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James McMurtry



Last Updated: 12/9/2009

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City: AUSTIN
State: Texas
Country: US
Signup Date: 6/21/2005

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009 

Capitalism is Dying
09/14/2009
By James McMurtry

Capitalism is dying, boy. It's dying of its own internal contradictions.[He was, after all, a Wall Street financier, so I listened carefully.] You think the revolution's gonna take five years. It's gonna take fifty! So keep your head down and hang in for the long haul, because I'll tell you something. The sons of bitches running things don't give a shit about their children or their grandchildren, and they certainly don't give a shit about you! They've paid their dues, and they want to get out with theirs! They're gonna sell off everything that's not nailed down to the highest bidder. Don't get crushed when it topples down. Take care of yourself and your family. If you can make a difference, do it, but there are huge forces at work here, and they have to play themselves out according to their own design, not yours. Watch yourself.     
 
Wall Street Financier, Morris Cohon, to his son, Peter Coyote---Winter of 1969/1970

The above passage is from Peter Coyote's excellent memoir, "Sleeping Where I Fall". In the next sentence, Coyote adds,
    
As far as I can determine, everything he prophesied has come true.

Sure enough, last year, 2008, balls out free market capitalism stepped on its dick and fell on its ass. We had lived a fantasy for nearly thirty years. In the interest of short term gain, Reagan peeled back New Deal banking regulations designed to avert thirties style crashes, Clinton peeled them back some more. The elder Bush knew Reaganomics was folly, he called it "Voodoo Economics" when he ran against Reagan, but by the time he got in, there was no stopping the allure of the fantasy. To step out in front of it would have been political suicide, so he didn't try. Greed was seen as a good thing, markets were deemed to be infallible. We failed to see Enron's implosion as the  microcosm for the global economy that it proved to be. Suddenly we witnessed an economic crash, the scale of which us forty somethings had been raised to believe we would never see. We had always been told we were safe now, the daddies were in charge, and they had learned from the Great Depression, they had put in safeguards . . .

Oops, they took the safeguards out, too cumbersome and restrictive of the free market.

Yet we cling to the notion of capitalism as if it were the only thing that keeps us American.  We still demonize any form of Socialism. Long ago, the term Socialism was, in our country, linked to Soviet Communism, which was reciprocally linked to the devil. It's very easy for the right to get their base stirred up, because the buzzwords have been in place for nearly a century. All that mean little parrot, Phil Gramm, ever had to do was start squawking the words "Socialized Medicine! Socialized Medicine!", then throw in a dash of Harry and Louise and the Clinton Health Bill's threat to the private insurer and pharmaceutical corporation dominated status quo was over and done with.

 My paternal grandfather railed against the prospect of Socialized Medicine and always hated Lyndon Johnson, but he took his Medicare just like everybody else. Socialized Medicine is ok as long as we call it something else, like "Medicare". Johnson was for sure a genius, folks. Yes, he was also crooked, but he got some good things done.

I personally, have no problem with Socialized Medicine, even when called by its proper name. To me, Socialized Medicine means the lady that checks me in at the hospital doesn't first ask me how I intend to pay for services rendered, but rather asks me, "Where does it hurt?" I know people who have had such an experience, people who live in countries that we now call Socialist, places like Britain and France, NATO allied nations who stood with us against the "Evil Empire" during the cold war, nations that were considered to be part of the free world then, Socialist attitudes toward medicine notwithstanding. True, citizens of France do pay high taxes, but they get something in return, universal free health care. Our tax money mostly goes to the military, half of it anyway. We Americans don't want our government all up in our business, so rather than pay for government health care, we prefer to pay private insurers who do everything in their power to keep from honoring claims, to keep from actually providing the care that our insurance dollars are supposed to guarantee to those few of us to whom they actually grant policies.  I don't have insurance. My insurance company was bought out by another. The new parent company staggered the premium schedule and I missed a payment while on the road with my band. I came home to find I was uninsured. That particular insurance company was lame anyway, so I didn't much care, but I dicked around and didn't get aggressive about finding a new insurer until after I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. Sure, you can argue that in this environment, my predicament is my own fault. Fair enough, I did know the rules here. But I have friends who are much worse off than I, friends for whom "this environment" is poisonous. One has a child with a bone disease. He had insurance, but his insurer was allowed to go bankrupt, leaving my friend's child uninsured with a serious pre existing condition. Texas High Risk Pool is his only option, ten thousand dollar deductible, I believe. My friend's experience is just one of many examples that illustrate the pure immorality of our healthcare for profit system.

