Author: BobHiggins

Have you ever gotten a piece of mail addressed to “occupant” or “resident,” that included an “important offer” or “time sensitive information” and contained the greeting “Dear Valued Customer?” Yes, I know, me too. Every time I open the mail I’m assaulted by some cheap “special offering” or “exciting opportunity” from some boiler room asshole who thinks that I’m so stupid that I don’t see through his sleazy crap.

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if you want to stay on my good side try not to let me know that you’re aware of that fact. If you want to do business with me please don’t insult the limited intelligence I have left over from the 60’s, and in the future address your communications to me like this:

“Dear Random Dickweed,” or “Dear Pathetic Sucker,” or “You have been carefully selected as today’s sappy ass target for theft, and or fraud,” but please lay off the “valued customer” crap, and while I’m on the subject, lose the ten second delay “Robot Sales Bitch” voice or things will never work out between us. Your mortgage money or storm doors or vinyl siding or camping trailer timeshares will rot on the shelves of retail hell before I will buy anything from you. OK?

About six weeks ago I had a heart attack. I happened to be in the emergency room of the VA Hospital at the time, so there’s a good news and bad news thing there, and it was on the 15 of March so I had the whole “Ides of et tu Aorta” deal going. Until this incident, except for a broken thumb, I hadn’t seen a physician in thirty two years and intended to continue that streak because I’ve found that most people die under the care of a physician.

I guess I was knocked out for about thirty six hours because they gave me too much morphine. They do that intentionally so that you can’t enjoy the buzz, which is another reason I don’t like physicians, they take all the fun out of drug abuse. When I finally awoke I was tied to the bed and thought that I had been arrested by the thought police. Morphine dreams. The nurses told me that while I was out I pulled the breathing tube out of my lungs so they had to restrain me. Whips and chains at the VA?

Thirty two years without a doctor and now I have about thirty two of them. Every morning my hospital room looked like a goddam Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting in Cairo. I know that these people saved my life and I really love them for it but the next bastard who wakes me up at 5:00 am to WEIGH me is getting a serious piece of whatever mind I have left. Notice: Instructions to Bob Higgins’ medical staff: If you have not yet heard the cock crow and are not delivering breakfast just guess my goddam weight. OK?

So here I am, already forced to deal with the combined assault of trash mailers, telemarketers and crooked politicians, and now the fates have beefed up the attacking forces with the combined bureaucratic weight of the Veteran’s Administration and the Social Security System. Try getting either of these outfits on the phone.

The Bush administration has, at last, found a solution to the budgetary crises in both the VA and Social Security systems and it is simple, elegant, and effective, they quit answering the fucking phones. I had been told to call and schedule a stress test, I tried repeatedly for a solid week and all I could get were busy signals and Kenny G and Barry Manilow tapes.

Had they just put a heart monitor on me and sent me home with instructions to: “Call The VA Concerning Your Heart It’s Urgent,” the stress test would have been taken care of right there with me shrieking into the phone while listening to Mandy or insipid saxophone solos and a voice breaking in every forty seconds to tell me in a calming voice that just cranks my rage level right through the goddam roof that my call is “VERY IMPORTANT.”

If I had ever expected to live this long, I probably would have taken better care of myself but now I have the world of modern medicine at my disposal and enough pills to take every morning so that I no longer need breakfast. I take my pills, I’m good til lunch. I felt a lot younger though, before I met my medical team, which is another thing I hate about doctors, they are stealing my youth by forcing regimens and restrictions on me that are more appropriate for old people.

Somebody said once that “gettin’ old ain’t for sissies,” I know what they mean and I’ll probably live to grow older and drag my feet all the way to the grave because I’m young dammit and you can’t make me get old.

The stress test came out all right though, it really wasn’t that bad, kind of like making a phone call.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Sixty one years ago today Germany announced the death of Adolf Hitler.
Hamburg radio announced to the German people that their Fuhrer had “fallen at his command post, fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany.”

The announcement was to be one of the last big lies told by the most accomplished band of liars of the first half of the twentieth century. Hitler had taken the exit reserved for cowards. The chickens were coming home to roost in Berlin and they were wearing Russian uniforms.

