Hammer Mill Days

Give me a little more slack on this XLR. Little more ... little more ... woof! That's good. Now point the speaker down over the side of the hole. There's a good chap. Right, well ... you've caught us in the midst of a pretty typical dilemma for bands as unsuccessful and under-resourced as Big Green. You probably know what I'm talking about (because I sure as hell don't). You've come to expect us to scrape our way through every situation, living in squat houses and lean-tos, taking the cheap seats on pretty much any mode of transportation you can name. So what the hell - we're not some fancy-ass successful band that can afford racks of expensive gear. We've got a bunch of second-hand kit that's held together with masking tape ... because that's what our audience demands. So, when you need reverb, and you don't have an expensive effect unit, or even an old, cranky one, what the hell do you do? I'll tell you what - you just lower a micro...

It's been more than 15 years and we're still at war in Afghanistan; a deployment and occupation considerably longer than that of the now-defunct Soviet Union. It's been more than 14 years and we're still at war in Iraq, a conflict longer than the one military historian Dilip Hiro once described as "The Longest War" (the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s). We're killing people in Roqqa, Syria, in Mosul, Iraq, in Yemen, and quite a few other places. Far from stepping away, we are preparing to double down, sending another contingent of thousands of American troops to Afghanistan on some quixotic effort to tamp down the wildfire we helped ignite thirty-seven years ago. Endless war in an of itself is now an invariant reality of modern U.S. foreign policy, regardless of which major party holds the reins of power. The broad political consensus has built a nearly unassailable war machine - not in the sense that it is impervious to military defeat, but rather that it is...