Soul Coughing has returned? Or is it just Mike Doughty, returning to original form? Nonetheless, to announce his new dance, the “Rona Pollona,” Doughty has teamed up with long time collaborator and touring mate, Andrew “Scrap” Livingston, for a new band called Ghost of Vroom.

The duo takes their name from Soul Coughing’s debut album, Ruby Vroom, and let me tell you, it sounds like we’re being rocketed back to those early, “Sugar-Free Jazz” days. This time around Doughty has enlisted the help of Mario Caldato Jr, or as Beatie Boys fans know him, “Mario C,” to produce this record.

Don’t touch the box, don’t touch the shelf
Don’t touch the people, don’t touch yourself
Lysol sprayed on the wheel
No hugging, no shaking, hand-holding, no feel

This is the Covid-19 dance that we all have to do to survive. Doughty and Livingston have called it the “Rona Pollona,” but when you listen to the lyrics, you know what they’re getting at, “The COVID.”

“Do the Rona Pollona, yeah/You do the Rona Pollona, right
You won’t know it if you’re doing it right
You’re never knowing it if you’re doing it right”

None of us know if we are doing it right, but we are trying our best. To wear a mask, to social distance, to wash our hands, to use hand sanitizer. We are doing whatever it takes, to stay safe, and to stay alive.

“If I jump, they’ll scrape me up
Throw me in sanitized SuperGulp cup
Come correct with a stimulus check!”

This is a snarky take on a serious subject, and I would expect nothing less from Mike Doughty. My biggest takeaway from this new project is that the Soul Coughing side of Mike is back! That is great news for fans of the band and the music scene in general.

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The way the New York Times tells it, he is a hero.

But as Ben Shapiro points out in this tweet:

Shapiro notes:

The only mention of his alleged crimes — for which there was an open warrant, and the alleged victim of whom called the police in the first place — comes in paragraph 17, and is as vague as humanly possible.

The paragraph says:

By videoconference from his hospital bed, Mr. Blake pleaded not guilty on Friday to three domestic charges against him, including a sexual assault count. The charges were filed in July. On the day Mr. Blake was shot, the woman who reported the assault called 911, saying that Mr. Blake was at her home. The Kenosha police said they were trying to arrest Mr. Blake when the shooting occurred. [Emphasis added.]

Need we go over the passionate response to any report of sexual abuse that emanates from the left? Such as the  failed attempt to hang Supreme Court Justice Brent Kavanaugh with such an accusation during his confirmation hearings?

Blake deserves justice just as do the accused Kenosha police officer. Judgment will be in the hands of a judge and a jury. And I’m not making a judgment about the charge against Blake. My point is the soaring hypocrisy of the New York Times demonstrated by this (what used to be called in journalism) “puff piece.”

It appears from the video of his attempted arrest and police shooting that he was either going for a knife inside his car or he was planning on fleeing the police with three of his children in car. If that’s true, in my book he’s not a hero.

P.S. Here’s a way to identify a reporter’s bias: Look at how the story concludes. If it comes with a quote that casts a good light on a subject, it’s a good bet that it’s where the reporter stands. Thus, the final graphs of the New York Times story:

“The way he’s trying to be a strong Black father for his children is the way that he’s taking on the mission of this movement,” Mr. Crump said.

Porche Bennett, an organizer with Black Lives Activists Kenosha, or BLAK, said on Sunday that there would be no pressure on Mr. Blake to publicly take up their cause or to become an outspoken advocate for the movement.

“We know we’ve got his support,” she said.

There are going to be some people we encounter who don’t believe in us, who are not for us and who will not choose us and that’s O.K.! Their lack of vision or willingness to accept the vision doesn’t mean we’re not in the picture! They can try to cut us out, erase or minimize our role, but the truth is without us there is no production!

Fellow Americans, throw off our chains.

Never in my 78 years did I think I’d see laws that would imprison Americans in their homes. Never, not even under the tyrannical British monarch, King George III, were Americans told that they could not leave their homes.

Not in the popular dystopian novels, from 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale,  was a nation’s entire population ordered to cower at home. I might be wrong, but I don’t recall reading anywhere that in their most totalitarian moments, did communist, socialist and nazi bullies order that everyone, except the vaguely defined “essentials,” be locked downed.

Yet this unprecedented and unthinkable state of misery has been imposed on Americans, people who came here for freedom and those born here in liberty. To my surprise and disappointment, Americans have meekly obeyed. That’s because they have been petrified by the public health and epidemiological aces who warned that going outside would be deadly. That has led many elected officers and their bureaucrats to inflict these dreadful measures because they fear questioning The Science.

