Author: Randy Haspel

It’s been more than 20 years since I visited Israel as part of a statewide delegation led by then-Senator Al Gore Jr. It was a multi-religious group, which was great for me as a product of a Jewish home and a Catholic education. I saw the tourist sights, but I was inclined to break away from the group, particularly at night, and stroll the streets in order to get a personal feel for the place. Chance encounters, in combination with walking in ancient footprints, soon had me believing that I was a part of some larger scheme. An old rabbi physically stopped me in the street and pulled me into his classroom for a lecture on goodness, and when he had finished, he invited me to join his communal group and promised to find me a wife.

My last night in Jerusalem, I hailed a cab driven by a young Palestinian, who offered to be my guide. When I told him I was leaving for New York the next day, he proudly displayed a business card from his brother’s sandwich shop inside a Manhattan office building. He had me memorize the address, since it was his only card. I glanced at it and told him I’d look up his sibling if I was in the neighborhood, then forgot about it. The next day, after an endless flight and morning hotel check-in, I was feeling jet-lagged and walked through a side door into the afternoon sun. Directly in front of me, not 30 feet away, was the office building whose address I had seen on the cabbie’s card. I crossed the street, entered the building, and walked up to the lunchroom counter where a gentleman identified himself as the owner. I told him, “I was with your brother in Jerusalem yesterday. He sends his love and wants you to call him.” Lunch was on the house. The proprietor told me that he had married a Jewish girl in Israel and they had come to the U.S. to escape the hostility of their respective families and communities. We agreed that the intolerance between the peoples of the Holy Land was regrettable and when I left him and again walked into the sun, I looked up and said (and I paraphrase myself), “Lord, you’re messing with me.”

Most of the Lord’s messengers have beatific news to deliver, but if I was only supposed to convey a shout-out between brothers, that was cool. Afterward, I walked around for several months searching for signs and wonders, believing the Lord was personally leading me by the hand, until reality returned and I discovered that I had neither been called nor chosen but had an ailment common to unseasoned tourists known as “Jerusalem Fever.” It’s the inclination for first-time visitors to the Holy Land to believe they are personally interwoven with the ongoing religious narrative and are receiving instructions directly from the Deity. Some believe they have been called to play great roles in the events of mankind.

Such a pilgrim is Glenn Beck, who claimed his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C., landed on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech because of “divine providence” and only “wrote out a few bullet points so as not to interfere in case the Spirit wanted to talk.” He professed an “American miracle” was going to occur and attendees would be present “at the awakening.”

Beck’s not that difficult to analyze. A self-confessed “hard-drinking, hard-living ignoramus” gets sober, reads some books, and begins to see patterns. By espousing his conspiratorial views, he is first promoted from talk radio to back-bencher on the Headline News Channel, then on to the big leagues, where he becomes the most controversial “entertainer” on Fox News — no easy feat. Soon his every utterance is dissected by other teleditorialists and his ratings and self-importance grow until he perceives himself as the leader of an earth-changing, transcendent movement. His grandiose scheme drew a quarter million people to the National Mall, but Beck’s gathering was more of a religious revival than a societal shift, and if he was trying to channel Martin Luther King, he came off sounding more like Elmer Gantry.

At his “Million White Man March,” Glenn spoke of returning to God, supporting the military, and the importance of family. Who could argue with that? The firebrand Beck was entirely inoffensive, unless you object to receiving religious instruction from a shill for Rupert Murdoch. The big crowd seemed pleased, but I thought it was like going to a Kiss concert and having the band come out in street clothes playing acoustic guitars.

Unquestionably, Beck possesses accumulated knowledge, but he consistently misinterprets it and ends up connecting the wrong dots. He praises the “chosen people” but rails against “social justice,” which is the cornerstone of the faith. He speaks of “restoring honor,” yet refers to the president as “a person with a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and “a racist.” Personally, I thought the nation’s honor was restored the moment George W. Bush left the White House, and although a short film was shown to commemorate King’s historic 1963 march, there were more blacks on stage as speakers and singers than in the audience.

Beck’s restraint was the result of his promise to keep the event non-political, but the location, the date, and the name, “Restoring Honor to America,” by implication, made it so. To his credit, Beck waited until three hours into the pageant before succumbing to his patented sobbing. He even read the Gettysburg Address. Mostly, he did no harm, which I suppose is a good thing until his next outrageous on-air outburst. But, his stature has been diminished. Beck demonstrated that he’s not a transformational figure and he certainly is no Martin Luther King. Forty-seven years ago, King had a dream; Glenn Beck merely has a delusion.

When the seasons turn, imagine hordes of illegal aliens streaming across the U.S. border dressed in their bizarre native garb and speaking in a foreign tongue, straining our social services and imposing their criminal ethic on sovereign citizens legally in this country.

It wouldn’t be the first time illegal drugs and contraband flowed undetected over that border and into the lives of everyday Americans, along with the accompanying violence that’s always part of the deal. It’s a frightening thought to envision roving gangs of disaffected Quebecois, crossing the Canadian border on snowshoes and wearing toques, speaking crude French slang, and overwhelming border towns like Buffalo and Rochester, hanging out in the parking lots of the Home Depots with huge snow shovels looking to clear someone’s driveway and take a job from an American.

And who can stand that whining music they listen to: Celine Dion and Bryan Adams? During Prohibition, our porous northern border was the gateway for Canadian hooch from the forerunners of the soul-stealing Seagram’s empire, just as today it is the entryway for the demonic “B.C. Bud” and the Manitoba drug cartels. Their entertainers, from Alex Trebek to Howie Mandel, have taken over television, while alien seductresses like Pamela Anderson come all the way to California to portray a lifeguard bouncing her way into our, er, hearts.

