As part of his notorious race-based “southern strategy,” Nixon led the efforts of conservative elites to co-opt American country-western music. He got the idea from George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which Wallace had filled with country stars like Hank Snow and Hank Williams Jr.

At his Grand Old Opry gig, Nixon bragged that White House performances by Merle Haggard and others had been huge successes with his “very sophisticated audiences” because the country singers spoke to “the heart of America.” He was lying, of course. In his diary, Nixon aide Bob Haldeman confessed that the Haggard concert “was pretty much a flop because the audience had no appreciation for country/western music and there wasn’t much rapport.”

Nixon’s tricky fib and Haldeman’s confession are just more evidence of conservative elites’ cynical manipulation of lower middle class whites in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and other transformative rebellions of the 1960s. Nixon had nothing in common with Merle Haggard’s audience. Blueblood George H.W. Bush had nothing in common with Lee Greenwood’s audience when he deployed Greenwood in his 1988 campaign. That didn’t mean they couldn’t pretend.

The right-wing colonization of country music is still very much in play. There was the 2003 Dixie Chicks controversy. Southern whites burned their albums and country stations blacklisted their music after Natalie Maines said she was ashamed of George W. Bush. And then there was Sarah Palin in 2008 singing “Redneck Woman” with country star Gretchen Wilson in 2008. Next thing you know Mitt Romney will sing about his trailer park upbringing.

This would seem to argue against the point of my “Untamable Melodies” piece. On the surface, it looks like one musical genre has been both domesticated and instrumental in the conservative domestication of its audience. A deeper look tells a different story. Country music, too, is untamable and can still be transformative and transcendent.

First, consider historian Steven Mithen’s points in his terrific book, The Singing Neanderthals. Music evolved from human proto-languages or what Mithen calls “hmmmm” utterances. They are marked by different tones, rhythms, animal sound mimicry etc. When language evolved further, though, it took over human-to-human information exchange. The “hmmmm” habit continued on in song, dance and ritual. It escaped language altogether. Its meaning was no longer even linguistically describable. Nineteenth Century composer Robert Schumann said that the only way to explain what music means is to play it again.

Perhaps because of its natural ineffability, it was used to communicate with the transcendent or the supernatural. Gods, for instance. Music has been escaping the confines of language and the mundane ever since. It is, as noted earlier, always lighting out for the territories with Huck Finn.

It’s significant that that the song that began the contemporary conservative/country music alliance was Merle Haggard’s 1968 hit, “Okie from Muskogee.” Haggard has said repeatedly he meant it as a parody. “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee” was a line said in jest as Haggard’s tour bus passed by the Oklahoma town. The song was captured by conservatives, it didn’t create them.

The same is true of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” He wrote it to mock the rednecks that beat him up outside of a New Mexico bar. An already existing conservative audience took up the song as their own anthem, as they had done with “Okie from Muskogee.”

There is, of course, a difference between pure musical expression and music with lyrics. Music may have escaped language, but what do we make of language that rides the musical magic bus?

We think of 1960s protest music as helping persuade a sleeping public about the horrors of war, segregation and economic exploitation. I think it’s the case, though, that a growing progressive culture used the protest songs not to persuade but to promote emotional, in-group solidarity. The songs’ polemical content was almost incidental. Dylan and others left the genre behind, I believe, because the need for polemics constrained their freedom and creativity.

My point is that music has always outrun efforts to domesticate it or use it for limited ends. It was born out of the oh-so-human desire to understand, escape or transcend earthbound limits, and its nature remains. Just as Henry Ford accidentally helped drive the popularity of Woody Guthrie or John Coltrane, the conservative colonization of mainstream country accidentally created a big market for the outlaw music of Waylon Jennings and Billie Joe Shaver.

Most importantly, we humans necessarily share music’s escape artistry. Contrary to nihilistic deconstructionists and other pessimists who talk about an escape-proof prison house of language or the impossibility of freedom, music lights an always-unrolling road to glory.

In July of 1972, at the height of Nixon’s popularity, Johnny Cash visited the White House. He refused Nixon’s request that he play “Okie from Muskogee” or Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac.” Instead, Cash sang the anti-war “What is Truth” and the poignant elegy, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a song about the Pima Indian WWII hero who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima but who died a lonely alcoholic, tossed aside and forgotten by the nation he had served.

Cash’s White House defiance raised a flag of its own, and when we salute it we speak of the love and anarchy that remains at the heart of the human endeavor.

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Henry plucks the A string uncertainly, then steps to the grand piano at the far end of the room and searches the keyboard for A. Counting forward on the white keys from Middle C – C, D, E, F, G, A – he pokes at the A, then plucks the A string of his violin again. His ear hears the same pitch. Unison, they call it, a good name for the sound of happy hands on his assembly line. He plucks the other strings and touches a couple of tuning pegs lightly, but doesn’t adjust them. Close enough.

Tucking the fiddle just so under his narrow chin, he bows each string once, and then, pinching his eyes at the difficulty of playing in E-flat, he begins to play one of his favorites, the 19th Century hit “Home, Sweet Home.” He whispers John Howard Payne’s lyrics as he plays.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Henry Ford’s industrial brainstorm – a moving conveyor that brought parts for assembly to stationary workers – was matched only by his insight that mass production was worthless without mass consumption. So, he helped invent American consumers. They, like his assembly line workers, would have the goods brought to them for assembly into an all-American consumer lifestyle. In this there would be harmony.

