Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi is great when he’s on the Wall Street as economic gangsters beat.
He’s lame as someone now attempting to cover extremism. In the last couple of posts at his blog — it’s not really that — he updates about once or twice a week max, he’s been finally seized by the idea that GOP extremism poses a real threat.
Doing that, he’s very late to the story. And the only thing that gets to him are the pieces everyone else has already passed around a million times, like Mike Lofgren’s TruthOut confession about the psychopaths he used to work with as a Congressional staffer.
I mocked this earlier in the day because it hews to the cowardly slime modern American tradition of publishing the tell-all, not when it might do some good early on, but after you’ve been run off or retired. At which point it serves as momentary candy for the professional left and, cynically, the demo first chapter for the inevitable big book contract.
Taibbi seems to think calling GOP extremism was formerly uncool. It was, he opines, too easy to beat up on the party
This is how he puts it:
I’ve always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it’s intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war.
That’s an ignorant rationalization being used as salve for his troubled brow.
Taibbi is too big a star journalist now to have been down in the weeds being washed and corroded by what’s been commonplace from the party for the last two to three years. Taibbi’s last piece on Michele Bachmann, which he conceded he did mostly by copying from others, showed he’s someone who prone to floating by and, if the fancy strikes him, taking a swipe at the news, adding his own sprinkling of stylistically unique slurs.
And now he’s changed his mind about GOP extremism. It’s really dangerous, he says:
But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we’re used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin …
Most people aren’t thinking about this because we’re so accustomed to thinking of America as a stable, conservative place where politics is not a life-or-death affair but more something that people like to argue about over dinner, as entertainment almost. But it’s headed in another, more twisted direction …
America might be a politically unstable country? He just found the courage to write that?!
The comic details the now commonplace and distasteful phenomenon of members of the GOP who confess how psychopathic the party has become. After they’ve either been voted out or aren’t collecting a paycheck from it.
None of these people ever have the stones to speak this sort of “truth” when their livelihood still depends on working for the psychopaths.
The recent names: Mike Lofgren and his widely publicized confession published at TruthOut and ex-GOP Senator Chuck Hagel.
“The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party and … becoming more like an apocalyptic cult,” is the immediately famous quote from Lofgren.
Adds the comic artist, August J. Pollak: “Actual quote from guy who had no problem with said cult for … years.”
Nature, the UK pub for serious peer-reviewed science publication, has a brief overview of what the Department of Homeland Security has achieved in the last decade. (It comes in the news section of the mag.)
It won’t come as revelatory to readers that the verdict is much less than stellar.
The writer interviews Tara O’Toole, formerly the de facto leader of the US bioterror public/private sector defense industry.
A couple years ago she was tabbed by the Obama administration for service as an undersecretary at DHS for its science and research development ops. And yesterday she bore mention in the blog in connection with the debt crisis, austerity politics and national economic failure putting a crimp into financing for bioterror defense.
From Nature:
Ten years on it has become apparent the {Science and Technology Directorate of DHS] has seriously underachieved …
When Tara O’Toole listed 16 of the directorate’s most significant results in a memo to [the author] earlier this year, she named some decidedly low-powered accomplishments along with some significant ones in cybersecurity and power-grid security. The accomplishments included a new lightweight breathing apparatus for firefighters, the IronKey secure USB thumb drive that can destroy its data or prevent unauthorized access, a new scanner called MagViz that will allow passengers to carry water bottles through airport security; and new hardware for making power grids resilient against lightning strikes, solar storms and electromagnetic pulse attacks. Despite some major achievements, the list is somehow underwhelming …
At one point the article mentions DHS projects to screen for nuclear cargo smuggling resulted in the inflation of helium-3 prices, from $200/l
to ten times that amount in the space of a year. This had a shot-in-the-foot effect, “putting a strain on research budgets.”
Nature is here. Articles are available by subscription. (Hat tip to SA.)
But does that make the [Bitcoin] experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin …
[There] has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
Krugman likens Bitcoin to a “private gold standard.”
“[It] reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression,” he writes.
You can leave your processor on for a century and maybe see the equivalent of a few bucks worth of bitcoins. Even semi-hard days of mining them are well over.
