The Deeper Accomplishment

I'll start with a "hats off" to the Washington Post.  They are a quality newspaper, and one of the few that still focuses on factual, authoritative, in depth news reporting.  It would help that its owner has money to fund it.  That is how the world works and more importantly how Capitalism should work.  Make money here, spend it there.  I read my digital subscription each day, and it is worth the price.  On the other hand I am sick of reading the news in general.  We have regressed to the doldrums of the dog day summer.  Masks again, because people are too hard headed to get a shot?  One of our most notable world class athletes bows out of the Olympic games, because their leadership is lackluster.  Dig a little deeper and the pig Larry Nasser snorts from inside prison.  The debacle of his sexual molestation of competitive female gymnasts is yet to rest.  One would begin to believe these sexual molestations are normal in America.  Lying is normal.  Dishonesty is normal.  Inequality is normal.  America is not the same.  We are a pallid shadow of our former selves, and I have to wake up to it every day.  I like to keep up with the news.  I like to stay informed.  I don't like being depressed at the current condition of America.  Necessarily I must change my focus and find my own beat, and I will be the first to admit I have lost it.  I have abandoned it.  I have chunked my beat to the ground, because not one ounce of it is being supported.  When I resurrect my beat and bang it loudly, I do feel depression, and that depression is because my immediate environment is not capable of marching to this beat.  They are Jimmy Buffet fans.  They choose not to get the vaccine.  They voted for Donald Trump.  They blame Nancy Pelosi for January 6th.  What prison camp is this in which I am living?  America?  Still some faction of the world is trying to kill us daily be dropping Covid from the sky.  American industry is burning the country alive.  (A cardinal couple pair is looking at me through the window perched on a dead dogwood limb.)  The female is chattering.  I do believe birds are angels and the eyes of God.  They don't like the infrasound, and with each gargantuan blast of each wave the air is tainted with pathogens.  Havana Syndrome now purports to cause tangible brain damage, concussion-like symptoms with no concussion.  It has spread to other countries, and each ISR pod on each plane is capable of delivering the blow.  They map topography with microwaves.  There are so many aberrant planes who is to know who the enemy is?  It is difficult to find on what to work.  The Protestant work ethic always has provided a structure for success.  Today honest work no longer is rewarded, so what is the point?  We are all fucked, because America is going down the tubes.  Speaking of the toob, turn it on and what we see is glorified altercation.  Then there is previous American television, television which does not seek to separate us, incite violence, or disrupt out society.  There was a time, believe it or not, when America did function.  That time is not now, and it is a major disappointment to most adults.  When we work in the cruise industry, the young age of crew staff predicates an immature social environment.  I thought by going on ships, somehow I would find a fairy princess from a foreign country who would love me for who I was.  What was or am I?  I am having trouble remembering, because now in America we are inundated with shit.  I am a musician, but who cares?  Our country can't vaccinate itself in the midst of impending death from disease.  Who could care about music?  Music only plays a role in society when Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is met or at least acknowledged.  There are era's of American history where music became a catalyst or catharsis.  The "Blues" emerged after the Emancipation Proclamation when President Lincoln freed the slaves, but the American South refused to accept this societal and governmental change.  The Federal Army enforced the freeing of Negro slaves for several years in New Orleans, but as soon as they sailed back to Yankee-land, Jim Crow emerged as the dominant Southern behavior.  They lynched Negros.  Although the United States of America fought a bloody civil war and eventually freed the slaves, the South would not accept this decision.  Southern Blacks were loathed, hunted, and murdered.  If they were not they were subject to strict segregation from white society.  If one had a need to feel "blue," then this was the time.  There was no place for you in American society.  There is no feeling of the Blues in America now, because the Blues requires honest and sincere feeling.  Instead we have the most superficial masquerade in American history.  The soul has been sucked from our bodies, and instead we are walking zombies.  It is not surprising, because television has been teaching us to be soulless, violent, degenerates for a while.  This assault on American sensibility obviously has come from afar, and we have yet to discover whence it has come.  It could be Putin.  It could be China, because although we feign peace with this vital nation, they have stolen much American intellectual property.  They are the pirate kings of pop America.  The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and we never should forget this as the Olympics tarry on in this island nation.  I will buy Japanese electronics, but I won't trust this country.  Who do we trust, and who is carrying out this attack?  Domestic terrorism rears its ugly head often, but I don't think fundamentalist militia members would attack their own.  They could be coerced into attacking Washington, but they are not smart enough to stage a full blown coup.  Trump on the other hand fully is capable of such a revolt, and most likely he is behind it all.  All he has ever wanted was to topple democracy and morph into an American dictator like his communist friends.  For some reason no one seems to remember this.  America never will return to business as usual until the Trump Clan is extricated from their failure.  Otherwise they will continue to sew the seeds of anarchy in our democratic republic.  Meanwhile petty dribble, hearsay, and fake news will continue polluting American contentment and security.  Like Afghani soldiers, I don't want to devote the rest of my life to hunting the dissidents and systematically eradicating them with violence.  I have better things to do with my musical skills.  Music in America does not possess the power it once commanded through Rock, Funk, and Heavy Metal.  Instead we have complicit, compliant, country pop which has little message at all.  The era of Hendrix, Dillon, Elvis, Frank, and the rest is dead, and I don't see the possibility of resurrecting their messaged.  Perhaps anarchy is the best path forcing most Americans to forget their preconceptions and simply say, "What the fuck."  I can do that, but my soul tells me to work on more.