Relentless Cruelty

Here is the pointer to an excerpt from a midi rendition a new orchestra piece.

It is an ode to the inhumane machinations of the USA's current government. I was trying to capture that sense of relentless dread that we have all lived with for the past 5 years.

Daily factoids like:
Food packages the same color as cluster bomb-lets.
Haliburton 292% profit margins in the last three years
The use of the word "crusade" in describing their current policies .... etc.

David Mamet recently said, " None of us has ever referred to our country as The Homeland. It is a European construction, as Die Heimat, or The Motherland, or Das Vaterland. " and you know where that leads.

You can get access to a whole boat load of other various music at my music blog

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ... Pericles (430 B.C.)

Open Letter to Bill O' Reilly

I am baffled by the popularity of talk show host such as Limbaugh and O' Reilly. This latest wrinkle made me want to rant, yet again. Here is the letter I sent to the email address that you don't have to pay to use and Bill "sex perv" O' Reilly will never read. Maybe he should try oxycodin ... like Russ.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
oreilly@foxnews.com
Reporting-MTA: dns;phoenix.foxnewsnyc.com
Arrival-Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:03:53 -0500

Final-Recipient: rfc822;oreilly@foxnews.com
Action: failed Status: 5.2.2 X-Display-Name: Show -O'Reilly

Mr. O'Reilly,

I have never listened to either you or Keith Olberman of MSNBC, but I have heard the absolutely un-American comments you made after one of your callers was making a comparison of your show and Mr. Olberman.

Basically," We have your phone number and "fox security" is going to come after you .... "

What the heck? This is America, buddy, not some despotic regime. Freedom of choice is more than the choice between Pepsi or Coke, and discourse of ideas includes intelligent discussion of both sides of an issue. For example, your shout down of Terry Gross did not take away from the fact that you never answered some very legitimate questions about your style of "journalism" she was asking. If you are so concerned with the "truth" you need to think this one through a little more.

Having read the NPR ombudsman report on this incident and then listening to the interchange, I agree that her reading of the People's magazine comments to your empty chair was not appropriate, but listening back to your inability to intelligently refute legitimate questions was equally if not more inappropriate.

Please find the middle again you have drifted way too far from the rest of us. I want our old America back where policies are discussed in an open forum.

Read one of the great American president's last speeches to get a real sense of what I am talking about:

Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040

Respectfully,
Scot Gresham-Lancaster

Blog readers here is an interesting analysis from the NYU journalim school of that rather shocking Terry Gross interview.

At the end of that analysis is a pointer to an incredible 1964 Harpers article: The Paranoid Style in American Politics

This ranks up there with Eisenhower's last speech that I alluded to at the end of the letter.

Great Essay by Mark Morford: Worth Reading

I encourage everyone to read this very articulate and colorful essay by columnist Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle. America, Narcoleptic Pit Bull
It is truly brilliant.

Here is a short quote just to give you a taste:
"Violence, as we seem to forget in some sort of collective denial, begets violence. Intolerance breeds intolerance. And war begets war. It self-perpetuates, feeds on itself, sucking and teething on the blood and exploded limbs and the punctured hearts of the dead, growing in the soil of hate and ignorance and my-God-can-beat-up-your-God. "

That is out of context bit of a brilliant essay, in my opinion.

I saw Bruce Bartlett the author of "Impostor" that I mentioned in my previous post on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and he made an interesting slip, "Republicans are better at making the trains run on time" an interesting allusion to Italian facist, Mussolini.

The potential closing of Abu-Ghrab prison in Iraq today is emblamatic of our national shame. Our once great and proud nation, destroyed and subverted by something that you should really read this Morford essay to really get a feeling for.

To date more than 20,000 wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes me think of the struggle and troubles of my grandfather and his paralyzed legs. Do these chicken hawks have any idea of the depth of this suffering? I some how doubt it.

Am I allowed to pray anymore? ... Because I am going to do it any way. I hope I don't get arrested. A recent bumpersticker captured some of this, "Orwell was an optomist"

Iran to crash US Economy, torture won't help

While Bush meets with his chum, despotic dictator Gen Musharraf of Pakistan, the real truth about all this Iran and Nuclear threat it poses is really a smoke screen.

Check this out

In the supporting article, Author Mike Whitney writes:

"The Bush administration will never allow the Iranian government to open an oil exchange (bourse) that trades petroleum in euros. If that were to happen, hundreds of billions of dollars would come flooding back to the United States crushing the greenback and destroying the economy. This is why Bush and Co. is planning to lead the nation to war against Iran. It is straightforward defense of the current global system and the continuing dominance of the reserve currency, the dollar."

I was amazed to hear the interview with staunch fiscal conservative and Reaganite on Fresh Air, Bruce Bartlett. I ran out and go his book, Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy The title says it all. Finally these guys are wising up. His most insightful observations, fo me, were regarding the absolute danger of their anti-intellectual stance. Complex problems require complex and thoughtful solutions. Bush's cheerleader mentallity is running low, actually it started during the Gore-Bush campaign.

Finally, Fred Branfman wrote and interesting essay for Yuba Net On Torture and Being 'Good Americans

" To ask what it means to be a "good American"is not to compare Bush to Hitler or Republicans to Nazis. The question does not arise only when leaders engage in mass murder on the scale of a Hitler or Stalin, which Bush has not. It requires only that they engage in actions that are clearly evil, which Bush has."

hmmm ....

Nice quote from Harry Truman on that site as well:
"I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."