James McMurtry

We Can’t Make it Here Naivete

Sometimes my song,”We Can’t Make it Here”, seems a bit naive. It’s still a pretty good song, and songs don’t have time to be fair and balanced. Songs are mostly about emotion. So I still sing it. But I read the New York Times a couple of Sundays ago, and I now understand why we can’t competitively produce iphones here. It seems that Steve Jobs was not happy with the easy to scratch plastic screen on his prototype iphone and demanded that the screen be made of scratch resistant glass. Making good glass is not a problem in the U.S., Corning has been doing it forever. Cutting glass to specs at a competitive pace is a different matter. After the meeting at which Jobs expressed his dissatisfaction, one of his execs booked a flight to China, where he knew there was a factory that could mobilize three thousand workers on a moments notice, by which I mean, waking them up in their dorm beds, putting them on the production line, and training them to cut the glass for the iphone screen. Corning did get the contract to produce the glass and a Corning plant in Kentucky was revived. But now, Corning is building plants in Asia to save on time and shipping costs.It takes thirty five days to ship glass from Kentucky to China, not competitive.

The Times article did a good job of detailing the intricacies of modern production. Cell phones employ materials from around the globe. The article mentioned, but did not dwell on, “rare metals from Africa”. A memory rose from my mind like a pre-historic fish, long thought to be extinct. I was in a bar in Austin. The guy to my right was some kind of computer person, a nice enough fellow, but most of what he talked about was incomprehensible to me. Yet, he told a story that I at least partially comprehended. He told me that there is a rare metal in the Congo. This metal is necessary for the miniaturization of circuitry, without which, there would be no cell phones of any kind. People dig large chunks of this metal out of creek banks and carry it out on their heads, at gun point. The people who harvest this metal are slaves. So are the Chinese workers who can be forced to wake up at any time of night, paid though they are. We can’t make iphones in this country because we don’t want to tolerate slavery within our own borders. We tolerate it within the borders of other nations because, without slavery, there would be no cell phones and cell phones have come to be seen as necessary by every culture in the world. So we outsource our slavery.

People love to talk about fixing our country. The Tea Party wants to “take our country back”, from whom, or to what, I’m not sure. Such talk is as naive as my song. The manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back here as long as, elsewhere, there are people willing to enslave and masses of people desperate enough to be willing to be enslaved. Fixing the country would not be enough anymore. We’ll have to fix the world.

It could take a while.

The Occupy Movement

About a week ago, at the end of a short solo tour of Southwest Alaska, I
wandered down to Occupy Anchorage. The camp was only a block from my hotel.
The temperature was in the single digits with a light snow. There were three
tents, the first of which was wide open. Inside were four young men, two
white and two native, a dog, and a propane heater. I offered them some
smoked salmon and some CDs. They took great interest in the salmon and it
was quickly consumed. The white guys introduced themselves. The natives did
not.

I guess I should have introduced myself to all of them, but I felt sheepish
and shy, like an interloper or a tourist. They all seemed to handle the cold
pretty well. I asked them if they had any tips to help Occupiers in the
lower forty eight get through the winter. They shrugged. John, the dog’s
owner, said,”It’s pretty simple. You need shelter, heat, and food.” About
then, a nice woman named Wendy, who lived in the neighborhood, came in with
a crock of hot soup. Morale improved instantly. Wendy struck up a lively
conversation with a young man named Matt, who seemed like he could become a
spokesman, if the movement wanted a spokesman. He had something of a
thousand yard stare from, I guessed, fatigue and constant cold.

Matt considered himself lucky to be protesting in Anchorage rather than
Portland or Oakland, because the Anchorage Police were not bothering the
protesters, and some officers were openly supportive of the movement,
stopping by to chat and to gripe about departmental budget cuts. Matt said
he thought he preferred sub zero temperatures to pepper spray, horses, and
batons. He offered me some of the soup. I’d had plenty to eat and had to
catch an early flight, so I declined, wished them luck, and left. I was
struck by their generosity. I liked the salmon, but they needed that soup.