No wonder our economy is in the crapper, when Canadians can smuggle their cheap, socialized pharmaceuticals into our country and sell it for half the cost of the identical product here. Busloads of Canadians are trying to escape their evil, Marxist health-care system to come here and have lots of unnecessary tests performed in substandard emergency rooms that serve the uninsured. There are even cabals of subversive comedians, led by Martin Short and Jim Carrey, who try to set the American standard for what’s funny.

This Canadian invasion has reached a tipping point, and true patriots want immediate governmental action to end this outrage. I demand that the fortifications protecting us from Canadian women sneaking into Detroit to have American babies become the president’s top priority. The only good to come out of this breach in our northern border is the proliferation of Canadian restaurants. And their work ethic, of course.

But when these illegals come into this country and take these rare jobs, what do they do? They don’t spend it here. They send their money back home to support their families. The underage, risqué singer Justin Bieber comes to this country, makes a fortune, and sends it right back to his people in some province called Ontario. If he gets sick on tour, he’s got the best medical care the government can offer, and he doesn’t even pay taxes in this country. Same thing with hippie surfer Keanu Reeves, who portrayed an average American teen in the Bill & Ted’s movies, but then I discovered he was not only born in Lebanon, he starred as Prince Siddhartha/Lord Buddha in Little Buddha. At least this Beatleboy Bieber pays taxes somewhere. For all we know, this “transplanted” Lebanese Canadian Reeves could be funding al-Qaeda with his Hollywood money. Plus, I heard he’s part Hawaiian, so there’s got to be something up with his birth certificate. Is it difficult to draw the conclusion that Reeves has settled in California with the intention of raising “terror babies” that will automatically be American citizens, as Texas representative Louie Gohmert has suggested? Is it just a coincidence that suspect leftist superstar moms are already raising North Vietnamese children?

That’s why I’m so grateful to the group of Republican senators who so revere our Constitution that they are prepared to change it in order to stop what Lindsey Graham calls the policy of “drop and leave.” These Canadian women will squat in the bushes like Sacajawea just to have an “anchor baby” that leads them onto the fast track for welfare. Senator Kyl of Texas, Kentucky’s McConnell, Iowa’s Grassley, and — since it’s an election year — John McCain of Arizona have all called for a “review” and potential revocation of the 14th Amendment, which grants American citizenship to those born within our borders.

The tough thing about repealing the 14th Amendment is that it also deals with that “equal protection under the law” business. In these turbulent times, however, perhaps “equal” protection is a little too much for the Mexicans and Muslims to expect. It takes a trained eye to spot a Canadian. The best way is to drop a hockey puck in a crowd and see who dives for it.

Ginning up immigrant xenophobia failed to work for the Republicans the last election cycle, and it will fail again this time. Right-wing candidates for office have offered solutions as varied as internment camps and mass deportation. But most people still come here illegally because they know there are employers who will hire them for more than they can make at home, be it in Alberta or Mazatlan. Americans have forgotten the struggles of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers or politicians like Bobby Kennedy, who championed not only their cause but their dignity. It’s easier to call them all drug mules or arms smugglers than people just trying to scrape by on this earth with their hands.

Wouldn’t it be weird if one day we found out that God was really on Mexico’s side all along and that “Manifest Destiny” actually pertained to them, and that’s why they are this nation’s fastest-growing demographic? I guess when Latinos become the country’s majority, we’ll let them deal with this encroaching Canadianization of the good old U.S. of A.

Mark Williams, the chairman of the Tea Party Express, got booted from the Confederacy of Dunces last month, because, in response to an NAACP suggestion that the group repudiate racial elements within the movement, he wrote and published an “Open Letter to President Lincoln” from the emancipated slaves, something he referred to as “satire.” In his “satire,” all Williams did was put down in words what many Tea Party types refuse to say out loud.

Dear Mr. Lincoln,

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the “tea party movement.”

The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bailouts directly to us Coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds …

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-Coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects Coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely,

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew NAACP Head Colored Person

Laugh? I thought I’d never start! How can you convince someone there is racism in their midst when it runs in their blood? A week later, Williams was still on cable news defending his remarks by saying the NAACP was guilty of reverse racism, which appears to be the Tea Party’s prime rebuttal for all the patriotic Americans’ outrageous behavior at the various kleagle rallies around the nation. Their new hero, Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, expressed the still-burning racist ember that private businesses should be able to choose who they serve. Not if they serve the public, they don’t. And I don’t believe for a second that Paul is a racist. However, when I grew out my beard and started hanging around with people with long hair, they called me a hippie. So, if the sheet fits …

The term “yellow journalism” was created in the late 1800s to describe the sensationalist rhetoric and fabricated stories of newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. The Hearst of the 21st century, Rupert Murdoch, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in order to own multiple media outlets in the same market, like The New York Post,The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News. His brand of contemporary yellow journalism is far more insidious than the sabre rattling of a few newspapers and makes the “Remember the Maine” jingoism of the Hearst era seem almost quaint.

With Fox acting as a running-dog for right-wing extremism, pseudo-smart “entertainers” like Glenn Beck get free rein to espouse their inflammatory “theories.” So, when a real journalist, like The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank, calls Beck out for his serial use of Nazi references to describe the Obama administration, the right’s reaction is to claim that the country is experiencing a phase of “political correctness,” in which their freedom of speech is under attack. They have become oblivious to the difference between “free speech” and “hate speech,” and the saddest and most alarming statement of all about Fox News is their massive ratings success.

