911 – A Review of Freefall – The Basis for Many Conspiracy Theories

I have watched the Freefall: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out DVD, a presentation of arguments for why the investigation of the 911 collapse of three buildings should be re-opened, and why what the official investigation said could not have been true. It is well produced. I agree with the first part but not with the second. I will explain this and why I think so many do not accept the official version of those events. Then I will conclude with my own thoughts on why there is so much controversy over the events.

First I need to say that as the “911 truth” movement grew, I tended to agree with them. I signed petitions asking for further or re-opened investigations because I thought Giuliani and the Bush administration blew it. I am counted among the large number of people who doubt or have questions about 911. But –

911 was a unique and tragic event. It was another event like the JFK assassination. Almost no one could have believed beforehand that these things could happen as they were explained. These events shook us up. In these events we learned to distrust our military, intelligence and police agencies, officials and experts of all sorts, and the media that reported them. Someone on the DVD says “We know we’ve been lied to about other things, so we must have been lied to about this.” I understand this feeling, but it is not a logical, scientific conclusion.

Immediately after 911, I think that not only the public, but government officials and experts were shaken. At first we thought maybe 10-20,000 people must have died. It was weeks later that the actual number of ~2,744 became known. The attitude of officials was: We must look like we know what we are doing, like we know everything that has happened and how and why. We must respond quickly with decisiveness and purpose to serve the public good (and preserve our political positions). Therefore, a massive hunt for survivors and then bodies or body parts was launched. A plan for removal of debris was set in motion. Even the piles of girders and other debris in NJ were offensive to the public. (I saw numerous stories about this on TV news.) There may be body parts in the debris, so let’s get rid of it. Sell it off to China. People are upset, so let’s launch a huge program to sell people cars at unheard of bargain prices. (Throughout the fall and winter, car sales surged.) Let’s get those who done it, so a massive bombing program against the Taliban in Afghanistan was planned and (literally) executed. This made sense even to many if not most liberals and Democrats. (It was easy to make war on a primitive country like Afghanistan without seriously weighing the morality of it.) What I am saying is that many of the mistakes made in the initial investigation are understandable in the context of the events and the aftermath.

A conspiracy is a secret plot. There are many such plots in business, government, churches, and all manner of organizations. They usually involve only a few people, otherwise they are easily uncovered. There usually is a paper trail and phone and email records. When the assassin(s) or perpetrators die in the event, suspicions increase greatly, because there is no one to question or confess. There is not necessarily a conspiracy behind every botched investigation and every complicated evil deed. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

“There is no satisfying scientific study” someone says on the DVD. I understand and accept how that could come to be. There is a lot of science to consider. The means to conduct such investigations are difficult after the fact. There will be disagreements among experts. A full investigation would cost many billions of dollars, and still would likely be judged incomplete or inconclusive by many.

I had trouble last month with the drain for my washing machine. It began to back up. The drain had been problematic before. It is a gray water drain system only for the kitchen sink and the laundry. It used to gurgle in the kitchen when the laundry was being done. A plumber installed a simple PVC “vent” on the drain pipe into which the washing machine drains. Now it seemed not to be working. So I went online to read about plumbing codes and practices and solutions re laundry drains and vents. Wow. There are multiple forums on the web on which hundreds of plumbers argue about such things. Many plumbers with opposing viewpoints claimed “It is just a matter of simple physics! Here is what you do and how you do it!” Only they disagreed. On one extreme are plumbers who require a vent on every drain in the house; on the other are those who argue that in Europe and Australia there are no such vents and no problems. Others argued over how long the vent pipe had to be and where in the line it should be installed. No agreement. I concluded that science isn’t exactly science or what I thought it to be. There is a lot that is not settled.

This experience comes to mind when I hear the experts who argue about whether the buildings came down in freefall or not, and whether a jet fuel fire can be hot enough to melt steel, etc. I think that no one was there who can tell us. There is no video showing what needs to be seen to make the necessary conclusions. It may be that no building has collapsed from a fire, but it is also true that no buildings like the twin tower ever were targeted by 767's loaded with fuel. So we cannot know. There will always be in such events “evidence omitted.” There will never be “unbiased scientific evidence and witnesses” considered to satisfy everyone. Yes, there was evidence not considered, and evidence too quickly destroyed. This is more likely because of incompetence in responding to a huge and unique event, than it is because of a conspiracy to withhold evidence.

Building 7 has always puzzled me. The questions are many about this, but now there are websites and videos showing pictures of the back side of the building that were not much seen in the years immediately after the event. A great deal of material from the towers landed on this building and tore into the back side. Also, the pulverized concrete and metal that blew out sideways at street level directly tore into building 7. There are recordings and testimony from many firemen and others on the scene that make it clear that they knew the building would fall sometime that day. There are at least as many engineers and architects who accept the way they fell as there are who don’t. I watched another video on a website that shows calculations that do not show free fall as if there were nothing to impede the falling. I for one do not expect “hesitation” when 40 and more upper falls are landing on floors below. The normal course of the buildings falling looks to me as it should, once one considers the damage.

A logical jump to quickly state a conclusion is repeated. What we saw “could only have been a controlled demolition.” From this the supposition is made that someone could get access to the core of each building unseen, and set demolitions. One statement got my attention: “I’ve never seen anything like it. Had to have been explosives.” Several witnesses concluded that it must have been what they thought it looked or sounded like: explosives. At the end of the video one witness considers many claims and concludes: “To me it means explosion.”

