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Even Better than Fascism

UPDATE: A better-written (and darker) discussion of this topic is available here.
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For those members of America’s dumb-ass electorate who don’t know why I keep yelling about the Supreme Court whenever there’s a presidential election…

…take a look at last Thursday’s horrible decision. The court, which is packed with corporate shills, has overturned a hundred years of case law and precedent by saying that there need be no limit on spending by corporations during political campaigns. That’s presidential campaigns, congressional campaigns, statewide campaigns and right on down to local elections for your own city council.

What this means for you and me is that in about five years, all elected officials will de facto be working for at least one corporation, having been supported/paid/bribed by them, and all governing from that point on will be strictly for the benefit of said corporations, even more than it is today.

Congress over the years has sensibly tried to restrict spending by corporations for political purposes, because corporations have no conscience and only one reason to exist: to make more money. Thus their interests do not often — if ever — coincide with those of the nation or its people. That’s you and me, and oh, by the way, corporations have unimaginably more resources than you and me, so don’t get the idea that if we all band together we can outspend corporations and defeat them in that way, because we can’t.

Consider: Worried that the Obama administration was going to hit drug companies with all sorts of regulations and demands for better deals on prescriptions for Americans, Pharma struck a bargain with the White House, agreeing to give up 80 billion dollars in revenue over ten years in exchange for no additional hassles. Yes folks, that’s 8 billion dollars a year that they are able to deal away, so let me ask you: If they have that much to spill, don’t you think they have a lot more that they’re keeping?

And now that they can spend it any way they want, why wouldn’t they just call Obama and tell him they have, say, a billion dollars to spend on his next campaign, and does he want them to spend it for him or against him? Obama’s been a big disappointment, but he’s not a fool. I’m sure his answer will be simple: “How can I serve you, Master?”

Or, consider: Just last June, a New York Times/CBS poll revealed that 72% of Americans favored a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” But after several months of disinformation and fear-mongering by the insurance establishment, the peasants have changed their minds and hit the streets with torches, pitchforks and yes, semiautomatic weapons, crying “fascist,” and “socialist,” and “Marxist,” and demanding that the government stay out of health care.

The court case on Thursday was called “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” and it was about a right wing group (a corporation) not being allowed to release a hatchet job movie about Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. The FEC stopped them because everybody knows these video assassinations are potent and often change the course of elections. For example, look what the lies of the swiftboaters did to John Kerry, a decorated war hero. By the end of that election, many Americans thought Bush, a draft-dodger, was the hero, and Kerry was a lying, cowardly skunk.

So we know that you can determine the outcome of US elections with videos and advertising. Now all you need to do is get the money to make compelling, professional, good-looking videos.

Enter the Supreme Court, headed by ex-corporate attorney John Roberts. Here’s their position: Corporations are people, just like you and me (you and me with hundreds of billions of dollars in our pockets). But they have this handicap. You see, the poor corporations can’t talk. (That’s actually because they’re not people, but pay no attention to that.) So the only voice they have to make their political arguments is their money, of which they have more than God. Thus, according to five members of the Court, there must be no restrictions placed on corporations spending their money during political campaigns, because that would be the same as jailing you and me for standing up and saying “Change we can believe in” or “Country First.”

Anyone who thinks that wealthy corporations will not use this ruling to completely take over the government is simply not looking at what corporations do. (See above, the one goal of corporations.) And this ruling cannot be appealed. And no laws can be enacted to counteract this ruling. And for you slippery-slopers, here’s an icy one for you: Soon, this ruling will be used to show that corporations, being regular folks like you and me, can contribute cash directly to candidates. This will be much more convenient for them, as they will not have to have meetings with campaign managers to find out what to say in their political TV ads and their “documentaries” about opposing candidates. They’ll just be able to pay money openly to whomever agrees to play ball with them after winning the election.

This used to be called bribery. Now it’s Free Speech.

This is going to be even better than fascism. In fascism, the government and the corporations are bound together, and run things sort of as a team, with the government making the policy decisions. In the new era of the Roberts Court, there will be no government, only corporations. They are not interested in health care for all. They don’t care if the roads are fixed, only that the toll booths are operating. Education? Private schools only, charging the most the market will bear. I could go on, but you know what I’m saying. Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

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PS: A quick shout out to the voters of Massachusetts: You sure sent a message to that socialist Obama! Maybe you should work to throw him out of office in 2012, just in time for a Republican president to appoint a couple more big business conservatives to the Supreme Court. That’ll teach him.

