Tune in today, Tuesday October 30, on Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

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We are assuming the outrage in the mainstream press will have an effect.

It won’t, not much.

Did the coverage of Martin Luther King’s assassination stop racism? Hell, there were states that wouldn’t observe his holiday, businesses that still won’t. People are myopic, to change their views is nearly impossible. Meanwhile, those concerned believe if they just generate enough outrage things will change, but they don’t, the longer time goes by the more Holocaust-deniers we’ve got.

But the real problem is anti-Semitism is no different from anti-immigration. They think we’ve got their jobs, they think we’re ruining their lives, they think we’re destroying the country.

That’s right. We’re ruining the American way of life, we don’t belong, we’ve got to go home. Which in this case is Israel, which they only support because it’s the birthplace of Christianity, but while we’re at it, why don’t we give the country back to the Palestinians and we’ve got to work with Saudi Arabia, because Israel has no oil.

You can’t even defend yourself. College students are anti-Israel. We are supposed to shut up and do what they say. Because otherwise we demonstrate who we really are, loudmouthed, money-grabbing predators.

Well, we were money-lenders because you wouldn’t let us into other professions.

The canard that all lawyers and doctors are Jewish is incorrect. Sure, parents push children to become professionals, but then you’ve got the ignorant saying they want a Jew-doctor, or a Jew-lawyer, thinking they’re the best.

Meanwhile, Asians sue Harvard for admission and what comes out is…

Harvard perpetuates the establishment via legacy admissions, but now they’ve changed their policy, to admit more quiet, introverted people. The blowback had an effect, but Harvard gets money from the government and is not ignorant. People get money from the government and vote against their own interests.

And when you cry anti-Semitism, the enlightened say it’s dead! These same people and cronies who go all the way to the Supreme Court where voting discrimination laws are deemed no longer needed because racism is dead, and then you get what you’ve got in Georgia, will Stacey Adams get elected anyway? We’ll see.

You see they want us to stay in our place. Not rise above. An African-American can clean your house, but not rule above you, despite in many cases being here longer than you are, when it comes to blood.

And you may ask me to look at the sunny side of the street, be all kumbaya, but I’d tell you it’s going in the wrong direction, all over the world. Hell, look at Brazil. The rank and file want law and order, a return to yesteryear, when anybody with a brain will tell you that’s impossible, but they don’t want people with a brain, meanwhile, brains are destroyed in the NFL and they keep watching, like feeding Christians to the lions at the Colosseum.

I am a Jew. I can’t hide it. And if I do, people leak out anti-Semitic comments. In the the highest ranks of our economy. I always say something, but many Jews do not, you see they just want to get along, live their lives.

History tells us we’ve been expelled from so many countries, limited to so many jobs.

Then they tell us we’re all powerful and all rich.

Right.

It comes down to education and travel.

But Betsy DeVos wants more religious education, and that ain’t Judaism folks. And the right wants to starve public education. What’s gonna change?

Nothing.

So if it makes you feel good about being distraught about Pittsburgh while you’re loving each other, good for you, but know it won’t make any difference. We’re talking about thousands of years of history here. Hell, Rodney King had it right, why can’t we all just get along?

Because your religion is better than mine.

Your skin is better than mine.

Your attitude is better than mine.

I am the problem, I need to GET OUT!

I heard you, and hopefully, unlike the six million, when it gets really bad, I’ll heed your advice.

Do sports die?

I just spent seven and a half hours watching game three of the World Series. It ended after three a.m. on the east coast, it took eighteen innings, and all through it I had to fight looking at my phone.

Forget the backlash, we live in a distraction economy, and it’s never going to change. We’ve empowered people, the individual is finally a star, and they like it.

It never used to be this way. Used to be there was a clear demarcation between those known and unknown. Now, most of the known, are not that well-known. Or if they are known, their fame derives from exploits far from their wheelhouse, like Kanye West, who’s a musician, but is known by most for his political antics. The only person everyone seems to know is Donald Trump, after that…

So I grew up loving baseball. Went to Yankee Stadium, watched the pre-season games on TV, but…

The game remains the same but times have changed.

And it’s not only baseball, it’s football too. Everything from the last century that has not modernized for the new era is fading. Football is a game of coaches, and a relatively faceless team, in an era where the individual is king. As for basketball, the reason the NBA is so big is because its management allowed the players to extend themselves, have an identity, speak up. The NBA runs on Twitter. The old people who watch baseball are flummoxed by the social media service.

Now baseball is better at the stadium. But even there, it’s hard not to get distracted by your phone and your eating. But at home? When time is passing and nothing is happening? That’s a condition we no longer have in our society, boredom. Hell, I remember the days before clickers, i.e. remote controls, hell, I remember the days before color! But now we’ve got pristine hi-def and it all looks good but your phone has an even sharper screen, and it’s tailored just for you.