Henry worried, though, that all this innovation would lead people to lose sight of the simple virtues of an earlier agrarian era. So, he conjured up some of those antique trappings – old time fiddling and folk dancing, in particular – and created popular demand for 19th Century folkways. Auto dealerships sponsored dances and fiddle contests that garnered enormous nationwide publicity. American musicologists like John Lomax certainly deserve more credit for the musical substance of the folk revival(s). Henry gets credit for his publicity campaign.

From his music room, Henry could look across a great meadow named “The Path of the Setting Sun” because the summer solstice sun set between a carefully landscaped notch among the trees. It was Ford’s own Woodhenge. Fiddle in hand, he knew he wasn’t making music so much as conducting a movement. Like Merlin atop Glastonbury Tor, he hoped to cast a spell across the land, using music to shape the character of his people in an image of his liking.

But a funny thing happened. Music may be the best measure of the human spirit’s fundamental irascibility and love of freedom. Like Huck Finn, music is always lighting out for the territories. It is neither domesticated nor domesticating. Music is liberating.

Ford played a vital role in the growing popularity of old-timey music. He hoped it would instill a mild docility and respect for mythic village propriety and authority. It backfired. Ford was less like a Merlin and more like Mickey Mouse’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” From Ford’s perspective, the musical magic and the future got out of hand.

Through complicated cultural traditions, routes and inventions (radio, inexpensive phonographs, Joe Hill’s IWW labor songs; W.C. Handy, 19th Century abolitionist Hutchinson Family singers, the Lomax family, etc.) the fad he created helped make possible the widespread popularity of the Blues, of Woody Guthrie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Rock & Roll.

Ford’s costly folkways initiatives were not sufficient for such musical revolutions, of course. But they may well have been necessary. There were many other influences upon the culture, but one wide road to musical innovation and rebellion led from Ford’s Fair Lane Mansion on Michigan’s River Rouge to the open fields of the Newport folk and jazz festivals.

Here’s another example of music’s revolutionary potential. Stalinist policies outlawed Baltic folk music and mandated mass singing to help pacify and discipline the people. As Andrew Cronshaw points out, the habit of mass singing led to 1988’s Estonian Song rally, an electrifying gathering in Tallinn of 300,000 full-throated, independence-seeking citizens credited with helping topple the authoritarian regime. Like so many Joshuas at Jericho, they sang down the Iron Curtain.

Music’s escape artistry is the creation of the human spirit. We may find ourselves unfree, confined, manipulated and impoverished by a contemporary world that seems to grow closer to an Orwellian or Huxleyan dystopia every day. But if the music we make is unchainable, then so are we. Or so can we be. From the tens of thousand of Youtube amateur musicians to church choirs to garage bands to hip hop to progressive Americana, to campfire singing and children’s piano recitals, humans seem always to be levitating on a musical spell of their own making.

Speaking at 1964’s Berlin Jazz Festival, Martin Luther King said:

Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties — and, if you think for a moment, you realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

I am not arguing that music is always inhabited by entirely progressive ideals. Overt right-wing political strategies (George Wallace, Richard Nixon etc.) to colonize mainstream country music and use it to conservative ends have paid the Right obvious dividends. More on that next installment.

Meanwhile, I return to Henry Ford, alone in his aerie, trying to fiddle the world into conformity with his paternalistic vision. Once set free, the melodies made it clear the land he surveyed wasn’t his it all. This land is ours.

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Clearly unthreatened and acting with a sociopathic coldness, Pike had obviously dehumanized his targets. I just don’t think it’s possible to act in that fashion against other human beings if you regard them as sharing your humanity.

But I also think a concept of authority is growing in America which wants to justify any action by authority against anyone perceived as defying its power.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote:

I can’t see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we’d react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We’d think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That’s what I think here.

These twin evils – individual loss of empathy and social retreat to authoritarian absolutism– feed one another. Sociopaths seem “normal” in the midst of an anti-human milieu that condones dehumanization and violence.

Pike’s pique and subsequent action has, thankfully, been widely condemned. That is all to the good, but the rash of brutal and excessively violent treatment of peaceful OWS protestors is another reminder of the need for vigilance and humane leadership.

Pike might have been deterred in a culture less forgiving of unnecessary violence. There is plenty of evidence of a rising authoritarian absolutism. We see it in the more extreme fundamentalist churches and in the lazy and dangerous embrace of private armies and security firms. We see it in all forms of “eliminationists” who see their opponents not as fellow humans to be persuaded but as enemies that should be cleansed from the nation.

It must annoy the hell out of your average college policeman that students usually easily intimidated over parking violations and library fines are refusing his or her authority. That is, in the authoritarian mind, not the way the world is supposed to work.

That the authorities across America are threatened by a few nylon camping tents is, well, damning. A culture so morally confused it can’t deal humanely with what are at most unusual inconveniences for bystanders is a culture on the edge.