Think of it as the citizen’s gold mining crew shown in Pale Rider, except there’s no chance you’ll find the big rock like Spider Conway before he was gunned down by Stockburn and his marshals. And no Clint Eastwood as “Preacher,??? either.
Today’s laugher re Howard is an interview conducted by Detroit music journalist Gary Graff for Billboard.
Almost all US music journalists are milchtoasts. They’re simply not capable of doing honest interviews with the likes of Ted Nugent.
Today’s piece in Billboard is no exception.
Entitled “Ted Nugent ‘Too Divisive’ to Get Role in Rick Perry Campaign,” the headline telegraphs what any reasonable person would find obvious.
However, most of the story is devoted to more puff hagiography for Ted Nugent.
It’s not the first time.
DD has mentioned Graff in the Ted Nugent tab before. Last year, right around the same time — Labor Day — when Ted had just finished his annual anti-union ritual.
I put it this way:
Nugent eventually left Michigan for Waco, Texas. And while assorted cream puff music journalists have asked Ted this summer whether he might run for political office, given his views, he’s unelectable wherever there is still an informed middle class. Even in this toxic climate. And that rules out almost his entire old home state. Ted knows it, too.
Ted Nugent, elected to represent places like Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor or Lansing? Surely you must be joking.
Now, as for Waco or Crawford, Texas? Maybe.
Ted’s return to Michigan for a Labor Day gig has generated local advance press. Typically, no one brings up the very bad odor of Ted’s attitudes and politics toward Detroit.
The only significant item appeared in the Royal Oak newspaper, a reprint of a trivial Gary Graff wire news piece which was published at Billboard a few days ago.
And did Graff ask Nugent about what he thought of the auto unions now, for a Labor Day gig? Nope. That would be possibly rife with unpleasantness.
Someone with guts might have chosen to make Nugent actually look at himself in a mirror, for a change.
Good job, Billboard and Gary Graff! Get that news on Nugent’s next album, supposedly featuring “‘ stone cold motherf***king songs’ ready to go when he takes his band into the studio later this year … ???
Guts, of course, are almost entirely ruled out in music journalism. It’s a black mark, a sign of mental illness and unreliability to have any.
But back to today’s Billboard piece on Nugent, again by Graff, which skips all mention of Nugent’s virulently anti-union piece for the Labor Day weekend in the WaTimes. The same weekend Ted played his “homecoming” gig in Detroit.
An enterprising reporter might have pleasantly asked Ted if he took time to share any of his opinions with the crowd at the DTE theatre in Clarkson.
Ted often shares his opinions, sprinkled with profanity, from the stage.
So, Ted, did you tell your crowd in Detroit last night that auto unions fucking suck, teachers unions blow and you despise them all? If not, why not? Did you not have the time?
As a Texas resident for the past six years, a diehard conservative and a personal friend of Gov. Rick Perry, there’s no question where Ted Nugent’s loyalties will lie during the 2012 presidential campaign. His capacity to be vocal about his candidate, however, is still up in the air …
“I don’t know if I’ll get a stamp of approval because I am so volatile and because the line in the sand in a political campaign can be so ambiguous — and I’m anything but, [Nugent tells Graff]. The reality is that Perry must penetrate what is presumed to be the non-Perry demographic, and if I scare them away so he doesn’t get their ear, then I’m being counterproductive” …
“That bully pulpit can also have a serious tone to it,” Nugent explains. “But on a rock ‘n’ roll stage, I can tell Hillary Clinton to straddle my machine gun. The more something causes problems with people, the more I’ll say it ’cause it’s rock ‘n’ roll and you can eat me. But that’s a rock ‘n’ roll show. I know how to change the tone …
“Volatile.” It’s like calling the first H-bomb test, the one that dug a crater a mile wide at Bikini atoll, a “big bang.” Here’s Ted being his usual tricky self when he knows a journalist won’t call him on it.
The tone in Nugent’s regular opinion pieces for the WaTimes contains no real differences from his stage rants.
Well, wait, let me correct that.
There is one difference. Ted is not allowed to use a constant stream of profanity at the WaTimes.
But otherwise, it’s the same. Ted hating on huge swaths of American society — condemning teachers, education, all aspects of the government, all Democrats, Muslims, just about everyone not exactly like him.
