Do You Feel Safe?

As I sit listening to Bobby "Blue" Bland and lament that my civil liberties are encroached upon each and every day...  What could I mean?  With a pandemic infectious disease outbreak in America and all of its faux limitations resembling a communist enforced social doctrine, why are my civil liberties important?  It is simple.  Either your immediate environment will pick you up an carry you through adversity, or your immediate environment will bury you in its ground.  While it easily is understood that the Lost Colony was not helped by their environment, I would think Americans have learned to be prudent about their surroundings.  Don't build in flood plains.  Don't build in tornado alley.  Find geographical locations which are conducive to human life.  Fresh water.  Clean air. No diesel electric locomotives to destroy mental health.  They beat on you constantly with their low frequency undulations.  It is like living in a pressure cooker, a nuclear reactor, or Fayettenam.  Decompression is a valid term for human health.  What does it mean?  It means when you get up every day and step into the world, the odds are not stacked against you.  You are able to live in a nominal state, and I mean an average state.  Nothing is working against you.  Allergies.  The flu.  Gen X in your air and water.  Violence.  Crime.  Shouldn't we be able to rise everyday to a level playing field rather than digging ourselves out of a hole?  We in America are doing a lot of digging.  I spend most of my time trying to sidestep the B.S.  Most days it seems overwhelming.  My brain just shuts down and enters survival mode.  I am not relaxed.  I do not feel healthy.  I am not at liberty to engage my brain at its upper level.  This is the America that America built?  Were we ever great?  How are we going to be great again?  Joe Biden made a simple observation, and asked why president Trump was criticizing the governors.  Why has he engaged in a pissing contest when the country apparently needs saving?  (Bobby's voice is distorted in this recording, overdrive on the microphone)  All I feel Americans want is to feel that our elected officials have our best interests at heart.  They are not trying to kill us or take our money.  We would like to know the American medical establishment is trying to help us and not take our money.   I can't say that it is true.  I do not feel safe at all.  Do you? 

Human Intellect

As I sit in front of an age old TV, a Sony Trinitron from the mid 1990's, watching David Byrne sing in his film "Stop Making Sense," I had a fleeting thought.  Why am I concerned with the well being of America?  Why do I care about childrens' education?  Why do the neighborhood kids seem important to me?  Perhaps it is because I myself missed this boat.  No children for me.  No wife.  No immediate family, and yet I am not unhappy.  Why?  I was fortunate enough to have experienced love at an early age.  I was privileged to have reaped the fruit of physical love at age fifteen.  It lasted seven years, long enough to learn about relationships.  I don't miss not being married, although with the current pandemic life has become challenging.  I have learned to be self sufficient, but people cannot live alone, can they?  My fleeting thought, which was comforting, was I spent four years at the University of North Carolina studying to become a school teacher.  I am certified to teach K-12 music in the state of North Carolina.  Let me say that again.  I studied at the collegiate level to be a school teacher, and school teachers' major responsibility is ensuring the proper education of America's youth.  It is logical that I would care about children, and yet I have none of my own.  That is comforting knowing that homosexual pedofiles are abundant.  It seems they can be traced back to ancient Greece.  I have no interest in the exploits of Jerry Sandusky, Michael Jackson, or Reed Lallier.  I do for some reason care about neighborhood children.  Perhaps it is because with no children of my own, I vicariously can absorb some of the essence, beauty, and inspiration of youth.  It is quite different than adulthood.  There is very much appealing about naive innocence.  It is not jaded.  It does not hate men.  It is not selfish.  It still has the capacity of altruistic love.  My experience is most of these things are absent from our immediate society.  Fayetteville is full of man hating lesbians.  It is full of white hating African Americans.  Most places I go I elicit a strong and antagonistic response from people, probably because I have been off the sauce for about a month.  When there is no alcohol for diversion, your inclinations become condensed.  I am not much for B.S.  If you are to become a successful musical artist, composer, or jazz improviser it takes serious commitment.  I will admit that in recent years, as I have assumed the responsibility of caring for my aging mother, my musical priorities have changed.  My life priorities have changed as well.  It is a different ball of wax.  I still strive for excellence, but instead of seeking it in composition I seek it in keyboard instruments.  They give me an immediate and gratifying reward for my due diligence, like a good wife.  For me they are necessary.  Maybe it is unusual substituting musical instruments for human flesh.  Musical instruments don't criticize.  They don't sass.  They don't abandon you.  No human being over the age of fifty deserves to be abandoned.  By this age you all ready know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and your capabilities.  You must to survive life's often cruel journey.  Your self worth is not based upon someone else's opinion.  Screw them.  We are all we have.  Ourselves.  This is not to say were are narcissistic like our president.  It just means we must look out for number one.  Caring about local children and their future makes me feel good.  It helps me transcend my own meager and seemingly meaningless musical existence.  While I strive to create musical beauty and excellence, I realize I myself am living in an extreme vacuum.  The world around me is deteriorating.  The things that inspire me, move my feelings, and give me spiritual fulfillment not readily are recognized by America as a whole.  I am an anachronism.  I assume there are millions of others in the same boat.  The priorities of America have changed drastically, and this pandemic is calling our bluff.  Money can't save humanity, only human intellect can. 