Some remain silent about the violence against peaceful citizens because they share the mentality of the abusers. Others have tactical reasons: messy street scenes can hurt the public image of protestors even when the moral motivations of the demonstrators are shared by a good majority. So, send in the police to mix it up and it’s a threefer. You clear the streets, reassert authoritarian absolutism, and turn public opinion against your political opponents.

It’s time for President Obama and other national political leaders to speak out forcibly against police brutality. And the rest of us should join them in denouncing these decidedly un-American actions.

In the essay quoted above, Fallows also asks another very good question.

And by the way, when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?

These new cop costumes are just another sign that we are slipping ever more dangerously toward a police-state mentality that is okay with excessive force in the name of authority. It will be argued that the sci-fi riot gear is needed to protect the “peacekeepers.” Really?

Needless to say, the police have dangerous jobs and they deserve all the protection we can provide for them. But isn’t it a bit odd that they are better outfitted than the men and women of our military were when first sent to Iraq back in 2003?

In any case, I’m not arguing against the protection of men and women who secure our safety and security. I am saying that such militarized peacock displays have no real place in a democracy and are intended, in part, to signal to the rest of us to stay quiet and do what we’re told.

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Anis Mojgani performs Shake the Dust at HEAVY AND LIGHT

Sometimes beauty hides in the magic of a URL. The nearly indecipherable strings of letters and numbers that only make sense when fed into a machine. But the code and the sound and the light the machine spits back is pure beauty. Pure magic. Pure love.

And sometimes this gift is delivered with the simple chime of the arrival of a new text message. Cutting through haze and blur of just another day. Landing like a burning ember, glowing red hot, right in the crotch of our day causing us to jump and slap wildly, dancing, flailing.  Trying in vain to maintain the shroud of an ordinary day.

The spark sets us alight. And for a few minutes, as the flames consume us, feeding off the tinder we pull over ourselves to keep out the cold, we can see in the light a different world. A place flickering with hope. Shining with love. Radiant with life.

Shake the Dust came to me today. Sent unheralded, unannounced. A flaming cannonball shot over my wall. And my kingdom is ablaze.

May the fire spread to your heart. The amazing and incomparable Anis Mojgani.

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Back to the album. I believe that had I listened to the album at the time of the first interview, talking about the living room flavor would have made a ton of sense. While it is, as promised, intimate and not at all overproduced, enough hard work and I assume, massively creative energy has influenced what this album has ultimately become.  What I hear when I listen closely, is a sophisticated layering effect that I usually find in great bluegrass.

Don’t get me wrong, the album sounds nothing like bluegrass.

But I draw the analogy because like great bluegrass, skilled musicians take us on a ride full of pleasant surprises, full of complex and unexpected arrangements.  However, unlike Bluegrass, the overall effect of this ride is subtle.  Noticeable, yet subtle.  And actually, I didn’t notice it at first.  Initially, I was swept up by the vocals and the lyrics as you might be–you’ll want to know more about what she is saying; you’ll sit still and imagine the situation that provoked those words to come together the way they did.  See what I mean in the track titled Gold and Silver:

Love could never live here
In a house that is so cold
The windows bolted down for good
The window panes are dull
The floor it creaks with every step
And echoes through the air
‘Til it’s swallowed up by silence
Through the cracks and down the stairs

-Alone in This Together, Star Anna & The Laughing Dogs

And have a listen to Star’s vocals, which are frankly just becoming indescribable for me.  Flipping through a thesaurus for hours wouldn’t give me the right words.  The effect of her vocals on her fans (if I may say so) is more of a gestalt experience—the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Back to the subtlety.   Now that you hear how down right awesome the title track is and recognize that  you are also, in fact, hearing is Mike McCready of Pearl Jam on guitar, the word subtle might be a confusing description.  Here’s what I mean:  you can sit on a plane and listen to this album four times in a row (yes, I did this) and sometimes you really notice how the guitar (Justin Davis) goes left while the keyboards (Ty Bailie) go right and something interesting is happening with the drums (Travis Yost), or you connect to the lyrics—your mind winding down a road you took once and the nostalgia it still evokes in you.   Still another time, you listen to the album while you read and it just works without you noticing much at all.  As Peter Griffin might say, it doesn’t insist upon itself.  But it is there for the taking.  I never have exactly the same experience when I listen to Alone in This Together.  I think that speaks to the depth of the album.  Star and the dogs are never self-conscious or affected personally or musically.  As I mentioned before, they are deep, genuine and just all around great people to meet.  And maybe that is what Justin Davis (guitar) meant when he described the album as having that living room sound.  Could be it…provided that your living room has Star’s unflinching and smoky vocals, a talented band that loves doing what they do together and guitar accompaniment by Mike McCready of Pearl Jam.  So yeah—I definitely need a living room upgrade.

Listening to Alone in This Together, or any recording of the band, for that matter,  leaves me with an intense craving to see them live.  The album is great.  Instantly a favorite.  I have two.  No shit.   I bought one, got one as a gift and I’m keeping them both. However, listening to this album just allows me to get a fix in between the few shows I can make in Seattle.  Much to their credit as musicians—this is a band that is best live.  Which brings me to their east coast tour.  If they are going to be anywhere near you—buy tickets.  Go see them.  Show the hell up.  Anyone who has seen them will back me on this.  You can not miss them if you are lucky enough to be anywhere within a 3 hour radius of them.  Even if they are planning to play children’s instruments (probably not).  Do it.