Historically, it’s always been pretty easy for the powerful to get poor
people to swing sticks at other poor people. The powerful simply have to pay
the stick swingers just a little bit more than they used to pay the strikers
or the protesters or whatever group is causing them annoyance, divide and
suppress. Police officers may not live in abject poverty, but they’re
certainly not rich. They need their jobs and they’re trained to follow
orders. They are not paid to care whether or not they belong to the one
percent that gives the orders, though I don’t doubt that some of them do
care anyway. I’m curious about the origin of the orders.

With regard to Occupy and Law enforcement, mayors and college
presidents seemed to be charged with giving the orders, at least officially,
and they are subsequently charged with taking the heat when the execution of
any of their orders goes terribly wrong and produces violence, physical
injury, and embarrassing Utube. Politicians and Administrators don’t
generally like controversy, it’s bad for careers. I don’t think such people
would give orders that would likely result in some really messy controversy,
unless enough pressure were brought to bear on them that they would fear for
their careers anyway. I think there are bigger forces at work here.

In October, the New York City Police Department arrested over seven hundred
Occupy protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. Some were held for hours without
charge. Earlier this year, J.P. Morgan/Chase, one of the recipients of the
government bailout, derided by both Occupy and the Tea Party, donated 4.6
million dollars, partly in technology, patrol car laptops and such, to the
New York City Police Department. This was the largest single donation ever
received by NYPD. You can’t tell me there were no strings attached. City
Budgets are strapped. Departments are underfunded. A direct donation from a
major corporation must be like manna from heaven to a police department. But
of course, the department will need more in the future, and it won’t get
more if it turns on its new benefactor.

No one gives away 4.6 million expecting nothing in return. J.P. Morgan CEO
Jamie Dimon is quoted as saying, “These officers put their lives on the line
every day to keep us safe, we’re incredibly proud to help them build this
program and let them know how much we value their hard work.” I wouldn’t
argue that NYPD, or any police department, is not worthy of such a donation,
but I must question the motive and the timing. I wonder if Mr. Dimon
actually lives in the City. The few New York CEOs I’ve had the pleasure of
dealing with all lived in Connecticut and rode limos down the Meritt Parkway
to work and back. Wherever Mr. Dimon lives, I doubt he fears for his safety.

I hear complaints that the protest is unfocused, that the protesters
rejection of traditional hierarchy renders the movement ineffective as a
political force, that it has no clear message. But I don’t see a problem
yet. Occupy has been effective simply by coming into existence. No one
organized Occupy ahead of time. A call went out and people showed up.
They’re still showing up and their numbers and tenacity do have an effect.
They get noticed. As for the message, one can google Keith Olbermann and
hear the message, well written by Occupy and well read by Olbermann.
Basically, occupiers want to take their country back from the banks and
lobbyists. Their demands aren’t that different from those of the Tea Party.
The two groups should join forces. They’re mad about the same conditions,
though they disagree on where to put the blame.

The Tea party blames the government, Occupy blames the corporations that now
own the government. Is there that much difference? Ultimately, we will all
have to join forces if we are to call ourselves a nation. Right now, we are
too polarized to be effective. We no longer recognize each other as
Americans. The mayors and college presidents who call out the riot squads
apparently don’t know that those are their fellow Americans getting beaten
and pepper sprayed. Those are American sons and daughters. Those are
American students, American librarians, American grandmothers, and American
veterans, and when they get hurt, we all get hurt. The stick swinging has to
stop. It serves no useful human purpose.

I’ve taken part in very few protests. I attended one No Nukes march
in Washington D.C. in the late seventies. It seemed to be conducted mostly
by old hippies who wanted to do it again, and younger people like myself who
thought we were sorry to have missed the sixties. My son and I attended
several anti war protests in Austin at the start of the Iraq war. Our fellow
Americans screamed expletives at us as we stood on the street, but we didn’t
get arrested. There were some “protest for fun” types there too. I think
Occupy is different. I’ll have to go to New York and check it out. I’m
pretty sure the guys in Anchorage weren’t out there for the fun of it. They
seemed to feel that they needed to be there, that they had no choice. It’s
common feeling and common conviction that makes a movement. And it seems
that more and more of us feel that we have no choice.

