September 12, 2024 • 41 mins
The conversation kicks off with a heartfelt tribute to Frankie Beverly and Maze, exploring their impact on the Jazz Fest in New Orleans and the broader cultural landscape.
The discussion then shifts to the recent debate, highlighting the stark contrasts between the candidates and their approaches.
From the intricacies of race relations to the economic struggles of the middle class, Clark and Hobart navigate through various topics, including the enduring challenges of climate change. This episode is a thought-provoking exploration of the issues that shape our society today.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome, everybody. This is Rambling Through the Brambles. I'm Clark Taylor. I'm Hobart Taylor.
And we're talking about race and culture in America.
I'm a white Caucasian male, and Hobart's a black man from the north and I'm from the south.
If you're going to be redundant, I'll be redundant too.
(00:20):
I'm a black African American. Well, you know, I think we talked about this last
time, that being white is not necessarily being specifically culturally as white as I am.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.
And certainly being black does not necessarily mean that you're part of African-American
(00:41):
culture or American culture.
So it's good to sort of be more granular in terms of background,
recognizing the fact that background is only an aspect and not a determinant
of a person. Yeah, yes, indeed.
Yeah, I listened to a podcast today, Code Switch, a Code Switch episode, podcast, very good.
(01:04):
I just happened to catch one today about James Baldwin and his take on Israel.
And so once you get into those variations on all themes, that's where it gets interesting for me.
We were talking before we started to record that Frankie, today's 9-11, you know. 9-11, 24.
(01:28):
9-11, 24, yeah. Right. And Frankie Beverly died today or yesterday at 77.
And I have a fond set of memories from his group, Maze, that performed every
year at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, which is an important part of my life,
Jazz Fest for a number of years, going every year in and year out.
(01:51):
And Mays, Beverly and Mays would always close out the Congo Square stage there
at one of the days, and I would always go out.
And it's all black audience, everybody wearing white.
It was always in that last part of the day where the sun's setting,
(02:14):
that really magical time of Jazz Fest, right towards the end of the day,
when if it's right, it's cool, the breezes are coming in off the lake.
And this audience was just huge fans.
They knew every word of every song, and they'd obviously come earlier in the
(02:37):
day and set up their picnics and set up their chairs and ice chess and whatever,
and were just there to see that band play.
And so their song, Frankie Beverly and Maze's song, Joy and Pain.
Was always that wonderful, I love that song so much, it just says so much,
(02:59):
joy and pain are like sunshine and rain.
And, you know, anyway, that was always one of my favorite parts of Jazz Fest
was Frankie Beverly and Maze doing that.
Yeah, you know, he's really a similar figure and part of a black culture that
wasn't crossing over very much.
(03:20):
I mean, there are people who, maybe in the South, where there's more of a connection
between black and white culture, there's an awareness of Frankie Beverly.
But my experience is that it's my black family and friends who are big fans and aware,
and most of my white friends just sort of relegated him to that vague realm of soul,
(03:48):
which is, you know, without any distinguishing marks.
They couldn't tell Philadelphia from Detroit, you know, from Memphis.
But he had wonderful arrangements, wonderful orchestration, and really just tight arrangements.
(04:08):
Just beautiful, beautiful sound.
You know, sorry if I'm interrupting you, but it occurs to me that we started
this podcast off with the general theme of music and black hands,
black music and white hands.
And we had gone down some rabbit holes in that world.
(04:30):
And, you know, for sure, this is a rich vein of exploration is areas of white and black music.
That seem sequestered in each.
So I would just posit that there's a certain amount of country music that occupies
(04:55):
a particularly white area.
And I may be wrong in that aspect, but certainly there's an area of black music
that is, in a way, kept precious,
if that makes sense, it seems to me and like
you say understanding the difference between philadelphia and detroit
i mean no white person's gonna oh well some might you
(05:17):
know but they'd have to be fans they'd have to be aware they'd have to be educated
not educated but you know you're a musician they'd have to they'd have to know
about it musicians i don't i couldn't tell you where frankie beverly's from
the phenomenon of maze was something i just discovered by accident because i was wandering
around Jazz Fest, as I tended to do.
(05:39):
And then I came upon this performance, and the crowd is what won me over because
they knew every word of every song, and I had never heard any of this music.
So, you know, I became a fan mostly of that day,
of those times, of that opportunity to go see those performances because between
(06:02):
the audience and the band, And there was such a,
that unified experience that you just dream of as you're a performer and you
love if you're a fan. Right, right, right.
Well, speaking of rarefied world, there's the debate.
(06:26):
Okay, we're jumping right out. Okay, we'll have to go back to the maze conversation.
Conversation, which, you know, but yeah, nice segue, Hobart.
Well, joy and pain, sunshine and rain.
And I think we saw joy and pain happening last night on the debate stage in Philadelphia.
(06:52):
Certainly one candidate was
espousing joy and one candidate was clearly espousing barbecued Pekingese.
Oh my gosh. Guys, I'm just – we spent the whole prior,
heck, month or so, his surrogates and the people the hangers on and the people
(07:18):
who think they can suggest something to him from Sean Hannity on down and that
he'll follow somehow their suggestions.
And they all keep saying, just talk about policy, sir, and not about personal issues.
And he can't do that. It's apparent to everybody that doesn't—the idea that
(07:40):
they're going to say, if only Trump would do this, if only Trump would do that,
it's not going to happen.
He doesn't have the mental acuity to do it.
But the best part for me is that he's like a 10-year-old who will tell a lie
and will double down on it and will try and expand on it and work it to death.
(08:05):
So whether it was the eating of pets or whether it was Abdul,
the head of the Taliban, I don't know if you know this. Yeah.
There is no such person. Thing after thing. No, there's no such person.
Here's a picture of your house. Yeah. He just makes up things as fast as he can.
(08:33):
He lets his brain take over his mouth.
There's nothing going on. It's rattling around.
And he finishes sentences with, I forget what the end of the sentence is about
the pets, But he says they're eating.
They're taking the pets of people who live there, you know, sort of like these
non sequitur sentences.
(08:55):
And bless her heart, Kamala Harris had the blew me away.
I have to say it's easy now to say, oh, well, she just outclassed him or out
done him or whatever. There was no expectation of that prior to the beginning of that.
I had no real confidence that she would be able to carry it off as well as she did.
(09:22):
So she impressed me thoroughly. Well, you know, I mean, the key is everybody's
saying, we're just repeating what we've heard, but I think it's true.
She suckered him in. All she had to do was just say the words crowd size.
