The Commander in Mob Boss

 Other than negatively affecting our 401K retirement accounts by way of the stock market, firing hundreds of thousands of federal employees, promulgating inflation and consumer prices, and embarrassing the nation, we must ask ourselves, "What else is Trump doing behind the closed doors of the White House?"  While these things are newsworthy and merit media coverage, with a severely oppressed and now limited Associate Press, what actually is happening around the world is speculation.  What is happening in our own back yards is hidden from us on purpose, because the unethical, immoral, and often criminal behavior of corporate America continues unabated.  The DuPont family never has stopped the polluting of our watershed with PFAS.  After a seven year respite in court proceedings and a scientific study of the effects of PFAS on the human body, DuPont continued to settle lawsuits on a one on one basis.  The Sackler family used the same approach.  They will do anything to keep their wealth, divert guilt, and live the good life off of the backs of the American people.  This is what America has become.  No longer are we the land of the free.  The taxpayers dollar has become the ultimate holy grail, and now Donald Trump and Elon Musk are after it.  Already they have gotten it, spent it, and driven America into irrevocable debt.  Trump's newest budget does exactly the same thing handing free money to the rich and oppressing the rest.  Stealing from the American people has become the status quo.  It no longer is necessary to devise, manufacture, and sell a product.  The rich feel entitled.  The metaphor is simple and clear, and it has not changed over two centuries.  It is racism, classism, bigotry, greed, narcissism, and egotism. This is what Donald Trump is.  The United States Constitution as penned by the framers, created a democratic republic of self governance with a free market system.  No longer does this exist.  The people do not govern themselves, and our market is not free.  Congress, the elected body chosen to govern its constituency along with the President, has chosen to represent themselves separate from the American populace.  It is a club that steals from the people.  Once the federal government separated themselves from corporate influence, The Lobby, and attempted to regulate and tame malfeasance.  Instead of stealing from and oppressing the common man, mostly poor, they took a rational and proportional percentage of the earnings of corporate America.  It would be much wiser to take America's fair percentage of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerburg's fortunes seeing as they have most of the money.  How oligarchy became vogue for America is unknown.  Always we have had the Carnagies, the Rockefellers, and Kochs, the DuPonts, the Mellons, the Mars, and others. After the stock market crash in the 1930's popped the venture bubble and the excess of the Jazz Age, prudent, honest, Christian law makers watched America suffer in great depth.  There was no escape.  America proved she was not bottomless well of prosperity.  We could infer God had something to say, proving we, the human being, are not the be all.  God created the heavens, the earth, and man, and for eternity as along as the human race endures, God will have the last say.  Where is He now?  Some believe it is about time for His second coming.  I would agree, if we want America to continue as her former self.  A Godless society is the only explanation for Donald Trump's Administration's governance.  Perhaps the largest example of this is the United States military suffering from lack of oversight and leadership.  If the Commander in Chief himself is setting these examples of almost criminal behavior and irreverence to the Constitution, then how are we to keep our military from adopting the same philosophies?  Trump's gaslighting has become so forthright, it is far overdue to scrutinize the largest piece of the American economic pie.  During the first Trump Presidency, the American military was rebuilt.  Almost a trillion dollars was spent shoring up the defense industry's finances giving this boys club unheard of leverage over the American people.  They control the military, not the Congress or the President.  Who are they, and what do they believe?  Do they still intend to defend the common man and his meager salary, or have they strayed into a paid security force for themselves and the rich?  If anything they do, if any piece of equipment they own and operate, or policy implemented infringes upon and does not protect Americans from harm, then they have sold out.  Living in close proximity to the world's largest military base, emphatically I can say much of their training methodology infringes upon the peaceful lives of average Americans.  The effects of their addiction to the electromagnetic spectrum are well represented in my own domicile.  Not only do they exert control of wireless technology, sound now is included in their arsenal of Intelligence, Reconnaissance, and Surveillance.  As an electronic musician who relies upon audible sound and electronics for music production, is it fair that when the military is practicing their craft and training recruits, I must stop my work?  When I produce music in any of my small studios the military listens and responds with mortar fire using me for practice.  The dispensable public.  It doesn't matter if we kill them or make them sick in the process of training for  war?  Really?   What possibly could they be using that would compromise the health of millions of Americans?  As the cell phone industry, the legacy created by Bill Clinton that sold off dangerous portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, balanced the budget, and paved the way for the Electronic Age, a predicted era when wireless technology was the most coveted product.  Only pilotless drones, aircraft, and trains can administer a deadly pathogen.  Starlink is not the only satellite network being built and administered by Elon Musk, and DOGE was not the only reason he went to Washington.  He was there to acquire his federal contracts assembling Star Wars in a stealth and abstract fashion as so to disguise its true purpose.  For a military to shift and obey an evil leader takes only 180 degrees, and it is far more common than a military protecting its own people.  Musk's partner in building a covert spy satellite network for our government is a retired four star general.  Apartheid is not democracy, and South Africa is not America.  These oligarchs with their accruing of most of America's money are not meant to be in Washington or near our system of governance, much less should they be cavorting with a chain saw in the Oval Office.  This man's presence in an abomination, and one of his claims is taking ten percent of your eBay auction for himself.  I am not anti-military, but with little oversight and leadership and manipulation by the defense industry for their own personal gain, I cannot say it is for us, we the people.  They are their own little club just like the rest picking the pockets of the American people. 

