The Chair recognizes the tin-eared Jr. Senator from TX

Junior senator from Texas, a gutless Bush rubber-stamper who’s both a sycophant and too stupid to know when to shut the fuck up, gets Bob Wills’s name wrong. Out here West of I-35, just down the road from Wills’s home-town, where the surviving Texas Playboys—some of them now in their 90s and still ferocious—put on an annual Wills Birthday Bash, that’s political suicide. Especially when Junior has the egocentric imbecility to try to show off his musical “knowledge.”

“Texas has produced a large number of our nation’s most famous musicians,” Cornyn announced, and then proceeded to misidentify the father of Texas swing, the late Bob Wills of the Texas Playboys, as “Bob Willis.” Murmurs spread through the crowd. “Excuse me! I don’t know why I said Bob Willis,” the embarrassed lawmaker apologized”

Because you couldn't read the pronouncer your handlers gave you, to make you sound like a "Texan," dimwit.

What a punk.

Apropos that, a real country musician, and author of a notorious—and notoriously misinterpreted—redneck anthem, has about had his belly-full of those faux-cowboy bitch-ass towel-snapping preppie blowhards who think that real Americans will cower just because Junior, and The Dick, and Rummy and ‘Berto and Ashcroft and Atwater before them, tell us to:

“The folks don’t have a say-so anymore. They’re being force-fed-- music, yeah, but every other darn thing too. I supported George W. I’m not exactly a liberal. But I know how that Texas thing works, who those oil folks are and what they wanted in Iraq...

“The thing that gets under my skin most about George W. is his intention to install fear in people. This is America. We’re proud. We’re not afraid of a bunch of terrorists. But this government is all about terror alerts and scaring us at airports. We’re changing the Constitution out of fear. We spend all our time looking up each other’s dresses. Fear’s the only issue the Republican Party has.

Junior would last two minutes in either a real debate or a real redneck bar where Merle Haggard is on the jukebox. Except as a bitch-slapping comparison, it’s an insult to even mention “John Cornyn” and “Texas music” in the same sentence, much less the same Senate hearing room. Hell, any W Texas junior high marching band’s brass section could out-reason Senator Cornyn, and kick the shit out of his fucking asinine anti-music arguments.

And, Chris Bowers, probably the smartest and certainly the most readable of the hard-core stats-and-policy-wonk bloggers, has a good analysis of the cultural foundations of “red versus blue” politics.

THE “REDS”
People with a “red” entertainment preference…don’t like most contemporary music and they don’t watch VH1 or MTV…They are more likely to listen to country and gospel than other people, but their favorite music is classical.

THE “BLUES”
People with a “blue” entertainment preference…like lots of different kinds of music (except country) and they watch MTV and VH1.

THE “PURPLES”
People with “purple” entertainment preferences like mysteries and thrillers best. Rock music is their favorite - they don’t like classical or folk music as much as other people.

[Let's don't talk about me, except to say that, if resistance to diverse and unfamiliar music is a mark of the right wing, then I'm somewhere out there falling off the left-hand edge of their Flat World.]

To me, the thing that leaps out of the statistics and his commentary is the fear theme: the fact that people who are hard-core social/political conservatives, in addition to watching daytime TV and preferring “clicky-clicky” action-adventure films, have these preferences because they are afraid of cultures different from their own. How else explain their terrified reaction to “world” music? Howie at DownWithTyranny points out:

Over 90% of conservatives said they never enjoy reggae, electronic music or Latin music. Over 95% said they never enjoy world music and punk music.

If less than 5 per cent of self-identified conservatives ever enjoy world music or punk music, it’s because they’re at base afraid of it; it’s like the wingnuts who had screaming fits at Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl. If you’re afraid, as Chris Rock put it, of “40-year-old tittie”, then you’re way too much of a coward to describe yourself as a cultural or political leader, and you’d be better-served to retreat to your gated community where the only Brown People you ever see are cutting the grass on the other side of the armored glass. You wanna say, like Frank Zappa, “motherfucker, it’s molecules moving molecules; what the fuck are you afraid of?” Or, as Robert Crumb put it, “it’s only lines on paper, folks!”

That’s why I teach music, punk: because it is a big world out there, and screaming with your panties in a twist about “Islamofascism”, and rubber-stamping every single infringement of the Constitution, every single theft from the poor, while mispronouncing Bob Wills’s name and pretending to be a knee-slappin’ good ol’ boy, is not going to hold it at bay.

I want my guys out there, tearing down the walls and making their worlds bigger.

You’re next, Junior. Can you hear light-colonel Rick Noriega knocking? I assure you, it ain't no brass band.

"AH-hah!"

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Now playing: Bob Wills & His Texas Playboy - Swing Blues No. 2