Fox virtually leaped on blogger and Tea Party apologist Andrew Breitbart’s odious contention that reverse racism existed at the Department of Agriculture in the person of one Shirley Sherrod. By slicing and dicing Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP, he made a convincing argument that she was discriminating against white people. I confess that I was fooled too. When I saw the initial reports and video of Sherrod on Fox News, I thought that she must certainly resign, and the outrage of the Obama administration and the NAACP was justified. They made the same mistake that I did — assuming that Fox was a semiresponsible news organization that abides by the rules of journalism. How foolish of me.

Why should I have assumed Fox News vetted the Breitbart piece, when he was the one behind the story and video of ACORN’s adventures with the now felonious, fake pimp and then spent six months lying about it? And all in the cause of proving Mark Williams’ supposed point in his “satirical” letter to Lincoln: that honest, hard-working citizens’ tax money goes directly to the support of shiftless layabouts who prefer “big-money welfare” to a job — the raison d’etre of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party darling Tom Tancredo has announced his candidacy for governor of Colorado, only months after waxing nostalgic about literacy tests at the polls during the Jim Crow era. Since good test results are a prerequisite for entering a respected college, isn’t there some way we could institute civics literacy exams for potential candidates for public office? At least check their SAT scores.

Randy Haspel writes the “Born-Again Hippies” blog, where a longer version of this column first appeared.

The initial wave of the hippie movement traveled from west to east, so it didn’t reach Knoxville until well after the 1967 “Summer of Love.” We had more of a “Springtime of Love” in 1968. Toward the end of the school year, rumors reached us that there was marijuana growing wild in the state of Kansas, right in the interstate median.

Just like the Gold Rush of 1849, van-loads of denim-wearing, entrepreneurial hippies raced to the Great Plains and, sure enough, returned with garbage bags filled with something that looked identical to cannabis. It was the remnants of a WWII-era government program that grew the plants for their hemp value. The problem was that the wild plants lacked the psychoactive ingredient that caused the euphoric effect in pot and were pretty much useless for anything other than weaving into handbags or sandals.

I never tried to sell pot, because I lacked the ruthlessness required to profit from your friends, but even I got caught up in this deal. We tried to doctor this cabbage in every way possible, including baking it, but only ended up with brittle leaves of the worst pot anyone had ever tried. It wouldn’t even give you a headache. I finally stashed it in a Styrofoam chest filled with dry ice overnight, and by the next day, the gas from the CO2 made you mildly dizzy. We drove it to Nashville, where a new breed of songwriters had settled, and distributed all of it without complaint — and soon afterward, there was a Renaissance in country music. Okay, that last part was a lie, but we did unload all the Kansas weed on Music Row.

Recently, I was reminiscing with an old friend about that escapade, and we couldn’t help but agree what a dumbass, reckless college-boy thing that was to do, like trying to smoke the inner skin of a banana peel because we had heard Donovan singing “Mellow Yellow.” We also agreed that it would have been a shame to be arrested over such hideous weed during an age when people were going to jail for seeds in an ashtray. The pot was just growing wild, but by picking it and carrying it across state lines, our crime became federal. Kansas ultimately eradicated all the interstate pot because Hefty Bag toting hippies kept popping up on the highways like penal farm work crews. It did occur to me, however, that if this weed could grow wild on a Kansas blacktop, it could pretty much grow anywhere, and, people being who and what they are, it was only a matter of time before the prohibition of pot would be tossed aside just like the prohibition of whiskey. That was eight presidents ago. What has prevented even the discussion of decriminalization until relatively recently has been the same old-boy deal that has always muzzled debate on the issue: political influence. In this case, the alcohol lobby, which is still smarting from having their seductive and subliminal liquor ads removed from television. The pot industry doesn’t have any lobbyists. Plenty of advocates, but no lobbyists.

It was reported on the local news last week that a man was arrested in Memphis after a DEA task-force raid found more than 1,200 pounds of baled marijuana in his Orange Mound home. Initially, he was held in city jail under a bond of one penny less than $10 million. A somewhat saner judge reduced the bail to $250,000, but you’d have thought these guys caught Scarface.

Rapists and murderers are given more consideration and less harsh treatment than a pot dealer, and they do less time. Though the bust warranted a scant five paragraphs in The Commercial Appeal, it was eye-popping news to pot aficionados who are experiencing the annual Memphis summer marijuana drought — or so I’m told. The DEA agents testified that after jack-booting the doors, they found large bales of a “green, leafy substance.” Can you imagine the number of police and the manpower used to haul away half a ton of leaves? In the end, it will all be burned, which was exactly what was going to happen to it in the first place. The dope had a street value of over a half-million dollars.

The zeal with which the local pot dealers were captured and jailed was exceeded last month by the Las Vegas police, who killed a 21-year-old man while serving a marijuana search warrant. And this was in a state where citizens voted to decriminalize possession. The late outlaw’s bride-to-be told local television stations that her intended was “a recreational smoker.” The police recovered “an unspecified amount of marijuana and some digital scales.” A regular Al Capone, this kid.

