It is Sunday and I listen to Pandora’s blues station on Sundays.  Last night the Senate affirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court for life.

Little Wing  by Stevie Ray Vaughn was playing when the blog came up on the task picker.  That song is on The Sky is Crying hence the title of the post.  There are a lot if issues surrounding this and I agree with most of them.  This post is mainly about white privilege.

What I saw this week is privileged old white men insuring their values are extended by a younger entitled white man.  I use the word entitled because he wouldn’t have gotten upset at his appearance after Dr. Ford.

I can hear his internal dialog,

“I busted my butt in high school and Yale.      I almost took a President out of office.  I waited 3 years to get confirmed to an federal appellate court.  I’ve waited for REAL conservative President to be elected.  You old farts are even CONSIDERING voting against me because of some bitch from my HIGH SCHOOl years says I fumbled around with her over 30 years ago?

THIS SUPREME COURT SEAT IS MINE!!!!”

He still would have had a job for life he hadn’t been confirmed.  He was going through this to get a better commute.

It reminds me of a character lesson I got from both parents at different times.

“No matter what you’ve done you make it worse when you lie about it.”

Kavanaugh getting confirmed sends a dangerous message to young people out there.  It matters who you know.  You can do what you want if you have enough power.

I always knew these were true but Trump’s America has brought them to the forefront.  Obama’s term swang the pendulum to the left and now the right came out of the woods to swing it WAY back to the old days when it was great to be white.

I’m not talking airline miles I am talking about Miles Davis.  This might go into a jazz category if I get the inspiration to write another post about the original American art form.

This post came about because a Miles Davis tune came up on my Pandora shuffle.  The song was Jean Pierre and the album was We Want Miles.

I can’t say I love jazz because I don’t play it all the time.  In fact I only listen to Pandora’s jazz station on Saturdays.   They play mostly piano-based songs where it’s easy to find the melody.  More about finding the melody later.

I got into jazz because I was in band.  I wasn’t a band geek because I wasn’t that good on my alto saxophone.  Concert bands don’t play fun or cool songs.  Stage or jazz bands had the cool kids that played the fun music with trumpet, saxophone, and trombone solos.  Those guys got to stand up and show off.
That kind of music got me interested in brass jazz like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.  Tommy Dorsey led me into the vocal jazz style of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.  Those guys led me to Broadway interpretations.  I found Miles through his version of Porgy and Bess.

Porgy and Bess was a cool version of the musical.  That’s not my opinion; it’s a jazz style Miles started in the late 50’s.  The melodies were thinly hidden.  Later jazz lost a lot of popularity due to long solos and weird time signatures.  Songs that you could hum or scat (boo boop be doo) were being replaced by pieces to be analyzed or explained by intellectuals with old records and expensive turntables or reel to reel tape players.

I’m not gonna lie; I wanted to be one of those intellectuals. Partly for the equipment and partly for being able to talk about something very few people in my circle of friends and possible girls could call BS if I strayed too far from the facts.

Steely Dan the band is still touring in spite of the fact that Walter Becker the co-founder of a 2-person band died in September of 2017 at the age of 67.  Donald Fagen, the other founder, is 70.

These guys shouldn’t be touring.  At their age we should be going to them in a venue they like near them like Billy Joel doing Madison Square Garden once a month.  Touring is a lot of work.  I like the idea of these guys relaxing in their golden years and doing a club date every now and then.  That way the show can change every time.

Steely Dan music doesn’t evoke the road like most country music.  It brings to my mind living in a city neighborhood full of jazz and blues bars within walking/staggering distance.

I live out in the Houston suburbs where it’s never walking weather and nothing is within walking distance.  In Houston walking distance is 100 yards.  After that temperature and humidity force you into the world of sweaty or moist.

We are a car culture along the Gulf Coast.  There is a Steely Dan song that asks if there is gas in the car and another one where the California is mentioned.  There might be others but I can’t think of or never heard them.  Most of them are inside the head or the city.

Obviously I like their music because I am an observer in the clubs and bars (read shy).  I hope to see the stories and songs to write them down one day.

Randy Newman is on my Pandora shuffle.  He writes both great and funny songs.  Today Mr. President Have Pity on the Working Man came up.  He recorded this song over 40 years ago.  The YouTube video is pointed at Obama.  Lord knows what they’ll do with Trump.

We have elected an oligarch.  He believes the rich should have power and respect because of their money.  I don’t think he’s as stupid as his deeds.  Nobody could be.  He’s not used to hearing negative feedback from people that have less money than him.

While everybody around me was yelling about how stupid he was I thought that rednecks would come out of their bunkers in the woods to vote for him.  I don’t think he had ever worn a gimme cap before even on the golf course.

I think he was elected because he was spouting ugly thoughts that a lot of off-camera Americans feel deep down where they’ve been trained to not mention or act on.  We are seeing incidents of people letting racist and sexist urges come to surface because one of their own is now in power.

I don’t think that the South Park guys thought that Trump was going to win when they did the episode about the Canadians coming to America because they had elected a Trump-like prime minister.  At least I hope not.

People with ultra-conservative views are going to let them fly.  This will be good because the public have all sorts of recording devices everywhere to call them on their attitudes when they are out of office.  Working in the Trump White House for the entire term will not be looked upon favorably.  Getting fired will be good; resigning will be better.

Donald Trump to everyone’s surprise has won the presidential election.  Hillary was more qualified, acted like an adult, and won the popular vote but Trump said what a lot of city whites secretly said in their hearts and rednecks openly believed.

My wife and a lot of liberals are outraged,   She keeps questioning me why I am not upset.  I think it’s because I’ve never been close to power or thought I could influence it.  I voted for Hillary and that was the most I could do.

Another reason is that Bob Marley is on my Pandora shuffle.  I’m getting in the mood for Jamaica on Brooke’s birthday cruise.  You can’t listen to Bob Marley without thinking about Rastafarianism.  Rastas believe that the world is going to end so you should do things to make life more pleasant like love, eat, and dance as much as you can.   Marijuana adds enhances these acts.

I don’t smoke weed and I’m not about to start.  I like the idea of not getting upset about macro problems.  The day after the election unpopular candidate is a macro problem.  If and when it trickles down to the people at my level is the time to get upset.

I’ve listened to the new Prairie Home Companion and they’ve kept a lot of the sketches.  Obviously no more news from Lake Woebegone and adventures of Guy Noir but all the actors except Garrison are there.

Chris will probably change the show but it sounds like he will take his time.  I won’t be able to hear bout the little town that time forgot but I still will be reminded about the soothing effects of ketchup.

I listen to radio dramas to get to sleep.  It started  when I worked in Austin.  Rooms there were cheaper than apartments and people didn’t run credit checks.    If I didn’t want to bother my house-mates so I had to use  headphones.  I couldn’t find headphones comfortable enough to sleep in and long enough to get to the TV so  I found radio shows over the internet.

I used to listen to old American detective dramas.  I something that had a time limit so the sound wouldn’t go on all night.  This led me to the BBC.  They have 8 different bands. BBC 4 and BBC 7 had the dramas and comedies.  BBC 7 is now BBC 4 Extra.

BBC4x has a scifi/terror hour at noon and midnight. (6 AM and 6 PM my time)  The rest of the night is filled with crime dramas like Lord Peter Wimsey and Paul Temple.  This month they are serializing Charles Dickens novels.  I don’t listen to them because they are long and depressing.

I’m not as up on my Dickens as I thought.  I started to listen to The Old Curiosity Shop Tuesday because I thought it was a short story.  I listened almost the full hour and at the end I discovered that it was just starting a bunch of depressing plot lines.