What a storehouse of sorrow must have existed in the soul of Miss Etta James, nee Jamesetta Hawkins, whose eventful life was fraught with childhood abuse, illicit drug use, and musical triumph. To quote Van Morrison’s “Summertime in England,” James was “high in the art of suffering” and could conjure her hurt Stanislavski-style as she belted out the blues, that history of sadness made manifest in the hurt of her voice, the expressions of her face.[1]
One of my favorite videos of all time is her duet with Dr. John in “I’d Rather Be a Blind Girl.” As I mentioned recently in a post on the Pouges, I’d treat my students to a music video whenever everyone in the class made a 100 on a pop or vocabulary quiz, which, of course, spurred them on to read or review vocabulary and afforded me the pleasure of expanding their cultural heritage, expanding the narrow range of what they considered cool.
What a pleasure to study their faces as they watched this video.
[1] As in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s acting system in which he sought to activate actors’ memories to express emotions rather than merely representing them.
This is the beginning of my current work in progress entitled Long Ago Last Summer. The first draft is completed, so now comes the painstaking work of refinement. What’s below are the first paragraphs of the 7100-word first chapter.
Chapter 1
Those Who Think, Those Who Feel
1
My father aspired at some point early in his life to become a tragic figure, but unfortunately, even at that, he failed. Born in the 1920s in the shabby outer edges of Reconstruction’s long shadow, he grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, in those days a rundown museum of a city with its weather-beaten mansions and black women calling out in Gullah, balancing baskets of vegetables or laundry on their heads. A talented storyteller, my father was a virtuoso on the heartstrings, recounting unfortunate events from his melancholy childhood, an exotic world of paregoric addicts, ancient cotton-haired slave-born coloreds[1], blind street musicians, and blue-blooded eccentrics. I can conjure his depiction of himself even now, a ragamuffin Depression boy in knickers and cap hawking newspapers on city street corners. It’s odd that I picture his old stories in black-and-white. Perhaps it’s because of the photographs or the old movies of that era. Memory is a curious thing. I guess you could say it’s a collection. The older we get the more we discard, up to a certain point. My father, however, was a curator with a very narrow thematic interest. And what he kept was very well preserved and artfully presented.
2
My father felt unloved by his father, a distant presence puffing a pipe, turning a page of The Saturday Evening Post. I remember meeting my grandfather only once or twice when my father was alive, and I never heard my father utter a kind word about “the old man.” In my post-mortem meetings with Grandfather Postell,he was what you might call lively but egocentric. He’d talk about his golf and his dead Airedales and about his photography but never expressed any curiosity about what was going on in my little life. He had been the youngest of five, the only boy, the son of an Upcountry state senator, and perhaps spoiled by the plump quartet of his elder sisters, my great aunts, formidable eccentrics in their own rights. I can very well imagine not being loved by this man, though, on the other hand, I can’t really imagine being abused by him.
His son, my father, absolutely worshipped his own mother, whose portrait hung, eerie and Oedipal, over my parents’ four-poster bed. She was beautiful and angelic and elegant and the brains behind the studio. Grandmother Postell’s death from T.B., three years before my birth, was right out of “Ligeia.” Yellowed photographs of her propped up on pillows in a ghostly white gown survive in black picture albums. As a little boy, I remember carefully turning the pages of those albums, gazing at my tall slender grandmother leaning against an antique car, my father half-her-size, standing beside her with his thick wavy hair combed straight back.
As a child, listening to my father’s version of his own childhood, my eyes would sometimes fill with tears as he would in his gruff way catalogue his sorrows. He made me feel lucky to be me, and I felt guilty because I took for granted the bright sunshine of Suburban Summerville, my middle-class neighbors, and the leisurely hours I had to loll away shooting marbles or riding my bike on lazy Saturday afternoons. Unlike his own father, my father had sacrificed everything for us by working at the dreary Naval Yard, a job well below the significant talents he possessed. My father saw himself as a marked man, doomed to a life of bad luck, and I guess you could say that in some ways he was.
