Yes, I’ve been following the media outcry over Secretary Chertoff’s "gut feeling" that we could be facing a terrorist attack in American soil in the near future up to and including Keith Olbermann’s special comment about same.
I was temporarily distracted when KO showed off his expensive education by quoting Shakespeare—wow! Culture with a side order of flatulence!-- but once I recovered, my Scots -Irish blood boiled.
Given that comment on that special comment was disabled (temporarily they said) at The Newshole Countdowns message board, I have a gut feeling that KO has been savaged by irate mothers, soldiers, firefighters, police officers, long distance truckers, coal miners, students of the paranormal, and fans of the late Winston Churchill, whose massive gut saved his life more than once. I’m not in any of these categories but I’m peeved nonetheless.
I might be able to defend Olbermann’s argument had he stopped once he made what was apparently his point: that there was a curious coincidence between Chertoff’s gut feeling and the latest clumsy attempts of the Bush administration to use fear as a means of convincing an increasingly exasperated and fractious American public that there is a legitimate front of the war on terror in the quicksand of Iraq. Unfortunately, Olbermann didn’t stop there. After a mischievous litany of euphemisms suggestions that the best cure for Chertoff’s grumbling gut would be a colonic irrigation, he went out of his way toinsult anyone who’s ever been unenlightened enough to follow a hunch.
Guess that includes me (and Willard adds herself too). I will not bore you with a recital of my presentiments but I have had my share and many have played out to the bitter end. A cranky colon will never restore the administrations credibility unless it provides specifics, like names, dates, places, I.Q. scores and shoe sizes and the timing of its revelation is sadly political but while I reject the present application, would never the phenomenon itself. I know first hand it works.
Oh well, Olbermann is a supercilious sophisticate with a cable "views" show, and I’m a dumb hillbilly with a blog, but I can express my opinion of his opinion in a more meaningful way than merely blogging about it.
next time he decides to do his Don Rickles impression, I’ll switch channels. After all, in the words of the late Whitey Ford—the comedian known as the Duke of Paducah, not the baseball great—I was born in a barn, and every time I hear a jackass bray, I get homesick.
Till next time, fair the well.

I got the blues bad today. The time-sanctioned honky tonk solution, of course, is to go on a bender. Unfortunately I'm a Type 1 diabetic. Then there's my hillbilly gothic ancestry. Everybody on both sides of the family is either TT, a lush or a binge drinker. (True story: I had a cousin who passed out sitting on a barstool. He woke up hours later to the smell of gunpowder and blood on the bar. He got up and went home, and I don't think it ever truly registered with him that while he was away, so to speak, two men killed one another within a couple of feet of him. He eventually died so well-preserved they skipped the embalming process.)

Since I can't get a decent buzz from my tipple of choice--CF diet Pepsi today, with a tap water chaser--I guess I'll have to do it with music. Kindly (please?) refer to my previous blogs on drinking songs, and allow me to add ten more to the list.

In reverse order they are:

"Chug a Lug" recorded by Roger Miller. I think Eddy Arnold may also have recorded this cheerfully choppy little ditty about drinking moonshine, but Roger Miller did his own songs better than anyone. He was one of a whole generation of songwriters, including Mel Tillis and Willie Nelson, who used to drink together at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. I've often wondered if he got the inspiration for this song while they were all getting companionably paralytic.

"Sweet Honky Tonk Wine" recorded by Wayne Kemp. Kemp, a songwriter who never quite made it as a singer, struck gold with this one from around l970, about a guy whose woman leaves him, taking everything except "some of that sweet honky tonk wine." Which, of course, he drinks.

"Party Time" recorded by T.G. Shepherd. This one from around 1980 successfully spans both the lost love and drinking song categories. Loud honkin' guitar, thumping whorehouse piano. Great stuff.

"I Gotta Get Drunk" recorded by Willie Nelson. I love this one for nothing better than this sage observation: advised by his doctor to give up the booze, he opines, "there's more old drunks than there are old doctors, so I guess I better have another round."

