tube, and now most of us pay heavy prices for the privilege of a televised rendering of our news and entertainment. I can see the Internet just becoming a broader platform of the same old television drill. A lot of clever people working for really big interests are hard at finding the magic pay-as-you-play formula for all this electronic wonderment.

Speaking of wonderment, I caught a couple of great articles on subjects I love, films and music. The articles were on the same subject matter, a new documentary on a long forgotten but still-hanging-in-there heavy metal band, Anvil. The name for the group is a perfect name for a heavy metal band. And in one of those real life beats fiction moments of serendipity, the film maker of Anvil's documentary, Sacha Gervasi, who wrote The Terminal for Steven Spielberg, was a roadie for the band twenty years ago.

I'm stoked about seeing this movie, which looks like This is Spinal Tap, only about real people. As the ultimate cosmic coincidence, Anvil's drummer is one Robb Reiner. There might be no degrees of separation between the original spoof and the reality here.

This Is Spinal Tap, the finest film spoof of all things metal and all rock music in general, is now twenty-five years old. This is a fine year to celebrate this great satire, which now proves life does indeed mirror art. Anvil looks like the perfect companion for an evening of tribute to the Tap. Rock on Nigel, David, Derek, "Lips" and Robb.

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.

Okie Dokie, Grapes of Wrath Turns 70 Today

Relief in the Southern San Joaquin comes with a cool arctic blast blowing through some much needed rain for the weekend and crisp breezes for the beginning of Income Tax Week. Tuesday dries out the unexpected rain cycle slowly with clouds keeping the temps way below normal. When you know six straight months of furnace blast nears these surroundings, periods like this one are sweet relief indeed.

Our oldest son turned twenty-seven this past week. We got him a Bosch plunge router to further his arsenal of tools as he builds sets and stages at the junior college where he works in the theater department. I can't get him covered for health care, but I can buy stuff with the potential to hack off digits and limbs. Happy Birthday, son.

My wife has been suffering through a frozen shoulder, originally diagnosed as calcified deposits near the rotator cuff, which gets the prescribed physical therapy treatment from doctors until the insurance company says twelve treatments is the limit for the year. Now my wife has been through a health care drill that goes like this: exam with x-rays at the primary doctor followed by anti-inflammatory drugs, when no improvement results she gets physical therapy and when that fails returns to the primary doctor where she gets clearance to see an orthopedist, which gets her a new exam, more physical therapy until the insurance cuts off the treatment. Insurance company X finally informs doctor and therapist that it will only cover more therapy if surgical method is undertaken to free the frozen shoulder.

My wife asked her primary doctor about taking the surgical option at her first visit three months ago. Nope to that hope for a quick solution. We have now paid in out-of-pocket fees more than five hundred dollars on this exercise of pain and futility to get back to square one, and she has the best plan her company offers. As her birthday approaches surgery awaits. Happy Birthday, sweetie.

I'm listening to a tune about the same age as my oldest son. Little Steven Van Zandt's song, Voice of America, cries out "Can you hear me, wake up. Where's the voice of America?" The lyrics mean more today than when they were first written for many people, probably due to our awakening realization of urgency amid our collective debts. America has become a collateralized debt obligation. We find ourselves again as the Great Depression era's sad-sack cartoon character, Wimpy, glad handing for a burger today that we promise to pay for next Tuesday.

I note that today marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck's great depression era novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck remains a galvanizing spirit in American arts and literature. I've met many fans of Steinbeck, and many who think he worked for the Soviet Union in some clandestine capacity to undermine everything virtuous in America. I still find it amazing that my current county of residence (Kern County) banned the book from being taught in the public school system from 1939-1972. It banned the book from the public library for two years from 1939-1941. By the time the book was allowed to be taught in literature classes here, John Steinbeck was four years dead. Truth eventually wins out, but truth can take a long, long time to finally emerge. Happy anniversary, John Steinbeck, where ever you are.