Perhaps I was to comfortable in my new spy garb.  Perhaps I got caught up in the gadgets when I should have been listening in Spy School.  Maybe I had a few too many at the neighbors christmas party and killed their cat with the tibetan neck pinch, just to show off (word of advice, never kill a neighbors cat for fun or the amusment of others).

The saddest part was that I was around friends and family when it happened.  I came home from work to celebrate my sister-in-law's birthday, only to be offed in front of my whole family. 

I will get into more details later, when I post the gorey details.  My children may never be the same.  Heartless killer that they were, I was obviously out matched. 

It's days like this I hate my job.

Agent CBW reporting for casket.

• Permalink
• | Write Comment
• | Comments (13)

Comments

Rawkkiddoh says:

it looks as if we are dropping like flies

 

Posted 1 day ago | Delete

Lady Miss Ian says:

Geez, it's getting think with corpses around the MOG-O-Sphere. So, who's still standing? I s'pose only control knows for sure.

Posted 1 day ago | Delete

Mike the Knife says:

I AM IMPERVIOUS! (Please, no perv jokes.) Of course, I've remained neutral throughout this conflict. Just call me MOG's one-man Switzerland.

Posted 1 day ago | Delete

A new kid works in our Warehouse.  He's 17 years old and a self proclaimed "Neck".  That's redneck, for those of you not in the know.  He listens to contemporary country music, and is slowly driving us crazy with it's dumbfounding banality.  The only thing worse than listening to the template driven pop country that emanates from the craptastic radio speakers in the warehouse, is hearing the same music through the walls of our office - a quiet din of twangy, sing songy, dreck, just loud enough to drive you crazy.  Like a single cricket hidden somewhere in the room, the repetitive playlists and sounds bleeding through the walls has you reaching for headphones  - anything to block out the sound. 

The most disturbing thing to me about the local country station isn't that people actually listen to this music everyday, but rather the fact that everyday, I manage to hear a different version of the National Anthem.  First, I'm surprised how many artists have "covered" the song, leading me to wonder if there isn't some post 9/11 stipulation in the contract for country artists to have to cover it.  I mean, I can almost understand it being played at the end of a programing day on a station.  It's kind of a concluding statement.  It's kind of like "Well, I've said enough, God bless america, thank you for your time.  Now go to bed." And then static.  Kind of holds a little weight.  But this is different, this is in the middle of the day, right between Brooke's and Dunn, or Kenny Chesney, or what ever bucolic sounding Americana name and hairdo is the latest big thing.  Just a moment of pause to remind you what country your in, in case you've forgotten.

So this is where we are.  Certainly this is nothing new - people in power co-opting the flag and god for their own purposes.  Fox News long ago incorporated the flag into every square inch of screen real estate on their network. The flag unfurls and flaps like the lips of their talking heads as they spew their ignorance and hate under the guise of patriotism.  Although what Fox offers as a patriotic version of the news isn't patriotism, its propaganda.

I haven't explored the depth's of the "new kid's" psyche - what makes someone want to be a self professed "Redneck", but I am aware that choices like this are usually a result of ones environment (like I said, he's 17, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt).  I lived in Atlanta for 10 years, home of Jeff Foxworthy, a man who made a fortune making jokes about rednecks and their simplicity, coined the term "Blue Collar Comedy", and subsequently even created an outlet store full of merchandise bearing his name.  What could be more American than that?  Surely for one to proclaim themselves a "Redneck" is an act of defiance or rebellion against an established belief, but what that belief is, I'm still not sure.  However, at lunch one day, our curiosity did get the better of us when it was revealed that he didn't know who Kevin Bacon was (in short, we were discussing the game 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon).  Feeling old, we needed to know what other pop cultural icons he didn't know about.  The resulting conversation played more like the bit on The Tonight Show, called "Jay Walking" when Jay Leno walks around and asks simple questions everyone should know.  We stumped him quickly when we asked him the name of the Vice President.

