JHUS Staging

Category: JH Videos

  • TLDR – Jason Aldean: Small Town, Big Deal

    So the internet noise machine has been trending this last week or so due to an execrably antagonistic and jingoist track called “Try That In A Small Town,” recorded by country “singer” Jason Aldean.

    First, let’s be 100% clear: this song is just…junk. Musically it’s as cookie-cutter and formulaic as they come in every possible way. The video immediately validated my suspicion that country music in 2023 is just hair metal with steel guitars and flags. I swear they lifted part of this directly from Bo Burnham’s Country Song.

    Pictured: A rube propagating propaganda

    This all started because I heard the beginnings of the big controversy and just for grins I read the lyrics.

    Here’s the thing, man – to even take this song on without burning the lyric sheet and hoping it doesn’t summon a demon, either you’re the rube who falls for this junk, or you’re a carefully constructed façade masking a steel-trap mind engaged in the deliberate subversion of American cohesion and community by fearmongering and playing on racist and “othering” tropes while clearly holding the intelligence and culture of your audience in contempt (and not without some reasonable basis given that you do in fact have an audience, which is definitely contemptible).

    I’m gonna go with “rube,” and assign responsibility for the rest of it to the committee of faceless hacks who take responsibility for actually writing this dreck.

    First, let’s start with the dystopian fearmongering nightmare of the first verse:

    Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
    Carjack an old lady at a red light
    Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
    Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like

    Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
    Stomp on the flag and light it up
    Yeah, ya think you’re tough?

    “Try That In A Small Town”

    This is a master class in “agitprop,” agitating propaganda. Propaganda subverts critical thinking by appealing directly to emotion; agitprop specifically targets emotions like anger, outrage, and frustration, and can reasonably be seen as one means of engaging in stochastic terrorism.

    So in the first verse you’ve got the setup – “those people” are comin’ to “our town” to sucker punch meemaw while they’re jacking her 93 Tercel so they can go rob Jimmy’s beer store! Be afraid! All Is Chaos!”

    Let’s be clear: crime happens and that sucks. But these are cherry-picked, isolated incidents far less common than, say, unarmed young black men being murdered by police. The purpose is to make you mad and get your blood pumping, because ol’ Jason here is gonna tell you just how to solve that problem in a minute. Let’s take a look at the chorus:

    Well, try that in a small town
    See how far ya make it down the road
    Around here, we take care of our own
    You cross that line, it won’t take long
    For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
    Try that in a small town

    “Try That In A Small Town”

    It gets really creepy in the second verse, all about grampa and some firearms put to good use against those others who aren’t “our own,” with vague references of what’s gonna happen when “they” come to take our guns.

    I can’t help but think of how many “small-town” folks I know – I lived in Oxford, NC for many years, and I’m currently sitting where I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which isn’t exactly Midtown Manhattan – who aren’t drawling, drooling, bigoted, ignorant, stereotypes. The contempt these “songwriters” have for the intellect of their audience is palpable, and that audience should be insulted to know someone believes this kind of bigoted dogwhistle – and it is one, those details have already been more than adequately covered by others at this point – will appeal to them.

    Listen: If a ratty old “NO FEAR” t-shirt covered in layers of Doritus and beer stains that are almost invisible because the beer that was spilled on ’em is some crappy, watery thing in a plastic bottle suddenly became a song lyric, this would be them.

    If you need to know exactly how many pounds of copper wire it takes to get a box of cold medicine, this song’s got you covered.

    This song’s gonna get that back door fixed one of these days but who CARES, Bobbie Sue, it’s the BACK door ain’t nobody can SEE it!

    This song spent thirteen thousand dollars on new suspension parts trying to get their ’78 Nova to stop dog-tracking…and six thousand of that was because the struts had rebel flags painted on ’em.

    This song used to have long hair until it got tired of cleaning the remains of last night’s alcohol overdose out of it.

    This song’s gonna chest-thump and in-group and passive-aggressive all OVER you, and what are you gonna do about it, SITTY BOAH? Ain’t been doin these twelve-ounce curls all m’life for FUN, son. *belch*

    It’s just dumb and gross and needs to stop. All of it, including the mediocrity of the music itself. Spare me the arguments about whether or not it’s a racist dogwhistle, it very clearly and obviously is, everybody knows it, the only people pretending otherwise are the dogs being whistled for, and everybody knows that, too, including them.

    Enough.