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I Hate It When That Happens

You know how when you’re going to work, driving on the freeway?

You’re running a little late, so most of the worker bees are already off the road, at their jobs, so traffic is a little congested, but not too bad and you’re rolling along at maybe 45 MPH, and you’re trying to do the right thing, driving safely and leaving four or five car lengths between you and the car in front of you and you’ve got Delbert McClinton playing on the CD player and he”s givin’ it up for your love and you’re cruisin’ and groovin’ and suddenly from the next lane over and without any warning or signal somebody pulls into that safe zone and cuts you off in a great big SUV. Now you have to slow down but if you do, maybe somebody else will pull the same stunt and you’ll be the chump again, so maybe you’ll just tailgate him for a while, that’ll show him, but then you realize that just as his huge pigmobile has completely blocked your view down the road so you no longer have any idea what’s up ahead, whatever selfish roadhog is driving that big Personal Global Warming Device probably can’t see you, either and so what’s the point, you might as well just choke on it and back off, the Big Guys rule everything anyway. So you back off and keep driving and the big SUV gets smaller and smaller in front of you until you can’t see it or even remember it anymore and then through some miracle you find yourself in another lane that’s moving along close to the speed limit and you and Delbert are grinnin’ and rockin’ down the highway and you get cut off again by the same SUV.

Doesn’t that chap your hide?

And then you get to work and you have to make an important phone call to another office and it’s really kind of urgent that you talk to this certain person at the other office and they have a switchboard operator and when you ask for your intended party by name she says “One moment” and then you get the Muzak in your ear. While you wait you wonder how long a “moment” will be, but it doesn’t matter because you’re going to be getting on with your important call pretty soon. You smile as you think of that operator at that other company you call a lot, who, no matter who you ask for or what you say to her, always responds by saying “My pleasure.” Ha! Is she getting pleasure from being a telephone operator? You think of her squirming a little in her chair and this fantasy is just starting to get interesting when the voicemail comes on in your ear. Oh no! You have to talk to this person, because you need an answer on a very important matter and you need it by noon or preferably right now. You don’t mind leaving a message, but what if he doesn’t check his voicemail, or what if he gets your urgent message but doesn’t get how urgent it is? While you’re pondering this you hear the beep so you go ahead and leave your important message and hang up but then back in your own office you’re doing stuff and time is passing and you’re not getting any calls and it’s like an hour later and you’ve only got until noon to settle this matter so you call again and before you can stop her and ask if your party is even at work today she says “One moment” and the Muzak starts again. This is not what you wanted but maybe the guy will actually answer this time so you stay on the line and you hear a ring, a hopeful sign, and your spirits rise but no, it’s voicemail again. You don’t want to antagonize your intended party by leaving another message so soon after the first one so you quickly press “0” on your phone to get back to the operator but the system switches you not to the operator but to some woman in the mail room who has no idea why you’re calling her if you want to talk to him and she can’t or won’t transfer you to the operator so you hang up and call back and this time you don’t start by mentioning your intended party’s name but you say “I’ve already left a message today but I was wondering if Mister So-and-So is in the office today” and the operator, who is the receptionist, says she doesn’t know, and you want to say “Why don’t you go back into the office and look?” but you don’t say that because she has that same power over you that servers in restaurants have — you never know who’s spitting in your chicken piccata or letting you sit on terminal hold while your professional life trickles down the toilet, and so you meekly ask her to put you back into your intended party’s voicemail again and you realize you may never get to have your very important conversation, or at least not in time for it to do you any good.

That really planes my shins.

And you know how you have a blog and you write stuff for like five years, almost as long as a car loan, and for a long time you have a bunch of imaginary friends and you read their blogs and they read your blog and you comment on their posts and they comment back to you and you have some fun and some lively “discussions” and once in a while you actually meet one of your blog friends in person and it’s not always that great but sometimes it is, but you love all your fake friends so much and then you start making an occasional inappropriate remark on your blog and little by little your fake friends drop off and finally one day you write a post from your heart and it’s like totally politically incorrect and for the first time in five years no one comments and you realize you have no more fake friends at all?

