Dixie Chicks and Such

One day this summer, as I headed out to do some work at our sauna-cabin (so called because it’s basically equal parts sauna and cabin – in other words, it’s not that big), I decided to put on some music for the drive. Something besides the Mozart that my son, who had recently been borrowing the car, had left in the CD player.    

I pulled the traveling CD case from the glove-compartment and started flipping through the random selection of discs there. Finding nothing I especially wanted to listen to, I decided to try one disc that I didn’t recognize, one with no markings I could make out.    

When I slipped the CD into the player I was surprised to hear the sound of “The Dixie Chicks” come out of the speakers. I’d almost forgot I had that one.    

I can’t claim to be much of a country-music fan. I grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry and didn’t really “discover” other kinds of music until almost high school, when like most of my teenage cohort, I started listening to rock. After that, me and “country” mostly parted ways.    

I do like some artists well enough, Willie Nelson, Doc Watson, some Johnny Cash, old school country, you might say, and bluegrass, but not so much modern, “slicker-sounding” country. I wouldn’t be able to pick Garth Brooks out of a line up. A musical line up, that is.    

Still, I like many of the songs on my one Dixie Chicks CD (Top of the World Tour: Live), spunky tunes, for the most part fun, high energy. Not bad. In reality, however, I bought that CD not because of the music, but because of politics.

Amazing to think that that was 14 years ago, though in many ways it feels like it was much deeper in the past, a very different time from our own.    

The Dixie Chicks, a trio of female country singers from Texas, were at the peak of their popularity in early 2003. Six of their singles had reached number-one on the country music charts in the previous five years, soon after lead singer Natalie Maines had come on board. By the first months of 2003 they had won four Grammys and ten Country Music Association Awards.    

The first months of 2003 was, of course, also the time when the drumbeat for a new war was in full swing in the US. The world watched anxiously to see if George Bush would invade Iraq. The wisdom of such a preemptive (Iraqi had not attacked the US) action was being debated in Congress and the media, though surely not debated enough. Outside the US there was much more skepticism.    

That was the background when The Dixie Chicks took to the stage in London on March 10, 2003. When it came time to perform their current top selling song, Maines paused to say a few words first.    

The song was “Travelling Soldier”, a classic country tearjerker written by Texan Bruce Robison (never heard of him, but that’s not a surprise). It tells about an unassuming young soldier from small-town America, a soldier sent to Vietnam who did not make it back, just one of the some 58,000 Americans who suffered the same fate. (In some ways, the song reminds me of the Vietnam-era hit “Galveston” by Glenn Campbell, who succumbed to Alzheimer’s recently.)   

I guess “Traveling Soldier” took on special meaning for the band as the US was being pushed inescapably by the president toward a controversial war that would again result in the loss of US soldiers. Surely with that in mind, Maines told her London audience this:    

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”   

The Iraqi War started ten days later. To date, over 4500 Americans have died as a result, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.    

I’m not sure how Maines’ London audience reacted to her mild anti-war statement. Probably with cheers. I suspect most Brits, with the exception of Tony Blair, were not especially eager to follow the US in its quest to topple Saddam Hussein.    

The overall reaction in the States was unambiguous, however, and scalding. Many of the Chicks’ fans were outraged, especially by the criticism of President Bush. People began boycotting the band. Their songs plummeted in the charts, sponsors started to abandon them, and I doubt they have ever fully recovered from the controversy. All because they said they were “ashamed” of the US president. Ridiculous.    

I’m not sure what the opposite of a boycott is. It would be too corny to say it’s a “girlcott”, but okay maybe I just did that anyway. In any case, in order to do my bit to support the band, to boycott the boycott, as it were, I bought a Dixie Chicks CD.  

How times have changed. In today’s political climate, where public discourse has never been coarser, Maines’s ding at George Bush seems quaint by comparison. This year there have been some celebrated cases of celebrities perhaps crossing the bounds of good taste in insulting Donald Trump, sparking outraged conservatives to ask for their heads. They got Kathy Griffin’s at least. She lost her New Year’s Eve gig at CNN and suffered other repercussions after posting a photo of herself holding a fake severed head of Trump.    

