Today in 1955, Elvis Presley made his TV debut, on “Louisiana Hayride” on KWKH-TV in Shreveport, La.
The number one album today in 1966 was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Going Places”:
The number one single today in 1966:
Back in 1976, the New Yorker had a cover that was a visual example of how the upper east coast “elites” see the rest of the country.
Remember when the left lost their collective shit when Jason Aldean dropped “Try That in a Small Town” a couple of years ago?
I do.
Good times.
It made the Stupids mad. You know the ones.
These are the people who tore down statues that “offended” them while putting up murals, statues and holding two televised funerals for a criminal drug addict who once held a pistol to the swollen belly of a pregnant woman and died while resisting arrest. The same ones who claimed that the protests had turned out to be fiery, but mostly peaceful, while entire downtowns went up in flames behind them.
Just last week, a strong progressive voice in DC circles, Heidi Pryzbyla, went on MSNBC and said:
“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians because Christian nationalists are very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any Earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God. The problem with that is that they are determining, men, are determining what God is telling them.”
Oh, my. Christians and their crazy ideas. What are we going to do?
Tell me you have never read the first line of the Declaration of Independence without telling me you haven’t read the first line of the Declaration of Independence – because the idea we get our rights from our Creator, Nature and Nature’s God according to Jefferson, is literally in the first line.
I began jotting down notes since I saw what Pryzbyla said when she went off on “Christian Nationalists” and how they (we) believe in GOD, for goodness’s sake! What a bunch of rubes!
Then I saw the clips of Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, my first take was pure anger, second take was that it was just a stupid example of the lowest level of thinking in a long line of low-level thinking – Waldman and Schaller’s book, Robin Di Angelo’s White Fragility, George Rogers’ (aka Ibram X. Kendi) Anti-Racist Baby, etc.
Eventually, I just started laughing even though my mom taught me it was not nice to openly laugh at stupid people. My take after I stopped laughing – White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a self-affirmation book for the Dunning-Kruger set.
I’ve watched “elites” like these effete, intellectually constipated, self-righteous Acela Corridor urban dwellers over the years, and I have nicknamed their entirely predictable thought processes “ricochet thinking”.
That name comes from what happens when a Mossad operative clandestinely eliminates a bad actor. The Mossad assassins use a suppressed .22 caliber pistol when they do close in work. It has several advantages, it is small, relatively quiet, leaves a very small entry wound and most of all, the .22L round is just powerful enough to penetrate the thinner areas of a human skull but not powerful enough to punch through the other side – no massive exit wound. What makes the .22 Long such an effective round is that while it can’t blow a big hole in a target’s head, it does have enough juice to ricochet around inside the skull for a bit, turning the brain to ground round.
That’s the thinking of the “elite’ on the left. An idea ricochets around in their head long enough to kill enough brain cells until mental retardation looks like scholarship.
It’s also why they can’t do science or logic because the scientific method and logical thinking requires rigor and the acceptance of the possibility of being wrong. This kind of “intellectualism” is not designed to push boundaries to get at the truth, its only purpose is to satisfy and mollify the thinker. It is a mental sedative that comforts them, reassuring they are all Stuart Smally and gosh darn it, they’re good enough, they’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like them!
As AOC said, it is better to be morally right than factually correct – even though you can’t be one without the other.
I’m working on my WRR (White Rural Rage). I’m sure I must have it because I vote Republican, I was raised on a farm, I fish and hunt, I’ve butchered hogs, cared for chickens, hogs, cattle and horses, put up hay, hoed a garden, tended fields, driven and operated a long litany of farm equipment, shoveled out stalls, used a manure spreader, roamed creek bottoms barefoot, eaten watermelon straight off the vine and generally filled myself with white rural rage.
I did set aside my WRR long enough to get a mechanical engineering degree, a degree in finance, one in economics and a Master’s in Business Administration, so I got that going for me, white rural rage or not.
But I guess Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia.
Matt Taibbi’s great piece over at his Substack, Racket News (do subscribe) titled “MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage“, does a thorough job of identifying the latest slander against rural America and covers the fact this anti-populism is really nothing new when the cow-kissing, manure shoveling, great unwashed deign to push back against the demands of the self-anointed elite. Taibbi noted:
“Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a ‘frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,’ and waged a ‘shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.’”
Who knew there were Trump voters back in the late 1800’s?
At the root, this is all based in irrational fear of Donald J. Trump and his supporters. The “elite” see people like us, people who were raised close to where the rubber meets the road, people who produce things and ideas, people who push back and challenge their assumed status, as existential threats to who they know they are – modern day looters.