I hate it when that happens.

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UPDATE: Thanks to Bains, who rescued the previous post while I was writing this one. I love you, man.

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Meet the New Year, Same As the Old Year

As the new year clicked over last Thursday night I pondered the situation in the world, as if I have any idea what the hell is going on.

All the major stuff is bad: The economies of the world are reverting back to feudalism, leaving only the super-rich and the dirt poor. The earth herself may be dying, and the very governments and corporations who might be able to stop it are either denying that it is even happening or blaming each other and refusing to act until somebody else does. Christian and Islamist extremists alike have evidently decided that the murder of innocents is OK with God as long as it’s done in the proper spirit. And here in the richest country the world has ever seen our legislators are bargaining away another chance for us to provide health care to all of our people, while big corporations are demonstrating — again — who is really in charge of things.

War
The British being massacred in Afghanistan, 1842.

On a personal note, while half the wannabe workers in the world don’t have jobs at all, I have to work at a job that I detest, doing the work of the devil.

Now forgive me for my one-track mind, but of all the major stuff that will be stinking up the new year, our various wars around the world are the ones that truly break my heart and sink my spirit. I see that I was conned again during the last presidential campaign. Not that I would have voted for John McCain anyway, but I let myself think that Obama was against the war and that if elected he would take immediate steps to extricate our country from the horrific and useless games we are playing in the Middle East. These days the best spin I can put on it is that his heart may be in the right place, but the War Machine has let him know that it won’t pay for another term if he tries to stop the carnage.

It’s not good enough.

I’ve said before — and pretty much lost all my readers because of it — that I don’t support the troops. (See also here.) They are, after all, the ones who pull the triggers. I got some half-hearted support in this, and at least one holier-than-me comment that I obviously don’t know any military people, because if I did I would know that they hate war more than anybody. That may be true, but there seem to be a couple hundred thousand of them right now who like it just fine.

But I am a poor writer, and I’m afraid I have never adequately been able to convey here the horror in my heart about war. Luckily, Chris Hedges has stepped up to help me out. Hedges is a divinity student turned war correspondent turned rabble-rousing author and columnist (at Truthdig.com). He has been to war and seen it for what it is:

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

And:

War’s effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people.

Read the rest of Hedges’ column here. Caution, though: it’s a little more shocking (and sickening) than what you’ve been getting from the TV and the press and our politicians. Mostly, we see and hear about Freedom, Democracy. Human Rights and safety for the American people. The unspoken subtext in all this, of course, is Glory, Bravery and Dominance.

I call bullshit on all of it.

To you politicians who say we have to win by killing them all, bullshit. The more of them you kill, the more of us they will kill. To you generals and admirals and commanders who pretend to hate war, bullshit. Do you think we haven’t noticed that your lives are devoted to it? To you chickenhawks who want someone else’s kids to go kick some ass and lose their lives, limbs and minds, bullshit and shame on you.

To you young men and women who think you are “defending freedom” by killing the enemy and destroying the countryside, well, sorry kids, but that’s bullshit too. I fear for you, and I weep for you. Like me, you have been conned. When you strap on your weapons and your uniforms and march into someone else’s home, don’t you see that you are the enemy, and all the stuffed animals and candy you hand out to the children cannot counteract the hatred you engender when you haul their uncle off to “enhanced” interrogation or shoot down their brother for running a checkpoint?

I know I’m a fool. I thought we were electing an antiwar president, and except for Dennis Kucinich, Obama did seem to be the strongest antiwar candidate. But he has already sent 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan (to fight an estimated 100 al Qaeda). And let’s not kid ourselves — there’s no way to bring that many people home in 18 months. What use is it to finally get out of Iraq if all he does is bring the ongoing invasion of Afghanistan to the front burner? Obama is the first president in my lifetime with both the requisite crises that demanded action and the juice to actually change the old, corrupt ways in U.S. government. That’s what he said he was going to do. And I, like a fool, believed it.

But here in the cold light of this harsh New Year, it looks like business as usual.

