Martin Luther King Day

Today is Martin Luther King Day and it seems that the newspapers are decrying how King is being compartmentalized into the collective memory of his famous "I have a dream" speech instead of focusing on his larger messages of anti-war and anti-poverty that, at the end of his life, made him a pariah among some people. It's a shame, because those messages are very relevant to what's going on today, with an unpopular war raging in Iraq and poverty increasing, even among those of us in the $20,000 to $40,000 a year income bracket, now considered to be among the "working poor", when before, that income bracket seemed to be the official entrée into the middle class. King would be astonished at what the Bush administration has done to this country in the past 7 years and how his policies have made the rich richer and the poor poorer. I imagine him rolling in his grave over the kind of things going on in this country today and the utter hubris of those running the country into the ground just to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of what was once the middle class, now largely reduced to being the "working poor".

I also imagine that King would be angered at how so many black youth are glorifying the prison culture by wearing those ridiculous "droop pants" and do-rags and how they're so caught up in listening to misogynistic rap lyrics about "ho's" and "bitches" and other stuff like that. I can rightly understand Bill Cosby's anger at his fellow blacks for what he seems to feel is backsliding from the gains of the civil rights era. Of course, it doesn't help that there is still a lot of underlying racism in this country that contributes so much to the anger of young blacks who feel that their only outlet is to join gangs and worship the whole "gangsta" culture. They come from largely fatherless homes where their mothers are probably working multiple low wage jobs just to keep a roof over their heads and they don't have time to nurture their children as much as they probably would like to be able to. But blacks have got to stop being so suspicious of education and realize that it is the only way out of a multi-generational welfare system. Inner city blacks tend to call educated, proper spoken fellow blacks "oreo cookies" - black on the outside, white on the inside, so the racism works both ways. What they should realize is that worshipping trash talking, bling wearing athletes instead of accomplished blacks who are in leadership positions just sends the wrong message about what is valued.

EARLY MUSIC:
Since I started reading Ken Follett's "World Without End" and started re-reading its prequel, "Pillars of the Earth", I have been listening to a lot of early music as a way to get myself more in the spirit of the time period of the books that I am reading. "Pillars" is set in the tumultuous mid-12th century during a bitter English civil war between Empress Maud, daughter of King Henry I, and her rival for the English crown, her cousin Stephen, who seized the throne from Maud, her father's chosen successor. "World" is set during the Great Plague of the mid-14th century in the same town as "Pillars" is set in, Kingsbridge. Both books are really good and perfect tomes to curl up with in this darker, colder season of the year. It's also nice to listen to the music of the times while reading. I remember falling in love with early music in my teen years when going to hear a concert of music for the court of Elizabeth I at Kent State many years ago. I decided then that I wanted to be a lutenist, but of course, we didn't have the money to make that possible, so I started teaching myself to play a bit of finger-style guitar in order to make it sound like a lute.

I used to have a lot of excellent LP's of early music that I bought back when at the old "Community Store" downtown, which was a really neat part of a whole cooperative of stores run by the local hippies. The only remaining relic of that is the Kent Natural Foods Co-Op downtown, but the "Community Store" had an excellent selection of LP's, sadly, many of which have never been re-released on CD. One of these days I'd love to buy one of those machines that can convert LP to CD. Maybe then I could finally burn off a lot of those great LP's that I have currently in storage, many of them classical, early music and some great old folk music albums, many on the Nonesuch label. I went to their web site recently to see what, if anything, was still available on CD and there are a few that they did re-release, but some of the ones I'd really like to have are no longer available, primarily the old early music titles they used to carry. That's a shame because they used to have an excellent selection of Mediaeval and Renaissance music and it'd sure be nice to have those on CD in order to listen to again.