Sealed in Blood

Never make the mistake of telling anyone that your musical psyche or "Id" is blocked.  You are opening yourself up to the worst kind of patronizing abuse from those only who want to live through you.  Vicarious is a humorous term around here.  Music as a profession is laced with cyanide, and the worst of it I have experienced.  The people around me never have been supportive of my musical inclinations.  Only they have been stunned that I chose to go my own path in music.  I lived my father's life of music my entire life.  I have no animosity about it.  He gave me what I have, and I am grateful.  It became clear to me when he wanted me to carry on his lineage, play his music his way, I said no.  Never did I want to become a band director.  Now after almost having a doctorate in music composition, I am feeling guilty for not being able to do the things he chose to do.  I took my class woodwinds and brass.  I learned my rudiments on the snare drum.  The music education program at UNC Chapel Hill was at a low point when I attended.  They hired a new Wind Ensemble conductor, who replaced a professor who should have gotten tenure.  He spoke German and played tuba, and they axed him.  Instead they hired James Arrowood, because he gave a charming and entertaining presentation in front of the Wind Ensemble.  He was a competent conductor, but one of his responsibilities in addition to conducting the Wind Ensemble was to teach the music education block courses.  These were two hour long affairs where basically he taught us nothing.  I sat in his classes for an entire semester and never wrote anything down, because he never told us anything.  When I turned in my notebook at the end of the course, he asked me why there was nothing written.  I said frankly, "You didn't tell us anything."  He didn't.  He was not prepared to teach these education courses, so my class was deprived of part of our necessary music education at UNC.  Because I had watched my father be a band director my entire life, I had an idea how to do it.  I didn't want to.  I got the Ed. degree, because it was something good to fall back on, teaching that is.  Because Mr. Arrowood didn't like me for my recalcitrance, my student teaching assignment was the bottom of the barrel.  The other students got good schools that were nearby.  I got Lee County Junior and Senior High Schools.  That sealed my fate of ever becoming a high school band director.  Never make the mistake of telling anyone close to you that your musical psyche is blocked.  What will ensue is the most patronizing, debilitating. insulting set of instructions ever.  Never make the mistake of asking anyone for musical suggestions, not in this day and age where musical ignorance is rife.  Look at television.  Listen to a song on any streaming service.  Music no longer is music.  No ones know better than you do what you should be doing musically.  To find that guidance one must separate themselves from the pack like Miles did.  No one can tell you how to excel in music.  Recently I had to listen to suggestions for my own vocation.  My mother continually yells at me that it is work.  
She accuses me of shirking work.  Truly she believes I don't want to work, but in reality it is all I want to do.  I just can't do it living with her.  The result is her trying to get her husband back by instructing me to play in his place.  I experienced this last night, and I will not experience it again.  I would rather be cooking in a food truck or busing tables rather then be forced to fill my father's very large and absent musical shoes.  I have no problems with his legacy.  I played  gigs with and for him many times when he was recovering from a stroke.  We worked well together, and he appreciated it.  Then he developed dementia.  Immediately I became an enemy and a competitor, just as I have become for my mother.  I have to coerce her into supporting my musical output.  There is nothing more I would rather do that work in the music field again in my own capacity.  It is not her fault she is not able to understand what that is.  Instead she demands I become the organist at her church, her husband, or any other music job that is prevalent in Fayetteville.  I am left feeling guilty, because I never studied the pipe organ.  I never studied church music or choral conducting.  I never sang tenor in our church choir.  I did different things, things which were interesting to me.  These are not.  They are old and stagnant to me.  There is no growth or development doing these things, unless you keep an outlet open for you own creativity.  I would have not issue with doing a rote music job, but the problem is I am not skilled in any of these areas.  I do not have adequate vision to read fly shit.  Instead I play jazz and improvise.  