Though, by Depression standards, at least economically, my father didn’t have it all that bad. He lived with his parents, who had been employed as portrait photographers but who had lost everything in the Crash. During the Thirties, they stayed with his mother’s parents who lived in the second story over a pharmacy they owned on the corner of Spring Street and Ashley Avenue. Anyone who owned a business that didn’t fold during the Great Depression shouldn’t complain too much about deprivation. With money so scare, being a child laborer[2], especially a paperboy, might be considered a blessing, but not to my father, who viewed himself as Oliver Twist, a figure to be pitied, and perhaps he deserved that pity. I wasn’t there to witness his life.
His stories, though, always accentuated the poverty. I’ll grant that living with eight other people in 1200-square feet isn’t enviable, but it’s not exactly The Grapes of Wrath either. After all, deprivation was pretty much the way-it-was in Charleston during the Depression, a city isolated and traumatized by the events of a war that still could claim a few living veterans shuffling down its sidewalks. Nevertheless, I don’t dispute that something must have been lacking in his childhood, and I suppose that the best guess for what was lacking is love. My own mother, in the unenviable position of following a dead saint, once surmised that what had ultimately been lacking in Daddy’s life was maternal love, not so much as paternal love, but Daddy would never have owned up to that. An insinuation like that would have thrown him into a rage, and he was the furniture-smashing type when he lost his temper.
When not working or getting expelled from a series of schools, my father roamed the streets of the Upper Peninsula. Here, he could put his seemingly endless store of anger to good use, saving a squirt from a cowardly bully or bloodying the nose an arrogant Northerner who had indiscreetly commented on the corporeal charms of some perceived paragon of Southern ladyhood. In the stories my father told us, he was always the cavalier, the heroic fellow, always smaller than the oppressors he pummeled, always a figure of sympathy. Boxing was the only sport he cared anything about. I can remember his yelling at the television on Friday nights, barking advice to Sugar Ray Robinson or Archie Moore, “Keep that left up, keep that left up.”
Of course, to be a tragic hero you’re supposed to be somewhat bigger than life and somehow bring your calamity down upon yourself, perhaps because you suffer from a fatal flaw, like too much ambition or too much pride, or in my father’s case, too much a flair for the dramatic. Nevertheless, his story, which is also my story, doesn’t quite make the grade as far as tragedy is concerned. I personally see our lives as a dark comedy, more Beckett than Tennessee Williams. You may have heard the saying, “Life is a comedy to those who think, but a tragedy to those who feel.” Like everything else, it all depends upon your perspective.
Ah, New Year’s Day, when we eat collards and black-eyed peas and look forward to changing ourselves for the better, vowing to practice mindfulness so that the all too ephemeral array of everyday wonders doesn’t flash by unheeded.
Alas, however, our resolutions, more often than not, succumb to the deadly weight of habit as we, distracted by the morning news, fail to appreciate the taste of our buttery toast.
Although I’m not a fan of HD Thoreau (too smug, too self-righteous, too puritanical), he does have somewhat of a point here:
“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, – we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad of instances and applications?”
New Year’s Resolution #1: Don’t read the paper or doom scroll while eating.[1]
On the other hand, you do want to be somewhat cognizant of what’s going on in the world, to base whom you’re voting for on something more concrete than “it’s time for a change” or “the price of avocados has gone through the roof.” Democracy depends on an informed citizenry and all that jazz.
I recall a Mad Magazine parody of the Fifties sitcom Ozzie and Harriet where Harriet, not wanting to upset husband Ozzie, had cut out unpleasant news stories from the paper, which resulted in his booking the family’s vacation in the civil war torn Dominican Republic, the contemporary equivalent booking a tour of the Gaza Strip.
New Year’s Resolution #2: Don’t book vacations in war zones.[2]
Hey, wait, here’s s resolution I hope we all can embrace without caveats.
New Year’s Resolution #3: Strive to be kind.
Hey, y’all, Happy New Year! Thanks for reading.
My son Ned’s Nuremberg rendition of his mother Judy Birdsong’s New Year’s Soup (Bon Choy substituted for collards, which you can’t get in Germany.
[1] Caveat #1: Yeah, but I’m not eating toast, I’m eating some generic cereal, so I’d rather read about the latest baseball transactions than contemplate the taste of cardboard.
[2] Caveat #2. Yeah, but the bluesman Robert Lighthouse recently toured The Ukraine and found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences of his life. (You can read my interview with Robert HERE.)