In the last third of the DVD, there is a lot said about psychology and emotion that explains much to me:
“It is difficult for us to come to terms with the official conclusions.”
“We were secure and then we weren’t.”
“We respond to such events with fear and anxiety.”
“There are a lot of things that are not as we think or thought they were.”
“It had a traumatic impact on all of us.”
These things are exactly true. What we conclude as a result is another matter. A narrator says “If we open Pandora’s box it challenges all the things we believe about the world.” Definitely. I think our view of the world was changed forever that day. But not in the direction of not believing that 19 extremist Muslims, mostly Saudi, trained in Afghanistan, pulled it off.

I have great respect for David Ray Griffin. I read and used some of his work about process theology. He is right about empire and American exceptionalism. Sadly, he contradicts many things about which he wrote in the decades before 911. He used to be suspicious of notions that science could solve all problems. Now he thinks he knows how buildings do or do not fall.

One person says “We couldn’t believe it (both the event itself and the official report) Why do people have so much trouble hearing our challenges - our truths?” Another says “We need to educate other people about this!” They are upset that everyone doesn’t agree with them and contradict their newly adopted worldview. As a trained Biblical student and theologian, I thought of great Biblical and other historical events and how they have been seen by different folks after the fact. I saw the church fill up with people in the days after 911 and then empty out. The rise of the “nones” and of atheists in the decade following are a direct response to the event. As a nation we are living most visibly within what Bellah called “the Broken Covenant.” I preached about how our implicit sacred contract had been broken: America was great. We had an agreement with God. We would fight to defend Jesus and the American Way (our version of the Kingdom of God or the Beloved Community), and God would protect us. After 911 it was easy to see that no one protected us from all the potential evils in the world. And we were blind to see that we created or set up the event by how we had treated Muslim, middle-eastern peoples in the last century.

The pleas are made in the DVD: “There is no trace of 1000 victims; why don’t we know? There needs to be identification!” Yes, 1,000 were pulverized or vaporized. Their remains will never be identified. What about our identification? Who are we now? This is a deep, existential problem that we are doing nothing to answer! O yes, we are. We are challenging the official narrative of what happened, and this is something.

“We need to heal; we need justice; we will never forget!” Yes. “Science can solve this!” No. “We have to have a new investigation; we have to know what happened!” We know enough but we will never know it all. We are very bad at living with ambiguity and uncertainty.
------
Ed Asner narrates a 15 minute documentary on this DVD in which the following logic is given:
The fall of the buildings looks like controlled demolition.
Controlled demolition requires months of planning.
Therefore, the 911 events (not the hijacking of airplanes, but the fall of the buildings) were planned and carried out after much planning and preparation.
I've seen the theories here about thermite and I am not convinced.

Oswald is to Kennedy as Conspiracy Theories are to Theology

I have been reading and watching TV shows about JFK conspiracy theories. I tend to agree with those who say that Oswald definitely killed Kennedy, and he probably did it alone. He was a loner. Everything fits his acting alone as much as anything can be made to fit a conspiracy necessary to understand the act. What we struggle to accept is that a nobody could get away with killing a somebody, that someone with no power (other than what comes out of the barrel of a gun) can kill the most powerful leader in the world.  We don’t want to accept that this Oswald was a leftist, who killed Kennedy in Dallas, the center of the right wing world at the time. The FBI and the CIA did not want us to know that they were incompetent, or at least had missed something really important. We did not want to know that our politicians, the best and the brightest, were merely human and unable to protect the President, and unable to make sense of what had happened, and at a loss like the rest of us about the meaning of it all, or the lack of it. We learned not to trust politicians, media people, and experts. Fear of nuclear war, anxiety about Viet Nam and communist threats, concern about or for greater civil rights for Negroes had put us on edge. We didn’t know that the insubstantial charisma of the Kennedys was the only substance of our hope. (Then, Lyndon Johnson gave substance to both our hopes and fears.)

Believing in conspiracy theories was and is necessary for many, in order to make sense of the senseless and to force order on the essential randomness of the universe. That leads me to think of theology. Today I read in The Christian Century a creative interpretation of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians by N.T. Wright (who I think of as NT Wrong). He thinks it wonderful that Paul gave new meaning to the Schema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One”). He thinks it logical that Paul was defending monotheism by reading Jesus into the Schema as “Lord.” Sorry NT, you are making Jesus more than the revealer of God’s just reign; you are making Jesus divine. But hey, maybe that is no different than declaring him to be the unexpected expected Messiah. My point is that all theology, while it tries to put order on our thinking about what we know least about, is essentially speculation. It is reason applied to unreason and resulting mostly in continued discussion about the supernatural. Every conspiracy theory is talk about what might be. Coincidences are collected to prop it up. People will continue to believe in conspiracies as long as there are alternative ways to understand what happened, no matter how forced. People will continue to speak of deities as long as we remain in ignorance of total reality.

Auden said it well. It has yet to be said best, because he lived in a time supportive of belief as our own time is not. I understand that he disowned this poem; we cannot: September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

------ We are human, and that implies a great deal about our capabilities for good but also for ill, and it describes also our limitations. We can learn a lot about ourselves in reviewing the Kennedy assassination. We had reason to be shocked by that event, but we should not have been surprised by 911. Nor should we have responded by seeking revenge. If any of the conspiracy theories is accepted in truth, then retribution against someone or some group would be required. It would not be justified.

Easy Listening and ---- Marcus Borg!!!

The other day I searched YouTube for a recording that my Father-in-law had, and which I listened to when visiting. I was fascinated with the arrangement of this orchestral version of a pop song. Couldn’t remember the song. What I did remember was that it was a Longines Symphonette LP, a best hits of ‘68 or some year around there.

