InstaPunk Returns

I know he’s a bit blurrier than she is. We’ll get to that as we go. Just so you know, our stand-ins here are from the Beverly Hillbillies and All in the Family . Chosen pretty carefully despite any initial outrage you might feel. Forget politics per sē. The first is a programmatic drone, pursuing what she’s aimed at without regard to, or understanding of, the human issues involved. The second is an armchair hero of the masses, always willing to claim credit for himself at the expense of others.  Yes, I’m talking about Kamaltoe and the Coach. The saddest thing perhaps is that the fictional characters above are both superior to their photo stand-ins. Miss Hathaway was childless but did not spend her early career years with her legs waving in the air seeking promotions. Archie Bunker was at least honest about his ignorant, half-assed prejudices and presumptions. He wasn’t actually lying about a skewed perspective honestly reported on. Why the Harris-Walz campaign is a kind of ultimat...

  Published 33 years ago, The Boomer Bible is a satirical treatment of how we became a Post-Christian nation with politics finally siring its own atheistic religion at the hands of the Baby Boom generation.  It attracted its own following over the decades, although the New York Times recognized it for the attack it was and announced to the publisher that they would never review it. The book has become a hidden work but not a vanished one. Its 88,000 print run eventually sold out and copies new and used are still available from a variety of sources. Along the way, The Boomer Bible has spawned a variety of complementary productions in print and ion the Internet, including three dedicated websites, a book explaining the text’s complex structure and writing innovations, a brief sequel scripture spoofing the decline of youthful literacy in the 21st Century, and a complete page-by-page photographic reproduction of the original book in the Modern Archive.  How is it different f...

  Where’s your William Blake? Twice in my life I have looked at women unblinkingly. When I went through a painful divorce in the 1990s and now when I am old and losing testosterone to the point that I agree with Samuel Johnson that sex is just a ridiculous position offering fleeting pleasure. All the ads for testosterone boosters we see on teevee strike me as sad. Graduating from sex is the male opportunity for wisdom. Why are we so desperately anxious to forgo the opportunity? I have questions I have posed no one has ever attempted to answer. Women are mad about the patriarchy. Why was there ever a patriarchy? Men in recorded history have always protected women to the point that female life spans were longer than male life spans. Women were the mothers of children. The future of the family and the species. It didn’t matter that they were otherwise less. Fairer but weaker, and somewhat dumber. As befitted their role. They cared about the children while men cared about everything el...

 Seemed like too much was going on. You’ll have to look at the Commennts. He was 79, first Babe of the Boom. https://www.theboomerbible.com/tbb378.html https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2024/07/what-paul-harvey-used-to-call-rest-of.html

A little bit of a thought piece. Just a little bit. I know nobody’s up to much thought these days. But I’m a huge fan of Canadian philosopher/rockstar/poet Leonard Cohen, who assures me, “ There is a crack in everything . That’s how the light gets in.” Found a crack. At a site called Raw Story. Written by Sarah Burris. Went like this: FTA: <<That's mean to Elvis!' MSNBC panelists laugh at comment that Trump's in 'fat Elvis' phase… MSNBC panelists couldn't help but chuckle Monday afternoon after The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes identified former President Donald Trump as being in the "fat Elvis stage of his career." Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) praised Sykes's comment on Monday morning, which started the network off. "I've got to give a shout-out to my friend Charlie Sykes," McCaskill said at the top of Nicolle Wallace's show. "I spit coffee over the weekend when I saw how he referred to Trump, that Trump is in the...

  I was an international management consultant. You can’t wish that fact away. I did something no one ever did. Put communication people on the line. Gave them a crisis they had to respond to in real time. Nearly got me fired. Didn’t. I made a project, first in the U.S., called the Monster. Yeah. I called it that. Kept them up all night.  Here’s what I did. First in Evansville, Indiana. Then in Paris, France. Same result, both places.  I created a circumstance that put the survival of the company at risk. You get awakened at night by the news. What do you do? I gave them all the tools they had at their disposal. TV, official statements and press releases, the creation of the company narrative, which in this case did not look good. I gave a budget but made it clear that as CEO I had more cash on hand if they asked for it after 2 am. In Evansville, I hired the leading male anchor newsman to say what they wanted him to say. They hired him. They scripted him. It was all a lie...

I’ve written and posted about much of this before, but I never put it all in one place. No fan of Lenin, but he was right about “weeks where decades happen.” Three months that changed my life unalterably for all the years since. What was it all about? Paris? My parents? Life and death suddenly encountered? Puppy love that was somehow more? It began when I was still nine years old. All over when I was barely ten, with a fortyish sequel. Who remembers? I remember. It’s all engraved in me. Suddenly brought back to memory by the nonsensical opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. I will never, would never, return to the City of Lights that once was and is no more. 1963. A hugely important year in American history, ending in November when my mother picked us up at school when as a rule we would have taken the bus. The President had been shot. Learned of his death on the radio on the way home. Not how the year began. We learned, my sister and I, that we were moving to Paris in the spring o...

  At my first Stones concert I wore my dad’s WWII leather  flight  jacket. Outside the Spectrum, there was a rumor I  was selling  acid.  I wasn’t. But I got to see “Star Star”  and the pink balloon. The Stones were a bit raggedy then, as was I. The radio station of Stones fans in Philadelphia was WMMR. For years after this concert, they used the pitiful Jagger attempt to pronounce the call letters correctly. The concert was great, but the Stones were, as I was, still trying to recover from the late Sixties. “Goatshead Soup” got bad reviews.  The only thing the critics noticed was the cleverly misfitled ‘Star Star.’  1973. I was 20. The Beatles were long gone. I wasn’t.  And Mick Jagger wasn’t. Just waiting for a comeback. [Have to intervene here. Blogger is Google, and Google does not like me. I’ve done dozens of music-centric posts, but none have encountered this level of difficulty in the posting. They don’t want me to restore le...

 MICK JAGGER & THE ROLLING STONES I’ve written at least a book’s worth of posts about The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger in my own 55 year writing career. Done a lot of philosophizing and literary analysis about him. Tagged him as an unconscious genius based on all the tales of him writing what would become deathless lyrics in a limo to the studio on a recording day. Learned he was a voracious reader in his concert travels, couple books a week. Wanted to meet him, never wanted to meet him. (Kind of how I feel about Donald Trump. Both ostentatious sybarites, both recipients of a gift not entirely different from the one I received when I wrote The Boomer Bible.) But I met Jagger long before I met Trump. In a closet in the boarding school room I shared with my Russian Jewish roommate who was staying up all night reading Dostoyevsky while I was staying up all night reading Ayn Rand. Together we found an LP in our disastrous closet with obvious scratches and no album cover. It began...