In the Memphis bust, there will be a trial or two and long incarcerations, costing the city and state and, ultimately, you and me. And because the profit motive is so high, someone else will take these guys’ place and the pot sales will continue. Author Eric Schlosser writes, “There are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any time in American history.” And that population will only grow as long as police forces around the country maintain the marijuana home-invasion mentality. Imagine if the ban on the plant were lifted for adults and regulated and taxed by the government. How many more policemen or teachers would that tax revenue hire? How much gang violence would be diffused by removing the profit from illegal pot sales? How would our problems on the Mexican border be affected if the demand for marijuana smuggling were eliminated?

I’m not naive enough to believe that there won’t always be a demand for illegal narcotics, but hard drugs that do emotional and physical damage are another matter entirely, and if we are being honest, we’ll admit our major national drug problem is with good old homemade American pharmaceuticals. I’d prefer to be able to take advantage of that “pursuit of happiness” thing. All these people are running around screaming that their freedoms are under siege and they want their country back. Well, so do I. No federal agency forbids you from growing poppies on the veranda. Give me the freedom to determine what grows in my own backyard. I want the government out of my bedroom and the police out of my garden. This is an issue worthy of a Tea Party.

I enjoy celebrating Independence Day much the same way I do New Year’s Eve — I stay off the streets. The nation’s birthday has become an annual orgy of mattress and auto sales, not to mention the charcoal and lighter fluid. Aside from visiting with family and friends, there’s really no good reason to leave the air conditioning for outdoor activities now that the fireworks display over the Mississippi River was moved due to budget issues. However, the amateur fireworks were so loud on my block that we had to sedate the dogs. After viewing the July 4th hot-dog eating contest at Coney Island, live on ESPN, I thought I would need sedation myself.

This has got to be the only country in the world where some people go hungry, while others are “professional” eaters. But who could object to a good old-fashioned sausage-eating contest that’s been going on at Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Stand since 1916? I can. The once good-time event has now gone big-time with the formation of the Major League Eating organization. It is the governing body that oversees all professional eating contests in the nation, under the auspices of the International Federation of Competitive Eating. The MLE is looking toward global expansion, but it is limited to places where they actually have food. Other than the U.S. and Japan, I think the league is having trouble fielding a team in countries like Haiti or Bulgaria. And it’s no longer merely hot dogs. In a year, there are more than 80 major scheduled events, like the Krystal Square-Off and the Pizza Hut P’Zone Chow-lenge, with corporate sponsors as varied as Smirnoff Vodka and Netflix. The Coney Island competition was co-sponsored, appropriately, by Pepto Bismol. I like a Nathan’s hot dog myself, just not 50 at once.

This year’s contest was engulfed in controversy when former champion and world-renowned eater Takeru Kobayashi refused to participate because of an “impasse” with Major League Eating. The Japanese challenger left the Mustard Belt up for the taking since the MLE wanted to bar him from participating in “outside competitions.” This meant clear sailing for defending champ, Joey Chestnut, who out-gorged the rest of the field, winning by nine dogs plus buns. Without Kobayashi to spur him on, along with the 95 degree temperature, Chestnut fell far short of his own record of 68 dogs in 10 minutes, devouring a mere 54 red-hots and half a bottle of Pepto. The real drama came after the event ended, when Kobayashi, wearing a green “Free Kobi” T-shirt, attempted to storm the stage during the award ceremony and was arrested and carted off by the police. The huge crowd of spectators chanted, “Let him eat,” while the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” blared over the loud speakers. Just like professional wrestling, allow a league to take monopolistic control, bring in the corporate sponsors, and there goes your “sport.”

In the end, the event looked more like the marathon dancers of the Thirties — doing something unnatural and demeaning for the entertainment of the mob in the hope of winning the $10,000 grand prize. The “color commentators,” who kept referring to the bingers as “athletes,” reported that Chestnut consumed 20,166 calories in 10 minutes while perfecting his technique of shoving two dogs in his mouth at once while doing a little jig to stretch his stomach lining. In his career as a professional eater, Chestnut has won over $200,000, three cars, and a motorcycle. He’s also eaten 10.5 pounds of macaroni-and-cheese in seven minutes and 56 matzoh balls in one sitting, even though he didn’t know what matzoh was before the competition. While the other contestants looked for buckets, Chestnut waved the Mustard Belt aloft while drooling hot-dog juice down the front of a T-shirt covered in corporate logos like a race car driver. I couldn’t decide which was more offensive: the mindless inhalation of massive amounts of food or the corporate takeover of “the sport of competitive eating.”

This Super Bowl of gluttony is a typically American spectacle that would be an occasion for mirth were it not for the fact that the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater since the Gilded Age of Robber Barons. But even then, the “in-your-face” attitude was subdued, lest the proletariat rise up and storm the suburbs. Major League Eating does nothing to help the nation’s obesity epidemic, especially now that Tennessee has been ranked second in the country, only behind Mississippi, as the fattest state in the union.

There are many issues to blame, but there is no worse perpetrator in the enlarging of America than the fast-food restaurant chains. I sympathize with people who struggle with their weight, but lately it seems as if most have simply stopped the struggle. Exhibit A is the sandwich sold by KFC consisting of two fried chicken breasts filled with bacon and cheese, a heart attack available in the drive-thru. Morbid obesity is so common here that the front pew in church looks like the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line. Major League Eating seems sort of incongruous while the Memphis Food Bank is feeding over 186,000 people per year who otherwise would not have nourishing meals. Other than gluttony and sloth, there is a word that describes this big-money, “professional” eating circuit: disgusting.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reading music reviews in Memphis’ various newspapers. Perhaps it’s time for someone to review the audience. I’ve picked my concerts carefully, ever since I realized that people don’t know how to act in public anymore. In Tunica, a Santana concert turned into a drunken frat party and some button-downed buzz-cut sloshed a beer down my back. I passed up tickets for Steely Dan because the show was on Mud Island. Afterwards, a friend told me tales of shouting drunks screaming their conversations over the band’s music and wanting to fight when asked to keep it down. Where we once went to concerts to get high and listen to the music, now it’s to get drunk and party. For me to attend a show these days, the artist has to be unique, and I need a reserved seat and an unobstructed view of the stage.