I found the album on ebay. Greatest Hits of 1969. The first track was Soulful Strut. That was it! It isn’t on YouTube (I should buy the album and upload it!), but here is Billy May from the same year with a similar performance.

I don’t think Billy May was as good as the Longines Symphonette on this number. This judgment requires some explanation, because if it was one thing I (and all my cohort) hated in the ‘60's and ‘70's was this “Easy Listening” sort of usually mushy music. Remember Mitch Miller? OMG, he played oboe on the Charlie Parker with Strings album! Remember those Readers’ Digest LP’s? And the ever present Longines Symphonette and other collections? I remember riding in cars to Presbytery meetings with old men who listened to the local “Easy Listening” radio station. (I think those are gone and I haven’t even heard a “Smooth Jazz” station for a few years.)

I searched for info on this mystery orchestra with the name of a watch company. It’s identity was not given, nor the conductor. In recent years a few music lovers have said, “Hey, this was high quality arranging, performance, and recording. What was going on?” They uncovered the secret: It was Neil Richardson and the BBC music studios.

Neil was a great arranger who wrote and produced theme music for BBC radio and TV shows. The back of the albums often told great detail about the latest electronic technology used to produce the recordings while saying nothing about Neil or the musicians, many of whom were from the London Philharmonic. BTW, we could say the same about Mantovani, also recording in London. (If it's been a while, you need to hear Charmaine, the theme for distribution of meds in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

Here is my thought about all this: Easy Listening was a way for my parents’ generation to come to terms with the new rock and roll of the ‘50's and ‘60's, and all of the cultural change they were forced to live through. This was the soft landing for them. Soulful Strut was something they didn’t want to hear, but a dynamic arrangement played by a small symphony – they could handle that. It served the grand cultural purpose of helping people through disturbing and disruptive change.

When I first went to work for The Jesus Seminar, I was asked if I knew about Marcus Borg (who was a fellow, but mostly absent from the Seminar.) I replied, “Yes, I had read three of his books.” “Well,” I was told, “He is our soft landing specialist. People who can’t handle what we are doing can read Marc and learn to accept what we are doing.” And I am sure that some people learned to like jazz through popular songs and bebop from Charlie Parker with Strings.

I am not making it well through the current musical transition. Walmart today was not playing the old elevator music (which until recently was the softened hits of the ‘80's). This was screaming soul and heavy metal. I had to get out of there. When my generation is gone, the youngsters can move on, with music and with religion.

Remembering Frankie Trumbauer, Bix, and Some Jazz Age Songs

I’m confessin’ that I got real deep into music of the ‘20's this summer. I was preparing for a musical of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1920's Style, playing tenor sax. It occurred to me that I should be playing a C Melody sax, like they did in the period. So now I’m overhauling one of those 90 year old things. The Buescher is sort of a baby tenor; the Conn is a long neck alto. But I digress. I started listening to C Melodies.

What won my heart was this recording from the ‘90's of Scott Robinson bringing to life a tune, Singin' the Blues, that Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer made in ‘27.


 Turns out Frankie made a lot of platters, and a lot of them with Bix. So I started listening to their stuff on YouTube. One that caught my ear and stuck there was No One Can Take Your Place, dated 1928. It seemed to epitomize the era.

 
It bounced around my brain for a week and I had to find out more about it. But nothin’. No sheet music. Not on any list of pop songs of any year. It was lost. Where’d it go? Prolly (a word I learned from Sinclair Lewis) lotsa songs got written and recorded, but never were published cause they didn’t catch on. First I found several newer songs with the same title, even one by Lynnerd Skynnerd, not so good. This must mean that even the title had disappeared over the decades.

Then I went back to the video where I had seen the Odeon record label. (BTW, Odeon, a German company seems to have turned out the best fidelity on those 78's. They recorded in London and New York, as well as Berlin and Paris.) The label identified the composers: lyrics by Gilbert and Melbeck and melody by Frank Signorelli. Turns out they wrote lots of tunes together, and scored with Stairway to the Stars and A Blues Serenade, later recorded by Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. What really lit me up was a different version of a 1945 song I grew up with about my home town: Sioux City Sue (1924). Can’t find the lyrics to Signorelli’s version, but it’s not much to write home about.

No One Can Take Your Place was Bix’ last recording session with Frankie in the spring of ‘29. Bix was probably sick, and the tune lacks much that would make it “jazz.” Bix does have a couple of short breaks, and the ending. Otherwise, just another pop song. And the story it tells is a little “off.” This guy is telling this doll how he still loves her even though he’s got a new gal. I don’t think anyone wanted to be singing about that scenario. But I like the melody, so I picked it out and guessed at the chords. This feels like a real contribution to the world's accumulated knowledge! It will be in the next post.

A Lost Pop Song from the '20's

This song is explained in the previous post: I have posted this on Google Drive as a public document, but I have no idea how you can copy it or open it. It is a PDF file.

What He Said - A Hymn about Jesus' Teachings

This hymn is explained in the previous post.

The Poverty of Hymns and One of My Own

Where are the hymns that tell the teachings of Jesus? I ask this because of a dispute this past month about the new Presbyterian Hymnal, Glory to God. The hymnal committee decided not to include a decade old praise song, “In Christ Alone.” This hymn actually does a good job of clearly stating a particular theology of the atonement. That was the problem. Presbyterians recognize that there are a variety of metaphors for how God reconciles the world to Godself (as some of us have said it).  Al Moeller, leading Southern Baptist and neanderthal theologian, is outraged that any Christian would deny the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement: that God sacrificed His Son on the Cross as a payment to satisfy the debt of sin that humanity had built up since we emerged from Africa. All of us collectively owed something to God for all of our wrongdoing, so God decided to pay it Himself. (He is “Father.”)

