On Friday, September 19th, 2008, there was no gasoline to be found in most parts of Nashville Tennessee. The gas pumps sat eerily abandoned, their nozzles shrouded with plastic bags. The few stations that did have gas, including the Exxon across the street from our hotel, were surrounded by lines of panicked motorists that stretched for blocks. Home of the Brave. I walked over to the station. There was a news van out front. Police and station staff were directing traffic to and from the pumps and explaining to people that they couldn't just turn in because the line started three blocks to the south.

I was a bit uneasy, because we were to play in Harrodsburg Kentucky the following night and I wasn't sure how widespread the gas shortage had become. I had noticed in the preceding days that some stations in both Athens Georgia and Chattanooga were out of regular. Was the whole South out of gas? I called an acquaintance in Bowling Green who said that if I could make it that far I would have no problem. There was plenty of gas in Kentucky. We had nearly a quarter tank, just about enough to make Bowling Green.

The next night, from the safety of Kentucky, I googled "Nashville gas shortage". Not much came up, mostly blogs from Nashvillians. I didn't see any sign of national coverage. The only TV news clip I found was from the Nashville Fox affiliate. The clip reported some violence including a drive by shooting in East Nashville, and widespread hoarding. People were topping off their tanks like okies in the dust bowl. There was a shot of a woman filling a gallon plastic milk jug with gas and putting it in her car. Real smart. She didn't even bother to duct tape the cap. At least she knew to set the jug on the ground when she filled it so a static charge on the plastic wouldn't blow the whole place to Jesus.

Then came a clip of Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn repeating McCain's shrill mantra "Drill here, drill now" and blathering on about how we need to find more oil "under American soil". I guess she hasn't noticed that we are drilling here now, and have been drilling here for some time. I have cousins who work in the oil field in North Texas and they're quite busy these days. They can't keep up with demand though.  Blackburn also called for increased refining capacity. She's right on that one. We do need more refineries, and we need refineries that can handle the low grade "sour" oils  that we're mostly finding these days. It seems that, while we're still finding plenty of oil, the "light sweet crude",  that's easy and inexpensive to refine, is growing scarce. The lower grade oils have sulphur that must be removed and long molecules that must be "cracked" into shorter pieces to make gasoline.  There have recently been some promising natural gas discoveries in North Texas and North Louisiana. Why is no one advocating that we convert cars to run on natural gas? Some public transportation companies run their buses on natural gas, so the conversion shouldn't be that hard. Natural Gas burns clean and requires minimal refining. Or, of course, we could limit our driving, conserve gas? Un-American, I guess.

I noticed in one article I read that Knoxville Tennessee had had a similar shortage the weekend before the Nashville shortage. Interesting, two major shortages in two Tennessee cities on two consecutive weekends, with minimal news coverage. No one seemed to know what exactly caused the shortages. Some theorized that the hurricanes had taken Gulf state refineries off line and that evacuees had burned up a lot of gas. I know what caused those shortages, someone at the back end of the pipeline cut off the flow. Maybe the reason for the shut off was indeed that they had no more gas, but, whatever the reason, someone had to make a decision to push a button, turn a valve, or key in a command. Someone decided which town wasn't going to get their gasoline that weekend. The result was an interesting social experiment that exposed our vulnerability. I'm not referring to the vulnerability of our infrastructure, but rather, the vulnerability of our collective psyche, a much more dangerous vulnerability. Our hysterical fear of not being able to go where we want when we want renders us powerless to any force, natural or human, that would attack the physical infrastructure, and some very unscrupulous politicians are itching to exploit that fear. You can bet they were taking notes on Nashville.

We think we'll die if we can't drive. Some of us might, but most of us won't. Pipes can be fixed, rides can be hitched. We'd better learn to relax. There will be more shortages in the future and we'll have to help each other get through them.We'll have to learn not to fight over a place in a gas line. We'll have to quit hoarding and just take what we need. It's really the only way.

P.S. In my last blog, in my fumbling attempt to channel H.L. Mencken, I referred to Chuck's Fish in Tuscaloosa as a world class restaurant. It isn't world class, the flat screen TV's and SYSCO seasoned fries disqualify it from that category. And the waiter, when listing the desserts, pronounced Creme Brulee, "Cream Brulay". However, the grilled Mahi Mahi was excellent. So was the Malbec.}

HAGLER VS. SUGAR RAY, BIDEN VS. PALIN

Don't give her any more room to dance.