Instead of challenging the science, the pols, the media and much of the public have turned this into a partisan blame game: One side says President Donald Trump’s at fault because he didn’t act quickly enough. The other accuses Democrats of being hypocrites because they opposed Trump’s “racist” and “xenophobic” closing of the border to travelers from infected nations. Truth is, no one was prepared.

Included among the blameworthy are the “experts.” These are the public health officers, epidemiologists and a slew of academics who found themselves sprung from their ivory towers into the spotlight. Sadly, they brought with themselves unchallengeable certitude about how the lives of every one of the 328,239,523 people in America should be conducted. Damnable certitude, I dare to add. 

They have flooded the national conversation with botched predictions and overly heated warnings. They and so many others who were given the awesome responsibility of keeping Americans safe from contagions and plagues were demonstrably unprepared.

To get a taste, check out, “Miscalculation at Every Level Left U.S. Unequipped to Fight Coronavirus: A shortfall in masks lays bare the blunders by hospitals, manufacturers and the federal government.”

…each part of the medical-industrial equation acted in its own interest, and didn’t set aside resources that might have better prepared America for the coronavirus crisis. Each ignored warnings of shortages of protective equipment in case of a pandemic—shortages that handicapped the struggle against the virus early on and continue today.

No need here to review the frequent, bloated and unreal predictions of 2 million Americans dying and overwhelmed hospitals. Doom and gloom showered down on us with Papal-like sureness. Among them were mandatory prescriptions that sometimes were at war with themselves: Don’t wear masks; then wear masks. Don’t go outside; then go outside.

If science is to govern us absolutely, the science better be right. And for those who blindly repeat the cliche, “follow the science” without understanding science, here is reminder: The Science can be and sometimes is wrong. Or incomplete and not comprehensive. As is the case of this pandemic.

Physical health is only part of the science that should have received due diligence. What is the true costs of such a crackdown on so many personal freedoms?  The sciences of psychology and economics were brushed aside, with minimal understanding or care about what the extreme  impositions would have on our mental health, learning, quality of life, relationships, security and much more.

When all is said and done, those ignored costs will, I believe, exceed the costs of Covid-19. Suicides and bouts of depression, especially among the young, up. Mental and emotional breakdowns, up. Deaths from deferred operations for heart diseases and more, up. Business failures, up. Unemployment, way up.

How many parents had to leave work to take care of their confined children? Or had to leave their children unattended? How many children feel abandoned because, well, they have been. How many children are falling behind, perhaps permanently, in their education. How many children are starving for friendship? How many children have become slaves of their smart phones in search of companionship? How many children have been denied the real-world experience of learning how to relate to other people face to face? How many children will carry these losses into adulthood? How much damage has been done to younger generations by subjecting them to untried and demonstrably destructive remote learning? And when the hell were teachers unions assigned to replace parents?

Never mind that the lockdowns and straight jackets have damaged minorities and impoverished the most. Do we have to listen to politicians whose expressed compassion for these folks are unmatched, but then launch another set of restrictions that pile on the misery?

What to do? How to escape this never-ending and suffocating suspension of some of our civil rights? Do Americans have to take to the streets like the criminals who are using social justice as a shield to hide their true purposes as they wreck lives and property? Perish the thought.

Because this form of government suppression is so unusual, the solutions are difficult. Peaceful civil disobedience was an effective tool to fight racial injustice. Maybe that.  Challenge the power of the tin-pot despots who run our cities, states and nation to micromanage our lives.  In the courts. In the voting booth. At public hearings. In the media. Confront these autocrats at every turn, whether they are on school boards, in city halls or statehouses.

Americans know what’s good for them. Parents who want to send their children to school shouldn’t be stifled. Parents who want to keep their kids at home should. It’s not in the American character to accept autocracy. Get mad. Don’t take it anymore.

My last trip to a hair salon was February 7, 2020. On my Google Calendar, I made a note: “Went half a shade lighter with goal of going lighter each time until age 75, then going gray.”

The plan to go gray by age 75 seemed, at the time, like a reasonable compromise. For years I regretted getting hooked on dying my hair. It was expensive, and I worried that it was harmful to my health. But each time I proposed going gray to my stylist, he warned me I would regret it and that the worst part would be the transition, with my roots waving the white flag of surrender to ageing. To ease that transition, I asked him to apply dye a half shade lighter each time I came in to the salon, giving me years to go from dark brown to something like sandalwood.

Five weeks later, when I would have been due for a cut and color, I was sheltering at home. My hair was the last thing on my mind. But as my bangs began to block my eyes, I had to do something. On April 6, I grabbed a pair of hair scissors and hacked away, twisting tiny bundles of hair and cutting on an angle. The results were acceptable.