Of course, outrage is often a one-way street. You didn’t see the same outrage on the right (or none, in fact) when Ted Nugent, while banishing two machines guns, inspired concert-goers with this bit of nuanced commentary:    

"Obama, he's a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch."    

No boycott. No outrage from folks worried about the sanctity of the Oval Office. In fact, Nugent got invited to the White House just three months after Trump took office.    

Isn’t that ironic? Perhaps not as ironic as America electing a president who now claims that he too shared (not really) the Dixie’s Chicks’ opposition to an unnecessary war, a huge disaster that was about to happen. 

His fake opposition didn't prevent him getting elected by many of the same people who 13 years earlier trashed the Dixie Chicks for speaking their minds and taking a genuine stand. Seems supremely unfair to me. 

The Dixie Chicks in concert, June 2003. 
(Credit: Wasted Time R)

Small Lies or Big Delusion?

Once again I’ve been astounded this past week by how fact-challenged Donald Trump is.

First up – the leaked transcript of phone calls. I agree with a lot of people (both Republican and Democrat) that leaking these kinds of presidential phone conversations is not good. But, boy, do they ever reveal some things about Trump.

In one of the calls Trump tells Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that the state of New Hampshire is a “drug-infested den” (no doubt, now the new state motto!) and for this reason Trump won the state.

To be fair to Trump, we can assume that he’s NOT saying that he was especially popular among the addicted-voter segment (though that might explain a lot). Instead, perhaps he meant that the concern over the opioid epidemic was an issue that worked in his favor – though I don’t know if that’s true, either.

The more interesting fact about Trump’s (mis)statement is that he did NOT “win” New Hampshire. Clinton did, though it was very close. You would think Trump would remember this. Someone should set the record straight with Peña Nieto so he doesn’t accidentally embarrass himself by bringing up this impressive “fact” about Trump at, for example, some cocktail party.

“Did you know,” he would say confidently, “That my good friend Donald Trump won New Hampshire?” while his better-informed companions stare into their drinks in awkward silence.

Anyway, perhaps Trump is thinking of his big GOP primary win in New Hampshire, the surprise victory that set him off on his journey to the White House. Maybe that looms so large in his mind that he confuses it with actually winning the state in the general election nine months ago.

The other thing that struck me this week is what Trump said at a campaign rally in West Virginia (a state he actually did win, bigly). Concerning the Department of Justice investigation into Russian meddling in the election, he assured a throng of cheering coal-industry supporters that “The Russia story is a total fabrication. It’s just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics.” Greatest loss in the history of American politics.

Only, it wasn’t. Trump LOST the popular vote by almost three million votes. He did win the electoral college, but only by 34 votes, the narrowest margin since George W. Bush and in no way a “great win”. (Obama won by 95 and 62 votes.)

It just goes to show that if you repeat an untruth over and over, maybe you start to believe it’s true. Seems to be working for Trump. He’s probably hoping it works for his audience too.

Ron and Betsy Work It Out

A lot of people have been claiming that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer who was offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton provided by the Russian government is a “nothing-burger” because Junior didn’t actually get any such information. He just wanted to get it, and the fact that it didn’t work out, they would say, excuses him of any possible wrongdoing.

And this is so true. One way to look at it is to imagine an everyday family situation that we can all relate to. 

Just picture a comfortable, suburban living room where...

Ron, a 40-something man, is on the sofa watching TV, when his wife Betsy walks in, holding a piece of paper. She has a concerned look on her face. 

“Ron,” she says. “I found this e-mail on your computer. Would you care to explain this?” 

Ron looks surprised. “E-mail? What e-mail?” 

“From someone named Tiffany. She’s talking about meeting you for dinner.” 

Ron looks relieved. “Oh that. That was just someone that a buddy from work told me about. Said she was, well, you know, easy.” 

“Easy?” 

“Yeah, you know, kind of loose. I thought she might be good for a fling. Maybe a one-night stand.” 

“And you had dinner with this, this Tiffany?” 