Near as I can glean from YouTube, The Marvin Hagler/Sugar Ray Leonard fight took place on April 6th, 1987. No one I knew at that time could believe the outcome. It was supposed to be a bloodbath. Leonard was supposed to do the bleeding.  Hagler had over fifty KO's under his Middle Weight belt. Leonard, a pumped up Welter Weight, had twenty three. Somehow, Leonard won on points.

 A couple of months later, June nineteenth, or Juneteenth , as they say in Texas, anniversary of the day in 1865 that the Texas slaves were finally told they were free, I was hanging out backstage at the Navasota Blues Festival . My lady friend, at that time, was a real good interviewer and had secured an interview with Johnny Clyde Copeland, the headliner at that festival. She and I constituted two of the four white people in attendance. Navasota is a black town in a black East Texas county. Turned out, Copeland's manager made most of his money managing boxers out of Houston. The ranch on which the festival was held was owned by a boxing promoter. The talk back stage went from music to reefer to boxing. Johnny and his guys ribbed me for not being much into pot. I remember Johnny saying, "You got fifteen dollars, you need a hair cut and some reefer, which one you gonna buy? I know which one I'm gonna buy." None of them were at all surprised by the outcome of the Leonard/ Hagler fight. They knew how it had gone down. Johnny's manager explained it very slowly. Hagler's handlers had lost the fight for him long before the first bell. They had rolled over to the Leonard camp's requests for a larger ring and heavier gloves, thus giving more room for Leonard to dance, and taking the sting out of Hagler's punch.

And now the Democrats have agreed to treat Sarah Palin with heavier, softer gloves. The Vice Presidential debates are to be question/answer, not debates at all. YOU MORONS. Palin is deadly when she has a script. Without a script, she's a Valley girl on St. Joseph's Baby Acid, unable to put together a sentence even worthy of Dubya. Had you "vetted" her any better than McCain did, you would have known this long before Katie Couric chased her back into the shadows from which she will only emerge, fleetingly, trout like, to snatch the occasional choice fly off the surface before the election. You are afraid to be accused of roughing up a woman. She's not a woman, you idiots, she's a candidate, and a very dangerous one. She's dangerous because she so . . . so . . . stupid, and she will be President if McCain is elected. McCain is about a million years old and has had four malignant melanomas, the most dangerous type of cancer. It will recur and it will kill him. The stress of the oval office would not be likely to postpone the inevitable.

I can't say I know Palin's personal beliefs, but fundamentalist Christians tend not to differentiate between acts of man and acts of God. They tend to see acts of man as acts of God through man. Man made global warming is just God's plan.  This world doesn't matter anyway. Jews are to be resettled in Israel, so they can die. Democrats are willing to let Palin get her hands on the Armageddon switch rather than risk being seen as bullies. YOU MORONS.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.

One can not order a glass of wine with one's meal on a Sunday evening in Tuscaloosa Alabama. Well, one could order a glass of wine, but the wine would not be served because it is illegal, in Tuscaloosa, for a restaurant to serve alcoholic beverages on Sunday. We drove up from New Orleans this afternoon, stopping in Tuscaloosa in the hope that we might have a fine lunch tomorrow at Chuck's Fish, a world class restaurant, before proceeding on to Birmingham. Chuck's Fish is not open on Sunday, but this evening I ventured downtown in search of a passable supper and a decent glass of wine. I was stunned to learn that I would not be served any wine, due to an archaic law of a type, referred to in my childhood, as a "blue law", a most barbaric form of legislation, designed to remind us that, despite all the freedom of religion rhetoric spewed out by most of our elected officials, we actually do have a state religion, Protestant Christianity(I say Protestant,because I've never known Catholics to care when or where one drinks). These laws make a big deal about the sabbath, but only the Christian sabbath, Jews and Muslims can defile their sabbath, Saturday, perfectly legally.

I Googled blue law and came up with an article by one David J. Hanson Ph.D. Hanson claims that the first blue law in the American colonies was enacted in Virginia in 1617. The law required church attendance and authorized the militia to force colonists to attend church services. Later, laws were enacted to regulate what one could or could not do at home on Sunday. One could not wear lace or precious metals or engage in recreation. (It's still illegal to hunt on Sunday in Virginia. So I guess Jesus was an anti hunter. Go tell the Republicans!). Sexual intercourse on the Sabbath was also banned, and since Puritans held the belief that a child was born on the same day of the week on which it was conceived, parents of children born on Sunday were often punished for violating the blue law nine months before. At some point, the main focus of the blue laws shifted to alcohol.
 