"Set 'Em Up, Joe" recorded by Vern Gosdin, whom peers and fans alike call The Voice. Part drinking song, part lost love song, part tribute to Ernest Tubb (he instructs the bartender, "set 'em up Joe and play 'Walkin' the Floor'"), this one's a compulsive singalong--but only Vern Gosdin can hit the low note at the end.

Tune in next time when the world's orneriest Wurlitzer cranks out the top five, second tier. Till then, fair thee well.

I cannot claim credit for that title: it's a 1960s tearjerker written by Curly Putman, who gave us another six-hanky weeper in "He Stopped Lovin' Her Today" and an unanswerable conundrum in "The Green Green Grass of Home": why the hell is the guy being hanged?

"My Elusive Dreams," recorded first by David Houston, is about a fiddlefooted man and his long-suffering but loyal wife. Also recorded as a duet by George Jones and Tammy Wynette during their tumultuous marriage, and by Charlie Rich as a filler on a 1970s album, the song per se has no relevance to me; only its title does.

To explain that we've got to go back some twenty odd years, to the days when I was a pompous, humorless, self-important college sophomore of the worst sort. Oh, I had dreams then! I wanted to be a published poet by the age of thirty; I wanted to travel; I wanted a sexy, handsome, intellectual husband; and I wanted to write about country music.

Country music, despite the best efforts of historians, critics and performers, has always been considered the least sophisticated of mediums, literally the country bumpkin of the entertainment world. At the time I was majoring in communications, and my advisor was a wonderful man named Bill Gribben, who had worked in the media for many years. He was wise, witty, kind, self-deprecating and observant, and I miss him to this day. (He died near the end of my senior year.) I could tell Mr. Gribben literally anything, and when I confided that I wanted to write about country music, he had one dumbfounded reaction: "WHY?"

Didn't know; just knew I did.

In any case, my dreams proved elusive. My father had two strokes my senior year; they were for him the beginning of a nine-year spiral of declining health and increasing mental illness. I never left home; I worked to help Mom pay his medical expenses. My siblings both married; I stopped looking for Mr. Right when I realized I was only attracted to abusive men like my father. And the poetry went from a stream to a trickle to a dry creek bed.

Fast forward to the present: one of my elusive dreams has come true, probably in retrospect the one that was meant to be. I'm writing about country music. I'm doing it on a borrowed computer (thanks Willard), but I have people reading what I write, and for that I'm profoundly grateful. Guess I'm living proof that not all dreams are fleeting things.

Till next time, fair thee well.

Hey guys, hope you missed me this week. (Don't everybody groan at once.) As part of an ongoing home repair project, we're digging in the equivalent of a trash pit. As my contribution to the cause, I'm disposing of a quarter-century's worth of journals. Totally aside from being major dustcatchers and prime breeding ground for silverfish, spiders and other vermin, the oldest ones have been chewed to hell by things with teeth.

I have been begged by a very few people (okay, Tooey's the only one!) not to destroy that much writing, but I want rid of all the nastiness those notebooks hold. So I borrowed Willard's shredder, and to its gnashing whine I began to think of country songs befitting the theme.

Hanging on to all that crap had gotten to be an obsession, like the poor sap in "He Stopped Lovin' Her Today": "Kept some letters by his bed/Dated l962. . ."

With a shudder I turned to Randy Travis's jocular "Diggin' Up Bones." Indeed I could be "exhumin' things that's better left alone" but I figure the less evidence I'm truly a pompous ass at heart, the better.

There were two others that came to mind, both recorded by a myriad of artists: "Old Love Letters" and "Burning Bridges." Unfortunately, save for some highly insincere ones I wrote to God during a desperate phase, there are no love letters in the collection. As for "Burning Bridges," it only reminded me of a quip attributed to the late NYC mayor Fiorello LaGuardia: "I never worry about burning my bridges, because I never retreat!"

