Okay so there are a lot of things I'd like to discuss today. First I'd like to welcome Calliope into the world, a healthy 9lbs baby (to hell with the doctors and their scales we're rounding up). Looking forward to seeing her real soon.
Second I'd like to thank everyone who came out to see all the shows I've had this year we had our last show of this run, and I won't be on stage again until sometime next year. I'm delighted to say while all the shows were great last night we really went out with a bang, and to a packed house no less. So thank you all you really made the whole experience more fun, and I'm glad you enjoyed it because that meant so much to me. On to the mental musings.
Last night's Rachel Maddow show is another must see, she eviscerates the man claiming to be able to "cure" the gay. Seriously if you have the time, watch it. While I was watching it though I couldn't help feel like I was watching a plotline of an episode of X-men, where once again someone claims to have found a cure to the mutant "disease" and now being a mutant is a choice, and since it's a choice we are now free to strip non-violent people of there rights and in the case of Uganda their life. I'm not sure when Stan Lee created the X-men he was envisioning a perfect analogy to the civil rights of lgbt but hey I'm just observing the similarities and it's fascinating.
It has occurred to me before, but the more I think about it, the more important it becomes to me. I have no idea what America is. Not only that I don't think any of us really do, we are all operating on these images in our mind of what our country really is. We all agree our country is great, it is the greatest, best, most free, awesomely stupendously wicked(for you Bostonians), radical nation on the face of time, space and eternity itself. The question is why? We love our country, but why? If you ask a liberal they'll tell you that they love America like a brother or sister who has been in and out of jail for robbery and assault. Yes they love them but they expect so much better from them in the future. Every time they see America slipping back into the patterns that sent them to jail they admonish it and try to change it encourage it to stop drinking, maybe talk about it's feelings, pick up a trade or a hobby that doesn't involve guns or bombs, or if you must bomb something how about the moon. The right treats America the way Jan Brady thinks the world treats Marsha.
I'm thinking about this because I'm still plowing through all the episodes of This American Life from 1995 to now (I'm up to 98). In one of the last episodes I was listening to was about do-gooders. At one point they were talking about this town that had all but fallen apart in Missouri. Some do-gooders were trying to fix the roads, bring restaurants back to Main Street, have people clean up their litter, convert to a sewer system, generally make things better, because they grew up there and left and made a good life for themselves in St Louis and wanted to restore their hometown. Things don't go well for them, they're home and vehicles are vandalized and they are shot at. What is important to note is that this is Middle America; I'm mean geographically speaking you can't really get much more middle.
This set my mind to thinking, we all know when politicians talk about welfare moms, and people taking advantage of the support structure and social welfare programs they're talking about minorities specifically blacks and Latinos but in a pinch any minority will due. Yet we know that statistically there are more poor white Americans on welfare then any other minority. If this is true how does this perception persist? The reason is we don't talk about rural America. What was the last story in the nyt, wsj, wapo, that began Beverly, Kansas? There is a perception of non-costal America, we call it the heart land, some call it the real America, we have all these inspiring images of Middle America, but I can't tell you anything about it. I honestly don't know but if it's anything like upstate New York, then what I can tell you is that it's in desperate need of social services. As a techie geek I can't live in an area without a decent internet connection, and in Missouri some places are struggling with a managed sewer system. This is the story of America, we have major disparities, and none of us really know how the rest of us live. I want to know about America, both rural and urban, in all its tragic, depressing, exciting, boring detail this will be more relevant than Tiger Woods, Sarah Palin, Kanye West, Carrie Prejean and the entire cast of gossip girl. But hey what do I know, I hated "had a bad day" and it was the number one song of this decade.
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