As mentioned Monday, Doug Roth — longtime mainstay of the Lehigh Valley blue collar rock n roll music scene and extraordinary guitarist — passed away recently at 50.
The above is a very nice fan tribute to Roth and his band, the Blissters, with a rare demo recording of “The Outlaw,” an original the band performed at every show.
The Blissters did not write much original material. However, this song — which was great — always deserved a wider audience that being on a record might have given it. It was Roth’s first-hand account of an arrest, one which put him out of circulation for a brief period.
A live performance of the song in Allentown from 2009 is here.
Nightclubbing was a weekend page instigated by me at the Morning Call newspaper in the early Nineties. It humorously covered live performances around the area in reviews not always entirely agreeable to the reviewed.
Here is another review of a Blissters show in Bethlehem…
Rock ‘N’ Roll Rules Rule At Blissters’ Reunion Gig
There are three things you have to always remember in a successful rock ‘n’ roll band:
1) Lose sight, lose the fight. Yup, don’t lose sight of your fans. The Blissters, as a band, always realized this and kept it in mind at a Four G’s reunion gig last weekend. They never lost sight of the fact that their supporters are essentially uncultured cabbages overly fond of repetition and group participation — the kind of people who routinely flip lit cigarette butts onto wooden floors, write in library books, wear baseball caps indoors, etc. So The Blissters performed their faves: ZZ Top’s “Waitin’ For the Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago.” And they did ’em mighty fine, too, occasionally letting some sodden riffraff onstage to yell into the microphone. The Blissters were well-rehearsed for this show and they did not screw up.
2) Speed is life. Never play rock ‘n’ roll slow. The Blissters were fast and they were scientific about it — breaking Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” into a languid part, y’know where the colored girls sing “doot-do-doot-do-doot,” and a real quick finish.
3) Always look good. Take, for instance, Blissters drummer Gary Pavlik, who always wears a nice pair of shoes and pants along with snazzy mirror shades. Pavlik twirls his sticks and looks like someone who should be playing heavy music, an important point. Guitarist Doug “Smash” Roth, however, is much too attached to baseball caps. Baseball caps are out unless you’re a big fan of Jerry Lewis back when he was pals with Dean Martin.
The UN’s recent approval of an arms trade treaty has, predictably, whipped WhiteManistan’s crazies into a now bog standard frenzy over its alleged conspiracy to take away America’s guns.
Although implementation is years away and there is no specific enforcement mechanism, proponents say the treaty would for the first time force sellers to consider how their customers will use the weapons and to make that information public. The goal is to curb the sale of weapons that kill tens of thousands of people every year — by, for example, making it harder for Russia to argue that its arms deals with Syria are legal under international law.
The treaty, which took seven years to negotiate, reflects growing international sentiment that the multibillion-dollar weapons trade needs to be held to a moral standard. The hope is that even nations reluctant to ratify the treaty will feel public pressure to abide by its provisions. The treaty calls for sales to be evaluated on whether the weapons will be used to break humanitarian law, foment genocide or war crimes, abet terrorism or organized crime or slaughter women and children …
Members of the General Assembly voted 154 to 3 to approve the Arms Trade Treaty, with 23 abstentions — many from nations with dubious recent human rights records like Bahrain, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
The treaty is an attempt to establish acceptable norms for international arms sales, not domestic.
Nevertheless, it will probably never be ratified by the Senate, because … WhiteManistan!
Indeed, the United States no longer ratifies any treaties because the Republican Party, which controls the Senate from a minority position, has determined that international co-operation, which is what all treaties are about, infringes on American freedom. (In this way a recent treaty to help the world’s weakest, the disabled, was quickly put to death in Congress after decades of effort.)
And that conspiracy theory is now deeply embedded in white right America, which means all of the Republican Party and those Democratic Party senators from red states.
Today, WhiteManistan’s Secretary of Guns and Ammunition, Ted Nugent, told the publisher of his weekly column, what he believes, the mania of which is akin to General Jack Ripper’s belief that fluoridation was a communist plot in Dr. Strangelove.
“I believe we the people have made it rather clear that ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ is more than a song,??? Nugent said in an interview with WND today after the U.N. adopted its long-developing Arms Trade Treaty.