I find myself wondering what it is that aligns people so much with this song.  I certainly love my country, for all it's faults, simply for the fact that it is as much a part of me as I am of it.  And there exists nothing else like this country anywhere else in the world.  A simplistic thought maybe, but really how could it.  I'm not connected to my country by flag or by pledge, nor by Anthem's (unless they are of the rock kind, and those aren't usually patriotic).  I'm in love with this country's un-translateable elements - the "Americaness" that can exist in no other environment but this one.  The America I'm in love with exists in all night diners, Blues from the mud of the Mississippi, Yankee frugality, Southern Pride, Left Coast flakeyness, New York aggressivness, Grassroots fundamentalism,  American ingenuity and tenacity, Irreverence for Sacred Cows, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin (thanks Britain, but he embodies America, even in his choice to leave it), Harry Smith, Alan Lomax, Barry Gordy, Martin Luther King Jr., Alan Freed, Jack Kuroac, DIY ethos, The ability to see the need for change and to make it happen, and of course our undying hope.  This list could be infinitely longer, but you get my point.

Even the story of this song has interesting origins, ones that would leave copyright lawyers and ASCAP scratching their heads.  In 1812, a tone deaf lawyer cum poet named Francis Scott Key transposed his poem ("Defence of Fort McHenry") of a failed attempt of the British to take Baltimore over the melody of "An Anacreon Song" by John Stafford Smith, which was the "theme song" of a group of amateur music enthusiasts.  This was actually Key's second set of lyrics that he had fit to the melody's meter.  But this is only the begining.

"The Star Spangled Banner"  wasn't made into The United States' National Anthem until much later.  In 1889 the Secretary of the Navy ordered it to be played when ever the flag was raised, and it wasn't until Woodrow Wilson was President, that it was chosen by the White house to be played when "appropriate."   It was Herbert Hoover (you know the guy who built the big Dam) that put it in place as The National Anthem, only "the new law...did not specify an official text or musical arrangement, but left room for creative arrangements and interpretations of "The Star Spangled Banner"'[1] .  And this is where the very American-ness of the song comes in.  Like the guarantee of "the pursuit" in the "pursuit of happiness", but not the happiness itself, the very structure of our own National Anthem is up for interpretation.  But don't tell that to Nashville.

Everyday on our local country station, "The Star Spangled Banner" is sung with hushed reverence, as if the Super Bowl is about to begin.  I'm afraid to say it's comical, and the intention is either a surface level cheap ploy to ad a degree of depth into the shallow world of contemporary country music, or it's more subtle one.  It's devised to invoke the false brand of patriotism that's always sold to us in times of great defense.  A black and white version, blind to the flag or the country's many colors.  A "patriotism" that exists as a beacon of light, shining "where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes" proclaiming our way is the right way, "Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just". 

What this says about format driven radio, I'm not sure.  Does it create a stereo type for who the average listener of country music is?  Possibly.  Does it make it right, certainly not.  Certainly no one would want to be stereotyped into such an broad brushstroke of who they were.  But as long as we can define ourselves, align ourselves, and identify ourselves within certain confines, then we are doomed to a fate worse than death - a fate of regurgitated mediocrity, recycled idealism from a different time, hyperbole and back patting about how good we have it, so why change it.  If that is our fate, then it is a disservice what this country strives to be, and to the true patriots and Americans who made and make this country so great.  A false or narrow sense of what is patriotic, is the most unpatriotic act of them all.

More on the History of "The Star Spangled Banner" Here.

• Permalink
• | Write Comment
• | Comments (22)

Comments

Dzendvokh says:

Well if this isn't a brilliant piece of writing, I don't know what is.

"The ability to see the need for change and to make it happen".... I hope you're right about this one.

 

Great post Tyler.

 

 

Posted 2 days ago | Delete

Dzendvokh says:

Jimi was taken from us too soon:

 

 

 

Posted 2 days ago | Delete

contrabandwidth says:

Oh we change things, we just don't always recognize the results.  We're impatient on this detail.  Although were still far from where we need to be, look at the people ou went to school with that your parents or grandparents didn't.  We're not bound by the confines of tradition or cast (or even regionalism) that other countries are (or were).  I think it's for the better, even in the worst of times, we're just a little impatient in wanting to witness that change. 

and hey...Obama?  That's some pretty amazing stuff, yet strangely, it doesn't seem out of the ordinary.

Posted 2 days ago | Delete