Of course I can read music, but sitting at the piano reading clumps of grapes never has been appealing to me.  It is the single reason why I was not a piano major at UNC.  I majored in the trumpet, and the entire time I was enrolled my teacher was threatened with my knowledge of the piano.  The same is true of my professors at USC.  When you skill rivals the skills of your teachers, in my experience, they are not supportive of you.  Instead they are threatened.  Hence none of my college teachers ever have helped me in the least finding a job.  Thirty years later and having returned to my childhood city, things have not changed.  They are still churning out the same hash at both schools.  I really thought about attending the South Carolina Masterworks Jazz Ensemble concert featuring Chris Potter in Newberry.  Chris played in my band when he only was in high school.  This was after John Emche, the director of jazz studies at USC, had died of a large brain tumor.  When I saw the program I knew why.  The taste is the same for me.  It is a noble accomplishment establishing this organization.  I have perused it with interest, all of its players and their achievements.  I take pride in having taught Dr. Robert Gardiner, while I was a Graduate Teaching Associate at USC.  He was my most serious student.  Still I have no interest in ingesting the same menu that was presented thirty years ago.  The faces are pretty much the same.  Columbia, although now filled with new and fresh faces of jazz, still is the same flavor.  That is because those academic jobs are long lasting, rewarding, and empowering.  They do not go away.  They just become "Emeritus."  In a society which needs freedom, change, and opportunity, this process is laboring.  It is too slow.  Forty years is long enough for anyone to have a well-paying university job.  It is time for those individuals to move on and let someone else have a chance.  

Healthcare Is Killing Us

It was amusing to turn on Saturday Night Live and hear my own words.  Evidently someone does read this blog.  Their parody of the Baby Boomer generation in comparison to Generation X and Millennials was spot on.  They are a gilded generation, the perfect metaphor for a time in American history when people mattered.  After all people are America.  People live in America, but they also make up America.  Buildings cannot be built by themselves or by animals.  Laws cannot be enacted by spirits.  People make up America.  If one looks at America today at least through the lens of reported news, it would seem that America is not fair.  America no longer is equal, if it ever were.  Certainly it wasn't to the millions of imported African slaves.  America's history never was Christian, but Americans have worked hard at making it so.  Progress has been made, and much of it has come in the last century.  Suffrage and civil rights are two important watershed events in American history.  Still one issue remains.  Equality.  America never has been equal.  While immigrants worked hard and accomplished much with the Protestant work ethic, racial inequality still remains in America.  I do not know the statistics, but older white men still hold the reins.  Comically SNL suggested it was time for them to move on.  If a city, state, or nation does not entrust the future leadership of their community to a younger generation, then you get what we have now.  We stopped embracing the younger generations, when we stopped supporting public education.  In America's prime public schools were the core of American life.  What better place is there to focus attention than on the preparation of the younger generation to come to economic fruition?  Not that long ago America forgot this.  Instead we began a covert systematic exploitation of our younger generations.  That is because Capitalism, the chosen socioeconomic system of America, cannot work without the spending of money.  Corporate America looked around and decided that the youthful generation had the expendable capital.  Emerge the iPhone, another perfect metaphor for the exploitation of American youth.  Instead of G.I. Joes, Barbie dolls, and tinker toys we primed Americas youth to want more.  Now everyone including adults are walking around staring at their palms.  I am a staunch Apple user.  I love my Apple computers, a Mac Pro, an iMac, and a Macbook Pro, but I do not have an iPhone.  I do not have an iPhone for two simple reasons.  One is I can't afford the contractual monthly charges, and the other is it is too small for me to see and hear adequately.  The three times I have had cellular phones they were nothing more than a nuisance.  I had a Samsung that burned up.  I had a Startac flip phone, and it never worked at all.  Finally I had a Nokia that did work, but I needed an ear piece to be able to hear on it.  Whatever happened to Nokia?  They were the phone of choice back then.  