JAMES McMURTRY OFFERS FREE MP3 IN SUPPORT OF OCCUPY MOVEMENT

JAMES McMURTRY OFFERS FREE MP3 IN SUPPORT OF OCCUPY MOVEMENTThe singer-songwriter is giving away mp3s of his iconic political masterpiece “We Can’t Make It Here” (from his award-winning Childish Things).  Fans are encouraged to use the free mp3 of “We Can’t Make It Here” to create videos supporting the Occupy movement.

Click here to download the free mp3.  

Send your stories and videos to mcmurtrysite@gmail.com, or post to the James McMurtry Facebook Page.  The best of the best will be featured here, on James McMurtry’s website. 

Message from James:We quit playing “We Can’t Make It Here” for a year or two.  We’re playing it again because it seems to still be relevant, and that pretty much sucks for everybody but us. I know the song is still relevant because people are camped out along Wall Street and in front of City Halls around the country and around the globe, demanding a solution to the problems I tried to give light to when I put my song out seven years ago. They are mixed in age and economic status. Some are young and idealistic. Some are old enough to have had their ideals trampled upon a time or two.  My son goes to school in the New York area and some of his friends have been involved in the protests. One was detained for nine hours without charge. This is not supposed to happen in our supposedly civilized nation. These people are getting roughed up, but the press only seems to notice when a victim of police brutality happens to be an Iraq war veteran. I’m guessing there are a good many vets in the crowd and the poor fellow in Oakland won’t be the only one hurt. I suppose the cops think the protesters are breaking the law.  Seems to me, the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to peaceful assembly. Meanwhile, the one percent, safely ensconced in the tall glass towers, does not have to break the law, because they get to write the law. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, in a democracy. I think maybe my fourth grade teacher lied to me.

Let your voice be heard.

What Happened to The Border?

Late in the summer of 1992, my tour manager and I crossed into the United States from Emerson, Manitoba, after a tour of Western Canada. We were tired and disheveled. The U.S. Border Patrol agent at the gate was a big man with a handle bar mustache and a big nickel plated revolver, with nice custom stag horn grips, hanging from his hip. He wore the green uniform of the era, and had a sense of humor, though a rather twisted one. He told me to pull into the bay on the left and park on the orange tarp. I did as I was told, he had a gun after all. Another officer, I think from U.S. Customs, met us at the open bay, took the customs form on which I had listed descriptions of our instruments complete with serial numbers prior to entering Canada, and told us to go into the building while he performed the inspection. The building was full of students yelling about their rights as American Citizens and silent, leather clad bikers. The bikers were not the insurance man, brand new Harley riders of today, their leathers looked live in, and they wore no helmets. My tour manager, Danny Thorpe, now deceased, was led off into another room because he had the money. He came back only a few minutes later because there wasn’t much money for Customs to count. He informed me that there was a biker by the door who wanted to kill me for parking on his tarp.

I crossed from Emerson with my band two days ago. The place looked a little different than it had nineteen years before. There seemed to be cameras mounted everywhere, one of which flashed brightly as we approached the booth. The woman at the window and the big man behind her both wore the blue uniform of the Department of Homeland Security. I handed her our four passports, as is now required. The woman asked the usual questions, twice asking me how long we’d been in Canada. Twice I answered that we had entered on the twenty-sixth of September. We hadn’t counted our cash, so we didn’t have an exact figure for the woman’s queries regarding the state of our finances, but we were pretty sure we had less than ten thousand dollars. If you cross with over ten thousand dollars, you must declare it or Homeland security can seize it all. Since 1995, our only border crossings had been at busy crossings, Buffalo, Niagara, and Detroit, where we were never inspected, so we hadn’t anticipated much scrutiny. The woman told us to pull up to garage door number one, and that we could have our passports back after the inspection. Where the open air parking bays had been in 1992, there was now an enclosed garage. I pulled the van up to garage door one and killed the motor. Garage door two opened and we were ordered to pull around. A stern looking woman waved us forward. There were several fast looking Japanese motorcycles parked to our left. I handed the woman the customs form and she ordered us to stand over by a stainless steel table and empty our pockets. A male officer told us to turn our pockets out so he could see that they were empty. They both wore the blue uniform, with light body armor, carried night sticks and modern, polymer framed, semi-auto pistols and neither seemed to have a sense of humor. The male officer asked me what we were bringing in from Canada. Usually they ask if we bought anything in Canada. The usual question was so ingrained in my mind that I replied, “We didn’t buy anything in Canada.” The male officer repeated, in a more intimidating tone,