Well, young and old and in-between, another winter solstice had swirled us into darkness, which means it’s time for my annual attempt to rack up a few more hits by shining a light on what I consider the highlights of a year of blogging.
So let’s get going.
January
In light of the Murdaugh mess, I became more aware of just how disloyal our computers can be, whether they’re ratting us out as we’re careening 80 miles an hour heading down a dirt road to Mama’s looking to cop an alibi or merely chatting it up in a bar and having our words transported to blood-sucking capitalists, which happened to me in The Saint James Infirmary iPhone Blues
Also, I at the start of the new year, I went all self-defacing with some un-wistful memories of motor incoordination. I went all Spasmadaco.
Here Comes the Night features a Van Morrison music clip, which in itself is worth a click.
July
July was fun. I wrote a nostalgic piece claiming not to be nostalgic called A Nostalgic Dismissal.
And I hitched a train up to DC, got to see my son, daughter-in-law, grandson, and fellow grandparent. Alas, though, I suffered misadventures after making some bad choices on the train trip home. There’s no fool like an old fool. You can ride along in Choo Choo Ding a Ling Ling.
August
Kirkus reviewed my novel: Kirkus Review of Today, Oh Boy.
And the delightful Montgomery Boat Brawl balmed my wizened heart.
As she’s wont to do, Nancy Mace made an ass out of herself by thinking being slightly snubbed is the equivalent of standing on a scaffold and being humiliated by an entire town and then being further sexually shamed by having your status as adulteress emblazoned on your breast for the rest of your life.
Although it occurred 71 years ago tomorrow, I remember my birth as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.[1]
I recall grooving in the womb, the temperature a comfortable 98.6, the background music the soothing backbeat of my mother’s twenty-one-year-old heart of gold, womb service delivered umbilically in the amniotic Eden of pre-Natal bliss.
But, alas, on the fourteenth of December, an earthquake, a rupture, unwanted spasms, an excruciating expulsion through an opening not nearly large enough to accommodate the partially deflated soccer ball of my head, which, as it turned out, was covered with Hemoglobins.
Hour after hour of torture. Then I feel the ice cold clamp of forceps on my head, depressing and denting it, as Dr. Snyder yanks me out of the vice of a constricted passageway into the freezing but blinding bright light of Dorchester County Hospital’s delivery room.
To add insult to injury, he grabs me by the ankles and slaps the tiny target of my ass as I let out a hellish, ear-shattering scream.
Welcome to the third planet from the sun, little one.
I was not a pretty sight. Both parents agreed that I was the ugliest baby they’d ever seen. They’d sometimes tell the story to dinner guests in my presence. The punch line was that Daddy had to ride back to Clemson right after the not-so-blessed event, and some lady on the Greyhound asked him why he looked so distraught, and he replied, “Because my wife has just given birth to a seven pound, four ounce monkey.”
After the laughter subsided, my mother would add, “But a week later he was the most beautiful baby you’d ever seen. When I would stroll him around Colonial Lake, strangers would stop and marvel at his beauty.”
Yeah, right. No wonder I’m so messed up.
[1] Of course, at my age, remembering what happened yesterday clearly is not a given.
A speech given in honor of Vaughan Murzursky’s retirement from Porter-Gaud School
Over the years, I’ve had the honor to deliver several of these sending-off speeches for some masterful teachers – the late Tom Evatt, Erica Lesesne, Sue Chanson, Ed Burrows, Natalie Herford. But never have I faced such a daunting task as to encapsulate in under four minutes the five-FEET, two inches of gut-crunching, man-eating terror that is Paula Vaughan Mazursky.
“The Czarina.”
Where to begin?
How about Barnwell, South Carolina, Vaughan’s hometown?
Besides Vaughan, Barnwell has produced more than its share of notable South Carolinians, including, in the political realm, Edgar Brown and Solomon Blatt. However, undisputedly, Barnwell’s most famous native son is James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in showbiz, or perhaps, nowadays, the hardest working penitent in Purgatory.