And he's off on a tangent.
And anything that she can say, if there is another debate and they try their
(09:48):
hardest to rein him in, I am sure that he'll just go with his instinct.
And his instinct is just to say whatever floats past that little area of the brain,
(10:08):
the head, that tickles him.
He likes to present himself, and his followers like to see him as some kind
of street fighter or tough guy or the guy who fights or whatever.
And this is an absurdity. there's nothing in
his life that would lead you to believe that he's a
(10:28):
a boy he was a brought up in extreme privilege when he was 18 years old he was
getting 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year literally paid to him by his father
to own him because i'm sure the father decided he would the best way to own
have children love you is to pay him a lot of money and so he.
(10:48):
He might be an asshole. He might have learned how to be a complete and utter
heartless son of a bitch.
But at no point was he ever asked to street fight.
That's why he liked having Roy Cohn around, because people like that would go
in and do his dirty work for him.
And that's where he finds himself.
(11:09):
So he's not a scrapper. He let her get under his skin just like a bad fighter
would allow an opponent to get them to swing wildly so they could land more punches.
He was a simpleton in that regard. Well, but you know, we have to acknowledge
(11:32):
the fact that somehow he's gotten this far.
And so there must be something that's appealing. And I think it's this sort of, it's comedic time.
It's like the ability to sort of watch and just be enamored of his rhythms.
(11:57):
And he just he was
I think off he's better when he's
by himself and has these extended riffs
but when he has to go back and forth in conversation he doesn't have the wherewithal
either to follow a straight line of thought and engage in dialogue or and he doesn't have the
(12:26):
extended airtime to sort of
build his momentum and build his sort of presence, his style, his slump.
And one line is, last night, really landed flat, you know, something about getting shot.
I got shot. You know, I got shot in the head.
Yeah. Anybody else says, I got shot in the head after an assassination attempt,
(12:50):
that would be, you know, bring the conversation to a dead halt.
And people would think about it, you know, think about it and have some sort
of sympathetic reaction.
Whatever. And it's just like, it's just like. And no one's been ever able to
see the wound, the bullet left.
They've looked at it. They do close-ups. He's got just as much ear now as he did before.
(13:14):
So where the blood came from is this Benvis Bizarro kind of trying to figure
out where did he actually get and what actually happened.
And I give him the assassination attempt. I will always say,
though, that it was way better for the Democrats that he stayed alive than the Republicans.
Ultimately, history will say
(13:37):
that had he died, the Republicans would have absolutely won the election.
The Democrats would have had no place to stand because they would have been
seen as conspiratorial assassins.
And Tom Cotton would be the president. And, you know, well, betide that reality,
especially since he would say, well, the Democrats obviously killed,
(13:59):
you know, literally weaponized the Justice Department to assassinate the president.
So they won't be doing anything anymore.
And, you know, it's very possible that the populace would agree, you know, with that.
Where are we now? Where are we now? Okay. Okay.
What happens if this has no effect? What does that say about it?
(14:23):
When we talk about the electorate, we're not talking about the majority of the
people, because we're not talking about the popular vote. We're talking about the electoral college.
So given the fact that there's an inordinate amount of power in the seven or
eight states that matter this year, even in those states, why do you think it's so close?
(14:47):
The the entrenched you referred to it a minute ago, the entrenched base who
see who doesn't see what's in front of their face and or or or what they see is not what we see.
So we see a bloviating idiot who is who's an accidental,
you know, some kind of Peter Sellers character who accidentally ended up being
(15:10):
coming president United States and is trying to hang on to that power because
it's so seductive. Right.
It's so the people around him didn't ever expect it to be in those positions of power.
And as soon as they get there, they all of a sudden realize that there's no
nothing to stop them from doing what it is they need to do.
That's a very seductive reality for both sides.
(15:31):
And so it's close because of the – I'm just throwing this out there,
but I think it's close because the people who will lose power if he loses are
going to fight to the very end to maintain this.
I mean, there's people that know that if Trump gets elected, they won't go to jail.
(15:56):
Potentially, or they'll get freed from jail. And that's a bit pejorative about
the people who like Trump. There's tons of money.
And as I say, a lot, a lot of people in very well-crafted Republican states.
So North Carolina, for instance, I just finished this book by Chemerinsky.
(16:16):
I think we talked about it before.
And this just came out. And he talks about the idea that in North Carolina,
And this is just one example of many.
In North Carolina, 47% of the electorate. Let's do the book title.
No Democracy Lives Forever. Right.
(16:37):
Is that right? Is that the name? I just said it, brought it back to the library.
It's a short book. It's a great read. It's brilliant.
And we'll get into the secessionary reality that Chemerinsky elucidated.
It's a topic for a future show. Yeah, but just because I think we did talk about
this, but his one factoid was that in North Carolina,
(17:01):
you have 47 percent of the electorate
is Democrat and 10 out of the 13 congresspeople are Republicans.
Republicans they've crafted their and gerrymandered their state to such a degree
in such a really smart politically adept way that the population is not represented
(17:21):
politically at least by people,
according to just basic percentages of of voters and it's obviously been carved
out and so you have this in state after state after state and so in a place
like North Carolina where you have this
pretty outstanding Democratic governor.
(17:42):
I'm expecting North Carolina to flip if it hasn't. I know it went for Biden.
So I think you're saying what's going to happen.
I think that the Electoral College might actually run into some issues like.
This is what I'm hoping for. What do I think is going to happen?
What I'm hoping for is that there's a turnaround
(18:04):
in the electorate led by women and
young people who really drive the vote
to such an extent that there's no path through Michigan or whatever they're
hoping for with these tiny little fractions of the voting public used for electoral
(18:25):
college victory. Because obviously, that's the only way you can win.
Can't win the popular vote. I think bringing it down even more,
it's a question of, and this is a group I can't figure out, Republican women,
women who have voted for Trump in the past.
(18:45):
You know, I mean,
it's very clear in terms of critical
issues that Trump and Vance are not all sympathetic to women in positions of
power or engaging in serious conversation with women.
(19:13):
And I think it can even point to Trump's advisers and cabinet where there were
no women anywhere within reach.
I guess the only woman in the cabinet was Mitch McConnell's wife,
(19:37):
Elaine Chao, and she wasn't in the inner circle.
And I'm just curious as to whether or not, you know,
there'll come a point where they'll say,
you know, we've been loyal and we've bitten our tongues and held our noses, but no more.
(20:04):
Yeah, that is a strange cohort, women who still continue to support him.