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Welcome to 2010

On this first day of the year 2010, there is a half-heartedness in the air.

NYE2009

The happy-new-years are spoken without any force. I don’t know anybody who really believes it will be a happy year. I don’t look anyone in the eye and say the words. I want to, but I can’t.

I’m afraid. Afraid that our wars have morphed into The War, one big, mindless, prideful morass of murder and greed, and that it will never end. Afraid that our planet will not much longer be able to defend herself against the thoughtless onslaught of her selfish children. Afraid that our leaders have all made deals with the devil.

I watched the revelers in Times Square on television. At nine o’clock my time it was midnight there, and the people, penned into little enclosures along the sidewalks, swayed as if to dance, kissed each other ferociously and sang along with the disembodied voice of Frank Sinatra. It was all about the glittery ball and the noise and the chaos. At twenty past twelve the ball was switched off, the people were gone, the cleanup crews were starting to collect the trash that was left.

On CNN’s “celebration” coverage, Kathy Griffin was working over the earnest dullard Anderson Cooper, jabbing him relentlessly with non sequiters. She was trying to be funny, and he was trying to be eloquent, and neither were succeeding. At one point she interrupted him with “Do you have a safe word? Because you’re going to need one.”

If 2009 has been any indication, this year I think we’re all going to need one.

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Run, Rudolph!

A happy, rockin’ Solstice season to all!Rudolph

I love this time of year. I like the short days, the long shadows, the cold weather (I know, I know, you people in Minnesota could tell me a thing or two about cold weather). I love the way my neighbors put lights all over their houses and yards, and the way the hardest hearts soften just a little. Even my own heart beats more warmly for this cold, cold world.

To celebrate I have recorded a holiday rock’n’roll song, my third such effort in three years. I should have my Christmas album finished in time for the 2019 holiday season, so stay tuned for that.

The other day I heard a segment on NPR about Senator Orrin Hatch’s Chanukah song, and when the question arose Why were there not more Chanukah songs? the answer was that all the Jewish songwriters were probably too busy writing Christmas songs.

This was exactly what Johnny Marks was doing. He was a Jewish songwriter who wrote a ton of Christmas songs, including “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, ” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and the awful “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” currently in heavy and sickening rotation on KOST-103.5 in Los Angeles.

But he totally redeemed himself by creating this gem for Chuck Berry, which is not only a Christmas song by a guy who should have taken more time out to write a few Chanukah songs, but sounds so much like a song that Chuck himself would write that even I was fooled until I looked it up. I now present my version of “Run, Rudolph, Run.”

It’s an ambitious project. My ambition was to get it posted here before Blue Girl and Neddie Jingo post their annual Christmas collaboration, which, if this were a competition, they might win, but they won’t, because it’s not, and I’m not competing. (I don’t know about them, though.) If you notice any shortcomings in the playing or singing, you can put it down to me trying to get finished in time to beat them to the internet. [UPDATE: BG & NJ finally posted their Christmas song, and the links above now point directly to it.] I did play and sing all the parts, except the drums, which I programmed, and the bass, which was played by the great Don Wittsten. Thanks, Don!


Just press “play,” and have a rockin’ holiday.

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Disclaimer

In my previous post I didn’t mean to suggest that I have more important or more difficult problems than anyone else in the world.

My goals and my secret travails seem crucial to me, but I am aware that I have it pretty good compared to billions other people in the world. I’m not starving. My basic needs are met — shelter, clothing, high-speed internet. I have a job, even if I don’t like it very much. By an accident of birth I am a citizen of the richest and most privileged nation the world has ever seen, and I participate thoughtlessly in the feast.

But this, of course, is what happens once a human gets past those basic wants: We want more. Over the years I have reduced my expectations a hundred times, and today I think I would be happy with just the tiniest improvement in my condition. Probably the only way to keep those expectations that way, though, would be never to move ahead, never to achieve that minimal next level of happiness or success, or whatever it is that I think I am looking for.

