Or accurately a song industry: the one that keeps pumping out Nashville's road songs.
I am thinking particularly of Tim Nichols' "HEADS CAROLINA, TAILS CALIFORNIA" and "YOU AIN"T IN KANSAS ANYMORE" , as sung by Jo Dee Messina.
God, how I love those songs: songs so infectious that they'd make a graveyard of old tombstones get up and dance a two-step.
Yet I know I really shouldn't.
They might seem innocent enough - just modern day variants of ole Huck Finn's decision to 'lit out for the Territories', keeping well ahead of Grecian aunts bearing Civilization.
Ultimately though, they're DENIER MUSIC, in much the same way that Western novels and Hard SF are DENIER LIT.
Unfortunately it is their same spirit that fuels every pollution-denying, wage&tax&safetystandards-moaning greedy SOB's decision to close his factory and head off to newer pastures where there are no unions, laws or taxes.
When the smallest, poorest nation on Earth gets 'too expensive', too 'regulation-bound', too 'democratic', these greedy SOBS are just going to head off for PLANET B (Mars) --- only this time they'll leave the 99% behind.
The new workers will all be robots and the planet will be privately owned - sorta like the way KOCH INDUSTRIES is already owned and operated today : only the KOCH BOYS will be running a gated planet, instead of just a gated company.
I mention the Koch boys not of any particular sense of malice but because their company (seemingly the monetary archangel to every single denier worth funding) was founded in and is still housed in Wichita Kansas.
"You Ain't In Kansas Anymore" plays off the famous line from Dorothy and "The Wizard of Oz" and off the general sense in America that the NEW YORKER magazine and its sophisticated ilk are precisely edited so as to not appeal to people from Wichita.
The addressee in the song tells the singer that he's from Wichita, a kinda 'Mayberry sort of town'.
The singer already knows this, because after kissing the headlights out of him under the Hollywood sign, she cuddles close and whispers, out here we call it "ronel, not rodeo" : sonny, you're in the big fast megacity of LA - not in Kansas anymore.
So Wichita has long been set up at the epitome of non-coolness or alternatively, as the home of decent law-abiding,God-fearing, Constitution-worshipping red-blooded Americans.
The Koch boys see it as the latter, and in 1974 as Environmentalism blossomed after the Oil Spike, they choose this armpit of non-coolness to thumb their nose at what they thought was the NEW green Hegemony ,as they birthed the Cato Institute and the DENIER movement in Wichita.
We will never ever understand or halt what the Kochs began, until we emotionally understand the power over all of us that Huck Finn and Joe Dee Messina's message has: otherwise as in the film "The Seventh Seal", we will all sing and dance our butts off, while driving happily in our gas-guzzler on an one-way trip into our graves.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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