And there's a whole, if you watch Fox News at all, and I watch it more than
probably is healthy, but it's
a way of kind of watching the other side and seeing what happened there.
They're loaded with these tightly dressed women with the hairdos.
(20:30):
And they are, you know, brutal in their stances.
And maybe it's just that they're ordered, they're just taking orders,
as it seems like they all are on Fox News from Rupert Murdoch.
In other words, to hold the line, whatever that line is that they're holding.
(20:53):
In other words, no critical thinking
is allowed, no questioning that the other side might have a point.
It's all battle.
It's all battle all the time.
I think of women in my life that I know will vote for Trump,
have voted for Trump, will vote for Trump.
(21:14):
And there's just a certain amount of, damn the torpedoes is not the right word,
but it's a recalcitrant.
It's an entrenched mindset that might have roots in racism.
It could have roots in concern for their white,
(21:38):
significant others who bemoan the status of the older power structure starting
to crumble here and there and lose its footing,
or at least perceived to be losing its place in America.
And so there could be as simple as that, you know, stand by your man kind of thing.
(22:03):
I know we're supposed to kind of find our way towards the racial attitude differences.
And I'm sure that's a fair amount of it is there.
But I try not to read too much into it. I'd rather, you know,
I think we can go there for sure.
(22:23):
And and but you
know harris is doing the she was so obama-esque
last night it was very very obama there were moments when she especially when
she's doing the takedowns of trump and and making fun of him to goad him into
losing his cool right out of obama's playbook i mean just You could hear the
(22:48):
intonations and everything.
And so both of them were very good at not being black.
If that makes sense, in my opinion. In other words, just saying, hey, I'm a politician.
I'm a leader. Well, the same thing that I said earlier on, which is where Trump
(23:12):
shows the depth of his racism.
To acknowledge that being black or African American culture is an aspect of a person.
It is not the definition of a person.
And so when he talks about Harris being black or South Asian or whatever,
(23:33):
he is defining the person by their race and all of the associations they go
with, rather than saying that this person has these influences that help make them up.
And the skill of Obama and the skill of John Kennedy and the skill of Harris's,
(23:57):
whether it's Kennedy's Catholicism and Irish heritage or whatever,
all of those things were relegated to the side because Kennedy was so much more
Kennedy than he was a member of any group.
And that's truly the case of Harris.
(24:17):
Harris tried to justify himself. mostly as a middle-class person.
That was Lena. If there was an aspect of herself that she wanted to make a part
of her perceived identity,
it was that of being a middle-class person.
(24:39):
Whatever that means. And middle class is the holy grail of American culture.
Rich people want to be middle class. They all deny the fact,
unless they're extraordinarily super rich, they all deny the fact that they're
upper middle class at best.
(25:00):
They try to hold on to that notion.
And certainly poor people don't see themselves as poor, don't want to see themselves as poor.
They want to see themselves as middle class, aspiring middle class,
you know, getting up there.
If you're going to stop there, you're going to walk through any small southern
(25:21):
town and see the guy out there working two jobs,
one at the changing tires and then a night shift at McDonald's,
and you ask him what he is, he'd tell you he's middle class.
You know yeah yeah he's busting
(25:42):
his ass to be middle class yeah yeah
right and then the authentic middle class
you know in some ways doesn't even exist anymore
you know as you're as you're pointing out like it's stretched
so you've got the got a certain number
of people who are you know have
lots of money and but see themselves as middle class
(26:04):
as you say and then and then
people on the the lower end and then in the middle you kind of
uh and you know and both groups have
a point which is i think this is maybe her strongest argument
when she talks about providing small businesses with with 50 grand tax breaks
to help them get going that's a big deal and and and acknowledging the fact
(26:29):
that you know your family can can have an income of a couple hundred thousand a year, but.
Running their small business, but they have a mountain to get,
and they've got to get their kids through college, and by the time you look
at all the rest of their struggle, on paper,
they're upper middle class, going into quote-unquote wealth, but in reality,
(26:54):
they're dancing as fast as they can.
I've been there, done that. I spent about six or seven years,
well, as soon as I got divorced,
I mean, my whole life turned into this kind of, it was just a hamster wheel
of just trying to crank out enough money,
create enough money in the world that I could see my kids and rent out an apartment
(27:14):
and buy some food and using credit cards to do all that.
And eventually it was, you know, I couldn't even afford taxes because they want that from you.
And so you get in this part where I was just, Trust, the $50,000,
I'd be like a perfect candidate.
I'd have been a perfect candidate for that kind of thing.
(27:35):
And what that does is that just provides you more debt.
Right. That's all that's going to do.
It sounds fun that she's going to give you $50,000, but nobody's giving you $50,000.
They're just going to make it cheaper.
And so I'm interested in that regard, and this is a whole other world to talk
(27:59):
about, but I'd be interested to see what industries rise up.
If she gets elected and they institute a $50,000 tax break for middle-class
business owners, entrepreneurs, the industry is going to be created out of that.
So to me, it's going to be something akin to what happened to the universities
(28:20):
when they said, we're going to go ahead and loan people money to go to college
at low interest rates, except you got to pay it off eventually, right?
To guarantee it for the banks who are really looking for this windfall of money
from suckers who are going to start small businesses and get that $50,000 in debt.
And as you say, just get on a bigger hamster wheel is all they're going to do,
(28:43):
a faster-moving hamster wheel. Because I did that. I lived that life.
That's exactly what it is. Yeah, we're Trumpists ourselves, right?
Because we just follow one tangent after another. But it's true.
The whole college debt thing was a real bait and switch.
(29:04):
When they started talking about college loans,
it was a conspiracy on the part of universities seeking to find ways to cover
costs by upping tuition,
setting up a loan structure that would provide a new source of revenue for the banks.
(29:27):
And then ostensibly create a larger middle class or upper middle class. And in point of fact,
When it came time to divide the pie,
which was supposed to be a fair deal for everybody, a fair shake for everybody,
(29:47):
the consumers, the people who were taking on this college debt,
didn't have the ability to advocate for themselves in Congress.
They didn't have the ability to make changes in the law to make sure that they were not abused. used.
And any time you set up a system where, you know, there's a three-way deal where
(30:13):
you have the universities, which aren't going to lower their costs,
the banks, which aren't going to, you know, change their lending policies.
You just got the consumer, the students, you know, caught in the vies.
Yeah, yeah. I went back to school.
I mean, part of my life, I went back to school in my 50s to get my master's degree to finish out.