America's Plight

Always it has been a bit of a mystery to me why the other half refuses to acknowledge that art has tangible boundaries.  Great art cannot be produced in a vacuum, although inspiration and natural talent are real.  Music, in all of its nebulousness, still is a genie's bottle.  Try to have a meaningful discussion about the tangents of music composition, style, or form and you are in for frustration.  Most people don't know anything about music.  Certainly because the arts have lost favor in American public education, jazz in particular remains a melting pot.  It is not.  Jazz, as one of America's truest art forms, easily is definable.  Ken Burns did an exemplary job explaining it in his video series.  I learned much from his documentary, and still I am learning.  What interests me the most is the authenticity of jazz music.  Its roots are the roots of America, and while these roots also were personified in country music, jazz embraces the African American experience and slavery.  Other than colonizing Europeans' ruthless rape and pillage of Native Americans to claim America for their own, what could be more representative of the triumph of the human spirit than the escape from slavery?  Even after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation, and hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly were killed in the Civil War, the South continued a reign of oppression and racism against blacks for sixty years.  They continued to wage war even after the war had ended.  New Orleans attempted to succeed from the union, and the federal army sailed up the Mississippi River and bombed this cultural mecca into submission.  Soon after they left, the South implemented their own system of racial segregation.  Murderous lynchings set the example for white rule in the American South.  This is difficult to fathom, people of America purposely and deliberately persecuting another race for their own gain.  Whether there was compassion and intelligence involved does not matter.  The South proclaimed the white race superior to any other, and evidently they enjoyed parading around in white sheets and pointy hats killing niggers.  You have to do something.  There is no explanation for this behavior except ignorance.  If a people are capable of such behavior, then we all can recognize the value of education and its ensuing wisdom.  Without it man regresses to level of the animal kingdom.  It was not that long ago.  It was not that long ago that Nazi Germany gassed millions of Jews in the name of ethnic cleansing.  While youthful Americans want to close this chapter of history and move on, unfortunately it is necessary to remind ourselves what is possible in a nation.  That is the worth of monuments of our Civil War, to remind ourselves what is possible.  It is important to memorialize the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died fighting for their own cause.  America was not able to achieve solidarity without the loss of many lives.  Still after this grievous conflict, racial oppression continues.  Jazz music is an aural and spiritual representation of this journey pitted with stones and thorns.  Possibly it is in the worst of times that the greatest art is produced.  It is like that now.  Again we are faced with such monumental conflict, a pandemic, a corrupt government, and an incapable leader.  On the up side in spite of threatening, ominous, and frightening news America seems to have found roots.  If being quarantined at home is the solution, being forced to go cold turkey from what America has become, then it appears to have transpired.  When faced with ensuing death it would seem human priorities become clear.  What is interesting is that our nemesis, other than racist Americans, is a tangible entity.  We are learning first hand that American government cannot regress into television.  Donald Trump has tried this, and it has failed on a massive level.  American life, human life, is not television life.  It is not artificial, scripted, and biased for entertainment purposes.  Our challenges for survival are real, and we are experiencing that with this outbreak of the corona virus.  Disease is and always has been real.  When the medical profession sells out to greed with the aid of the pharmaceutical companies, the reality of disease will present itself.  It has.  Likewise the predicted "Electronic Age" is wreaking havoc on humanity and our planet.  Electromagnetic energy, dangerous invisible  radiation has become rampant.  Its defense is not unlike the defense of jazz music by ignorant men.  It is nothing.  It is everything.  You can't define it.  It just is, so let it be.  And so ends the planet as predicted in the Bible's Book of Revelations.  Fire will rain down from the heavens and up from the sea.  Those who have accepted God will be transported or resurrected to a new planet, and the rest will be left to suffer on the scorched earth.  That is not a pleasant scenario, and yet Republicans seem not to be concerned.  I think they may be more at home in hell. 

