Old School Confederate Money

 Fayetteville, North Carolina's ante-Covid slogan was "History, Heroes, and a Hometown Feeling."  The city is named for the Marquis de La Fayette, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, a French nobleman whose chose to fight for the American Continental Army.  Fayetteville has deep cultural roots, and five decades ago this Southern town had a social and cultural hierarchy not unlike Charleston, SC or and Savannah, GA.  There is old money, and this Wealth was the fabric of a military-influenced town.  Society made sure that Uncle Sam, with his quest for conformity, did not consume Fayetteville.  It does serve the post of Fort Liberty, but fifty years ago the influence of old money had more sway than the Pentagon.  That has changed, and Fayetteville has been absorbed by the Borg.  The old money gathering dust in the Cumberland Community Foundation has few remaining purveyors.  This generation in the last decade, and partially because of the fatalities of Covid 19, has waned.  It is on the brink of extinction, and its influence cannot be replaced.  I have spent the last decade as a care-giver for my aging parents in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the loss of their generation is severe.  It almost is too expansive to grieve at one time.  I have experienced this kind of loss before.  In my twenties I was ejected from Columbia, South Carolina, a reject of academia.  Thirty years later these controlling politics have not changed, but this should not be surprising.  (Lindsey Graham still is a South Carolina senator).  It is disappointing.  On the fringe I continue to be accosted by the reality of these politics, and I don't deserve it.  I gave my heart and soul in teaching commercial music at USC, and I fell from grace.  After spending two years as a Graduate Teaching Associate and earning a Masters degree, I was hired as an adjunct faculty member to take Dr. John Emche's duties.  John was the coordinator of jazz studies, and he died of a brain tumor over the summer.  I was paid a stipend with no benefits, but I had the distinction of being a college professor.  It was a small taste of the good life.  After the music department completed their national search over the course of the next year, they chose an Eastman graduate to assume the full time teaching position.  The cause and roots of my depression were tangible, unchangeable, and daunting.  After seven years in higher education (including UNC-Chapel Hill) the height of my academic achievement was playing in a wedding band.  The respect of being a college professor was gone, and the brutality, drug use, and evil of real world music were upon me.  There was the FBI sting of the state house in Columbia, where most law makers accepted bribes.  These politics were rife challenging.  You would not succeed unless you befriended the right people.  Academic competition it would seem is more concerned with keeping you out than bettering the craft.  To acknowledge that someone has something to offer more than what is there is to have to swallow pride and lose notoriety.  In academia in particular there is little room for insecurity or weakness.  It is winner take all, and academics by nature are ruthless passive aggressive narcissists who stop at nothing to prevail.  It is the holy grail.  That is what academia is and I am sure today is the same.  If your community will not allow you to excel, than effectively you are dead at the choosing of others.  This not chosen death manifests itself as depression.  It seeks to control you and largely is a product of your external environment, not your own foibles.  I have been depressed before, and the cause of that depression was and is the same, because nothing has changed.   You can not see a solution for your obstacles because of the outside world.  Others, operating in America's so-called free market capitalist construct, have no choice but to quell competition.  It is winner take all, and that is what America capitalism has become.  I cannot watch prime time television, because the human maladjustment is too severe.  Lottery tickets worth 800 million dollars.  It makes no sense in any possible life scenario.  If America had an ounce of God-like sensibility, we would provide for everyone, not the individual.  In North and South Carolina the jazz hierarchy is small and controlled.  John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk knew this, and it is by white men in politics.  Southern old money has kept its hands on the puppet strings.  Never have I been remorseful of my musical accomplishments, because never have I stopped working.  Never have I been lazy or unmotivated or dissuaded by competition.  The only way you can survive a mediocre world is to make it better.  You must create your own reality, because the reality that America now offers is a pittance.  If ever were there a time to consider living abroad, it would be now.  It is a shite state of affairs, and there is no denying it.  The reason why our GOP has no plan, is because they are happy as the recipients in an antiquated system that can't adapt to change.  The world has become too complex for Washington to consider solving our problems.  They are too old, too sheltered, and too selfish.  A value meal at a fast food restaurant in America costs $10.00.  America no longer serves the populace, she antagonizes it.  This McCarthy fellow, this black sheep hesitantly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, is the metaphor for utter failure of the world's superpower.  What is it exactly they can hate about the democrats and Joe Biden?  The answer is because the GOP is Jim Crow, and still they are sitting on their plantation porches, drinking lemonade, and making Golliwogs. What possibly could be so demonic that instead of governing a nation they are waging civil war?  The incredible childishness of such an out-of-touch contingency is shockingly wrong.  Barack Obama said it recently.  "The accumulation of wealth is so lopsided, its gravitational pull has distorted space time. We are stuck in a black hole with no flowing money and social and economic oppression."  Recently I made peace with myself and am happy with my life's work.  It will not be appreciated for decades, but I have made a substantial contribution to the evolution of the language of music as personal expression.  The appropriation of my will nearly is impossible, because I trust no one.   No one in America will swallow their pride long enough to allow progression.  This is the archetype of the GOP.  "Slavery was a fruitful time.  Why can't we go back to that?"  My solution to this depression long ago was to move, and it sufficed.  You must step around your detractors.  You must leave them in the stagnation of their own appreciation of themselves.  Coming back to North Carolina has resurrected the same ugly nightmare.  Nothing has changed.  I have changed.  I have grown.  I have matured, and I no longer care about myself. I would rather help others and instill a sense of urgency in the importance of music.  That is not the lay of the land below the Mason Dixon line.  Jim Crow never died, and his newest generation is the same bigoted, discriminatory, racist ideas now calling themselves LGBT.  Only is it different faces.  They do not seek solidarity in America.  They do not seek community.  They do no want to help others.  They want recognition and spoils for rejecting their God given biology and playing drag queen.  Is this something America should celebrate?  The degree to which they play this show in Fayetteville is as violent and intimidating as gang warfare.  I have experienced nothing so disturbing in all of my life.  Nazi lesbians and sniveling fags whose only purpose is to distort God's hierarchy.  Tell us a plan.  GOP, give us your plan, but there is none other than selfishness.  Fort Bragg is now Fort Liberty, and Uncle Sam is now Jim Crow.