(30:37):
I had to finish a bachelor's and then got a master's in my 50s,
which I love, and I wouldn't trade it, but we borrowed money.
I borrowed money to pay for the rent and pay for the kids' food,
et cetera, and lived beyond our means, which is what also happens in everybody's lives.
And it's because, I would argue from a certain perspective, kind of what you're
(31:02):
talking about is that what this all system does is it maintains the high cost of living. Yeah.
It allows the, it allows the landlords to make more money than they did for
makes a university's the cost of a college education.
I think it went up 800% in, in less than a decade, something insane like the,
(31:24):
the inflationary effect of it was just obviously a, a.
Yeah, and the Republicans like it because they're helping their contributors,
the businesses, and the Democrats like it because it looks like they're providing
social services and providing opportunity when they cut the deal.
(31:46):
So, yeah, I think it is fair to be concerned that we may get another bait and
switch with Harris' proposal.
But certainly anything that Trump would come up with would be even worse.
Sure, sure. It would be the same thing. It's everything to keep the banks afloat.
(32:09):
And that was the whole $2 trillion they shoved into the economy when the COVID
shut down, which itself was insane.
The COVID shutdown was an insanity.
I do agree with that. I do believe that ultimately it was just a bad policy all the way around.
It was just a giant panic that didn't help anybody.
(32:29):
We might have a lot more debt.
It's an economic thing. And if you're not the debt person, you care a little bit less.
If you're at risk, you think we did fine.
My comedian's take on it, of course, is that there was there's something went
(32:49):
wrong with the whole thing because we let for some reason the people we saved
first were the crazy old people.
You know, we let the kids go home from school and hang and not get educated
or socialize. And the little guys and we we sequestered them in the house.
(33:11):
They got laughed. last. They got the jab at last.
The first people we saved were the least valuable members of society.
There's something biologically, that's just basic nature going,
wait a minute, okay, let's just rethink.
First on the ice floor. Like the aftermarket. Yes!
(33:33):
I'm sorry. I remember Little Big Man.
I'll never forget Little Big Man and the noble savage Savage can't travel with
the group anymore, so they put him on a –.
A funeral thing and they just leave him, you know? And I think in there a point
(33:53):
in the movie where, where little big man goes to talk to him,
he's just laying there dying, waiting to die because he can't travel with the
tribe and they have a conversation.
Hey, how you doing? I'm doing still.
I'm still alive, you know, laying there.
But anyway, I, a serious part of that, the serious part of that comedic take
(34:15):
on it is that there's just a, There's just a misunderstanding of natural reality, you know.
Yeah, this is another topic for another show, but I will argue that we didn't
know at the time what was going to happen.
And it's better to be safe than sorry, you know, because you could say it's
(34:40):
like a bad flu, or you could say it's like the Black Flag.
And if it's the Black Plague, if it turned out to be the Black Plague,
which killed a third of the population of Europe, and we had the opportunity
to prevent something like that, then we probably, you know, would be remiss
if we didn't make an effort.
Well i yeah i think what happened was
(35:02):
somebody said a virus uh a lab
created virus has jumped out of the lab and it's
hot zone you ever read the book hot zone i strongly recommended
recommend the book hot zone it was written in the 1980s and it's a true story
and it will send chills down your spine of some monkeys that had ebola and they
(35:24):
got out of they got out in in the Virginia woods and it is harrowing when they're
trying to catch up with this,
with these monkeys that were released in anyway, hot zone.
So I got to panic, but anyway, we've kind of rambled.
We've rambled pretty far. So let's move on around. Frankie, Beverly, and Mays.
(35:47):
There's a callback. When he was popular, that's when we started talking about
climate change and when the environmental movement, you know,
that's all a part of that time.
And here we are 50 years later, and we're still moving a lot more slowly.
(36:07):
To face this danger than anybody said we needed to be.
Anyone who's been through this summer, and anyone who's noticed how the general
temperature of the world and the ocean has continued to increase year after year,
has to wonder if this election could have a much deeper long-range significance
(36:34):
than was acknowledged or discussed in the debate.
The topic got only cursorily mentioned, and yet it may be the biggest existential
question of our lifetime.
It certainly is. And I will throw my bona fides into the mix there.
(36:55):
I actually worked on an environmental documentary called Deep Green,
which is out there, and I worked on that for a couple of years.
And it was released in 2012 with all the attendant. We interviewed people.
We shot film all over the world between 2008 and 2010 and interviewed everybody
(37:18):
from Michael Pollan to Thomas Lovejoy.
And I could sit here and write down a whole list of the people that we interviewed
and talked to about this.
After that experience, I was going to write a book called Why We're Fucked.
This was because of ego. It's human ego.
We cannot imagine the idea that God is going to take away our wonderful little
(37:41):
home no matter how much we shit on it.
And that is absolutely true. I helped try to pass the Big Green,
I don't know if you remember this, the Big Green Initiative in California, 1993.
And it was a pretty simple, broad Broad take on the coming...
(38:02):
This is 20 years after Earth Day, right?
20 years into it, 1993, a common-sense effort by the state of California to
start moving towards a green future with all its attendant,
the vast amount of wealth available to be earned in this pursuit.
(38:23):
And it failed abysmally.
And so...
The way I see it is that there's nothing you can do about it.
There's nothing you can do about it. You want a cynic on this, you got one here.
It is. Go look.
(38:44):
We could go ahead and let Trump do what he's going to do. Yeah.
Nature is going to win this battle.
We will lose to nature just like every other species has on the planet. it.
And if we don't, we will hopefully survive this round of foolishness because
we're really the only, you know,
(39:05):
I like to say that nature is trying to kill us off as soon as it can.
And it started, it gave a good early salvo with the Zika virus.
It said, okay, let's see if, what if I make them have cone heads and be really
stupid, you know, just devolve this whole group of primates that are doing so much damage.
But there's plenty of hope. There's plenty of possibility.
(39:29):
We'll do the best we can. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better,
if at all. It's going to change our lives.
And so, really, it's just about accommodating yourself to the new reality and
these tipping points that are happening all the time, the loss of species,
et cetera. You know, this is a funny time, isn't it?
(39:50):
We're looking at an incredible devolution, the evolution.
At the same time, the James Webb Space Telescope is out expanding our knowledge
of the universe exponentially.
Just in time for us to go, oh, look how wonderful it is.
(40:11):
Oh, shit. All right, well, I think let's take a hiatus here,
take a break here, and pick it up on the next show. All right.
Well, this is. This has been rambling through the burning brambles.
