Another Visit to Burt's Tavern

[RC]

Karaoke Night in George Bush's America
Another Visit to Burt's Tavern

By JOE BAGEANT

73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!

---Men's room wall, Burt's Westside Tavern

Learning through drinking was never dull. But when karaoke came to American bars it got even more entertaining, especially at Burt's where some participants get gussied up for their three weekly minutes of stardom. One of them is Dink, a stubble-faced 56-year-old guy presently dressed like Waylon Jennings. However, Dink's undying claim to fame in here in Winchester is not his Waylon imitation, which sucks. It is that he beat up the boxing chimpanzee at the carnival in 1963. This is a damned hard thing to do because chimpanzees are several times stronger than a human and capable of enough rage that the pugilistic primate wore a steel muzzle. Every good old boy in this place swears Dink pounded that chimpanzee so hard it climbed up the cage bars and refused to come back down and that Dink won the hundred dollars. I don't know. I wasn't there to see it because my good Christian family did not approve of attending such spectacles. One thing for sure, though. Dink is tough enough to have done it. (By the way, a note to readers who email me asking if names like Dink and Pootie are fictional devices. Hell no! Not only do we have a Dink and a Pootie here, we also have folks named Gator, Fido and Tumbug---who we simply call Bug.)


>SNIP<
"I often think the culture wars are just more educated liberal silliness, cocktail chat that never touches the heart of the problem---which is that gutless soft liberals refuse to cross class lines and meet their suffering brothers and sisters face to face right here on this earth. The Republicans did a great job of this in grassroots organizing, and they were selling bullshit and a screwjob. Imagine what an honest populist effort might do."

http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant09092004.html

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This is a good read. It shows a down side of America by a person who lives there.

[tomreedtoon]

1. It is a sad, touching article that everyone should read.

You want to know why so many people aren't thrilled by Obama's election? Or by the usual gang of liberal candidates? Read the whole article.

And sadly, the conclusion is right. The people in the article will die from preventable diseases and other causes, and undergo pain and suffering, because they are incapable of getting excited by (or angry at) things that politicians say. Because everything being said is a lie.

I know of country music bars where the daily alcohol-fueled fight is about the only relief working-class people have from their despair. Not Obama, not Olbelmann, not anything said by Kerry, Kennedy or Edwards. Argue if you want about who killed the American Dream, these are that dream's walking dead.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. I have to agree with that last statement.

Joe Bageant rails against the same kind of progressive complacency and delicacy all the time. In my own experience, with an inside-the-beltway initiative, the people were generally unable to talk to each other. They could never, ever communicate with a Bubba or a Tumbug. Besides, they wouldn't want to, either. Theirs is a subtle elitist attitude, one caused by a closed and incestuous system, one where connections, reputation and familiarity get them wheere they want to go, which is the promised land of big contributions. Anything outside of the beltways is strange, alien and incomprehensible.

And perhaps unclean.

Get into flyover country, and it even gets more bifurcated.

Some folks need to wipe the shit offn' they upper lips and get that look offn' they faces.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. Go to my brother in law's bar in Arlington TX

And you'll hear liberal talk, thank you. (BTW, he says business is up 25% this year--perhaps having to do with the talk as well as the Guiness on tap and the darts.)