It’s easy to review and DD has done so. Hey, Media Matters runs a regular ticker on Nugent, too, and it did not miss Nugent’s anti-labor Labor Day generosity this weekend.
Gary Graff, and Billboard, I’m reasonably certain, know all this. They just choose not to share it with readers or take time to make Nugent defend himself. It’s just too damn distasteful to have to walk Nugent back over most of his proclamations, particularly those which are totally indefensible in a reasonable society with any kind of heart.
At one point Nugent is asked about his “I Still Believe” song.
He seems to acknowledge it’s a duff piece, asserting that if only he’d had more money to spend on it, that would have fixed things:
[Nugent] considers it more of a demo than an actual single.
“It’s [sic] doesn’t have the big, musical sound I’d normally get,” he explains. “The guitars aren’t what they need to be. The drums aren’t what they need to be. But I’m not going to spend $100,000 to give something away. I’ll spend $10,000 to give something away, and I wanted to get that song out there.”
Ten thousand dollars to give that song away? More horseshit.
The Billboard piece includes the Ted concert vid on YouTube, the one I laughed at and linked to over the weekend here.
Nugent threatens a new album, one he knows his current audience won’t buy.
Over the Labor Day weekend, Guitar Centers nationwide had a sale.
Naturally, DD went to the store in Pasadena.
What was being sold, tried out and handled — I was there on Saturday and Monday — were guitars, all made in China.
They were the only ones the customers, middle class youngsters, could afford.
The Second Great Depression Great Recession destroyed the buying power at the heart of the company’s customer base. The result has been a struggle to squeeze even lower prices from American-branded Chinese manufacturing.
On Saturday and Monday the store featured 99 dollar (99!) Epiphone SG Juniors, the lowest price possible Gibson-brand guitar made in China Indonesia. (Same difference. — ed)
I played one. It was solid, looked very nice, and it was so light it almost wasn’t there. Compared to my old ’79 made-in-Michigan Gibson SG, it seemed to weigh about as much as a paper plate holding a big cheeseburger. (I went back a week later. The tone knob was broken on it. The pseudo-slave labor instruments get played a lot by the daily store riffraff, but still …)
About five yards away was a $79 (!) Fender Squier (made in China) Stratocaster.
The depression in prices to match smashed and amputated incomes was eye-opening. Most used made in China guitars sold two years ago, now in pawn shops in Pasadena, actually cost more.
While business seemed to be fair — squeezing ever more out of the charge card and hoping things will turn better in a few months — the sale and the instrumentation were a good metaphor for the ruins of the US economy. The profit margins must now be terrible.
Gibson and Fender employ more people in China than they do in the US. And this surely seemed like a great idea during the last decade.
Now it looks like a growing pile of ashes. Unless, of course, you work in the Gibson and Fender custom shops making guitars for the wealthy end.
The Reich column described what looked to me like an insoluble problem for the US. It de-industrialized and destroyed the idea that American workers deserve reasonable wages and that such things are good And it did it relentlessly over the course of decades.
Coming back from Guitar Center on the Saturday trip afforded an opportunity to chat even more about the vast amount of Chinese made merchandise.
My colleague, another musician, blurted out something I occasionally read and hear from those who run small businesses that have failed, or those who believe crap they’ve read from Tom Friedman, or those idiot libertarians stuffed full of Ayn Rand.
America, he said, should “only make the best things in the world!”
That was how we might fix things.
I immediately replied that this was Gibson and Fender’s philosophy — that they would only make premium goods for the wealthy. And that it had resulted in a relentless net loss of jobs, as it has throughout the economy with every other company that has practiced it.
I said that it was delusional to think a country of over 312 million people could get away with being the Swiss chocolatiers to the world.
For example, the Chinese multitudes do not have to make things better than everyone else. Far from it. They don’t need special education, or pricey degrees, or even know how to figure out enzyme kinetics or do linear algebra. They just do it cheaper because the rent’s so low.
And looking at the vast sea of US countrymen, it’s uncool, mean and exceedingly stupid to believe that they should only be allowed to succeed if they make “the very best things in the world.”
Americans used to make lots of things. And they weren’t always the best made. The Sherman tank, for example, was far from the best armored fighting vehicle in the world in WW II.
The Germans made the best armored fighting vehicles. That went well.