Let's just hope there's brambles to ramble through next time we get together.
(40:34):
Absolutely. Moses, Moses, Moses, Moses.
Okay. All right, bud. This is Hobart Taylor. I'm Clark Taylor.
See you next time. Bye-bye.
Music.
Welcome, everybody. This is Rambling Through the Brambles. I'm Clark Taylor. I'm Hobart Taylor.
And we're talking about race and culture in America.
I'm a white Caucasian male, and Hobart's a black man from the north and I'm from the south.
If you're going to be redundant, I'll be redundant too.
(00:20):
I'm a black African American. Well, you know, I think we talked about this last
time, that being white is not necessarily being specifically culturally as white as I am.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.
And certainly being black does not necessarily mean that you're part of African-American
(00:41):
culture or American culture.
So it's good to sort of be more granular in terms of background,
recognizing the fact that background is only an aspect and not a determinant
of a person. Yeah, yes, indeed.
Yeah, I listened to a podcast today, Code Switch, a Code Switch episode, podcast, very good.
(01:04):
I just happened to catch one today about James Baldwin and his take on Israel.
And so once you get into those variations on all themes, that's where it gets interesting for me.
We were talking before we started to record that Frankie, today's 9-11, you know. 9-11, 24.
(01:28):
9-11, 24, yeah. Right. And Frankie Beverly died today or yesterday at 77.
And I have a fond set of memories from his group, Maze, that performed every
year at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, which is an important part of my life,
Jazz Fest for a number of years, going every year in and year out.
(01:51):
And Mays, Beverly and Mays would always close out the Congo Square stage there
at one of the days, and I would always go out.
And it's all black audience, everybody wearing white.
It was always in that last part of the day where the sun's setting,
(02:14):
that really magical time of Jazz Fest, right towards the end of the day,
when if it's right, it's cool, the breezes are coming in off the lake.
And this audience was just huge fans.
They knew every word of every song, and they'd obviously come earlier in the
(02:37):
day and set up their picnics and set up their chairs and ice chess and whatever,
and were just there to see that band play.
And so their song, Frankie Beverly and Maze's song, Joy and Pain.
Was always that wonderful, I love that song so much, it just says so much,
(02:59):
joy and pain are like sunshine and rain.
And, you know, anyway, that was always one of my favorite parts of Jazz Fest
was Frankie Beverly and Maze doing that.
Yeah, you know, he's really a similar figure and part of a black culture that
wasn't crossing over very much.
(03:20):
I mean, there are people who, maybe in the South, where there's more of a connection
between black and white culture, there's an awareness of Frankie Beverly.
But my experience is that it's my black family and friends who are big fans and aware,
and most of my white friends just sort of relegated him to that vague realm of soul,
(03:48):
which is, you know, without any distinguishing marks.
They couldn't tell Philadelphia from Detroit, you know, from Memphis.
But he had wonderful arrangements, wonderful orchestration, and really just tight arrangements.
(04:08):
Just beautiful, beautiful sound.
You know, sorry if I'm interrupting you, but it occurs to me that we started
this podcast off with the general theme of music and black hands,
black music and white hands.
And we had gone down some rabbit holes in that world.
(04:30):
And, you know, for sure, this is a rich vein of exploration is areas of white and black music.
That seem sequestered in each.
So I would just posit that there's a certain amount of country music that occupies
(04:55):
a particularly white area.
And I may be wrong in that aspect, but certainly there's an area of black music
that is, in a way, kept precious,
if that makes sense, it seems to me and like
you say understanding the difference between philadelphia and detroit
i mean no white person's gonna oh well some might you
(05:17):
know but they'd have to be fans they'd have to be aware they'd have to be educated
not educated but you know you're a musician they'd have to they'd have to know
about it musicians i don't i couldn't tell you where frankie beverly's from
the phenomenon of maze was something i just discovered by accident because i was wandering
around Jazz Fest, as I tended to do.
(05:39):
And then I came upon this performance, and the crowd is what won me over because
they knew every word of every song, and I had never heard any of this music.
So, you know, I became a fan mostly of that day,
of those times, of that opportunity to go see those performances because between
(06:02):
the audience and the band, And there was such a,
that unified experience that you just dream of as you're a performer and you
love if you're a fan. Right, right, right.
Well, speaking of rarefied world, there's the debate.
(06:26):
Okay, we're jumping right out. Okay, we'll have to go back to the maze conversation.
Conversation, which, you know, but yeah, nice segue, Hobart.
Well, joy and pain, sunshine and rain.
And I think we saw joy and pain happening last night on the debate stage in Philadelphia.
(06:52):
Certainly one candidate was
espousing joy and one candidate was clearly espousing barbecued Pekingese.
Oh my gosh. Guys, I'm just – we spent the whole prior,
heck, month or so, his surrogates and the people the hangers on and the people
(07:18):
who think they can suggest something to him from Sean Hannity on down and that
he'll follow somehow their suggestions.
And they all keep saying, just talk about policy, sir, and not about personal issues.
And he can't do that. It's apparent to everybody that doesn't—the idea that
(07:40):
they're going to say, if only Trump would do this, if only Trump would do that,
it's not going to happen.
He doesn't have the mental acuity to do it.
But the best part for me is that he's like a 10-year-old who will tell a lie
and will double down on it and will try and expand on it and work it to death.
(08:05):
So whether it was the eating of pets or whether it was Abdul,
the head of the Taliban, I don't know if you know this. Yeah.
There is no such person. Thing after thing. No, there's no such person.
Here's a picture of your house. Yeah. He just makes up things as fast as he can.
(08:33):
He lets his brain take over his mouth.
There's nothing going on. It's rattling around.
And he finishes sentences with, I forget what the end of the sentence is about
the pets, But he says they're eating.
They're taking the pets of people who live there, you know, sort of like these
non sequitur sentences.
(08:55):
And bless her heart, Kamala Harris had the blew me away.
I have to say it's easy now to say, oh, well, she just outclassed him or out
done him or whatever. There was no expectation of that prior to the beginning of that.
I had no real confidence that she would be able to carry it off as well as she did.
(09:22):
So she impressed me thoroughly. Well, you know, I mean, the key is everybody's
saying, we're just repeating what we've heard, but I think it's true.
She suckered him in. All she had to do was just say the words crowd size.
And he's off on a tangent.
And anything that she can say, if there is another debate and they try their
(09:48):
hardest to rein him in, I am sure that he'll just go with his instinct.
And his instinct is just to say whatever floats past that little area of the brain,
(10:08):
the head, that tickles him.
