ABOUT RAR: For those of
you new to this site, "RAR" is Rick Alan Rice, the publisher
of the RARWRITER Publishing Group websites.
Use this link to visit the
RAR music page, which features original music
compositions and other.
ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance"-AVAILABLE
NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM
AMAZON.COM.Use
this link.
CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.
Elmore Leonard
Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime
Novel
I am offering another
novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service.
Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its
sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado,
1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of
individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and
distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good yarn, filled
with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to
pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950,
when the story is set. Richard Padilla
has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of
a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The
whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on
Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little
of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY
If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.
Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves atNOOK
Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.
Haters and False
Inferences
By RAR
I recently watched a brief
Cyndi Lauper promotional video in which she discussed self-respect,
self-confidence, and the deleterious effects of allowing either of those
two self-love strategies to be negatively influenced by “haters”.
I recall this term “haters” being introduced to
our household by my kids who, born in 1995 and 1997, grew up with the
concept. The Urban Dictionary traces the origin of the term to 2000,
when the Hip-Hop group 3LW used the phrase “haters gonna hate” in their
song titled “Playas Gon’ Play”. ICE-T kicked off the concept in his 1999
song “Don’t Hate Tha Player” but 3LW seems to be responsible for
creating the noun form “haters”. The term was added to the Urban
Dictionary in 2003 with this definition:
Hater (n.): A person that simply cannot be
happy for another person’s success. Instead of giving acknowledgment
in courtesy, a hater often pursues his/her point by exposing a flaw
in the target subject. Hating, the result of being a hater, is not
exactly jealousy. The hater doesn’t really want to be the person he
or she hates, rather the hater wants to knock somelse [sic] down a
notch.
One could argue that the Urban Dictionary, which
has sought to codify the informal language of “the street”, has been
complicit – or even directly responsible – for legitimizing the mangled
English of an uneducated underclass ill-equipped to manage the
complexities of competing in a world that obviously conspires against
their potential for upward economic mobility.
This further promoted the general acceptance of
something known as “Ebonics”, which was a name given to a form of
English used by working class Black people. A deeper dive into the
derivation of that concept would reveal that it was really poor White
southerners who created the form, which was then adopted by uneducated
southern Blacks who were simply imitating that southern strain of White
culture. They were trying to improve themselves based on some really
sketchy role models who were on the next higher rung of the economic
ladder, often uncharitably described as “poor White trash”. It was all
on the way to the establishment of another term, “Wiggers”, in part
popularized by Oprah Winfrey, which
was a concatenation of “white niggers”, which was a nasty reversal on
the notion of downwardly mobile poor Whites relating to Black culture,
or those on the next lower rung of the economic ladder. On a cultural
level, it was a little like a snake swallowing its own tail until
finally the progenitors of the problem were imitating the inheritors of
the problem that they created.
To cite a real world example, I spent a brief
amount of time in the Cable TV industry, where I worked with a White
southerner who would routinely advise customers, who had questions about
cable services, to “axe your installer”, which always struck me as a
horrifying grammatical construct. The idea was to “ask” your installer,
not to murder him Lizzie Borden-style. (You can imagine how difficult
that would have made the simple act of recruiting workers to install
cable services.) Mercifully, if somewhat distressingly, everybody
understands what he was actually suggesting. Poor elocution did not lead
to bloodshed, though the butchering of language does come with real
downsides for the well-being of our larger cultural standards.
WORD GAMES:
Ebonics became a hot-button issue for White social critics, like
right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who used it as proof-positive that
American culture was going to rot. (Mind you, persons such as myself
might suggest that the existence of Rush Limbaugh was proof positive of
the same.) It was a thinly veiled attack on Black culture, toward which
Limbaugh is/was clearly a “hater”.
Mainstream journalism saw these developments
early on, with news magazines like Time and Newsweek running cover
stories in the 1990s on “the dumbing down of America”. It was a “canary
in a coal mine” observation that referenced the stagnation of the U.S.
economy, in freefall since 1970, and the surrender of the struggling
class to the realization that the values and potentials of America’s
promise simply held no promise for them. Rather than further resigning
to self-hatred, there was a grassroots impulse to recreate a
social-cultural paradigm that fit the reality of their lives. This is at
the heart of Rap and Hip-Hop music, spawning a form of patois that found
a personification in the form of the rapper Snoop Dogg (Cordozar Calvin
Broadus, Jr., also known as Snoop Doggy Dogg and, more recently, as
Snoop Lion). He coined a language form that exchanged or augmented
standard English words with various forms of the phonetic sound of “izzle”,
to wit:
“Plim-plizzle, my nizzle, don' foget bouts
tha six-fo, chuch, dawg up in da hood, chilly my grilly. fo sho.”
Snoop was/is sort of funny, and his patois is
closely related to the older patois of British Cockney that developed a
similar word-substitution street language, which used rhyming slang to
create a reference scheme that revealed whether or not speakers really
belonged to the groups with which they were associating. The members of
The Beatles were steeped in this working class language game, examples
of which can be found in this excerpt from Wikipedia:
One example is replacing the word "stairs"
with the rhyming phrase "apples and pears". Following the pattern of
omission, "and pears" is dropped, thus the spoken phrase "I'm going
up the apples" means "I'm going up the stairs".