Man, It's Too Hot

As the corona onslaught continues, and March Madness proves its authenticity common Americans should ask themselves, "What is the source of this pandemic?"  Roughly we know its origins were in China, the product of bat droppings.  Quickly it spread to Europe.  I remember SARS.  I remember the bird flu.  I remember ebola.  The question is, who or what is responsible for the news?  News.  I don't mean fake news.  Once there were news bureaus, and they were high and mighty, not in the sense of pretentiousness but in the sense that they were staunch, respectable, and honest litmus tests for American society.  News reporting, as in the Washington Post's expose of the Watergate scandal, is what keeps America and hence the swamp honest.  With the slate of recent legislation which frees corporate America of any governmental oversight, and the repeal of specific legislation requiring news agencies fairly to report both sides of a story, our news "media" has become a monopoly.  I am not going to take the time to research again who owns the three major television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS.  We all know they are a distant shadow of their former selves.  Les Moonves was a part of it as is the Murdoch clan.  Rupert quickly is aging, but his family will inherit his kingdom.  From down under Rupert came and like Ted Turner swallowed every media guppy in eye shot.  Our question should be, "Who are the gods controlling their media?"  It is a small lot, because how else could such a consolidated and far reaching presentation be accomplished?  Each night my mother and I sit and the supper table and watch the evening news, once a source of unbiased honest reporting, we listen to Wes Hohenstein say, "We have broken another record."  This happened again a few days ago when Fayetteville almost broke the heat record in the month of March.  Like a bad B grade satire Wes's protocol now is trying not to break a smile when he announces we have broken yet another heat record.  This has been ongoing for several years.  I only can ask myself what is the source of his meteorological information.  His forecasts are about fifty percent accurate.  We are better to stick our heads out the door each morning and breathe in.  There is no explanation for why Fayetteville is so hot, and why it continues to break climate records.  There are simple answers and yet Thom Tillis and Richard Burr are not interested.  Neither is Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin desperately wants climate change, because the melting polar ice caps mean an open shipping lane for the USSR.  His ships all ready are traversing this now open channel.  Certainly energy companies benefit from global warming.  We must pay to stay cool.  If you live in a climate controlled pent house with your every need tended global warming might not be of interest to you.  For the rest of us global warming is wreaking havoc on our everyday lives.  How you may ask?  Ask our yard.  Truly it is confused by record breaking heat in February, when Fort Bragg holds one of its mass vigils of war preparedness.  Something like 650 vehicles assembled at the Normandy Drop Zone.  The heat in Fayetteville comes from military activity at Fort Bragg.  Also it comes from CSX and their constant freight rail activity servicing DAK Americas, Cargill, and military aircraft.  No one seems to care, because Fayetteville is a military town consisting mostly of military dependents.  When faced with a moral dilemma such as the choice between ensuring the health and longevity of the planet or  putting food in the mouths of your kids, it is understandable what they choose.  It is unfortunate that America has become so financially irresponsible so to no longer be able to ensure her own security.  Our investing and lending practices have become dubious, covert, and risky.  No longer do we vet risk.  We pool and trade private mortgages.  We behave like immature and self centered children.  The deep and substantive systems upon which America was built have been cast aside like aberrant step children.  Science, the arts, and other crucial humanities, parts of the core existence of the human species, have been cast out.  As such the economy of America, once infused with life, spirit, and hope through freedom of opportunity, now is an oligarchy.  There is no better example of this than an elected president who never understood the job or role of the American president.  He wanted the office for show to become popular.  Trump is the ultimate narcissist.  He has proven again and again that his administration has no clue about what they are doing.  Jobs?  Tasks?  Managing America?  Handling pandemics?  Balancing the budget?  Trade negotiations.  Bringing down the Berlin Wall.  Ending the Cold War.  Making peace with China.  Solving the Bosnian crisis with the Dayton Accords.  Freeing the Iranian hostages.  Trumps presidency will be documented in history as one of the most failed tenures of leadership.  Meanwhile, as Stephen Colbert would say, our yard is confused.  The azaleas, hydrangeas, and other flowering foliage don't know whether it is summer or winter, because our temperatures fluctuate dramatically.  Wes Hohenstein has the most difficult job, because he has to report the weather with a straight face. 