Matt Taibbi, who is not a conservative:
“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”
Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.
White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading,is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America. …
The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.
Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.” When White Rural Rage came out this week he rushed to review it, the intransigent refusal of yokels to accept his wisdom being his favored current hobby horse. “The Mystery of Rural White Rage” is remarkable on multiple levels, one being that after spending so much energy talking about the health of the economy, he pulls out an economic version of Sam Kinison’s classic “Move to the Food!” routine:
The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers. Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are?
He answers his question: “Some cities have become unaffordable… and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.”
To recap: globalization and technological change have devastated small towns and made the urban keyboard warriors richer, and rural voters can’t move to the cities because they can’t afford to. However, instead of being grateful for the “huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia” in the form of federal programs paid by the taxes of luckier citizens like Krugman, small town America is unaccountably hostile.
Schaller and White Rural Rage co-author Paul Waldman make the same point, that “cities produce far more of the nation’s wealth,” and rural citizens are increasingly “subsidized by the taxes paid by higher-income metropolitans.” What gives? Why won’t they shut the fuck up?
“For so long,” complained Waldman on Morning Joe, “Democrats have been told… that in order to get rural voters… you have to go there… you have to show them that you understand… You have to put on a Carhartt jacket and go down to somebody’s farm, right? Maybe milk a cow?”
“Yes!” exclaimed* Mika.
But it turns out, a sad Waldman pronounced, that you “don’t have to do any of that,” because Donald Trump didn’t. He just “gave [rural voters] a way to essentially give a big middle finger to Democrats, to people who live in cities and to the rest of the country.”
The Morning Joe set looked perplexed. Why would that work better than wearing a Carhartt jacket and milking a cow? It didn’t make sense.
Educated America. We’re in good hands!
*The correct phrase is really “‘Yes,’ dipshitted Mika,” but I was afraid the usage would throw off some readers. For future reference, it may come up again.
The Grammy Awards premiered today in 1959. The Record of the Year came from a TV series:
Today in 1966, John Lennon demonstrated the ability to get publicity, if not positive publicity, when the London Evening Standard printed a story in which Lennon said:
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
Lennon’s comment prompted Bible Belt protests, including burning Beatles records. Of course, as the band pointed out, to burn Beatles records requires purchasing them first.
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1973, Pink Floyd began its 19-date North American tour at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison.
Today in 1966, Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay formed the Buffalo Springfield.
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1971, the South African Broadcasting Corp. lifted its ban on broadcasting the Beatles.
Perhaps SABC felt safe given that the Beatles had broken up one year earlier. (SABC was South Africa’s radio broadcaster, by the way. TV didn’t get to South Africa until 1976.)
The number one British single today in 1961:
The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1964, the Beatles began filming “A Hard Day’s Night,” and George Harrison met Patti Boyd, who had one line in the movie.
Boyd later would become the subject of an Eric Clapton song (in fast and slow versions), and then Clapton’s wife, and then Clapton’s ex-wife, while inspiring enough songs, between Harrison and Clapton, for an entire album.
As you can imagine with a date that occurs only every four years, not much happened today in music.
Today in 1968, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” won album of the year at the Grammys:
The number one single today in 1992:
Besides our fat chihuahua Leo, birthdays begin with Jimmy Dorsey …
… and end with Gretchen Christopher of the Fleetwoods:
Two deaths of note today: Songwriter Wes Farrell in 1996 …
…and Mike Smith of the Dave Clark Five in 2008:
The number one single today in 1970 was also the number one single of 1970:
The number one single today in 1976 is the first record I ever purchased, for $1.03 at a Madison drugstore just before it left the WISM radio top 40 list:
Today in 1977, a member of the audience at a Ray Charles concert tried to strangle him with a rope.
The number one single today in 1981:
Birthdays today start with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones:
Joe South:
Donnie Iris of the Jaggerz:
Ronnie Rosman of Tommy James and the Shondells:
Cindy Wilson of the B-52s:
Ian Stanley played keyboards for Tears for Fears:
Phil Gould of Level 42:
Four deaths of note today: Frankie Lymon in 1968 …
… one-hit-wonder Bobby Bloom in 1974 …
… David Byron of Uriah Heep in 1985 …
… and drummer George Allen “Buddy” Miles, who had the good taste to record with two of the greatest rock guitarists of all time on the same song, in 2008:
The number one single today in 1961:
The number one British single today in 1964 was sung by a 21-year-old former hairdresser and cloak room attendant:
That day, the Rolling Stones made their second appearance on BBC-TV’s “Top of the Pops”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 