The Enemy that Music has Become

First and foremost I am a musician.  My father was a musician and an educator.  Unbeknownst to me being a musician marked me for life.  Like other archetypal American vocations, I was cast a failure before I began.  Because I was not aware of this discrimination, I ignored it and pursued the profession of music with gusto.  This resulted in a Bachelor of Music Education degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, a Master of Music in Composition from USC-Columbia, and finished coursework for a D.M.A. in Composition at OSU-Columbus.  During this journey of higher education, I held two Graduate Teachings Associateships and an adjunct faculty professorship in Jazz Studies.  I never stopped to smell the stale beer and cigarette smoke, because academic music has nothing to do with playing in bars.  While jazz music needed a place to proliferate, and clubs were convenient, the reality of "dying in the bottom of an empty liquor bottle" never was an option.  It only when I was separated from academic study that the moniker of musician sat in.  Now I was expected to be a rock star and curry favor from everyman.  I wasn't interested in every man, because the musical sensibility of average Americans is limited.  Certainly they do not favor African-American based jazz music, Black Church, Reggae, or Hip Hop.  It was Beach music and country, so I played shag music to get by.  Racial boundaries or discrimination mostly were absent in my musical education.  Personally I was influenced by the laid back vibe of the west coast music of Los Angeles.  In a nutshell what musicians play in bars and at jam sessions does not interest me.  This repertoire and culture falls outside the lineage of most American popular music.  It is its own tart, terse, protected thing.  It is local.  Without the hustle and bustle of a college music program, music drops back to the archetypal American stereotype.  The challenge is continuing to recognize America's rich history of popular music.  It nearly is impossible, because of the extinction of radio.  The industry of radio was the foundation for the dissemination of American popular music.  Not only did radio connect America, it provided a vehicle for the production of and consuming of music.  Music was a part of our fabric.  Now that is gone.  Why?  I have tasked myself with the acknowledgement and appreciation of this music, and to a small extent a meager attempt to rekindle it.  This task is daunting, because the catalog of American music is so vast and diverse.  In certain ways it may be more substantial than European orchestral and chamber music.  It is at least equal.  America seems to think this lineage and cultural heritage is not important, but it is crucial.  It is our identity over the decades.  If as a population we were privy to this American music from the past, we better would understand ourselves now.  The internet has created a large vacuum, and it is ironic.  Music was not meant to thrive in the digital realm, because it is too isolated.  Solidarity is what music can create if allowed to live and breath in real life.  Radio did that.  Television dropped the ball, and film is a pale shadow of its once former musical glory.  It is stark and unpleasant to me living in this reality, a reality where common Americans know little about music of any kind.  Society today does not want you to affect change.  It is burying American history, American identity, and American opportunity.  It is digging a hole in the ground and trying to hide its money.  The Trump Administration is a staid, oppressive, suffocating vacuum of existence, and it seeks to annihilate any relevant  human tendency.  I never wanted to be a rock star.  Some appreciation for you music is welcomed, because music is meant for humanity.  It is universal, but we have lost sight of this.  All God's children have music, and it is and should be a natural part of human behavior.  It is a language more far reaching, complex, and rewarding than the spoken word, because it organizes both rhythm and time.  Understanding these relationships gives us models for living.  Works, forms, and songs provide patterns for healthy living.  Often and sometimes quintessentially these models parallel intimate sexual expression.  As I continue to rekindle my interest in music and express my feelings in musical performance, I am met with the abyss.  I feel no plural synaptic chain event.  I feel obvious, vulnerable, and silly. Was music really supposed to feel this difficult?