Don’t tell the thought police, but I wonder sometimes what the world might look like had Beethoven and Stravinsky simply been piano players and not composers. If Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t had the gift of writing… hell, what if Tom Jefferson had had his heart, ideas and ideals, but was illiterate? Where would we be?

For that matter, where are we? How many Jeffersons and Kings are among us now, the very answer to our woes in their breasts, unable to present themselves to the world in any more articulate way than rap, graffiti or rage, their rubber unable to meet the road because we’ve sold out their educations?

I’ll go one step further and admit to a treasonous level of scrutiny: I openly wonder how many of us credit-card-carrying, consumer-culture lemmings still possess the capacity to truly reason as patriots should, and to doubt the honor of any government that would willingly bankrupt the very educational system of its own citizens.

As Americans, it is our duty to hold the tough questions up to the light, to answer them and to create a better world. As Americans, we should all hold ourselves to the highest level of realism where governing is concerned, and not only vote realistically, but not hesitate to draft some laws, and/or abolish some.

As Americans, we must always hold a few truths to be self-evident; draft legislation (and/or riot) when we feel our patriotic voice is not heard. And as Americans in the modern world, we must always determine what is really true. Yet we, and our fellow voters, allow ourselves to get corralled into the dumbest, most obvious Hollywood-driven drivel of reasoning on such a regular basis that I call voting day “Tuesday bargains.” The selling out of America, you see… ”Tuesday Bargains” …never mind.

In the musical world, as in all other cross-sections of humanity, there are followers and there are leaders. In music, leaders are called “Composers,” “Arrangers” or “Musical Directors.” Occasionally, a “Producer” qualifies as a leader in the eyes of musicians, but never “Agents” or “Managers” or “Publishers.” These usually fall under the heading of “Opportunists” (and I’m being kind)… but I digress. This log entry regards human composing, be it the Ninth Symphony or the American Bill of Rights, and I hereby put forth this tenet: Writing is writing, creating is creating, whether it’s music, a government or the future of your child or of our world. Not only is it all the same process; it’s all intertwined. Ideas grow from ideas, good and bad.

Long ago, one of our ancestors had had enough of living in the trees just to avoid danger, and dropped to the ground to try their luck. The rubber met the road. Creating lays the groundwork for the next generation of potentials, the way the hand moves a steering wheel, manipulating destiny where possibility meets time. Any strong, needed idea that gets realized, implemented and survives is amplified in its power as the foundation for the next generation of ideas, developing that theme… it’s all a whirling, dancing mobile of likelihood and potentiality, swinging from the ceiling of our collective psyche like the stars we will never reach, try though we must.

Thwarted by bad ideas and boosted by good, we lurch forward through our millisecond here on earth, on our species’ pilgrimage toward the next big thing, all the while developing our theme, collectively and as individuals, either according to intent or despite it. Good and bad, dark and light, ignorance and awareness… they’re all tools of the cosmic rules of thematic development, and these forces are as helpless as you or I against the almighty sky. The sky, by the way, is also helpless; it’s just bigger.

What portentous words, those: thematic development. Dit-dit-dit-daa, indeed. The track of reasoning that Beethoven rode into history while discovering and developing the Fifth Symphony was the same real estate trod by Jefferson, Einstein and Gandhi. It was (and is still, for any who care to stick their necks out) one man’s tenacity to keep chasing an idea, like a ferret diving down a rabbit hole, developing and applying that idea to the point that the ripples sent out change the whole collective body of human reasoning.

The pivotal fulcrums of human development, historically, have had as their accompanying engines imagination, audacity, pragmatism… and resolve. First the wheel must be invented; then it must meet the road. Hopefully, if the idea is good, this occurs before assassination, and if the idea is bad, assassination occurs first. A cursory glance at human history unfortunately confirms that this has not always been the case.

You see, what we’re all riding on here, ALL of us, and ALL of this—this big bus of humanity, this cosmic book of cause and effect under which we all pretend to the throne—all of our accomplishments, good and bad, and the systems springing from them, good and bad, and our art, good and bad, which so vividly captures our culture, love, war, grace, our ugliness and our beauty, and throws it all against the sky like a thunderhead blazing in a sunset for all to see, past, present and future… that, and the hopes we have for our futures, especially of our children, and the framework of our collective human constitution… all of this, this US, this WHOLE ENCHILADA… it all springs from IDEAS.

