Thoughts on this fat bastard from Queens who now sits on the throne
I rarely, if ever discuss politics in this blog, which has been strictly about my thoughts and observations (Musings, as in the title) and personal tributes about great musicians I have known and interviewed and covered over the course of my 50 years as a working journalist (from April 1975 to the present). Indeed, I felt bound to that ethos. Until now.
While I have written exhaustively about great jazz and blues and rock musicians, along with countless visionaries who defy easy categorization, in this Substack column as well as for such publications as Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazziz, Absolute Sound, Guitar Player, Guitar World, Modern Drummer, Musician, MIX, Pulse, Interview, FI, Music+Sound Output, Modern Recording & Music, Audio, Cityside, Good Times, the UWM Post, and through the pages of the seven books that I have authored — Rockers, Jazzbos & Visionaries (Billboard Books, 1998), Swing It! An Annotated History of Jive (Billboard Books, 2000), Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, the World’s Greatest Bass Player (Backbeat, 2005), Jazz Legends (White Star, 2010), Keith Richards: A Rock ’n’ Roll Life (White State, 2011), Here And Now! The Autobiography of Pat Martino (Backbeat Books, 2011) and Ode to a Tenor Titan: The Life and Times and Music of Michael Brecker (Backbeat, 2021) — I can’t be silent about this corrupt and morally bankrupt presidency that has now been foisted upon us.
I think these three videos sum it up nicely:
Bottom line: Trump is a dope from Queens, an arrogant huckster and crybaby who has succeeded in slapping down the proletariat with the ugly stick of obedience that Roy Cohn bequeathed to him in the mid 1970s. Apprentice indeed.
The pardoning of the 1500 insurrectionists that he alternately calls “hostages” and “patriots” was clearly done to create a private militia (his answer to Hitler’s Schutzstaffel of SS), just in case the military and police refuse to do his unconstitutional bidding. And that hateful display at Trump’s inauguration — the image of his main henchman Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute — may unleash hordes of closeted neo-Nazis and other racists psychos who now feel emboldened, just as David Duke and his Klu Klux Klan did when Trump soft-pedaled the violent, tiki torch-carrying mob of white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 for a “Unite the Right” rally protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
And so, here we are eight years later. This would-be king — the same doofus who grew up in Jamaica Estates, just blocks away from where I lived when I moved to Queens in 1980, three months before John Lennon was assassinated — is trying to bring the world to heel after his coronation. And it’s all part of his revenge on the Manhattan elites who laughed at him and stole his lunch money back in the day when he was just your average, everyday slumlord who would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans.
You might say, “But why are you talking about politics in a column entitled ‘Musings on Music by The Milkman’”? Given what’s going on these days, how could I not? But just to make that bridge to music, check out the following clip from the 1968 dystopian comedy-drama film Wild in the Streets movie starring Christopher Jones as the popular rock singer and aspiring revolutionary Max Frost (and yes, that is Richard Pryor on drums as a member of his group, Max Frost and the Troopers):
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