My mother has an iPhone, and it was my task to acquire it for her.  I did the research and then did the leg work to import her photos, contacts, and other important information.  It was not easy.  To set up video calling on the Amazon "Show," you had to have an iPhone.  We are set, but watching an 86 year old woman learn to use an iPhone is not amusing.  It was painstaking.  Remnants of that process still linger.  She enjoyed her desktop PC the most, when picture taking was still done with a digital camera.  Both Outlook Express and her Kodak software were enjoyable for her to use.  Now she struggles with Apple mail, its graphic interface, and Photos.  Neither are fun to use.  The iPhone proves to be more conflating creating confusion between it and her iMac.  Quickly she realized that a larger screen and more encompassing software create an easier human interface.  You can see more, so you can do more.  The iPhone was entertaining for a while, but now the reality has set in.  In today's political climate nothing is fun anymore.  The news headlines are severe.  Political bickering is the norm.  Few positive headlines make their way to the dinner table.  We carry on.  Luckily in my mother's case my father was an astute wager earner.  Although now he has passed, his hard work and talent have manifested themselves greatly in my mother's security.  She tells me stories of her church friends, and most of them are destitute.  Constantly I hear her reiterate how down and out most people in Fayetteville are.  With my help my mother and I have prepared for her future.  Contrarily I have not planned for my future, because it is impossible.  Her life of almost a century is overwhelming, histrionic, antagonistic, and unsupportive the way America has become to her youthful generation.  It should be no surprise there is no model for the appropriate Christian behavior to support our youth.  Instead I bear the brunt of her hardships.  Effectively she transfers her anxiety, worry, and grief to me, like all good parents should.  Truly in her own mind she feels this is appropriate.  It is unusual for a fifty-six year old single man to be living with his mother, or is it?  Not today.  With the depression of 2008 came a great economic change in America.  A handful of conniving Wall Street traders bet against the American economy.  To make good on their bets, the powers at be convinced W. that the taxpayers needed to bail out the Wall Street investment businesses.  If the American people saw that Wall Street was bankrupt, it was rumored it would be another great depression.  W. created the Troubled Assets Relief Plan, dipped his hand into the American cookie jar, and handed these Wall Street companies our money.  The money went to pay off this handful of investors chronicled in the film, "The Big Short."  Today still they have our money, and where is it?  Was this group of men qualified and responsible enough to possess that sum of capital?  Under the system of Capitalism money has to be spent.  It is a system of supply and demand.  Money must be spent for Capitalism to work.  It has to flow through society to stoke the process.  Money must flow.  The problem with America today is that the money is not flowing.  It is sitting shelved in overseas banks and otherwise invested for the gain of its proprietors.  These men and the other American corporations which refuse to infuse the middle and lower classes with economic opportunity are to blame.  Instead America has regressed back to slavery, but our slaves are in Asia.  All of our pollution as a byproduct of the production of goods squarely is in Asia, unregulated, naive, and accessible.  In a perfect metaphor for quid quo pro, China is polluting America with Gen X.  Not the Generation X, but the byproduct of making Teflon.  Likewise the Mexicans are making polyester resin at a plant on Cedar Creek Rd.  Turnabout is fair play.  Fayetteville, our Fayetteville, is a rail freight yard for DAK Americas.  Daily trains make their way down the middle of Russell Street supplying DAK Americas with the appropriate raw materials to make plastic drink bottles.  These plastic drink bottles end up creating small islands floating in the Pacific Ocean, killing marine life, and not biodegrading.  They will be on earth until someones decides what to do with them.  This is not good commerce.  Neither is accumulating money in a system that needs it to flow.  A super rich social class that has no authority, no qualification, and no stomach for doling out money to the lower classes should not be in power.  This is why and how Capitalism has failed America.  What is the most appropriate metaphor for failed Capitalism in America?  The answer is the medical industry.  Not the medical profession, but the newly created medical industry that began with the invention of HMO's.  