Let’s begin with a little bit of clangor, shall we? If a composer were to write any music dealing with these times, they would have to really reach into their bag of tricks. Instead of suggesting birdsong or pastoral settings or even cannon fire, they would have to come up with ideas for:
- what does treachery sound like?
- which instruments can really play cowardly the best?
- we need cellists who can use their instruments to evoke the whine, the pule, and the obfuscation
- There would be titles like Concerto for Disbelief and Governmental Cacophony in D Major and The Fascist Songbook
What challenges the classicists would face. But hey, rock and roll is a different animal. There have always been strong threads of anger running through its fabric.
Let’s watch an example, as Tom Morello plays Soldier in the Army of Love on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Tom used to be in the group Rage Against the Machine, which you might have surmised from the name was not a chamber orchestra.
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The graphic below tells a truth. There are a lot of different chickens coming home to roost today because of the scandalous policies of Cluck and his plaything, the Republican Party. Some of those chickens involve American farmers and ranchers, who voted pretty much overwhelmingly for Cluck every chance they got, and now are finding themselves in a real pickle.
Many editorial writers are exultant about this, and happy to tell those disgruntled rural voters Nyaa Nyaa, we told you so. How ya like it now, crybaby? I haven’t joined them, because this is not a new thing. It is a case of same old, same old.
For reasons inexplicable, this population group has voted Republican forever, even though almost without exception they have done better financially during Democratic administrations. They believe that Democrats are unreliable when it comes to the economy but the reality that the national debt routinely skyrockets when the GOP is in charge of things, and improves when they are not seems beyond them.
No surprises here. The difference today is that we’re all in the shitter together now.
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I’ve made a couple of discoveries just this week. The first is the existence in the lovely country of Canada of Orange Shirt Day.
Orange Shirt Day is observed annually on September 30 to honor Indigenous children who survived residential and boarding schools and to remember those who did not return.
If you do an internet search on the subject you will find that their slogan is “Every Child Matters,” and that there is a veritable storehouse out there of beautiful art found on tee-shirts and posters dealing with this emotionally charged subject.
I chose these three images as examples, but there were scores more that I could have selected. In the United States we had our own residential and boarding schools for indigenous children with their uniformly sad and sometimes horrific stories.
Of course every child matters. The words roll off the tongue with almost no effort. And yet, as a society we don’t always behave as if we believed that at all. Children do not vote. So when their food supplies are taken away as in the SNAP program cutbacks, they depend on grownups to hold the politicians accountable.
When we look at the variations in educational programs available to children across the country, the glaring advantages for the children of the wealthy stand out like an endless row of sore thumbs. Kids once again depend on grownups to help bring some sort of fairness out of what are today scandalously unbalanced resources. But grown-ups are always in short supply. 
The Orange Shirt Society was established in 2015 to:
- Support Indian residential school reconciliation
- Create awareness of the individual, family, and community intergenerational impacts of Indian residential schools through Orange Shirt Society activities
- Create awareness of the concept of “Every Child Matters”
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What was the other discovery? There is a Substack site called Revive Your Roar. The author combines poetry and beautiful illustrations and video to help us through … you remember the phrase “the fog of war?” Well it may be that this writing and artwork can help us navigate the fog of life.
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In 1969, the year I began my two-tear stretch of military service, a book called The Peter Principle was published, and for a while it was on every book club’s reading list.
The Peter Principle stated that in a hierarchical organization, employees tend to be promoted until they reach a level where they are now incompetent, and they stay there. Often severely impeding progress.
When this happens, one of the ways of “fixing” the problem is the lateral arabesque, a pseudo-promotion where an underperforming or incompetent employee is moved sideways out of the way, often given a longer, more impressive job title and fewer meaningful responsibilities. It feels like a promotion to the employee and outsiders, but it is actually a transfer from one unproductive or isolated position to another. But now they are out of the way and more capable people can be placed in their former position.
Being alert and relatively unhappy at being forced to be in uniform, I was able to find examples of the Peter Principle all over the hospital. (I need to add that there were also many, many examples of men and women who were doing exceptional work, but a cranky draftee is apt to emphasize the negative, and I did just that).
But now, in 2026, I realize that this entire country has been Peter Principled to a fare-thee-well. Our entire executive branch is a testimony to the book’s main point. We have a confluence of incompetents and evildoers begging for something to be done. What we desperately need is to lateral arabesque the bejaabbers out of the whole lot.
My tentative plan involves sending this disreputable cohort to an uninhabited island. (I like islands because they are so tidy a way to isolate a problem. Remember Napoleon and Elba?) But I digress. These miscreants would be fed, housed, clothed, and allowed to live out their mean-spirited lives in something resembling comfort. At least as much as one could find with limited electricity and very structured communication with the outside world.
On arrival they would be asked to build their own privies, and provided the tools and materials to do the job.
They would all be given extravagant titles, and a local newspaper would trumpet even the tiniest accomplishment of theirs in order to appease their very large egos. But leave the island … nope. It would be truly a matter of national security, as it is now.
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