“Sure. She sounded great, so I had to check it out. Anyone would have done the same.” 

Ron notices the shocked look on Betsy’s face, mutes the sound on the TV. “But, honey, trust me, nothing happened.” 

Betsy looks at him doubtfully. Ron stands up, takes her hand, gives her a sympathetic look. 

“Sweetheart, she just wasn’t as hot as my friend said. She would have been a lousy lay. Lousy. Yuck. So, I cut the dinner short. Told her ‘No thanks’.” 

Betsy smiles, her eyes misting a little. 

“She wasn’t hot enough for you?” 

“No. And it’s too bad. Trust me, I was really looking forward to it.” He squeezes Betsy’s hand, watches her face. “So, we’re all good? 

Betsy hesitates. Ron continues, "I could have cheated on you, but I didn’t. She just wasn’t hot enough.” 

There’s a twinkle in Betsy’s eye. She leans up and gives Ron a kiss on the cheek. 

“I couldn’t ask for a better husband. I’d better go finish the dishes.” 

As she scurries away, Ron picks up the remote, gazes at the TV with a satisfied smile on his face.

So children, as any good wife like Betsy will tell you, “intention” to cheat doesn’t matter. It's just a nothing-burger. 

Japanese Characters

Something that greatly surprised me on our trip to Japan was how little knowledge of English there is the country. Now, I realize that makes me sound like the archetypal American lout expecting to be addressed in my native language wherever I go in the world. It’s easy enough to fall into that trap.

However, I did think that in Japan, which is maybe the most Western of any Asian country – they play baseball there, for goodness' sake! – English would be quite common.

Wrong. In Naha City, the capital of Okinawa, we struggled to find a restaurant with street-side menus in English. At our hotel in Tokyo, we struggled when asking the polite, but bewildered, clerk if there would be coffee available in the lobby when we left at 6:00 the next morning. He looked sympathetic, wanting so much to understand us, but remained clueless. (Okay, to be fair, we were staying at cheap hotels, maybe not often used by Western tourists, so the standards are no doubt different.)

In any case, it began to feel that the Sofia Coppola film “Lost in Translation” rings completely true.

Of course, Japan presents special challenges for English speakers. If you travel in countries that use an alphabet based on the Latin of ancient Rome (which, by my count, is about 80% of all countries) you can squint your eyes and almost make out how a word reads, no matter how foreign it may be. Or at least find it in a phrase book. Or make a comical attempt at pronouncing it to a hotel clerk.

Places like Japan are much different. Without knowledge of the language, it’s impossible to make out anything of signs, maps, menus, practically anything written in Japanese.

The only Japanese characters I had any clue about previously were 入口. I partially remember this from our trip to China some years ago, where I eventually grasped from signs in the Beijing metro that 入口 means “entrance”. Teasing out this bit of understanding was no great lift, however, since the Chinese word was accompanied with its English counterpart.

That was also the case in the Tokyo metro. Chinese characters are employed in the Japanese kanji writing system, and the word for “entrance” is written identically in both languages. It helps that these two characters are quite simple, made up of only a few lines, unlike many Japanese characters that are much more baroque. For example, the kanji for “bear” is 熊, which, if you think of the little lines at the bottom as legs, you could almost imagine as a bear. Or maybe not.

Naturally, if you know the meaning of the two characters in 入口, it all makes sense. 入 means “entering”, and 口 signifies “gate” or “mouth”, which is especially easy to visualize. Likewise, the word for “exit” 出口, is made up of 出 (“out”) 口 (“gate”).

That’s about the extent of my Japanese reading comprehension. I have no clue how “entrance” and “exit” would be pronounced in Japanese, or Chinese for that matter. Nothing to brag about really.

I did learn one additional word on this trip. We spent part of one day in the town to Takayama, which means “tall mountain”, and is written as 高山. I like the simplicity and obviousness of 山, the character for yama ("mountain"). If I ever got tattooed with a Japanese inscription, it would probably include 山.

Maybe something like 高熊山 ("tall bear mountain"?). It might be garbled Japanese in reality, but it does look impressive, doesn’t it? 

