Snort Notes – May 2012

DISCO MUSIC ERA ICONS DONNA SUMMER AND ROBIN GIBB DIE WITHIN DAYS OF EACH OTHER

These two artists could not have come from backgrounds much further apart then they were. Summer’s early releases emphasized her sex kitten qualities, but she quickly graduated to a disco music diva. Gibb, with his brothers Barry and Maurice, revived their moribund Beatlesque ballad careers by storming the charts with their work from one soundtrack album. The two artists virtually shut out all other music genres from the charts between the years 1978 through 1980.

Being a fan of popular music — with a leaning towards what is now labeled classic rock — I didn’t have any use for disco music. I didn’t consider myself a great dancer; even now I’m still self conscious about what others might think of seeing me try to create some sort of alluring rhythm out of the uneven legs with which nature has saddled me. Disco music became that annoying noise blasting from the radio and record turntables seemingly 48 hours a day. 

Despite my reservations about the genre, there is no denying the talent and success which Summer and Gibb brought to our popular culture. God help me – I can now admit to liking songs such as “How Deep Is Your Love”.  I can also appreciate the feminist ideals which enabled women to work outside the home that Summer sang about in She Works Hard for the Money. Their respective passings on May 17 and May 20 will be marked with somber reflection, but also hopefully a celebration of their contributions to music.

PROPOSED LEGISLATION WOULD PUNISH THE WEALTHY WHO ESCAPE PAYING HUGE TAX BILLS BY DENOUNCING THEIR AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP

Two Senators have introduced a bill which would incur huge monetary penalties for those multi-millionaires and billionaires who leave America for more tax-safe havens in the world. The legislation is aimed at people like Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who escaped the United States to save millions on his tax bill, and got some interest from the media on the eve of Facebook’s stock sale on Wall Street.  At face value, the proposed law appears to be a knee-jerk political reaction to a problem that probably affects a small fraction of the 1%. It wouldn’t surprise me that Republicans are leading this charge into silly law writing.

Oops! I just discovered that the sponsors of the bill — Chuck Schumer and Robert Casey Jr — have a “D” after their names. Well, this changes everything—NOT!

WTF, gentlemen? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry — like job creation and improving the economic lot for all Americans — than this superfluous exercise in political point making? Really, how much of the US debt could be retired from the monetary penalties which your law would impose on these super-rich? 

REPORTS FROM DIFFERENT MEDIA QUARTERS LEAD TO ONE CONCLUSION: TEA PARTY MEMBERS ARE DUMB!

Oh, and by dumb, I don’t mean unable to speak. Tea Partiers have already demonstrated that they can be the noisiest empty-headed vessels in the political arena. By dumb, I mean see citation, “dirt, dumb as…”

Item One: Congressman Joe Walsh (R- IL) held a town hall meeting recently where a Tea Party constituent renounced Barack Obama as a “Nazi, Socialist, Communist.” The report noted that Walsh didn’t attempt to correct his constituent’s rant. In this case, the Tea Party fails political science.

Nazism, Socialism, and Communism are opposing political philosophies. They cannot exist together harmoniously within the same political boundaries, let alone the same person. No one can be all three, at least at the same time…unless of course they are schizophrenic. In which case, they might consider running for Congress. (oh snap!)

Item Two: The Sunlight Foundation, an education organization dedicated to promoting transparency in government, released a study in Congressional speech patterns since 1996. Their results: House members in the current Congress communicate at the level of high school sophomores, the lowest level of all the Congresses in the study. The group stated that ten of these Congresspeople are Republicans (no surprise here) and that all but two of them were freshmen. It is highly likely that the freshmen rode into office on the Tea Party wave.

The group offered one theory that speech patterns changed from the grand, eloquent recitations of yesteryear to messages that could be easily digested by the masses in this era of 30-second sound bites. So the question remains, and will probably be debated in academia for years to come: did we the people drag them down, or did they drag us down? 

Their report also focused on the frequency of SAT words that Congresspeople used in their speeches. Apparently, very few of the legislators used the 100 top SAT words which the report recognizes would be familiar to most high school students. Of these words, the most frequently used word was — the report noted with dry irony — compromise! This last statement deserves a few more exclamation points: !!!!!!!

The findings of this report, coupled with a Tea Party-backed winner in Indiana over incumbent Richard Lugar (who actually dared to work with the Democrats), demonstrates that the days of effective government will not return anytime soon. We might as well prepare ourselves now for more political gridlock and paralysis. After all, we elected them, so this is the way we the people must want it to be.

(Thank you for reading. RIP, Donna Summer and Robin Gibb.)