Finally, I decided that the nearest song thematically was Ray Price's stunning "Burning Memories" with certain modifications.

I also made a list of reasons to shred. In reverse order, they are:

There are no obsessive would-be biographers banging down my door, begging for the chance to write FAIRWEATHER LEWIS: BLOG YOUR HEART OUT, COUNTRY GIRL. Not even the ever-loyal Willard will touch that one. On a more practical note, I'm also eliminating any potential for blackmail.

I don't need written depositions about my father's abuse: I won't be his prosecutor in the afterlife.

I don't need written reminders of the sweet funny things my precious nephew and nieces have done from babyhood: those are locked up in my heart.

We're in the midst of a drought; the chances of me getting a permit for a bonfire of the inanities are between slim and none.

And lastly, try as you might, you can't burn memories over a gas heater.

But I can duet with Ray Price while I shred.

While I'm at it, happy 80th Bday to Charlie Louvin, the surviving member of the great Louvin Brothers. And until next time, fair thee well.

I love not only country music history, but all history. The brouhaha between Ann Coulter and Elizabeth Edwards brings to mind a character who is, perversely, my favorite from British political history: the vicious eighteenth century polemicist known as Junius.

From 1765 to 1771, Junius savaged King George III and a series of cabinet ministers, many of whom were forced to resign their posts by public outcry in the wake of his assaults. One hapless minister of finance was exposed as an inveterate gambler, unfit to handle the country's treasury. Another minister was accused of being a sodden alcoholic who handed out jobs and patronage to his drinking companions. A third was attacked as a shameless womanizer, then as a heartless seducer and betrayer when he married a woman other than his mistress. The king was characterized as stupid, incompetent, tyrannical, and equally as corrupt as his ministers.

Ann Coulter uses newspaper columns, books, blogs and TV to spew her venom; Junius spewed his through letters to the editors of newspapers, the lone mass medium of his day. Unlike Ms. Coulter, Junius was almost paranoid about concealing his identity; to a polite query from radical politician John Wilkes, Junius replied that if his identity was revealed, he would not survive a week, such was the fury and embarassment of his victims.

Although Junius continued to publish sporadic letters as late as l773, they show a marked decline in quality after 1771. As a bitter government critic, he remained a highly popular figure into the nineteenth century. In Lord Byron's satirical poem "A Vision of Judgment" Junius--whom Byron describes as a "mighty shadow of a shade"--rails against George III's admission into heaven.

In the twentieth century it was established that Junius was in fact two men: Philip Francis, a clerk in the Naval Office, and Tobias Fitzpatrick, a consumptive wit and man about town. Francis relayed workplace gossip to Fitzpatrick, who turned gossip into the scurrilous innuendo of the letters. Fitzpatrick died in 1771, and Francis lost his job at the Naval Office shortly thereafter. Although Francis was an unpleasant man at best, he was no fountain of spite like the late Fitzpatrick. Lacking both his vitriolic partner and the gossip that was Junius's lifeblood, he retired into obscurity.

Junius was a staunch supporter of the American cause long before our revolution began, and a stout defender of both the far-left radical John Wilkes and the brilliant Irish liberal Edmund Burke. He was never so crass as to pretend that his attacks on politicians added ideas to political discourse. He never took cheap shots at the bereaved, as Ms. Coulter has done at the politically active 9/11 widows and the Edwards family; nor did he ever express a pious hope of any politician dying as a result of terrorist assassination. (Yes, I realize Ms. Coulter was only parroting the sleazy Bill Maher; the comments were inappropriate, no matter what the source.) Although Junius was referring to the cabinet minister who fired Philip Francis, his bemused words could equally apply to Ann Coulter: "The proceedings of this wretch are unaccountable."

The genius of Junius, nightcrawler though he was, is that Francis, his surviving half, knew when to quit. Junius showed up, skewered his targets, and vanished back into the shadows after a short spectacular career. Too bad Ms. Coulter is too egotistical and proud of her nasty image to follow the example of her elder and better.