Human existence owes its survival to the human inception of creativity, perhaps beginning with the IDEA of leaving the trees and walking upright. To whoever first did that, it probably just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Time, of course, grew to history, and the inevitable layers of logistical portent grew upon that decision, like so many generations of legacy, and amplified that event to such significance that we, viewing it all from today, cannot imagine things to have ever been otherwise. But ‘t ain’t so. We just lost track of how lucky we truly are. Lucky and bad-ass.

Some of those ideas, seen from the perspective of modern ineptitude, were giant. Indeed, we live in a world where one doesn’t expect to even hear in the news (corporate or otherwise) of a human capable of really, REALLY leading. To wit: Drafting a Bill of Rights, a Gettysburg Address (hastily sketched on a train), a Ninth Symphony, or an “I Have a Dream Today” speech (head wound be damned).

Imagine if the western leaders in charge today had the moxie displayed by Churchill, Roosevelt or Truman (Stalin omitted). Iraq would be three easy pieces: Sunni, Shiite and Kurd. Bring the kids back in time for lunch. Of course, no true leader would have gotten us into Iraq in the first place, any more than any truly patriotic body of voters would ever have elected such a goon (in fact we didn’t)—but I digress.

When a culture loses its ability to put forth ideas and hook the rubber up to the road, game’s over. Cultures are like animals; in that way at least, mankind has not strayed from nature. Compare a city on the surface of our planet to a virus or bacteria in a Petri dish, and the word “culture” takes on new meaning. Ideas grow, and our civilization with them. And where an animal or a species grows weak, the balance tips and another animal or species pounces on the opportunity with what can only be called “all due ferocity and joy,” to quote Steinbeck. This is as it should be, of course. This may be a difficult thought to wrap your acceptance around, but it’s true: If we’re not the fittest, we don’t deserve survival.

America first carved out a niche based on the notion of holding a few truths to be self-evident, and then grew to be the exemplar for modern governments worldwide. How did we get to where we are now? I respectfully suggest that a government for the people, by the people REQUIRES the people, with their attention span intact—not X-boxers and other tumors of consumerism.

Looking back at the last forty years—a time during which American education was strangled, hopefully not for good—I remember it as being like watching an hour hand moving, or a boa constrictor slowly choking its victim; slow enough for John Q. not to notice or raise the alarm, only the rag-tag fringe cognoscenti.

Fast forward to the result, and now all of a sudden, We The People, the world’s great shining light, have the dawning realization and horror: We The People are no longer at the top of the food chain. Animals are crouching in the night, and we can’t spell “sullewshun.”

Personally, I love America, I would gladly die defending the Constitution (as long as killing elected officials is not required—as much as I’d love to, that’s not the American way), and I think we owe it to the world to get this fucking show back on the road, and in good form. Them animals crouching in them bushes don’t like human rights, and the world needs us.

So, what’s the “sullewshun?” Obviously, we need to locate and maybe reinvent our toolbox. Making funding for education not only a constitutional right, but a constitutionally required percentage of the budget would be a good start. ARTS in education should be a goddamned mandate, with copious spending. I am a musician, and have seen music do miraculous things in environments where nothing else could have possibly saved things, so I’m admittedly and duly biased. It is true, though, that musical study results in higher academic achievement. I don’t know why that’s so, but it’s an undisputed fact.

By the same token, it’s evidently the case that being raised in a Texas oil cartel family with back-door access to the CIA and then thieving into the White House results in global instability. It seems, to this writer at least, that the more sensible road is the musical one.

It’s easy for John Q. to look back wistfully on the time when Americans were considered to be educated by world standards, and would know what to do, and care enough to do it. And John Q. would rightly say, “I wish we were still like that.” It’s also easy for one to say, “There truly were giants in THOSE days” and, “It’s a shame that solution could never happen now.”

What we forget, and all too soon in our consumer-culture brainwashing, is that we have the same blood as our ancestors. The thematic development of time may have changed our level of ignorance, but not our blood. In the past, that blood has changed not only our world, but thematic development itself, as the most fundamental aspect of any human development is sheer goddamned will—but again, I digress.

“Where are the giants now?” you may ask. The answer is in your hands. They are us, or more succinctly, they are our ACTIONS. And bear in mind: Inaction is an action. Leave your video games, young ones. Leave your corporate news, shoot your televisions, leave your consumerism and pursue the ACTUAL truth. We can do this. To quote greatness: “If not now, then when, and if not me, then whom?”