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This Land (Revisited)

NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” talked to Arlo Guthrie on Monday about the copyright flap that has arisen over a campaign parody of his dad’s “This Land Is Your Land”:

Neil Conan: Your father was a political musician. What do you think he would have said about people using his music for political purposes?

Arlo: Well, you know, I really can’t speak for him. I can just tell you that when I saw it a few weeks ago, I thought it was one of the funniest commentaries, if not one of the most directly inspired–I mean, I called my sister, I called my friends, I sent everybody a link to the site so that they could go see it and we’ve all been laughing about it since then. I don’t think that was–I think my dad would have absolutely loved the humor in it.

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Gulf of … Whatever

Not that we ever learn anything from history, except how to repeat it, but this week is the largely unremarked 40th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that precipitated the Johnson administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War. NPR had a long audio report from Walter Cronkite on Monday that gave a detailed account of the incident itself and how it played out inside the White House. It’s history, or maybe just journalism, with a real feeling of immediacy and insight. One can’t help but wonder how many years it will take to hear/see something similar on Iraq.

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The Commander

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A few weeks ago, Kate and I were walking someplace in the neighborhood and she suddenly exclaimed, “Look, there’s the Commander.” Yes: a well-known local character. It’s a wreck of an old RV spruced up with red paint. It patrols the greater North Berkeley flatlands in search of parking places where the neighbors won’t raise a stink. It graced our street and others nearby last December. Then on Christmas Eve I saw the Commander chugging slowly away; I thought it looked kind of sad; but maybe it was off on an Xmas mission, delivering its own Yuletide treat to a soon-to-be-surprised homeowner.

Now, with winter long behind us, the Commander, which apparently hails from a Canadian RV maker, has migrated back to our block. Not all the neighbors are pleased with its reappearance. The police have been called. The Commander has been ticketed and towed. One guy up the street says he had an angry face-off after following the Commander’s commander to try to figure out where he lived (the owner doesn’t live in the RV, apparently, but ventures out from a more conventional domicile and moves his vehicle from place to place). Tensions run high in a place where some people have a deeply proprietary feeling about their native asphalt and others just can’t give up the romance of the open road. (Though now that you ask, no, I wouldn’t be especially thrilled to have this thing dumped in front of my house, either).

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Triathlete Guy

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Went up to Sonoma County yesterday to see our friend Pete compete in the Half Vineman triathlon. The event involves a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run; all events half the distance of the established Hawaii Ironman distances. Anyway, here he is at the finish, 5 hours, 36 minutues, 3.4 seconds after he started out. Pete rocks.

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Now, back to reality

Bob Herbert has a decent column in the Times (registration required) that throws more than a bucket of cold water on the campaign-trail optimists:

There was no shortage of pretty words and promises at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last week. But there’s a big difference between the rigidly crafted reality at the heart of a political campaign and the reality of the rest of the world.

“Practical politics,” said Henry Adams, “consists in ignoring facts.”

The facts facing the United States as George W. Bush and John Kerry joust for the presidency are too grim to be honestly discussed on the stump. No one wants to tell cheering potential voters that the nation has sunk so deep into a hole that it will take decades to extricate it.

I think his basic thesis about how fundamental our problems are. The question he poses, without trying to provide an answer, is whether voters are up to hearing the truth.

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This Land

There’s a great story on Wired News (and elsewhere in previous days) about a copyright lawsuit against the two brothers who produced the brilliant “This Land” campaign parody. The people who own the rights to Woody Guthrie’s songs, the Richmond Organization, have demanded “This Land” be removed from the Net because the brothers stole Guthrie’s music. The Wired News story ends with this note on Guthrie’s reported wishes regarding the song’s copyright:

“According to various Internet sources, including the website of the Museum of Musical Instruments in Santa Cruz, California, Guthrie allegedly wrote, ‘This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.’ ”

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John Brown’s Body

Oddest moments (for me) in tonight’s sporadic convention viewing:

–Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, extolling remarkable Kansas citizens of the past, included John Brown, the abolitionist. I guess it was startling to hear the name of one of the most radical characters in U.S. history, and one generally held responsible for killing five pro-slavery farmers in Kansas, because the proceedings have such a carefully crafted moderation to them. But maybe I’m wrong and John Brown is on his way back as a hero of the New Democrats.