When I bought tickets to see Nancy Wilson with Arturo Sandoval at the Cannon Center, I expected an older, more sophisticated crowd. I imagined that the rarely seen Ms. Wilson would surely draw a more musically knowledgeable audience, one that would appreciate the two jazz legends. Not a chance. The event quickly descended into another Memphis embarrassment, complete with heckling, crowd misconduct, and admonishments from the promoter.

The performance drew only a half-filled house, yet still people came late. Thirty and 40 minutes into the concert, ushers with flashlights were still making rows of people stand to accommodate the tardy arrivals, who seemed oblivious to the distraction they were causing. Maybe some of the attendees thought they were going to see one of those guitar-playing Wilson sisters in the band Heart. At some point, “fashionably late” becomes unreasonably rude. After all, this was Nancy Wilson at the Cannon Center, not Meat Loaf at the Coliseum.

The opening act was world-class Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. The Grammy-winning artist and his quartet had played four polished jazz instrumentals when some boorish lout yelled, “We want Nancy.” Sandoval replied, “I want her too, and she’ll be here soon.” But after the next song, the shouts rang out again. The now aggravated Sandoval said, “We’re contracted to play here for a certain period of time,” before his words were drowned out by applause from the supportive crowd. An uneasiness fell over the room as the flustered musician continued, “I’ve never had anybody shout out at me like this before. I hope this won’t be our special memory of Memphis.” Voices of protest and encouragement and a smattering of applause erupted in the darkness. The Latin jazz virtuoso added, “In 50 years, no one has ever shouted at me like this.” I wanted to sink down in my seat and cover my head while the insulted Sandoval played a blistering trumpet solo, seemingly to spite his detractors, and then stalked off stage, pausing only momentarily to acknowledge the standing crowd.

After intermission, the concert promoter and head of Cultural Arts For Everyone (CAFE), Rebecca Edwards, interrupted her welcoming remarks and the announcement of the nonprofit organization’s 10th anniversary to assist some patrons in locating their seats. Edwards scolded the crowd that Sandoval would return to the stage later and was deserving of a standing ovation.

When the house lights dimmed and Nancy Wilson appeared in a stunning red dress and a boot on her broken ankle, little white rectangles began to light up all over the hall. It’s not sufficient to merely attend and enjoy a concert anymore. Now, everyone has to record it on their cell phone and maybe get some hits on YouTube later. Ms. Wilson responded positively to the obligatory audience shouts of “We love you,” until one woman began a personal dialogue with the artist about how much the songs meant to her and her husband. During a dramatic pause at the end of the showcase song “Guess Who I Saw Today,” a man yelled something unintelligible. Before the return of Sandoval and the unspontaneous love-fest that was to come, my wife and I left the building, wondering exactly when decorum died.

I’ve seen recent concerts in Nashville — including Van Morrison at the Ryman Auditorium and Steely Dan at Starwood Amphitheatre — that were memorable. Maybe because Nashville has so many residents who are musicians or friends of musicians, they show a little more reverence for the music. But obnoxious audiences spring up in every part of Memphis, in all types of venues. This is why I haven’t performed in a club in five years. I finally grew weary of being background noise for diners and drunks, and I thought there must be something else I can do. That’s why you’re reading me instead of hearing me. We don’t need to personally interact, and I can read your comments at my leisure.

I admire the persistence of Rebecca Edwards in her continuing quest to bring cultural experiences to Memphis. I would have thrown up my hands long ago, since I subscribe to the adage “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” After an endless caravan of yesterday’s country stars and geriatric rock bands, perhaps jaded Memphis audiences take live music too much for granted. I believe, however, that an artist with the stature of Nancy Wilson deserves better. And at these ticket prices, so do I.

Randy Haspel writes the blog “Born-Again Hippies,” where a version of this column first appeared.

“As Democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H.L. Mencken

Former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford once referred to Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce,” but Reagan’s not the “downright moron” Mencken was referring to. At least, Reagan had principles. But there is a direct line leading from Reagan to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin. His “trickle down” economic theory was mocked by his then political rival and future vice president, G.H.W. Bush, as “voodoo economics.” But Reagan’s most glaring error was his pronouncement that “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” Thus began the era of public distrust of government to solve problems and the embryonic stages of what is now the Tea Party movement.

I was astonished that Reagan was elected in the first place. After a career in B movies and a stint as a shill for General Electric, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, where his impact was felt during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunts of the ’50s. Appearing before the committee, Reagan blamed labor unions for “communist infiltration of Hollywood,” and this was when he was still a Democrat. He switched parties in 1962, arguing that the “Democrats had left him.” Conveniently, this was in the heart of the civil rights era, and Reagan had political ambitions. He won the California governor’s race on a “law and order” platform in 1966, just in time to preside over the worst period of social unrest since the Civil War.

