Why Does Willie Nelson Still Do It?

The music icon talks to us about how he’s able to continuing writing—and touring—well into his eighties.

Willie performing at Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theater on December 29, 2017. Photograph by Jeff Wilson.

Many of his peers are dead, and countless others haven’t picked up a guitar since their arthritis kicked in. But on April 29, two days after releasing his aptly titled seventy-third studio album, Last Man Standing, Willie Nelson turns 85. A few weeks later he’ll be, as per usual, on the road again.

He’s got plenty of cash and a legacy that rivals any musician who’s ever lived, so no one would blame Willie if he spent the rest of his life doing nothing but lounging on a beach near his home in Maui or enjoying edibles at his ranch outside Austin. Yet he’s still writing songs, playing guitar, and making music nearly every day. We joined him on his tour bus ahead of a show at Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theater to ask the big question: Why does he still do it?

Because it still makes him happy. “I think I need to keep being creative, not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it,” Willie says. He partially credits doing what he loves for keeping him animate into his eighties. “I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.”

Because what else would he do? Over the past couple of decades, whenever Willie was asked about retirement, he’d reply, “All I do is play music and golf. Which one do you want me to give up?” And Willie doesn’t play as much golf anymore.

Because he’s never been good at sitting still. From his initial move to Nashville, in 1960; to his return to Austin, in 1972, growing out his hair and bringing the hippies and rednecks together; to his first turn in Hollywood in 1979 to try his luck on the silver screen, Willie has spent his life on the move. Like he says in 1993’s “Still Is Still Moving to Me,” the closest thing he has to a spiritual manifesto: “I swim like a fish in the sea all the time.”

Because he’s a generous person. Playing music is how Willie gives back. He fights for American farmers with Farm Aid—the annual fundraising concert he first organized with John Mellencamp and Neil Young—he plays benefits for hurricane and fire victims, and he performs gratis shows for wounded soldiers. For years, Willie’s handlers have tried to insulate him from outsiders asking him for help because, they say with exasperation, “Willie can’t say no,” a character flaw that we are all thankful for.

Because the people keep coming. “The fact that people still show up and like what we do is a good enough reason to keep doing it,” Willie says. His concerts over the past few years haven’t been his best; he’s been sick (colds knocked him out of several gigs last year, and the flu forced him to cancel two months of shows this winter), and he doesn’t perform as long as he used to. But when he walks onstage, waves at the crowd, and greets them with a “How y’all doin’?” he’s repaid with adoration. His fans come for the music and the ritual: “Whiskey River” first; the medley of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” and “Night Life,” in the middle; gospel songs at the end. But mostly they are there just to be in the same space as Willie, and he feeds off of that energy.

Because he likes to win. For a born competitor like Willie, staying relevant has remained a priority. “It’s all a game,” says his friend and frequent collaborator Ray Benson, the front man of Austin-based Western swing group Asleep at the Wheel. “It’s all a bet. He loves to win a game, whether it’s golf, chess, or poker. I was in Maui recently, and he said to me, ‘You should’ve been here last night—I beat Woody [Harrelson] out of $3,000 playing cards!’ ”

Because all of a sudden he’s writing songs again. Until recently, Willie, who has penned some of the greatest tunes in the American songbook, seemed content to re-record old classics or pay tribute to other songwriters. As he admitted in 2012, “I haven’t had time to write anything new.” But then, later that year, he started working with Nashville producer Buddy Cannon and rediscovered his writer’s voice. Their first co-write was 2012’s “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” and the partnership has been thriving since.

Because it’s a family affair. Sure, he’s shared the stage with some of the world’s most renowned musicians, such as Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra, but nothing pleases Willie more than playing with family. Every night on tour, his sister, Bobbie, 87, whirls through the instrumental number “Down Yonder” on piano, while Willie looks on in admiration. And he gets special joy from performing with his brood: his sons Lukas and Micah and his daughters Amy and Paula. “There’s nothing better than having your kids get up onstage and play music with you,” he says. “You can’t beat that.”

Because his body lets him. He’s certainly had health issues over the years: one of his lungs collapsed in 1981 and again in 2008, and in recent years he has ruptured a bicep and torn a rotator cuff. But Willie stays in shape. He used to run; now he bikes, swims, lifts weights, and does tae kwon do. “I think Dad’s gonna live to be 108 years old if he wants to,” Lukas says.

Because it’s how he can best prove the death rumors wrong. In February 2015 a fake news site proclaimed that Willie was dead. Two months later it followed with a report that a gardener had found him lifeless in the front yard of his Maui home. On the morning of August 3, 2017, various radio stations began tweeting rumors that Willie had died. When Willie heard about his demise, he laughed.

But he knows that one day the rumors will be true. Last Man Standing, like last year’s God’s Problem Child, is about mortality. “I don’t want to be the last man standing,” he sings on the title track, “but, wait a minute, maybe I do.” As with loving and longing and drinking, Willie’s interested in death when he can turn it into a song. “I don’t think about dying,” he said in 2012. “It’s inevitable, so why worry about that shit?”

https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/why-does-willie-nelson-still-do-it/amp/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Web%20Social&utm_content=Willie%20Nelson%20Still%20Do%20It&__twitter_impression=true

Glyphosate shown to disrupt microbiome 'at safe levels', study claims.

