Music Is

By James Bauhaus (As published in The Prisoner Express magazine, 2010)

            When I was young, music was like a drug to me; a very mild drug like caffeine or nicotine, but a drug nonetheless. "Good Vibrations" would get my fingers tapping. Foghat's "Fool for the City" would send chills up my spine. The Beatles could make me sing, laugh, or cry. Others were good for driving, running, working out and even dancing.

I did not have this music addiction like other kids do. In my whole life, I have only bought one record, a 45 RPM of "Green-Eyed Lady" by Sugarloaf, and it was not even for me, but for my girlfriend. I've never even bought a radio or stereo system. I had to take an 8-track system on a debt that would otherwise have never been paid. AII the other stuff was given to me instead of thrown away when someone upgraded. f was glad that Detroit could not figure out how to make car radios work long enough for me to get them. 1 fixed a radio in my truck once, then never used it, and wished passengers would leave it alone. Despite this, the music would play in my head, disturbing concentration, distracting me from important tasks, wasting my time and lowering my efficiency.

Gradually I grew out of this addiction, sooner than most. It turns out that music is a place-saver, to keep new, empty minds from collapsing until our cortexes can be filled with useful, functioning maps, sensory arrays, information and processes required for adult life. It's like when babies are born with cataracts. You have only two years to remove them, else the baby is blind for life simply because the ocular areas of the brain never form due to the lack of visual input.

Now I've got plenty of input, even while suffering the latest round of illegal, corporate prison masspunishment lockdown torture. (2500 victims trapped in toilet-sized cages 24/7 because two idiots attacked ripoff artists from an adjacent mini-prison. Nobody died, and only minor injuries, but they've been torturing us for 4 weeks with no end in sight.) Instead of listening to the crap that passes for music today, I write my own music and send it to the gov-crats for play. My most recent success is a letter that inspired our local state representative to call up these worthless, harmful corporate prison poltroons and make them but PBS back on television here. They thought I would politely accept being trapped in their phony grievance denial machine, glad to pay them $2 for the privilege of their nonsense rulings, but I went around them to their bosses, the state legislature.

Now my music is the logic of their own federal laws, such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which prohibits them from letting monopolies like GEO, Keefe, CCA and Centrics group rape us just because their lucre has bought them some politicians. More of my music is the Clayton Act, where the federal government prohibits states from price gouging, such as Keefe Corporation perpetrates against us every day.

We don't have to pay for civil lawsuits against them every time. Sometimes we are able to obtain justice by simply appealing to their sense of justice, morality, ethics, and law. We use logic, their own sense of fair play, and if that fails, we can shame and censure them. Getting service and fair play from gov-crats while in prison is like how ancient Chinese built roads through swamps: Everyone brings a rock, coming and going. The weight of continuous protest, appeals and logic gradually wears away the wall of knee-jerk denials until they finally realize that denial is more costly than simple, ethical, human behavior.

This is how we got cages too big to simultaneously touch opposite walls. This music is how we got exercise yards and balls to play with. This is how we got a table to write on, a chair to sit in, a wastebasket and shelves so we don't have to walk and trip over what few possessions we have. This is how we got radio, TV, and print media. This music is how we are going to get computers, net access, video games, and anything else that we want or need badly enough.

Instructions on how to accomplish this are on my net site, www.jamesbauhaus.org in essays such as "Why Write?", "Electronic Voting: ...... "More Bread, Less Circus" and many more.

Let the music play, and crank it up!"