Reagan assumed office with all the paternalistic and patronizing attitudes of the “war and whiskey generation” concerning the impertinent hippie protesters. After an anti-war demonstration at Berkeley, where police used deadly force to suppress the protesters, Reagan said this about restoring order on California college campuses: “If it takes a blood bath, let’s get it over with now.” He later attempted to explain that he was only using a “figure of speech,” but consider that Reagan’s daughter, Patti, was an anti-war activist and quasi-hippie. Would he wish for a “blood bath” if it included his own child? As a Vietnam War objector, I was revulsed by the blind ignorance that prevented the rabid right from understanding that these young people protesting in the street were not “communist agitators” but their own children. Reagan parlayed his bellicosity into a commodity and was marketed and sold by the GOP as the old cold-warrior who could restore our tough-guy image in the world after the impotent Jimmy Carter refused to turn Iran into a nuclear sandbox.

It was no accident that Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the location of one of the civil rights era’s most gruesome and murderous crimes. It sent a message about which side of the racial divide he was on and further capitalized on Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of 1968, where the GOP actively courted white Southerners disaffected by the civil rights legislation of the Johnson years. It was a foreshadowing of the heartless budget cuts the Reagan administration would make in social programs and the mindless, unlimited cash machine they would offer to the military.

“Government is the problem” is a good campaign slogan if you intend to be a reformer, but Reagan ran up the highest deficits in history (prior to George W. Bush), ramped up the arms race, and secretly sold weapons to the very regime that had held our diplomats hostage in order to arm anti-government rebels in Nicaragua. Does that sound like less government to you?

Even Reagan’s “aw shucks” speeches were a construction to burnish his uber-patriot image. “The shining city on a hill” and “It’s morning in America” weren’t Reagan’s words. They were speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s. Yet despite the sunny rhetoric, there were consequences to the abandonment of the poor and helpless. It was during Reagan’s term that the rise of inner-city and ghetto gang membership exploded and began to establish franchises in major cities. Reagan’s term saw the creation of violent rap music and the spread of gun violence. And it was in Reagan’s term, during his “just say no” campaign against drug use, that crack cocaine first hit the streets of California and spread into a nationwide scourge.

There is now no question that the CIA planes that delivered arms to the Nicaraguan Contras returned home filled with cocaine. The San Jose Mercury News first reported that crack cocaine was invented, manufactured, and distributed in urban areas by the CIA, but they were forced to print a retraction when their sources recanted.

The “just say no” policy on drugs during the Reagan era is the same policy conservatives use on nearly everything today, especially when it comes to “family values.” In fact, Reagan was the first to recruit right-wing activist Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell as presidential advisers, a post previously held exclusively by Billy Graham. And the eternal Republican talking point that Reagan “ended the cold war” is like crediting Pat Boone with the invention of rock-and-roll. He deserves credit for his consistent anti-communist stance, as do Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and others, but since the Berlin Wall fell on his watch, he gets bragging rights.

He also deserves credit for being a better actor than I thought: He convinced an entire generation that government is an intrinsic evil that must be restricted. The result is the GOP of today. They want smaller government and less governmental intrusion, until an oil rig blows up. Then, the proponents of “small government” find themselves standing on a metaphorical rooftop, holding a sign that says, “Help us!”

The most moving song I know about the Gulf Coast is “Biloxi” by Memphian Jesse Winchester. When he resided here, Jesse went by the name of Jimmy Winchester and fronted a great garage band called the Church Keys. I was a freshman at Christian Brothers High School when he was a senior and a member of the National Honor Society. With a limitless future, Jesse was instead forced to flee this country and accept refuge in Canada rather than participate in the Vietnam War. It was while living as an expatriate that he wrote the wistful “Biloxi,” an evocative childhood memory of frolicking in the salty sea water of the Gulf, made more poignant by Winchester’s circumstances. If a potential draftee sought sanctuary from Vietnam in a foreign land, he became a man without a country and was unable to return to the United States without the threat of arrest and imprisonment. So Winchester wrote “Biloxi” as someone who never expected to see the Gulf again.

The song takes on weighty new meaning today, since none of us may ever see the Gulf Coast again, at least as we remember it.

After Jimmy Carter pardoned thousands of draft resisters living abroad, Winchester was able to sing “Biloxi” at Memphis’ Ritz Theatre on Madison Avenue. It was the same year that Carter tried to warn us about the dire consequences of our dependence on foreign oil. Regardless of your opinion of Carter as president, he was the first advocate for wind and solar energy. Had we heeded that advice 35 years ago, or learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster 20 years ago, we wouldn’t be facing the most massive man-made catastrophe since the New Orleans levees broke five years ago.

But floodwater eventually recedes. A tsunami of oil is a bit more tenacious. With this ecological 9/11 looming, it seems as if even the local politicians still don’t grasp the scope of the danger. Like dense bureaucrats in a disaster movie, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu and Governor Bobby Jindal see no reason to suspend permits for future off-shore oil exploration, even while the Louisiana marshes are dying.

BP has become the villain of this piece, although they are as beholden to the petrol cartels as any other major oil trust. What’s astonishing is their admitted cluelessness over what to do about it. Too bad we don’t have an underwater equivalent to Red Adair. When alleged “experts” in their field begin asking the public for suggestions on how to plug a leak, you know we’re in big trouble. And they continue to refer to it as a “spill.” A spill is what happens to a glass of wine. Two million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf every day is not a spill. It’s an underwater volcano, and BP’s attempt to insert tubing into the shattered pipes to capture the oil is like siphoning water from the Mississippi with a garden hose. Now, a month after the explosion and fire, we have only seen their faulty caps and cement doghouses fail to stop it. The company’s latest plan is to bombard the area with tires, ropes, and shredded golf balls. Wasn’t that the premise of a Seinfeld episode? Rush Limbaugh removed an obstruction from his blowhole to blame the Sierra Club for forcing the oil syndicates to drill farther offshore with their pesky regulations. Come to think of it, old Rush might be the perfect fit to plug that thing.