Making things is a living. It ought to be a good living for many and not tied to only those who can be artisans.
Coincidentally, last week news broke that the federal government had raided Gibson’s manufacturing facilities in Nashville and Memphis.
The company has been in trouble with the Feds since 2009 when it imported ebony from a corrupt regime in Madagascar.
Andrea Johnson, director of forest programs for the Environmental Investigation Agency in Washington, says the Lacey Act requires end users of endangered wood to certify the legality of their supply chain all the way to the trees. EIA’s independent investigations have concluded that Gibson knowingly imported tainted wood.
“Gibson clearly understood the risks involved,” says Johnson. “Was on the ground in Madagascar getting a tour to understand whether they could possibly source [legally] from that country. And made a decision in the end that they were going to source despite knowing that there was a ban on exports of ebony and rosewood.”
Gibson uses ebony fingerboards on their premium Les Pauls, among other guitars.
Other guitar manufacturers stayed away from Madagascar.
One, the Martin Guitar Company of Nazareth, PA, in the Lehigh Valley, had its chairman put it this way:
“There was a coup … What we heard was the international community has come to the conclusion that the coup created an illegitimate government. That’s when we said, ‘Okay, we can not buy any more of this wood.'”
The company supports the ban on Malagasy ebony.
The most recent raid on Gibson concerned rosewood from India. And it now seems certain the US government will eventually file criminal charges against Gibson.
“We believe the arrogance of federal power is impacting me personally, our company personally and the employees here in Tennessee, and it’s just plain wrong.???
It was said Gibson was using social media to tap into “right wing anger with the federal government.”
Which is a fairly idiotic statement. Guitarists don’t have a lobby, let alone a right-wing Tea Party-like one ready to take the issue and run with it as another example of why we ought to hate that socialist from Kenya, Barack Obama.
Yeah, complain on Twitter the government is abusing your business after getting on the radar for importing banned precious wood from a Madagascar black market. Tweeting Twitterers to the rescue.
Keep in mind your host plays Gibson guitars.
Through the previous week a couple news stories tried to play up fear that the Feds might come for your old instruments if you didn’t have the paperwork in order, paperwork showing time of purchase prior to when things got sticky with bans on protected special woods.
DD wasn’t feeling the fear. And as far as I could tell, none were in GC on Saturday and Monday.
However, there is one small demographic that stands to lose money in the matter when and if the federal government occasionally seizes instruments with protected wood when they come through customs.
It’s those who trade in vintage instruments, selling very high priced pieces to the mega-rich around the globe.
Nashville’s George Gruhn is one of the world’s top dealers of old guitars, banjos and other rare stringed instruments. “It’s a nightmare,” he says. “I can’t help it if they used Brazilian rosewood on almost every guitar made prior to 1970. I’m not contributing to cutting down Brazilian rosewood today.”
Gruhn acknowledges that the government has tried to create exemptions to cover vintage instruments. But he says they are rife with delays and to play it safe he’s nearly eliminated the 40% of his business that used to deal with overseas buyers.
Today’s example … men who hoard late-Fifties/early Sixties Gibson Les Paul Standard guitars painted in sunburst finishes.
An example of the ridiculous prices the instrument fetches is here at Gruhn Guitars, run by reseller/guitar collector/speculator, George Gruhn. If you read guitar magazines regularly you know Gruhn owns 98 or maybe even 110 percent of all the guitars worth having in the world. No one is allowed to say anything about the worth of electric guitars without first checking if it’s all right to do so with Gruhn …
In case you didn’t click through the link, the guitar on display at George Gruhn’s costs a good deal more than your house.
For you to accept the idea of used guitars which sell for a quarter-of-a-million dollars, you have to buy into all the conceits trotted out about them for the last thirty years. As conceits handed down for decades and pounded into the bedrock of electric guitar lore, they’ve created a warped reality.
In other words, “We said nonsense, but it was important nonsense.”
Now, if you’re a foreign buyer of a quarter million dollar Les Paul, you might be concerned if there was even a remote chance of it being seized by customs. Particularly since no insurer will cover the loss if the trafficking is a potential criminal matter.
Just off the cuff I’d imagine there’s little sympathy or much of a political lobby for the dealers in vintage guitars industry.