Of course, the Godfather was 13 years older than Vaughan, and Barnwell’s schools were segregated in their day, but what an exciting concept to think of them as contemporaries, the Godfather and the Czarina, in an integrated high school, perhaps as chemistry lab partners – if I may quote the Godfather – [holler] – what an explosive combination that would have been!
For, like James Brown, Vaughan Mazursky has Soul, soul with a capital S, which may be the most remarkable trait of this very remarkable, unforgettable woman. I don’t mean to diminish Vaughan’s stellar intelligence – anyone who has had the privilege of being her friend can attest to her quickness and her formidable knowledge of geography, history, art, and politics – but it is her passion that sets her apart from all the rest of us who have taught and teach here; it is her passion that has made her the teacher that former students first ask about when we bump into them years later, the teacher whom they never ever forget.
Add to her intelligence, her passion, and her learnedness – spontaneity – a joie de vivre that might spur her to jump upon a coffee table in the old teacher’s lounge to belt out Marvin Gay’s “A Stubborn Kind of Fellow” or to scream the Georgian word for freedom right in front of a Soviet tank in occupied Tbilisi or to raise both arms in triumphant joy at an Obama rally at the Cistern, an image that appeared internationally in various media (though as a subject of a National Enquirer article, Vaughan is no stranger to the limelight). Absolutely, Vaughan lives her life to the fullest.
Damn the cruise missiles, full speed ahead!
She was a demanding teacher, which endeared her to wise parents, not so much to materialists. Whenever I hear of that proverbial subliterate high school student from No-wheres-ville, USA who points to the Indian Ocean when asked to locate Alaska on a globe, I think of my two sons pouring over maps of godforsaken sub-Saharan countries, labeling rivers and mountain ranges, or strutting around the house doing the Wagga-do-do dance (which, by the way, Vaughan, I have spelled in this speech W-a-g-g-a-d-o-d-o).
O, my brothers and sisters, I have faced the fearsome wrath of MaZoo. In ’89 before I accompanied her and 21 students on a 28-day trip to the Soviet Union, a trek that took us from Leningrad to Moscow to Siberia back through Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Samarkand, and Tbilisi, I had to prove my worthiness by taking geographical tests along with the students on every so-called Republic we passed through. I, too, had to memorize the names of transliterated towns, rivers, lakes, and mountains and spell the transliterations correctly. Let’s say on the first couple of quizzes I didn’t meet the Czarina’s high expectations, but soon learned that she was serious. She wasn’t going to take along to a foreign land anyone not competently aware of the history and topography of his destination.
The good ol’ Evil Empire has been in history’s dustbin for two decades, so many of you may not know that Vaughan taught a senior course in Soviet history back in the day, a course that attracted the very brightest of our students, the de facto AP history course for seniors back when there wasn’t an AP history course for seniors.
It is, I think, the mark of a great teacher that she can effectively teach a wide range of grades. Here, the Czarina reigned supreme – She taught 8th graders geography, current affairs – and had them watch heart-throb ABC news anchor Peter Jennings every Monday thru Thursday – all the while below the radar teaching them organizational and study skills. Meanwhile, in the Upper School, she was having students grapple with the forces that led to the Russian Revolution, the complexities of the emerging Soviet State, the nuts and bolts of economics.
[Sigh] There’s so much more to say – I should talk about her trailblazing as one of the first female teachers in this school – I should talk about the devotion that the very best graduates we’ve produced hold for her, people like George Kent, Paul O’Brien, Blakely Blackford, and Alex Werrell, but I’m nearing the end of page two, which is my self-imposed limit.
* * *
In closing, as I stand here recalling the history of a great history teacher, I would like to mention a name from the past, Berkeley Grimball, who hired Vaughan and me and a handful of others here but without whom none of the rest of you would be here, because this institution would not exist.
By the early Sixties, Porter-Military had been reduced to a school for troublesome boys, and the Gaud School, though excellent in academics, subsisted in dingy, threadbare rooms, in a sort of Dickensian shabbiness.
It was Berkeley Grimball who had the vision to unite the spirituality of Dr. Porter and the academic rigor of Mr. Gaud to create this hyphenated school, and when the three schools merged in 1965 – at the height of Civil Rights Unrest – Porter-Gaud offered enrollment to anyone who qualified, white, black, or yellow, Muslim, Jew, atheist, or Hindu – a liberality of which we all can all be proud, a liberality that Vaughan Mazursky has always proudly embraced.