(I should state here that atonement concerns me not at all any more. Having abandoned belief in the supernatural, I see our problem as needing reconciliation with each other, period. God gets in the way of this, and often becomes the impetus for hating and annihilating each other. Jesus, I think, had other ideas.) Myths and metaphors are helpful, as long as we are clear that they are myths and metaphors, and not literally true.

The hymn controversy reminded me of why I dislike most hymns. They are about the Christ and doctrines, and rarely about the historical Jesus. As I look at the list of hymns in the new Glory to God, I do see a few newer hymns that may be about what Jesus taught. “A Woman Broke a Jar,” and “A Woman and a Coin” are two obvious examples. Different ways of singing about Jesus, other than spiritualizing and glorifying him as divine, are possible. The Disciples of Christ have a wonderful hymn speaking of Jesus as “Holy Wisdom.” That didn’t make the grade for Presbyterians, and I guess Avery and Marsh hymns or songs are verboten now in the PCUSA. (They were Presbyterian ministers in Port Jervis, NJ until not too long ago.)

About 15 years ago, a Jesus Seminar scholar wrote but did not publish a paper analyzing what the Methodist hymnal said about Jesus. I do not remember that the human Jesus did more than “call us” and “die.” Somehow the bit about his death does not connect with his teachings about power, empires, and violence. Of course there is a lot about how Jesus loves us, but that is inference, not directly found in his sayings. OK, maybe I will do an analysis of Jesus in Glory to God.

A friend on line suggested that I write a Jesus hymn, so the file that follows displays it: “What He Said.”

I had recently presented to my local Unitarian-Universalist congregation the teachings of Jesus from the Jesus Seminar. I looked at The Essential Jesus, wherein Dominic Crossan translated some of Jesus’ teachings into free verse of the simplest and direct language.

The tune had to be irregular, a necessity when working from other than metrical poetry. Maybe someone else can suggest better language and a better tune. I tried to produce a simple, singable tune, but may have failed in that. There are a couple of nice “hooks.” I would have liked a blues form, or a pentatonic melody. The chords are simple for guitar players. The chords could be enhanced. Maybe others can write in other ways about what Jesus taught. I think it’s time for another “Not Alone for Mighty Empire,” (not in Glory to God), or another hymn of the Social Gospel, or a revival of some hymns of the ‘60's. But today we are heavily into personal, individual praise and traditional, doctrinal divine man hymns. Even the topical hymns are not very realistic. So it goes.

Missing in Action

What is missing here are posts about my Yom HaShoah sermon in April, my thoughts about the Heidelberg Catechism, and lots of other deep thoughts about many other important things. This spring I joined a big band at SUNY ADK, which made 4 music groups. Kinda busy.

Love over Law in Les Miz

As a sophomore in college I struggled with third year French. I couldn’t get it conversationally. I could read it and the prof had me read a history of France in French because history at least used to be written in a fairly consistent and simple tense. The prof said I should go to France and that he could get me a Fulbright to study in Grenoble, a university well known for its history department. I was so frightened of the prospect of going so far from everything I knew (in Iowa!) that I turned away from it.

This was one of those turning points in my life that could have led to an alternative reality today. If I could have seen into the history of revolutions (mostly French) that attracted me then, I could have gone to Grenoble and made a career in French history. Instead I went on to study Russian and spend two years studying the Russian revolution. (Later I traded it all for study of Church history.) What I didn’t see was that the Russian was built on the four French revolutions (1789, 1830-1832, 1848, 1871).

Now I can see this merely reflecting on the great symbolism of covering the body of Lenin with a flag from the failed 1871 Commune of Paris. I wrote in a post last year about how many in France and elsewhere believed “Socialists who seek to reform the human race, but without a revolution are scorned by communists and conservatives alike.” The French army executed as many as 30,000 Parisians within a week to put down the Commune. Lenin knew that if the Bolsheviks didn’t aggressively eliminate their enemies, their enemies would eliminate them.

Les Miserables is an impossible fiction about real events that speaks to the need for social change without violence leading to totalitarianism.

Hugo said:
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

Let’s be blunt. Hugo saw terrible injustice, inequlaity, and suffering around him all his life. The entire century and more was about the dismantling of divine right monarchies and the price paid by working people for industrialization. In 1832 he dodged bullets in the brief uprising, in 1848 he opposed the revolt and helped dismantle barricades. But he became a strong Republican and by 1871 he was able to support the Commune, if from a distance, with poetry. He spent 17 years writing Les Miserables to change the world.

Hugo explained his ambitions for the novel to his Italian publisher:
“I don't know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone. It addresses England as well as Spain, Italy as well as France, Germany as well as Ireland, the republics that harbour slaves as well as empires that have serfs. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind's wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: ‘open up, I am here for you’.”

I think that the musical and film does great justice to the massive novel, which few will read. The score has wondrous riffs, hooks, and modulations. The lyric is superb. The final scene of the world – the 99% – at the barricade, always seeking justice and progress, freedom and egalite, gives us his purpose. Ultimately, Hugo’s answer to violence is personal love, always pushing progress to its next level in the next generation. The story, called the greatest novel, lifts liberalism from our own sewer of tea party shame. It will do so again for each new generation.

The Tyranny of "Fake Books"

I have just completed the basics of a big project, and if you aren't a musician you won't care. Using an app called Mobile Sheets on a 10" Android tablet, I have entered about 1,300 songs in Bb and Eb so I can find and play a tune called in a jam session. I play sax sometimes with guys who can play anything while I have difficulty thinking of a tune. Just for the record I currently have over 500 ballads, 100 blues heads, 100 bebop classics, and many songs from a dozen other genres. (Photo - not a good one - shows the 5" x 8.5" very readable backlit screen in a dark room.)

