Well…NOW look what you’ve gone and made me do, BooMan.
Make a diary out of a comment I wrote on one of my own diaries. One that was an answer to one of YOUR diaries. We are getting close the the blogging equivalent of incestuous onanism here.
However…
BooMan wrote a diary called Can’t Win for trying where he compared the left’s strenuous and mostly losing labors over the past 60+ years or so to the travails of poor Sisyphus and his rock in Greek mythology (Complete with references to Jean Paul Sartre’s take on the subject), and I answered with one of my own.
BooMan: Sisyphus SINNED. We just sleep.
To which a number of people responded by saying that perhaps I do not “get” Sartre. Complete with quotes.
Oh, I get him, OK, kiddies…in fact, I read him when he was alive and still chasing young sailors down the Rue Madeleine or wherever he practiced his relativism. I just do not in this case agree with the idea of applying Sartre’s “Sisyphus as existential hero” version of the myth to our position as we teeter on the precipice of fascism and possible Armageddon.
Sartre also said that the Nazi occupation allowed the French the luxury of free thought.
Well…THIS one won’t be so luxurious.
Hard to think in a nuclear firestorm, and hard to resist when 85% of the country is in some kind of hypnotic trance.
We’ve got to get real here, folks.
NOW.
Before it’s too late.
Too many intellectual games going on.
The RatPubs USE this.
Read on, if you’ve a mind to…
Y’know, BooMan…when I read Sartre…and when I read such deep thinkers as yourself as well…I am often reminded of a lesson I learned from a great jazz musician.
Houston Person.
Never heard of him?
You ain’t been listening with them GOOD ears, then.
Not a famous intellectual figure even in the jazz world…just a true player. A black tenor player with real southern roots who is now probably well into his 70s and who for 50 years has made a steady living playing…the blues.
The JAZZ blues, which is harmonically and rhythmically a whole ‘nother level beyond the simpler blues forms.
Sophisticated music that has not lost its common sense.
Its soul.
Its connection with working people.
So here we are…a fine big band of NY jazz players, rehearsing for a concert celebrating the sophisticated (and decidedly NON-bluesy, in its original intent) music of Harold Arlen. (Over the Rainbow, It’s Only A Paper Moon, Stormy Weather, I’ve Got the World on A String…YOU know. STANDARD standards.)
With Houston Person as the featured soloist.
Now Houston doesn’t talk a lot.
He’s a big man…wide receiver, NBA shooting guard big..and he looks and sounds as if he’s leaning against an invisible wall while he’s playing. Every note relaxed, from the heart and true. And the arrangements and band were fine as well. So we were just sailing along, getting the cues straight, etc. About an hour and a half into the rehearsal, however, we ran into a little roadblock. The bass player, who although VERY good is also somewhat renowned for being a little…fussy (A little too thinky, not enough feely sometimes)…stops the band on this one chart and starts a discussion about how the rhythm section should be approaching the time feel. Should it be straighter eighth notes, more or less of a shuffle feel, etc. This goes on for about 5 minutes, the arranger/conductor trying to reason w/the rhythm section (to little effect) and Houston just leaning back against his invisible wall up there in front of the band.
Waiting.
Until finally he straightened up a little, turned around to face the band, and said quite clearly and slowly “HEY man. It’s JUST the blues!!! Let’s take it from the top. ” And he counted it off. “2-3-4.”
You can intellectualize about Sisyphus all you want. I’ll bet HE did some heavy thinking around the 27th millennium of his endless task as well.
But it’s just the blues, BooMan..
It’s just the blues.
It’s REAL simple.
You…and almost the entire REST of the left…continue pushing the wrong rock up the wrong hill.
You’re a rock junkie. And you use intellectualization as a denial tool.
“ME??? I’M not a rock junkie!!! I’M a deep thinker!!! This rock rolling is just what I do to get my exercise whilst I’m a’thinkin’.”
Bullshit.
Kick cold turkey or die like a dog.
It really IS that simple.
Do it or not.
“Take it from the top….2-3-4.”
One more time.
Please.
Roll that ol’ rock on down the hill and never EVER go back to push it up again.
It’s ONLY the blues!!!
Go on out and play it.
It’s only a new set of dues.
Go on out and pay them.
Your union has proven itself to be incompetent and useless over the last 50 years.
Go out and join a better one.
Or start your own if you have to.
In the end…you be bettah off.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.-Frederick Douglass