Healthcare for profit capitalizes on illness. To profit on drugs and surgeries one must have a steady supply of sick people. We have some very sick people among us and we seem hell bent on keeping them sick. Every time I go to the supermarket, I see fat people, and I don't just mean regular old fat, I mean grossly obese. Many are diabetic amputees in electric wheelchairs. Soft drinks seem to be a popular item with them. I don't remember seeing such people when I was a child, when I pretty much lived on Dr. Peppers, which were then sweetened with cane sugar, rather than the high fructose corn syrup used to sweeten nearly everything today, a sweetener that our bodies just don't know how to handle. I don't know if the corn lobby is in cahoots with the makers of those electric wheelchairs, but I would say the times are good for both. I make my living driving across the country, occasionally stopping at Walmart for fresh socks. I see obese people in the Walmart and miles and miles of nothing but corn from eastern Nebraska to eastern Ohio, one big cornfield. Correlation does not imply cause, but one does notice.

I don't understand the preoccupation, fanciful or not, of the angry white people at the town hall meetings, with the notion that the government might tell them which doctor they can see. Even if the fear mongers were right this time and the government really was going to dictate to us our choice of doctors, so what? If  I could see a reasonably competent doctor for free, I'd be perfectly glad to see the doctor of my government's choice. Most of us can't really choose our doctors anyway. If we don't want to pay out of pocket, then we must find a doctor who takes our insurance. And as for the  "death panels" hysteria, we already have death panels. We call them private insurers. Insurers decide who gets coverage and who does not, in effect, who lives or dies, and they base their decisions on potential profit.  And in the arena of potential profit, white people still tend to fare better that the rest.

I believe that our chief objection to any form of socialism is, and has always been, rooted in racism. Thirty years ago, the specter of the Cadillac driving black welfare mother was the A-Number One bogeyman for the angry white man against socialism crowd. The notion that that same Cadillac driving black woman might receive federal dollars to pay for an abortion would really get the bibles thumping(funny how fathers are always left out of the abortion equation. No one blames the irresponsible male who knocked up the Cadillac driving black welfare mother. And the same people who want to ban abortion don't seem to favor open discussion of contraception. weird).

Now, it seems that the illegal alien has eclipsed the black welfare mom as bogeyman du jour. Our bigots have progressed. Fearing a backlash of political correctness(and subsequent loss of funding), they no longer engage in unabashed racism. Now they cloak their racism in nationalism, the second string motivator of the paranoid moron masses, easily spun as patriotism, a supposedly more noble virtue. But what sort of illegal aliens do they fear?

I once employed an illegal alien, a tour manager from New Zealand, white fella. Once, while traveling East along interstate 10 back in the pre-Homeland Security days, we came to a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint. When the man in the green uniform asked if everyone in the van was a U.S. citizen, the tour manager simply answered, "Sure mate". The man in the green uniform was eyeing our San Antonio born and raised Hispanic bass player rather suspiciously and didn't seem to notice the tour manager's Kiwi/Aussie accent. He eyed the bass player for a second or two longer and then waved us on.

I don't think the town hall hooligans are worried about Kiwi tour managers receiving health care on their dime. When they say "illegal aliens" they mean "brown people".

Why would it be such a terrible thing for a brown person from another country to receive free healthcare here in the U.S.? My current bass player was recently treated for a bad flu while touring in Germany. I think the doctor visit cost about twenty-five dollars and they didn't mind that he wasn't a German citizen or that he didn't pay German taxes. He was sick, so they tried to help him.
     
We don't seem to have any trouble finding the money to fly planes halfway across the world to drop bombs on brown people. That gets pretty expensive you know. I'd be willing to bet that socialized medicine is cheaper than war. Maybe Iraqi oil revenue could pay for our healthcare, just like it paid for the invasion of Iraq . . .   right, it didn't pay for the invasion, our great grandchildren will have to do that, but when Rumsfeld put forth that wonderful piece of fiction, did any future town hall storming, bible thumping, constitution waving pissed off red faced white guy question Rummy's logic? Nope

