|
This is part of a rambling, wonderful interview that Barlow, who wrote "Mexicali Blues" and is one of the true fathers of cyberspace, gave in his native Wyoming. Yes, he knows Cheney pretty well. Barlow, the son of the former Wyoming Senate majority leader (Rep., what else?) thinks Dick and the GOP Congress have betrayed what the Republicans used to stand for. Audio and text versions: http://www.planetjh.com/davis/davis_2005_07_27.html SNIP JPB: Yeah, I’m a free-marketeer. I believe in free markets, but like the discussion we just had gives evidence, sometimes you have things that look like free markets but aren’t because of artificial reasons. I’m not very happy with the current state of what calls itself free market economy in the world because you’ve got all these grotesque monopolies that are able to gain the system in a way that’s to their advantage by virtue of their power, and that’s not a free market. A real free market has some kind of counter-veiling influence from the government to keep a monopoly in check, but this government…it’s not about free marketing principles, it’s about greed pure and simple. And this government wants to assure that the other people that they went to college with get just as rich as they do. This country is going to make Mexico look like Sweden inside of ten years in terms of wealth distribution, because there are no counter-veiling forces. They’ve eliminated tax basically for the ultra-rich, they’ve eliminated any control over monopolies, the greedy have free reign and its just going to be the super rich and the peasants.
AD: Do you come back to Wyoming very often?
JPB: Fairly. Not as much as I’d like to or have in the past.
AD: You still have a home here?
JPB: I still have enough land in Cora…if I didn’t know what a ranch really was, I could pretend that it’s a ranch. And that’s where I vote and don’t pay taxes. Wyoming doesn’t have an income tax.
AD: I know all about that. Hey, I emailed your photographer from your website. Bart, is that his name?
JPB: Bart Nagle
AD: Yeah. He sent me an email back and said ‘did you know that Barlow is into 'polyamory’, what’s that all about?
JPB: (laughs) Polyamory, that’s where you’re freely confessed that you have more than one lover at a time. And actually I’m less that way than I used to be, but I was trying to make people understand, that at least for some folks, this was a fairly natural state. And instead of skulking around about it that we’d all do better to avoid the deceit and be honest.
AD: What is the story behind “Throwing Stones”? You wrote that in Cora as well, right?
JPB: Yeah. That’s the only explicitly political song we ever wrote. And the story behind that was that I was having a serious argument with Dick Cheney at that point, who I’d help get elected and been a pretty good congressman for the stuff that I was interested in, which was environmental stuff. We’d helped stop acid rain in the Wind River Mountains and passed the Wyoming Wilderness Act together and worked out a lot of the necessary compromises. He fished on my ranch and…we were co-conspirators.
But then he got into this obsession with the Russians and this conviction that we had a clash of cultures that had to be resolved by whatever means, and so he helped base the MX Missile in Wyoming. The original idea of the MX Missile was that it was a second-strike, retaliatory weapon that could not be taken out by a first strike because it would be running around on a vast railroad system kind of like a gigantic shell game, so the Russians wouldn’t know where the MX’s were. And the MX itself is an extremely destructive instrument. It has ten warheads, each one of which delivers 550 kilotons of explosive energy. And just for purposes of comparison, the bomb that completely leveled Hiroshima and took out half a million people in a second had only seventeen kilotons to give you some idea. So you can to the math. That’s just one missile. And the plan was to base 100 of them. And Dick was instrumental in seeing to it that they were not based in the original basing formula, which made them explicitly second strike, but that they were basically first strike weapons. They were completely naked and stationary and they were all put on launch on warning. And had all of those missiles gone, because some cloud of geese flew over a radar in Greenland, that would’ve been the end of all like on the planet. And I got so freaked out that somebody was so determined to win a political battle that he was literally willing to endanger all the life on planet Earth, that I felt like I had to say something…so I wrote that song. And like I say, I owe Dick a lot for that song.
AD: Would you consider yourself Republican?
JPB: At this stage? Yeah, I probably would except that I don’t consider him one. I mean, I was raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, weariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There’s a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they’re Republicans, I’m not. But I’m really not a very comfortable Democrat. The Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to dithering pus%@#& and it was pathetic. So I’m just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone.
AD: I hear ya. SNIP |
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
