Codger: Sing louder

Codger had been feeling paranoid lately for imagining that the government was coming after him. 

It’s not as if he actually had dealings with those teen-aged DOGES or the faceless ICE. They were busy abducting laborers and chasing government bureaucrats out of their Washington offices. They probably didn’t even know that Codger existed, happy as a wild turkey on his enchanted island.

Meanwhile, Codger wasn’t paying enough attention to the news. He has been busy dealing with the aftermaths of spinal surgeries. Lately, he has been basing his hopes for complete recovery on steroid injections into his back.

Just then, the stock brokers in charge of the nation’s health care announced new programs to evaluate and possibly eliminate Medicare and Medicaid funding of various treatments including certain spinal surgeries and steroid shots into the back. 

That got Codger’s attention. He wasn’t paranoid. He was in trouble. It was one thing when they merely canceled foreign aid programs that saved a chunk of the world or restricted the vaccines that had kept millions of Americans alive, but the spine is Codger territory. Could Trump’s cartel have been any more specific? 

They were coming after Codger.

As it turns out, he was paranoid. They are coming after everyone, even those who voted for Trump. The present administration is the nation’s autoimmune disorder. Slashing the safety net, overturning the rule of law, replacing order with chaos, then placing the military in charge, are all classic steps in a coup for power and profit. 

Aren’t we safe and protected here on Shelter Island? The supervisor and her deputy are Republicans, but who thinks Amber and Meg are plotting to shut down Sylvester Manor unless it stops teaching about slavery? The town doesn’t even have an attorney, and that’s not political, it’s a bipartisan issue. And look how well it handled the Mister Softee crisis, silencing its music when the truck stopped to sell. A compromise! The president would have demanded all the ice cream the DOGES could eat.

So maybe if it’s not happening on Shelter Island, it’s really not happening. 

Codger was able to hang onto that thought until two weeks ago when he attended the sixth annual reunion of the Island’s pop music troubadours, Tom Junod and David Browne. In past years they have discoursed on such subjects as Long Island music and yacht rock. This time they asked, “Where Have All the Protest Songs Gone?” It was surprising to realize that in this time of terrible fragmentation, there is so little musical response. Where were the current versions of “Dixie” or “Blowin’ in the Wind?” or even “Strange Fruit?” 

Codger recalled the playing of “La Marseillaise” at Rick’s Place in Casablanca. That would have held the ICES at bay. There are plenty of musicians and some songwriters on the Island, and residents are not timid. Remember how the pickers packed Town Hall to protest restraints on rummaging through piles of scrap? And how local oligarchs keep flooding Town Hall with lawyers when their entitlement to build into wetlands is endangered?

Maybe people are intimidated after all, just too fearful to stand up. Those DOGES and ICES seem so sure of themselves, backed by a self-declared infallible president and the National Guard, who in its last most notable American assignment, 55 years ago, massacred college students at Kent State. 

It was in the anxious time last week after the murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk that Codger discovered the Canadian singer-songwriter Martin Kerr. His  most recent album, “Overdue for a Revolution,” is a remarkably rational, though astringent, call for sanity in a time of genocide, billionaires, immigrants and homeless-ness.

For Codger, Kerr’s songs — disavowing violence, calling for common ground — felt like an answer to the calls for revenge against Kirk’s killing along with retribution against those who dared mention his deliberate provocations against minorities and his view that gun deaths were an acceptable price to pay for preserving the Second Amendment. Is America ready for that level of irony?

Kerr sings “Can’t We All Get Along?” His most relevant song is “Hey, Luigi,” about the young man who murdered a health company executive last year.

You put bullets into Brian

But they’ve already replaced him

And the kids will keep on dying all the same.

They’re still denying all the claims 

They’ve got no shame

Oh, there must be better ways.

There better be. Codger feels threatened, but not hopeless. People are stirring. There are demonstrations around the country, although not well-covered by the media. There are new songs that need to be sung louder.

There must even be people who voted for Trump twice because they wanted change, wondering if this is the change they wanted. Many of them, thinks Codgers, have bad backs.