Europeans can be racists too. They don't necessarily like it that the dark skinned natives of their former colonies came home to them when the great colonial empires collapsed, but they grant them citizenship and extend to them the requisite benefits of citizenship while occasionally grousing about the dilution of their national character. They have their extreme nationalist factions and lunatic fringes, but they recognize them as such and for the most part behave sensibly. They're not afraid of big government, because to them, governments are service organizations designed to aid the people. And when they don't like their governments, they throw them out. Remember W's "coalition of the willing"? It consisted  mostly of our troops, a good many British, a few Aussies and Italians, and a hundred or so Spaniards. The Spaniards all went home after their people caught their government in a lie. Bombs had gone off in the Madrid Metro. At the behest of our government, the Spanish government blamed the bombing on ETA, the Basque separatist movement. The Bush administration didn't want anyone to think the bombings could have been done by Al Quaida, so they talked the Spanish government in to blaming ETA. But Spaniards aren't stupid. They're sick of ETA, but they know that ETA does not indiscriminately bomb subway stations. They saw through the lie, tossed their government out on its ass, and brought their troops home from Iraq. Spain, it seems, is an actual democracy. Perhaps we'll be a democracy someday.

We have recently made bold strides towards democracy. We flipped the majorities in both houses of congress and voted in a President from the previously underdog party because a vast majority of us were sick of the status quo.  And I did say "vast majority".

Obama won by a fucking landslide, people. Unlike Bush's two elections, Obama's election was nowhere near close enough to steal. We, the vast majority that voted for Obama, knew he would try to reform healthcare. So, why are the town hall mobs getting so much media attention? They can't constitute that much of the electorate. Probably, the media needs a story to sell, and they can sell it more effectively if they add suspense by making the playing field look even. Republicans aren't acting like the field is even. They are snarling like cornered wolves, booing and hissing at the President during his address to the joint session of Congress. People get mean when they feel outnumbered. Joe Wilson and his ilk can still stir up their base, but their base is shrinking.

Still, they might block healthcare reform one more time. The drug companies and insurers have so much money with which to combat common sense, that we may have to go another round. But universal health coverage will come to the people of the U.S. and its opponents know it. The only question is, how broke will Americans have to be before they no longer care whether or not their health care system would once have been considered Socialist and rise up and demand the reform that should have been theirs long ago? It's true that when it is ultimately implemented, our newly socialized healthcare system will be an unholy mess for a while, because we don't yet know how to do universal healthcare. If we'd let President Truman have his way, and implemented universal health care sixty years ago, when the rest of the free world did it, we'd probably have our system worked out by now.

I've noticed that some of the people who don't want healthcare reform are also upset by Obama's stimulus package. They were also upset by Bush's stimulus package, and I don't blame them. I'm upset too. I don't like it that we have to bail out the people who ripped us off, but that seems to have been the only viable course of action. Paul Krugman seems to think it worked, at least for now. From my hotel window in downtown Cincinnati, I don't see any bread lines. I'll pose a question to those who's greatest fear is socialism. Those bankers that you hate so much, those bankers whose bailouts your grandchildren will be paying for while they're also paying for the wars and maybe a bit of healthcare, those terrible evil banker people . . . are they socialists?
12:01 AM 
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Thursday, September 03, 2009 
James McMurtry and The Heartless Bastards have announced their second European tour. Stay tuned for more info and possibly more dates. Here are the dates that have already been confirmed. 10/3 Groningen, NL, Take Root Festival 10/4 Antwerp, Belgium, Arenberg Schouwburg 10/5 London, UK, The Borderline UPDATED 10/6 Nottingham, UK, Rescue Rooms 10/7 Bristol, UK, Fiddlers 10/8 Buckingham, UK, Old Town Hall UPDATED 10/ 9 Manchester, UK, Club Academy NEW! 10/10 York, UK, Duchess of York 10/11 Newcastle, UK, The Cluny 10/12 Edinburgh, Scotland, Bongo Club NEW! 10/13 Belfast, Northern Ireland, Errigle Inn 10/14 Kilkenny, Ireland, Langtons Theatre NEW! 10/15 Dublin, Ireland, Whelan's
5:59 PM 
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Tuesday, August 11, 2009 

JAMES McMURTRY LIVE IN EUROPE  CD WITH BONUS DVD DOCUMENTS FIRST EURO TOUR WITH GUESTS IAN MCLAGAN AND JON DEE GRAHAM, DUE OUT OCTOBER 13

Album cements McMurtry’s ability to make great live albums as augured by 2004’s Live in Aught-Three. Live in Europe available as CD/DVD set and collectors’ edition vinyl LP/DVD set.