This was the beginning of the end for American health care.  Who suffers?  The answer is the youthful generations.  I do not have health insurance and as such have not one ounce of care about my well being.  I am on my own, and I am watching out for my eighty-seven year old mother.  Because there is no model, she does not know how to support me and my life.  We have prepared for her future but not mine.  I am in a necessary stasis reflecting only her sentiments, worries, and passions.  My artistic voice, my own personal emotional expression has been silenced.  It is hard.  I played a gig last night, and instead of playing from my musical soul, I emulated my father.  I couldn't shake fifty years of paternal influence enough to reach deep into my own well of musicality.  That is why it is called work.  I realized that I didn't want it.  I don't want it.  I don't want my mothers emotional psyche.  It is thirty years older than me, and consequently there is little correlation.  While the patrons at my gig were kind and appreciative, it was not musically rewarding to me in any way.  It was rote labor hashing out tunes my father would have played.  I even made this decision, to play in his style with instruments that emulate his sound.  It has worked since he has been playing professionally.  Why would it not work again?  It is the same place, the same city where he played most of his life.  The patrons of the party were of the blood of their local predecessors.  Like the cast of SNL I was being haunted by the ghosts of the Baby Boomers.  We want the spirit of the Baby Boomers to be laid to rest like it should be.  America has not been kind to us.  In fact Millennials have received the rawest deal of all.  It's a good thing they are finding this out.  What is healthcare in America?  It is a bureaucratic spaghetti bowl of red tape which seeks only to line the pockets of its owners.  At America's inception one could go see the local doctor downtown, get an X ray, get a flu shot, or get a prescription for pain.  It was simple.  Medicine was grass roots.  The battleground of America starkly was apparent.  It was littered with the corpses of Union and Confederate soldiers, dead lynched slaves, and the sick and dying of disease.  There was no spin.  There was no hedge.  There was no future.  Healthcare was meant to save your life.  America no longer is a Christian nation.  Rest assured that satan is alive and well and living in Washington, DC. 

Doomsday

I can't believe what I am reading, hearing, and feeling.  When did it become normal in the United States of America to hear about abject
poverty as a result of slave wages?  When did our federal government become a club for rich businessmen who care nothing about the middle and lower classes in America?  These are our elected representatives, and starkly it is clear that our voting system deeply is flawed.  If these men purport to have the best interests of citizens at heart, they are lying.  Never in my memory have I witnessed such a flawed Washington.  The image of Hank Paulson coaching Bill Clinton from the podium is enlightening.  The film "Vice" which recently was released was enlightening.  When did elected Washingtonians become puppets manipulated by wealthy Nazi's?   It is frightening.  News stories about detainment, harassment, deportation, and border security.  It is our President Trump waging a campaign against evil Mexican terrorists trying to penetrate our southern most border?  It is commonly understood drugs do not enter our country walking across a border.  They are tunneled in by a complex cartel system of bribery with fast boats, aircraft, and strategy.  No humble South American citizen fighting for their own survival has enough time to fathom smuggling drugs in the United States.  A border wall is nothing more than a symbolic campaign promise made in 2016 relating to nothing more than vote gathering for the 2020 presidential campaign.  If Trump openly voiced it was his token to the American steel industry, that would be different.  All ready we are a socialist nation.  The government supports the American people, but the American people do not own the means of production.  They are not smart enough to manage it.  What is left of our private work force quickly is becoming a posse of slaves.  Stories of despair, humiliation, poverty, suicide, and murder frequent our headlines.  Murderous violence in North Carolina is enough to make one shudder.  All of it accelerated with the inauguration of Donald Trump.  When he took office in January of 2016, CSX-T expanded their rail activity.  It has not stopped since.  There has been a standing wave in my home for over two weeks.  I am forced awake at 3:40 a.m. by a humming, vibrating, pounding freight which stops and sits for the next five hours.  The air pressure is so strong from their infrasound, it could knock you over in your home.  