So they may be stuck by this attention to proscribed woods. But it’s no big loss to the middle class economy.
But it’s another example why the idea of rewarding only those businesses which can be the American chocolatiers to the world basically blows.
What will happen to Gibson? I don’t know. But I doubt it will put them out of business.
A criminal prosecution might cause the firm to purge some top management. Which probably wouldn’t hurt because it’s not that innovative or spectacularly run (traits it shares with the other American guitar manufacturers.)
Posted in Bioterrorism at 12:43 pm by George Smith
The bioterror defense lobby dynamic duo, Jim Talent and Bob Graham, are about to try and coattail/carpetbag the Contagion movie, using it to push for more spending.
It was not a success. And this push will undoubtedly flop, too. Although the lobbyists will probably be successful in getting a couple opinion pieces planted in the nation’s newspapers.
The publicity push will fail to gain traction because of a simple question.
How many people want to see a movie where masses of people die horribly, along with the threat of worldwide collapse eight now? Yep, Hollywood has sure guessed the public mood right again.
Everyone is just dieing to see a doomsday plague movie! (Just prior to the beginning of the sick season.)
“In ‘Contagion,’ which opens next weekend with a cast that includes Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne, health professionals around the world combat a deadly airborne virus of mysterious origin. The action thriller depicts mass suffering and panic.
“Hoping to capitalize on the movie, Talent and former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., the chair of the WMD commission, plan to release a new report that reiterates the threat of biological attack ..”
The bioterror defense lobby is also suffering from a bit of the blues brought on by the economic collapse and austerity politics now in play. The debt talks and political climate have made it nervous.
If there’s a place that actually can be cut without much screaming, it’s in bioterror defense.
And this explains the slant of some articles now emerging on the subject, hooked to hit the tenth commemoration of 9/11.
Again, from the wire:
The Homeland Security Department is the government’s lead agency when it comes to protecting against biological weapons. Part of that task is developing technologies that can quickly trace the source of an outbreak, a critical step in determining mass treatment.
Yet the House proposed a budget this year for Homeland Security that would have cut research and development by 81 percent, a cut that Dr. Tara O’Toole, the agency’s undersecretary for science and technology, said would have been devastating.
“It would be have basically shut down science and technology here,” O’Toole said in an interview.
The federal budget remains uncertain for the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1, making it hard to plan for long-range projects that don’t immediately bear fruit, she said.
“The work we’re doing in biodefense won’t get done unless we do it,” she said. “The notion of a bioattack sounds outlandish and farfetched to some people, but it’s really not. It’s easier to imagine that happening than a nuclear attack orchestrated by terrorists.”
Making that case in the climate of cutting is a challenge.
Earlier in the year the economic collapse accidentally and pleasantly intervened to kill a bioterror defense project that looked like all but a done deal a couple years ago.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, long a force in expanding government funding for bioterror defense, has shockingly seen plans for a bioterror vaccine facility collapse …
This is the project that Tara O’Toole, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity and now at the Dept. of Homeland Security, tried to build.
Slight victories in these matters are good things. If the bioterror defense industry is hurt a little bit in these times, fine. It exploded post-anthrax and continued unrestrained and unregulated growth through the entire decade.
And to see Tara O’Toole expressing even the slightest alarm re its future is, from this perspective, a sign that something is going in the right direction. If only minutely and by accident/coincidental events changing its trajectory.
The wire story quoted, originally from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, continues the long tradition of mainstream media stories which quote only from the bioterror defense lobby.
Subsequently, it is written to convey the impression that there is a consensus on the level of bioterror defense spending which is appropriate. And that there are no critics of the industry.
From a business wire, no link, as it’s a joke masquerading as a piece of hopeful news.
Ten top jobs in the current US economy. And one of them is — spammer:
2. E-Mail Marketer
Hiring demand: 0.65 active job seekers for every open position
Annual salary range: $43,840-$84,430
10-year growth projection: 28%
Job description: Spam I am. The fragmenting of the information market makes it harder and harder to get the attention of consumers. Just as a fisherman has better luck if the bait ends up where the fish are, more companies are turning to targeted e-mail efforts to get the right message to the right audience. [Yeah, right. Not according to my mail filters.]