AUSTIN, Texas — James McMurtry’s recent studio albums, 2005’s Childish Things and 2008’s Just Us Kids, earned him formidable accolades. The Village Voice called him “a poet of the people.” Stephen King, writing in Entertainment Weekly, pronounced him “the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.” Yet a lot of current McMurtry converts were introduced through the 2004 release Live in Aught-Three. Live albums aren’t typically greeted with rave reviews, but McMurtry’s rockin’ treatments of songs like “Choctaw Bingo” and “Out Here in the Middle” in concert made an uncanny translation to record. The Austin Chronicle proclaimed, “This is no-frills, freak-flag rock. Turn it up!”PopMatters called it “a snapshot of where McMurtry is now, [marking him] as a legitimate inheritor of the Texas songwriting tradition.”
 
Now, on October 13, 2009, Lightning Rod Records will release Live in Europe, a document of McMurtry’s first European tour, on which he was joined by keyboardist Ian McLagan and fellow Texas songwriting legend Jon Dee Graham. The set will be available as a CD with a bonus DVD, or as a deluxe vinyl LP package with a CD and DVD insert.
 
In early 2009, James McMurtry and his trio traveled overseas to play their first European tour. The guys played for enthusiastic crowds in Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and Belgium. Joining the band on keyboards for the tour was the legendary Ian McLagan (who also played on McMurtry’s latest studio album, Just Us Kids). 
 
The best recordings from the Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Geislingen, Germany concerts were combined to create Live in Europe. The album includes a bonus DVD featuring performances from the Amsterdam show. This marks the first time fans will be able to purchase video footage of McMurtry live in concert. The deluxe vinyl version includes inserted copies of the CD and DVD. Fellow Austin-based songwriter Jon Dee Graham opened the shows and joins the band on a version of his tune “Laredo” on the bonus DVD.
 
The son of acclaimed author Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment), James grew up on a steady diet of Johnny Cash and Roy Acuff records. His first album, released in 1989, was produced by John Mellencamp and marked the beginning of a series of acclaimed projects for Columbia and Sugar Hill. In 2004, McMurtry released the universally lauded Live in Aught-Three on Compadre Records. 2005’s Childish Things garnered some of the highest critical praise of McMurtry’s career and spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Americana Music Radio Chart in 2005 and 2006. In September 2006, Childish Things and "We Can't Make It Here" won the Americana Music Awards for album and song of the year, respectively. McMurtry received more Americana Music Award nominations for 2008’s Just Us Kids. The album marked his highest Billboard 200 chart position in more than 19 years.
 
The Washington Post noted McMurtry’s live prowess: "Much attention is paid to James McMurtry's lyrics, and rightfully so: He creates a novel's worth of emotion and experience in four minutes of blisteringly stark couplets. What gets overlooked, however, is that he's an accomplished rock guitar player. At a sold-out Birchmere, the Austin-based artist was joined by drummer Daren Hess and bassist Ronnie Johnson in a set that demonstrated the raw power of wince-inducing imagery propelled by electric guitar. It was serious stuff, imparted by a singularly serious band."

McMurtry will tour the U.S. and Europe this fall in support of the live album.
 
Track List:
Bayou Tortue 
Just Us Kids 
Hurricane Party 
You’d a’ Thought (Leonard Cohen Must Die) 
Fräulein O. 
Ruby and Carlos 
Freeway View 
Restless 

Bonus DVD:
Choctaw Bingo
You’d a’ Thought (Leonard Cohen Must Die)
Freeway View 
We Can’t Make It Here 
Laredo (with Jon Dee Graham) 
Too Long In The Wasteland
2:41 PM 
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009 
James McMurtry and The Heartless Bastards have announced their second European tour.  Watch for more info and possibly more dates.  Here are the dates that have already been confirmed.

