I took a little vacation.
I went to war-torn Portland, the place presidentially purported to be burning. It's funny because sometimes social media is spreading inflammatory b******t, and sometimes it's the source for true, on-the-scene reporting. More often than not in my 55 years I have seen a preponderance of attempted truth coming down the conduits that connect the world to me: internet, TV news, the radio. I pick well. I check.
I listened to the Columbine situation unfolding from a car radio on a cross country drive.
Today it's no guarantee that what is coming at you has a substantial relationship to the truth. Case in point- war-torn Portland:
Part of my trip was gloriously free from news of the world in a cabin on the beach, and for the record, Portland is calm. It seemed the same as always. I didn't go to the building ICE is temporarily occupying. It's where the protest is a vital constant. It's where the terrorist furries handing out flowers and dancing in exchange for free tear gas and socialized redistribution of plastic bullets is the current daily norm. In my understanding, it's happening on one side of a city block.
In the city where I live, I have seen less than a dozen picketing pro- lifers portrayed as a major protest on the six o’clock news and been well displeased to know a show was capable of such a thing.
During the part of my career when the first Caucus in the country was in Iowa, I worked dozens of Caucus events, called “shows” by the production staff that worked them- the same as Broadway shows and rock shows and boat shows and stunt shows and car shows.
You can't get the whole thing into the conduits that take the news from where it's happening to the TVs and the radios and the phones that deliver it to the humans, so you present the part that builds the brand, that defines the candidate, that forwards the good or even the best foot. You compromise the reality of the event to do so, in part because you can't get the whole thing into the conduit.
If the brand or the messaging is impossible to portray with the media collected on sight, in order to profer the message one might have to run counter to reality itself, leading to, in the long run, a complete mistrust of the conduit, perhaps resulting in…
I like the radio, when the news ain't on in the car parked out front of the house before dawn. I like the radio when the news ain't on.
But no baby, I aint high like you. And it's who you are not the things that you do. I could take what you take, see who you see, do what you do but babe it ain't me. No,baby, I ain't high like you.
And you ain't rich like me. What I got you can't even see. No, baby, you ain't rich like me.
I’d like to wander off and never come back home, be the kind of man no one knows is gone. I could sleep under the stars at night, spend my time just gettin’ right, never come back home. Never come back home.
I like the radio when the news ain't on in the car parked out front of the house before dawn. I like the radio, when the news ain't on. I like the radio.
A version of this recording appears on the album, Lucky 13 which you can buy right here: it's track 10
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