Other top jobs, those you’ve seen DD mock previously.
There’s the continuing growth market for bedpan technicians. Two types — one for working at the installations where the poor and average elderly are warehoused. And one — call them mobile bedpan technicians — for attending to the wealthy who warehouse in their mansions.
And, of course, programmers for trivial apps for “smart phones.”
True story: DD was at Ralphs in Pasadena last week when an iDolt used an app on his phone to enter the discount count, which is your phone number. Seriously. There’s an app that wastes your time, those behind you, and the grocery checker’s, in replacing your brain and index finger.
Ted Nugent has many beliefs. And he’s not a courageous enough a musician or lyricist to fit ’em into his songs. He also knows his new smallish audience of bottom-out-of-sight white assholes in wife-beaters and motorcycle gangster colors wouldn’t have it.
Not because of the actual political content. But because, in songs, they would sink a set where all anyone wants to hear is “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
So here is today’s Nugent bit at the Washington Times, for the second year running, an anti-labor column on the Labor Day weekend. Which takes stones and no heart.
Most people reading it won’t perceive the double paradox this weekend.
Ted performs one of his summer tour wrap-ups in Detroit. He’ll be performing at the DTE Energy Music Center in Clarkston, Michigan, today.
The real purpose of Labor Day is a day for the Democratic Party to celebrate. Labor unions and their members are solidly in the Democratic camp. At every Democratic campaign rally, Big Labor is there.
The National teachers union (NEA), one of the nation’s largest unions, is a rock-solid supporter of the Democratic Party, as is every other large union. The NEA cares more about maintaining taxpayer-provided benefits for its members than ensuring our kids get a world-class education. On the NEA’s watch, test scores have plummeted and dropout rates have skyrocketed.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has been a solid supporter of the Democratic Party for decades and has had automobile management under its thumb. The end result: Automotive plants have closed all around country. What was once the envy of the world, the American automobile industry has been totaled.
Al Capone-wannabe Richard Trumka [etc] …
Public-sector employees should be banned from joining a union …
The result of the labor movement has been a disaster. Labor unions have not sustained labor but rather have destroyed it …
Ultimately, you get what you bargain for – an unemployment check.
The Ted message: He despises unions, school teachers, and all public sector workers. Unions are responsible for mass unemployment, not the economic collapse of 2008. The unemployed deserve it because they supported unions.
Published on Labor Day. In the evening Ted plays Detroit, where the audience obviously won’t have read this column or hear him cursing them from the stage. Or they’d tar and feather him.
While Nugent’s name recognition in Michigan is still significant, there’s a reason he left it for Texas years ago.
I feel good mocking Ted Nugent’s mediocre “I Still Believe” in the previous post.
[Migrated from the old blog. It still attracts commenters who wish to share their memories and Blogger discontinued support for FTP remote blogs over a year ago. Ergo, now it’s here. And if you’re seeing this and have a story to tell about the old Professor, feel free to post.]
DD’s parents had a record collection, one which demonstrated how much they hated music.
The stuff they were into: Assorted records by piano hacks Ferrante & Teicher, a duo who turned popular tunes into muzak; a collection of the Ray Coniff Singers, a vocal group which turned pop hits into muzak, the complete works of Robert Goulet and crap from Mitch Miller’s Sing Along With Mitch show.
When it came to 45’s, their taste was almost as dire. Think novelties like Rolf Harris’s “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto and the absolute pinnacle of elevator music, “The Girl from Ipanema.”
However, the neighbors — who were Pennsylvania Dutch — were another matter.
The Musselmans introduced me to Professor Schnitzel’s records. Schnitzel was a stand-up comedian from Lancaster who traded on humorous foibles particular to the Pennsylvania Dutch country, which my hometown, Pine Grove, was smack dab in the middle of.
The Pennsylvania Dutch were good at three things: beer, potato chips and sausage. The chip companies in Lebanon and Lancaster counties were the best in the world. By way of example, nothing made in California, or by the food giant Lay’s, compared or compares favorably with Utz.
Interestingly, it took the Pennsylvania Dutch a bit to get sausage right. The natives tended to undercook their pork, the result being that the PA Dutch country had the highest rates of trichinosis infection in the country well into the Eighties. Tastes good, though!