With no way to surrender to the British or the Americans and knowing that the Russians had completely lost their sense of humor, many high ranking Germans were considering or had already done the “honorable thing.” The rest were trying to arrange surrender to the Yanks and Brits or humming the Bosa Nova and casting long yearning glances toward Brazil and her neighbors.

Hitler, if memory serves, shared a cyanide Bon Bon and a post prandial bullet to the brain with his sweetie Eva Braun who, he had recently married in a lovely ceremony in the damp bunker fifty feet below the boots of the approaching Russians. I believe they married to avoid going to the great rathskellar in the sky in a state of sin. Such a finely tuned sense of morality and respect for the cultural niceties, much is expected of our great leaders.

Reports don’t tell us whether refreshments were served.

It had all been a lie, the advancing danger of Bolshevism, the crimes and intrigues of the Jews, the genetic inferiority of the Slavs, the Gypsies, the mentally ill and disabled. Homosexuals and intellectuals also came in for special consideration in the new Germany. Some of the lies went back centuries, some were more recent.

The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” a phamplet that made the “Heinrich Himmler Book Club Selection of the Era” was a myth begun in Czarist Russia before the revolution in an attempt to divert anger away from the corruption of the royal court and cast the Jews as the source of the people’s misery. The phamplet also played well with Henry Ford who distributed the filth in his dealerships in America. Jews weren’t getting many breaks here either.

The Germans borrowed lies from everywhere, from the world of the occult and astrology, from harebrained religious cults, from twenty centuries of European superstition, they found what they needed to keep the German people docile and filled with fear.

Before they could set out on their holy crusade to cleanse Germany and the Aryan Race of sub human influence they first had to emasculate the German people and they did it well. When lies weren’t enough to bring submission they turned to terror, to torture, and to murder.

By the time they were ready to move east and begin scarfing up the world, German spines and testicles were as common as Stegosaurs unless they were turned to the service of the Fuhrer.

Hitler and his gang of comic opera beer hall and bratwurst thugs rose to power on an overwhelming wave of fear and lies and held on to that power using the same tools against a docile populace for twelve years.

Now in April of 1945 the jig, as they say was up. The “Thousand Year Reich” had lasted twelve years and a few months. The mission Hitler accomplished in his time led to the deaths of so many millions that the numbers become meaningless. Who can conceive and grasp the idea of 75 million dead men, women and children in little more than the span of one of our presidential election cycles?

The mind that can calmly hold such a thought should probably be destroyed. The crushing weight of the horror and misery, the brutality and violence of Hitler’s war will lie heavy on the soul of man for a thousand years, and therein is his resurrection and his “Mission Accomplished.”

Hitler was dead, a lifeless hulk of a pathetic and insane man who wielded control over others who allowed him to do it. As I write this he remains dead but his legacy presses upon us, the hubris that leads men to lust for power over others for control of the Earth and it’s bounty, is alive and well in many of our leaders with missions of their own yet to accomplish.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Notes on Guernica

I don’t want to make a mountain out of this little Spanish molehill (actually I just don’t want to get caught doing it) but there is something about Guernica that has always moved me and, I know now, moves others as well.

There is a profound sadness in the subject of Guernica that begins with some melancholy passion in Spain and her people, and continues through any narrative of the awful event in question, and ends in our mutual humanity and horror at the reality of war.

As I wrote this little thing I heard Miles Davis’ mournful horn blowing pieces from Sketches of Spain and I could feel the breezes from the Bay of Biscay. In my mind I heard the bombing and the screams, I felt the flames and the terror and the sense of loss. Writing these few paragraphs left me exhilarated, exhausted and with an unidentifiable sense of longing.

I usually get a response from a few to several people but, at the moment, with Guernica, the responses are approaching the one hundred mark. This is not a notable thing I guess to anyone other than myself and I only write this to thank those who read and perhaps felt what I did, and to those who took the time to respond.

We share a humanity, you and I, we share a history with all it’s art and love and beauty, it’s passion and romance and all the aspirations and accomplishments, loss and longing, that have marked the lives and experiences of our ancestors. In so many ways we are woven from the same thread and are part of the same tapestry.

Our similarities outweigh by far, our political, religious, physical or ethnic differences, and in addition to sharing a past, as I was reminded by my reflections on Guernica, we share a present.

