Nailing a few theses on the door

[pseydtonne]

I'm on my second work-shift weekend. This one has been so much quieter that I'm watching TV and commenting to my LJ. Day seven without coffee has been quiet and leisurely. Last night when I posted, I had just dealt handily with the only call of the day. I slept like a log last night.

I started watching the PBS special "Get Up Stand Up", which claims to be about protest music. More than 70% seems to be "charity concerts of the latter Twentieth Century. I keep cringing as Chuck D has to make the Eighties sound activist. Then they throw Liz Taylor on the screen saying how beautiful giving is and I want to melt her face with a hair dryer.

So I gotta ask: is anyone else getting tired of Baby Boomers telling their story of the Nineteen Sixties? Naw really, let's bury them as they retire. Let's take all their money and cure a few diseases, the first of which being Obsessive Televised Nostalgia Disorder (which we can pronounce "aught-nid").

I am tired of seeing honkies pontificate about the meaning of the Black Panthers.

I am tired of hearing about how bad the Vietnam War was when the same people can't get their shit together to end the two wars we're running now.

Why do millionaire musicians go chugging? If they get ten bucks from ten thousand of us, that's $100,000. If one of them gets an accountant to shuffle some income to a charity as a tax dodge, it actually funds that accountant's family and keeps him from working the docks with his package tucked in.

It's clear that Chuck D may have only had influence on the last 40 minutes of the two-hour special. It's not not clear that he could be cringing about the middle, crummy 40 minutes of "here's a lot about Live Aid".

I want to be involved. Then I hear these dolled fauns talk and even when they make fun of themselves, I would rather use my energy to extinguish theirs. That's not constructive.

Bono admits one thing in this special: "I'm a vain person. I know it." I'm glad he did do at least one useful thing for the world by selling debt forgiveness to political leaders. It's more than you can say about a lot of musicians. He found the right audience to get done what he believed. Still, he is never going to be human again but I suspect he'd never planned to be.

So yeah, I'm figuring out my energy now that it's decaffed. I'm taking that slowly. I want to help fix the world but it's hard to know what is a good idea besides building and fixing computers.

-haven't finished this thought yet, Dante

Comments

[fuzzplugjones.livejournal.com]

You keep talking like that, they're gonna take away your Democrat Party Membership Card. They have rules against speaking ill of the wealthy elitists!

(and while I'm being snotty, you never did write about WHRWalumni.org, the new community for WHRW Alumni (http://www.whrwalumni.org). Yes I'm Google-whoring right now but you'll thank me at some point :-).)

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

That piece of garbage let Bono get the last word. That's sufficient proof positive that it had nothing to do with protest. I watched it a few nights ago because there was nothing else on, and ultimately the only thing holding me was the trainwreck quality.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I dodged that special entirely; I thought about it, but having watched the Dylan thing (which properly spent most of its time talking to Pete Seeger), I couldn't see what they would cover except We Are The World and Farm Aid.

Until something drastically changes, GBH is owned and run by self-absorbed Boomers, and I missed that generation entirely -- even my parents are a bit older than that and look down with bemused annoyance at the self-indulgence of them. And I'm not sure it's going to get better as they retired, though assisted living quality standards might go up (with the corresponding increase in cost).

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

And by GBH I mean PBS. Sigh. Breakfast.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

"Trainwreck quality" totally nails it. At the end you're seeing people trash-talk each other and then the talkee coming up with excuses. "Why I Hugged Putin, by Bono". Bah.

It was nice to see Michael Franti and Jello Biafra. The former made the train wreck almost slow down because there he is with his daughter hugging him, oblivious to the camera. It was cute. I've hugged Michael Franti and I could understand why no one would ever abandon his side.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Is there really a difference? It's the leader of the scene. It's not like WBUR, where you get the impression these people just don't get what NPR is like in the rest of America and you want to see them suffer.