"Rejoice Dear Hearts"

by Peter Cavanaugh

  While early Rock & Roll represented an explosive fusion of “Country & Western” and “Rhythm and Blues”, both basic music forms purely American in origin; it was the English who engaged in an amazing resynthesis — elevating “black music” to a position of cultural preeminence in the world of white Rock. It was The Rolling Stones who effectively did this first and, to many and to this day, do it best.

  And it’s The Rolling Stones I still find myself listening to these days on my morning walks up Stagecoach, now on an iPod cranked to 11, finding continuing inspiration from a band celebrating their Fiftieth Anniversary this very month.

  Their newest lyrics are as ancient as their old — eternal, primal hope springing forth — utterly irrepressible even in the worst of horrid circumstance.

  National debt? Fiscal cliff? War weapons on civilian streets?

  “All I hear is doom and gloom.

  All is darkness in my room.

  
Through the night — your face I see.

  
Baby, come on!

  
Baby, won’t you dance with me?”

  Chapter Five – “Sheikh It Up Baby”

  Al Gore didn’t sell out to Al Jazeera just because they have the same first name.

  There’s that half a billion bucks.

  Al and a pal, businessman Joel Hyatt, formed Current TV on August 1st of 2005 in an effort to create a viable “Progressive” cable information channel to position against Rupert Murdoch’s phenomenally successful FOX News. While becoming available in forty million homes through Gore’s considerable political clout, the basic Current mission has been a big flop. That is — until now.

  Riding to the rescue comes Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, Chairman of Qatar Media and, more importantly, Emir of Qatar, Supreme Chancellor and head of the government of Qatar — a family run business for the last hundred and fifty years. Having overthrown his father in a bloodless 1995 palace coup, the Sheikh enjoys enormous popularity among the 250,000 citizens of this tiny nation geographically squeezed between Iran and Saudi Arabia and it’s no wonder. His constituents are the richest people on the face of the earth, pay no taxes, enjoy free education and health care and have moved from transportation by camel to 747s in a single generation.

  The Sheikh is paying an estimated $20,000 per “Current” viewer with his five hundred million dollar purchase of the channel, which should make you feel important if you’ve been watching, but please know he’s buying viewing location, not viewer loyalty. He’ll be tearing down the old house and erecting something quite new in the neighborhood.

  The current lineup and name “Current TV” will shortly disappear, to be replaced by “Al Jazeera America” – programmed out of New York and Qatar. I know that sounds weird, but this is a changing world — and to influence future change and stay on top — we need to be aware.

  My own familiarity with Al Jazeera — The Island” — comes about through Fresno Free College Foundation’s 50,000 watt KFCF (88.1) which carries both evening news reports and live breaking coverage when appropriate from “Al Jazeera English.”

  Admittedly quite skeptical at first, I now regard the service as thoroughly professional, impressively produced and journalistically superior to much of what we find ourselves receiving these days from our traditional commercial broadcast networks, squeezing every penny for more profit to the bottom line.

  News bureaus have been closed by the dozens and staffers fired by the hundreds as viewers and readers have been short changed by the tens of millions.

  To the embarrassment of our culture, the most penetrating foreign reporting is often found in documentaries that run on the financially challenged Public Broadcasting Service, often in the work of young journalists who are forced by circumstance to finance their own projects or rely on the occasional philanthropic grant.

  So here comes the Emir with billions to boogie.

  Since its creation in November of 1996, Al Jazeera has become one of the most powerful media sources on the globe and is generally credited with being “the engine of the Arab Spring”.

  Bob Simon conducted an extensive interview with The Emir in an impressive “Sixty Minutes” segment about Qatar on January 15th of last year. Check it out. It’s worth your Google.

  Qatar was our ally with NATO in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and is recognized by many as a force for lasting peace in the Middle East, a view not shared by the current Israeli government.

  American Secretary of State Hilary Clinton recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers “real news” — something she said American media was falling far short of doing. The Secretary added that other countries and global news outlets were making more inroads around the world than we are and that “the United States is losing the information war.”

  Wait? What do I hear?

  “The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming!

  Hey, they’re already here!

  Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia — with a personal wealth of 28.7 billion dollars — is the second largest owner of — FOX News.

  In this changing world.

  Chapter Six – “N.R.A.”

  There’s recklessness in the air.

  This is a winter of deeply divisive discontent.

  Even though the American people have spoken.

  Barack Obama was elected in November for a second term as our President with a 51% to 48% win over his opponent — a three and a half million vote victory margin. Democrats in The United States Senate now outnumber Republicans 54 to 45 and picked up eight seats in the House of Representatives, where they now trail the GOP by just 33 votes, a significant shift away from their former 49-member majority. In fact, there were a million more Democratic ballots cast for House members than Republican on a national basis in 2012, but some fancy pre-election hanky-panky (formally known as “Gerrymandering”) is keeping John Boehner as Speaker for another two years of crocodile tears.