We share a present for which we must each assume responsibility because we will remain woven into the fabric of our shared and advancing future. For good or ill, we will share that future as well.

But enough about molehills.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Today or yesterday is an anniversary of sorts,a day of commemoration, a day to reflect on what it is in man that dooms him to endless repetition of his mistakes.

Maybe it’s just a day to spit on the sidewalk, hitch up your pants and say, “same shit, different day” and let man worry about himself.

Sixty nine years ago Hitler and Mussolini decided that propping up their soul mate Francisco Franco would offer them a great opportunity to test out all the new high tech military hardware they had amassed.

This was bad news for a Basque city called Guernica and 1500 or 6000 or 16,000 of it’s inhabitants. The number is uncertain, record keeping tends to go out the window when the entire universe is a collage of blood and body parts.

Numbers don’t matter when it comes to human carnage, the first bestial act is horror enough. Once the stench of blood and death, the evil reek of terror and pain overloads all the sensory pathways, whether we wallow in the blood and gore of hundreds or thousands is only a matter of accounting.

The town was defenseless, there was no Basque Air Force to protect the citizens and the Republicans had run out of airplanes and nearly everything else. Guernica was about to become famous.

It is described in Historical accounts as the first time that civilians had been attacked by air power with such wrenching devastation. Devastation by bombing is only a phrase and can’t convey the sights and sounds, the screams of terror and random senseless violence of what occurred in Guernica that day. By morning Guernica would have nothing left but it’s fame.

They came, the Germans in their Heinkels, primitive by our sophisticated standards, they came, the Italians in their Fiats and they hurled their now quaint antique bombs down upon the guilty and the innocent, down upon the cowardly and the valiant, the pure and the profane alike.

They came in the late afternoon and bombed and came again and again and bombed and bombed and bombed and bombed…and returned in the early evening and bombed.

A rubble of ruin, a great hideous forlorn tumble of refuse, of smoke and fire of screams and pain and dust and sun baked rubble cooling in the evening breeze surrounded only by the mournful sounds of dying.

They say that there are conservation laws, that energy and mass cannot be destroyed. Physicists and technicians tell me that other things as well obey these laws, momentum and something called spin.

I wonder about the moans of the dying and the screams of the children, I wonder about the weeping of the mothers and the cries of rage of the brothers, I wonder, are these too conserved?

Are the all sounds of terror and loss from all the wars of history conserved, each war laying it’s grotesque symphony atop the next?

I guess that’s a question for the accountants, the strategic thinkers who are able to see these things calmly and having convinced themselves of the necessity of the first bestial act no longer worry about the numbers.

I don’t know, I’m not a professional person, I just hear the screams, the physicists tell me they don’t go away.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Just a few bean fields and a corn patch or two from Dayton, Ohio a battle has been forming for some time now. This battle is squaring up as a struggle between good and evil, between the righteous congregants and pastors of two large Columbus area churches and the “hordes of hell” according to one of the pastors.

“Pastor” Russell Johnson leader of his flock of 3000 faithful at Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio is a fundamentalist preacher, right wing activist and one of the founders of the “Ohio Restoration Project,” a group founded for the stated purpose of registering 300,000 voters under the direction of “Patriot Pastors” who will commit themselves to registering 300 “values voters” apiece for the 2006 election.

I’m not sure what a “patriot pastor” is but I think I know what a “values voter” is and I believe we can be certain that when the two are combined they will not be stumping for a slate of liberal or progressive candidates, in fact I believe that the liberals and progressives just might be the aforementioned “hordes of hell” in their lexicon. I made a note to check into that.

Johnson is in league Christian fellowship with another well known telethumpalist preacher in these parts named “Pastor” Rod Parsley who has his own flock of righteous true believers in the World Harvest Church near Columbus. This one’s a biggie, try to imagine12,000 holy political crusaders under one steeple. The thought of this much outright, unabashed holiness would intimidate Christ Himself. Just for that reason I doubt that he attends services there.

Parsley wields a lot of clout in Ohio conservative republican circles. He has hobnobbed with James Dobson and Chuck Colson and many other luminaries of the religious far right. At the kickoff of a book tour last year he was joined by Alan Keyes and the Paris Hilton of conservative politics, faux news starlet Ann Coulter. How Ms. Coulter who “lives on cigarettes and Chardonay” and her mini skirt, played to the “Born Again” crowd I don’t know.

