Twelve Thirteen Fourteen

Nigel-Wright Intra-galactic Relations #4

(K)ehkashan: It’s terribly difficult these days to differentiate who’s grand, old, and pusillanimous in politics and who is not!   

(D)addy Anwar: Grand, old, and pusillanimous? GOP?

(K)ehkashan: And the Democrats! There’s a new onslaught of Democrats that are aligned with the Tea Party Republicans who orchestrated the defeat of the Democratic Party and progressive candidates across the United States in the November 4, 2014 Midterm Elections.         

(P)apa Harry: The Tea Party Democrats? How so? Expound upon the mechanics, my love.

(K)ehkashan: Yes. I was listening to The Byrds and wanted to know more about their history and the lyrics to their songs. That inquisitiveness led me to the celebrated jazz prodigy and pioneer Miles Davis upon whose recommendation Columbia Records had signed The Byrds in 1964, by which time Davis was a confirmed legendary musician many times over.       

(P)apa Harry: Okay. Miles Davis got The Byrds a contract with Columbia Records in the mid-sixties.

(D)addy Anwar: And Miles Davis was an established and innovative artist himself at the time, having come onto the music scene in the 1940s.

(K)ehkashan: Whereas, despite having started in the 1960s and becoming renowned for their renditions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn”, The Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fifteen years before Miles Davis was given the honor posthumously. 

(D)addy Anwar: That’s unjust. However, what’s more unfair is the derogatory tonality of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s biography of Miles Davis. Compare it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s biography on The Byrds and you can sense the underlying reprehensible dismissal of Miles Davis’s genius and wisdom by the mainstream media then and today.  

(P)apa Harry: The same underlying reprehensible dismissal of black men’s lives as in the homicides of Akai Gurley, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin at the hands of cold-blooded police officers like Darren Wilson and unfit neighborhood night watchmen like George Zimmerman.   

(K)ehkashan: Miles Davis died the year The Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1991. He was sixty-five-years-old and had created and been credited for an astonishing number of breakthroughs in sound across musical genres. John Lennon was too inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously like Miles Davis, and had also died of a gunshot wound like Gurley, Garner, Brown, and Martin. However, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s being shot by police officers while at play with a toy gun in the snow outside his home and the subsequent trauma his two sisters suffered in the hands of that same patrolling police force is horrifying.      

(D)addy Anwar: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame stresses the insignificance of Miles Davis’s genius and wisdom with such unnecessary exhaustiveness throughout its biographical bit that I wished it had had the courage to edit that visceral bitterness all these years later. That same visceral bitterness with which the Tea Party Republicans and their Democratic counterparts in the United States Senate are stalling the trillion dollar spending bill.    

(K)ehkashan: The prelude to the stalling came after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky left the Senate, at which time his Republican colleague Senator Ted Cruz of Texas approached the dais and proceeded to stall the legislation despite the House of Representatives having passed the measure and adjourned itself for the holidays.       

(D)addy Anwar: Senator Mitch McConnell should not have been permitted to leave the Senate as he did, with a presumptuous strut personally and absolute inaction publicly.  

(K)ehkashan: Speaking of pork barreling, what is it deemed when a politician’s constituents do not matter anymore either? And the Majority Party perched in the United States Congress got there by all means necessary except legitimately?   

(P)apa Harry: Why is what called pork barreling, my love? The matter of restitution for past injustices, slavery specifically, is where pork barreling originates. It is alleged that slaves were rationed off barrels of salt pork mercilessly, the task of dividing a barrel being left to the masses enslaved by generationally cruel masters.

(K)ehkashan: As one peaceful protestor inquired in print upon a poster board today, “Is breathing a white privilege too? Black lives matter.”