  Elbridge Gerry was Governor of Massachusetts in 1812 and helped engineer the restructuring of several state senate districts to benefit his political party, said organization curiously known at the time as “Democratic Republicans”. Their opposition was The Federalists. A local Federalist newspaper in Boston casually noted that one of the new “carved out” sections resembled a grossly contorted — salamander. Combining this humorous imagery with the good Governor’s name, the practice of gaining advantage by such chicanery became known as “Gerrymandering.” The name has stuck ever since for over two centuries, therein offering an important cautionary note for writers of all stripes. Words do live on.

  Elbridge Gerry continued his political career to become Fifth Vice President of the United States under James Madison — as everyone knows.

  But one clear, undisputed, unqualified fact of the entire matter is that the sole reason the GOP controls the 113th House of Representatives is because they gerrymandered congressional districts through a 30 million dollar investment during the 2010 election cycle in “blue states” such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This campaign was so successfully executed that Republicans went from controlling both legislative chambers in 14 states before Election Day to 25 states afterward, paving the way for new salamander art.

  Now they’re trying to work that same slithering magic with rules governing the Electoral College, scheming and dreaming that a future Presidency might similarly be sliced out.

  All of this was released last Thursday by the Republican State Leadership Committee, along with the specific admission that only through such activity was the House not lost. This was also the same time Lance Armstrong gave it up to Oprah, although not nearly as fully as the RSLC in honestly owning up to cause and effect. Admittedly clever manipulation carried the day. Score a big one in memory of the Gipper.

  So — here’s the deal.

  Along with all the aforementioned realities, even Ronald Reagan wanted to ban assault rifles.
He remembered being shot. Latest accredited polling shows 56% of American voters believe laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict while 7% say regulations ought to be lessened. 85% of respondents are in favor of background checks for private and gun show sales with only 12% opposed. 63% of the American people support a stringent limitation on high capacity magazines. A total ban on military war weapons, such as used to kill twenty little kids in Connecticut, is favored by an overwhelming majority of fellow citizens 55% to 40%.

  So who are these creatures calling our President an “elitist hypocrite” in a misleading radio and television ad referencing his young daughters with a dangerous appeal to the worst instincts of gun-rights subversives?

  How can any fair-minded individual consider the National Rifle Association to be anything other than a cowardly cabal of antagonistically angry and horribly frightened old men?

  As English Moralist Samuel Johnson reminded us on April 7, 1775, false patriotism is “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

  They dare to flamboyantly wrap themselves in our treasured flag with feigned defiance, hiding from their fear as a small child shakes and trembles behind its mother’s apron.

  Pathetically pitiful.

  Outrageously antiquated.

  Surely shameless.

  The N.R.A.?

  Not Really American.

  Chapter Seven – “Fairly Unbalanced At The Speed of Lies”

  It sometimes seems half my old friends are three-quarters nuts, but few of them watch FOX.

  Given a career background in broadcasting and advertising from the late ’50′s onward — “Mad Men” being outrageously authentic — this might not come as a complete surprise, but I should offer further subjective commentary that these particular vocational endeavors did and do require a certain degree of basic smarts, however jaded.

  And so it was I found myself not thoroughly mystified near the end of last year when a “Press Release” was released by an outfit identifying itself as “The Intelligence Institute” stating that its researchers tested 5,000 people measuring everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as FOX News viewers and “Conservative” had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. The results of this “4 year study” were said to solidly establish the fact Americans who obtain their news from FOX News channel have an average IQ of 80, which would represent a 20 point deficit from a norm of 100 — not that far from special needs.

  But there was no Santa Claus. Such dramatic testimony quickly turned out to be a fanciful hoax concocted as a Pre-Christmas prank by who knows whom, but I am happy to report that investigation into the authenticity of such a delicious allegation did establish several unchallenged findings by the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

  It seems Conservatives regularly demonstrate their proclivity for accepting without challenge many outrageous falsehoods presented by FOX personalities and their foam-at-the-mouth counterparts in Talk Radio due to enlarged — and here’s a word you don’t often hear at the barber shop — “amygdales” — such condition being associated with greater emotional inflexibility and accelerated danger response.

  Amygdales are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located within the media temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates. That includes us. Have you checked yours today?

  This physiological variance would seem to account for many Conservatives displaying a greater susceptibility to conspiracy models of thinking, “they’re coming for our guns” being a timely case in point.

  Absurdly spun tales driven by anxiety and fear find immediate, almost pleasurable acceptance in the minds of our enlarged amygdale brethren, perhaps making more understandable ready acceptance of such novel concepts as “FEMA concentration camps”, “Obama otherness” and “enhanced interrogation.”

  An excellent book entitled, “The Republican Brain” by Chris Mooney ((John Wiley & Sons – 2012) tends to strongly echo the idea of congenitally impaired cognizance, as does a Farleigh Dickinson University study which reveals that FOX viewers are the worst-informed media consumers in the America they profess to love. PBS came in first, just ahead of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. How ’bout that? And the Colbert Report is right behind. Pun intended.

