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.