Killin' In The USA

So (a friend of mine once said that "'So is the new "like'"), let's begin with an assertion: Americans are wicked enamored of killing.  The country was founded on it, extended by it, and to this day we, the people, seem thrilled by it.

And I'm not just talking about killing animals here, about the "sport" we call hunting (in order to truly qualify as a sport, shouldn't the animals be armed, too?  We don't play football with one team in cleats, helmets, and full padding while the other wears street shoes and business suits, do we?).  I hunt, and I'm embarrassed to say that perhaps the main reason is that there's something viscerally pleasurable about making a good shot, seeing the animal fall, watching it bleed out and breathe its last.  It's a first-person-shooter video game come to life-and-death. We do it, most of us, not because we need the meat to survive, but because it's fun.  Killing. 

No, I'm talking mainly about killing other humans.  Stones to arrows, flintlocks to Winchester repeaters, smallpox blankets to lynchings, Saturday Night Specials to Bushmasters, atomic bombs to napalm to drones, we keep finding newer, better, more efficient ways to kill other humans.  It's not enough to just do it, either:  we need to watch it, listen to it, read about it.  Our popular "culture" is dominated by our fascination with killing.  Just think of the highest grossing films at any given time, the most popular TV shows, the best-selling books: death, murder and mayhem are surefire routes to fame and fortune.

Abroad, we lionize the "warriors" who go to faraway lands to kill people we think need killing, reflexively and universally referring to them as heroes, regardless of whether or not they actually do anything more "heroic" than enlist, often simply because that seems like the best employment opportunity available to them at the time.  At home, we watch the news with some fascination, maybe mixed with horror, maybe not, taking in the daily litany of shootings: at schools, malls, movie theaters, convenience stores, wherever two or more of (you) are gathered....   I'm just so fucking sick of it, and can't for the life of me figure out why we keep letting it happen, why we let an extremist group of gun owners jeopardize the safety of each one of us.

If I go to a movie, forget to turn off my cell phone and it rings, should I duck and cover, for fear of being shot, 'cause it annoyed some pistol packin' patron drooling over the trailer for the next installment in the "Urban Vigilante"  ("He's white, he's armed to the teeth, and he's pissed--AT EVERYTHING") series?  If I'm at a convenience store and have "Ode To Joy" blasting from my car stereo, do I need to worry about someone emptying a clip into my vehicle--even as I try to drive away--'cause they can't stand that elitist, white-guy crap?  If I'm walking home from a convenience store (say, is there a pattern here?  Should we outlaw convenience stores, since they seem to attract the wrong element so often?  But then again, if convenience stores are outlawed, only outlaws will have convenience stores.  If they want my Slushie, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead....) with some Skittles and Mountain Dew, wearing a hoodie, do I run the risk of being shot for, well, for wearing a hoodie and possessing Skittles and Mt. Dew? 

We like killing so much that, though it seems counter-intuitive, we even like killing killers.  The US, the only Western country that still uses capital punishment, ranks 5th in the world in state-sanctioned killings, trailing only those bastions of human rights and enlightenment China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.  Texas alone would rank 7th in the world.  We've hit a bit of a snag recently, though:  the European countries we relied upon to provide the chemicals needed for lethal injections have refused to sell them to us anymore, as they seem to find something distasteful in a government killing its own citizens.  Those pussies.  We ought just to invade them and force them to give us our death-dealing drugs, but instead we've turned to domestic compounding pharmacies to make the goods.  Problem is, they can't seem to get the formulas right (lethal drug manufacturers are apparently as proprietary as Coke and KFC about their secret herbs and spices), and a couple of people the government has tried to kill have suffered and lingered in their death throes.  Why don't we just go to firing squads?  If we're gonna be serious about this stuff, let's get serious.  Seems like there'd be no shortage of volunteers to do the deed.

Is this an incredibly angry, snarky post, even for me?  You betcha.  I'm fed up with our love of guns and, by extension, killing.  How can it be that, in a putative democracy, the public debate and attitude is controlled by an organization comprised of somewhere around 2% of our population?  What are the rest of us doing?  If we feel less and less safe--and I know that I do--why don't we step back and see if we can rein this madness in?  Instead, we are exhorted to arm ourselves more, and to take our guns everywhere.  It's "forward, into the past" for sure, into the Wild West of the late 19th century.  There's nothing wrong with owning guns.  There's something terribly wrong with feeling that we have the need--and the right--to use them on other humans so often.  Until we get up on our hind legs and do something about it, we're going to watch the same scenes played out again and again.  And we're all complicit.

