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.