Where did I get all this sheet music? From jazz and other musicians, and teachers and students, who over the years have compiled “fake books,” collections of what are usually one page “lead sheets” with the melody and chord symbols. This gives the roadmap for the forms and voicings that are the basis for performances. Fake books also record the original or preferred key in which the tunes are played. This layout provides the foundation for where all music – especially jazz – is made, at the intersection of the expected and unexpected, the written and unwritten improvised playing of a tune.

I have six fake books in print and another ten in PDF form on my computer. Some are in the key  of C so that they must be transposed for a Bb or Eb instrument. (Tenor and soprano sax are Bb instruents. Alto and bari sax are Eb.) Reading music quickly a step up or a minor third down is hard, so I seek out Bb and Eb fake books.

The basic fake books for jazz are “The Real Books,” now published by Hal Leonard. They were originally written by hand and I think were compiled by students and teachers for classes at Berklee School of Music in Boston beginning in the ‘60's and ‘70's. [There is a Wikipedia article on The Real Book, which leaves the origin up for question.] There are three volumes. They were illegal because they violated the Copyright laws. [I will post about the tyranny of Copyright Laws later.] I bought mine from the back of a small music store after receiving a reference from a friend they knew. I heard stories about people getting arrested selling them out of the trunks of their cars. This is as close as I ever came to experiencing prohibition or dealing in drugs.

In the ‘90's Sher Music began publishing multiple volumes of “The New Real Book,” a project that I think spurred Hal Leonard to work out the Copyright issues and publish The Real Books legally in ‘03. There had been legal and illegal fake books of popular songs for years, and now there are Brazilian, Cuban, Blues, Ellington, and other specialized mostly legal Real Books. Hal Leonard has done a fair job of updating the old Real Books. There may or may not be an effort to publish them in PDF on cd’s.

In ‘’93 Adobe introduced Acrobat, which allowed publication of large documents in a form that could be saved on disks and later cds, and on line. In the late ‘90's I bought a cd for $5.00 that included a dozen fake books, mostly in the key of C. Now we could see the written music for a lot of tunes. More recently a Swiss site gives downloads of some fake books in Bb and Eb. I wish there were more.

What is included and what is left out of these books constitute huge problems. As I loaded music into my tablet, I edited out music that I knew I would never play. The Real Books are loaded with music written by Berklee teachers and jazz musicians who were popular in the ‘70's and ‘80's. Let’s face it – No one is going to ask me or most musicians to play any music by Pat Metheny or Steve Swallow. Nor are there many who would request most Wayne Shorter tunes and the minor hits of a dozen other such greats. I reduced The Real Book to this extent:
                                  Vol. 1 from 485 to 219 pages,
                                  Vol. 2 from 414 to 174 pages, and
                                  Vol. 3 from 360 to 163 pages, the total pages by 55%.
I acknowledge that others would make different editing choices, but I doubt that they would be much different than my choices. Most of the ballads are keepers but a lot of bebop and mainstream jazz tunes were the possession of the musicians who wrote them. They aren’t performed anymore.

Perhaps the larger problem is the dozens of good old tunes that were left out, and the many tunes written since1970 from pop, rock, and Broadway. Land of Make Believe (Mangione), I’m Beginning to See the Light (Ellington), Anything Goes (Cole Porter) are just examples of what was left out of the original books. I discover new omissions weekly. We are all grateful for singers and others who dig in the hits of the past and turn up new golden oldies. I think Haunted Heart had been forgotten before Charlie Haden and Ernie Watts revived it in the ‘90's. Madeleine Peyroux, Cyrille Aimee, and Catherine Russell find any number of old songs that people of my generation or younger haven’t heard. They are just like new. Sone songs were buried under censorship in the ‘30's, which prevented radio play, such as “Was I drunk?” (This requires a female vocalist.) http://youtu.be/Mg4RIrtDcjQ

I hate to say it, but more fake books are needed. A good American Songbook and a BeBop and Mainstream Jazz fake book would be nice for starters. Hope is in the tablet. For the Ipad there is Igig, for which an Android version is promised soon. Now you can get the chords from Igig for many of my favorite tunes on "jazzstudies." This allows one to use a laptop at a gig. I am not done, but I will keep at it because the payoff is high. I welcome other opinions on Real and other fake books.

Guns and Guilt

One thing missing from much discussion about guns and Second Amendment rights is the issue of the aftermath of shootings.

Thanks to the graphic reality (and sometimes hyper-reality) of violent films, we now know what we did not when I was growing up in the ‘50's. Then there was little or no blood. Bullets made small holes or none at all. Death followed only a grimace or two. Death looked relatively easy. Recovery from a wound looked harder, but the wounded were fixed up and sent home and back to work. Everything was fine.

So I played with guns when I was a kid probably from 7 to 11 years old. I especially prized a very exact copy of a .45 Colt revolver. It even had fake bullets that inserted into brass casings. A cap would fit into the casing and I could load, fire, and reload, just like Hopalong Cassidy, my hero who for some reason dressed in black. He had a nice smile.

My friends and I played cowbows and rustlers and Indians, and re-enacted WWII with great intensity for several summers. We shot and were shot. We fell and died. Perhaps we were preparing for the movie business.

 We knew nothing about death or dying. My maternal grandmother died when I was eight, and I attended the funeral. It was the first time I saw grown men, my uncles, cry. It was scary but all I knew was that Grandma was gone forever.

