The scene is a smoke filled room, men - old to my 3 year old eyes- stand around a pool table, whiskeys in hand, waiting their turn at the eight ball.

The women sit circled around a round glass table. There’s an idle dart board on one paneled wood wall.
In the background, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem rejoice over the words

I’m a weaver, a Calton weaver
I’m a rash and a roving blade
I’ve got silver in my pocket
And I follow the roving trade
Whiskey, whiskey, Nancy Whiskey
Whiskey, whiskey, Nancy-o

This is one of my earliest memories, and a scene repeated over and over again while my role changed over the years from child observer to one standing round the felt-top with a cue in hand. The constant was the music. Mostly the Clancy Brothers. Sometimes the Irish Rovers; there were others.

Music I’d always simply known as eternal. Music I loved then, and grew to love more as I passed it on to my children. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

Tommy Maken came to Amerikay as a young man determined to act in American cinema. A teetotaler (!) never afraid of work, he did what was necessary to survive as an aspiring actor must do. One dark and stormy night, he crashed into fate: he was asked to sing a few songs at a tavern. He did so and found he liked it.

Timing helped. He entered the scene a capable young man at a time when the music was hot.

But he was one of the best. Multi-instrumental, he could play what was needed. He had a deep sensitivity as both player and singer that translated. Audiences loved listening to him.
When he wept, you wept. When he laughed, you laughed. While he never considered himself a songwriter (and had a very low opinon of his own works) his “Four Green Fields” is one of the most beautiful laments ever written for the troubled country he came from.

What have I now, said the fine old woman
What have I now, this proud old woman did say
I have four green fields, one of them’s in bondage
In stranger’s hands, that tried to take it from me
But my sons had sons, as brave as were their fathers
My fourth green field will bloom once again said she

And let’s be real. Nobody could make a comical McScat like
ay-diddley-idelum-diddley-doodleyidelum-di-diddley-di-dddley-eye-ay
actually sound like lyrics.

He was a compelling stage presence. He was a raw, captivating singer, and whether live or on disc, always made you feel like you were sitting at the stage-side table. The lilt in his voice was a smile, so rare seen, so rare heard.

Alas, Tommy, we must share a parting glass, and say farewell and Godspeed to a great friend.

As he himself sang in “Tipperary So Far Away”:

In the kingdom of love may your deal soul rest
are the words we fervently pray
That we’ll all meet above, the old friends we love
In Tipperary so far away

He was born in Keady, County Armagh, on November 4, 1932.
He died Thursday, August 1, 2007 in Dover NH.

Not that I really believe this, but I’ve always found it to be an amusing way of looking at history and mankind’s overwhelming propensity for doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.

Maybe this is why I enjoyed reading A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. as much as I did. Rather I should say I enjoyed re-reading the book (evidence that not everything we do-over is a mistake!). I had read it in a high school lit class, lo these many years gone by.

First published in 1959, A Canticle for Liebowitz begins some time after the end of “All your base are belong to us”. “Somebody set us up the bomb!” “Make your time, gentlemen.” World-snuffing nuclear war has ended, and the remaining vestiges of civilization have entered a new Dark Ages. These days were preceded by a “Simplification” period, during which gangs of bloodthirsty survivors exact revenge against anyone suspected of having contributed in any way to the development of the science and technology of war. Scientists and teachers are hideously “martyred”, and books are burned in the survivors’ attempts to permanently eradicate man’s ability to build tools capable of such horror. The Simpleton becomes the ideal man, pure in ignorance, and perpetually wishing to stay that way.

Naturally, rogue groups of thinkers work to preserve man’s achievements. Most notably is Liebowitz, who during the “Simplification” worked to gather all remaining writings and hide them in casks buried in deserts. This knowledge becomes a new religion, Liebowitz, captured by a Simpleton gang with books in his pants leg, is executed. But monks who worship the Judeo-Christian God add the preservers of knowledge to their lexicon of faith, and copying of “Memorabilia” becomes their devotion.

During the millennium-long Dark Ages, an order of Monks devoted to Liebowitz gathers, catalogs and preserves knowledge relics from the great suicidal civilization (ours).

Eventually knowledge gathers again like storm clouds, man evolves for better of worse, and about 4000 years later commits species-suicide (again) in thermonuclear war.

The irony is unspoken but deep. A devout religious order preserves the very thing which got Adam and Eve cast from the garden, never grasping that their worship of God is really worship of Satan, and that they do the world no favor.

Miller defines the concept of original sin as merely human, because our species will always seek greater knowledge of its universe, without seeking greater knowledge of its inner self. No matter how smart we become, we are helpless against our collective suicidal vision.

The book is considered science fiction and relegated to those shelves in bookstores. It should really be stocked in “Psychology”. Then burnt after it’s been read.

But read it first. Or read it again. It will leave you with the unnerving sense that you’ve been here before, and will be here again.