Sometimes I have to laugh — or cry — at my foolishness and selfishness. To all those Americans who have been thrown out of their jobs, who can’t see a doctor when they or their children are sick; who can no longer afford their mortgage payments; who must choose between food and medicine; whose hope and optimism drain away while our government fiddles in endless debate and parliamentary maneuvering; to you all — I am sorry. To the rest of the world — the poor, the sick, the homeless, the hungry — I can’t even begin to express my sadness at your plight.

It’s hard for me to take all that in. The horrors of the real world are like being hit by a bullet, or a truck: You go into shock, and your mind conspires with your body not to feel the pain. When it becomes too awful even for that mechanism to work, you go to sleep.

And so, to my shame, I am sleeping. I’m just a guy, more comfortable but just as helpless as the most dispossessed of us. I used to believe that I could have some effect on the world, but now I think I was kidding myself.

This is no excuse. It’s just that all I have to work with is me. I can’t fix the world, and worrying about it drives me crazy. I’m afraid I don’t have the strength to venture much outside my own playpen these days. Once I might have had a chance to make the world a better place, but I missed it. Time is short now, and my reach is not very long.

I hope I can be forgiven my shallowness.

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Living In Fear

I feel as if I’m headed for some kind of breakdown, or blowup.

First, heartfelt thanks to you who noticed my low morale in the previous post, and wrote to help me out. You did help me. Here’s where I’m at these days.

The past few months have been difficult. I’ve lost a couple of old friends. I’ve been living under threat of unemployment for about a year now. These things knocked my usual bubbly personality down a couple of notches, but probably the most intense downer was the sickness.

We had a medical emergency here at revision99, complete with ambulances, paramedics, a near death experience and a week-long hospital stay. For two weeks I had to look hard at the possibility that I was going to spend the rest of my life without Mrs. Jones. The exact medical problem is something that will never go away, and its precise nature is not really important to tell here, but strangely, I wasn’t panicked or overcome. I was sort of numb, waiting to see what would happen. I didn’t have any power to fix the problem, and I was a stranger in the land of hospitals and medicine, so all I could do was wait. I waited for test results, I waited for doctors to show up and tell me what was going on, I waited for a nurse to bring me a tuna sandwich, I waited for prescriptions to be filled, for medicine to take effect.

My wife is fine now. It’s almost as if nothing ever happened. Oh, I still bump into an occasional neighbor who hasn’t yet heard the story of why the ambulance was here (and the fire truck. Why do they always send a fire truck?), and telling the story again makes me revisit the whole thing. Of course, the most insistent reminder comes almost every day in the mailbox. We get bills from eight or nine entities: our gateway doctor, a couple of specialists, a surgeon, the hospital, the emergency room staff, the labs, the fire department, and of course the insurance company, who has already threatened not to cover any of it, pending the submission of various documents, affidavits and appeals.

While this was going on, I was feeling a lot of new pressure at work. I’ve written here before about what I call My Crummy Job and I won’t go again into the awful details. Let’s just say that corporate life is not for me. My mind, heart and soul are opposed to the behavior of my company — and that of all big corporations — and I am tortured to know that I enable their money-grubbing. In recent months, however, they have found new and obnoxious ways to ratchet up the crumminess, and the strain is wearing me out. I have kept this job for a long time, despite mediocre pay and the damage it does to my soul, because it’s been pretty easy, the paydays are regular and I have medical insurance.

But this is the first time it has been made so brutally clear to me that I have to have medical insurance. The six-day hospital stay cost $7,000 a night, and there are also bills from just about everyone we saw during those six days. Seriously, I expect an invoice any day from the janitorial service. So just when I have been feeling totally fed up with the job and ready to blow it off, just at the moment when a younger me would have told his employer to take this job and stick it, I realize that I am trapped in it more than I could have ever anticipated.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I don’t have a solution. I have some slender hope that the government will pass some kind of medical reform pretty soon, and maybe that will give me a little breathing room, but that’s just a technical matter. The real issue for me is what have I done with my life? Or maybe I should ask what has become of my life, because it seems to have slipped away, and I don’t know where it went. The compromises I’ve made have become who I am, and they weren’t supposed to do that. Those compromises were just supposed be temporary adjustments to fleeting situations. They weren’t supposed to encircle me and alter the way the world sees me.