Most death is fairly clean, i.e., no blood. But we ought to know that death is the end of everything. If you kill someone they are gone forever. You have taken everything from them. You have taken them from them and the world. A number of films recently have commented on this, but I have not taken notes. It is said that killing someone changes you forever. There is no going back from being a killer. How can killing be forgiven or forgotten?

But a killing is soon over. Worse may be the woundings. Word from Aurora CO is that the wounded from last year’s mass shooting are having a very hard time. We aren’t talking flesh wounds that heal with a scar. We are talking about shattered bones and joints and destroyed internal organs. Wounds that disfigure the face in ways that no plastic surgery can fix. Destroyed hands or feet. Broken backs, paralysis. Unending pain. These things are the most likely outcome of a shooting.

The wounded also have families who must help, who must deal with life-changing circumstances. Interrupted or ended schooling. Jobs and careers ended. Plans wiped out. Many, many tears. Depression. PTSD. Etc. “And so it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

The movies have done us wrong. They created the myth of redemptive violence, that violence and vengeance are good and can make justice and save us from death and destruction. They created and amplified the myth of the gunslinger, the vicious outlaw, the bad Indian, and the wonderful Calvary in the old West. (This mythmaking began in print before the films.) They also helped amplify the myth of the glorious old South, that was done wrong.  Here are some lessons on the laws of physics that are violated in shootemup films.

I think that if you want to carry a gun, you should think about the following:

1. Carrying a gun makes you a target for someone else carrying a gun, who is afraid of you or what you might do.

2. If you draw, you should be prepared to shoot and have damn good reason to do so.

3. You had better be a mighty quick draw. One of the lessons of the gunslinger was that there is always someone better.

4. No matter how good you are on the range, you won’t be that good in a shootout.

5. Even if you shoot, so might the other guy. Be prepared to be killed or wounded.

Me, I stopped playing with guns when I was 11. When I was 12 the NRA taught me to shoot at Scout camp. That’s what the NRA did then. That’s about all they did then. They made sure we knew how dangerous it all was. Ultimately, guns are about a false kind of power. It is the power to destroy rather than to create. It is a power over and against mostly for individual purposes rather than power with others for societal purposes. Happiness cannot be a warm gun.

Guns without Guilt

One thing missing from much discussion about guns and Second Amendment rights is the issue of the aftermath of shootings.

Thanks to the graphic reality (and sometimes hyper-reality) of violent films, we now know what we did not when I was growing up in the ‘50's. There was little blood. Bullets made small holes. Death followed only a grimace or two. Death looked relatively easy. Recovery from a wound looked harder, but the wounded were fixed up and sent home and back to work. Everything was fine.

So I played with guns when I was a kid probably from 7 to 11 years old. I especially prized a very exact copy of a .45 Colt revolver. It even had fake bullets that inserted into brass casings. A cap would fit into the casing and I could load, fire, and reload, just like Hopalong Cassidy, my hero who for some reason dressed in black. He had a nice smile.

My friends and I played cowbows and rustlers and Indians, and re-enacted WWII with great intensity for several summers. We shot and were shot. We fell and died. Perhaps we were preparing for the movie business.

We knew nothing about death or dying. My maternal grandmother died when I was eight, and I attended the funeral. It was the first time I saw grown men, my uncles, cry. It was scary but all I knew was that Grandma was gone forever.

Most death is fairly clean, i.e., no blood. But as the film directors have told us since
Now we know. Death is the end of everything. If you kill someone they are gone forever. You have taken everything from them. You have taken them from them and the world. A number of films recently have commented on this, but I have not taken notes. It is said that killing someone changes you forever. There is no going back from being a killer. How can killing be forgiven or forgotten?

But a killing is soon over. Worse may be the woundings. Word from Aurora CO is that the wounded from last year’s mass shooting are having a very hard time. We aren’t talking flesh wounds that heal with a scar. We are talking about shattered bones and joints and destroyed internal organs. Wounds that disfigure the face in ways that no plastic surgery can fix. Destroyed hands or feet. Broken backs, paralysis. Unending pain. These things are the most likely outcome of a shooting.

The wounded also have families who must help, who must deal with life-changing circumstances. Interrupted or ended schooling. Jobs and careers ended. Plans wiped out. Many, many tears. Depression. PTSD. Etc. “And so it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

The movies have done us wrong. They created the myth of redemptive violence, that violence and vengeance are good and can make justice and save us from death and destruction. They created and amplified the myth of the gunslinger, the vicious outlaw, the bad Indian, and the wonderful Calvary in the old West. (This mythmaking began in print before the films.) They also helped amplify the myth of the glorious old South, that was done wrong. Here are some lessons on the laws of physics that are violated in shootemup films:

I think that if you want to carry a gun, you should think about the following:
Carrying a gun makes you a target for someone else carrying a gun, who is afraid of you or what you might do.
If you draw, you should be prepared to shoot and have damn good reason to do so.
You had better be a mighty quick draw.
No matter how good you are on the range, you won’t be that good in a shootout.
Even if you shoot, so might the other guy. Be prepared to be killed or wounded.


Me, I stopped playing with guns when I was 11. When I was 12 the NRA taught me to shoot at Scout camp. That’s what the NRA did then. That’s about all they did then. They made sure we knew how dangerous it all was. Ultimately, guns are about a false kind of power. It is the power to destroy rather than to create. It is a power over and against mostly for individual purposes rather than power with others for societal purposes. Happiness cannot be not a warm gun.

Guns and Power

 It occurred to me the other day that I have seen nothing in the debate about guns and violence concerning the relation of guns to power. Let me try. There are not a lot of conclusions here, only an attempt to explore and maybe understand what is going on behind and underneath this issue.