A Rigged Novemeber Election

We all should take a moment to reflect on the Coronavirus.  While the Fort Bragg air show has ceased for the most part with the exception of a flyby by their Compass Call Command jet, other industrial activity still flourishes...  In the true nature of American capitalism when humanity is challenged industry doubles down, not for the people but for themselves.  That is the example of Fayetteville, North Carolina.  The weekends in Cumberland county are not for R&R.  They are not peaceful, serene, relaxing days like God intended.  The sabbath is the day of rest.  In Fayetteville the military uses Sundays to monopolize a mostly inactive regional airport.  They practice "touch and goes."  Likewise isolated diesel locomotives wander the landscape like stray cats looking for a mate.  It is well known that most affluent citizens travel to the beach or to the mountains to enjoy their weekends.  Fayetteville recognizes it as a time to exploit.  It is a deserted wasteland and provides no rejuvenation for your soul or body.  The weekends
in Fayettenam are like war, and you are better off to understand this.  You sleep worse on the weekends.  You feel worse on the weekends.  Weekends, once meant for enjoyable outing at the Myrtle Beach Pavillion, the Wrightsville Beach fishing pier, or a meal at Calabash now are reserved for the preparation of the military.  North and South Carolina have become donors for the Pentagon.  Let's see.  Seymour Johnson Airforce Base.  Camp Lejune.  Cherry Point.  MOTSP.  Fort Bragg.  STRACNET.  The military action is churning all the time.  Even when there is a global pandemic Fort Bragg covertly continues its war economy.  What is it this time?  Why has there been a standing wave in my home for the last few weeks.  Why is my left ear ringing like a banshee?  That is because under the ruse or guise of a global pandemic manipulative wheels are churning to manipulate the American people.  What do I mean?  How easily we are distracted.  Interfere in the November election?  Ah yes, Bach.  "What if the pandemic still is causing problems in November."   The answer was absentee ballots.  Mail in ballots.  Manipulable ballots.  Ballots with no chance of being accurate.  They all ready are talking about new machines.  New software.  Let's all mail in our votes so that Trump can declare a hung election.  Too many dicrepancies.  Talk about manipulating the electorate.  How about falsifying the results in grand fashion with a bunch of white collar corruption so familiar to incumbent Republicans.  It is the modus operandi. 