 10/3     Groningen, NL, Take Root Festival
 10/4     Antwerp, Belgium, Arenberg Schouwburg
 10/5     London, UK, The Garage
 10/6     Nottingham, UK, Rescue Rooms
 10/7     Bristol, UK, Fiddlers
 10/8     Buckingham, UK, Old Town Hall  UPDATED
 10/ 9    Manchester, UK, Club Academy  NEW!
 10/10   York, UK, Duchess of York
 10/11   Newcastle, UK, The Cluny
 10/12   Edinburgh, Scotland, Bongo Club  NEW!
 10/13   Belfast, Northern Ireland, Errigle Inn
 10/14   Kilkenny, Ireland, Langtons Theatre  NEW!
 10/15   Dublin, Ireland, Whelan's
8:45 PM 
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009 
Fabchannel will present a live webcast of Alt.country legend James McMurtry entire show from the legendary Paradiso in Amsterdam tomorrow, January 27. The show is the first of McMurtry’s European tour. The webcast will start at 19.00 (GMT).

A few days after the live show, the entire recording will be included to Fabchannel’s online video archive.

Fabchannel records and streams live concerts every week. The James McMurtry recording is the latest addition to the extensive Fabchannel video archive, which includes 1000 full-length concert recordings, including Paul Weller, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Calexico, Iron and Wine, Fred Eaglesmith, Grayson Capps, Chuck Prophet, Joe Henry, and Drive-By Truckers and many more. http://www.fabchannel.com/james_mcmurtry_concert/2009-01-27
12:34 AM 
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008 
James McMurtry's latest album showed up on a wide array of Best of 2008 lists. USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Blurt Online, and the Philadelphia Inquirer are some of the publications that laud Just Us Kids as one of the year's foremost releases. Here is a partial list of the reviews:
USA Today - Ken Barnes' Number 2 album of the year
Entertainment Weekly - Stephen King's Number 3 album of the year
Baltimore City Paper - Geoffrey Himes' Number 1 album of the year
Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Number 4 album of the year
Americana Music Chart - Number 2 album of the year
Blurt Online - Number 11 album of the year
Popmatters - Number 5 Americana Album of the year
6:53 PM 
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Wednesday, December 17, 2008 
The Top Ten most played records, as charted on the Americana Airplay Chart include:

1) Hayes Carll
2) James McMurtry
3) Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
4) Steve Earle
5) Tift Merritt
6) Ryan Bingham
7) John Hiatt
8) Band of Heathens
9) Levon Helm
10) Alejandro Escovedo


CLICK HERE to view the full Top 100!

The Americana Music Chart can be seen in R&R Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine and Country (in the UK).
11:29 PM 
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Saturday, November 08, 2008 
Catch James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards LIVE :
Check with venue as showtimes are subject to change

Fri Nov 7 '08
8:30PM
Atlanta, GA
Red Light Cafe

Sat Nov 8'08
9:00PM
Greenville, SC
The Handlebar

Sun Nov 9 '08
8:30PM
Carrboro, NC
Cat's Cradle

Tue Nov 11 '08
8:00PM
Baltimore, MD
8 X 10

Wed Nov 12 '08
9:00PM
Philadelphia, PA
Johnny Brenda's

Thu Nov 13 '08
7:30PM
Albany, NY
The Egg

Fri Nov 14 '08
9:00PM
Brooklyn, NY
Music Hall of Williamsburg

Sat Nov 15 '08
8:00PM
Lancaster, PA
Chameleon Club

Sun Nov 16 '08
7:00PM
Charleston , WV
Mountain Stage
Cultural Center Theatre

Tue Nov 18 '08
Bloomington, IN
Bluebird Nightclub

Wed Nov 19 '08
9:00PM
Chicago, IL
Double Door

Thu Nov 20 '08
8:00PM
Champaign, IL
The High Dive

Fri Nov 21 '08
9:00PM
Colombia, MO
Mojo's

Sat Nov 22' 08
9:30PM
Little Rock, AR
Juanita's Cantina Ballroom
7:42 AM 
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Thursday, October 30, 2008 


"We Can't Make It Here" (LIVE)

Just before the 2004 Presidential Election, James McMurtry gave away a free download of his state of the union anthem, "We Can't Make It Here." The song struck a chord with the public and went on to win Song of the Year at the Americana Music Honors and Awards. Author Stephen King described it as the "best American protest song since 'Masters of War'" in his Entertainment Weekly column. On the brink of the 2008 election, McMurtry is giving away a previously unreleased live version of "We Can't Make It Here" from his 2008 concert at Southpaw in Brooklyn, NY.

