uTopianTurtleTop

I'LL BE THERE

One of my all-time favorites, the Four Tops’ Holland-Dozier-Holland tune “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There” -- listening to it last night, I notice, at the start of the first 2 verses, someone shouts quite far back in the background, really punching it, “Yaahh!!” Heard the song how many dozen times? And never noticed it before. Really great.



TIME TO GET CRACKIN’ (IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY, AND I HAVEN’T)

A couple weeks ago I joked around here that politics is my favorite spectator sport. And it is. It’s also a participatory sport. And not only do I get to vote, I also get to try to help persuade my fellow citizens to vote the way I think they should. There are many ways to do that.

The Kerry campaign has a web site that makes it easy to volunteer to help elect John Kerry. If you ain’t already involved, I urge you to get so.

Rock critic Robert Christgau’s web site has a clearinghouse of organizations that can use volunteers. Christgau says it well: “No one is overqualified to work for John Kerry.”

I still think Kerry is going to win, but only because a LOT of people like you and me are going to put in some time helping to raise money, get people registered to vote, distribute Kerry’s info, identify like-minded voters & make sure they vote.

In 2000 I got over-emotionally involved in trying to persuade a large number of friends (including my beloved spouse) not to vote for Nader. And so a lot of that rhetoric is still echoing around my skull. Nader’s critique of the corporate media was half right-on and half way-wrong. He really missed -- continues to miss -- the spectacle of plutocratic media lords and ladies pulling out the stops for the more-plutocratic candidate. It happened throughout the ‘90s, with the rabid anti-Clintonists getting all their lies published “as is(n’t)”; & in 2000, with the media leading the charge against Gore’s “serial exaggerations” while giving Bush’s blunt dishonesty a pass; and it’s happening now, with the Swift Boaters, with Memogate, with everything possible being spun to Bush’s advantage, including perception of momentum and sampling pools for polls. The plutocrats know that one party will lower their taxes humongously, and the other party won’t; and the pundits and wannabe pundits are all enjoying or hoping for 6-figure salaries on the shouting-head TV pundit spectacles, and they have an interest in wealthy taxlessness too. I raise this to say: Don’t believe the media when they say Kerry is losing, or his candidacy is mediocre, or his staff is in disarray. Keep the faith, and act out that faith with positive action. Please.

Once Kerry wins, I really hope he looses the dogs of justice against Cheney and Halliburton, against the Republican spies who gave secrets to con men like Ahmad Chalabi and who outed Valerie Plame, against the Pentagon chiefs who OK’ed torture in Guantanamo and Iraq, against all the criminals in Bush’s world. Sure, vengeance is part of my hope, but more importantly, America shouldn’t let these criminals get away with it. To let them slide uninvestigated would send a wrong message, to the world and to ourselves.

Keep on rockin’.