This atrocity’s origins can be found in the era of lax regulation by government and corner-cutting by ruthless profiteers. Since Dick Cheney allowed industry insiders to write this country’s energy policy behind closed doors, we have lurched from one Enron rolling blackout to the next, driven by unfettered corporate greed. No company in U.S. history has benefited more from friends in high places than Halliburton. Yet from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico, Halliburton has been the very model of incompetence. It was Halliburton’s responsibility to properly seal this well, but they used seaweed instead of cement. The only thing more disastrous than Cheney’s oil war has been his corporate crony energy policies. Has there ever been a vice president who has done more personal damage to his country than Cheney? I think there’s finally enough accumulated evidence to charge him with international racketeering under the RICO statutes. Hey, they finally got Al Capone for income tax evasion.

This bomb went off on Obama’s watch, and it’s past time for him to get his wingtips dirty and his ass to New Orleans. If we learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that the perception of leadership in a crisis is as important as the methods used to alleviate the problem. There is an urgency now and action needs to be taken or else those white sand beaches that Jesse Winchester sang about and all that “fun among the sea oats” enjoyed by thousands of Memphians and millions of Southerners will be lost for a century.

The “Redneck Riviera” may seem remote to our countrymen, but let that crude get into the loop current and start landing on the beaches of Miami and Florida’s Gold Coast and we may yet see some outrage. Five states are facing an environmental and economic apocalypse, sea and land creatures face extinction, yet Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, told Sky News, “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.”

My father used to say, “It’s a dirty bird that fouls his own nest.” Heads up to the human race: We just peed in the gene pool.

Randy Haspel writes the blog “Born-Again Hippies,” where a version of this column first appeared.

That was one helluva fortnight we just experienced. There were volcanic eruptions and ash clouds in Iceland, earthquakesin Chile and Indonesia, a slick, slow-motion Katrina headed for the Gulf Coast, an attempted terrorist car bombing in Times Square, and Nashville drowned.

And I was upset because my garage flooded. Millington and Dyersburg got waterlogged too, not to mention the hapless Beale Street Music Festival. The festival organizers have begun including the annual rainfall in the event’s promotion. They have attempted to tie in the “Old Faithful” downpour with the folklore of the festival, and the mud is now supposed to be just part of the adventure. Sorry, no one but a toddler enjoys slopping around in the mud. This year, the torrential rains had to compete with the wailing of tornado sirens and a park evacuation. The Memphis in May folks need to stop pretending this mud-fest will one day turn out all right and go ahead and change the damn dates. Here’s a thought: Schedule it the last weekend in May.

Of course, international events made the music festival the least of our worries. It seemed as if every type of disaster occurred except a bomb detonating in the capital. Oh, I forgot: Jay Leno’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

And while the country’s mass media was fixated on the Texas League car bomb that some swine planted in Gotham’s theater district and dumb-ass politicians and their rabid, radio masters speculated that Obama sabotaged the BP oil rig to prevent further offshore drilling, Nashville went snorkeling. My Music City pals inform me the flooding was devastating, including the suburb of Bellevue, where no sane resident would have dreamed of wasting money on flood insurance before now. The downtown area and the Country Music Hall of Fame were under water, with several top musical acts, including Keith Urban, Vince Gill, and Rascal Flatts, reporting the total loss of their gear.

Meanwhile, a man-made disaster is oozing its way toward our friends on the Gulf Coast, like they need more problems. Perhaps it’s time to ask Governor Bobby “Sox” Jindal: “How’s that ‘Drill Baby Drill’ thingy workin’ out for ya?” Everyone is hating on BP, but if it wasn’t them, it would be another amoral conglomerate. Remember the scenes in all those western movies where the wildcatter strikes oil? The reason we call them “gushers” is the same reason it’s not wise to drill offshore for oil.

The Los Angeles Times reported allegations of negligence by, guess who, Halliburton! Cheney’s old firm was in charge of cementing the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and their work was as professional as the electric showers they installed in Iraq. In remote Alaska, the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill continue to be felt 20 years later. In Louisiana, the people who used to shuck oysters can now get jobs washing grease off waterfowl.

It took NYC’s finest and the FBI only two and a half days to catch the unibrow bomber. A half-hour later and the guy would have been on the way to Dubai. With all this nightmarish airport “security” that we have endured since 9/11, the culprit managed to purchase a one-way ticket — with cash — to the United Arab Emirates and was taxiing toward take-off when the plane was halted and he was taken into custody. His first words to arresting officers were “I’ve been expecting you,” leading some to speculate that this entire escapade was a scheme to test federal officials.

If the “no fly” list proved to be ineffectual, consider that the homegrown malcontent only recently returned from five months in Pakistan, bought a gun in Connecticut last month, and was videotaped stocking up on fireworks in Pennsylvania. Though the bomber’s ineptitude has been ridiculed by the cable news stations, this country was only a few I.Q. points short of another major terrorist attack, proving our vulnerability despite the draconian Bush/Cheney policies. Is it that difficult to connect the dots between a Pakistani vacation, gun and fireworks purchases, cash for propane tanks and containers of gasoline, and a whole shitload of fertilizer?