“What are you bringing in from Canada?”

“Our gear”, I replied.

The woman kept grilling Tim, our current tour manager, about the money, tapping the declaration form with her index finger and telling him to answer the question of whether or not we were carrying more than ten thousand dollars cash. Her tone was that of a middle school teacher who had had enough of a disruptive student. There were two bags of cash. Daren, our drummer handles the merch money, Tim handles the gig money. We don’t sell merch in Canada because the Canadians tax it too heavily for us to profit, so all the merch money had been earned in the states and carried through Canada, but there was no way to prove that. Tim counted his cash and Daren got out his paperwork and checked his figures. Now, it looked as though we had somewhat over ten grand. The officers took Tim off to another room to fill out forms and recount the money, refusing to give back his pocket knife, saying they would leave it in the van. I realized then, that I had a multi-tool in a belt pouch on my hip. They hadn’t seen it under my shirt tail. I thought about offering it up but didn’t. They hadn’t asked if we had anything on our belts. After Tim left, the rest of us were told to wait in the waiting room, really more like a closet with a one way window through which they could see us. From the inside we could see our own reflections in the bright glare of the fluorescent lighting. The walls were cinder block and painted yellow. I didn’t try the door to see if we were actually prisoners. A woman in two tone leathers sat quietly in the corner. There were two helmets on the chair next to her. In a while, a man in two tone leathers, her husband I guess, was led back into the room. She asked him if he had been treated nicely. “Oh, you know, third degree”, he replied in a British accent. They were summoned shortly. As they left, I thought I heard someone say “English people are not allowed to enter this way … now, you’re not under arrest … we’ll have to move the bike …” After thirty minutes or so, The male officer came and told us he had completed his inspection of the van and told us to pull it outside and wait for Tim. As soon as I pulled the van out, the formerly ever so stern female officer came up and asked to see Daren. There wasn’t as much cash in the merch money bag as he had reported. He had forgotten to subtract credit card sales from his total, so it turned out that we had well under ten thousand dollars. We were proven innocent after only having been assumed guilty for forty minutes or so, not bad as border hassles go, but it left a bad taste. I haven’t traveled the world extensively, but I’ve been in and out of the country a few times. I’ve never been treated like a suspect by officials of any nation other than my own. Sure, they have a tough job and we didn’t have our shit together. But they were nasty from the get go. I don’t know how such an attitude helps them do their job.

Entering Canada was different this time, too. The U.S. officer who gave me the customs form in Sweetgrass Montana, actually insisted on looking in the van before stamping and signing the form, a first. Then, Canadian immigration charged us four hundred and fifty dollars for work permits, another first. The immigration officer folded the permits, stapled them into our passports, told us we were good until the fifth and to have a nice trip. I just took my work permit out and read it, here in Iowa. Apparently we were supposed to have stopped at the port of exit to tell the Canadians we were leaving and give the permits back. The immigration officer didn’t say a word about exiting, and we’d never run into this requirement before. The last time we’d been in Canada, a couple of years before, one could simply leave Canada without a word. We’ll have to get on this situation right away if we want to work up there in the future, mole hills just seem to want to turn into mountains these days. We mused on the changing world as we rolled toward Lethbridge, Alberta. Wasn’t NAFTA supposed to make it easier to do cross border business?