Here’s a little taste of them live with Mike McCready at PJ20.

Here are their tour dates.  Get out your calendar.

10/14/11 Great Falls MT- Machinery Row
10/15/11 Bozeman, MT – The Filling Station
10/16/11 Spearfish, SD – Back Porch
10/17/11 Sioux City, IA – Chesterfield Live
10/18/11 Des Moines, IA – Mars Cafe
10/19/11 TBA
10/20/11 Chicago, Il – The Hideout
10/21/11 Milwaukee, WI – Shank Hall
10/22/11 TBA
10/23/11 Cleveland, OH – Brother’s Lounge
10/24/11 Buffalo, NY – Mohawk Place
10/25/11 Albany, NY – Valentine’s
10/26/11 Allston, MA – O’Brien’s Pub
10/27/11 Brooklyn, NY – Southpaw
10/28/11 New York, NY – Piano’s
10/29/11 Hoboken, NJ – Maxwells
10/30/11 Philadelphia, PA – The Fire
10/31/11 Asbury Park NJ- The Saint
11/01/11 Washington DC – The Black Cat
11/02/11 Chapell Hill, NC – The Cave Tavern
11/03/11 Atlanta, GA – Smith’s Olde Bar
11/04/11 – TBA
11/05/11 Kansas City, MO – Czar Bar
11/06/11 Lincoln, NE – The Zoo Bar
11/07/11 TBA
11/08/11 TBA
11/09/11 Boise, ID – The Reef

Purchase their album and visit their site www.staranna.com.

Check out my work at www.keeshadavis.com and www.simfotico.com.  I am a professional photographer and do freelance web design while I juggle a full schedule at the University of Washington as a Ph.D student in Education.  Photos of Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs copyright Keesha Davis, Simfotico, LLC.

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It’s true that contemporary racism doesn’t look exactly like yesterday’s racism. In many social circles white people no longer use the N-word. Lynchings have disappeared it hate crimes haven’t. We can all eat at the same restaurants and use the same drinking fountains and restrooms. But this self-contratulating myth that we as a generation have magically transcended race is not just immoral, it’s destructive. It blinds us to a racism that continues to have terrible consequences.

Rick Perry’s policies punish people of color. He’s tried to walk back his talk of secession, but he mentioned in purpose multiple times in order to fire up right wing nuts who heard the code for just what it was: a harkening back to a time when white people ruled and people of color were considered less than human.

We are very reluctant these days to brand anyone a racist. Even racists. I suppose there’s some good in that. At least we realize that racism is so evil we shouldn’t toss the word around lightly. Is the name of a hunting lease enough to earn Perry the brand? I don’t know. But the rush to issue a blanket pardon — “Rick Perry is not racist” — seems a bit too much to take. A governor who plays upon racial prejudice as Perry did with his secession comments should not be pardoned for their racial implications.

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I was even more focused on my script, Waiting for Gordo, a South Texas adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s classic that I had set on the border, not far from where I am writing this week on the Rio Grande River in and around Laredo. Gordo was a small effort to personalize a story that is too often dehumanized and always politicized.

A decade later, the eight candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination – arguing like an octopus turned on itself – are arguing about border immigration and freeloading illegals in the same tone I was hearing then.  I’m not going to hold my breath for a solution, but I have learned this week that border intervention is a huge business and not likely to ever become a smaller one. It’s been an honor to look for a little understanding of border issues in the company of Time Magazine’s Joe Klein and one of the greatest and bravest photographers of our time, Lynsey Addario. Watch for Joe’s stories and Lynsey’s photos on Joe’s Swampland Blog and in Time Magazine for the next month.

But first, here’s my Slate Diary Blog from soon after 9-11 – a time capsule to a me that I hope I can hold onto.

The beauty of being a free-lance writer is you get to pick your subjects, themes, and characters. Unless they pick you. The age-old dictum, of course, is to “write what you know,” a philosophy that works for a time, though I wouldn’t recommend it as a tattoo. Much better to write what you learn.

Foremost, I learned that my daughter is not the only one plagued by dreams hanging on our fears of a darkness that threatens to envelop the earth. This morning, one person after another related their sleepless experiences until it seemed like half of America must have awakened at 4 a.m. from what I can only describe as a collective nightmare. Oh, if this war were only a dream, how sweet would be our waking tomorrow.

One thing I learned in that quest today, learned and relearned as I have to learn nearly every day, is the aspiration to write simply. Misquoting Faulkner—but raising a glass to his spirit—my goal is to write from the heart, not from the balls or brains (though those can be handy in a pinch).

A few years ago, while a guest on Sky TV’s literary talk show from London, I was talking with Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass series and other timeless tomes. Pullman is a former schoolteacher who started quite a row in the literary world by saying the art of storytelling had been foolishly devalued by hip literary stylists. I believe Martin Amis was one name that he singled out, though I don’t intend to reduce one great writer to hoist up another. But I do think Pullman was right to wonder if the literary hipsters weren’t forgetting to give something back to their readers.

