Post about "Barack Obama"

Nearly forty years ago, I participated in an energy summit. I was young, inexperienced, hadn’t found my voice, and my job was merely to be a journalist at the most base level; to record and catalog what was said. I could have done more, but what I heard intimidated me. It was the first time I realized there are some problems that can’t be solved, so I organized my tapes, turned them in with a comprehensive index, and said nothing.

The summit was held at the beautiful Ventana Inn at Big Sur. Its participants included executives of oil companies, the Sierra Club, public policy institutes and regulators. The concept was we all sit down and have a freewheeling discussion about the problems. What we discovered was we all pretty much agreed on what the problems were; and that there was no politically viable solution. So we all did what I did: nothing.

We could solve this problem tomorrow with something as simple as a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. The primary function of this tax would be to reduce consumption, so revenue would be far from a straight line computed from current consumption. We would still, however, raise a shitpot full of money.

This money could be plowed back into paying the people whose livelihoods were taken away by the spill to clean it up, and to promote new methods of energy production. We’d still hound BP into bankruptcy, but any revenue we’d get from them in fines or damages could be plowed into green energy technology too, or go back into the economy in the form of debt reduction.

But the public outrage over millions of gallons of oil in the gulf would quickly turn to public anger at the imposers of the tax. There would be rumors of corruption; that the money was lining the pockets of the energy companies. The energy companies themselves would scream bloody murder and sue everybody in sight to stop it. Cheap energy long-term alternatives are unwanted competition, artificially inflated short-term prices simply cut into their bottom line.

Most socially responsible liberals would be outraged over the terrible effects on the poor. This solution is a progressive tax run wild because it makes energy inefficient systems worthless and within the reach of the poor, which amplifies the inequity.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a vision of energy independence that has been worn away by the refusal by the right to pass a truly robust recovery package; one that not only bails us out, but helps us build a future. Until we do that, until we do something truly dramatic, we will simply repeat past mistakes.

Withdrawing from an addiction is painful, and until we are willing to walk through the pain, we will keep electing politicians who either promise cheap energy or promise alternatives but who know or learn the American people simply aren’t interested in solving the base problem.

That problem isn’t the oil in the gulf, that’s the symptom. It’s our denial of our cheap-energy addiction that put that damn hole in the sea floor in the first place without any Plan B to plug it.

Shortly after the 1950s became the 60s, I was one of those geeky kids who read Popular Electronics and took gadgets apart to see how they made their magic. I got in just on the end of that period where a big part of  Popular Mechanics was how wonderful the future, driven by science and engineering, was going to be.

I hit the tail end of that period; things became more noir starting in the 50s. We became xenophobic. Superman’s fight for “Truth, justice and tolerance,” in the comics became “truth, justice and the American Way” when it moved to television. And then we became downright cynical. Donald Fagen mocked it all, with his great lyrics for I.G.Y. A song set in 1957-58 about how wonderful things would be in 1976.

Here at home well play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

………………………………… –from IGY – Donald Fagen

I’ve been watching TED videos since shortly after they first came online. I’ve always loved them, and always learned, but this year it was different. The election of President Obama has restored science and reason to public policy. It no longer must hold equal footing with the assertion that Adam & Eve rode dinosaurs. We are not afraid of stem cells. We’re not afraid to hope.

Following the tweets from the many on Twitter who attended, and then watching the videos as they’re released from this years’ TED conference has brought me back to the way I felt reading the pop science and engineering magazines of my childhood.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The presenters allude to it or say it directly in their presentations. The audiences erupt in spontaneous applause when they do. I’d guess that if you’re reading this blog, you’d feel that way too, and if you aren’t following TED, you’re missing out. They’re available as video podcasts on I-Tunes and through other “delivery mediums near you.”

It wasn’t but 20 years ago, we were dumping ASCII messages from BBS to BBS in the dead of the night. Today we send text messages instantaneously to hundreds of thousands of the likeminded and follow it up with high quality video.

We can leverage technology to escape our predicaments. We can develop energy industries that can save us from paying oil rich countries while simultaneously giving us a valuable export.

We can find ways to teach our children better, and use our knowledge to better understand the world and help it solve its problems, which will restore our tattered image oversees.

The Internet has shrunk the world to nearly manageable size, and our search for other worlds and in the ancient history of our own has shown us how much there is left to explore and learn. Some may disagree, but I think its a wonderful thing that with a few clicks of the mouse, you can find I.G.Y. as done by a Japanese cover band.

Dear Rush Limbaugh:

Thank you for writing your open letter to President Obama, published Friday as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I know things have been tough for your syndicator and owned stations (Premiere/Clear Channel). First, the banks tried to renege on their deal to take your employer private, and you all had to take less. Then the bean-counters came in and you had that mass firing Inauguration day.  Then, the junk bonds keeping your company alive got even junkier.  Standard and Poor downgraded them from B to B-.

With so many things wrong in this country, it made no sense when there was suddenly so much hue and cry from the biggest right wing talk networks and station groups over the fairness doctrine. Mr. Obama’s never liked the fairness doctrine, your party is against it, and you can count those in my party who want it reinstated on your fingers and toes. You may not even need your toes.

Last Friday (the same day Clear Channel’s massive debt got downgraded), you dropped your pants in your WSJ op-ed and it suddenly all made sense. Its not about the fairness doctrine at all, is it?

