History, Heros, and a Home Town Feeling

I do not hate the town whence I came.  I do not feel any shame.  Although I was born in Mocksville, NC we transplanted to Fayetteville in the mid 1960's.  Starkly I remember the evening newscasts were wrought with Viet Nam violence.  Alexander Graham once was Fayetteville High School, and it sat downtown at the bottom of Haymount Hill off hay Street.  Margaret Willis once was called Belvedere Elementary School.  I was bussed across town to Ramsey Street and Washington Drive.  Friends of mine attended Horace Sisk which now has been absorbed by FTCC.  I graduated from Terry Sanford High School as a member of the Honor Society.  I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Bachelor of Music Education degree and have been licensed to teach K-12.  I still am.  I completed a masters degree from the University of South Carolina in jazz and commercial music, and I have completed all coursework for the completion of a DMA degree in music composition at The Ohio State University.  My memories of Fayetteville consist of musical excellence, intelligence, class, and artistry.  Now I am seeing a different picture outside looking in.  I do not hate the town whence I came.  I do not feel any shame, because although I do complain, and Fayettevillle has become a pain, I will remain.  (for the time being anyway)  Notable achievements in Fayetteville are the development of a world class symphony orchestra, a professional chorus, a new baseball stadium, an aviation museum, a skateboard park, and soon to come to frution, a sport complex and performing arts center.  I pleasantly was surprised to read Bill Bowman's opinion on this new city endeavor.  "Don't Railroad the Performing Arts Center!"  There is a rich musical community in Fayetteville, and whence it comes I am not sure.  My mother and I enjoy concerts of all kinds, and all of them are artistic and satisfying.  This is unusual and a fairly new occurrence in Cumberland Country.  What we don't have is jazz.  With all of this said, a city once which was heralded as possessing history, heros, and a home town feeling, now has become an industrial junkyard.  To name a few business closures:  Walmart on the Murch.  Auto Zone in front of it.  Many corner drugstores.  The ghosts of thriving businesses are beginning to haunt us as the trees disappear into the mist.  "We can't get to your store, because of the concrete medians."  There are a handful of things happening off the radar of the population, and they are kept there on purpose.  I would ask how single working parent military families can afford three hundred thousand dollar homes in Vanstory Hills?  The reason is because I feel they are being coerced into adopting such a lifestyle to ensure their military longevity.  Bill Clinton's major campaign promise was that every American should be able to own their own home.  Three decades later this concept almost destroyed the American economy.  Unvetted loans were shoveled out to everyone.  When the fine print was revealed and their payments escalated, foreclosures abounded.  It was a trap.  Everyone gets a house.  One housing crisis later, the economy of the United States has yet to return for the working class.  Instead those who got the money, those Wall Street brokers, kept the money and began implementing a system of oligarchy controlling the masses.  This was the beginning of a new governance system in America, and Donald Trump is the final chapter.  Bill Maher on his show has asked several guests including Amy Kloburchar the question, "What if Trump doesn't leave?"  I had to think about this for a few weeks.  What is he talking about?  He then clearly states that Trump's camp is the military, police, and the others who have caused trouble from the inception of his presidency.  What Bill is talking about is a revolutionary war.  I feel it is a combination of a civil and revolutionary war.  What he has yet to describe is a governmental/military takeover of North America.  Trump after all is the military's Commander in Chief.  Oficially they must do what he says.  Right there is one grift upon which I reflect.  If called upon to suppress the American people if they rallied against him, would they do it?  Would they obey the Commander in Chief of the United States, or would they commit mutiny?  Are they enlightened enough to know for whom they serve, or is their personal security more imporant than the good of the American people?  It is a tricky question.  Bill Maher is saying that the Trump administration would refuse to relinquish federal power with a lie.  They would fabricate a story that simply lies and disguises the true results.  It has been happening for four years.  It happens everyday.  Big Brother is here and Trump is it.  The problem is his supporters are not enlighened enough to see through him, even after he has hurt so many people.  Only the oligarchs are being looked after.  Imagine a coup in Ecuador.  Imagine Hugo Chavez.  Imagine bloddy civil wars all over South America and in the Middle East.  Imagine a militaristic dictatorship lead by Donald Trump and mindless Americans following him until they are shipped off to the gas chambers.  Sound familiar?  Adolph Hitler used infrasound as a tool of the Nazi Party.  They would inundate the crowds with massive low frequency noise to rile them up.  America is riled up now.  There are murders everyday, and the evening news is like satire.  The most brutal and ignorant crimes happen every day with no explanation.  Imagine armored vehicles thundering down your street enforcing a national curfew.  Imagine the Senate counting America's electoral votes.  Imagine the Senate, with Mitch McConnell as its leader, acquitting our president of treason.  It is time to be afraid. 