As we old folks disappear, we are fairly soon mostly forgotten. That is the way of the world.
However, Vaughan, you, for sure, have attained legendary status and your legacy will be remembered and cherished for decades as you remain a part of those students’ lives you have enriched – as you have enriched those of us who have taught with you – and I hope you’ll continue to enrich us, your friends, at parties and taverns and non-violent demonstrations.
Mike Johnson, the hastily installed new Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a religious fanatic who makes my late Bircher literalist cousin Zilla look like a forward thinker.
For example, here’s his take on same-sex marriages:
“Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone. Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
Oh, I’m sure at the moment Mike’s on a prestige high, puffed up with pride, swamping Jesus’s switchboard with an overload of hallelujahs, enjoying all the attention, but this too shall pass because he’s destined to fail at his new job – understaffed, inexperienced, more or less chosen, not for intellect nor competence but because he possesses a winning Republican combination of rightwing fanaticism softened by a pleasant demeanor.
Affable Mike Johnson believes that the Bible is literally true. He’s on record claiming that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, which is pretty remarkable for anyone in the 21st Century but especially remarkable for someone so powerful, someone a mere two deaths away from possessing the nuclear codes.
I suspect that the 18 Republican representatives who serve in districts carried by Biden and who voted for Johnson may come to rue their decision come November 2024.
Hey Mike, as St. Teresa of Avila once said, “More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
Man, oh man, is the Internet ever a cesspool for the ol’ scam-o-rama! Daily, I’m informed that my Netflix payment has failed (even though I’m not a subscriber) or that 800 c-notes are headed Norton’s way for malware protection. I suspect that I’m an inviting target because of my advanced age (I don’t even have enough hair to part behind, and bending over far enough to roll my trousers very well might throw my back out).[1] Cobwebs crisscross the attic of my brain where I often have trouble finding the lines of a poem or song lyric I once knew by heart. So, of course, the [redundancy alert] nefarious Russian scam artist stinking of Turkish cigarettes and hacking a precancerous cough zeroes in on me, an old fool, because, as the saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool.
Detail from an MRI of Wesley’s Brain
On the X social media platform (nee Twitter) it’s not unusual to receive a notification that Lori Buckett (pictured below ha-ha) is following me. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of these lovelies have exactly 22 followers and have posted absolute zilch on their pages, or if they have, it’s whatever the Russian word for cheesecake is.[2]
I wonder if older women receive similar solicitations. From, say, some pictured shirtless studly yet lonely thirty-year-old seeking the digital companionship of recently widowed nanas. I doubt it. After a lifetime of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous males, mature women know better that to click follow. Targeting older women would be like fishing for marlin in koi pond. Not worth the trouble.
I hate to admit it, but I recently fell for one of these would-be people on Facebook. A woman pictured in an army uniform contacted me and claimed that she really liked my writing and wanted to be my friend. She had liked several of my posts, so I checked her page out, and at first glance, it seemed legit, lots of military photos, so I friended her, thinking she might buy my novel.[3]
Sigh sure enough, she DMed me, and even though I replied that I didn’t enjoy communicating with strangers, that I was happily married, collecting social security, etc., etc. The queries kept coming, so I blocked her.
Anyway, I just checked my jink mail, and presto:
Well, I gotta go. I got some beta-reading to do on this bleak, gray windy day on the Edge of America.
[1] Congratulations if you got the “Prufrock” allusion. Yesterday marked the 135th anniversary of Tom Eliot’s birth in St. Louis, Louis.
It’s too bad the quaint cool-sounding derogatory noun oaf is dying out, having been supplanted over the years by bonehead, spastic, and most recently dickhead, all of which lack the specific visual associations we conjure at the sight or sound of the word.
Oafs are male, usually bald, fat, dull-eyed, slack-mouthed, and clumsy whereas dickheads can be good-looking Lotharios who catalog their romantic conquests or gifted athletes who make acrobatic catches or PhDs who lord their petty powers over TAs eking out livings in academia.
The thing is, though, if you close your eyes and attempt to visualize an oaf, chances are you picture some lout in Medieval garb, Chaucer’s Miller or Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver.