He likes to present himself, and his followers like to see him as some kind
of street fighter or tough guy or the guy who fights or whatever.
And this is an absurdity. there's nothing in
his life that would lead you to believe that he's a
(10:28):
a boy he was a brought up in extreme privilege when he was 18 years old he was
getting 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year literally paid to him by his father
to own him because i'm sure the father decided he would the best way to own
have children love you is to pay him a lot of money and so he.
(10:48):
He might be an asshole. He might have learned how to be a complete and utter
heartless son of a bitch.
But at no point was he ever asked to street fight.
That's why he liked having Roy Cohn around, because people like that would go
in and do his dirty work for him.
And that's where he finds himself.
(11:09):
So he's not a scrapper. He let her get under his skin just like a bad fighter
would allow an opponent to get them to swing wildly so they could land more punches.
He was a simpleton in that regard. Well, but you know, we have to acknowledge
(11:32):
the fact that somehow he's gotten this far.
And so there must be something that's appealing. And I think it's this sort of, it's comedic time.
It's like the ability to sort of watch and just be enamored of his rhythms.
(11:57):
And he just he was
I think off he's better when he's
by himself and has these extended riffs
but when he has to go back and forth in conversation he doesn't have the wherewithal
either to follow a straight line of thought and engage in dialogue or and he doesn't have the
(12:26):
extended airtime to sort of
build his momentum and build his sort of presence, his style, his slump.
And one line is, last night, really landed flat, you know, something about getting shot.
I got shot. You know, I got shot in the head.
Yeah. Anybody else says, I got shot in the head after an assassination attempt,
(12:50):
that would be, you know, bring the conversation to a dead halt.
And people would think about it, you know, think about it and have some sort
of sympathetic reaction.
Whatever. And it's just like, it's just like. And no one's been ever able to
see the wound, the bullet left.
They've looked at it. They do close-ups. He's got just as much ear now as he did before.
(13:14):
So where the blood came from is this Benvis Bizarro kind of trying to figure
out where did he actually get and what actually happened.
And I give him the assassination attempt. I will always say,
though, that it was way better for the Democrats that he stayed alive than the Republicans.
Ultimately, history will say
(13:37):
that had he died, the Republicans would have absolutely won the election.
The Democrats would have had no place to stand because they would have been
seen as conspiratorial assassins.
And Tom Cotton would be the president. And, you know, well, betide that reality,
especially since he would say, well, the Democrats obviously killed,
(13:59):
you know, literally weaponized the Justice Department to assassinate the president.
So they won't be doing anything anymore.
And, you know, it's very possible that the populace would agree, you know, with that.
Where are we now? Where are we now? Okay. Okay.
What happens if this has no effect? What does that say about it?
(14:23):
When we talk about the electorate, we're not talking about the majority of the
people, because we're not talking about the popular vote. We're talking about the electoral college.
So given the fact that there's an inordinate amount of power in the seven or
eight states that matter this year, even in those states, why do you think it's so close?
(14:47):
The the entrenched you referred to it a minute ago, the entrenched base who
see who doesn't see what's in front of their face and or or or what they see is not what we see.
So we see a bloviating idiot who is who's an accidental,
you know, some kind of Peter Sellers character who accidentally ended up being
(15:10):
coming president United States and is trying to hang on to that power because
it's so seductive. Right.
It's so the people around him didn't ever expect it to be in those positions of power.
And as soon as they get there, they all of a sudden realize that there's no
nothing to stop them from doing what it is they need to do.
That's a very seductive reality for both sides.
(15:31):
And so it's close because of the – I'm just throwing this out there,
but I think it's close because the people who will lose power if he loses are
going to fight to the very end to maintain this.
I mean, there's people that know that if Trump gets elected, they won't go to jail.
(15:56):
Potentially, or they'll get freed from jail. And that's a bit pejorative about
the people who like Trump. There's tons of money.
And as I say, a lot, a lot of people in very well-crafted Republican states.
So North Carolina, for instance, I just finished this book by Chemerinsky.
(16:16):
I think we talked about it before.
And this just came out. And he talks about the idea that in North Carolina,
And this is just one example of many.
In North Carolina, 47% of the electorate. Let's do the book title.
No Democracy Lives Forever. Right.
(16:37):
Is that right? Is that the name? I just said it, brought it back to the library.
It's a short book. It's a great read. It's brilliant.
And we'll get into the secessionary reality that Chemerinsky elucidated.
It's a topic for a future show. Yeah, but just because I think we did talk about
this, but his one factoid was that in North Carolina,
(17:01):
you have 47 percent of the electorate
is Democrat and 10 out of the 13 congresspeople are Republicans.
Republicans they've crafted their and gerrymandered their state to such a degree
in such a really smart politically adept way that the population is not represented
(17:21):
politically at least by people,
according to just basic percentages of of voters and it's obviously been carved
out and so you have this in state after state after state and so in a place
like North Carolina where you have this
pretty outstanding Democratic governor.
(17:42):
I'm expecting North Carolina to flip if it hasn't. I know it went for Biden.
So I think you're saying what's going to happen.
I think that the Electoral College might actually run into some issues like.
This is what I'm hoping for. What do I think is going to happen?
What I'm hoping for is that there's a turnaround
(18:04):
in the electorate led by women and
young people who really drive the vote
to such an extent that there's no path through Michigan or whatever they're
hoping for with these tiny little fractions of the voting public used for electoral
(18:25):
college victory. Because obviously, that's the only way you can win.
Can't win the popular vote. I think bringing it down even more,
it's a question of, and this is a group I can't figure out, Republican women,
women who have voted for Trump in the past.
(18:45):
You know, I mean,
it's very clear in terms of critical
issues that Trump and Vance are not all sympathetic to women in positions of
power or engaging in serious conversation with women.
(19:13):
And I think it can even point to Trump's advisers and cabinet where there were
no women anywhere within reach.
I guess the only woman in the cabinet was Mitch McConnell's wife,
(19:37):
Elaine Chao, and she wasn't in the inner circle.
And I'm just curious as to whether or not, you know,
there'll come a point where they'll say,
you know, we've been loyal and we've bitten our tongues and held our noses, but no more.
(20:04):
Yeah, that is a strange cohort, women who still continue to support him.
And there's a whole, if you watch Fox News at all, and I watch it more than
probably is healthy, but it's
a way of kind of watching the other side and seeing what happened there.
They're loaded with these tightly dressed women with the hairdos.
(20:30):
And they are, you know, brutal in their stances.