Click on the link below to access the free MP3 (Radio-Friendly Edit also available):


http://www.lightningrodrecords.com/cantmakeithere.php
3:20 AM 
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 
Running on Empty
10/10/2008

On Friday, September 19th, 2008, there was no gasoline to be found in most parts of Nashville Tennessee. The gas pumps sat eerily abandoned, their nozzles shrouded with plastic bags. The few stations that did have gas, including the Exxon across the street from our hotel, were surrounded by lines of panicked motorists that stretched for blocks. Home of the Brave. I walked over to the station. There was a news van out front. Police and station staff were directing traffic to and from the pumps and explaining to people that they couldn't just turn in because the line started three blocks to the south.

I was a bit uneasy, because we were to play in Harrodsburg Kentucky the following night and I wasn't sure how widespread the gas shortage had become. I had noticed in the preceding days that some stations in both Athens Georgia and Chattanooga were out of regular. Was the whole South out of gas? I called an acquaintance in Bowling Green who said that if I could make it that far I would have no problem. There was plenty of gas in Kentucky. We had nearly a quarter tank, just about enough to make Bowling Green.

The next night, from the safety of Kentucky, I googled "Nashville gas shortage". Not much came up, mostly blogs from Nashvillians. I didn't see any sign of national coverage. The only TV news clip I found was from the Nashville Fox affiliate. The clip reported some violence including a drive by shooting in East Nashville, and widespread hoarding. People were topping off their tanks like okies in the dust bowl. There was a shot of a woman filling a gallon plastic milk jug with gas and putting it in her car. Real smart. She didn't even bother to duct tape the cap. At least she knew to set the jug on the ground when she filled it so a static charge on the plastic wouldn't blow the whole place to Jesus.

Then came a clip of Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn repeating McCain's shrill mantra "Drill here, drill now" and blathering on about how we need to find more oil "under American soil". I guess she hasn't noticed that we are drilling here now, and have been drilling here for some time. I have cousins who work in the oil field in North Texas and they're quite busy these days. They can't keep up with demand though. Blackburn also called for increased refining capacity. She's right on that one. We do need more refineries, and we need refineries that can handle the low grade "sour" oils that we're mostly finding these days. It seems that, while we're still finding plenty of oil, the "light sweet crude", that's easy and inexpensive to refine, is growing scarce. The lower grade oils have sulphur that must be removed and long molecules that must be "cracked" into shorter pieces to make gasoline. There have recently been some promising natural gas discoveries in North Texas and North Louisiana. Why is no one advocating that we convert cars to run on natural gas? Some public transportation companies run their buses on natural gas, so the conversion shouldn't be that hard. Natural Gas burns clean and requires minimal refining. Or, of course, we could limit our driving, conserve gas? Un-American, I guess.

I noticed in one article I read that Knoxville Tennessee had had a similar shortage the weekend before the Nashville shortage. Interesting, two major shortages in two Tennessee cities on two consecutive weekends, with minimal news coverage. No one seemed to know what exactly caused the shortages. Some theorized that the hurricanes had taken Gulf state refineries off line and that evacuees had burned up a lot of gas. I know what caused those shortages, someone at the back end of the pipeline cut off the flow. Maybe the reason for the shut off was indeed that they had no more gas, but, whatever the reason, someone had to make a decision to push a button, turn a valve, or key in a command. Someone decided which town wasn't going to get their gasoline that weekend. The result was an interesting social experiment that exposed our vulnerability. I'm not referring to the vulnerability of our infrastructure, but rather, the vulnerability of our collective psyche, a much more dangerous vulnerability. Our hysterical fear of not being able to go where we want when we want renders us powerless to any force, natural or human, that would attack the physical infrastructure, and some very unscrupulous politicians are itching to exploit that fear. You can bet they were taking notes on Nashville.

We think we'll die if we can't drive. Some of us might, but most of us won't. Pipes can be fixed, rides can be hitched. We'd better learn to relax. There will be more shortages in the future and we'll have to help each other get through them.We'll have to learn not to fight over a place in a gas line. We'll have to quit hoarding and just take what we need. It's really the only way.

P.S. In my last blog, in my fumbling attempt to channel H.L. Mencken, I referred to Chuck's Fish in Tuscaloosa as a world class restaurant. It isn't world class, the flat screen TV's and SYSCO seasoned fries disqualify it from that category. And the waiter, when listing the desserts, pronounced Creme Brulee, "Cream Brulay". However, the grilled Mahi Mahi was excellent. So was the Malbec.}
4:24 AM 
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