The Once Beautiful Music of America

As I sit in my bedroom and listen to my own rendition of Henry Mancini's "Moon River," it dawned on me that not everyone may understand my beef with the railroads and the military industrial complex.  It is more probable that most people think I am a fanatic, an extremist, or more threateningly a socialist.  To rail against the military in a military town is unpopular.  To chastise an incumbent industry upon which the military relies also is risky.  I am surrounded by young, fit, exuberant fighting men.  To criticize their sustenance is picking a fight, and to criticize the "Iron Horse," that which built America, also could be considered  unpatriotic.  It also should be remembered that while the railroads did traverse our continent and pave the way to the west, they also took prisoners.  Any settlers that were in their way, by the use of Eminent Domain, were misplaced and lost their homesteads to the railroad's right of way.  Railroads became monopolies and eventually trusts which maintained lopsided power over American citizens.  Not much has changed.  Because the railroads built America there is not much place that is not replete with long existing trackage.  It is everywhere, in our towns, in our cities, and in our own backyards.  The railroads have made a resurgence in recent years and now have forged their way into the Fortune 500.  Warren Buffet owns the Burlington Northern Santa Fe in its entirety.  That should tell you something.  Every American knows that we are living in a time unlike ever before.  We are on unfamiliar ground and it is shaky.  Major aberrations have transpired in financial America which have put the nation at risk.  A newly elected President Trump has not helped.  Instead he rewarded corporate America with a twelve percent tax cut which unbeknownst to most tricked back to the middle class.  The rich continue to reap massive rewards for duping the American public.  The media has not helped.  Whenever God was removed from American consciousness and legislation was repealed which forced the media to present both sides of an issue, the stage was set for massive corruption.  The Huffington Post calls it the rise of white collar crime, again.  I could care less about Precision Railroading.  What I do care about is the infringement of my right to peace and well being.  These rights are blanketed under our federal government's Environmental Protection Agency, and it has taken a full frontal assault.  During the Trump presidency everything in place in America which protects citizens from unfair exploitation and abuse has been purposely dismantled.  Our environment, our natural resources, our civil rights, and our opportunities have been seriously neutered at the behest of Donald Trump and his administration.  It is undeniable.  It should be of no surprise that when he was inaugurated things instantly got worse for American civil rights.  Trump began a race war and reignited segregative sentiments which have torn the country apart.  Ranting about environmental pollution and noise would seem a pebble in a fast rushing stream of ensuing governmental corruption.  Scott Pruitt, a man who sued the EPA fourteen times on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, was tapped by Donald Trump to be its administrator.  In like fashion our current president has attempted to dismantle just about every American policy ever enacted for the good and protection of average working class people.  It has been a bold agenda, and not unlike Adolph Hitlers Nazi propaganda seduced and hooked many Americans.  Only when you are on a train headed for Auschwitz will you realize truly you have been railroaded.  Railroaded we have become.  When I criticize rail traffic the most common response I receive is how most folks wax philosophic about the wail of the distant train whistle.  A whole genre of popular music was created by the influence of the rhythmic undulation of chugging steam locomotives.  Certainly it has a place in America's heart and culture, but things have changed.  No longer do we live in a care free time when hobos traveled the rails living the vagabond life.  Railroading, more specifically "Precision Railroading," has penetrated America.  Our spaghetti bowl, a mish mash of meandering trackage, has become the target of high dollar exploitation.  European models of super efficient and quick rail transportation have put undo pressure on an antiquated and unstable network of trackage in America.  All ready we have seen the dire consequences of its exploitation.  Amtrack casualties have risen dramatically.  People are dying as a result of riding Amtrack passenger trains.  This is because what once was a federally funded company has become a for profit privately run business, and they share their corridors with major freight railroads.  Precision Railroading has created massive delays in Amtrack service, because shareholder dollars take precedence.  Amtrack passengers are left waiting on sidings until big business gets its nut.  This could be a metaphor for today's America.  Average citizens, the little guys, no longer are America's priority.  Since Donald Trump became president America has become a rich man's club.  In very deliberate, covert, and sinister methodology Americans are being ethnically cleanses.  If it is by the food industry and unhealthy and mislabeled groceries, with polluted drinking water, or coercive misleading healthcare Americans are being poisoned rather than healed.  Healing has become a favorite and lucrative business for the wealthy.  With all of this squarely in our faces I as a musician shout most loudly about one thing.  When I am listening to Henry Mancini's "Moon River" in the privacy of my own home, I am reflecting on the ridiculousness, absurdity, and unconstitutionality of how my musical craft is made more difficult.  It is simple.  Our home is full of invisible pollution.  We have done all that we can do to suppress ambient noise, but when I try to create music it is startling and infuriating to the degree that sound is mangled.  Rarely do I ever hear a pure, pristine, and beautiful sound no matter how skilled the source.  Instead I hear an undulating, modulated, demonic wash of sound that bears little resemblance to its true nature.  I have been trying to voice and tune several Fender Rhodes electric pianos, keyboard instruments which derive their sound from electromechanical means, and their tone generator, vibrating metal amplified by magnetic pick ups is raped and pillaged by aberrant, airborne, electrical and acoustic energy in the infrasonic range.  It is non stop.  Not only does electricity arc through the air, sound continuously moves from the modulation of this energy.  The Environmental Protection Agency was created to protect Americans from hazardous pollution of all kinds, but President Bill Clinton saw fit to ignore the long standing recommendations of the FCC and auction off unused microwave frequencies to telecommunication companies which have become the new American economy.  With microwave transmitters on every corner, the need for a portable entertainment device seems to outweigh the dire crisis of the excessive heating of our environment.  Does no one really put two and two together?  Microwaves produce heat and manufactured heat is killing the earth.  I struggle to produce beautiful, meaningful, and sonorous music, and yet I do it in spite of the military industrial complex and its supporting industries.  There are those who believe in and support a war economy.  Bombs bursting in air and the red glare of rockets are patriotic to some degree, but war is not the answer.  Any economy that is based on war and the probability of war will fail as man has proven time and time again.  Will we destroy ourselves in great and loud revelry, a bacchanal of military might, or will we find peace, joy, and serenity in the beautiful music of America? 