But my hair grows fast, and I balked at trimming the hair on the back of my head. Two weeks later, I handed my scissors to the only person I would allow inside my house, my fiancé, Johnny Zoom — the nickname came from his years in advertising. John is a talented artist and a perfectionist, traits that served him well in his professional life but that stretched the haircut to almost two hours. Tiny snip, step back, repeat. Still, there’s no one I’d rather spend time with, and although John had never cut hair before, you could have fooled me. He needed a cut too, so I tried to follow his example. We were both pleased with the results. Selfies taken at a certain angle didn’t reveal the white taking over the back of my head.

We repeated our mutual haircuts a few times until mid-June, when a friend gave me the name of her backyard stylist. Armed with precision scissors and a cape, the stylist came to my backyard and set to work. She knew what she was doing, and I became so occupied with learning about her background — there’s something about talking to a stylist, less judgmental than a therapist or even a bartender, that can’t be beat — that I forgot to show her a photo of what my hair had looked like pre-COVID. The result, which was totally on me, was the shortest hair I’ve had since infancy. Re the gray, it was like going cold turkey: darker strands shot through everywhere with white.

I haven’t needed another haircut since then, while my hair grows back to its pre-pandemic length. But I’ve embraced the gray. In 1956, Shirley Polykoff, the lone female copywriter at Foot, Cone & Belding, dreamt up the provocative “Does she . . . or doesn’t she?” campaign for Clairol. Now, more than 60 years later, I can answer. She doesn’t.

It’s almost impossible to try and relate to people what it’s like for a cop who has to remain calm while processing the scene of a  violent death of a child. I will tell you that an overwhelming feeling of grief sets in, it’s something that never gets erased no matter how many times you’re exposed to it. The dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them, but to those of us who are confronted with the carnage of dealing with the violent death of children, it remains a haunting recurring nightmare. Look at the faces of these boys below. For the rest of their lives, they will be haunted by their friend’s death at 9 years old.

Almost immediately after the initial grief comes raging anger.  Yesterday Dajore Wilson just 8 years old became Chicago’s 43rd juvenile under 13 to be murdered by gang violence. She joins the long list of names that without question will be forgotten in a few weeks. Life on Chicago’s streets indeed is a fragile bargain, rescindable at almost anytime. Only wicked people who lack a complete sense of decency and who are afflicted with “EMPATHY DEFICIT DISORDER” kill children with absolutely no sense of compassion.  The gang mentality so coldly put to me one day some years back by the Notorious Street Gang leader and founder of the  GANGSTER DISCIPLES Larry Hoover,  “YOU WIT A GANGSTER! YOU ARE GANG.”

None of those 43 innocent children will appear on a famous athletes helmet, there will be no outrage or memorial plaques, their names will fade from memory and only their loved ones and friends will remember and shed tears and share nightmares long after they are gone.

As for the other 541 victims of Chicago’s gang violence THIS YEAR, it cannot be said that today’s shooters will be tomorrow’s victims. The killing of innocence continues, all the talk and pompous speeches have not stopped the slaughter. “CHICAGO’S CHILDREN  SOMEHOW HAVE RESURRECTED THE WORDS OF THOMAS HOBBES THE GREAT ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER WHOSE WORDS IN 1651 ARE HAUNTING.  “NO ARTS, NO LETTERS; AND WHICH IS WORST OF ALL, CONTINUAL FEAR OF VIOLENT DEATH; AND THE LIFE OF A CHILD, SOLITARY, POOR, NASTY, BRUTISH AND SHORT.”

Dr. Martin Luther King,  Jr. once said,  “In the end, it’s not the words of our enemy we will remember but the silence of our friends.” It seems that far too many political leaders in Chicago have blanched in the face of the ongoing slaughter in their City. Day after day, hour after hour the mayhem continues and now it has reached the age of innocence, silencing children forever. City leaders breathing their own exhaust not knowing that delusion is contagious. The Gangs in Chicago are emboldened and they are more of a power than they have ever been. It’s wise to believe that power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.  The question is WHO AND WHEN WILL THAT DEMAND BECOME A REALITY?

The silence by the leadership in Chicago is exactly what Dr. King meant.  The constant shootings and killings by the gangs tell us who the enemy is, and the SILENCE by political Leaders speaks volumes. Too much power permits the powerful to skate responsibility. There are no morals in politics, there is only expediency. By being silent and passive only a blind person cannot see the problem is rapidly expanding.  A politician’s tears dry quickly when it’s shed for others. Hunter Thompson once said, “TOMORROW WE HAVE TO GET SERIOUS.”  HOW MANY MORE OF CHICAGO’S CHILDREN HAVE TO DIE BEFORE THE SOUND OF SILENCE GOES BACK TO BEING A SONG?