In Texas, we have dry counties, where one can't purchase alcohol on any day of the week, but they are usually pretty far out in the sticks, where anyone accustomed to a fine Barbera is not likely to be ordering a meal in a public place. Compared to these places, Tuscaloosa is Paris. It's a major college town, home to the University of Alabama, with at least one fine restaurant, yoga classes, all the trappings of reasonably refined modern culture, but it is still under the thumb of the nine hundred foot Jesus. I suppose it's not the end of the world that I couldn't get my wine, but I surely hate being denied something in order that others might get to continue to believe they're going to heaven. 

We now have a Vice Presidential candidate who, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, inquired of the librarian of the Wasilla Public Library, how to go about getting certain books that offended the mayor's Christian sensibilities pulled from the shelves. Here's my suggestion to Sarah Palin, and anyone else who likes to legislate the morality of their fellow humans. Move to the dry county of your choice and live your life as you see fit. Refrain from activities that you think Jesus wouldn't allow. Let the rest of us drink and read what we want in merry anticipation of fire and brimstone, if you believe in that sort of thing.    

WHITE MEN AND THEIR TOYS

I don't think the super rich are evil, but I fear they are out of touch--and that's dangerous.

Car traffic on the interstate highways has thinned out a bit in recent months, but the number of privately owned Prevost tour buses seems to have remained constant. The Prevost, squared off and boring looking, long ago replaced the more flamboyant looking Silver Eagle as the preeminent mode of band transportation, but most of the Prevosts I see on the highway don't appear to be hauling bands. Bands don't tow cars behind their buses, and most of the buses I see have some sort of SUV in tow. No, these buses, burning $4.50 a gallon diesel by the tanker load, are hauling rich people, and there are a whole bunch of them. One of these guys is a fan of ours who likes to drive his bus up from Lake of the Ozarks Missouri to Kansas City whenever we play at Knuckleheads. Our stock rises when he shows up because he parks his bus in front of the club and everybody thinks it's ours. Once, he came up towing his BMW. Somewhere in the blackness south of Jeff City, the driver noticed an orange glow in the side mirror and pulled over to find that the BMW was on fire. The owner simply unhitched the Beamer and they left it burning by the road.

It's amusing to hear about such extravagance in isolated incidents, but when I see all those buses pulling all those cars, burning all that expensive diesel merely for the amusement of the owners, I can start to go full-on Commie. Why do they get such big toys, and at what cost to the rest of us?

Meanwhile, back in Austin, the downtown skyline changes daily. We return from a six-week run to find that yet another high-rise condo, units all sold before construction commenced, has been completed. Where is all this money coming from? The economy is bad right? The condos are messing with the music scene. Condo buyers don't want to live near music venues, even here in the city that bills itself as “Live Music Capitol of the World,” so the developers are pressuring the city to lower the noise ordinance to 70 decibels at property line, way quieter than your lawyer neighbor's new Harley, and crippling for a music venue across the street from a construction site. Some clubs manage to get grandfathered in. Some don't. Those that do can expect the rules to change.

I was at a party in one of those new condo units once. The place turned out to be a sort of urban retreat for a couple who mostly lived on a high fenced ranch out in the hill country. The condo was one more toy. When you get that rich, is anything essential? I asked the fellow what he did for work. He said he was a cedar chopper. File under “Oh, please.” Cedar choppers were flinty, wiry fellows with gnarled up hands from gripping axes who, in the time of my grandfather, supplied ranchers with cedar fence posts. They rarely chopped cedar off their own land, as they generally had none. Now, in the era of mass produced metal fence posts, cedar chopping is an endeavor reserved for presidents on a photo op and rich guys whose wives want them out of the house for a while. I never did find out where his money came from.

The guy who left his Beamer burning by the road owns a club on Lake of the Ozarks. We played there once. I would never have guessed that there were so many 50-foot yachts in the middle of Missouri. The Mississippi Gulf Coast was once referred to as the Redneck Riviera, but I think that title now should go to Lake of the Ozarks, a vast manmade impoundment on the Missouri and Osage Rivers, which I'm told, has more navigable coastline than California, due to all the feeder creeks and secondary rivers that it backs up. But the yachts, My God they're everywhere. Most are wrapped in white plastic, perched on trailers in the lots in front of the dealerships that line the roads around the lake. Many more are lined up in slips down in the marinas, and quite a few are floating around in the coves, their owners and their friends lounging on the decks, drinks in hand, eyeing one another across the brown water. I asked why no one seemed to be fishing and was told that the fishing wasn't much good around there.