On a positive note, many people are now converts to health-care reform after a rash of cardiac infarctions last Thursday when the Dow dropped 1,000 points. Now, the SEC is looking for a fat-fingered trader whose decimal-point mistake nearly crashed the market. When I was first learning about the stock market from my father, I asked him what was to prevent another crash like the one in 1929? He told me that after the crash, regulations were put in place governing esoteric practices like margin stock purchases, ensuring that what had happened leading up to the Great Depression could never reoccur. Satisfied, I rolled over in my crib and finished my nap.

Of course, that was before Ronald Reagan was elected president and the era of de-regulation began in earnest. I’m still waiting for an entire generation to wake up to Reagan’s bogus claim that government is somehow the enemy. The government exists to protect us from our enemies, and right now it looks as if those might be domestic terrorists and unbridled, unregulated American corporate interests.

My sympathies go out to our neighbors inundated by oil, fire, and floodwater. With friends like these, who needs al-Qaeda?

Randy Haspel writes the blog Born-Again Hippies, where a version of this column first appeared.

It would only figure that being gay would also make you bipartisan. Or so says a trough of bilge named William Gheen, who is the head of the South Carolina branch of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). This “up is down” method of reverse labeling used to be called Orwellian, until the Michael Jordan of bizarro sloganeering, Frank Luntz, emerged to advise the GOP. So, ALIPAC is merely Luntzian for “Round ’em up, load ’em up, and move ’em out.”

Even professional xenophobe Lou Dobbs was offended by Gheen’s jaw-dropping speech to a Greenville, South Carolina, Tea Party rally, in which he demanded that Senator Lindsey Graham “come out of that log cabin closet” and “tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality.”

If that weren’t sufficient nastiness for one speech, the Gheen slime creature continued: “I need to figure out why you’re trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to be sure you being gay isn’t it.” In a state famous for political luminaries like Strom “Jungle Fever” Thurmond and Governor Mark “The Gaucho” Sanford, Gheen has publicly accused the senator of being manipulated by blackmail to maintain his “secret.” The days of blackmailing public officials over their sexuality have pretty much ended in this country — all except for one place: the Republican Party.

There’s a documentary film worth seeing, readily available on cable, called Outrage, which proves it’s hard out there for a closeted, gay Republican. Gay activists, weary of legislators living one way and voting another, gathered witnesses to provide anecdotal evidence that some of the GOP’s fiercest opponents of same-sex marriage and gay rights are themselves closeted gays. Rumors about Graham’s sexuality are common D.C. gossip fodder, but this unprovoked public attack occurred because ALIPAC is really more concerned about Graham’s conduct in the Senate chamber, rather than the bed chamber.

Not that I savor defending a red-state conservative who called the health-care reform bill “a Ponzi scheme.” But Graham is one of the few remaining Republicans who, on occasion, will work with members of the opposite party for the benefit of the country. This dying breed was known in a previous century as a “moderate.” Gheen must think “reaching across the aisle” means something else.

The right’s outrage over Graham results from his co-sponsorship of an immigration-reform bill with New York liberal Democrat Chuck Schumer. Queer-baiting is merely the surest and fastest way to rile up the rubes into indignant opposition, and the insinuation that Graham is somehow being coerced into working with the Democrats sounds like a bad plot from a cold-war espionage movie. Judging from the roaring response from the Tea Party crowd, however, it seems gays are among the last groups that it is still safe to publicly demonize.

Openly gay congressman Barney Frank has endured slings and arrows from his critics yet remains an effective Democratic advocate, while Republican governor Charlie Crist of Florida, outed as a closeted gay in the aforementioned documentary, is about to be hounded from the party. The Tea Party has declared jihad on those Republicans they determine to be insufficiently conservative and there’s an ethnic-cleansing taking place to purge the ranks of the weakhearted. But screaming “homo” at Lindsey Graham wasn’t really about sexuality. It was about immigration. I guess if you can get mud on several groups at once with just one swipe of the brush, all the better. Nothing gets the Tea Partiers’ blood up faster than a hot-tempered tub-thumper railing against illegal immigrants or homosexuals, and if you’re a gay Mexican, God help you.

The true outrage is that confessed whoremongers like David Vitter and John Ensign remain in Congress, unscathed by the censure of their colleagues, while Graham, who served six years in the Air Force and in the JAG Corps during the Gulf War, is smeared by the “new right.”

This sort of ugliness is part of the reason why sane people question the Tea Party’s motives. They call for less intrusive federal government but demand an unconditional ban on abortion; they want a smaller government while we fight two wars with an economy on life support but don’t want to touch Social Security, Medicare, or the military budget. They believe in the principle of state’s rights yet favor a national constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. And when a state — as Arizona just did — grants powers to the police to detain and demand identification from anyone at any time and for any reason, that is called “fascism.” It’s what the “Greatest Generation” sacrificed nearly 300,000 men to fight against in WWII. But then again, Arizona produced Barry Goldwater and was the last state to acknowledge a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. And it’s a state where war hero John McCain has to re-animate his Frankenstein monster, Sarah Palin, to help him win a Republican primary.

There is an angry, anti-incumbent mood in the air, and the Democrats will undoubtedly lose seats in 2010. But should the Tea Party confuse that for a personal victory and continue polluting the air with their public vitriol, they will share the same destiny as the Dixiecrats in 1948. Or as their candidate, old Strom Thurmond, used to call them between visits to his sweet thang: “real Americans.”

Randy Haspel writes the blog “Born-Again Hippies,” where a version of this article first appeared.