The current crusade is focused on electing Ken Blackwell as Ohio’s Governor replacing the ineffectual and scandal ridden Bob Taft. Currently Ohio’s Secretary of State, Blackwell is the wet dream of the religious right around here and has traveled extensively and appeared often with both Parsley and Johnson, notably in his efforts to pass Ohio’s ban on gay marriage. He was with Parsley on one occasion when he said of gay marriage “That notion even defies barnyard logic, even the barnyard knows better.” Blackwell never met my ex dog Spike.

These three agape amigos are determined to put Jesus back in the schools, back in the government and back into everything except their own churches. They intend to have the entire populace marching in goose step to “Onward Christian Soldiers” as they move to create the great “American Kingdom Of Corporate Theocracy And Jesus Go Lightly.”

I have spent my life after childhood trying to ignore organized religion and it’s adherents as much as possible. I have no interest in Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Hindus, Scientologists or any of the dozens of isms, sects, and cults that have cluttered history with their madness and wars, with their ignorance and intolerance, and with their distrust and hatred since the dawn of human thought and superstition.

For myself the concept of God or Creator is self evident and inescapable. Oddly enough it was a layman’s study of science that led me to a belief in God. The more I read in physics and cosmology and the farther I got from anything that resembled a church the more comfortable I became in some innate and personal awareness of God.

My beliefs are also private, I don’t care to display, package, sell, or ram my beliefs down the throats of anyone. I would rather that the facts of my beliefs be ignored, perhaps treated as an amusing oddity of my character which poses no threat to anyone and which is the business of no one else.

Somehow I became convinced that I had the right to be so ignored and to ignore in return the somewhat quaint and amusing beliefs of others. The reason that I refuse to be disabused of the notion that I have a right to ignore and be ignored in religious matters is that I also believe that the law of the United States of America guarantees me that right.

Apparently I was wrong. The same people who have had so much success interpreting the “Word of God” to their advantage, now intend to rewrite “The laws of Man.”

The “Patriot pastors” are coming and they mean to reestablish the Inquisition, the rack and the darkest times in the history of man. A group of people who would surely make Christ vomit, or send Siddhartha into cardiac arrest is going to establish a Jolly Jonestown here in Ohio.

Actually they will need a great number of them because there are such deep disagreements over the correct way to worship whichever version of the creator is approved by their particular sect. Churches are forever growing and dividing, splitting up the spoils and moving on down the road to attract another collection of people desperate for a belief to lean on.

In actual fact these three amigos are flimflam men, throwbacks to some cheap carny ancestors who have cashed in on the potential of the information age and have become very adroit at putting on a light and sound show, creating a bit of mass hysteria and fleecing the flock of hundreds of millions of dollars. They are no closer to God than Billy Sunday or Elmer Gantry.

I hate to get involved with this religious war thing but if they won’t leave me alone I say, “OK. Bring it on.” I can’t explain it, I can’t prove it but I really believe that God is on my side. And I don’t even have a steeple.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com

Chairman and CEO of Exxon – AP Photo

I have been involved in myriad discussions of corruption in business and government, in private and public affairs and have been aware, intuitively, most of my adult life of the cancerous cesspool of corruptive greed that exists in the heart of America. When I saw the portrait above I recognized the face of an ancient demon.
What has, and is being done to the average American by the one percent among us, who, by luck, accident of birth, and sheer murderous criminality find themselves to be members of the ruling oligarchy makes the Stamp act or the Tea taxes of our history seem somewhat quaint and peevish discomforts.

I find greater grievance and reason for revolution, for armed struggle against an oppressive criminal class at the beginning of this twenty first century than our predecessors had at the outset of our last American Revolution.

There exists in our time more grievous mistreatment of the body politic than any English King ever envisioned. Even those who believed in the “divine right of Kings” never dreamed of the depraved excess of what has taken root among us. The enormity of the crimes of this ruling corporate class cry out to the heavens, to whatever gods of justice there may be for redress.