So the main sport seemed to be one-upmanship. The talk was all about who had the biggest boat. Someone pointed across the cove to an amphitheatre where some big touring act had recently played. The amphitheatre faced the lake, and there were slips where, for a fee, one could pull one's 50-foot yacht in and watch the show from one's very own deck chair. Virtually no one came to our show, but the club owner paid us well and provided the right wine back stage, a rare occurrence. He said he was sorry we hadn't gotten there in time to go out on his boat. This guy looked like he could have actually been a cedar chopper. By his wiry build and hillbilly twang, I guessed he had been raised in poverty, busted his way out of it in a big way, and was now proceeding to have himself a time.

I don't think the super rich are inherently evil, but I fear they are out of touch, and there is a danger in their being out of touch. Everyday, I see the physical evidence of extreme wealth sliding into the hands of a few. My fear is that those condo owners and Prevost drivers, despite the fact that they make up a very small percentage of the population, will be calling the shots for all of us—elites always do somehow, even in more or less democratic countries. How do you convince people who can afford to leave their burning cars beside the highway to care whether or not the rest of us can afford health care? Can they be made to understand that the price of the diesel they pump into those buses on their way to Disneyland affects the price of food, catastrophically for some. It's a hard sell, especially here in the States, where we still have enough room to isolate ourselves from people we believe to be different from ourselves. It's easy to pretend that other people's problems won't effect us, as long as they're out of pistol range or over a wall.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he’s not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.

SEE THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Good luck, Senator Obama.

What am I to make of this place? In the words of Eliot, “How shall I presume?”

I am driving to Madison, Indiana, a ways off the interstate. The two-lane winds between lush farms. The livestock looks healthy and well bred and the machines all look brand new, pickups, cars, tractors, balers, bush hogs, riding lawnmowers—especially the ones which are ridden exclusively by older white guys. Some of the lawns exceed the four acre mark, but every inch is mowed. One of my bandmates remarks that these are some lawn-cutting sons-of-bitches out here. My friend, Leslie Silko, once referred to Texans as, “The People of the Lawn,” but Texans would have to do some serious irrigation to get lawns like these. Nice place they got here. And, they've got the necessary mowers and the gas to put in them.

They're prosperous, and, judging by their billboards, they're also religious, and they're… pissed off. One sign reads, “Your New Age Christ according to Oprah, will not save you.” Another says, “Heartbeat: Eighteen days after conception.” Yes, I'm sure most mothers’ hearts are beating eighteen days after they conceive. The next day, on the way down to Louisville, I see a billboard that reads, “Saturday, the true Sabbath, changed by the Antichrist.” One pickup has a “Terrorist Hunting License” window sticker with a picture of Osama Bin Laden, or maybe just some anonymous A-rab in the crosshairs.

These were my people once. I was never a Hoosier, but I was, and still am, related to middle Americans. They weren't always so angry, or so violently Christian. Someone has convinced them that they are in danger and that only Jesus and George W. Bush can save them. With Senator Clinton bowing out, Senator Obama will now have to try to win these people over. Good luck, Barack.

Of course, Hillary would have had a hard time with this lot too. Her husband, an Arkie, could talk the talk, but even he was branded by the gun press as “Handgun Control, Inc.”

Just you watch. No one will want to be called racist, so many rural Midwesterners, economically strapped from eight years of Bush policy, will still say they can't vote for Obama because he's a Democrat and therefore not totally committed to preservation of the second amendment as we now know it, as if any president would have time to mess with the Second Amendment in the current economic climate. No, when they say they can't vote for Obama, their real reason is that he's black, plain and simple.

Now, the Republicans get to run a former POW against a black man, and we all know they're rejoicing. I know Clinton shot herself in the foot when she "misspoke" about the sniper fire in Bosnia. The Republicans didn't have to engineer her downfall as they did Edmund Muskie's in 1972. But, I'm still haunted by the words of the Deep Throat character in All the President's Men: “They didn't want to run against Muskie, they wanted to run against McGovern, so look who they're running against…"

Look who they're running against now.

Good luck Senator Obama. You now have my vote.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he’s not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.