American Art

There are major junctures in history when previous artistic achievements abruptly stop, and a new period begins.  In Western music history over the course of twenty centuries since the birth of Christ and previously for ancient Greece, style periods emerged.  Commonly they are known as Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern or Twentieth Century.  I am learning their are sub categories of each of these stylistic periods.  That is the beauty of Western music history, of which millions have made their passion studying.  Phd's would be nought if these intricacies of musical expression were not abundant.  American music history has its own eccentricities, and because it is a young many of them have yet to be formed.  Jazz has done well to study and organize its music, although it more accurately could be named African American Classical Music.  It should be, suggests jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan.  The history of jazz music in America necessarily must embrace our nation's deepest scars.  Many of them are from slavery.  The practice of slavery and the evolution of its reaction, the Civil Rights Movement, both intricately are entwined in the formation of jazz music.  Jazz should be thought of this way.  There is much more going on than Americans see or hear.  The importance of America's personal cultural heritage, which is documented in jazz music, is threatened.  Fascism through a projection of communist rather than democratic ideals is growing.  Our traditional American Republic is under siege.  The suppression of art and more particularly personal opinion and expression threatens to create a stark, militaristic, oligarchical nation not unlike the rest of the world.  America always has been a torch of freedom for everyone, but this way of life now has become threatened.  The internet, technology, and the computer sector have aided in this fracture.  Traditional human behaviors and the art forms which represent their passions have been stymied.  While the internet has created new business models and now monumental wealth, also the internet has extinguished previously viable forms of business and artistic expression.  In particular American popular music, film, and television have suffered.  The juncture of which I speak in America is where traditional methodology has been replaced with internet and computer methodology.  All three pinnacles of American artistic achievement, music, film, and television have been crippled.  They have been crippled because each all ready has evolved to its highest form.  American history is short compared to Western history, and only in the future will we discover this truth.  We all ready have lived through the Golden Age of Television, the Golden Age of Motion Pictures, and a Golden Age of Popular Music.  These landmarks were achieved by pioneering, emboldened, and impassioned desires to make America better.  Often they were championed by the Jewish faith, and Jews who have been persecuted by Fascism.  It can be said that great art is a reaction against evil.  It can be said that great art is affirmation in the face of adversity.  Perhaps these things are true, but it is not difficult to understand whence came the great art of America.  We open our eyes in the morning everyday and stare into the void.  There is nothing left to do but create.  The internet has proven fruitful for human pleasure, but now it is beginning to destroy it.  Humans cannot live in cyberspace.  Our needs are physical, spiritual, and emotional.  While the iPhone cleverly can mimic human inclinations, it cannot provide them.  It is inevitable if the American way of life is to persevere, then its methodology must sustain.  Software cannot and should not replace brick, mortar, flesh, and blood.  It cannot create music played upon a stradivarius, sung by the human voice, or swung with human desire and faith.

Pray Now

Trump praises the  Carolinas and his rough and ready force to guard petroleum and poppies.  It could be a folk song, "Petroleum and Poppies," the theme song of the Trump presidency.  The reason why the country is doomed is because no legislators (if they can be called that) are intellectual enough to understand, conceptualize, solve, and implement laws to protect American citizens from the overzealous tyranny of rampant, unbridled, and fraudulent corporate dominance.  Since W. private corporations have tainted the American landscape with their diseased semen, spewing jism over the unknowing and uncaring lawns of iPhone addicted millennials.  Elected politicians are no better informed, because they are not demanded to provide a better of quality of life.  An example?  Fayetteville, North Carolina, an intersection of the defense industry, big business, and government.  Vegetable oil, polyester resin, rubber, and military might.  What is the task?  The task is to understand an industrial park nestled in the belly of a small southern town and keep it from killing its hosts.  Perhaps they would be more content if the surrounding inhabitants of Fayettenam were dead.  We are headed in that direction.  What is the task.  How does a governmental body regulate an out-of-control process?  Try this on for size.  First understand the environmental hazards of unbridled industrial pollution.  Everything that is emitted from a train is harmful to humans.  Leaking electricity from AC traction motors and power inverters.  Infrasound.  Microdust.  Heat.  AC traction locomotives are an environmental nightmare, and Congress doesn't care.  The United States Senate counts the electoral votes that pick the president.  The Senate just buried their heads in the sand and acquitted Donald Trump of treason.  There is no reason they will not commit fraud again and choose Donald Trump no matter what the American popular vote.  I expect it to happen.  They don't know how to do anything but watch Nascar and molest young boys.  The country is doomed, unless this body of man vaginas are sentenced to prison where they will be comfortable anyway.  (having their man asses pounded everyday)  Begin with the Rail Feasibility Study all ready paid for and published on the internet.  Read it, understand it, and develop guidelines for CONSERVATIVE rail activity not raping and pillaging their host geography.  Begin with a prime mover limitation per square mileage.  A quick look at the power axle rule of a single Class A railroad would be a beginning.  These rules are not followed or enforced.  Infractions occur all the time.  No one cares.  No one understand, thus no one enforces.  Only a finite number of 4000 HP diesel electric locomotives per square yardage. You can't have an orgy of rail providers, Norfolk Southern, Aberdeen and Rockfish, and CSX all fucking each other within the city's limits.  This happens now.  It is a happy incestuous herd of dotard engineers protecting their own families.  Cargill needs its raw materials as does DAK Americas.  Fort Bragg needs its jet fuel.  Pellets.  Resin.  Blah.  Blah.  Nothing is more important than vegetable oil, plastic drink bottles, and defending Middle Eastern oil and poppy plants.  The American military, bless their hearts, are getting their asses shot off for what?  Trump say, "Bring our military home," and deploys the 82nd Airborne a day after the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ.  There is no greater Brutus then Mitch McConnell, and no greater satan than our president.  We couldn't be living in a darker time, and we may not recover. 

