In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun.

On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us.

Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing.

In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren’t sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session.

After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that a man had opened fire with a handgun on the Empire State Building’s observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws for the rampage.

America’s latest adventure in easily available firearms is, of course, the massacre at Virginia Tech. As I have mentioned, my wife and daughter, who had visited Blacksburg the day before, missed this one by about 18 hours.

The world press paid close attention to this shooting for a long time. It was front-page news in just about all the newspapers of the world for four or five days. As I write this, nine days after the attack, major papers in Germany, Austria, France, and other countries are still reporting the aftermath.

The one thing the world press has emphasized, without exception, is their absolute bafflement at the U.S. gun laws–or lack thereof. We are the laughingstock of the world in this department. People from civilized countries around the world look at the apparent American fascination with guns and cluck in disapproving astonishment. The unifying theme is something like this: how can a great country such as the U.S., the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, continue to allow this to happen?

After all these years and decades, I cannot come up with an answer. The National Rifle Association seems to have our congressional legislators in a deathgrip. One mass murder happens after another, all carried out with handguns or assault rifles, and yet nothing changes.

The morning after the Virginia Tech shootings, I heard Washington Post sports reporter John Feinstein on WTWP. I wish I could find a transcript of his remarks. Essentially what he said was this: when gun owners and gun fans complain about the inconvenience or unfairness of having to register these deadly weapons, he is sick of hearing about it. Since 9/11 we have been subject to a series of ever more humiliating and inconvenient searches of our persons and property at airports. Nobody really complains, because that’s just the way the world is.

Well, the world is also selling deadly handguns on the Internet to psychotic young men, who then commit mass murder. Couldn’t we endure just a little inconvenience to combat such madness?

I am very angry now at our American stupidity. I am angry at the weak will of the majority of Americans who want stronger gun controls, yet who will not raise hell with their congressmen or senators about it. I am embarrassed to have to try to explain to my European friends and colleagues why Americans are still allowed to buy and carry handguns.

The cartoonist Pat Oliphant has captured my sense of befuddlement and rage.

Thinking back to the rah-rah spirit with which I undertook podcasting in 2005, I’m inclined to shout “Yeah!” and hold my right fist in the air, thumb and pinky finger extended in a “rock-on” posture. We’ll show them who the powerful people are in the music biz. This is the quaint world-view I held about 9-12 months ago.

Then I reflect on it, and start to wonder: just exactly who is going to be impressed by this? As I mentioned yesterday, the media landscape is already fractured by virtue of the simple reality of the marketplace. I don’t think Big Media really cares about whether Black Lab shoots to the top for one day.

“The Charts” used to mean the Hot-100 charts published in Billboard or Record World. Everybody in the radio/music biz knew about those charts.

Who knows anything at all about the iTunes Music Store charts? Did you even know there was such a thing? Does it matter?

This really seems like a mostly empty gesture. It will do two things, neither of which is necessarily bad: it will give Black Lab a goodly boost in income for a day; and it will give the Podshow club something to talk about on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code for the next three weeks.

But I don’t think it will really change the music business at all.

If you want to participate, it’ll cost you 99¢. Here’s the link:

Geezer that I am, I’ve lived through ten U.S. presidents. Every one of them, plus the two prior to my birth (FDR and Truman) spoke in front of radio and television microphones. They represented a lot of speaking styles, several different areas of the country, and a wide spectrum of political views.

In my entire life, there has never been a president who came across as a bigger babbling idiot than George W. Bush. When he speaks, he just seems to have trouble thinking up things to say. Yesterday’s press conference was no different. In the Washington Post today, Dana Milbank pointed out that W. conveyed nothing other than his own personal beliefs. Between babbling, stammering attempts to state his beliefs in the best words (using the phrase “in other words” no less than eleven times), he refused to answer any question directly.

The rest of the world has seen Bush as the personification of stupid Americans for several years now. On the German radio talk show SWR1 Leute, the Swiss cabaret artist Emil Steinberger expressed hopeful anticipation of the next American election, so that we’d get a decent president for a change.

Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code of February 13 opened with a (non-work-safe) song by Nice Peter that sums up my frustration and disgust with W. now. Put headphones on and listen to The Bush Song.

But now it seems as though they’re just one of the big boys.

They’ve sent PodcastReady a cease and desist letter instructing them to stop using the word “podcast” in their business name.

Wha?

The word podcast entered the New Oxford American Dictionary last year. It was named the “word of the year” by Oxford University Press. It’s been around for two years. It is now accepted as the word designating an independently-produced audio made available for downloading on the internet.

Now Apple says it’s their word. I guess maybe they have their reasons, but this really looks like hubris to me.

The Apple iTunes Music Store, of course, has a whole division devoted to “podcasts,” but now, apparently, it’s only okay to call them that if you are using the iTunes Music Store to find them.

Ridiculous. I may mention something about this in the podcast–uh oh, I mean independent audio production–I do later on today.

I think Apple may be surprised at the breadth of negative response about this. My own podc…independent internet audio show has several thousand listeners who are NOT podcasting geeks. However, they all use the word “podcast” to refer to these things. I heard the word used at a high school back-to-school night earlier this week, by a non-geek French teacher who plans to use them in class. “Podcast” is what they’re called. We’ve had this discussion for the past two years, and we’ve all agreed that the train pulled out of the station in the fall of 2004.

