Dad’s Home, So Cut the Horseplay

by Jim Washburn

You know what an Obama speech is like? It’s like a grownup coming into the room. Up til then, you and your siblings are acting a right bunch of hooligans, shooting Silly String and throwing cat shit at each other, and here come the fisticuffs, boyo. Then there’s a single serious knock on the door and Dad walks in.

He’s the best Dad ever, stern yet mischievous, poised and assured, because he works so hard at doing right all the time. You know that he’s thrown some cat shit in his day, and that he’s going to give you the benefit of his experience now. You simmer right down, and resolve to do better.

Then, as soon as Dad’s car leaves for work, the brawling recommences, heedless, use-your-head-as-a-battering-ram combat, and where’d you stow that cat shit for a rainy day? Cats just can’t squeeze it out fast enough to suit you. Let the battle join!

The not so cute part is that the brawlers I’m talking about are largely aged 30 to 70, and should probably have learned to act like grownups by now.

“The President’s going to talk to students? Jesus Christ, stop him, before he has them marching us to the Gulag with his radical, socialist, un-American talk! How dare the President of the United States talk to children! Not on my watch!”

So the cat shit flies around for a week, accelerated by a media that treats every right-wing pork rind belch as if it were the graven word of St. Ronald. There have been accounts this year of Blackwater running guns into Iraq, of KBR electrocuting our troops with faulty wiring, of greater proofs that our nation was lied into a grievous war, yet all the media has time to report is how some goober somewhere is claiming that the President is trying to brainwash children; that he’s somehow starving the military by increasing its budget; that he used the Vulcan mind-meld on Arlen Specter; that he’s wasting your tax dollars on sponge baths for illegal aliens.

I can only imagine what the late William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater—men who could articulate a reasoned conservative position on American affairs—would think of the gun-brandishing know-naughts who are now regarded as the voices of conservatism, by virtue of being loudest.

They keep the pot churning until the moment Obama actually talks to schoolchildren, then the nation remembers anew that he’s the most reasoned, compassionate president of our lifetime, and even right-wingers who’d inveighed against him admit he is a just and mannered man.

And then his motorcade drives off, and the cat shit starts flying again, only pausing when he addresses Congress, and then it re-recommences with gusto. The only solution I see is for Obama to become like the late Rev. Gene Scott, and just stay on TV 24 hours a day, so Big Dad is always there to remind us of what adult civil discourse sounds like.

The late, great Orange County businessman John Crean told me his business philosophy in detail, for an as yet unreleased book. Most of it was conservative—as in prudent—commonsense stuff. He had a better sense of commonsense than most: his essential pillars of business were: do right by your customer and do right by your employees. In his business—trailers, motor homes and such—he was making better, safer models long before government regulations mandated them; he paid his employees better than the industry norm, and had profit-sharing plans for them decades before those were cool. If a production line wasn’t producing, he could fine-tune it, because he’d worked every position on the line, as had his managers.

But for all his caution and savvy planning, projects would still hit seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and his managers would be at loggerheads. Crean’s practice, he said, was often to propose the most harmful, unworkable idea he could think of, such as shutting the plant and laying everyone off. He said that never failed to spur a more beneficial solution.

Republicans are good at pushing for an absurd extreme, so that when they get what they really want—usually just one notch to the left of privatizing the atmosphere—they can act like they’ve compromised. Democrats are far less skillful at going the full retard, and usually start their negotiations with an offer of compromise.

I think Obama’s big health care speech should have been short and sweet:

We’re going to stop using money. That’s right, No. More. Money. As of midnight tonight, your money ... means nothing. Your bank account ... means nothing. Your insurance ... means nothing.

Now you may be wondering, “How am I going to get by?” and you’d be right to. You’ve got, what, maybe five days of food in your house. You can’t grow your own food, can’t pump your own water. So how are you going to get by?

Let me tell you how. Repeat after me, “Plenty Aloha for everyone.” There, you say it. That’s right, plenty Aloha for everyone. Now keep saying it. Again, make it a chant. Plenty Aloha! Plenty Aloha! God bless the United States!

If he’d started negotiating from that position, the Dems might have compromised their way to a health care plan that did citizens some good, while the mash-up they’ll get now will almost certainly benefit business more.

Just watch, before this is over Republicans will be attacking this bill just the way they did Hillary’s, ridiculing its length and bureaucrat’s fine print, while the only reason the bills, then and now, became so long is that the framers bent over backwards to include insurance companies, big pharma and the other monied players.

If I was a congressman—you never know, things may loosen up—and was faced with holding a town hall meeting in today’s angry climate, I would bring a mammoth PA system with me. I would speak softly, but the minute a ruckus broke out, I’d provide the soundtrack.

It might take a while to dial in the right musical accompaniment for humanity run amok. Do you flatten them with 42,000 watts of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” followed by the Geto Boys second album? Do you chill them out with Gabby Paninui? Do you wrench the u

nreasoning masses into a whole other consciousness via James Brown, live with his bad self in Augusta, Georgia?

If you were being riddled with bullets amidst a Somali firefight, you would still hear Brown’s superhuman shriek above the din, and it would take you to a better, funkier place. You could be hot oil wrestling two Burmese tigers in a box at the 2033 World Series, and you would still go, “What the bejabbers was that???!!” when Brown screamed. The guy was present. I wish they had strapped a Scientology E-Meter to James Brown: he’d take it past clear then drag it straight back to black. Listen to nearly any live recordings of Brown and his band over a 20-year period, and you are hearing some of the finest, most profoundly American art this nation has produced. Brown’s music and influence stopped riots when Martin Luther King was slain, so it should be able to give tea-baggers pause.

I was in New Orleans in 1992 when the Rodney King beating verdict came in and riots broke out across the country. The Crescent City had every reason to explode. Blacks had got the short end of the stick ever since the town’s days as the world’s largest slave market, and the city’s recent history was rife with untelevised injustices.

But the city didn’t riot, in large part, I think due to the shared music, food and culture that drew its people together despite their prejudices. I worry for a nation that seems to have less room every year for a shared culture. People just dial in their own comfort zone on the radio, TV and Internet. They’re never presented with another view, never experiencing what’s in the headphones of the person next to them. It’s a far cry from when you’d get Gore Vidal taking the Establishment to task on the Tonight Show, or when Jimi Hendrix was a musical guest; a long, long way from when you, your neighbors and everyone else all watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, where you’d also all seen James Brown, Bo Diddley, Russian Cossack dancers, and Richard Pryor.

We were a better people for that, more humanized, more speaking the same emotional language. Without that, what makes us Americans? Our assault rifles?

Why is it that, the fewer voices people hear, the more it sounds like babble?

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