We wonder whence the violence comes.  Why are Americans violent and unhappy?  Who is doing anything to ensure Americans have clean air, clean drinking water, and economic opportunity?  Who is trying to get American's jobs, knowing that to survive in America without government entitlements jobs are necessary?  Our manufacturing has been outsourced to foreign countries.  Wages have been stagnant for decades, and yet, "The price of concrete keeps increasing."  Inflation.  Adjusted for inflation.  What inflation?  Wages have not increased, they have decreased with the lack of presence of labor unions.  Our entire support system ensuring economic opportunity for everyone has been crippled by wealthy Republican businessmen who want only for themselves.  It is depressing.  There is no American Dream.  The only dream is to escape persecution, poverty, and slavery.  Escape imprisonment.  Escape torture.  Escape genocide, the same genocide which happened less than one hundred years ago.  All ready it seems to have begun in America but from within.  It is covert, internal, and subtle.  We poison our population with genetically modified foods.  We tempt them with fatty fast good.  We addict them to substances which are necessary to make it through the day.  America no longer is America.  We have become surrogate America, a population of childish images, behaviors, and habits.  Television commercials depict us as cartoon characters at the level of mindless, naive, stuffed animals.  When did America regress from a nation of renegade, recalcitrant, hippy, good-hearted souls to a nation of student murderers?  "What am I going to do today?  I think I'll motor on down to the local elementary school and murder some innocent children."  What kind of nation produces such behavior with an elected leader who patterns his presidency after a child Asian dictator?  Fuck us, because we all are doomed. 

Employment in America

What's the scrow, bro?  Nada.  Word up, Homey.  Hammond smorgan.  I have been working on my organ, so to speak.  Recently I asked a thirteen year old girl if she would like to try her hand at our organ, a Hammond A-100.  Not really, but I try to be careful about the innuendo.  "Would you like to try your hand on our organ?"  Currently I am not teaching.  I have not taught since I was enrolled in the doctoral program at Ohio State.  I taught a few private jazz piano lessons.  One was to a MOP, a miscellaneous oriental penis, I mean pianist.  They were plentiful in the OSU School of Music.  Because they can read fly shit on a newspaper, I wasn't very effective for her.  She just wanted to read jazz transcriptions, or else I should have told her to buy an Oscar Peterson book and read away.  Jazz piano is a much more involved process.  I stopped thinking about jazz music when I was in the program.  To complete the D.M.A. in composition I had to adhere to their curriculum guidelines.  That meant focusing on contemporary classical music, concert, or symphonic music from the 20th century.  All of these titles are misleading.  WCPE calls themself "The Classical Station," but they are not really that.  While they do play music from the Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance, Classic, and Romantic periods, none of that except Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart correctly are thought of as classical.  The Classical Period, or more specifically the "High Classic Period" is thought of as 1780-1790.  This is what I learned from Lois Rosow in my History of Classical music at OSU.  The first time I took this course at UNC-Chapel Hill, I made a D.  This was the only D ever I made in my entire tenure at Chapel Hill.  Dr. Harold Andrews was the professor, and his class was dry.  Not only that he was not an effective lecturer.  The exam I took in his class was the only exam I ever took which had nothing to do with what he said in class.  Nothing.  Nothing he said to us during his lectures was on his written exam.  All of the material was foreign to me when I read his test questions.  I suppose it came from his assigned reading, but why did I even spend time in his class?  Instinctively I knew this, and hence I hated sitting there.  Not only was it boring, it was a waste of my time.  One evening when I was walking through the foyer in Hill Hall, I spied the light on in this very classroom.  Then I heard the faint whisper of opera music coming from behind that closed door.  I had forgotten we had an extra listening session for his class that night.  I pondered walking in late, and then I decided to blow it off.  It was horrible, that opera stuff.  Today I have learned that opera is a visual affair.  The music truly is high art, perhaps the highest form of music because it is coupled with drama and the human singing voice.  