The American "freedom cycle"

I was getting myself adjusted to the closing of Talking Points Memo Cafe's reader blogs and mulling over my manageable sense of loss and disappointment... and there I was, getting the old deja vu all over again...  I felt something familiar pushing up from my subconscious, a memory, a metaphor, for something I had seen and felt so many times...

By now, I go a long way back and things from my childhood sometimes take a while to work their way up to the surface... Then it came to me... From 1950s, deepest Eisenhower, Chicagoland... The first time I came across what I call the "American freedom cycle", the heady promise of freedom, its domestication and finally its death.

I was preteen then and I was over at a friend's house. His older brother put on a  45rpm record he had just bought, it was Elvis Presley singing Lieber and Stoller's, "Heartbreak Hotel", his first big hit.

I still remember the staccato opening "chinese" chords, the solid bass line, the "existentialist" lyrics and most of all, the amazing black-white voice. At the very beginning, in that stultified, tight assed, white bread, suburban America of the mid-fifties, the racial ambiguity and sexual energy of that voice gave me, and much of my generation, the idea of what it could be to be a fully free, young, adult male... it was soon to end... as usually happens to anything wild and free in the USA: in came the suits.

John Lennon was a poet, philosopher and a genius when he commented at Elvis Presley's physical death, "Elvis died when he went into the army". The horrid movies, the corny songs, the sequined rolls of fat, the redneck Judy Garland death, all were born in that barber's chair.

Elvis promised freedom and copped out, he is a symbol of that... Since then we have all seen it happen over and over again, the dream goes pffft... I can think of very painful examples right down to this very day (if you catch my drift). Sometimes I think that only the greatest artist of my generation, Muhammad Ali, was for real, right down to the last drop.

No people are more obsessed by the idea of freedom than Americans are, no one else thrills more to seeing freedom in action than we do, I don't think any people love to live it more, even if only vicariously, but no system is so adept at smothering it in the cradle as America's system is.

Here at TPM Cafe a free space suddenly appeared and we all walked out into the sunlight and played in that space and enjoyed our freedom while it lasted and finally, as almost always happens... in came the suits and the party is over.

I am not comparing Josh to Elvis or to Colonel Parker, but TPM is turning into a serious proposition and watching a lot of people having a good time without it producing any money is not the American Way... In come the suits.

I want to thank Josh for ever having thought of having something like the reader's blogs in the first place and for keeping it around as long as he has and if he ever figures a way of doing it again without losing money, I'll be back in a flash.

Hope to continue to see all my friends there in the commentary section in the following fashion:

Mr. Rosenberg, I heartily disagree with your opinion as stated above, And hey Aurthur babe, how you keeping?

 

Till then as my childhood radio favorites, Bob and Ray, used to say in signing off:

Write if you get work and hang by your thumbs!