Chem Trails and Powdered Tails

Once upon a time and not so far away, Vanstory Hills Elementary School was an icon of privilege.  It was white.  Things changed within Cumberland Country Schools, and I began to see a familiar scenario evolve a few thousand feet from our home.  I experienced this scenario first hand at Margaret Willis School in the early 1970's.  Black specks began to emerge at the school.  How has Vanstory Hills Elementary School remained a pinnacle of quality education for children?  The school has become subject to the same inequities haunting other reputable Fayetteville neighborhoods, and it is not integration and bussing as a result of the redrawing of school district lines.  Low flying aircraft above the school and its surrounding neighborhood also is inevitable as a result of the manipulation of flight paths at the Fayetteville Airport.  Perhaps the identification of low flying aircraft could earn students extra credit.  Several years ago when a flasher was exposing himself, two Beechcraft King Air 350 surveillance planes flew concentric circles in the sky above the school.  Living in close proximity to the playground, we were subject to this annoyance.  Likewise if I threw my axe at a fallen tree in the woods behind the school, several seconds later an aircraft would appear over my head.  I discovered the Fayetteville Arms Room had been built on Executive Place.  This gated entity organizes and keeps track of all the weaponry used at Fort Bragg.  Adjacent to Harris Teeter was a large, gated, outdoor facility with massive communication satellite dishes.  They were owned by L3.  Eventually when the Arms Room relocated, this facility vanished.  Sierra Nevada, a defense contractor located near Grannis Field, manufactures surveillance arrays for these expensive twin engine aircraft.  The markings on the planes were Customs and Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security.  When the planes finally disappeared a muted Cessna took their place.  Replete with an aircraft muffler it circled the city continuously.  Recently several Cessna pilots and owners have crashed and died, one killing innocent people in a trailer by the airport.  The Army has a small plane at Signature Aviation.    During Fayetteville's purported agrarian Golden Age incumbent home owners were not subject to the nuisance of continuous low flying aircraft, especially directly above their homes.  Like most evolved communities flight paths are kept away from living areas.  Vanstory Elementary School has succumbed to the same ills as the rest of the city of Fayetteville.  Because old money's influence is dying out, and because our educational system purposely has been neglected to under educate young adults, Ground Forces Command does what it pleases.  The DOD changed the flight paths at Grannis Field, so aircraft can more expediently fly to the base.  I am mystified how commercial flights fly directly through what should be secure and guarded air space.  The day after Christmas in Cumberland County was the most extensive air show in our history, but without aircraft.  Criss-crossing chem trails littered the blue sky
in an insulting homage to the birth of Jesus.  There are things other than the military.  There are things that do not deal with killing the enemy, especially when tainted media obscure them.  Not all Americans want an economy of war as defined by Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Some of us want to live in peace and moderation, not wealth and imperialism.  The long term ramifications of low-flying air traffic is exacerbated by the felling of trees within the city limits.  Trees scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and jet fuel creates it.  Our eyes burn most of the time from the stark decline of air quality in Fayetteville as a result of rail and air traffic.  The idea that a freight rail provider is "green" is propaganda.  The consequences of the military industrial complex are threefold.  They are air quality, infrasound, and electromagnetic radiation.  As a performing musician, composer, and artist these things are anathema.  In the "Electronic Age" which has been predicted, airborne electricity becomes the death of the planet.  The container in which the human race lives is tangible, fragile, and nourishing.  When it is destroyed the human entity has no options. Violence erupts.  When you create sound pressure and electricity in an all ready compromised atmosphere, where are we supposed to go?  Elon Musk has that answer, but planet Earth traditionally has been good enough for the common man.