Cowboy Confessional

California is quaking once again. In this instance it has nothing to do with plate tectonics.

California is like a functional drunk. It sips, then swills, then gulps, then passes out, waking and swearing off the juice until the next time. Government spending is California’s whiskey, and when the lush – also known as the state legislature – has sucked on the budgetary bottle too long, the state’s slightly more sober side kicks some collective rump.

Like any empire, California employees people to do its dirty work. The more employees, the larger the empire. Aside from having a lot of them, Cal state employees enjoy pay scales and benefits unknown outside of the Saudi royal family. Working for the State of Emergency is one of the best ways to not earn a living.

Yet like both drunks and empires, things tend to get out of control when unchecked. The Golden State grows in spurts like a teenager on steroids. When it grows too fast, the slightly more sober side kicks the collective’s posterior a bit harder.

California citizens instinctively feel when government has grown too big, and together they take corrective action and inaction. In the 1970’s the state grew to such Gulliver proportions that the people passed Proposition 13, restricting the flow of blood to the cancer called Sacramento. At that time the state was employing nearly one in every one hundred residents, and that doesn’t include the dozen or so illegal aliens each legislator kept on hand for personal hygiene purposes.

(click chart to enlarge)

A couple of decades after Howard Jarvis smite the state, and under the expert mismanagement of Gray Davis, California’s employee roles and budget ballooned yet again, retaining nearly one percent of the population for no discernable performance. Davis was summarily dismissed and replaced by an intellectual teenager on steroids.

Six years later the employee roles have expanded yet again, popping back above the seemingly magical one percent barrier, assisting the inevitable bankruptcy of the State of Disaster. The people revolted by denying the legislature’s request to raise taxes. Since California’s credit rating is slightly below Zimbabwe’s, there is little choice but to cut costs, and the obvious place is an over packed payroll.

The open question is if anyone in Sacto gets sacked as they should.

Bookmark to:

Some days the universe conspires to uncover the blatantly obvious.

In and around the nation’s capital today, Jews were targets, in literal and metaphorical senses. At the Holocaust Museum an aging bigot with an old squire rifle shot a security guard. It was a senseless act by someone so consumed with hatred that his mental faculties are suspect.

In nearby Virginia, another aging bigot said of the President “them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me.” It was a senseless act by someone so consumed with hatred that his mental faculties are suspect. Unarmed aside from his infected mind and mouth, this incendiary statement came from Obama’s pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “They will not let him … talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.”

Which begs the question “how many degrees of anti-Semitic separation are there between Obama and James Von Brunn?”

Bookmark to:

Our local scandal rag, the San Francisco Chronicle (also called the San Francisco Chronic by people who enjoy drug humor too much), is busy celebrating itself as members of the media are prone to do.

Seriously guys, check the ego at the door.

The Chronic has been printing highly readable bird cage liner for 144 year. Normally a paper with multiple Pulitzer’s would pause until reaching the 150 year mark. However, the rapid financial decline of American newspapers in general and the San Francisco Chronicle in particular is such that the journal’s current editorial board fears they may not be around six years hence.

In telling their (almost) century and a half of both high and low journalism, the paper mention a rather interesting episode that illuminates the nature of American media and the always wide open burg known by outsiders as ‘Frisco’ (technically that term was outlawed by Emperor Norton, but that edict has not been enforce since his reign).

Ever opinionated about politics, the Chronicle’s original editor – a fellow named Charles de Young – decided he was not found of a mayoral candidate called Isaac Kalloch. It was not so much that Kalloch – a Baptist minister from back east – was a bad fellow. De Young’s discontent lay in having already selected a different candidate and didn’t want a man of the cloth holding the office.

After all, San Francisco with a moral leader at the helm would destroy the city’s essence.

According to the current edition of the Chronicle, de Young wrote that Kalloch was “a tainted preacher, seeking his election in low groggeries.” What the today’s editors failed to mention was that de Young also accused the preacher of having an affair. No doubt history has unveiled one or more adulterating clerics, or at least that would be Jessica Hahn’s opinion. De Young’s low blow was low even by 19th century journalistic standards, which were somewhere south of those held by gutter drunks.

Yet the unsubstantiated account was not mentioned by anyone littering the Chronicle’s 2009 masthead. Curious omission.

Well, Kalloch responded claiming de Young’s mother of running a brothel. Granted, it is a short moral distance between a yellow dog journalist and a hooker, but assuming it was a family business and bringing somebody’s mother into the argument was out of line, especially if true. De Young, a working man of letters, power and influence did what any well tempered and worldly newspaper editor would.

He shot Kalloch. This may explain the Chronicle’s constant position favoring gun control. They have first hand experience with what short tempered snots with revolvers can do.

Curiously, this seems to have had the inverse effect. Kalloch was merely wounded and later elected. Something about shooting a preacher brings out the sympathy vote.

Ministers allegedly are of a forgiving nature. Sons, as Cain showed, are occasionally not. The following year, Kalloch’s son strolled into the San Francisco Chronicle’s offices and pumped a round or two into de Young, accomplish what de Young had not, namely a successful homicide.

If there are morals in this tale, they are warnings about select sins including pride, false witness, and mouthing off about the business activities of other people’s mothers. It also shows us the value of specialization. Had de Young kept to his accomplished trade of raking muck, he might indeed have thrown the election through slander and liable. However, he chose to employ himself as a marksman and assassin. Failing at both, he encouraged those with superior skill sets to give it a try.

Bookmark to:

AFTERLIFE is now available in the U.K. on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Afterlife-Guy-Smith/dp/1439237433/

Bookmark to:

A hurricane died this week.

Koko Taylor was nothing less than a growling storm of blues. Hailed as the Queen of the Blues, Koko possessed seemingly endless energy erupting from her paunchy Chicago blues body and soul. When performing you lived in fear that either she or the audience would explode in frenzied elation, like a revival tent gone horribly right.

I first caught Koko in Richmond, Virginia. Like many touring acts, her band first warmed up as the mixing board jockeys got the sound levels right. One and a half songs into the opening set, Koko sashayed onto the stage and smiled at the crowd like a hungry man grins at a steak dinner. She assaulted her microphone with one hand and belted out an opening lung full that caused her sound engineers and half the audience to wet themselves.

Cliché it may be, but Koko was a force of nature. Lighting barely contained in a half full bottle of Tennessee bourbon.

Aside from a voice of thunder in a cement mixer, Koko knew how to let near reckless abandon infect an audience. Unbridled, she could cause a crowd in venues small or large to lose their inhibitions. When a slick south side brother and a conservatively dressed middle class suburban woman jump simultaneously onto a table and dance like Saint Vitus had a lien on their souls, you knew Koko was singing.

Like many other road hardened blues masters, Koto merely got better with time. It is said that as one looks down the backside of life, they care less about what other people think and start exploring. Liberated from conformity’s prison, these folks begin mapping new territories. Johnny Cash’s final records on the American label fused country with Nine Inch Nails. Ray Wylie Hubbard has let swamp and Texas dust decorate his recent works.

Koko just became more Koko, which was unique to begin with. Concentrated and pure, she was the essence of herself and something that will never be duplicated.

Bookmark to: