How Eddie Rabbitt Framed America
The Country Elvis of the Ford Presidency
Actually, he was a rocker from New Jersey
Still, who doesn’t love a rainy night?
Eddie Rabbitt got a record deal in 1974, a real-life example of cause and effect. He’d just written a number-one song for Ronnie Milsap, and that mattered to the folks who inhabited the fashionable record-company offices. There were more number ones to be had, they must have figured, and not the kind written in back rooms where grizzled songwriters hover over legal pads and chain-smoke Marlboros. Maybe the higher-ups thought Eddie had the right look for the Gerald Ford era.
Eddie got to tour with Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton; he wrote and sang the title song for a Clint Eastwood movie, which is hardly the stuff of a shadowy existence.
From 1975 onward, Eddie Rabbitt worked in bright light, and for a while he was ubiquitous. It’s easy to forget that there was a time when Hee Haw reached a huge TV audience, or that Barbara Mandrell and her sisters hosted a weekly variety show for a …
Fire for Hire
Mercenary fire-fighting rigs loaded up with adventurers, old GIs, and ex-cons flock to the big burns for glory and profit.
They protect the houses of the rich on behalf of big insurance companies. Sometimes, they start fires themselves.
Our chaotic, crooked approach to managing fire and timber is reflected in what happens on the ground.
The fire began in silence. On the west ridge, an expensive radiographic weather station stood guard. The fire would not get that far. Below, in the green valley bottom, heavy equipment requisitioned from logging companies cut fuel breaks. The Overhead, as firefighters call the command team, buzzed all around in side-by-sides, using radios to deploy fire engines like ours: oversized pickup trucks loaded with water tanks and tools. We sidehilled the truck, our water tank full with 400 gallons, and it lurched on its tires.
Twenty men from a handcrew fanned out, watering the smoldering brush with thin, lateral hoses. Burning stumps and rootballs turned the air sour. Our other engine hand remained in the back seat, moping and nauseous, while the boss and I played dominoes on the hood.
“That looks promising,” said the boss, as lightning began to thread the clouds together. That August day was …
Tansy
Miraculous flower essence works directly on self-awareness; 4 drops under the tongue will cure your procrastinating, turn you into a model of healthy vigor and drive.
The Carolingian emperor Charlemagne new its qualities. So did Hildegard von ingen, Madame Restell, and the herbalist Steve Horne.
Ask President Henry Dunster of Harvard, whose corpse it helped to preserve.
Two summers ago, my neighbor in Las Vegas — an eloquent and refined man with one of the sharpest minds (and tongues) of anyone I know, a Wildean wit — admitted to me that he was depressed, and that his doldrums took the form of playing video games. If Oscar Wilde himself had materialized and told me he was a big fan of Grand Theft Auto, I could not have been more surprised. My neighbor is impressively well read, a person who recaps Thackeray novels for me as he finishes them, and with whom I discussed Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady over Zoom during the most stultifying months of the pandemic. He has serious literary aspirations, often waking at the crack of dawn to write before opening the small business he owns with his husband. And somehow, with all this talent, intelligence, and promise, he was sitting around wasting time… playing video games. Reader, forgive me: I am …