Study on rats said to show that the chemical, found in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, poses ‘a significant public health concern’.

A French farmer sprays glyphosate herbicide produced by US agrochemical giant Monsanto on a field of corn. Photograph: Jean-Francois Monier/AFP/Getty Images.

A chemical found in the world’s most widely used weedkiller can have disrupting effects on sexual development, genes and beneficial gut bacteria at doses considered safe, according to a wide-ranging pilot study in rats.

Glyphosate is the core ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and levels found in the human bloodstream have spiked by more than a 1,000% in the last two decades.

The substance was recently relicensed for a shortened five-year lease by the EU. But scientists involved in the new glyphosate study say their results show that it poses “a significant public health concern”.

One of the report’s authors, Daniele Mandrioli, at the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna, Italy, said significant and potentially detrimental effects from glyphosate had been detected in the gut bacteria of rat pups born to mothers, who appeared to have been unaffected themselves.

“It shouldn’t be happening and it is quite remarkable that it is,” Mandrioli said. “Disruption of the microbiome has been associated with a number of negative health outcomes, such as obsesity, diabetes and immunological problems.”

Prof Philip J Landrigan, of New York’s Icahn School of Medicine, and also one of the research team, said: “These early warnings must be further investigated in a comprehensive long-term study.” He added that serious health effects from the chemical might manifest as long-term cancer risk: “That might affect a huge number of people, given the planet-wide use of the glyphosate-based herbicides.”

Controversy has raged around glyphosate since a World Health Organisation agency – the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – judged it to be a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015.

However, US and European regulators subsequently deemed it acceptable for use, a move campaigners condemned because of regulators’ use of secret industry papers and experts with alleged ties to Monsanto.

The US firm, which recently merged with Bayer in a deal worth more than $60bn, argues that it is being unfairly targeted by activist scientists with ulterior motives.

Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s VP for global strategy told the Guardian: “The Ramazzini Institute is an activist organisation with an agenda that they have not disclosed as part of their crowdfunding efforts. They wish to support a ban on glyphosate and they have a long history of rendering opinions not supported by regulatory testing agencies.”

“This is not about genuine research,” he added. “All the research to date has demonstrated that there is no link between glyphosate and cancer.”

In 2017, the Ramazinni Institute was criticised by members of the US Congress, which has provided it with funding. US congress members have also probed funding for the IARC.

The new crowdfunded pilot study which the Ramazzini Institute compiled with Bologna University and the Italian National Health Institute observed the health effects of glyphosate on Sprague Dawley rats, which had been dosed with the US EPA-determined safe limit of 1.75 micrograms per kilo of body weight.

Two-thirds of known carcinogens had been discovered using the Sprague Dawley rat species, Mandrioli said, although further investigation would be needed to establish long-term risks to human health.

The pilot research did not focus on cancer but it did find evidence of glyphosate bioaccumulation in rats– and changes to reproductive health.

“We saw an increase in ano-genital distance in the formulation that is of specific importance for reproductive health,” Mandrioli said. “It might indicate a disruption of the normal level of sexual hormones.”

The study’s three peer-reviewed papers will be published in Environmental Health later in May, ahead of a €5m follow-up study that will compare the safe level against multiple other doses.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/16/glyphosate-shown-to-disrupt-microbiome-at-safe-levels-study-claims 

Conservatives Should Care about Institutional Racism.

Contemporary America faces continued racial discord that throws into question our mutual seriousness about the natural rights tradition and our commitment to the demands of republican citizenship. In an effort at self-scrutiny, conservatives should ask ourselves what our first response is in the face of evidence of institutional racism, and then ask ourselves what it should be.

Two cases that exemplify racial tensions in America are catching our nation’s attention.

In one case, Brennan Walker, a black teen, was shot at by retired firefighter Jeffrey Zeigler after knocking on the door of Zeigler’s Rochester Hills, Michigan home. Brennan was in search of directions to his campus after missing the school bus and getting lost on a shortcut to his school.

In the second case, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson (Photo) were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after a manager accused them of loitering and called the police, claiming the men were trespassers. The men had refused to leave when asked because they were waiting to meet with real estate developer Andrew Yaffe about a business opportunity. Yaffe arrived as the men were led out in handcuffs for trespassing, and vociferously assured the police that the men were waiting for him and therefore not trespassing.

Understanding what is at stake in both of these incidents—and in our own responses to them—is the intention of this essay.

The Walker Case.

In Walker’s case, the moment was caught on Zeigler’s home security video, disproving Zeigler’s claim that he shot in self-defense. This evidence led to his arraignment for assault with intent to murder. Allegedly, Zeigler’s wife can also be heard on the tape asking “Why did these people choose my house?” According to prosecutor Kelly Collins, the video affirms Walker’s account of events, not Ziegler’s. The scene described by Walker is one of hysteria, with Mrs. Zeigler opening the door, yelling and accusing Walker of trying to rob her, and Zeigler responding to his wife’s screams by running down the stairs with a 12-gauge shotgun and shooting at the fleeing Walker.