1. Guns are neither good nor evil in themselves.  A gun by itself is a mechanical tool. It is not merely a mechanical tool because it is inherently dangerous. It  be used for good, such as the necessity of hunting food or of defending oneself, or it can be used to wantonly kill wildlife or other humans.

2. Power likewise is neither good nor bad in itself. We commonly tend to think of power pejoratively as an evil, but what we object to is the misuse of power. Power is little more that the ability to do or accomplish something. In a society of other people with disparate goals, it is the ability to influence others to work together for a larger purpose. Nothing good in this world was created without power and certainly much evil has been inflicted on the world by its misuse.

3. Someone with a gun in hand or holstered has more power than someone who does not. It is the power of life and death. To possess a gun, especially in a situation where a gun are not normally expected to be present, is to possess great power for the intimidation of others. The power of a gun is in its ability to exact fear in another. A person with a gun is powerful because others without guns cannot easily object to that person’s demands without threat, explicit or implicit, of great injury or death. The possession of a gun is a threat to those who are unarmed.

4. As a society we permit persons with police powers to carry guns. Normally, we have no reason to object to the presence of the police who possess guns. They possess guns in order to pose a legitimate threat to any who would do harm or break laws, which are the rules we have agreed to through our elected representatives. The presence of police is meant to be protective, not threatening. Police power is restrained by many rules and much training. We authorize or give authority to police to carry weapons on our behalf.

5. If two persons who are not police, carry guns, they are a threat to each other. Neither has reason to believe that the other intends harm, but has reason to be suspicious of the other’s intentions because each has the power to kill the other. Each may have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun, but the authority, legitimacy and control existing under police powers are absent. This is the situation of the mythical “wild West.” Each is capable of claiming the right of vigilante justice. Such quick and rationalized “justice” is more likely to be vengeful, violent, and mistaken. Historically, people have resorted to guns in the absence of government authority.

6. Police powers are not ubiquitous in our society. I live in a small town where the only police presence is from the County Sheriff 15 miles away or a state police car which may be in the area. There is one deputy on patrol for every 90 square miles in this county. Much of their work concerns traffic safety. We may describe such a society as basically “peaceful,” when residents are generally unafraid of one another needing only a minimal police presence.

7. In a generally peaceful society we have little need to defend ourselves or prepare to do so. If two persons have a dispute, either or both may have tendency to anger or rage. If either of these persons carries a gun, the potential for a shooting is substantial. Therefore, we have reason to be concerned that others around us may be carrying a gun on their person, in their car, or close by in their home. Fear of being harmed by another with a knife or a club, or just because that person appears bigger and stronger, is a reason why guns are purchased and carried for protection.

8. Fear of crime is another reason given for gun ownership. At one extreme, some people do not lock their doors at night. Others keep their doors bolted even in daylight. Many studies have shown that much fear of crime is unjustified. Perception of widespread crime is a product of media coverage of crime. If there is a considerable amount of crime in an area, a person may feel a need for a gun to protect self and family. This is a decision based on the reality that police force may be too far away to be able to intercede in an altercation. Property and violent crime tend to be more prevalent in poor areas. A gun may not be necessary to protect property from an intruder without a gun, but there is a long tradition in English law giving the right to shoot if one’s home I invaded. Here is a foundation stone of our Second Amendment rights. Historically, individuals owned guns for hunting. The same guns could be used in such a situation, in protection against crime. Many accidental shootings have occurred both hunting and in the mistaken belief that a family member or friend was an intruder intending harm.

9. In a time when many people see themselves as powerless, some will seek to fill that void in their lives with the a gun. Perception of powerlessness and perception of the power given by a gun are the driving forces here. People feel powerless when they have lost control of one or more aspects of their lives. This includes abandonment and divorce, loss of jobs, perceived threat by immigration of peoples who may have different customs or not speak English, perception of an increase of crime, failure to achieve political or ideological goals, fear of government invasion of individual rights, and even fear of foreign invasion. The rise of the current zombie meme may be a function of this growing fear of amorphous threats to our well-being.

10. War is the ultimate use of guns to achieve ends. Von Clauswitz said that war was the pursuit of politics or the continuation of policy by other means. Total war was a creation of the 19th century. Nuclear warfare is its limit. Brutality in entertainment has recently broken all limits. Many films feature wholly unrealistic villains who are total psycopathic in their lack of human concern. Guns are fired at individuals without reflection merely because they are “in the way.” Opponents must not be restrained but eliminated. In a list of five stages of conflict, the fifth stage requires that the other not just lose, but die. We do not yet know if such entertainment reflects or creates a more violent society.

11. The peaceable kingdom has existed and can exist again. Each person has the power to influence others through words. The processes of Roberts’ Rules, the legal system, and representative democracy have been understood to be sufficient to create a mostly peaceful society -- but may not be now so much. I think we have a right to live without fear of our neighbors. More guns may reduce fear of being at the mercy of others. They seem to equalize power. However, they do not reduce the fear of those with guns on the part of those without them. The possession of guns by my neighbors does not make me feel more safe.

To Blog or Not to Blog

I have been absent here for several reasons:

Some days I have little to say.
I have lots of other interests, such as performing music and watching films.
I have been posting short simple thought and comments on Facebook and in response to other blog posts.

I have been busy trying to understand the new technology. I have needed to learn a new tv, wireless bluray player, phone, mp3 player, tablet, and loading a sheet music app on the tablet. This is a major first world problem. I am thinking while doing all of this about the effect of all these changes on all of us.
I do not use Twitter. That would overload my ageing brain.

I continue to read and think about how we can speak of God today.

In the absence of the old God, I suspect that I will have more to say in weeks to come.

