WASTELAND BAIT & TACKLE / James McMurtry

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.