Here are some songs I'll be playing on Tuesday, from noon till two.  And an update: WOOL FM is right on the cusp of greatness, of going to full power.  The antenna is in place, the old call number, 100.1 is kaput (the new one 91.5, awaits final FCC approval), so we are available only by streaming at wool.fm.  Anyway, the songs:

Killed Myself When I Was Young                                              A.A. Bondy
Killing Me                                                                                   Aztec Two Step
Time To Kill                                                                                The Band
License To Kill                                                                            Bob Dylan
They Killed Him                                                                          Bob Dylan
Killin' The Blues                                                                          Chris Smither
Where The Hawkwind Kills                                                        Daniel Lanois
My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama                                         Frank Zappa
Hard Time Killin' Floor                                                               Geoff Muldaur
Killing Floor                                                                                Howlin' Wolf
Killing Floor                                                                                John Hartford
Kill The Messenger                                                                     John Wesley Harding
Sex Kills                                                                                      Joni Mitchell
Kill Your Sons                                                                             Lou Reed

Kill The Buddha                                                                          Michael Smith
Killing Floor                                                                                Mike Bloomfield
Foolkiller                                                                                     Mose Allison
Cortez The Killer                                                                         Neil Young
Killer Wants To Go To College                                                   Paul Simon
Killer Wants To Go To College II                                               Paul Simon
Killer Queen                                                                                Queen
Won't Kill Me                                                                              Quicksilver
New York City's Killing Me                                                        Ray LaMontagne
Never Kill Another Man                                                              Steve Miller Band
Kill You Dead                                                                              Rusted Root
Life'll Kill Ya                                                                               Warren Zevon
Kill Zone                                                                                     T-Bone Burnett
Kill Switch                                                                                  T-Bone Burnett
Psycho Killer                                                                               Talking Heads
Laugh Kills Lonesome                                                                Michael Nesmith

Are We Not Men?  Apparently, we are Devo....

Some Get The Awful, Awful Diseases...

So sang Warren Zevon in "Life'll Kill Ya," the title track to his next-to-last album.  And as we all know all too well, some do get those diseases.  Turns out that Alice B. Fogel is one of those people.

RSD--Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy--is its old name, Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome the new, updated, one.  By any name, it's an autonomic nervous system disorder, related in some ways to both Multiple Sclerosis and Muscular Dystrophy:  with CRPS, the central nervous system keeps reacting to a simple injury (sprain, fracture, stroke, even surgery) as if it were continually new.  It sends these messages to the brain, which goes into action to heal this "new" injury, though it may be months old (Alice broke a bone in her foot in September; that's what led to this situation, and, while that bone is healed, the foot is not).  The body's own defensive actions cause it to eat itself, in a manner of speaking: bones, muscles, joints, skin are all targets of the body's defensive reaction, which can lead to atrophy of all of those things.  It can spread to other parts of the body, spontaneously or through other actions; Alice's fall also resulted in a tear of the meniscus in her right knee, but she may not be able to have surgery to repair that, since that could worsen her disease, or at least give it another point of attack.  And the pain that comes with and from RSD can be excruciating.

Alice got her diagnosis about a month ago.  At that time, I sort of glossed over it, thinking, "Okay, she has this thing, but it'll pass.  It can't really be that serious."  A week or so ago, she sat me down and explained thoroughly and in detail what it all meant.  Turns out it is that serious.

At this stage, we know that this is going to be life-changing somehow (obviously it already is for Alice), but it could have larger ramifications as things progress and we see exactly where they're going.  Will she still be able to hike or run, two of her favorite, necessary, restorative pastimes?  She's hoping "yes," but the future, someone said, is hard to predict.  While, as she was told by one Dr. "There's no such thing as a 'mild' case,"  thus far A's pain is not constant, and seems to be manageable.  I know, I know: easy for me to say, but she's a very tough woman and has a high tolerance for pain.  I like to think that almost 30 years with me has contributed to the building of that tolerance.  We all do what we can....

Although it may seem somewhat weird for me to post this on a blog, Alice asked if I would be the one to spread the word, as she just wasn't up to the task, and this seems like an effective way to inform lots of our friends and family quickly.  It also feels like an opportunity to alert folks to the existence of this disease, which I was pretty surprised not to have ever heard of in my 60 years here. If I had just heard of it in another person, I'd likely have both "poohed" and "poohed" it, but now that it's in my life, I can't avoid it, and it feels important to sound an alarm about it.

Because CRPS/RSD is fairly rare, medical people don't often even consider it as a possibility until it's too late, but if it's caught in the first 3 months, through treatment (primarily Physical Therapy) its effects can possibly be reversed and eliminated.  Unfortunately, even though she had tell-tale symptoms all along, it was almost 5 months after Alice's injury that it began to dawn on people that this might be what was happening.  Seems like good information to have, to at least raise the possibility early if you or someone you love is in a potentially similar situation.

After all, the verse that lends this piece its title ends "Some people get to die in their sleep/ At the age of a hundred and one."