A sign in Takayama warning about bears, featuring three of the six kanji 
characters I can recognize. 

Falling Drops Earth Moves

I recently made a trip to Japan with my wife and grown kids, the first time we have been on holiday together since a trip to Paris in 2010. The “kids”, after all, are all in their twenties, and prone to go off on their own unencumbered by their parents. Traveling as a fully family affair doesn’t often happen anymore.

We were, in fact, visiting one of my sons, who is spending a year in Japan studying folk music. Needless to say, we had an amazing ten days there. We experienced many of those things you would expect to experience in Japan. But not all of them. One experience I was especially hoping for, there on the Pacific Ring of Fire, was a small earthquake. Just a small one, mind you. Just strong enough to know the weird sensation of the ground, solid earth, suddenly moving under my feet without warning. That didn’t happen. Not as I imagined, anyway.

About half through our time in Japan we left the urban whirlwind of Tokyo to see some of the countryside. We departed by bus one night at 11 o’clock to travel overnight through the rainy Japanese Alps. It was a grueling ride, the bus’s seats far too cramped to allow any real sleep. Bleary-eyed and stiff, we were finally deposited at 4:40 A.M. at our destination, the misty town of Takayama.

Temple in Takayama.

We immediately set out in the breaking daylight to explore the town, its streets wet from the overnight rain and deserted at that hour. After a couple of hours strolling through the town, passing a Buddhist temple or two along the way, we found ourselves approaching Shiroyama, a nearly 700-meter-high hill and the site of a heavily forested park surrounding the ruins of a 16^th-century castle.

At the base of Shiroyama, we paused as we crossed a stone bridge over a small pond that led to a Shinto shrine. Some of us were watching the fat carp lazily swimming under the bridge. I was checking out one of the blooming Japanese dogwood trees lining the pond. An old woman across the street was doing traditional Japanese exercises in front of her house.

Suddenly, we heard a disembodied voice. At first, I thought it emanated from a loudspeaker at the shrine, making some kind of announcement in Japanese. We quickly realized, however, that the unexpected sound came instead from my son’s and daughter's phones. My son understands Japanese well enough to explain we had just received an earthquake alert. More precisely, a warning that a quake had just occurred somewhere relatively nearby and that aftershocks could be expected.

(A side note: the alarm came automatically only to the iPhones in the family. Not to my blighted Windows phone.)

One of the paths on Shiroyama.

As it turns out, this high-tech warning was not the only indication that a quake had occurred, at least for family members observant enough to notice. As we excitedly discussed the warning, some of us remembered that just moments, literally moments, before the warning was broadcast something else occurred.

The nearby trees had all suddenly shed the rainwater hanging on their leaves. All at once. Instantly. For no apparent reason. There was no wind. The air was dead still. The water just dropped. 

Several of us had noticed the water dropping off the trees so abruptly, but hadn’t thought anything about it. I hadn’t noticed it at all. Clearly, the ground beneath our feet had moved imperceptively, enough to shake water off trees, but not enough for any of us to feel it ourselves. Rainwater dropping from dogwoods from an earthquake seems almost, well, Zen, to me.

Graveyard at the foot of Shiroyama. 
(Photo: Helena Korpelainen)

Watching TV later that evening we saw reports of damage from the quake. Broken roof tiles on a street in the town nearest the epicenter. An elderly woman showing an ornamental clock knocked off her wall. No one seriously hurt. Obviously, not a big quake. 

Googling the quake after returning to Helsinki, I learned that it was measured as a 5.2-magnitude quake according to the US Geological Survey, 5.6 according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. The epicenter was located only about 50 kilometers away from us, as a Japanese crane flies, just on the other side of Mount Ontake, the second highest volcano in Japan and the source of a deadly eruption as recently as 2014.

Of course, we didn’t know any of this as we stood in front of the Hidagokoku Shrine in Takayama and wondered at the marvel of a tectonic event that was revealed only through water falling off trees. 

A marvel that I, for one, missed completely. Maybe, that’s also Zen-like.