And My Tunes Were Played on the Harp Unstrung

[dweller]

by Christopher Cooper

We had brought the drywall contractor to the customer's home, but we had not made him drink the beer. A homeowner might
believe he or she would be better served by the sober, but many miles of flawless wallboard seams and acres untold of paint placidly
applied attest to the good work and good will and good service rendered by lightly intoxicated practitioners of the finishing trades. So
would it happen on the job I describe, but the customer wished to know when it would happen or how much it would cost.

“Will you be finished by Friday?” perhaps she asked. Or maybe, “Will it go over fifteen hundred dollars?” Either way, the answer
commenced: “I'd like to tell you....” That is, realistically, it would be finished when scheduling and sobriety and ambition fell into a
stable orbit. It would cost what it cost, labor plus materials, and if you could do it cheaper, why'd you bother to call me? But Frank
was smooth. He always let 'em down easy. “Well, I'd like to tell you it will be done Thursday for twelve hundred....” The but was
implied with such a beery-breathed force that no further elucidation or refinement was required. Frank was a customer relations
expert, a great musician working the spaces between the notes to profound nuance.

The question has come to me. Its presentation varies: asked or demanded, begged, whispered, hammered home with too many
exclamation points or question marks. It's a very good question. I'd like to tell you the answer. Well, yes, and I'd like to tell you what
you can do. Should do. Might do that would be worth the time it would take to boot your computer or dial a telephone number or
stick a stamp to a letter you wrote. I'd like to tell you there's a product you can buy, a solvent apply, a person or office or committee
that, hired or engaged or directed or forced or frightened into action will get this job done. I'd like to tell you!

Frank and I, we're not bad guys, just bad liars. The job will take longer and cost more than the customer, operating on some
inherent homeowner faith-based initiative (we have a budget, we have a schedule) wishes. We'd like to tell you what you want to
hear, but you probably don't want to hear the unpleasant truth we'd tell you.


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0929-23.htm

Cooper weaves his point with many threads, it takes time to get the whole tapestry completed. And there's a great bumpersticker idea at the end of article!
dp

[dweller]

1. ...

More than four hundred readers have e-mailed, written or called me in the past ten days, responding to my column of September
fifteenth. Four or five found my message or its delivery wrongheaded, tasteless or “typical liberal rhetoric.” One, an attorney, faulted
me for decrying wife abusers, pointing out that many men, most particularly he, were regularly abused, humiliated, worked over,
bankrupted or emasculated by women. A gentleman from a southern state reminded me that poor blacks had it coming, most
refugees were criminals. Another warned that I have “have lost the sight of Twin Towers in a smoldering heap, with thousands of lives
up in smoke,” and invited me to join him “in a call to repentance to The Creator of The Universe.”

I answered the hundred or so that seemed most desperate for some human connection, for an acknowledgement that their passing
my door had left a trace. Except for the tiny proportion of dissenters I previously noted, everyone agreed with me that our country
has been hijacked by selfish, petulant, shallow persons of privilege and practitioners of the religion of Mammon. My readers weep for
our children, our land, the diminished and hurting creatures with whom we share the ravaged planet. Women, especially older
women, singled out my unflattering description of Barbara Bush. Old ladies are as angry and embarrassed to have her stand as a
representative of their sex and generation as middle-aged men are disgusted to share time and space with her dull-witted son.

But so many then asked the question, “now what can we do?” Of course if you still find some logical connection between the Saudi
Arabians who steered those jets into Manhattan and our never-ending assault upon Iraq (Rumsfeld says twelve years or so should
clean things up pretty well), you just keep pumping three dollar gas into your Hummer and flying the yellow ribbon. If you don't see a
connection between our crushing national debt and the tax holiday for millionaires and billionaires, you just tune up your residential
security system, bar the gates and watch those unprepared, lazy, stupid renters and trailer dwellers go under the flood again.

If you feel powerless, if you despair, if reason and humility and decency and proportion appear to have been squeezed out of the
conduct of government and business, if you suspect your own school board might soon require the teaching of evolution come with a
warning label, if you wait in vain for the Democrats to remember they once opposed wars of aggression, domestic suppression and
the unfettered accumulation of vast wealth by a favored or connected class, you may have become so desperate for hope, for
encouragement, for a turn toward clean air and healthy daylight that you petition some inadequate, unknown, unconnected,
powerless, partyless opinion monger from Maine for help.

One reader reminded me that Neil Young said “it's better to burn out than it is to rust.” Another said he turned in good times and bad
to Bruce Springsteen, in particular to the assurance that “I ain't a boy; no, I'm a man, and I believe in a promised land.” As the
politicians say at the end of their commercials, “I approve this message.” And I'll suggest a poster to hang up while you listen to
those lyrics. Find a picture of Woody Guthrie holding that old guitar of his with the hand-painted sign on its top side: “This guitar kills
fascists.”

(link above)
dp

[bemildred]

2. Ripple

http://www.rockmagic.net/guitar-tabs/grateful-dead/ripple.crd