In what volume of our mutual library of documents, of history and law, of justice and beauty, of war and of the tranquility and peace of nature’s god will I find the treatise that will explain to me why the creature displayed in the bloated faced image above should be rewarded for his efforts in the world at a rate four hundred times that at which I am paid for my own?

I don’t believe that anyone can show me the teachings of any man in control of his mental functions, a rational person, who would advocate such a circumstance.

I do not profess to be a scholar, but in my limited exposure to the lore and learning of history I can remember only cries of outrage against the rise of such a condition. Prophets and preachers have railed against it, statesmen, politicians, men of science and men of religion, the leaders, and the led have all, in my memory, decried the existence of such inequity, at least among reasonable men.

Yet here in our time it is portrayed as the summum bonum of American life to which all aspire, the grasping for obscene wealth at the expense of one’s brothers, filling one’s porcine mouth with loaves while the rest scratch for crumbs is now seen as something to admire.

Again, I am no scholar, but such teachings escape my memory.

The beast portrayed in the hellish portrait above has a name, “Mammon est nomen daemonis” This demon has been reviled and resisted for all the centuries of man. This evil has been reviled and resisted, in every language, every religion, every tradition whether primitive or those with pretense to sophistication.

I have never encountered a culture which placed avarice on the altar as mine has in this last quarter of my life.

I suppose it’s to be expected, and in the nature of things, when the president is a cowboy and a preacher and all the preachers wear pinkie rings.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com/

A Thousand Words
by Bob Higgins on April 23, 2006 – 4:09pm.
It’s seven thirty and I’m waking up over coffee and the morning paper. Through the kitchen window I can see the light frost slowly burning off the deck railings, offering a promise of decent weather for the day. I glance back down at the table where my coffee steams and the headlines wait.

In the center, on page one above the fold is a photograph from AP taken by one Karim Kadim. The camera has captured the image of a crowd of very angry Iraqis, maybe a hundred of them, although if the camera were to zoom back, the crowd could be much larger. They are all male and brandishing weapons, mostly cheap automatic assault weapons, and generally glowering at something to the left of the camera.
There is a intense lethality in their faces and an implicit threat in the weapons raised above their heads. They are clearly not having a good day.

I turn toward the window again when my dog barks at a car which has had the audacity to drive down her alley. The deck railings are almost dry now, February is nearly gone and spring is approaching. The dog loses interest and plops down at the back of the yard content just to loaf until her next quarry presents itself.

I feel the warmth of the sun streaming through my window and my eyes follow it’s rays back to the table, the angry Iraqi faces, and the headline, “Tension, violence grip Iraq” “Truckloads of gunmen attack house, mosque.”

I study the faces, young men, certainly none over forty five or so, one in the center foreground just a boy really, maybe seventeen, eyes almost black under hooded brows.

He is especially menacing, this boy, he has the eyes of a killer, he’s looking directly at the camera, his weapon held shoulder high pointing at the sky.

Looking at his eyes is like looking down a gun barrel. I can feel the violence and hatred emanating from this kid as surely as I feel the warmth of the sun now touching my hands.

I can hear their angry rhythmic chanting, see them moving almost dancing to their frenzied chorus, their rifles bobbing up and down keeping time.

The dog barks again, a neighbor leaving for work, I sip my coffee and fold the paper, no need to read the story, I saw the picture.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com/

It’s five in the morning, foggy and chilly, too cold to sit on the deck and greet the birds as they revel in the daily fact of dawn or to watch the squirrels as they go about their daily mischief.

Coffee cup in hand I retreat from the weather to the online world and surf to Iraq where the weather is much warmer and the only fog is that of war, a war so far away.

In the news I find a feature series “Faces of the Fallen” and as I read I note that many of the faces are only dark silhouettes. It somehow brings me sadness to think that they should appear this way before the living.
A face or a silhouette and as I move my cursor across the page I see the names appear below the faces and the faceless alike which offers some small comfort. At least, I tell myself, we have their names.

Above the names, above the faces and the faceless appear the dates of their deaths and this is all we are told, all we are to know of these young men and boys, these young women and girls.

We know of their death but no report is given of their lives. We know the date they left us behind but of their birth or how they spent their brief time among us we will forever know little.

There is no gender in these silhouettes yet I know that Mothers dressed some in tiny pink dresses and others in miniature blue coveralls. Oshkosh B’Gosh comes strangely into my mind and the image of my son now grown. I feel a sudden shame.

