Hammer Mill Days

Gather 'round, kiddies ... ol' grampa Big Green is going to spin a few tales about the glory days of yesteryear, when it was us against the world, gas was 35 cents a gallon, and love was just a buck forty-three away. Heh heh. (Get off my lawn!) Yeah, the truth is, Big Green is pretty short on war stories. That occurred to me today as I was driving along, listening to an old Fresh Air interview with Keith Richards. (In truth, the most interesting parts were when Terry played some of the old Stones hits, which I still like o'plenty.) You expect some of the pillars of rock and roll to have the ripest, pithiest tales about backstage exploits, drugs, women, men, asteroid wrangling, pretzel bending, and so on. But bands like us, clinging to the clammy underbelly of pop music ... well, we don't have a lot of that. Sure, there are stories. But nobody wants to hear about riding back from Middlebury College on NY Route 8 in the dead of winter, in a battered old van that had n...

A lot of talk the past few weeks about refugees flooding into southern and eastern Europe, mainly people from the hell that is Syria and the catastrophic landscape of post-revolution Libya. First reaction of the right-wing government in Hungary was to thug them with riot police and hastily build a border fence. One of the more memorable videos was the one where Hungarian officials are tossing baloney sandwiches into a corral filled with hungry migrants, including young children. Then there was the Hungarian broadcast journalist who deliberately tripped a fleeing refugee. Nice. People. The thing is, you need to listen to their rhetoric. They're talking about "illegal immigrants". They're echoing the applause lines of our own crackpot politicians. No surprise, because we're witnessing the same experience on our own southern border. People fleeing from the neoliberal aftermath of our bankrupt Central America policy, starting with support for decades of regressive, ...