Vonnegut never pitched Death as a villain in his work, but more as a relief or a last resort. His characters longed for it, loathed it and fought it, yet accepted it as a reasonable and sensible conclusion once all other avenues had failed. But their lives continued for better or for worse, and their antics and mishaps kept their relationships with Death constant. There were never any happy endings, or sad. There were only endings that never quite ended - until now.

In a way, I believe Vonnegut never intended an ending to his work because it was inextricably tied to his own life, and for the man and his work, there was only one ending possible, and that would have to be written by somebody else.

Dead, dead, dead. Last Wednesday, 530pm Austin time.

Great obits in papers everywhere. But it all boils down to yet-another woman taken by a cancer that was practically unknown a generation ago.

I will miss her as much as one who has never known her could. The way our mothers and grandmothers miss Elvis and Johnny Ray.

But I really didn’t start this post with the intention of writing about Molly Ivins. I wanted to write about Anna Nicole Smith.

Because, in case you haven’t been hit in the face by a snowball with this fact written on it, Anna Nicole Smith is dead.

CNN.com, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, are all leading with the Anna Nicole story as though it actually matters one iota to the public discourse.

Are we so mind-numbingly apathetic that bbc.co.uk’s headline: Palestinian rivals in unity deal
doesn’t matter?

When the passing of a voice that put bread on the table of our daily lives garners less than a minute in the feeble minds of the credit card-swiping herd, and at the same time are utterly saturated with news of the passing of someone who was more like a bedsore on the ass of the Great Society, we are in trouble.

Anna Nicole Smith represented everything that was wrong with this society, our culture and our media. It’s sad that anybody cares about a washed up B-lister whose greatest contribution to anything public was her decision to get implants - again.

A trillion dollars pissed away in Iraq, signing statements, Patriot Act, Bankruptcy Law, inflation, deflation, conflagration, immolation, desperation, capitulation.

Molly can’t be replaced. Anna can.

Autopsy results at 11.

They hate democracy. They hate women’s rights. They hate capitalism. They hate secularism. All are answers we as Americans take comfort in. These are virtuous answers, and our medieval enemies despise such trappings of modern Western society. But they are not the answers to the basic question. The answer lies in America’s historical relationships with these countries; what we’ve done on behalf of America’s global corporations.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an autobiographical tale by John Perkins, who was himself one of the tools used by the American government and big business to enter poor “third world” nations, trick them into borrowing massive sums of money from the World Bank or IMF with wildly inflated GDP projections if they’d just build out electrical grids in their jungles.
The growth projections, being false to begin with, would never materialize, the country would default on the debt, and the US Government would put the squeeze to the country on behalf of Big Oil, which would secure cheap exploration and drilling rights. They would create environmental havoc, keep the money and leave behind extreme poverty and death, while raking in billions of dollars in booty.

This scenario is played out over and over again in the book, which is a very fast page turner. The narration is excellent and compelling, most of the claims Perkins makes in the book are footnoted with sources or references, and you will put the book down with significantly greater insight into why the world is the way that it is.

You will understand why “they” hate us, and you will see they “why” side of history repeating itself right before your very eyes.

This book should be taught in every business school, along with the Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

These devices become smaller/faster/cheaper feature-packed future junk, and I ask myself why do we need this stuff?

I think of the iPhone as the guy next to me on the train trashes his eardrums with the audible-over-the rumble-of-the-train hip-hop iPod, and I keep repeating to myself WhyPhone WhyPhone WhyPhone.

I think of Apple, Inc.’s marketing lit, “a true multi-tasker” they call it.

Does this mean my seatmate could continue listening to music while he talks to a friend on the phone? Would he lower the music so he could lower his voice? Or just yell loud enough so he could hear over it?

Radio stations advertise the fact that they are “Still Free Radio Stations” as a competitive advantage, setting the stage for a future of pay-per-listen-only airwaves. TV stations push their (for a small additional fee) HD siblings, I try to imagine what our “entertainment culture” will be like in 5 or 10 years.

Technology companies have been building the infrastructure to nickel and dime us to the tune of billions of dollars with “advances” like Digital Rights Management “services” and Clipper Chips, I dream of a profound and serious techno-savvy culture backlash, where hobbyist record collectors with Heathkits and Netgear wireless routers spin vinyl on USB turntables and broadcast them nationwide on a “free” network of linux-driven linked home networks, outside the purview of the Apples and Microsofts, Cablevisions and Time Warners, making Fair Use of the toys in ways never intended… neighbor to neighbor, house to house, Pringles can antennas amplifying their signals, a technical uprising occurs, where people tired of the force-fed tripe they get from media-makers take matters into their own hands and host talk shows about consumerism with their webcams.

Or are we really satisfied? Do the antics of the Paris Hilton of the hour really fulfill us, validate us, and give us the inner-peace and serenity we crave as a species?

Or is she a Band-Aid we slap over a wound until we wait for it to heal itself?

The iPhone is a brilliant step in an evolution - but I wonder what we are evolving into.

Does anybody really idolize an American Idol? Does anybody really need an iPhone?

Try humming a few bars, we’ll see if we can fake it.