I spent a week in Canada and watched the news a time or two. Their news is different than our news. The Canadians are alarmed, to say the least. Apparently, we now have gun boats on the Great Lakes, drones and Blackhawk helicopters patrolling the land border. There’s talk of building a fence or perhaps even a wall. What terrible threat is coming at us from Canada, I must ask? And how will we get enough Mexican Nationals to the Canadian border to build a wall? Canadians don’t sneak into our country. They’re doing pretty well up there, by the look of the place. Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg all looked prosperous. In none of those sprawling cities did I see the signs of poverty so often evident from crosstown freeways in the U.S., and I suspect their health care system works better than the elder George Bush would have had us believe. No doubt many of us can be fooled into thinking a wall would make us safer, keeping out drugs and terrorists, but I file such arguments under “Yeah Right”. Where there are walls, there are tunnels and bribes, and most walls are built to keep people in rather than out, food for paranoid thought, given that Canada’s economy is holding up relatively well, and they have the majority of the world’s fresh water which will soon be the world’s most precious commodity (If you doubt this, note that T Boone Pickens, former oil and gas tycoon, is now in the water rights business). Big Brother paranoia aside, any real threat is most likely to arrive in one of the countless shipping containers I see piled up on our docks and piggy backed on train cars all over our nation. I don’t know the current figure, but I remember that during the rough tough Bush administration, Home Land Security was allocated enough funds to inspect four percent of inbound shipping containers. There’s no way to inspect them all. There are simply too many. So, the politicians clamor for walls, to make us think they’re doing something to protect us, pad the pockets of a few construction firm and high tech CEOs, and keep the DEA funded to the gills. Meanwhile, a once friendly border grows more and more militarized and unfriendly. This can’t be good for business.

Keeping Tulsa Safe

Why is it that small Midwestern airports have all the most up to date passenger screening equipment, while some of the busier airports do not? Do they think Al Qaeda is planning to hit us from the heartland, or is the fear index just higher out there, prompting the local politicos to bring home more homeland security dollars? Of the three times I’ve been ordered into the full body scanner, a cylindrical device resembling a see through version of the orgasmatron from Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, one was in Tulsa, one in Green Bay(I think it was Green Bay, pretty far north and more or less up the middle), the third was somewhere east. Tulsa was a trip.

I flew to Tulsa from my home town of Austin, Texas. The Austin airport is small but often very busy. Sometimes, if one of the three checkpoints is mysteriously closed, it can take one nearly two hours to complete baggage check and security screening. I’ve grown used to it. I haven’t noticed if the Austin airport even has one of those clear orgasmatron like machines. If so, I’ve never been in it.

My tour manager and I made it to Tulsa, played the gig, got paid, well, most of it, spent the night, and were back at the airport two hours before our return flight was scheduled to depart. It was Saturday, and the Tulsa airport was practically deserted. There was no line for baggage check.

There was no line for security. In the screening area, there were about fifteen TSA employees and maybe five passengers. Seemed like a bit of overkill. After I ‘d done the ex-ray conveyer dance, shedding belt, necklace, cell phone, change, shoes, pulling the lap top out of the bag and setting it in its very own bin, I noticed that I was being barked at. It was ten in the morning, the voice might have been human, it sounded like a higher pitched version of the teacher’s voice from the Charlie Brown holiday specials from my childhood. I held up my boarding pass to signal that I was familiar with the procedure. The voice became more shrill, I had to focus.

“You have something in your cargo pocket!” yelled the woman behind the voice.

“Yes ma’am, that’s my wallet”, I yelled back.

“Take it out or they will search you.”

I noticed then, that the only lane that was not taped off lead right through the orgasmascanner. Hmm… I wasn’t familiar with the procedure after all.

The woman with the voice approached. “You have to take everything out of your pockets”. I clutched my wallet, boarding pass and baggage claim checks.

