News & Articles

I tell you, I’ve got the blues. Not the Buddy Guy, Junior Wells kind of the blues that make me stay out late, make my body sway and my feet move. No, I’ve got the bad society blues, the kind of blues you can’t do anything about, the kind of blues where the huddled masses have been so easily subjugated by the upper crust.
You see, I heard this fellow on the radio the other day. He’d lost his job. He had to sell his motorcycle. He was listening to Rush Limbaugh and he was going to vote this year and he said evil thoughts had gotten into our president’s soul and that his religion is bad and that both he and his wife, the first lady, hate white people.
People down on their luck sure fall prey to snake-oil salesmen. People down on their luck obviously turn haphazardly gullible as well, hoping for an answer when they wander into the wrong place. The charlatans await them like buzzards in a tree.  
Yes, I’ve got the bad society blues, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. I try to walk them off, I try to talk them off. They won’t leave. People are out there thinking goofy, idiotic, and ignorant thoughts, and they aren’t going away anytime soon, either. They listen to Rush Limbaugh and are going to vote.

I’ve got the blues.

I saw this big billboard along the highway the other day. It shouted out in black letters against a white background, “Tired of socialism?” That gave me the blues. There was a website on the billboard, and I discovered it was full of hatred and misinformation and very little about socialism other than a type of paranoia, typical of the kinds of beliefs followers of the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) are willing to uphold, just as the NCNP panders ceaselessly to the proletariat, the masses, with faux-populist rhetoric and billionaire donor dollars to influence public discourse.
I’ve got the blues that so many of the proletariat, the huddled masses, are listening to the verbal legerdemain.
I get the blues because there are snake-oil salesmen, shysters, and charlatans in this world. I get the blues because people don’t use enough of their brains to see through the charade of those nefarious professions and the elections and public policy they try to sway back in time toward the days of serfs and slaves and indentured servants, all under the guise of democracy and freedom and the unregulated free market.    
Once again I came to realize that many people simply use a different part of the brain than I do.
Left side, right side, the temporal lobe or the cerebral cortex, it doesn’t matter. A whole bunch of people in this world simply use a different part of their brain than I do to digest and process what the world sends their way.
That gives me the blues. The NCNP, the snake-oil salesmen, and the charlatans have figured out how to access those most vulnerable parts of the brain with their fear and loathing. After seven or nine concussions, my brain is resistant to their siren call, so concussions can serve a purpose other than as a catalyst for dementia. My concussions have saved me from being brainwashed by the faux-populists, purveyors of the failed Backwards Doctrine.  
As I’ve written before, where those folks gather and I wander near with my innocuous questions, say at a Tea Party rally or a Humbug Convention, there can be a few hundred of those folks within arm’s reach, but they’ll be no closer to me in thought than the Earth is to Pluto. We orbit the same sun, but after that I’m not sure what other celestial observations could be made.
So I’ve got the blues, you see, the bad society blues. And when I have the blues I listen to the blues, I play the blues. Maybe the only hope is to get those people who use a different part of their brain listening to the blues. Maybe the blues can get in there and make them whole again, since nothing else seems to work. Maybe the blues can get in there and rewire those brains before election time and save the republic from a fateful demise.
A little dose of Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials or Guitar Shorty playing “We the People” just might do the trick. Talk to them, Little Walter. Heal them, Reverend Raven. Cleanse their minds of bad thoughts, Barefoot Becky.
Blues therapy for the bad society blues may be our only hope for 2014. That guy who lost his job still won’t have a job and he’ll still have to sell his motorcycle, but he just might realize that we’re all in this one together, and don’t let anybody tell you different. The blues is everybody.

Forrest Johnson has been writing for over 20 years and was editor of the Lake County Chronicle in Two Harbors.