I later shared a few ales and words on this subject with Richard Cohen, the British publisher of my novel, Fast Greens, which I was promoting at the time. Richard fell more into the Pullman camp than the Amis, saying that he had once worked for a marvelous publisher who only asked one question when Richard found a novel that he wanted to publish. “Did itmove you?”

Cohen also gave me a piece of advice I’ve carried ever since. One of the advantages of being a Southern writer (or a Texas writer), he said, is that the innate style and language of our region enables us to write close against the line of sentimentality. (He neglected, however, to mention the Sisyphean nature of defining the line that separates sentiment in its true light from blatant sentimentality.)

A couple of years ago, I wrote one of those little Christmas novels that a cynic might think the product of monetary desperation. But this was a story that chose me. I’d been thinking of writing something for my family’s Christmas but had no solid ideas. Then one morning I awoke from a late night’s reverie and began to write. Twenty days later, I stopped writing and sent the book to my friends and family as a Christmas present. One week more, and the editor of Algonquin Books called to say she’d like to publish When Angels Sing, which most critics lauded as a heartfelt story simply told. But two critics (fans of Martin Amis, I imagined) absolutely loathed my story of a man who had to shed his hatred of Christmas in order to hold the love of his son.

I dashed off irate letters to these reviewers—letters I later regretted, learning the hard way that it’s better to offer thanks to those who give us praise. I also learned a more valuable lesson—that we can’t make the entire world into what we want it to be. The writer’s job, if you put your faith in the verities of old, is to shine a light on what is already there. To help us all awaken from the dream within a dream so that someday we may realize the dreams within our hearts.

Samuel Johnson wrote that we tell each other stories in an attempt to be made whole. Through storytelling we reveal who we are at the core; through storytelling we lay bare the hearts and souls of humankind, 6 billion people whose DNA can all be traced to a handful of common ancestors. Can there be any wonder that we share the same dreams?

So let me tell you a story from the set of Going to California—a story that even a sentimental writer wouldn’t have the balls to make up. In my episode, “Waiting for Gordo,” the two guest roles are Pucho and Fortunato, Latino characters inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Pozzo and his slave, Lucky. As the coyote Pucho, we enthusiastically cast Tony Amendola, the kind of actor you always dream will say your words. A man of infinite moods, Tony moves so deftly from darkness to light and back again that I wish I could be his full-time scribe, following close behind and whispering everyday lines into his ear just to hear him make me sound brilliant.

More important to today’s story, though, is the young man cast as Fortunato. The show’s producers knew only that on videotape, Bernardo Verdugo seemed to be an angelic natural as an illegal alien who is discovered in the trunk of a car where he has been locked by a coyote. Like so many people from so many parts of the world, Fortunato’s great aspiration is to come to freedom, to make a new life in America. After the first few scenes this morning, I complimented Bernardo on his performance, and he said that it was not a difficult part for him. Six years ago, well before he got his green card and residency in the United States, Bernardo was brought to America by a coyote.

“How did you cross the border?” I asked.

“Locked in the trunk of a car,” he said.

And then I watched him climb back into the trunk of a car. The lid slammed shut, and I thought of him there in the darkness, wondering what awaited him. Cameras rolled and our director softly said, “Action.” As the trunk came open, the sun peeked out from behind a tall cloud, and long rays of light shone in upon the face of Bernardo Verdugo.

And on a film set high atop a hill on a ranch outside of Austin, the shared dreams of a young man from Mexico and a writer from Texas came true.

We finished the scene to everyone’s delight, then the sun slipped back behind the clouds. That’s when I heard someone say, “We need more light.”

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Like the rest of America and the world, there’s no going back to who we were before. We can’t undo the falling of the towers or the growing tragedies of the Iraqi and Afghan War, but we’re still searching for the best way ahead through the stories we tell in words and pictures. Much of the diary below is about Willie Nelson and a voice that continues to fill a need in so many people. Willie’s still out there doing what he does. The rest of us can only follow his example to the best of our abilities. One happy note – the diary mentions our upcoming American Masters film on Willie which later premiered to great acclaim and was rewarded with an Emmy Award for the best non-fiction series.  Thanks for all the music, Willie. We still love you; still need you.

So here’s my Slate Diary #3 – in the wake of 9-11

Slate.com Diary by Turk Pipkin

This has turned into the right week to be buried under a tall pile of work. When I’m talking on the phone about one project or another, I’m not watching my country edging toward a growing anthrax panic, our national consciousness flinching as we wonder where and how terrorism will strike next.

This afternoon, I tried to sit down to some serious writing, but the words wouldn’t come, so I decided to call someone I knew could lift my spirits. Most of us have that one person who can reliably bring you up. It may be your mother or your brother, your new best friend or a pal from long ago, but the bottom line is, you hear that voice and the world suddenly looks better. Or it may turn out thatthey need their spirit lifted, and the job of strength falls upon you. Not quite the same, but you do learn that perhaps you had it better than you knew. I’d been saving that phone call, and the time had come.