Writing for chorus, soloists, and orchestra indeed is a lofty accomplishment.  It is worthy of study, but fully to understand the intent of opera one must SEE it.  What is happening on stage, the sets, the lighting, and seeing people sing is important in the opera genre.  Simply to hear the music is not enough.  It is and should be an encompassing experience, one which draws you in with human emotion and anoints you with passion.  This was not happening in that classroom.  What was happening was students were sitting stationary in hard wooden seats watching a bumbling man blather on about something which was nondescript.  Never in his class was the intent of classical music expressed.  It was the pedagogy of the Ivory Tower, an "I know more than you about something that is very important" kind of deal.  This precept in the music department at Chapel Hill was not helpful.  Students are no less than professors.  They just know less.  The reason why they are enrolled, paying tuition, and supporting the personal habits of tenured professors is to learn more, so that one day they may be able to do the same thing, teach music.  Possibly at the undergraduate level this philosophy is not evident.  Students are just trying to make it through.  If a professor did instill the worth of the music, its meaning and expression, perhaps the students would become more interested.  That was not the case in Dr. Andrew's class.  Instead, like Judge Rick Pfieffer in environmental court, he dissuaded me from being interested.  Pfieffer changed me from being penitent to being angry, because he enacted a sentence that was not related to my crime.  It was hypothetical and motivated only by his desire to try to seem like a powerful judge and to collect revenue for the city.  There was no correlation between what I had done and his fine.  It was arbitrary.  Already I had remedied my mistake, and I brought him evidence of my contrition.  He was not interested.  I was ahead of his game.  I was on top of the bell curve.  I already had put myself through the criminal justice system.  I realized my wrong-doing, amended my foible, and asked for forgiveness. None was given.  Instead he enacted retribution that far missed the mark.  He conspired with the prosecutor before I appeared with no knowledge of my situation.  I was not given a fair trial.  I assume this is commonplace.  Especially it is in the American South, in a good old boy network of selfish ladder-climbing.  They are not interested in you in the least.  You are inconsequential.  You are nonexistent except that you broke their law and were responsible for your own lynching.  This kind of premeditated stereotyping is rampant in America.  It hangs on from our times of slavery, racism, and white supremacy.  These roots are hard to swallow, because America has come a long way.  We had a Civil Rights Movement, but one would not know it.  America has regressed to violence, ignorance, and greed.  Dr. Andrews repelled me from classical music with an unskilled, dispassionate, condescending approach only that made me angry.  I took the History of Classical Music again while working on my masters degree at the University of South Carolina.  I made a A.  I took it again at OSU, and also made an A.  This is a lesson in politics of America.  One region will put you in the grave, and another region will lift you up.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

I am not sure how Trump supporters cannot see his dictatorial tendencies.  He is modeling his inexperienced, narcissistic, near fascist presidency upon communist leaders such as Kim Jong-un.  Do Trump supporters not understand that our democratic republic is destined for a military dictatorship if Donald Trump is allowed to continue to be the American President?  Do they not see he wants to bypass Congressional oversight and rule America like a mob connected CEO?  Perhaps this is acceptable, sidestepping a gridlocked Congress, pissing away billions of taxpayer dollars for symbolic purposes, and reinforcing extremist, naive, and zealot machinations?  Trump will go down in history as the American pinnacle of evil which no one recognizes.  Is this how and why our civilization will end, with Trump as Brutus still yet to be discovered.  How long will it take for breast fed, dough boy, silver spooned Republicans to impeach him for the host of crimes all ready he has committed including treason.  It is like an epic B grade movie unfolding in our consciousness each day, but it is real.  Or is it?  Is the deficit real, how much the United States owes in debt to India and China?  Could the debt be eliminated by a covert operation destroying all of Wall Street?  V for Vendetta?  Fight Club?  Raze the selfish trader's playground and let America reemerge from the rubble.  