–PBS vs. MSNBC vs. Fox vs. C-SPAN:
PBS: Jim Lehrer looks like he’s sleepwalking through this thing. The New York Times’ David Brooks doesn’t seem to have much insight to add, and no one, Republican or Democrat, has done anything to deserve the torture of watching Mark Shields paw through the proceedings in search of meaning nuggets. We next switched to …
MSNBC: I thought I might be able to stomach Chris Matthews. I didn’t watch long enough to really find out, because of the jittery way he kept leaping from correspondent to correspondent after John Edwards’s speech. Next up was …
Fox: Tuned in while Brit Hume was holding court, and Kate insisted I refrain from switching so we could see what “the other side” is saying. It was surprisingly un-awful — in the context of how awful network news in general has become. Hume’s panel included Morton Kondracke, who termed Edwards’ speech 95 percent positive but took points off for his having uttered the “fiction” that there are two Americas with different levels of privilege; NPR’s Mara Liasson, whose startled looking (not to say bug-eyed) expression explains why she’s not on the tube more often, stuck to her guns in analyzing Edwards’ speech as effective; and the most damning thing conservative lion Bill Kristol could come up with was to say the speech was the most hawkish heard at a Democratic convention since John F. Kennedy was nominated in 1960. Hume’s most memorable contribution was a complaint about the volume of the Black-Eyed Peas performance after Edwards finished. Later on, Greta van Susteren took over and provided a frightening look at face-work gone bad. To recover from the Botox scare, we tuned to …
C-SPAN: Thank the deity, if any, for a channel that won’t get in the way of the Guam delegation’s long introduction (60 years since liberation from the Japanese, 100 years under U.S rule) to its vote.

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X Prize: The Motel

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OK, sometimes I think I’m immune to learning anything. Kate and I went down to the SpaceShipOne launch in June and wound up staying in Lancaster, about 25 miles from the Mojave Airport, the staging site. That meant we had to get up ridiculously early (2:30 a.m.) to make sure we got to Mojave by 4 a.m. to avoid getting stuck in a monster traffic jam that never really materialized. Ever since then, I’ve been telling myself that the really smart thing to do for the X Prize launch, which logic dictated would happen in September sometime, would be to call a motel in Mojave to see if anyone would put a room on hold. But since that was the eminently sensible thing to do, I hesitated to act.

Then Burt Rutan announced yesterday the first prize launch will be attempted September 29. So first thing, I filed my story. Then I called the Best Western down there in Mojave, which is just outside what turned out to be the press entrance to the airport. Rutan announced the launch about 11 a.m. When I called the motel at 1:30 p.m. or so, the clerk told me the entire 50-room joint was sold out from September 28 through October 6 (Rutan hopes to do the second flight on the 4th of October, the anniversary of the launch of Sputnik I in 1957).

The clerk directed me to another motel, the Mariah Country Inn. They already had a waiting list, and the clerk there told me it would take three or four days to get back to people about room availability. Then I called the Econo Lodge, which advertises “nice clean rooms, away from train” (Mojave’s got a fairly substantial railroad yard).

The clerk there checked the nights I asked for — from September 27 through October 6. Yes, they had a couple rooms still available. But he wanted to tell me about a few ground rules first. The rate would be $159.95. I could cancel, but only with 30 days’ notice. And once that 30-day notice deadline passed, I’d be on the hook for the entire 10 nights I had reserved; I couldn’t cancel a couple nights in the middle or cut the stay short without paying for it.

I asked the normal rate for the room we were discussing. “Oh — 69 dollars.” “So you guys are really making out on this deal.” “Yes, but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” Ah — the beauty of the free market at work.

All of which reminded me of two comments from our June visit. A couple of California Highway Patrol cadets who were directing traffic all night before the launch said they had never seen so many people in Mojave. “All the motels are booked,” one said, “even the ghetto ones.” Later, Kate overheard another woman in town telling a friend about the launch: “Wow — this really put Mojave on the map.” And her friend answered, “And tomorrow it’ll go back to being a ghost town.”

Yep, one with plenty of cheap motel rooms. I finally threw up my hands and booked a room in Tehachapi, again about 25 miles away, for half the price of the Econo Lodge room.

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Barack Obama

Well, last week Kate told me a friend was begging off a social engagement — well, it was actually a planned reading aloud of “A Tale of Two Cities” — because she wanted to watch John Kerry’s speech at the Democratic convention instead. My response was, “No way I’m changing anything in my personal life to watch John Kerry talk.” Yeah, I’m still stuck on wondering what in the world he was thinking when he voted to give Bush the OK to pound Saddam. But I won’t wander down that trail now.

But tonight after picking me up at the airport, Kate wanted to get home quickly to watch Barack Obama’s speech to the convention. I didn’t bad mouth Obama. I’m curious about him as a native Illinoisan and also — just having seen “Fahrenheit 9/11” last night — really wondering if there is anyone out there who might appeal to “the better angels of our nature” (no, I don’t think it’s Michael Moore, though he did succeed in making an occasionally funny, often wrenching film).

So I heard Obama tonight, and right away I was thinking he should be on the ticket. He’s articulate. He speaks from experience. He talks convincingly about inclusion and unity, about looking out for each other and about the keys to helping the poor and disenfranchised succeed. Hope he makes it to the Senate in November (running virtually unopposed in Illinois, I suppose he will). We need a presence and a voice like that on the national scene.