The Reality of the Military Industrial Complex

It dawned on me today, that perhaps I have not made it clear that Fayetteville, North Carolina, my home town, is a military town.  Not only is it a military town, now it is the host city for what has become the world's largest military base.  Perhaps we should call this metropolitan (if you can call it that) area Fort Bragg.  Fayetteville really is and probably always has been the commercial support system for the post.  They are changing that.  Since BRAC decided this was the place for Ground Forces Command, because a general wanted to be able to walk out of his office and see his charges, Fort Bragg has become a system of and for its self.  Like Mark Regensburger pointed out in his published refute to an opinion of mine that was published in the Fayetteville Observer, I never implied that Fort Bragg was an orange grove, a pine tree forest, or a sanctuary for the woodpecker, although two of those examples apply.  If you read the charter information about the formation of Fort Bragg, its geography was a major factor in it becoming a training ground for the United States Army.  Agrarian it is not, but once it was open to everyone.  This was before 9/11, before veteran army member Timothy McVey bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a huge rental truck filled with diesel fuel and fertilizer, and before cops began murdering African American men indiscriminately.  Fort Bragg was casual perhaps because the nation was tired of war.  We were at war for ten years in Viet Nam, and many people died for no reason.  American soldiers were labeled baby burners.  The country had a brief respite from the war machine until the Persian Gulf and Americas attempt to secure oil in the Middle East.  We haven't stopped this pillaging, and it is why America's fighting men are dying senselessly in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is both oil and poppies, because large drug companies control both the prescription and illicit drug trades.  The rumor was the FBI flooded Hollywood with cocaine, because who else except well paid stars could afford recreational drugs?  In the flick American Made where Tom Cruise plays on of the first pilots who flew drugs into our country, I only could ask myself whence was the buy money coming?  Who had all of those millions in cash to be able to buy the drugs he was smuggling?  Good question I think.  The word was soldiers of all ranks were smuggling hard drugs into Fort Bragg in dead soldiers' coffins.  Now the base is buttoned up like a granny's gown, and DAK Americas, the former Roman Haas plant is owned by a Mexican conglomerate.  I am not making this stuff up.  I used to drive straight across the base to get to Pinehurst to play the piano in the hotel, right past the Special Operations facility.  When I drove back after midnight I would get strafed with attitude from low flying aircraft.  Sometimes I would see a night jump.  They were not concerned about a pianist.  We attended concerts at the stadium on July 4th, ate brunch at the Officer's Club, and otherwise had free reign of our taxpayers property.  Perhaps Professor Regensburger is not familiar with this era in Fayetteville history.  Certainly it was not agrarian, but it was not ominous and foreboding.  There were no attack helicopter ranges.  Pope Field was still Pope Air Force Base, and we would go to airshows right on the tarmac.  If is unarguable that Fort Bragg no longer is this way.  It also is unarguable that four returning veterans murdered their wives while stationed at Fort Bragg.  As much as the Pentagon, the DOD, or the Commander and Chief try, people want to get as far away from Fort Bragg as they can.  To me it is a bit like the Longaburger Basket company.  They want you to live on the compound.  Inhabitants of Fayetteville are familiar with the 82nd Airborne.  We are familiar with the Golden Knights.  We are familiar with an army that once was steeped in patriotism, pageantry, and good spirit.  Daniel Toven, in his brief stay at Fort Bragg, carried on this tradition with his Ground Forces Band.  We were privy to expertly performed music of all kinds in Festival Park all year long.  I really came to love this army band.  Now they have been dissolved and a small contingency merged with the already existent 82nd Airborne Band.  