So if we don’t call them podcasts, what do we call them?

(If you’re a blogger, please blog about this. Apple pays attention to the blogosphere.)

(Bizarrely enough, the Washington Post largely ignored this moment, at least in the print edition. Dana Milbank, in his gushing review of the new press secretary, mentioned in passing, deep in the middle of his column, that Snow “risked some loaded language.” According to the Post website, this piece appeared on page A2 of the print edition, although I did not see it. A more critical piece by Dan Froomkin appeared only on washingtonpost.com, not in the print edition.)

In his very first briefing Tuesday, Snow casually used the term “hug the tar baby,” apparently to refer to refer to what might more neutrally be termed a “sticky situation.” His reference seemed to be to an old children’s story by Joel Chandler Harris, in which Brer Rabbit tricks Brer Fox into hugging a baby made out of tar, and thereby traps his nemesis the fox.

However, it is probably more commonly understood in American discourse as a racial slur, a very rude term for African Americans.

The thread of comments on ThinkProgress.org (at the time of this writing already numbering 291 comments) shows how racially charged this careless use of language is. While a lot commenters claim the whole flap is an instance of political correctness run amok, many others hear in the off-hand remarks by this occasional substitute for Rush Limbaugh an extraordinary insensitivity to the perception of this phrase.

Even if Snow was only thinking of the Brer Rabbit story, which is generally perceived nowadays to be somewhat racist on its own, he seems to have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the voice and lexicon of 21st-century America.

Race is still the big taboo of American life. This country, which was founded on a slave economy, is still trying, 142 years after our Civil War, to figure out who we are and how we should talk to each other. The Word Nerds did a show recently on Race and Language in which we tried to explore the edges of this taboo zone. In the back of our minds, Howard Chang and I know that there is a wide spectrum of possible reaction to racially charged speech, from very sensitive to very thick-skinned.

But whether you think the uproar is obviously justified or is a case of exaggerated political correctness, one would have to acknowledge that the choice of the term “tar baby” was a rather bizarre turn of phrase for Snow to use on his very first day on the job in front of the White House press corps. Whether Snow was subconsciously using the phrase as a racial slur or simply recalling the Brer Rabbit story, there is no way he should have let it pass his lips.

In our podcast, Howard Chang introduced the concept of “homophonic creep,” which is what happens when words that sound like offensive words become taboo, just because of their sound. One very well known example is a controversy in the Washingtron, DC local government in 1999 over the use of the non-offensive term niggardly.

But the Tony Snow flap this week is nothing like that. “Tar baby” is either a nasty racial slur, or else it’s a plot feature in a story that no one tells any longer because of its racial overtones. It is certainly not a phrase any educated public speaker should get away with using nowadays.

Certainly not a White House press secretary.

Dr. King was a man as important in American history as Abraham Lincoln. In the 1950s and 60s he worked bravely, tirelessly, and persuasivly to save us from ourselves. When I started school in North Carolina in 1960 the schools were racially segregated. There was not a black kid in any of my classes until I was in the fifth grade. Nowadays, government-sanctioned racial segregation is impossible to imagine in the U.S. And that is a direct reflection on Dr. King’s work to teach Americans that they should build a just society, once and for all.

So what did I do to observe this holiday? I slept late, since I didn’t have to teach school today; I did a 25-minute exercise workout with FitTV; I shopped for hardware for the new doors for my house; and I went to the movies.

Some commemoration.

I participated in no special commemoration of how far Dr. King brought this country in the thirteen active years of his career. For thirteen years–from 1955 until he was killed in 1968–he put himself in harm’s way again and again. In the 1950s black people in the southern U.S. could be arrested for using the same water fountain as white people. When folks like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and the students at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter started just saying no to this American apartheid, it began to change everything.

Yesterday I was thinking about how hollow this holiday has become for a lot of white people as I was sitting in the choir at my church.

Now, like a lot of churches in the U.S., my church has an aging membership. The church was founded in 1955, the very year Dr. King started his work on the national stage, as an overt gesture of racial integration.

The founding ideals of this church remain at the center of its philosophy, and most of its members can remember the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They can remember when the simple idea of “mixing the races” was a powerful notion, when black people as a group were completely disconnected from mainstream, middle-class (read: white) America. In 2005 this view seems quaint, but 40 years ago it was anything but.

As we celebrated MLK Day in church yesterday, we made the standard one-time shift in our musical selections: both the choir and the congregation sang “Negro spirituals” instead of the 19th- and 20th-century European-American hymns we usually sing.

The ephemerality of this one-time change has bothered me for several years now. If these songs are so worthwhile, why do we save them up for the Sunday before the third Monday in January? What point are we making by singing these songs this weekend in particular? And what does it say that practically all the people doing the singing are European-Americans from the suburbs? When we as a choir try to infuse a bit more “rhythm” into our performance, isn’t it a rather lame gesture? (In any event, it’s usually a futile effort. Our choir remains resolutely locked into square eighth notes and diatonic scales.)

I know I’m sounding like a guilty, liberal, self-criticizing curmudgeon, but for some reason, the fact that our congregation is overwhelmingly white struck me yesterday.

I always feel as though I should attend one of the official commemorations of the life of this great man–and I always blow it off and treat the day like just another free day on which I don’t have to work. And then I’m always sorry about it.

Categories: politics, religion