Now I’m trying to figure out who I really am, in the context of this new sense of imminent mortality. The last time I felt this way was when I was in my thirties. Maybe I was being over dramatic then (and maybe now, too), but I had several extremely bad, dangerous habits that I “couldn’t” kick, and I didn’t think I’d live to see forty. I didn’t take any direct action to correct my course. For that, I just needed to grow up, which I finally — and belatedly — did. But I did live each day as if it were my last, because I really thought it might be.

I was a full time musician, record producer and recording engineer in those days. A lot of people didn’t think I was particularly good at any of those jobs, and certainly I didn’t make much money at my endeavors, but at least I was doing what I thought I wanted to do. I felt like an artist, and I was an artist. Things might have been better if I had not been completely out of control, but at least the mess I was making was my own chaos and flames.

Once I got involved in working for a living, I left myself behind, and wore costumes and masks to hide who I really was, the person I felt myself to be. This is surprisingly easy to do, katz and kittenz, because at first you are conscious of doing it, and you tell yourself that it is outward only, a compromise you are making for practical purposes. But if you keep at it the days become weeks, the weeks months, then years, then one day you can’t remember why you are doing anything, why you are getting up every morning, why you are living at all.

So before I have a breakdown, or a blowup, I have to figure out the answer. Why am I living? It’s certainly not to shuffle papers in my corporate office. Really, is anybody living for that? But let me just say it out loud for once: The bush around which I’m beating here is that I want to get back to making music. I mean writing and recording my own songs, and maybe even finding some place to perform them live. I’m a grownup now and I don’t have the luxury of living in a hovel, eating only potatoes and split peas and driving a dilapidated VW bus to my gigs, my only health insurance a box of bandaids. (Funny how that life looks like a luxury to me now.) Of course, I play part time in a cover band, sort of a living juke box, but that is another compromise, and I no longer have time to burn on such projects.

Writing this has made me feel a little better, probably because it’s a start toward admitting the embarrassing reality that I just want to rock, a foolish and extravagant dream for a man of my age. But even in making this admission I feel myself hiding stuff. I’ve pushed a lot of things to the back of the emotional closet over the years, and I guess it’s time for a housecleaning.

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Desperation

What have I done with my life?

Or maybe I should ask what has become of my life, because it seems to have slipped away. Oh, I’m healthy, but that’s just a technical matter. I’m not talking about the strength of my body, but the condition of my soul. I have made a lot of compromises, and I am trapped in the consequences, and now I look around and I wonder if it has been worth it. It’s gotten to the point that I’m afraid even to say what I want in my life, afraid that I will seem foolish, impractical, a dreamer. I’m running like the fox in a hunt, and the hounds are closing in. Will it end with me in a tree, paralyzed, or will I find an escape?

At this moment, I don’t know. And this is all before the real darkness of winter has set in.

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Hit Radio

I have been — God help me — listening to Top 40 radio.50's Radio

Top 40 radio. That’s what it used to be called. I’m not sure what they call it today, although I am pretty sure they don’t have 40 songs on the playlist.

See, I was reading the other morning in the Los Angeles Times about the competition between hit radio stations in LA — it seems the upstart Amp Radio (KAMP-FM) is giving the reigning champion (KIIS-FM) a run for the ratings money. Who cares, really, but the story made me start wondering just what it is the kids are dancing to these days, so in the car on the way to work I turned on KAMP-FM.

Apparently everything’s hip hop now. I heard a bunch of commercials, a DJ yelling really loud and really fast and really loud, and then a song called “Hotel Room,” by Pitbull. Ginormous beat, speaker-rippin’ bass, cheesy synth line, misogynist lyrics:

“…after party in the hotel lobby,
then we off to the room like vroom! put them fingers in your mouth uh open up your blouse and pull that g-string down south oooo!”

And the chorus, repeated 5,000 times:

“Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.
Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.”

It’s actually quite infectious in a brain dead, purely physical sort of way. I turned the bass all the way up in my car, but I have a feeling the stock Honda sound system wasn’t designed for that kind of thing, and I didn’t get the full effect. Still, infectious.

I only listened to KAMP-FM for ten minutes, and that’s what I heard. Then on the way home from work, I turned it on again, and guess what was playing? That’s right, say it with me — “We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn…” True, it was nine hours later, but I’ll bet it was more than a coincidence. I’ll bet they play that song and about eight others every hour, all day, every day.