All I see is a dictator waving his hands in the air pretending to be the American President, and yet Donald Trump has no clue how to govern America.  America is not a nepotistic, private, real estate firm, and herein lies our problem.  The wrong man was elected president.  Has this ever happened before, a completely incapable and in denial politician who gets off throwing darts at the America people rather than helping them?  What a great example.  I am going to say this, and fervently I believe it.  Guns are not the problem in America.  Guns do not shoot people, people do.  When people shoot other people it is because America has failed them.  America has failed to instill a sense of morality, security, and hope in those who erupt in violence.  We can blame this problem on illegal immigrants, or we can see reality and confess that our country is the only country where those seeking acknowledgment for neglect travel directly to churches, schools, and entertainment centers and murder the innocent.  That is because other countries still maintain a sense of God, religion, spirituality, and conscience.  America has become "America the Violent" at the joke of angry and jaded foreigners many of whom were persecuted by America.  That skewed blade of terrorism is fueled by America's lack of interest in her own population.  The violence in America is not the result of too many guns.  It is the result of our failure in public education, religion, and economic opportunity.  When the parents of a child in Robeson County, North Carolina cannot read we could try to blame them, but we can't.  The violence in America is a result of our failure in public education, through generations, and capitulated by our increasing lack of morality in the absence of God.  Criminals are Americans who have been neglected, and whose animal instincts are being stoked by pollution.  Because we no longer embrace academia and its disciplines, psychology, philosophy, religion, and the arts, we no longer have the capability to understand why Americans would commit genocide on innocent children.  We have regressed to a time of cavemen, basic needs and desires, and violent means for our own survival.  We are an ignorant culture, and we will continue to grow backwards until the second coming of Jesus Christ.  Only a resurgence and support of the educational process, the elimination of military and industrial pollution, and a revitalization of America's capability to produce goods and services will save this civilization.  Guns are necessary for America's survival, because a well armed militia is the citizen's last line of defense against a tyrannical government.  If we are not careful as in other countries the common man will be fighting our own military.  In the world this is commonplace.  What is America?  What is our culture?  What have we become?  We are a drug addicted, introverted, sedentary, naive, bisexual, and narcissistic club of video gamers who are prepared for nothing.  This often is reiterated as prominent community leaders such as Joe Biden tell us America lacks a trained work force.  Why is this?  It is because our millennial generation was sidetracked by the tech industry.  They were neglected by our system of public education.  They were ignored by Washington, and they were exploited by corporate America.  The millennial generation has become America's new wave of Yuppie's whose skills are so immature, defined, and extraneous to human survival they are incapable of becoming a meaningful part of our culture.  Slowly through the school of hard knocks, millennials are waking up to the concept of social inequality.  It widely has not been reported that the perpetrators of 9/11 were the Saudi Arabian junior league.  As such the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman should not be allowed into this country.  He is a war criminal no different from Slobodan Milosevic.  How could American allies, the Saudi Arabians, have planned and implemented the most grievous attack on American soil since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which began World War ll?  This prince is scourge, and he should be treated as such.  How is it possible that the sister of the founder of Blackwater, a private contracting security force employed by Dick Cheney, is our current Secretary of Education?  As is the pattern of the Trump administration, when the nemesis of a cabinet position instead is appointed to that job, eventually they will resign or be forced out in disgrace.  Miss DeVos is next.  Education in America will not resume until she is fired or steps down.  We will call her Medusa DeVos, the least capable Secretary of Education America ever has known.  The bodies are buried deep in the Trump administration, and this country will not recover until they are exhumed, recognized, and given salvation.  Trump will not be so fortunate, as God will have words for him. 