“As putrid and anti-American as the entire U.N. concept/agenda is,??? he added, “we mean it and I believe we have … driven home an adequate fear factor into the lives of the soulless U.N. gangsters. It is they who should be fearful??? …
Nugent believes that President Obama is working with the U.N. on the rules, making the president a “clear and present threat to freedom and the American way of life??? …
“We the people have stepped up to the plate in a most powerful way to the Obama/U.N. gun grab by purchasing more guns and ammo than any society in the history of the world,??? he said.
And there you have it. WhiteManistan stands prepared to shoot UN tyrants and gangsters right between the eyes should they come for the guns. Much like preppers stand ready to shoot the rest of us between the eyes when we come boiling out of the cities WTSHTF (When the Shit Hits the Fan).
A couple weeks ago the Congressional Research Service quietly published “Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Policy Implications.”
The CRS report made this observation about gun massacres in the United States:
“Of the public mass shooting incidents identified by CRS for which information on the race of the perpetrator(s) was available, over half of the shooters were reportedly white.
“Almost all the shooters were male …???
The report adds they also tend to kill themselves during the assaults.
Experiencing the unavoidable news on public mass shootings has shown that, in America, this is indeed a white male thing.
Yet the country has yet to begin a big public discussion on why that is.
What in American white masculinity or psychology predisposes to gun massacres, if anything? Is there a linkage between the tradition of white male ownership of guns as a rite of adulthood predisposing white guys to gun massacres? Does it predispose toward mental illness or is there some other feature peculiar to how white US males acquire guns which has something to do with it? How does the white male component in American gun massacres compare with that of other civilized nations?
Questions, questions, all deserving of answers.
But be careful who and where you ask them. Some people may just shoot you right between the eyes as an enemy of freedom.
“Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Policy Implications” has been put on-line by Steve Aftergood at the Secrecy blog here.
Today Paul Krugman devoted his twice-week opinion column in the New York Times to California and the demographic that has made the Republican Party dead, dead, thoroughly dead, here.
The demise of the GOP came not a moment too soon. The party, gone extremist, had figured out how to destroy the state’s government from a minority position due to the requirement for super-majority votes in the state legislature.
And what is now going on at the federal level is exactly what everyone living in California has had to deal with for most of the last decade.
Modern movement conservatism, which transformed the G.O.P. from the moderate party of Dwight Eisenhower into the radical right-wing organization we see today, was largely born in California. The Golden State, even more than the South, created today’s religious conservatism; it elected Ronald Reagan governor; it’s where the tax revolt of the 1970s began. But that was then. In the decades since, the state has grown ever more liberal, thanks in large part to an ever-growing nonwhite share of the electorate …
The point, however, is that these problems bear no resemblance to the death-by-liberalism story line the California-bashers keep peddling. California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.
And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct …
Krugman summarizes the history of the state.
I arrived in California when Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley were still Republican territory, still part of WhiteManistan. The Pasadena Weekly, an alternative publication, actually had a column called “The Compassionate Conservative,” in which a crabby old rich white guy, the head of Jacobs Engineering on the Arroyo Parkway, recited the platitudes of Ronald Reagan each issue.
I saw the story about teaching-a-poor-man-to-fish-rather-than-giving-him-a-fish way too many times.
However, the growing population of Hispanics and Asians in the San Gabriel Valley turned Pasadena blue. And the Republicans never made it back.
This occurred for the same reason it happened throughout the rest of California. The party thought it had a winning hand in attacking brown people.
In so doing it loudly pursued cruel public initiatives and legislation to punish illegals. And the people who live here, in the most populous areas, slowly but inexorably turned on them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, could not even govern. Although elected to two terms, his own party disowned and destroyed him. He could no more be a part of it than Abraham Lincoln could if he were alive today.
California remains two states. The important part, the California that means something in the world economy, the one with the image, although tarnished, that still beckons, the most populous cities (LA County!) and the coast, firmly rejected the GOP.
The small towns in the interior, up and down the state, the empty counties near the Sierras, are still WhiteManistan. There, like in the rest of rural white America, they cling to the delusion that they can persecute everyone not exactly like them and get away with it. And that they have a majority ruling class on their side.