I am a musician, and I perform in public, but I have to tell you that I will not make myself ridiculous by trying to sing this song, or any of the stuff they are playing on the hit stations. I take seriously the obligation to be entertaining, but there have to be boundaries for a man of my age. I’m just exploring, like an explorer, the Indiana Jones of intergenerational musicology. You know, taking notes.

Then the other night I’m flipping through a range of seldom-viewed channels up in the four hundreds on my Verizon FIOS fiberoptic entertainment pipe and I come across a show called “Talk Asia,” or something like that, which has one gorgeous non-asian woman interviewing another gorgeous non-asian woman. I love women, I really do, I don’t care if they’re asian or not, they are all gorgeous to me, and so I watch for a few minutes and it turns out the interviewee is Lady Gaga, who looks like she is going to be the next Madonna. Researching this later I find this video on YouTube (WARNING: Banned in Australia!), and the very next time I turn on Amp Radio there she is! I have been listening to hit radio only a couple of days and already I know one of the big hit artists! I’m feeling so inside!

Anyway, if you’ve listened to “Hotel Room” you know pretty much what’s going on with the Top 40 these days. Gaga sings melodies and uses instruments and background singers, but 85 percent of the progamming sounds just like “Hotel Room.” To me.

One thing they are all doing, even Gaga, that they need to stop right away is using Auto-Tune on their voices. Auto-Tune is a digital technology that you can apply to audio. It detects the nearest “in tune” note to the one the singer is singing, and alters the singer’s pitch to match the “correct” pitch. If you think about it for a minute, you will see that while this could be a boon to a lot of vocalists, it also has the potential to take away all the nuance and character from a performance. Singers through the decades, from Billie Holliday to Mick Jagger to Bono do not necessarily nail all the notes, and in fact it is the “wrong” notes they sing that often give their performances their warmth, humanity, style, soul — whatever you choose to call it.

Auto-Tune could take that magic away, and that’s if you use it sparingly. That would be bad enough, but if you turn it up to extreme settings, it changes your voice to this. This seems to have started in 1998 with Cher’s huge hit “Believe.” OK, fine, it was a cool effect, but enough! Naturally, everybody on Amp Radio (and probably KIIS-FM, too) is overusing Auto-Tune, and the result is that all the singers kind of sound like the same singer. Also, the robot-voice thing gets old and irritating pretty quick, so knock it off. No, really.

I’m definitely going to try it the next time I get near a microphone, though.

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Chasing Bubbles

Hooray, the recession is over!roulette-wheel

Bankers on Wall Street have come up with a plan to save us all. Er, save the economy. Or maybe they are just trying to save themselves, but hey, the important thing is that at least they trying to help. According to this New York Times article dated September 5, 2009, here’s what they’re doing:

They are going to buy life insurance policies for pennies on the dollar from old people who have fallen on hard times and need some cash. Then they are going to bundle a whole bunch of these policies together and sell them on the market as sure-fire securities. What could possibly go wrong?

Does this sound familiar? Remember securitized mortgages? We all know how well that went. Everything was triple-A rated, of course, and yet somehow only a few bankers and brokers survived, while everybody else lost their shirts.

Of course there is no regulation of this proposed market at this time, and by the time the SEC or whoever gets around to that, the market will be — say it with me — too big to fail, and we’ll just have to live with it, and then later bail it out. And can anyone guess how long it will be before armies of salesmen start calling grandpa to let him know what a great deal they have for him on his silly old life insurance policy? I’ll guess: five minutes.

But there might be room here for some regulatory action. After all, once Grandpa sells his life insurance, the investors have to start hoping he will die sooner rather than later, because as long as Gramps is still kicking they have to keep paying the premiums on the policy, and they don’t get to collect the payout. Naturally they’ll want the old guy to sign a promise to die as soon as possible. This is where the government could step in and insist on end-of-life counseling first. These would be Death Panels Republicans could believe in.

So there you have it. The next brilliant idea, brought to you by the folks who gave you credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles and collateralized debt obligations.

Step right up, katz and kittenz, and place your bets.

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