A final thought about Indiana. The Financial Times has an article about corporate backlash to the RFRA laws in Arkansas:
The Arkansas u-turn followed a rare intervention by Walmart in a sensitive social policy debate. Doug McMillon, the retailer’s chief executive, said on Twitter the bill ‘threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present through the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold.’
Who is the moral arbiter for 21st century America? Wal-Mart. Big business has become MORE of a moral arbiter for equality in our society than religious right legislators.
We also are seeing a love-fest between Progressives and Big Business over the Arkansas/Indiana fracas. This isn’t the first time Progressives and Big Business have seen eye-to-eye, but the spectacle of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, taking his brave position on Indiana’s lack of discrimination protection for the LGBT community begs the question about whether he would ever take the same position about China’s discrimination of LGBT individuals. Would he reward states in the US that had already protected LGBT rights even before big business made it trendy, maybe by pulling a factory or two out of China and relocating them to those states?
You already know the answer.
On to music, well, to a story about music. The Smithsonian has an exhibition of the art and music of Mingering Mike. Mingering Mike is a fictitious funk and soul recording artist created in the late 1960s. Mike’s work might never have been seen if Dori Hadar hadn’t visited a flea market in Washington, DC in 2003. Digging through a crate of used LPs, he found 40 album covers that Mingering Mike had created for his non-existent music career:
I came upon this one crate that contained albums like I had never seen before…There were approximately 40 LPs that had hand-painted covers and handwritten liner notes and lyrics. And they were all made by someone named Mingering Mike.
Hadar later met Mike, and learned that starting in the late 1960s, Mike recorded hundreds of songs on a reel-to-reel recorder with his cousin. Today his music is only available on the subscription service eMusic.
To Mike, the album covers seemed like a natural way to archive his music in case a record label ever came calling. That never happened. In 1970, he was drafted into the military. He made it through basic training, but when it was time to fly to Vietnam, Mike just went home. In 1977, after President Carter pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers, Mike got a job and put his hand-painted albums in a storage unit. After 20 years in storage, when he fell behind on the payments, his albums eventually ended up at the flea market.
NPR reported that Leslie Umberger, who curated the exhibition, Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits at the Smithsonian, was drawn to one cover, made just after Mike went AWOL, because it shows his feelings at the time:
It kind of shows him as the civilian on one side, back to back with himself as a soldier…On the back side it shows the singer and the artist making people happy, and the other Mike, the soldier, going to war and standing in formation.
Here is a clip of Mingering Mike at his art show at Duke University in 2010:
Here are two images of his album art:
See you on Sunday.