In similar fashion, "telephone" is replaced
by "dog" (= 'dog-and-bone'); "wife" by "trouble" (=
'trouble-and-strife'); "eyes" by "mincers" (= 'mince pies'); "wig"
by "syrup" (= 'syrup of figs') and "feet" by "plates" (= 'plates of
meat'). Thus a construction of the following type could conceivably
arise: "It nearly knocked me off me plates—he was wearing a syrup!
So I ran up the apples, got straight on the dog to me trouble and
said I couldn't believe me mincers."
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS:
Where this all converges is in the way that the word “haters” has come
to work as a shield against any kind of criticism of any aspect of
social expression, and the way that has dove-tailed with another
somewhat recent development in our culture, which is the idea of
“political correctness”. This also developed on a parallel track with
Ebonics and in 2016 it has been a principal driver of
Donald Trump’s
ascendancy to the top of the Republican Party. Trump’s supporters are
viscerally appalled by the notion of political correctness, which rather
like a doctrine eschews any kind of criticism of social behavior based
on the judgment it brings upon the subject being questioned. Trump’s
people believe we should all be able to “call a spade a spade”, as it
were; to reinstate the lost values of a pre-Civil Rights era wherein all
manner of controls were in place to maintain a certain social order
however venal and corrupt that social order may have been. One can see
where people on either side of the issue could feel that their views of
political correctness are somehow to the betterment of society.
Otherwise put, it’s a really complicated issue. One can appreciate that
continuing to use language that has been put in place to oppress certain
classes of people has had a deleterious effect on society. On the other
hand, should people not be allowed to question behavior that they
perceive as having a deleterious effect on society?
SHUT UP: As
a weapon of political correctness, classing all criticisms as somehow
being the work of “haters” is designed to shut down discourse, which is
of course anathema to the effective functioning of a democratic society
that relies on free speech and freedom of expression as principal
foundational concepts. It is also a false general notion in the same way
that calling someone a “racist” is often a false charge that is also
designed to shut down exchange of viewpoints.
While there are people who honestly believe that
their race is superior to others, that is not necessarily what is going
on with people who criticize behaviors observed in another group.
Sometimes people are just social critics with opinions that have nothing
to do with the ethnicity of the person or persons that they are
criticizing. These verbal weapons seem to make the argument that if you
are criticizing some aspect of a group or person of an ethnic makeup
different than your own, then you are a “racist”. If you are criticizing
a person of your own ethnic makeup, then you are probably just a
“hater”. Those may well be false inferences entirely different from what
is being implied by the critic. Sometimes people just offend one’s
values. In a freedom of speech society, one must be able to voice such
an opinion. Why? Because we are all architects of the world that we live
in, and in the echo chamber of pop culture it is probably important to
challenge behaviors that diminish the quality of our shared experience
with life.
CRITICISM:
Some may wonder whatever happened to sophisticated determinations
regarding the perceived value of things. I, personally, am deeply
offended by the fact that Dave Grohl is one of the wealthiest musicians
on the planet, a fact that bothers me for two reasons: one being that I
think he is void of musical talent, and has profited from the execrable
taste of a generation of unsophisticated music fans who have been
successfully exploited for big money; and secondly, and more importantly
to me, is that he cannot utter a single sentence without somehow working
the word “fuck” in there two or three times. I find that stupid and
incredibly poor role modeling. Grohl is a white dude, like myself, so I
can’t be rejected in my criticism of him based on any charge of racism,
which means that I must just be a hater. It is true that I hate the
celebrity and musicianship of Dave Grohl, but is it not possible that I
just have musical tastes and a sense of social/cultural responsibility
that makes it impossible for me to find anything about Dave Grohl that I
could support?
STUPID WORLD:
People seek education so that they may become sufficiently sophisticated
to tell wheat from chaff. It would be pretty difficult to look at the
sophistication in our cultural lives, comparing where we have been in
our society to where we are now, and not feel that we are on a steep
trajectory downward. A great deal of this has to do with the way we have
gone from being a literate people, who produced smart, sophisticated art
forms (see the art works, literature, architecture, movies and music of
the 1920s through the 1950s), to the TV generations of the 1960s and up
to the present. As the world experienced a post-World War II economic
boom, that put expendable income in the pockets of really young people,
the hucksters of commerce turned their sights on exploiting that gold
mine and our popular culture became geared to young, unsophisticated
consumers. For the sake of profit, we veered toward dumb, and now 50
years into this stupid new world we are feeling the effects of that
disastrous decision. The movie industry, for instance, is more or less
destroyed, depending almost entirely on remakes of previous films, and
on tent pole summer block busters, based mostly on comic books, that are
drawing smaller and smaller audiences. Likewise, the music industry is
largely defunct, with only the Dave Grohls of the world turning music
into money. Our modern architecture is really nothing more than boxes
with colored glass. Our automobiles are void of compelling design
qualities. And when was the last time anybody got excited about a modern
artist?
We are developing entirely new ways to defend
generations of shallow thinkers, of the unlearned. We accept, as valid
forms of expression, products that would have been thought of as crap in
the old world. We have invented dumbed down expressions and a range of
false defenses designed to protect our new reign of idiot kings and
cheap idols, or so it feels to me and many other of my generation and
older.
Of course, we may just be haters.
The CCJ at RARWRITER provides a steady stream of news
feeds from a variety of sources. Use this link to visit the
Music News page.
SEARCH CCJ CONTENT
Looking for something in the RARWRITER.com
archives? Type the item you wish to find in the custom search
field below, then click on the magnifying glass to see a list of
previously published articles relevant to your query.