Two New Songs

My uncle is an old Buddy Holly fan, and he asked me to do a Buddy Holly song. I decided to do Oh Boy, because it's always been my favorite Holly tune. 

When I was in high school, M and I spent a lot of time talking on the phone. For some bizarre reason, her phone picked up a local oldies radio station. Anytime she was on her bedroom phone, you could hear the oldies station in the background. So old 1950s rock n' roll hits were frequently the background music to our hours-long conversations in high school. Oh Boy was played frequently and I loved the background vocals - they were so emblematic to me of 50s pop music. 

Anyway, this is my rendition of Oh Boy (without any backing vocals of course). I created the backing track online by writing out the drum and bass lines and then playing it in the background as I played and sang guitar live. 

And the next song is Goodbye, by Elton John. This is the last track on his 1971 Madman Across the Water album. I have no idea what it's about - like a lot of his songs from the early 70s, it doesn't really make any sense. But I love its melancholy beauty. 

Fixing Our Political Party Problem

As of this writing, the 2020 election still hangs in the balance two days after Election Day as states finish counting ballots. In the interim, I've been thinking about how we could solve our little problem of massive, widespread political unrest and division. 

The first step, of course, would be to have a normal, non-divisive human being in the White House, someone who actually seeks to unite rather than divide. But that's not actually what I want to talk about. 

Instead, I want to talk about fixing our existing political parties. There are a million things that should happen - chief among them would be extensive changes to campaign finance, including a complete ban on television, internet, and print advertising. I would also argue that campaigns should be 100% publicly-funded - no private donations, and definitely no Super PACs. 

But as for the parties themselves, they should be each be split in two. Mainstream Republicans get hurt in elections by their association with right wing extremists. Similarly for mainstream Democrats. 

Biden's failure to secure a resounding victory on Election Day was partly due to the Trump campaign successfully tying him to the left wing and its outrages. For instance, many reports have argued that Biden lost numerous Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida because attack ads painted him in league with socialists and communists - something that is very close to those particular voters' hearts. 

This could be avoided by splitting the parties. The left wing should break away from the Democratic Party and form its own organization. AOC or some other firebrand could be its leader. Similarly with Trump and his right wing supporters. That would then leave the traditional Democratic and Republican parties to the moderates who don't want to be associated with the fringe. 

Obviously, in Congress, the left wing party would largely vote with the Democrats, and the right wing party with the Republicans, but in major elections, Democrats and Republicans wouldn't have to suffer because of the outrages of their extreme elements. It would be much harder for an attack ad to tie Biden to AOC and socialism if all those socialists weren't actually members of, and influencers of, the Democratic Party. The same would be true for Republicans. 

Four parties would, of course, solve one set of problems only to create different ones. What happens when the candidate is a Democrat and the left wing party refuses to support him/her? Conservatives then run away with the election. Beyond that, it could create headaches in Congress. 

But I can't personally see how more parties would be a bad thing for American democracy. I've argued elsewhere that the U.S. is the only major democratic country on earth with only two political parties, and that's despite having the third highest population. Canada has 5 parties currently represented in its legislature, despite having only a fraction of the U.S. population. India literally has dozens. 

So when I become king of America, this is the first change I'm going to make. The second will be to ban guns. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.