Christianity After Religion - Two Sermons

I was asked to preach in a traditional Presbyterian Church the last Sunday of 2012. Then I was asked to preach in a Unitarian-Universalist congregation the first Sunday of 2013. For each congregation I spoke about the many changes that have taken place and are taking place with increasing rapidity. Especially, I wanted to share with them what is happening in the larger church and within global religion. This amounts to a challenge to Presbyterians and also affirmation of freethinking that is going on there. This amounts to a celebration of  Unitarian advantage in the year ahead for the UU's, who don't always have high self-esteem among other churches and religions. I chose Diana Butler Bass’ book, Christianity after Religion: The end of church and the birth of a new spiritual awakening, as a way of approaching the subject.

There are a lot of books coming out about what is changing
in religion in the US and around the world.
[I asked the UU’s: “Have you read any books on religion or spirituality this last year?” “What have you read?” I received a big response of 20 or more books and authors, from Marcus Borg to Shirley MacLaine to Thich Nhat Hanh.]

One of the books I read this year is called Christianity after Religion.
It has been a big seller and Diana Butler Bass, the author,
is invited to dozens of churches a year to speak about her ideas.
She grew up as a Methodist and is now an Episcopalian.
I now know Diana through Facebook. [think about that:
now you can converse with the author of a book you read, on social media!]

We have known that churches are in trouble.
Now it is not just mainline Protestants.
Even the southern Baptists now report a decline.
Since 2008, megachurches aren’t so mega.

Basically, she says – Everything has changed in the church
since her early experiences 40 years ago in the ‘70's,
which covers my career in the church.
She says that now we can see that a new spiritual awakening was beginning then.
But we either didn’t see it or we misinterpreted what was going on.
There have been waves of nationalism and nativism
and religious movements that called people back to old traditions and
rear guard attacks on non-whites, women, gays, union members, and others.

But what began in the peace movement of the ‘60's has held underneath it all.
Diana sees this in the broad support for a Black president and for
willingness to move forward into a difficult future
rather than hold tight to the old ways.

A fundamental thing that has changed (that she writes about in the book)
is how Christians, Unitarians, Muslims, and Jews relate
to their churches, mosques, and synagogues, or temples.
It used to be not so long ago, that you had to believe certain things
before you could belong.
After believing the right things,
the religious institution would teach us the rituals; how to act;
how to worship and pray.
Then you could have membership and belong;

Believing, behaving, and belonging were quite rigid.
There were often strict lines between
believing what is right and believing the wrong things.
Belonging had to do with people in authority accepting you,
beyond your wanting to belong.
All these things added up to “the Christian life,” “Judaism,” “Islam.”

Now, these three things have turned upside down for most people.
People are more free and willing to choose which church they will join.
Belonging comes first.
More and more people have been looking for the spiritual side of belonging.
This has to do with finding positive relationships with others
who will help us grow.

Bass notes that Jesus did not found a church, but first formed a community.
He called disciples and did not ask what his disciples believed,
but asked them to follow him. Very basic.
Later when Jesus taught his disciples about the Kingdom,
he sent them out into the world to practice living their new vision
as if the kingdom were now.
Only later when the gospels were written,
did believing have to do with confessing that Jesus was Son of God.
Only later than that - 4th century - did believing have to do with assent
to many more propositions that obviously no one can prove.
[I say things like that to Presbyterians, too. I am prepared for discussions of systematic theology, if challenged.]

Community is still the first and most important thing about congregations.
People are building new community within and outside of old ones.
We are now at a place where the congregation that welcomes everyone
will be the one to survive and thrive.

[To the UU’s I said: Sounds like the UUA to me.
And the Uus have grown by 15% in the past decade.

In USA Today there was an article about UU growth in the south:
I thought you would like this description:
“Unitarian Universalists are a group of people who believe in organized religion
but are skeptical about doctrine.”
(Not so much organized as some others!)

Bass said about the UU in the south --
"I think there is a role for these kinds of more open and liberal spiritual groups," Bass said.
"They provide a nice counter-cultural community." (laughter)
Even up north here, that’s true.]

I think community means people need to care for each other, sometimes
even intervening in families where there is abuse and other problems.
Children are important. Anything we do for children is a great thing.
In today’s society, caring communities of the spirit need to foster
inter-generational activities.
One big learning: We can no longer live with the illusion
that we live in a closed world or system
in which our beliefs are the only true and right ones,
as if there aren’t others who think and believe differently.

[UU’s know that.]
What more can we do?
We need to learn other traditions; world religions; other practices.

Maureen Dowd, writing about the Newtown CT massacre, quoted a priest:
“I believe differently now than 30 years ago.
First, I do not expect to have all the answers,
nor do I believe that people are really looking for them.
Second, I don’t look for the hand of God to stop evil.
I don’t expect comfort to come from afar.
I really do believe that God enters the world through us....
One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community,
and God is experienced in family and community.
We need one another to be God’s presence.”
To me that is a big change, hearing words like those from a Roman Catholic priest.

Community still means talking with each other face to face.
And talking with those of other viewpoints.
We need not be shy or ashamed of thinking differently than did our parents.
And all of us need to continually find new words
to express our feelings about life, love, spirit, God; and truth.

[I suggested to the UU’s that the world is becoming more like them.
Anyone can feel at home in a UU congregation because of the sources of the UUA, which we read together:

1. Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
2. Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
3. Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
4. Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
5. Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
6. Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.]

(Note: As a trained Presbyterian, I see a lot of potential problems with #1, which is why I am skeptical of all spiritual renewals. Many Christians live in #4. I wish they would make more use of the rest -- #2, #3, #5, and #6.)