  Mooney offers fascinating elaboration, but it pretty much comes down to ready Republican acceptance of only those thoughts, ideas and philosophies that offer comfortable conformity with already established, often pre-conditioned beliefs. Ultimately, it seems more a case of “nothing new” than “low I.Q” — Resurgent Isolationism — the last mindset we need as ready or not we accelerate our collective slide through time.

  Paraphrasing the late Bette Davis as she so brilliant spoke of aging — “The 21st Century is no place for sissies.”

  And perhaps no place for FOX News without substantial changes in programming and presentation.

  Check out this — “Breaking News!”

  In January of 2013, FOX News had its worst prime-time ratings in the coveted 25-54 demographics since August 2001 and its lowest total day ratings since June 2008. And — gasp — MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow beat “Studio B” and the 11 PM repeat of “The O’Reilly Factor” for the very first time. Even many “Republican Brains” have had enough — FOX’s interpretation of the famous phrase “fair and balanced” finally perceived as the hideously cruel joke it always was.

  As for a concluding analytical summation, I love the quote Mr. Mooney chose to open his book and close this week’s column with it here:

  “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” — Stephen Colbert

  Chapter Eight – “Bullfighting in Coarsegold”

  Although the Oakhurst area has been treated to two separate displays of impressive support for gun rights these last few weeks at the intersection of Highways 41 and 49, local participants might as well have been demonstrating against the introduction of bull fighting at next year’s Coarsegold Rodeo.

  No one is discussing any such thing, just as no one is talking about taking anyone’s guns away or introducing any major legislation nationally that hasn’t already been the law here in California for at least the last two decades.

  The old “Slippery Slope” argument isn’t remotely applicable. That’s like arguing for no speed limits in characterizing any form of collective restraint as inevitably opening the door to complete restriction. As Mr. Spock would observe — that’s not a logical perspective.

  So let’s use basic reason.

  What has President Obama’s history been on gun legislation since he took office in January of 2009?

  In February of that year, he supported former President George Bush’s last minute rule before leaving office allowing loaded guns in national parks.

  In 2010, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave the President a report card of seven F’s for his first year in office, including one on “standing up to the gun lobby.”

  FactCheck.org reported at the end of 2011, “We’ve seen little or no evidence that the Obama Administration is doing much to regulate guns or gun ownership.”

  Caroline Brewer, Director of Communication for the Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says, “We certainly don’t have a record of President Obama calling for an elimination of any kind on handguns in the United States.” Brewer adds, “After the near fatal shooting of U.S. Representative Gabby Gifford, the President called for better background checks, not banning guns.”

  All of the above is presented in response to a number of anti-Obama, anti-government proclamations included in the recent Tea Party supported Oakhurst demonstrations.

  Can’t our poor President do anything potentially right for the seemingly outraged politically right? And let’s be mindful of the fact that President Obama’s record on Gun Safety prior to the Sandy Hook killings, particularly lack of inclusion or even the slightest reference to the issue in his successful re-election campaign, has earned him significant negatives from t
he left wing of his own party.

  To help set the record straight, the Democratic Club of Oakhurst will be distributing informative leaflets on both Saturday, March 16th, and Saturday, March 23rd, from 2 till 4 in front of Von’s.

  I already have my own sign ready. It simply says, “Support the Constitution! NO Confiscation!”

  We’ll have a copy of the Second Amendment visible as well. It states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

  I am of the opinion that the phrase “well regulated” clearly necessitates reasonable measures of control, meaning it’s probably not cool to keep nuclear tipped rockets in one’s garage. And I believe the words “free State” can be fairly defined as the new government existing on December 17, 1791 — known to all these days as our current United States of America. It’s hard for me to envision our Founding Fathers declaring, “If we get this wrong, shoot us!”

  Anyone who thinks they’re going to overthrow a tyrannical federal government with their AK-47′s might want to read up on drones, cruise missiles, our Navy SEALs and APC’s.

  Please.

  Chapter Nine – “McClintock No April Fool”

  Guilty.

  When I first learned the date of April First being fortuitously chosen for our Fourth District Congressman Tom McClintock’s first appearance at an Oakhurst “Town Meeting”, I herein confess being overcome with exuberant expectation. I savored the joyous prospect of reviewing his visit with some sort of playfully pejorative “April Fool” headline. As can be seen above, this was not to be.

  It was pretty much a Tea Party party.

  Even North Fork Steve was there — a political peacock fully costumed in colorfully enchanting, majestically magnificent, red, white & blue patriotic garb. Betsy Ross would have been proud. Steve got to close the session with a passionate, almost tearful expression of gracious gratitude extended to Mr. McClintock for his service to the nation, including an apology for having inadvertently exposed such a distinguished visitor to a lack of proper decorum on the part of certain unspecified individuals.