And maybe it's just that they're ordered, they're just taking orders,
as it seems like they all are on Fox News from Rupert Murdoch.
In other words, to hold the line, whatever that line is that they're holding.
(20:53):
In other words, no critical thinking
is allowed, no questioning that the other side might have a point.
It's all battle.
It's all battle all the time.
I think of women in my life that I know will vote for Trump,
have voted for Trump, will vote for Trump.
(21:14):
And there's just a certain amount of, damn the torpedoes is not the right word,
but it's a recalcitrant.
It's an entrenched mindset that might have roots in racism.
It could have roots in concern for their white,
(21:38):
significant others who bemoan the status of the older power structure starting
to crumble here and there and lose its footing,
or at least perceived to be losing its place in America.
And so there could be as simple as that, you know, stand by your man kind of thing.
(22:03):
I know we're supposed to kind of find our way towards the racial attitude differences.
And I'm sure that's a fair amount of it is there.
But I try not to read too much into it. I'd rather, you know,
I think we can go there for sure.
(22:23):
And and but you
know harris is doing the she was so obama-esque
last night it was very very obama there were moments when she especially when
she's doing the takedowns of trump and and making fun of him to goad him into
losing his cool right out of obama's playbook i mean just You could hear the
(22:48):
intonations and everything.
And so both of them were very good at not being black.
If that makes sense, in my opinion. In other words, just saying, hey, I'm a politician.
I'm a leader. Well, the same thing that I said earlier on, which is where Trump
(23:12):
shows the depth of his racism.
To acknowledge that being black or African American culture is an aspect of a person.
It is not the definition of a person.
And so when he talks about Harris being black or South Asian or whatever,
(23:33):
he is defining the person by their race and all of the associations they go
with, rather than saying that this person has these influences that help make them up.
And the skill of Obama and the skill of John Kennedy and the skill of Harris's,
(23:57):
whether it's Kennedy's Catholicism and Irish heritage or whatever,
all of those things were relegated to the side because Kennedy was so much more
Kennedy than he was a member of any group.
And that's truly the case of Harris.
(24:17):
Harris tried to justify himself. mostly as a middle-class person.
That was Lena. If there was an aspect of herself that she wanted to make a part
of her perceived identity,
it was that of being a middle-class person.
(24:39):
Whatever that means. And middle class is the holy grail of American culture.
Rich people want to be middle class. They all deny the fact,
unless they're extraordinarily super rich, they all deny the fact that they're
upper middle class at best.
(25:00):
They try to hold on to that notion.
And certainly poor people don't see themselves as poor, don't want to see themselves as poor.
They want to see themselves as middle class, aspiring middle class,
you know, getting up there.
If you're going to stop there, you're going to walk through any small southern
(25:21):
town and see the guy out there working two jobs,
one at the changing tires and then a night shift at McDonald's,
and you ask him what he is, he'd tell you he's middle class.
You know yeah yeah he's busting
(25:42):
his ass to be middle class yeah yeah
right and then the authentic middle class
you know in some ways doesn't even exist anymore
you know as you're as you're pointing out like it's stretched
so you've got the got a certain number
of people who are you know have
lots of money and but see themselves as middle class
(26:04):
as you say and then and then
people on the the lower end and then in the middle you kind of
uh and you know and both groups have
a point which is i think this is maybe her strongest argument
when she talks about providing small businesses with with 50 grand tax breaks
to help them get going that's a big deal and and and acknowledging the fact
(26:29):
that you know your family can can have an income of a couple hundred thousand a year, but.
Running their small business, but they have a mountain to get,
and they've got to get their kids through college, and by the time you look
at all the rest of their struggle, on paper,
they're upper middle class, going into quote-unquote wealth, but in reality,
(26:54):
they're dancing as fast as they can.
I've been there, done that. I spent about six or seven years,
well, as soon as I got divorced,
I mean, my whole life turned into this kind of, it was just a hamster wheel
of just trying to crank out enough money,
create enough money in the world that I could see my kids and rent out an apartment
(27:14):
and buy some food and using credit cards to do all that.
And eventually it was, you know, I couldn't even afford taxes because they want that from you.
And so you get in this part where I was just, Trust, the $50,000,
I'd be like a perfect candidate.
I'd have been a perfect candidate for that kind of thing.
(27:35):
And what that does is that just provides you more debt.
Right. That's all that's going to do.
It sounds fun that she's going to give you $50,000, but nobody's giving you $50,000.
They're just going to make it cheaper.
And so I'm interested in that regard, and this is a whole other world to talk
(27:59):
about, but I'd be interested to see what industries rise up.
If she gets elected and they institute a $50,000 tax break for middle-class
business owners, entrepreneurs, the industry is going to be created out of that.
So to me, it's going to be something akin to what happened to the universities
(28:20):
when they said, we're going to go ahead and loan people money to go to college
at low interest rates, except you got to pay it off eventually, right?
To guarantee it for the banks who are really looking for this windfall of money
from suckers who are going to start small businesses and get that $50,000 in debt.
And as you say, just get on a bigger hamster wheel is all they're going to do,
(28:43):
a faster-moving hamster wheel. Because I did that. I lived that life.
That's exactly what it is. Yeah, we're Trumpists ourselves, right?
Because we just follow one tangent after another. But it's true.
The whole college debt thing was a real bait and switch.
(29:04):
When they started talking about college loans,
it was a conspiracy on the part of universities seeking to find ways to cover
costs by upping tuition,
setting up a loan structure that would provide a new source of revenue for the banks.
(29:27):
And then ostensibly create a larger middle class or upper middle class. And in point of fact,
When it came time to divide the pie,
which was supposed to be a fair deal for everybody, a fair shake for everybody,
(29:47):
the consumers, the people who were taking on this college debt,
didn't have the ability to advocate for themselves in Congress.
They didn't have the ability to make changes in the law to make sure that they were not abused. used.
And any time you set up a system where, you know, there's a three-way deal where
(30:13):
you have the universities, which aren't going to lower their costs,
the banks, which aren't going to, you know, change their lending policies.
You just got the consumer, the students, you know, caught in the vies.
Yeah, yeah. I went back to school.
I mean, part of my life, I went back to school in my 50s to get my master's degree to finish out.
(30:37):
I had to finish a bachelor's and then got a master's in my 50s,
which I love, and I wouldn't trade it, but we borrowed money.
I borrowed money to pay for the rent and pay for the kids' food,
et cetera, and lived beyond our means, which is what also happens in everybody's lives.