  • “Just Ignore It…”

    “Just ignore them and they’ll go away” is a long-standing stock response to behavior that is abusive, harmful, dangerous, and intolerable. In this edition of “TLDR” we break down this gaslighting behavior and call it out for what it is. It’s time to end this harmful and destructive narrative.

    In a departure from the norm for this edition of “TLDR,” this page is just a summary with the media files embedded. The canonical transcript is published at this link on Medium.Com. (Disclosure; I get paid for writing at Medium. This is a “friends link” that will ignore your free article limit if you’re not an existing Medium subscriber, or bypass the paywall if you’ve already read your five free Medium articles for the month.)

  • In Capitalist America, Bank Robs YOU

    In spite of all the disinformation you’ll find around the subject of capitalist economics, it is very true today in the US that banks have rigged the system to rob everyone else.

    And it just sort of…happened, while we weren’t looking. The result of it happening is this massive inequity of wealth and power that we’re living in now.

    In the US (and most other places) we have this thing called fractional reserve banking. In this system, commercial banks are allowed to loan money in excess of their actual cash and assets on hand. If the fractional reserve is 10% and I have a thousand dollars, I can write loans for ten times that.

    Perfect conditions for this to actually work are first, all the loans have to be paid back, completely, on time. Second, the banks aren’t leveraging regulatory and tax code features to lower their tax liability through artificial or less than honorable – even if legal – means.

    In that perfect world, the payment of the loan cancels the money created by the loan. This is the same mechanism as federal tax; they “print” the money by appropriation, and then they “destroy” it by taxation.

    We don’t live in a perfect world.

    If you default on a loan, that’s money in the economy which has lost its way to get back out. If you pay it off early that’s (usually) a loss of some amount of profit for the bank. That and innumerable other variables all have to be accounted for in tax policy.

    It also means that even though that money cancels itself out as its returned to the lender, you still have to adjust tax policy to account for the money that’s in the economy right now, including the rates “we the people” must pay in to keep things running smoothly.

    The people who manage the whole thing aim to balance between maintaining currency value and ensuring there’s sufficient currency stock in the economy to keep it stable. That balance must be calculated to fit as closely as possible what’s really in the economy, rather than only the aspirational projections of what commercial banks expect to be in the economy.

    It’s that first calculation which has the greatest impact on tax policy. You and I pay taxes now to balance the money creation that banks are profiting on now (by charging interest on those loans). Then banks hire attorneys and accountants and lobbyists to take advantage of regulatory and tax code features to reduce their own tax bill – and also to have a strong hand in creating those features. That includes increasing the amount of money they can “print” via loans versus the amount they actually hold.

    Eventually other capitalists realized they have attorneys and accountants and lobbyists too and joined the party, further shifting the burden of taxation onto the backs of the people they were refusing to pay and overcharging to live – us.

    End result: they are never paying the taxes needed to offset the money they’re printing and putting in their pockets, and thus that money, the taxes, has to come out of our pockets.

    Then our pockets become too shallow to meet our needs and we get a credit card. Or take out a loan. Next verse, same as the first. They get paid on the money, then they don’t pay taxes on what they get paid. The taxes must be paid to keep things running smooth and stable (but not to pay for federal spending! It’s so important people internalize that fact!) so we, the rest of people who aren’t major executives in banks and multinational corporations and such, pay them instead. Over time this puts an ever-larger portion of the “real” wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, while leaving an ever-smaller portion for everyone else.

    Executive compensation is a tax-deductible business expense.

    This isn’t all the result of some “invisible hand” or magic. It’s the result of individual human beings making decisions for their own material benefit, knowing that they’re doing so by harming others.

    As the old meme goes, those people have names and addresses – not to encourage anyone, mind you – but that’s why we don’t talk about these things.

    If there has ever been a valid way to say “taxation is theft,” this is the true way. Problem is you say that and everyone thinks the thief is “the government.” The government is just the bookkeeper. The thieves are the people who are taking the money – capitalists, oligarchs, plutocrats. The more control they have over every aspect of our lives, the less likely it is that we’ll start looking for those names and addresses, or even know there’s a problem at all.

    Means, motive, opportunity. Capitalism is a dead-end street for the species, and none of the other things we’ve tried are perfect either, so it’s time to move forward into what’s next. I’d hold on tight, because these folks aren’t going to let go easily.

