In the early sixties I saw Ray
Charles perform at the Hollywood Bowl. He fell off the piano bench.
Aides came out, dragged him backstage and a few minutes later he
returned and finished the show. Years later he said getting off
cigarettes was harder than getting off heroin. The thing I always
liked about Ray Charles was the fact that he was always who he seemed
to be. He may have been screwed up emotionally and personally from
time to time but he literally sang his way out of it, bull-dogging
his way through meter and convention.
On the other hand, Ronald
Reagan was never who he seemed to be. The drooling press made up
accolades like Teflon President and charming and the great
communicator. But he was a lying front man for corporate interests
even when I was bringing him into my heart as a child when he was the
host of Death Valley Days and GE Theatre. By college I got it -- his
job was to lie for people who couldn't lie very well. He was really
good at it. Ray Charles was a victim of the drug culture. Reagan
implemented it. His administration brought crack cocaine to East LA
in order to fund his illegal war against the elected Sandinista
government of Nicaragua with the (beneficial to corporate planet
grabbers) side effect of slapping down people of color trapped in
ghettos defined by white rich folks.
In 1988 a fire, the 49er
Fire, if was called, raged through my neighborhood in the foothills
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The fire was accidentally set by a
mentally retarded adult who burned his toilet paper. The burning
paper got away from him and despite his frantic efforts to put it out
the fire raged for days and burned out hundreds of homes. In a cosmic
bit of irony, the fire raged right up to the hamlet of Smartsville,
right to the boundary of property owned by the President Ronald
Reagan, where it was doused. Reagan always got the lucky breaks.
(When he was deregulating the beef and other food industries, he
himself would only eat meat from Sheldon's organic
farms.)
Reagan was the guy who said
(on the behalf of car dealers in Los Angeles and other myopic rich
corporados who sponsored his rise to political fortune) that us plain
folks ought not put up the money for people living off the government
programs for people who are mentally ill or otherwise incapacitated.
He spent his own later years in the dismal darkness of Alzheimer's
Syndrome with round-the-clock care provided by the public largesse, a
largesse he campaigned against for others all his store-bought
political life.
As a person whose own father
died of Alzheimer's and who came face to face with the loss of a
whole life's work due to the insensitivity of Post Reagan California,
I am dismayed that Reagan died so soon. He should have lived
longer in the agony of his own doing.
Reagan's pioneering influence
is this: With a subservient, drooling media, one can get
elected to the highest offices of government by running against the
need for the highest offices of government. He set the standard that
Bush W. and Das Gropenator try to live up to today..
When Reagan was running
against the hapless Jimmy Carter (in many ways the first
re-incarnation of Bill Clinton) and negotiating behind the scenes
with the Iranians who were holding Americans hostage, I sang a song
about the situation as I saw it at the time. Of course, we now know
the situation was far, far worse than I had imagined -- and I had
imagined the worst.
In 2001, a client of the
Nevada County (CA) Mental Health Department, the brother of a
Sacramento police officer, a mentally ill person with an arsenal in
his home, walked into the mental health department and started
firing. He then went to a local restaurant, reloaded, and fired
again. Three people were killed, others maimed and traumatized for
life.
It seemed to me that the
terror felt by my community when the shooting occurred -- schools and
businesses closed, the streets emptied, folks hung by their radios --
was one and the same as the terror felt by the community when it was
on fire years before. I wrote a song about it -- about how we treat
our mentally impaired citizens and the damage we suffered because of
how we treat them.
It is one thing for a lying,
evil scoundrel like Ronald Reagan to sell his soul to the corporate
monsters. It is entirely a different moral issue for us citizens to
succumb to the emerging celebrityocracy and give our moral well-being
over to it. Shame on us,
Ray Charles. Ronald Reagan.
I'm a patriot-- but I'll pick my own day of mourning.
Dan Scanlan
Grass Valley CA
Country-pickin'
'flation
©1979 Dan
Scanlan
There's this
country-pickin' 'flation
Runnin' round
the nation
Keepin'
people poorer than they are.
They got a
presidential 'lection
Cause such
consternation
By pittin'
Georgia peanuts 'gainst
That Hollywood
candy bar.
And I'm
lookin' Haggard, a walkin' Travis T.
No Cash is
Parton my wallet, and Chet that'd Hoyt Autrey.
I've stuck my
long neck out in Texas, and been fur away from home.
Don't know
where my next buck is, and the dough leaves me alone.
I've ridden
the chili-bean sunset and I've tumbled on the weed.
Had my girl run
off with another man who said I was a durn hayseed.
And I have
trucked across the desert and I swum naked in the crick,
And I slipped
into a little booth to vote for the lesser prick.
There's this
country-pickin' 'flation
Runnin' round
the nation
Keepin'
people poorer than they are.
They got a
presidential 'lection
Cause such
consternation
By pittin'
Georgia peanuts 'gainst
That Hollywood
candy bar.
Charleton
and Ronnie
© 2001 Dan
Scanlan
When Charleton
Heston and Ronald Reagan rode into town
People bolted
their doors and they locked the schoolhouse down
A mad man's
Ruger sprayed bullets all around
And three
people lay bleeding dead on the ground
When Charleton
Heston and Ronald Reagan rode into town
Teflon Ronnie had a gang who chose to ride behind him
They hid out of sight but lurked where they could run him
They tugged his ropes in every fight and wrote out every whim
Trickle down bandits steal the health of their victim,
Teflon Ronnie had a gang who chose to ride behind him
They hid out of sight but lurked where they could run him
They tugged his ropes in every fight and wrote out every whim
Trickle down bandits steal the health of their victim,
Supply side
profiteers, damn the lost, the ill and dim.
Charleton had a gang that once trained the National Guard
But it got lost in puberty, its sensitivities jarred
A confused constitution, its manhood marred
A fondling of
guns -- they're so slick and hard
A fight to bury
others' arms in the graveyard.
A dozen years
or so ago a forest fire was our plight
A homeless window washer whose thinking was not right
He burned his toilet paper and it burned homes through the night
The fire raced to Smartsville, right within Ronnie's sight,
We sent the
homeless man to jail, nor was our thinking right.
When Charleton
Heston and Ronald Reagan rode into town
People bolted
their doors and they locked the schoolhouse down
A mad man's
Ruger sprayed bullets all around
And three
people lay bleeding dead on the ground
When Charleton
Heston and Ronald Reagan rode into town