And it's because, I would argue from a certain perspective, kind of what you're
(31:02):
talking about is that what this all system does is it maintains the high cost of living. Yeah.
It allows the, it allows the landlords to make more money than they did for
makes a university's the cost of a college education.
I think it went up 800% in, in less than a decade, something insane like the,
(31:24):
the inflationary effect of it was just obviously a, a.
Yeah, and the Republicans like it because they're helping their contributors,
the businesses, and the Democrats like it because it looks like they're providing
social services and providing opportunity when they cut the deal.
(31:46):
So, yeah, I think it is fair to be concerned that we may get another bait and
switch with Harris' proposal.
But certainly anything that Trump would come up with would be even worse.
Sure, sure. It would be the same thing. It's everything to keep the banks afloat.
(32:09):
And that was the whole $2 trillion they shoved into the economy when the COVID
shut down, which itself was insane.
The COVID shutdown was an insanity.
I do agree with that. I do believe that ultimately it was just a bad policy all the way around.
It was just a giant panic that didn't help anybody.
(32:29):
We might have a lot more debt.
It's an economic thing. And if you're not the debt person, you care a little bit less.
If you're at risk, you think we did fine.
My comedian's take on it, of course, is that there was there's something went
(32:49):
wrong with the whole thing because we let for some reason the people we saved
first were the crazy old people.
You know, we let the kids go home from school and hang and not get educated
or socialize. And the little guys and we we sequestered them in the house.
(33:11):
They got laughed. last. They got the jab at last.
The first people we saved were the least valuable members of society.
There's something biologically, that's just basic nature going,
wait a minute, okay, let's just rethink.
First on the ice floor. Like the aftermarket. Yes!
(33:33):
I'm sorry. I remember Little Big Man.
I'll never forget Little Big Man and the noble savage Savage can't travel with
the group anymore, so they put him on a –.
A funeral thing and they just leave him, you know? And I think in there a point
(33:53):
in the movie where, where little big man goes to talk to him,
he's just laying there dying, waiting to die because he can't travel with the
tribe and they have a conversation.
Hey, how you doing? I'm doing still.
I'm still alive, you know, laying there.
But anyway, I, a serious part of that, the serious part of that comedic take
(34:15):
on it is that there's just a, There's just a misunderstanding of natural reality, you know.
Yeah, this is another topic for another show, but I will argue that we didn't
know at the time what was going to happen.
And it's better to be safe than sorry, you know, because you could say it's
(34:40):
like a bad flu, or you could say it's like the Black Flag.
And if it's the Black Plague, if it turned out to be the Black Plague,
which killed a third of the population of Europe, and we had the opportunity
to prevent something like that, then we probably, you know, would be remiss
if we didn't make an effort.
Well i yeah i think what happened was
(35:02):
somebody said a virus uh a lab
created virus has jumped out of the lab and it's
hot zone you ever read the book hot zone i strongly recommended
recommend the book hot zone it was written in the 1980s and it's a true story
and it will send chills down your spine of some monkeys that had ebola and they
(35:24):
got out of they got out in in the Virginia woods and it is harrowing when they're
trying to catch up with this,
with these monkeys that were released in anyway, hot zone.
So I got to panic, but anyway, we've kind of rambled.
We've rambled pretty far. So let's move on around. Frankie, Beverly, and Mays.
(35:47):
There's a callback. When he was popular, that's when we started talking about
climate change and when the environmental movement, you know,
that's all a part of that time.
And here we are 50 years later, and we're still moving a lot more slowly.
(36:07):
To face this danger than anybody said we needed to be.
Anyone who's been through this summer, and anyone who's noticed how the general
temperature of the world and the ocean has continued to increase year after year,
has to wonder if this election could have a much deeper long-range significance
(36:34):
than was acknowledged or discussed in the debate.
The topic got only cursorily mentioned, and yet it may be the biggest existential
question of our lifetime.
It certainly is. And I will throw my bona fides into the mix there.
(36:55):
I actually worked on an environmental documentary called Deep Green,
which is out there, and I worked on that for a couple of years.
And it was released in 2012 with all the attendant. We interviewed people.
We shot film all over the world between 2008 and 2010 and interviewed everybody
(37:18):
from Michael Pollan to Thomas Lovejoy.
And I could sit here and write down a whole list of the people that we interviewed
and talked to about this.
After that experience, I was going to write a book called Why We're Fucked.
This was because of ego. It's human ego.
We cannot imagine the idea that God is going to take away our wonderful little
(37:41):
home no matter how much we shit on it.
And that is absolutely true. I helped try to pass the Big Green,
I don't know if you remember this, the Big Green Initiative in California, 1993.
And it was a pretty simple, broad Broad take on the coming...
(38:02):
This is 20 years after Earth Day, right?
20 years into it, 1993, a common-sense effort by the state of California to
start moving towards a green future with all its attendant,
the vast amount of wealth available to be earned in this pursuit.
(38:23):
And it failed abysmally.
And so...
The way I see it is that there's nothing you can do about it.
There's nothing you can do about it. You want a cynic on this, you got one here.
It is. Go look.
(38:44):
We could go ahead and let Trump do what he's going to do. Yeah.
Nature is going to win this battle.
We will lose to nature just like every other species has on the planet. it.
And if we don't, we will hopefully survive this round of foolishness because
we're really the only, you know,
(39:05):
I like to say that nature is trying to kill us off as soon as it can.
And it started, it gave a good early salvo with the Zika virus.
It said, okay, let's see if, what if I make them have cone heads and be really
stupid, you know, just devolve this whole group of primates that are doing so much damage.
But there's plenty of hope. There's plenty of possibility.
(39:29):
We'll do the best we can. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better,
if at all. It's going to change our lives.
And so, really, it's just about accommodating yourself to the new reality and
these tipping points that are happening all the time, the loss of species,
et cetera. You know, this is a funny time, isn't it?
(39:50):
We're looking at an incredible devolution, the evolution.
At the same time, the James Webb Space Telescope is out expanding our knowledge
of the universe exponentially.
Just in time for us to go, oh, look how wonderful it is.
(40:11):
Oh, shit. All right, well, I think let's take a hiatus here,
take a break here, and pick it up on the next show. All right.
Well, this is. This has been rambling through the burning brambles.
Let's just hope there's brambles to ramble through next time we get together.
(40:34):
Absolutely. Moses, Moses, Moses, Moses.
Okay. All right, bud. This is Hobart Taylor. I'm Clark Taylor.
See you next time. Bye-bye.
Music.
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