  • Who Watches The Watchmen (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUeD_ReLG6Q[/embedyt]

    In this video, filmed spontaneously on West North Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan (just west of North Park, I’ll embed a map) in the summer of 2010, we watch a police stop in the background while discussing the significant possibility that simply by recording this video, I was risking arrest.  As I write this in 2021, there is an active case in process that may make that more true.  Thanks to noted asshat and anthropomorphic suppurating rectal polyp James O’Keefe at Project Veritas and his bullshit, a court in the eastern district of Michigan has put this state’s long-standing position as a “single party consent” state for audio recording – meaning only one person, and not all of them, need consent to a conversation being recorded – into jeopardy, and the state supreme court is expected to rule on the matter fairly soon (if they haven’t already; I couldn’t find anything in a quick google search).

    The ability to record authorities in the execution of their official duties is absolutely critical to of a free state.  Honorable execution of the duties of public safety should never require hiding in shadows and forbidding an independent record.  It is absolutely incumbent of each of us as citizens to remain vigilant and diligent in holding our public servants to account, every time.

    These laws also represent something that I didn’t discuss in the video, and that is how the right wing has engaged in a long play of stuffing every possible office from president to dog catcher with fundamentalists advancing authoritarian and – as is now much less radical to say than when I was saying it at the time this video was filmed – even fascist agendas.  You have to keep your eyes open, you have to remain engaged, and even if it means running for office yourself you have to take an active and ongoing part in protecting the necessary freedoms that allow us to exist in a free nation, no matter how abridged that freedom may be at any given moment in any given circumstance.  To whatever extent American freedom is succeeding at all, it is succeeding because we, the people, keep our eyes open.

  • I Shouldn’t Have To (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfxTj7_V8c[/embedyt]

    “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English, this is America!”  Another recurring theme that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.  As you can see from the screenshot/featured image for this article, which was captured on 25-March-2021, it’s still occurring.

    I’m not even going to bother with all the reasons this kind of bigoted, ignorant thinking sucks; anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the arguments backwards and forwards.  This video is pure bias reinforcement, shot spontaneously outside my home in Kalamazoo at the time.  It’s not likely nor intended to move any bigot who thinks this way.  It’s intended to be something others who feel the way I do about this ignorance can share when they encounter it in the wild, to reinforce and normalize the idea that we’re out here and not going away, and we won’t be gaslighted into hiding in a closet to please bigots.

  • Fahrenheit 9-11: Thoughts (2004)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZbXnDmmlio[/embedyt]

    This video is pretty special to me for a number of reasons.  First, it’s the first really decent thing I did in Adobe Premiere, even though now, sixteen years later, it doesn’t look all that decent.

    Second, this video was created as part of my daughter’s summer project for one of her classes in high school.  We went to see the film Fahrenheit 9/11, and put together a presentation about eight minutes long.  Unfortunately the first four minutes were lost, but what remains is good enough that I’ve considered recreating it just because I like it that much.

    She got a 99 on the project – in part because she proved that she actually participated in it and it wasn’t just “dad’s project” – and the whole experience is definitely among my more cherished memories of fatherhood.

    As I write this in 2021, I’ve cycled through a lot of “new audiences” who don’t realize that I’m not new at this.  It’s nice to have artifacts.

  • Laff Riot: Partying 101 (2010)

    This is one of my shorter videos, shot after I heard about a big party and a bunch of arrests over spring break near the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

    A couple of interesting/fun/funny points here.  First, about six months after this I became a student at Western.  Second, I’m the spot I’m standing on is part of the Hunter’s Ridge apartment complex on West Michigan Ave.  In 2019, I ended up working for them as a “porter” (and destroyed my feet doing it, but that’s not their fault at all – age, little diabetes, little poor nutrition, etc.).

    Anyway, yeah.  Another entry in my sporadic and ongoing series of “don’t be a dumbass” media tutorials.

  • It’s Your Dime (2009)

  • I Can’t Stand Intolerance (2009)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7B0a5kCCq0[/embedyt]

    Recorded at Bronson Park in Kalamazoo, Michigan during the same session as “Holiday Rant (2009),” this piece builds on a couple of specific points in that show related to racism and bigotry.  Essentially, a restatement and analysis of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, but about eleven years before it became popularly known as that.  As always, keep your eyes and ears out for themes and bullet points that I continue to hit today, including pokes at various facets of “big picture/root problem” issues that I believe we have now begun the process of truly evolving away from.

    Also notable for being one of the few times I’ve ever used the n-word in a piece that wasn’t specifically about that word, and for being the first time I discussed the fact that I’m part black in public.

  • Holiday Rant (2009)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7LHYCPHShk[/embedyt]

    In this video holiday rant from December of 2009, JH goes off on racism, materialism, hypocrisy, and much more.  Shot at Bronson Park in Kalamazoo, Michigan.