Its about a handful of companies owning the vast majority of powerful radio stations across this country and putting on nearly every station the same imported schlock with no local staffs, minimal local content, and in some cases not even a living soul stationed at studio or transmitter.

Your precise question to President Obama:

Is it your intention to censor talk radio through a variety of contrivances, such as “local content,” “diversity of ownership,” and “public interest” rules — all of which are designed to appeal to populist sentiments but, as you know, are the death knell of talk radio and the AM band?

Requiring Clear Channel to provide local content in their communities of license is not censorship. Its like requiring an investment company to actually buy some stocks and bonds for their investors and truthfully advise those investors about their holdings. Requiring radio stations to serve their communities–regardless of the political leanings of the ultimate content–is only a death knell to weak and poorly managed companies: companies like yours; companies that you would ordinarily, as a free market conservative, demand be thrown under the bus.

Fact is, Mr. Limbaugh, what has happened in the radio business is the same thing that has happened in the banking, the mortgage, and even the automobile industries. We “let the market decide,” by deregulating everything in sight, and the charlatans took over: people who don’t give a rat’s ass about ethics or values or anything but this month’s profit. Your masters bought up every radio station and station group they could find using expensive debt. The interest payments siphoned off the money for local programming and public service.

The decimation of the radio business by firing legions of talented people at the local stations, replacing them with automatons voiced in sweatshops in “cluster facilities” hundreds of miles away is broadcasting’s version of a Ponzi scheme. Its like selling off the locomotive of a train claiming inertia would keep it moving. Now that its ground to a stop, you’re trying to blame President Obama because you’re afraid he’s going to force you to replace the engine.

Your answer is to do what Rove, Cheney, and Bush did to sell the Iraq war. First you teach that the fairness doctrine is a bad thing. You call it censorship. Then you use those terms in a sentence with all the things you want to sully. Fairness doctrine, public interest, diversity of ownership, local content. There’s no connection, but you hope your listeners aren’t sharp enough to catch it. Saddam Hussein, terrorist, 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, axis of evil, mushroom cloud.

But this time, they might catch on. All those words strung together to get us into war were either bad or unfamiliar and foreign sounding. Local content, local ownership, local people behind local mikes discussing local issues—what we once called full-service radio—are things people understand and many of us even remember. It will not be easy to redefine them as a negative when a lot of people will see them as an old friend, and it would truly be karma to see the “populist sentiment” that you’ve played like a violin for 20 years be the thing that puts your stations back in the hands of people who care about serving their communities, and takes you off the air for good.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if your denouement came the very first time you got caught red-handed at the Shock Doctrine? Rush Limbaugh, Saddam Hussein, Sean Hannity, Clear Channel, Terrorist, 9/11, mushroom cloud.

If you watched the five-day celebration where Barack Obama became our 44th president, you’ll recall the many parallels that were drawn to Abraham Lincoln, from the train trip that retraced Lincoln’s, to the reading of Lincoln’s words by patriot Tom Hanks at the Saturday celebration at Lincoln’s memorial. Lincoln was looking down on us.

And you also heard Aaron Copland. A lot of Copland, from The Lincoln Portrait which accompanied Hanks’ reading, to strains of Simple Gifts,  one of the themes blended by John Williams for his arrangement for Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, also used by Copland for his Appalachian Suite, to Fanfare for the Common Man. Our list of American composers of ceremonial music is short, and runs the range of styles from John Philip Sousa to Mr. Williams. But the dean is Aaron Copland whose pioneering styles can still be heard in modern film composers like James Newton Howard.

I couldn’t help thinking how proud Aaron Copland would have been; a proud Socialist during the 30s FDR administration. A man who loved his country not in the “love it or leave it” frame, but “love it and improve it.”  He wrote the soundtrack for monumental progress that would happen long after his death.

Perhaps Copland and Lincoln were both looking down at us in our time of great progress and great peril. Thinking of that, I started experimenting with Copland and Copland-like themes as an arranging project, which I’ve posted here. The middle portion is real Copland, performed at the Obama Lincoln celebration and narrated live by Tom Hanks. These are real instruments playing real Copland music in a fair-use sized chunk. The surrounding music, accompanying Mr. Obama, are my composition and orchestration realized by the East-West Symphony Orchestra sample set being driven by Sonar 7 Producer.

Most browsers should play the files below by clicking the links. Don’t attempt the lossless WMA without a fast connection.

President’s Day Copland Tribute – mp3

President’s Day Copland Tribute – wma (lossless 18meg)

President’s Day Copland tribute – wma (compressed 1.8 meg)

I spent some time today starting the cleanup from the election. What to do with the local grassroots web site? How about the email addresses tied to the local url? Do we park them all for four years for the re-election, or just let them evaporate when they expire and start over.

In 2000, and again in 2004, we cleaned up after a disaster. Its been so long, since we’ve won one, I don’t quite remember how its done.

We have such a mess of problems, and no doubt we’ll discover there are many more that the Bush/Cheney administration was able to hide or spin hoping the truth wouldn’t emerge until the transition is over. I’ve never seen such problems, but I’ve never had more faith that the new folks in charge are up to the task.

Congratulations to everyone who helped elect Mr. Obama, and I hope those who didn’t will give him a fair chance to be everybody’s president.