Willie Nelson and I have been occasional golf buddies for 20 years. I’ve written a few things for him and about him, but mostly we just like to shoot the shit. Lately he’s been fighting a nagging case of pneumonia but is still playing his gigs, so I called him on the bus that he calls home for a couple of hundred days a year. For a long time, when I called the bus I’d ask where he was. He’d look out the window at the passing countryside and say, “I see some fields,” or “Looks like America to me.”

So I already knew where he was, he was at home in America.

“Mr. Nelson, Mr. Pipkin,” I said.

“Hey!” he said, his mellifluous tone rolling back at me, strong enough for me to know he was feeling better. “I enjoyed that magazine story!”

A couple of months ago, we’d spent the day playing golf and chess, shooting pool and listening to his upcoming album The Great Divide, which I think is one of his best. I took notes all day and wrote a story for a new magazine called Fringe Golf. Lemme tell you, writing about your friends is no gimme. Willie’s a better golfer than most people suspect, but I couldn’t resist saying his swing looked like “fly-casting a frozen turkey,” so hearing that he liked the piece was all the lift I needed.

Just hearing his voice sent me back a couple of weeks when I’d watched him on TV singing “America the Beautiful” to close the “Tribute to Heroes” telethon. As Clint Eastwood’s speech morphed into Willie’s first guitar licks, I found myself fighting back my tears. Then Willie got to the line that got to all of us: “Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.” Like so many Americans, I just let it flow. Willie had given me permission.

Today we had some new business to go over. The Emmy-winning PBS documentary seriesAmerican Masters is producing a two-hour film on Willie. I initially took the project to American Masters, and it’s since taken on a wonderful life of its own. American Masters knows what they’re doing, and New York filmmaker Steve Cantor is directing. That leaves me as a producer whose main job is to make sure everyone’s happy. Willie sounded happy. We talked about filming his upcoming 10k race for Farm Aid in Austin and about the photo Texas Monthly is going to take of Willie and mystery writer Kinky Friedman posed as the farm couple in American Gothic.

“I get to hold the pitchfork; Kinky’s going to wear the dress,” Willie told me. “Kinky’s always been mad he wasn’t born a woman anyway.”

I was still laughing when, as they say in London, we rung off. A smile had found my face, and for the first time all day, I had the general idea that everything was going to be OK.

For the next couple of hours, I managed to put in some good work on a whole string of projects: the still-pending movie of my coming-of-age golf novel, Fast Greens; a first-look at the Web site, turkpipkin.com, that my sister-in-law is putting together, and a magazine pitch about the dam the government of Belize foolishly wants to build on the upper Macal River basin that will destroy much of the breeding grounds of the endangered scarlet macaw and Baird’s tapir. Good news and bad, the world was moving on.

I didn’t even let the round-the-clock anthrax coverage get to me. Not until my wife came in this evening to report why our 10-year-old daughter was so emotional tonight. She’d been having trouble sleeping and finally told her mom that it was because of bad dreams. In her dream, she was at a local market when a man asked if he could sit down with her and her friends.

“What was that chemical that they used to spray on crops that was so poisonous?” my daughter asked.

“DDT,” my wife answered.

“That’s it,” she said. “The man was mentally disturbed, but he looked normal, and he had this big tank of DDT that he started spraying on us.”

Believe me, this is as hard to write as it is to read. The worst part was, in my daughter’s dream, her best friend had died. Not too surprisingly, our girl was scared and sad. I think my wife came up with some pretty good answers for her, but let’s face it, they’re answers to questions we never wanted to hear.

“Sadness is a real emotion in your heart,” Christy told our first-born, “but fear is in your mind. And your mind you can control. If you live in fear that things might happen, it can be as bad as if they really did happen. You have to take strength from what’s real, even when it’s sad.”

When I was 10, my fears were that Communists were going to sweep across America, lock us in our stadiums, and torture us until we thought like they did. In the ensuing years, I somehow came to the conclusion that we’d done a better job in the world since then. But now my daughter is 10, and the world is falling down around her.

“Man has been faced with terrible tragedies and events throughout our history,” my wife reassured her, “and we’ve always come through it.”

“I know that,” our daughter said, “but this is the first time it’s happened to me.“

Our daughter is asleep now, her dreams beyond our reach. Tomorrow is another day, more bad news from far away no doubt, more fears from just around the corner, and more phone calls to the people we love.

Stay well and keep singing, Willie; we need you.

- Turk Pipkin

celebrific.com

My photos are online at www.turkpipkinphotography.com

Learn about The Nobelity Project’s education work in the U.S. and abroad at www.nobelity.org

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Whatever else 9/11 is, it is an extraordinarily personal trauma. It comes to consciousness within its own hall of mirrors, images and thoughts appearing un-summoned and then disappearing before they are neatly understood.

It is the day we fell to earth, and with that thought my mind leaps and I’m in a limo on a New Mexico highway with David Bowie’s alien in Nicolas Roeg’s film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. I glance out the window at a white horse that seems winged as it glides beside our car. Like Bowie’s character, Thomas Jerome Newton, I ride the horse into memory fields as the song from The Fantasticks, “Try to Remember,” whispers like the ghost of irony on the soundtrack.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow
Try to remember the time of September
When love was an ember about to billow
Try to remember and if you remember
Then follow, follow.