Brazilian Anarchy

As opposed to being thought of as a chronic complainer, I would rather be thought of as an adult American, who has lived long enough to look back past Generation X and see the shortcomings of the Millennial Generation.  If that makes me a chronic complainer, then I am nothing more than a modern George Carlin.  I am someone old enough to be able to remember American history rather than learn it out of a modern textbook.  That would be a disaster, because American history has been doctored from the beginning.  As I age and begin to realize what really happened in American history, I get angrier and become more malcontent.  Because I am a mature, educated, intelligent being I do not choose to commit acts of violence.  I don't protest either, although maybe I should.  My sociology professor at UNC-Chapel Hill deeply wanted his students to engage with current public issues.  As a graduating senior this was not an appealing prospect.  We simply wanted to write the paper, study, and pass the exam.  Seeking an issue in the public forum, researching it, adopting a position, and engaging with the local community to support your cause?  There was too much time involved.  Instead like other savvy UNC seniors, we preferred to find a way around it.  I wrote a paper about something which I all ready knew, hydro-electric power.  I laced it with personal opinion and submitted it as my project.  It was no surprise I passed with a C.  It was well-written, because I had written it before.  It sufficed.  Never have I had to engage with protest, civil rights, or inequality.  Although when I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, immediately I knew America was not fair, I continued.  That was more music study.  I missed the link that at some point one needs to work to earn a living and secure one's future.  Beginning teacher salary in North Carolina was $18,500.00.  Looking at the figure for a beginning band director, I felt extremely disappointed.  Graduating from Chapel Hill was the single most difficult thing I ever did.  On graduation day I had to look at the program to make sure my name was on it.  I had to take an extension on my woodwinds class, so I learned to play the flute by myself over the summer.  Brooks Smith gave me a C, because of the extension.  I was penalized, because I didn't have time to learn my scales during the regular semester.  I made an A in clarinet, because I could play all of my scales three octaves and did it on time.  I felt what I had learned and what I could do was worth more, so I went to grad. school.  It was not difficult to get a Graduate Teaching Assistantship with my newly obtained college degree.  It paid for my Masters degree.  During this time I was successful and lived the "jazz" life.  It was a nice time, but I am relatively sure this type of lifestyle is rare these days, especially in Fayetteville, North Carolina.  Jazz is not appreciated, and as such there is no jazz scene.  That is a big disappointment when you are living in a particular place.  What I do is not appreciated.  Perhaps that has something to do with my malcontent in America.  Perhaps in other cities life would be better for me.  Life was better in Columbia for a while.  Life became better in Columbus, Ohio after a while.  I am a capable and reliable musician.  I am passionate about my chosen craft.  The common connotation of a Phd is being an independent scholar.  An independent scholar will be productive in their chosen field of study no matter what.  Why not?  The alternatives are to get up each day and look at Trump America.  I have been reasonably successful at remaining musically productive over the last few years.  My father died on May 6, of 2016.  I am looking after my mother, and she has no one else.  She is 87 years old.  We live in the same house.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to be musically productive, because as Lenny Bernstein said a musicians soul is the world around him.  The political dynamic of the day is the pool from which we draw musical inspiration.  Even when the dynamic is violent, depressing, and immoral, musicians find a way to tell the truth.  Never have I felt the need to protest anything until now.  As an adult looking back modern day America is a pale, polluted, mockery of the once American Dream.  I have an entire list in my head why beginning with Global Warming.  The newest entry is democratic collapse in Brazil, their military's role in this event, and its implications in North America.  I live in a city which hosts the largest military installation in the United States, and yet I do not feel safe.  When I sit with the GI's and their families at restaurants, it is clear to me that we are not about whom they are concerned.  They are in the Army as a job.  Many of them have moved into my neighborhood and are raising families.  Still I am not sure they know the purpose of their service other than showing blind allegiance to their Commander and Chief.  This is their duty.  This creates an extremely unsettling scenario for me.  We have a dishonest narcissist in the White House who is setting the wrong example for America.  He is their Commander in Chief.  Many of the social programs and cultural practices which have been championed in America have been abandoned by his administration.  The American majority is not being represented by our elected officials in Washington, DC.  Most upsetting is the failure of Capitalism for the middle and lower classes and the eventual dismantling of our republic.  It is imminent.  Why?  It is imminent because the renegade spirit which grew America has been stifled by a sterile, authoritarian, militaristic rule especially in North Carolina.  We are very close to losing our democracy to a club of dough boys.  I am not sure the millennial generation understand what America truly has been is.  It is cloaked under the damp, mildewed, old tarpaulin of affluent America.  Affluent America wants America to be quiet and hand them their money.  This is not America.