No longer do we have these concerts, and since the base is secure we are not free to frequent their performances for their own families.  We are accustomed to heavily loaded low flying C-130 transport planes filled with fighting machinery.  They are unmistakeable, because they fly in a que directly over Cross Creek Mall.  Today Fort Bragg is both covert and a covert.  They are loading munition trains underground.  People used to ask, "Where is all that dirt coming from?"  While Fort Bragg may not be NORAD, its proximity to Washington, DC is cherry.  Additionally the political process has relieved Charleston, South Carolina of its once naval responsibilities.  The hauling of heavy equipment via rail was one of the prerequisites mentioned when BRAC made their decision.  This burden was transferred from the Charleston Naval Station to Fort Bragg.  We live in a democratic republic, not a communist regime.  America's taxpayer dollars pay for the excess of Washington, DC, and as of late everyone who is an elected official seems to forget their job.  They are being paid to serve us.  The booty is so rich, so clandestine, and so tempting, they must take the fruit, and so they do.  Donald Trump is no different.  The deficit has escalated during his presidency.  No one in Washington seems to understand that each and every employee, elected official, or cabinet member has a job.  The entire charter of America, its government and systems, purposely has been discarded.  We are on a fast boat to communism.  The coronavirus merely is a tool to implement this vision.  "Stay in your homes!"  "Cancel cultural events!"  Control the masses.  I can't believe what I am seeing.  Our president wants to rule America like Kim governs North Korea, and everything he says or does leads to this philosophy.  Not unlike Adolph Hitler he has mesmerized and whitewashed his followers into submission.  The people you see at his rallies behind him at the podium are paid employees which travel with him on chartered buses.  I cannot look at him.  The change at Fort Bragg has come with this president.  A change in corporate America has come with this president.  How is it possible that CSX posted first quarter earnings of 834 million dollars in 2019?  That is in three months time.  Three months.  The answer is STRACNET, the Strategic Rail Corridor Network.  I am not going to take the time to research their protocol.  I know Hunter Harrison was hired as a ringer and then died.  His successor vowed to continue his rail policy, Precision Railroading.  I know CSX was found guilty of bullying their employees not to file for workers compensation.  It is a mafia.  Rudy disassembled the Italian mob and handed the reins over to a folks of his choice including himself.  So appropriate.  "We can't let those dago guineas control the rackets!"  The dapper Don died in jail and the new mob went to Ukraine with Rudy as their consigliere.  Trump is their Pope.  All of this politics aside and back to reality, or a semblence of sanity in American history, politics along with most other American aesthetics now are defunct.  America is a mass of addicted, self-aborbed, androgynous, androids staring blankly into the abyss of their iPhones.  The idea that one must become autonomous, self thinking, saavy, questioning, and plural is far beyond our current educational system.  It is marginal.  It is base line.  It is ineffective.  The current state of recent Americans is exactly what was desired by those in charge.  I have a lot to mourn,  the death of friends, family, and now the death of a nation and its heritage.  It is crumbling all around me.  We do not know what an artist is.  We do not know what politics is.  We do not know anything about what America is.  We are being transformed into nothingness only with the Greek gods pettily bickering over what's for dinner.  Once I enjoyed politics, because it gave you an identity.  You stood for something.  You had ideals.  You made decisions.  You disagreed.  Now we are fodder, and we are fodder so corporate America may do as they please.  Corporate regulation has been disassembed like the Office of Noise Abatement in the ERA, and arch enemies have taken control.  How can any Trump supporter not understand that it is the human race's responsibility to care for the earth?  Only childish trust accounts could be so foolish, a silver spoon in their mouths from birth.  It is time to wake up and become an adult.