This is what the media has wrong. This is what the boomers have wrong. We are never going back, only forward. These people blamed Apple and Android for ruining society. They even got them to include software that theoretically discourages use, but it doesn’t, read the reviews. Wait a second, I should shut off my phone so I should read your physical newspaper and watch your TV program and talk to people? I hate to break it to you, but they do call it SOCIAL media. I’m in touch with more people than I’ve ever been in my life, and they’re all looking for ME! And it’s not only me, it’s EVERYBODY! And this has numerous consequences, one being that it’s hard to penetrate everybody’s feed. The second is that old paradigms, like baseball, don’t mesh with the new world.

First and foremost, baseball is now about money. Hell, they now have ads DURING the game, between pitches. Maybe they can fix it so it’s all ads occasionally broken up by the game. And one reason the games are so long is because the commercial breaks are so long. But money comes first. Only it doesn’t.

If you want people to believe, which is the bedrock of any enterprise, you’ve got to make it about the core, not the penumbra. The game, not the ads. The music, not the sponsorship. People want to believe. When you’re whoring yourself out, they can’t. But the ten percenters keep telling us it does not matter, when the truth is they just want to get paid. Any wanker who admires you because of your wealth is not a true fan. They’ve got to admire you for your identity, your talent, your skill, and that’s got nothing to do with money. Furthermore, these same people will support you when the sponsors are long gone.

We live in a Me Decade. Tom Wolfe’s was different, the seventies were about personal development. Today it’s about curating the world for yourself. Hell, everybody’s got a different wallpaper on their screen. Everybody’s got different settings.

And this is even evident at shows. People are on their phones because the experience is about them. They want to share it, with those there and at home. And if you bore the audience, they’ll start surfing their handsets for information. I know, I was recently at a gig and when the act played an unknown song, the guy next to me started reading the “Wall Street Journal” on his phone.

So you want to create something so great, that it trumps the phone. And that’s hard to do, but not impossible, but that’s your challenge.

Kinda like today’s game. What makes baseball work is the tension. And it didn’t emerge until about the thirteenth inning, when the Red Sox had run out of players and everybody was tired and anybody who got on base could change the game. And when the Red Sox scored and the Dodgers did too, in the bottom of the inning, to keep the game going.

Then again, experienced viewers winced many times. Because of the lack of fundamentals! Cody Bellinger running before the pitcher’s delivery? God, they teach you not to do that back in Little League. And the missed throws. Used to be these errors were the anomaly, now they’re there all the time, because the players are millennials, and the ethos is it’s all about ME! I don’t want to move the players around the bases, I want to hit a home run and be a hero! Unless it’s Instagram-worthy, it’s not worth doing!

So I don’t know if I’m gonna watch tomorrow, at least it’s now a series, two to one instead of three to zip. But I do have a life, and I had to blow off stuff I wanted to do this evening. Do I want to do that in the future?

Used to be the World Series had gravitas. Back before the endless playoffs, when the games took place in early October during Indian Summer. Baseball was not made to be played at forty two degrees, hell, it impacts the playing of the game. And it was not made to be played long after midnight either. But over the decades the game has been changed in service of the almighty dollar, to the point where most of the public has no idea who the great players even are.

But I’m not sure baseball is savable.

People like action. Something so intense they don’t want to be distracted. Something that they feel involved in. Which is why eSports and Fantasy games are so big.

But the owners of this nation, the ones who believe they are in control, feel that nothing must change and they must continue to win. So they miss change completely until it smacks them in the face. Like Trump. Turns out globalization hurt a lot of people, even though it was the right path to take, but these people felt ignored, they should have been helped, but if one team is winning they don’t care about another until…

It all crashes.

What we’ve learned in the twenty first century is edifices crash overnight. Kinda like that old Hemingway quote. The change comes very slowly, then all at once. Kinda like digital cameras. Kinda like the adoption of smartphones. Kinda like the death of baseball.

Geiger just called me from the airport, he said he was going to see Zhu at Red Rocks, it was sold out, did I know Zhu?

NO!

You hate to admit this. Even in this overpopulated world where no one really knows what’s going on.

So after I got off the call I pulled up the most streamed track on Spotify, “Working For It,” and I got it INSTANTLY!

Hmm… This is not supposed to happen.

I checked the Google News, I found no mainstream articles, nothing in the NYT or WSJ or WaPo. But they’re writing about hip-hop all the time and “Working For It” has 150 million streams and “Faded” has just as many and “My Life” from the new album “Ringo’s Desert,” released on September 7th, already has in excess of 16 million.

So Zhu definitely has an audience, both listening and going, even though he does not have a profile. You know, scorched earth publicity with antics profiled on TMZ. Maybe you don’t have to light yourself on fire to make it. Then again, making it is different from it used to be, and the emphasis is on the road, that’s where careers are cemented, how many tickets can you sell? How many people will want to see Cardi B next year?

Zhu

P.S. Zhu put out an EP, which is really as long as an album in the pre-CD years, back in April. He understands that it’s a steady stream of product that keeps the hard core satisfied, and the hard core keeps you alive. Which is one of the reasons rock has been left in the dust. Keep the customer satisfied!