But back to Professor Schnitzel, who issued his jokes on 45’s, of which DD believes there are four: “As I Was Saying…”, “Schussel Along with Schnitzel,” “Imagine That” and his first, “Pennsylvania Dutch Spoken Hereabouts” — all on Buch Records of Lancaster, PA.
“As I Was Saying… is another in a series of records giving you a taste of Pennsylvania Dutch flavored humor and stories,” reads the jacket copy from 1962. “Ingredients: a bit of spice, logic and tall stories of the gay Dutch, served to you platter style by none other than the famous Professor Schnitzel, one of Pennsylvania’s outstanding humorists for more than three decades. He bubbles with humor and friendliness, and dispenses corn, comedy and nonsense in a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent … [Professor Schnitzel] has become our local ambassador of goodwill to millions of people throughout the nation.”
The last sentence may overstate the case somewhat.
For “As I Was Saying…”, Schnitzel expounds on his “courting days” as well as his Uncle Louie, who seemed either to be always having sex or knocking on doors answered by nude women. [See also What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? by Alan Funt.]
Another prominent feature of Pennsylvania Dutch humor is the shit joke.
A good Pennsylvania Dutchman thinks there is nothing quite so funny as a mess in someone else’s pants. Indeed, the love of brown humor was and is so ingrained, copy editors at the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown used to have to regularly purge it from columns contributed by a local pastor, prior to publication.
Professor Schnitzel contributes his own gentle version of the shit joke, one containing absolutely no four letter words. The fifty second routine, from an old copy of “As I Was Saying…” is here.
The astute listener will immediately notice the crowd laughter appears to be from a women’s social event.
[Big thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Rick Noll of Bona Fide Records in Pennsyltucky for reuniting DD with the old professor.]
KarenAnn said…
Just for some clarification on Professor Schnitzel who was my great uncle. He was from Berks County and considered the tiny residential area of Turkey Hollow between Shillington, Pennwyn and Mohnton as his home as an adult. My uncle Ted (for his real name was Theodore Rickenbach) performed live for quite a few years, enjoying venues such as the Kutztown Folk Festival, but he also had a radio show on WHUM in Reading. I was just a child when he had that radio show and don’t remember much about it. He passed away in 1969. By the way, he was a hoot at family reunions!
Anonymous said…
My Grandad “COXY” ran a bar in Berkshire Heights Wyomissing and used to play the records on the side of serving drinks. Got all the workers in Rockwell and Burlington Indus. roaring. So of course he brought the records to our house and my brothers and I would play them continuously, and die laughing. I remember most of the jokes still….(Prof) “You know, the Dutch speak fewunny. Instead of saying feed the horse some hay, they say things like throw the horse over the fence some hay. Or instead of turn off the light they say “outen the light”. There are so many more, especially the story of going to New York City to find Don to write his Momma a letter. (Prof pulls up to a gas station) “Do you know where there is a little white house? (Garage Man) Why yes, there’s one around in the back. (Prof) So I went out back and by golly there it was. I saw a feller coming out putting on his coat. So I said, “are you Don?”. (Man) Why yes. (Prof) So why don’t you write your Mum a letter (sounds like why don’t you wipe your bum a little). Course, maybe he had no paper. God did we love this stuff. A BIG part of my growing up, trying to understand what much of it (the tongue in cheek) meant.
Anonymous said …
Growing up in the 50s and the 60s in the heart of the Pennsylvania “Dutch Country”, I remember only too well the humor of Professor Schnitzel.When listening to this humor, one must pay close attention to the Professnor speaking, or one will miss the humor. It was a very sad day when my sister told me that a group of nonEnglish speaking people lodged a complaint with the local police and the county goverment about the people who were speaking a language that they did not understand. The non-English speaking people said they felt threatened by these people and wanted it to stop. A language (Pennsylvania Dutch/German) that has/had been spoken for over 250 years in Berks County and survived two World Wars, may some day be against the law. And look who’s calling the kettle black?????
Anonymous said …
FYI,there was an LP of “The Best of PS”,Buch BLP 3311,with a 1964 date.Liners refer to a total of four 45EPs originally released.My wife’s family(paternal grandparents?)were neighbors(possibly next door) of Ted and their names show up in some of the routines.
