• Secret Meetings   (mp3 format; 3:12 -- 4.6 Mbytes)

I have two theories. The first is about our small Borough of Roosevelt. We're a town of leftie liberals who love to argue, and it seems about once every five years an issue comes along to divide -- ferociously! -- the town. Friends become un-friends; neighbors stop behaving neighborly. Since Jill and I have moved here, we've lived through the DEP Wastewtater Compliance Order debate, the Gated Community Development debate, the Low-Level Nukular Waste debate, the School Superintendent debate, the Ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva debate, and most recently the Emergency Services Building debate. And when I say the town is "divided" about these local matters, I'm not over-generalizing. For example, the town put up a bond issue last year to fund a new Emergency Services building, and the vote was... tied. [note: there surely have been other local political hot-potatoes, but these are the ones I can recall of the top o' my haid]

My second theory is more personal, more ethically philosophical. I think that people sometimes tend to become what they condemn the loudest. I can apply this to myself. I am a staunch anti-elitist, and many of my writings have decried elitism in artistic cultures. Yet where do I teach? I'm on the faculty of one of the most elite institutions of higher education in the world. My music is hyper-elitist; I think it exists for an "elite" of one: me (which is kind of pathetic when you think about it).

So there's this guy who lives down the street, and he drives me crazy if I think about him too much. He styles himself a political radical-of-sorts, deploying his hackneyed subversive ideas to 'stir the pot' in town. Wow! How "sixties"! What a guy! One of his favorite techniques is to claim that people are holding clandestine meetings to decide the ultimate future of Roosevelt and its poor, uninformed citizenry (bear in mind that our total population is about 900, including our kids). Oh the power! The ironic confirmation of my second theory is that he is one of the more secretive bozos on our Borough bus. Our semi-periodic town debates give him ample opportunity to pretend he's the Roosevelt Borough incarnation of Che Guevara. Yeah.

He's long since devolved into a ridiculous joke for me most of the time, but sadly, people still take him seriously. Unfortunately his bald-faced lies have caused consternation for my good friend Jeff Ellentuck, currently Mayor of Roosevelt, and my wife Jill, currently Borough Council President of Roosevelt. I wanted to do something to cheer them up. One of the things I think I can do well is write silly rock-like songs. Once again, I'm pretending to be young! I wrote Secret Meetings to inject a bit of levity into the frame.