Krugman points out California still has problems, a deeply damaged infrastructure and public education system. But no one is fleeing, the census statistics do not support it.
WhiteManistan’s death grip has been pried loose.
“[California’s] political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too,” writes Krugman.
“So is California still the place where the future happens first?”
Time will render WhiteManistan into dust except in the places that don’t matter. But will it happen fast enough?
It’s dripping venom of old white guy nationalism and entitlement was made clear by the Times in a piece on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an old coal town near where I was born and raised, one whose representation in the nation’s capitol encompasses all that is bad.
This working-class city in the Poconos (Hazleton is not in the Poconos — me) passed the country’s first law aimed at making life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they would pack up and leave.
The city’s crackdown in 2006 was led by Lou Barletta, then the mayor and now a congressman. On Wednesday, he wrote to a bipartisan group of eight House members working on an immigration overhaul bill to criticize them for heading “down the path of proposing some form of amnesty …???
“Why are we even talking about a pathway to citizenship when our borders aren’t even close to being secure???? said Mr. Barletta, vowing to fight a plan that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to compete legally for jobs.
Not everyone in Hazleton and the surrounding area is with that, the Times makes clear.
But there are more than enough like this man:
“The people in this town, we’re becoming a minority,??? said Chris DeRienzo, 30, a wedding photographer who opposes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “It hurts. I grew up here. It’s not what it used to be.???
“You want to scream.???
I’m 27 years older than this fellow. How did we both grow up in about the same place and wind up so different, with nothing in common except, perhaps, a mutual repulsion? What went so off the tracks?
“Despite Hazleton’s reputation as one of America’s toughest cities toward illegal immigrants, the Hispanic population there has surged,” informs the newspaper. “The 2010 census showed Hispanic residents totaling 37 percent of the population, up from 5 percent in 2000.”
Steve at Secrecy blog alerted me to Sunday’s episode of The Simpson’s, Homer Goes to Prep School, which pillories a subject familiar to blog readers. In it Homer Simpson goes to the local bar where he runs into a kook who asks if he’s ready for a world gone WROL, Without the Rule of Law.
This leads to enrollment in doomsday prepper training, with the cartoon show adopting all its idiot jargon: TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), and the bug-out place for When the S—- Hits the Fan.
Of course, there’s also electromagnetic pulse doom (triggered by Homer ignoring his work at the nuclear power plant), a bag of dried grain to eat, and an “unsourced” video showing American civilization collapsing like a “deck of cards” (one of which bears the name of Fed boss Ben Bernanke). A shout out to my home town, for reasons unknown, is briefly spotted in a future road sign: “5 Minutes to the Ruins of Pasadena.”
The Simpsons effectively insults the worst in American society, often delivering an overriding moral at show’s end. So it’s fitting that the tribe of white fascist neo-Confederate weapon-stockpiling survivalists who’ve tried to rebrand themselves as “doomsday preppers” come in for their fair share.
They certainly deserve it.
As I’ve written many times, it’s a tribute, of sorts, to the toxic and mind-rotting legacy of the Cult of EMP Crazy, the far right lobby of missile defense nuts who’ve labored for years to get white Americans worried that their civilization could fail at any moment due to electromagnetic attack. And they have been eminently successful in twisting an easily twisted subset of the Republican Party, paranoid John Birchers and Tea Party types.
I’ve written there are never are any liberals, progressives, or non-whites in the bug-out bunkers because part of the mythology of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and by extension — that of preppers, is they’ll be armed and ready to shoot the rest of us between the eyes when the world ends, and we allegedly come out of the burning cities for their stuff.
Marge points out to Homer that it’s not Christian to leave Springfield high-and-dry in a power blackout. So Homer steals the supplies from the prepper community and high-tails it home where everyone finds power has been restored and rioting did not break out.
Why?
Because all the “weird, angry people” left, remarks one character.
Along with the prepper movement, which continues its zombie shuffle through the cynical business of monetizing WhiteManistan’s freaks on reality television, the reputation is well and truly shot in the mainstream when your crazy hobbies and outlooks have been set up as objects for scorn, however gentle, by The Simpsons on Sunday night family television.