The Fantasticks? It’s a musical about two fathers who pretend to hate each other to trick their son and daughter into pursuing forbidden love, a conspiracy among modern Capulets and Montagues to marry Juliet and Romeo. Like I said, the thoughts come unbidden. Maybe I’m thinking about the destructive power of manipulation, about the arrogant and terrible fools who toy with the hearts of others out of their own ambitions.

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel

And then there’s another image in the mirrors, Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, an image that also appears in Roeg’s movie. In the painting, life goes on as a tiny Icarus splashes unnoticed into the sea below. But if I try to draw a parallel between Bruegel’s Icarus and America, the thought falters. Surely we would notice if we fell?

Poet William Carlos Williams wrote about that painting. But it’s another Williams poem, “The Descent,” that offers hope of a way out of the hall of mirrors (pardon auto-formatted line-breaks):

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
a sort of renewal
even

Whether we know them as “collateral damage” or “civilian casualties,” slaughtered innocents deserve perpetual mourning from those of us who survive. If we are to find renewal, it will be the accomplishment of such memories, as Williams hints.

We like to think this was something new on our shores, but it was not. If we are to mourn the innocent dead, we have to include the indigenous Americans, don’t we? And many others: slaves, mineworkers, murdered protestors, the wrongfully condemned and on and on. Still, there are the ugly memories of brutal civilian carnage during the 20th Century’s great wars, and 9/11 taught us just how artificial our calendar is. The New Millennium was wishful thinking.

Panic and madness followed 9/11. The towers fell over and over again on our screens. Those in power puffed their chests and promised vengeance. We felt unsafe and uncertain, and power used those frightening images to scare us into giving them permission to war and to diminish fundamental democratic rights in the name of security.

In horrorshow ways, we responded to the falling buildings by jackhammering the foundations of our own social order.

It need not end there, though. Renewal is always possible. Didn’t William Carlos Williams tell us that? The universe is open, after all, and when the Dude abides, that’s what he’s agreed to.

How many millions of words about 9/11 have been uttered? How many experts, commentators, psychologists, and politicians have tried to tell us what that day means? Many today are critical of our repeated return to the events of 9/11. There is concern that it’s driven by commercialized sentimentality and the pursuit of ratings that repeatedly reward the attackers with renewed attention. There’s something to that criticism. And I’m uneasy with the task of explaining its meaning because I do not yet know what it is.

I get help excusing my tentativeness from Cathy Caruth, author of Trauma: Explorations in Memory:

The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemas of prior knowledge – that cannot, as George Bataille says, become a matter of ‘intelligence’ – and thus continually returns…

It was Ben Saunders’ cool essay on Spider-Man, American pop culture’s longest-lived meditator on the existential anguish caused by our ultimate powerlessness, super-powered or not, that pointed me to Caruth. Spider-Man is forever failing his own sense of justice and fretting over such traumas as the possibility he played an innocent role in the death of the woman he loved (Spider-Man No. 121).

I feel better about my wild and willful, post-9/11 stream of thought. I mean, if Spider-Man can hang with it, I oughta try. He asked, “What good is my fantastic power if I cannot use it?” (Spider-Man No. 1). I suppose the fathers of The Fantasticks asked themselves the same thing.

Another shattered community, the Beatles, came together again in 1995, virtually and long after John Lennon’s murder, to make a song from a tape Lennon had left behind. In “Free As a Bird” the Beatles sing:

Whatever happened to
The life that we once knew
Can we really live without each other
Where did we lose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It always made me feel so free

Speaking for Icarus, for Spider-Man, for Bowie’s Thomas Jerome Newton, for the Beatles, and for post-9/11 America, an earthbound Lennon asks, “What’s the next best thing to be/free as a bird.”

The next best thing. That seems like an appropriate earthly prayer on this September 11, 2011.

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Turk Pipkin: In the days before everyone’s grandmother had a blog, the Slate Diaries were one of the internet’s greatest outlets for interesting writing from widely disparate voices. I was asked by Slate to be a weekly diarist a month before 9/11, and when I scheduled my week for early October, I couldn’t have anticipated that America and the world would be in such a soul-searching and somber mood. Rereading this story is a great reminder of the life I used to live, of the lives many of us lived in the decade before 9/11 when the economy was fairly good and the worst thing the fine members of America’s Congress could imagine was a blow job.

A decade later, we’ve blown three trillion dollars in two lost wars, bailed out billionaires with government money while hard-working men and women discovered that the hardest thing about work is finding it. For a few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, we had the whole world with us, but we blew it all away with hubris, lies and a ten-year battle without end that has destroyed far too many lives and has fractured America into groups that are unable to recognize their common ground because of the massive focus placed on their differences.

 Frustrated at America’s response to 9/11, my wife and I ended up founding The Nobelity Project and, like so many people who care about a better way ahead, are trying our best to be a positive force in a world that needs us all. Here’s my Slate diary from October 8, 2010.

It was a beautiful weekend. There was a chill in the air, and the monarch butterflies were winging their way to Mexico. I set all my writing aside, left my computer at home, and drove with my wife and kids to the Texas Hill Country, where I’ve been building a cabin overlooking the Llano River. Every trip I make to the river is a pilgrimage, for I spent much of my childhood at my grandmother’s ranch on the river’s headwaters—wading, swimming, and fishing in the cold spring water that eventually runs over the granite outcroppings at the property we now own. My family lost my grandmother’s ranch when I was in high school, and I spent the next 30 years trying to figure out how to get back a piece of the river.