She motioned me through the machine and I obeyed, but neither of us had noticed that the woman on the other side of the machine had her back turned, I realized too late that I had walked up behind a large woman with a Glock pistol on her hip. She didn’t startle, her hand didn’t reflexively go to her gun. She just seemed tired and slightly annoyed that I wasn’t familiar with the procedure. I should have remembered from Green Bay, but Green Bay was so long ago. I was beginning to get irked. Snappy comments were bubbling their way to the forefront of my half consciousness. It was still two hours until flight time and I was wondering if I could get in some serious trouble and still get out of it in time to make my flight. What would’ve happened if I yelled out something on the order of “No I don’t know this procedure because real airports don’t bother with it and if any of you ever flew you’d know that.”?

Not nice. And the woman with the Glock actually did seem professional and pretty much lacking in delusions of self importance. She ordered me to step back into the machine, put my feet on the yellow footprints and raise my arms over my head while keeping my hands together. I did as I was told, while the ghost of Evelyn Waugh whispered, “The pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous …”

The machine made a rather loud noise as the scanning device circled me. I was aware that some poor soul staring at a TV monitor was seeing a good deal more of me than any of us got to see of Diane Keaton in “Sleeper”. I was told to step out. The woman with the Glock (come to think of it, I guess they all had Glocks, or some such modern polymer framed hi-cap semi auto) went through my wallet and told me I was cleared. I walked to the conveyer and reassembled myself. I felt jarred somehow, more so than after the usual screening ordeal, and more jarred than I remember feeling after any of the few times that I’ve been bodily searched. Why is it assumed, in our culture, that an individual would rather be visually spied on than physically touched? I’m not sure which act is more invasive.

The lady with the Charlie Brown’s teacher voice sure seemed to think that the threat of search would snap me into line, but I’m not sure it will next time. I don’t relish being frisked but I don’t like that jarred feeling the machine left me with. I doubt that the machine increases one’s risk of cancer more than does life in the twenty-first century, with its constant bath of electromagnetism from cell phones and all our other necessities, but I don’t like the machine. Still, I might be hesitant to request a bodily search for fear that to do so might place me under extra suspicion and increase the hassle potential in an already hassle filled day of travel.

Tim, my tour manager, was waiting in the hall when I finally got myself back in order. “Glad they’re keeping Tulsa safe,” he said.

New Tour Dates

New Tour Dates

Sat Oct 16
Continental Club
Austin, TX

Sat Oct 23
Austin Variety Show
Austin, TX

Fri Nov 5
Threadgill’s
Austin, TX

Sat Nov 6
Gruene Hall
New Braunfels, TX

Sun Nov 21
Mucky Duck (Solo)
Houston, TX

Wed Dec 1
Iron Horse (Solo)
Northampton, MA

Fri Dec 3
World Cafe Live (Solo)
Philadelphia, PA

Thur Dec 11
The Aardvark
Ft. Worth

Fri Dec 12
Floores Country Store
Helotes, TX

New Tour Dates

Thursday, September 16   Marfa, TX Padre’s

Friday, September 17  Lubbock, TX Lone Star Event Center

Saturday, September 18 Santa Fe, NM Santa Fe Brewing Co.

Sunday, September 19 Phoenix, AZ The Rhythm Room

Tuesday, September 21 Solana Beach, CA Belly Up Tavern

Wednesday, September 22 Los Angeles, CA The Mint

Thursday, September 23 Felton, CA Don Quixote’s

Friday, September 24 Felton, CA Don Quixote’s

Saturday, September 25 Santa Rosa, CA   Earle Baum Center Fest

Tuesday, September 28 Portland, OR Doug Fir Lounge

Wednesday, September 29 Seattle, WA Tractor Tavern

Thursday, September 30 Seattle, WA Tractor Tavern

Friday, October 1  Eugene, OR  WOW Hall

Sunday, October 3 San Francisco, CA  Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival

Tuesday, October 5 Salt Lake City, UT The State Room

Wednesday, October 6 Denver, CO Bluebird Theatre

Friday, October 8 Kansas City, MO Knuckleheads

Saturday, October 9  Columbia MO Mojo’s