Hammer Mill Days

Okay, blow out the candles. Try harder. Nope, nothing. Try again. What the hell ... you'd think at your age you would have this worked out by now. Silly kid. Right, so before you call child protective services, let me reassure you that we, of Big Green, are all biologically childless. The line stops here! And it's just as well. No, sir ... I was just in the midst of celebrating the nineteenth birthday of our first commercial release (a.k.a. album), 2000 Years to Christmas , which was released .... I don't know ... sometime after Christmas in 1999. Nice timing, right? Typical. Anyway, that was a few weeks ago, and I'm glad to say it's pretty small in the rear view mirror at this point. So, 2000 Years To Christmas was our biggest seller. That's not saying much. Of course, it was released relatively early in the era of online retail, and over the course of the succeeding decades it has wormed its way into any number of places online. A simple Google search ...

If there's one thing about the Trump administration that's consistent, it's their laser focus on immigrants - specifically the ones with dark skin or non-christian religious beliefs. This is basically Trump's political brand, though it's nothing new in American (and particularly Republican party) politics. This specific strain of bigotry has made its way into national elections for decades, most noticeably since the early 1990s and the Buchanan direct mail scam .... I mean, presidential campaign, right through right-wing hacks like Tom Tancredo and up to the now-sainted (by the phony "resistance") Senator-elect Mitt Romney, who ran to the right of his fanatical GOP competitors on immigration. So it makes little sense to assign this tendency exclusively to Trump - scapegoating immigrants is central to Republican politics, and as for Democrats, Obama was the deporter-in-chief, despite his uplifting rhetoric. That said, it's hard to deny that Trump ta...