But as a comedian, then a free-lance writer of books and television, the price of waterfront land was always just out of my reach. Whenever I started to make more money, the prices went up. Then on Valentine’s Day, 2000, while I was writing a magazine story in Belize, my wife sent me an e-mail saying her mammogram had shown something suspicious. I came home to a diagnosis of DCIS—Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. We went from doctor to doctor and the word “mastectomy” kept hitting us like a hammer. Eighteen months later, I still couldn’t say which one of us was more scared.

Running from what we could not escape, one day we dropped the kids at school and headed for the river, driving on back-country roads till we came to a low-water crossing built by German settlers in the 19th century. In the space of one day, we fell in love with the land overlooking that crossing, learned it was for sale, and made an offer to buy it. Eighteen months later—with my wife having beaten her breast cancer and having begun teaching yoga for a living—the river has become a central part of our lives.

We have no television or radio at the cabin; it’s too good here for all that. This weekend, with the wind blowing cool out of the north, we built a campfire in the late afternoon, then grilled steaks and vegetables by the light of an orange and violet sunset. Within an hour, the sky was brilliant with stars, the Milky Way shining bright from horizon to horizon. Just before bedtime, my daughters and I looked up and all saw the same shooting star.

It’s never easy for me to escape my work. People tell me they envy my carefree life as a writer, but they don’t have any idea how hard I have to work to keep from having a job. To cobble together one real income, I write for television, film, magazines, and try to turn out a book every couple of years. That means long, butt-throbbing hours at my desk and very short nights in bed. It’ll be a miracle if I get any writing done this week. A one-hour episode I wrote for a great new Showtime series—Going to California—will be filming in Austin, and I’m hoping to see as much of the action as possible. I’ll also be working on a documentary on Willie Nelson for American Masters on PBS, and I’m moderating panels and hosting events at one of my favorite events of the year, the Austin Film Festival.

At last year’s festival, I chaired a panel with David Chase, the creator and executive producer of HBO’s hit, The Sopranos. Before the panel, we talked a bit about my experiences in Italy interviewing lawyers and hitmen for the ‘Ndrangetta, the fearful Calabrian mafia. When the panel started, David was looking at me kind of funny, and I thought I must have said something wrong. Far from it—a couple of days later, the casting director of The Sopranos called to see if I’d videotape an audition for the show. The role was a total hoot—the born-again, narcoleptic boyfriend of Tony’s sister Janice. They faxed the script, I sent back a tape, and a couple of weeks later I was in Queens falling asleep on Tony Soprano’s shoulder and having him bounce walnuts off my sleeping noggin at the Sopranos’ Thanksgiving dinner.

For a writer whose future depends to a great extent on a larger audience discovering his work, this tiny brush with fame was a dream come true. All the better when the show brought me back for a couple more episodes, giving me some fun scenes with Aida Turturro, a wonderful actress who makes Janice one of The Sopranos‘ most memorable characters. When Aida was nominated for an Emmy for her work this year, I felt sure I’d soon be in front of the TV watching her accept her award.

NYC skyline and sunset from La Guardia just before 9/11

Then came Sept. 11. The week after the bombings, I could not look away from the television. I had to know everything, had to e-mail everyone I knew. For some reason, I felt a compulsion to be a reassuring voice, to tell my friends and family that somehow everything would be OK. A lot of nice words came back for my efforts, but I also got the worst possible news from too many friends whose family members, business associates, and college buddies had been in the Trade Centers. On one of my trips to film The Sopranos, I’d taken my 10-year-old daughter to the top of the World Trade Center. Now she wanted to know about the people we’d seen there, and what would happen to the children of those people who’d died. My voice began to sound less and less reassuring. And our refuge at the river began to seem more and more important.

It was still cool this morning when we hiked down the granite point to the river’s edge. It was a little late in the year for a swim, but I waded in till my knees were wet, decided it was too cold, and turned back to shore. Then I slipped on the slick rock, and the river gave me my baptism anyway. Once I was wet, I went ahead a paddled around in what turned out to be the best swim of the year. And then I headed back to Austin to watch Aida win her award.

It was a beautiful weekend, but then I turned on the TV. America Strikes Back was a harsh return to reality. The awards, of course, were pushed from our concerns, and the war had started without me. Now I find myself trying to remember my long-ago friends, David and Lynn Angell, who died on American Flight 11; find myself trying to imagine rushing to the rescue of innocent men, women, and children, knowing you might never return, or what it must be like to be under bombs and missiles raining down from the sky. I try to think of all the things we need to think of when our country is at war, but instead my mind keeps returning to the monarchs, their orange and black wings brilliant in the sun as they fly unknowing across the borders of man in their ancient pilgrimage of life.

And the week is just beginning.

Learn more about The Nobelity Project and watch the trailer for Building Hope at: www.nobelity.org

I’ll try to update some of the other diaries this week, but in the meantime, all five of my daily posts from the week are archived at: http://www.slate.com/id/116912/entry/116920/

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