From this page I can tell you that Michael Probst was a young man who became a Marine although he still looked like a boy and I know that when he died he was a Lance Corporal.

This is all that we left him as a legacy or at least all we will be permitted to know.

From the name Alecia Good I know that she was probably a child that Mother dressed in frills, I cannot see her face, she was a Senior Airman when she died on the seventeenth of February. Fate decreed that she become an American silhouette.

I know only that they were. I know only that they are no more, that they arrived and soon departed.

From somewhere I can almost hear the wrenching sounds of grief from those who knew them well and loved them. The spirit of their loss fills the clouds above with sadness and hides the sunlight, and from the window I cannot hear the sound of birds.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com/blog

Open letter to the editor of The Washington Post

To the Editor

I have no idea how many people in this country are reading and writing on political blogs. I do know that the number is significant and growing.

While some commentators such as Hugh Hewitt may attribute a bit more influence to blogdom than it deserves there is no denying that its’ clout in the political world is growing daily, both in influence and in the coherence of its message.
 

Open letter to the editor of The Washington Post

To the Editor

I have no idea how many people in this country are reading and writing on political blogs. I do know that the number is significant and growing.

While some commentators such as Hugh Hewitt may attribute a bit more influence to blogdom than it deserves there is no denying that its’ clout in the political world is growing daily, both in influence and in the coherence of its message.

In David Finkel’s April 15 article “The Left, Online and Outraged” he focuses on Maryscott O’Conner who has been referred to as “The Goddess of the Blogosphere,” and her blog “My Left Wing.”

I have read a great deal of what has been published on “My Left Wing” recently and actually contributed a comment or two myself and I would like to try to correct the impression that Mr. Finkel may have unintentionally left with his readers of Maryscott O’Conner as some kind of Red Guard nut case.

In the last six years, America, in the view of many, has become nearly unrecognizable from what many of us believe to be our country. The policies of the Bush administration have created in the public mind an enormous amount of distrust, frustration and as Finkel points out anger, and rage.

While there exists a vast ocean of insult hurling, vitriolic, ad hominem nonsense clogging the bandwidth of the Internet, there are also islands of reasoned discussion, talent and intelligence as well, I believe that Maryscott O’Conner’s “My Left Wing” is such an island.

I have read many blogs and contributed to a few, from the bottom feeding semi literate collections of online ogres and trolls shouting at each other across their virtual school yard, to the upper crust exclusionary collections of media and entertainment celebrities who often seem to be more interested in the melodious sound of their own voices than the importance of any message they might have to convey.

While the lower end does not merit discussion here and the upper end seems to feel themselves to be Mandarins living in the Forbidden City of whom we in the hinterlands of public discourse would know little, Maryscott O’Conner and her associates at “My Left Wing” have created an accessible forum available to everyone.

Try to picture the pundits of the mainstream media or the high class prim, proper and oh so intellectual blogs as a symphony, a formal, structured and highly organized concert, given by George Will in a bow tie and played before a respectful and well-behaved audience.

To get a true image of Maryscott O’Conner’s “My Left Wing” you have to imagine a late night jam session in a smoky jazz or blues club, with underdressed musicians making individual musical statements as they feel them, before an audience doing much the same, with drinks and cigarettes in their hands and probably more underdressed than the musicians.

The individual notes and phrases of the musicians blend into a sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant whole and mix with the crowd noise and the smoky boozy flavor of the air and become a message far larger than the room.

More Bebop than Baroque, more Charlie Parker than Bach, sometimes you can dance to it and sometimes you just have to stand and scratch your head wondering if your ears are telling you the truth.

Sometimes emotions run high, the crowd gets surly and the musicians fight among themselves but if the Goddess is not in the middle of the fracas, in her role as instigator, proprietor and bouncer she soon has things straightened out.

I see My Left Wing as a late night democracy of the talented and the curious, who come to rant and to reason, to listen, to learn and to question.

I see it as diverse group of people learning to play together and Maryscott O’Conner as the virtual emcee presenting and encouraging, scolding and correcting, her ubiquitous presence inspiring in its’ energy and her voice the rhythm behind it all.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com/blog