America is waiting for a message of some sort or another
While I'm thinking about what and whether to write, here's some cool stuff I've run across on the Internet and elsewhere lately:

The Civil War in Four Minutes -- A video on YouTube showing how the area controlled by the Union and the Confederacy ebbed and flowed during the Civil War. It's really quite satisfying when Sherman marches to the sea. Yay, Sherman! You go, boy.

UPDATE: Aw shoot, the guy had to pull it. Maybe the Abraham Lincoln Museum will put up a link sometime.

enoweb lyrics : My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. --- By "cool stuff," I mean of course "cool for me," not necessarily "cool for you." That said, I'm not alone in thinking this Brian Eno/David Byrne album is simply one of the best ever, period, full stop. The "lyrics" are actually snatches of recorded voices of radio talk show hosts, preachers, politicians, folk singers, and oh, yes, an exorcist.

In the spirit of Jose Isaza's annotations: we recently acquired a car with -- gasp -- a multi-CD player, with this album now ensconced in the #4 slot. So Maddie's listened to it now to where she likes it even better than "Remain in Light" (#1) -- and was observed declaiming "no will whatsoever... no WILL whatsoever... I mean what you gonna do?" to herself the other day.

Hunting around, I've discovered there's now a "Bush of Ghosts" web site about a re-release of the album, with an essay by David Byrne about the making of the album, and even more intriguingly, a site where you can re-mix tracks from two of the... songs, recordings, whatever, "A Secret Life" and "Help me, somebody":

In keeping with the spirit of the original album, Brian Eno and David Byrne are offering for download all of the multitracks on two of the songs. Through signing up to the user license, and in line with Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like. Add them to your own song or create a new one. This is the first time complete and total access to original tracks with remix and sampling possibilities have been officially offfered on line. Visitors are welcome to post their mixes or songs that incorporate these audio files on the site for others to hear and rate.

"Once" -- I confess I was reluctant to see this movie, but I found out last night I was wrong. Shot on a shoestring budget in Ireland, it features Glen Hansard (turns out he was also in "The Commitments" a while back) and an equally impressive 19! year old Czech musical prodigy Marketa Irglova. He's a street performer pining for an old flame, she's a young mom who wants little more from life than a chance to make music. What's very cool about this movie is how good and heartfelt and believable the music they make is, and how well it fits the story that goes with it. Justly called a new kind of musical, it's well worth your time.

Our favorite bookstore, Politics and Prose, just got better: many of the book readings and the subsequent Q&A sessions there can now be viewed online at "Fora.tv", among them Robert Dallek ("Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power"), Fritz Stern ("Five Germanies I Have Known"), and Christopher Hitchens ("God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything").

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann. The title might as well have added "Everything You Know Is Wrong." You get a good sense of the book in an Atlantic Monthly article by Mann; I got interested after a glowing description by Teresa Nielsen Hayden ("Making Light") last year, which you should read both for its own sake and for the comments by her anthropologist, sociologist, ecologist, and etceterologist readers.

Mann says two main things in this book. First, there were many more people living in the Americas before Columbus than had been suspected. Second, they had civilizations that were much, much more advanced than had been suspected (by me, at least) -- the largest cities on Earth, some of the healthiest people, civil engineering and scientific feats to rival the Old World's. Check out particularly the stories about Tisquantum (a.k.a. Squanto of Thanksgiving memory), the stuff about khipu, a three (and, including color, four-)dimensional knot-language "like the coding systems used in modern-day computer language," the story of maize (a prodigious feat of plant breeding), the possible real significance of the huge passenger pigeon flocks of the 1800s, and the bequest of the Haudenosaunee to the ideals America struggles to live up to.

The archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists Mann writes about -- and Mann himself -- are resurrecting the memory of a huge swath of mankind that was very nearly forgotten or at best given short shrift. This is quite simply the best book I've run across in the last couple of years -- it's that interesting, well written, and horizon expanding.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:39:00 PM -- |    

 
Neil Young: Let's Impeach the President
Let's impeach the president for lying
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
He's the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let's impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones
What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government's protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Flip - Flop
Flip - Flop
Flip - Flop
Flip - Flop

Let's impeach the president for hijacking
our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected
Thank god he's cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There's lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean
Thank God

-- Neil Young, 2006: "Let's Impeach the President," on the album "Living With War."

Of course, Bush isn't really "clean," his fingerprints are on everything -- they have to be -- from claiming there were WMDs to ignoring FISA to torture. But even if they weren't, it's his administration, so Young's on target. He's also being generous to other artists: if you like to sample new music with a political edge, Young's "Living With War" web site links to hundreds of other protest songs, as well as dozens of videos by him and others.


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LYRICS via Tennessee Guerilla Women; I hear "misleading". posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:47:00 PM -- |    

 
Takoma Park impeachment resolution vote tentatively July 23
According to the rolling agenda document posted at the city's web site, the Takoma Park City Council has tentatively put a resolution calling for the impeachment of George Bush and Richard Cheney on the agenda for the meeting of July 23 (7:30pm, Takoma Park Community Center, 7500 Maple Avenue). If you support impeachment:

• Call or contact your council member between now and the 23rd and let him or her know you support the resolution. Phone and e-mail contact information for the mayor and each ward's council member are available on the City Council web page (click on their photographs.)*
  
  
• Attend a city council meeting between now and the 23d, to thank the council for considering the resolution, and to speak for it. You'll have three minutes during the public comment period, and are expected to give your name and address.**
  
  
• Attend the July 23d city council meeting, and speak for the impeachment resolution during the comment period preceding the vote.
  
  
• Visit the Takoma Park Impeach Bush & Cheney web site to learn more about impeachment and about how you can help.
  

I went door to door recently, distributing lawn signs and gathering signatures supporting impeachment and the resolution; while support is strong, I sometimes encounter people who think it's naive or inappropriate for a local city government to weigh in on an issue like this.

I tell them that yes, I'd have preferred members of Congress to have made much more progress than they have (a resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich calling for Cheney's impeachment has 8 co-sponsors). But they haven't, and they're clearly not going to unless it's demanded of them. As a speaker at the last council meeting put it:

I think that we can see that Congress has been intimidated by the president and by the whole national security apparatus, and that it's the place of local governments like Takoma Park, who don't suffer the same intimidation, to stand up and create some groundswell so that Congress understands that the people are behind this.

We can wring our hands and say "somebody oughta do something" about Bush and Cheney. It turns out that 'somebody' is each of us. This is one thing we can do. Let's do it.


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* Don't know which ward you're in? Here's a map of Takoma Park, and here's a street list if you can't tell from the map.
** Your comments will be an important part of a public record documenting support for impeachment, and resistance to unconstitutional and lawless behavior by President Bush and Vice President Cheney. If you can't make it in person, you can also submit written testimony: "If you are unable to attend a public hearing, you may submit your testimony in writing to the City Clerk via clerk@takomagov.org or by mail to City Clerk's Office, 7500 Maple Avenue, Takoma Park, MD 20912. Written testimony will be copied to the Council and included in the official record of the hearing."
EDIT, 6/29: photo added. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:28:00 PM -- |