The Millere was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones.
That proved wel, for over-al, ther he cam,
At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.
He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre;
Ther nas no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.
His berd as any sowe or fox was reed,
And therto brood, as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A werte, and thereon stood a toft of herys,
Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys;
His nosethirles blake were and wyde.
A swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde.
Illustration from Thijs Porck’s leidenmedievalistsblog
Here’s my translation:
The Miller was a stout dude of stone
Very big he was of brawn and bone.
That proved well. When it came
to wrestling, he always won the ram.
He was short, broad-shouldered, a thick tor
Who could rip the hinges off any door
Or break it by ramming it with his head.
His beard like a sow or fox was red
and broad just like a spade.
On the right side of his nose he had
a wart that sprouted a tuft of hairs
red as the bristles of a sow’s ears;
his nostrils were black and wide.
A sword and buckler he had by his side.
You probably wouldn’t call the drooling loud mouth banging his hand on the bar for service an oaf; however, in my research I have discovered a modern day oaf, thanks to that most urbane of publications The Daily Mail, the UK’s version of the National Enquirer. Checkout these headlines.
Foul-mouthed motorist with ‘Big Oaf’ number plate and ‘Fast and the Fuhrerious’ T-shirt rants at coach driver to ‘get a proper job’ in 15-minute road rage stand-off that sees him dubbed ‘the new Ronnie Pickering’
Bald man tells coach driver to ‘get a proper job and shut your mouth’ in video
Overweight VW driver launches an abusive tirade through the coach window
The road rage motorist wore bizarre T-shirt reading ‘Fast and Fuhrerious’
Compared to Ronnie Pickering, whose 2015 row with motorcyclist went viral
Do you know the ‘Big Oaf’? Contact alex.robertson@mailonline.co.uk or call 0203 615 3767
So, dear readers, I encourage you to be on the lookout for oafs and use the word, which is such an unlovely embodiment of sound and sense. Say it out loud – oaf – and feel it coming out your mouth – oaf.
You know how some literates, English majors and their ilk, just for the sake of argument joust about whether we’re living in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984?
Well, this afternoon Chico Feo is giving off some heavy Huxley vibes. Workers off-the-clock loll in full self-expression, tattoos mapping their life histories in hieroglyphic fashion. A 21st Century version of a Pre-Raphaelite model, wan with auburn ringlets, sits across the bar from me hitting on her vape every now and then, vacant eyed but sort of beautiful in a retro-futuristic tawdry sort of way. I think she is what Aldous had in mind. Across the street at Berts you can buy blunts stuffed with Delta 8 and toke on them in public.
Oh, brave new world, indeed.
Meanwhile, a few billionaires (like the Fords) command a ridiculously disproportionate portion of global wealth, but few of them cotton to giving up not even a sliver of it, especially through taxation. These powerful people – the opposite of folk – possess the means to “dope [us] with religion and sex and [the internet”], to update John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” TGIF is the rallying cry of drudges content to go with the status quo. It’s so ingrained that even though I’m retired, I still look forward to Fridays.
Huxley prophesized pleasure, drugs, sex, and swing music, which morphed into rock-n-roll, disco, hip-hop, and all the jazz. All of it literally at my fingertips as I key “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” into Spotify.
But that’s in the USA.
Iran, Russia are North Korea are bigtime Orwellian. Not many dropping Soma In Pyongyang. skinny dipping in Tehran, or thumbing their noses at Big Brother in St. Petersburg.
But let’s face it, the US is also Orwellian, but in more subtle ways. It’s not so much Big Brother is spying on us, but that we’re spying on ourselves, paying AT&T, Verizon, and Apple to track our every move, tallying the number steps we’re taking as surveillance cameras video us from storefronts. Computer-equipped automobiles clock our speed as we bounce down dirt roads up to no good. Alex Murdaugh can attest to that.
The good news – and it’s very good news – is that we have freedom of speech. I can burn a Chinese made American flag and not be dragged off to a Gulag while wearing a vulgar tee shirt mocking the President, the Pope, and/or the Dalai Lama. I might get punched in the face or shot by a fellow citizen, but the government will not be coming after me.
You Do Hoodoo 