Several things stand out here. First, Zeigler is a retired public servant who pleaded guilty to shooting at someone during a road rage incident in 2004. However, in online and personal discussions of this case, I have not seen anyone ask whether or not Zeigler has a criminal record. Instead, I have seen or heard multiple people ask whether Walker, the teen who was shot at, has a criminal record. The presumption of criminality lay not with the man whose own surveillance tape accuses him, but with the black boy who was shot at.

Second, the Zeiglers’ recorded response offers a frightening insight into current race relations in America. The Zeiglers saw the appearance of a black boy at their door as a kind of invasion. The mere sight of him led to a quick escalation: an inference that he was there to rob them, cries for help, and a quick resort to potentially lethal self-defense. The immediate fear of someone different from them is captured in Mrs. Zeigler’s expression: “Why did these people choose my home?” Walker was not at the Zeiglers’ door at the head of a mob; he was alone. By “these people,” Zeigler means “black people.” The teenage Walker becomes a symbol to the Zeiglers of all the assumptions they hold about black citizens and their intentions.

The Zeiglers’ unhappy and limited understanding of “these people” is not a merely a lack of political correctness. It is a matter of life and death.

The Starbucks Incident.

Similar themes of swift escalation and prudence forgotten in the face of blackness are present in the Philadelphia Starbucks incident. However, some people mistakenly dismiss the incident as a non-substantial kind of dignity harm, while others view the outcry against the arrest of the two men as a kind of intolerant demand for toleration that exceeds the bounds of justice and moderation.

Other people may focus more on the fairness of the Starbucks policy itself, not on the application of the policy, or even the fact that the men were not loitering, but participating in the common consumer habit of meeting friends and business associates in public places and waiting to make a purchase. The implication of such scrutiny is that the men were expecting special treatment, the kind of treatment not afforded to citizens in a republic of equals.

On the contrary, the problem is not that Nelson and Robinson were expecting special treatment, but that they were not afforded the equal treatment that all citizens should receive in a republic. The sentiment of many of those present was that the men were singled out. Melissa DePino, who posted the vital footage of the incident to Twitter, remarked in her tweet that “All the other white ppl are wondering why it’s never happened to us when we do the same thing.” Furthermore, Starbucks “acknowledged that the incident is at odds with a common practice,” noting the reputation of Starbucks as “community hubs” and throwing into question the status of the policy itself. Philadelphia’s police chief has since apologized, saying his actions “"exacerbated” the situation.

What is it like to live in America for Brennan Walker, or for the two Philadelphian men? This is the question I turn to next.

Republican Freedom and the Resistance to Equality.

It is worth quoting Tocqueville, no advocate of any tyrannical democratic impulse, at length here.

There is a natural prejudice that leads man to scorn the one who has been his inferior, long after he has become his equal; real inequality produced by fortune or law is always followed by an imaginary inequality that has its roots in mores; but among the ancients this secondary effect of slavery came to an end. The emancipated man so strongly resembled the men who were born free that it soon became impossible to distinguish him from them. What was more difficult among the ancients was to change the law; what is more difficult among modern peoples is to change mores, and for us the real difficulty begins where in antiquity it ended. This happens because among modern peoples the non-material and transitory fact of slavery is combined in the most fatal way with the material and permanent fact of the difference of race. The memory of slavery dishonors the race, and race perpetuates the memory of slavery.

Tocqueville notes something that American conservatives often deny. The reach of human memory is a long one, and particularly so in the case of race, which combines the remembrance of subordination with a physical marker.

Tocqueville suggests that intermarriage, and its psychological effects, might help us to escape this cycle. In the children born of such marriages, the white parent would see his or her features reflected back and would thus be more inclined to view African Americans as equals rather than inferiors, gradually erasing any remembrance of legalized inequality. In other words, the natural love of one’s own would teach the white American to love his black family members and then neighbors and fellow citizens. This dynamic is captured in Tocqueville’s account in Democracy in America of the sufferings of the white slave owner whose black sons would be sent downriver after death because he had failed to manumit them. Though the master learned justice too late, it was love of his own that enabled him to learn justice at all. This seems to be an extension of Tocqueville’s understanding of self-interest well understood. Perhaps he thought no other motive would work successfully on Americans when it came to race, because they had not yet learned to think of the three races present in America from its inception as being worthy of being included in “the love of one’s own.”

Continued Racial Discord.

Instead of racial reconciliation or integration, however, contemporary America faces continued racial discord that throws into question our mutual seriousness about the natural rights tradition and our commitment to the demands of republican citizenship. Though it is the fashion in many circles to think that the problem of race ended with the success of the civil rights movement, recent scholarship and commentary show this is not the case.

In the recently published Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae convincingly proves “that racial segregation seeped into the nooks and crannies of public life and private matters, of congressional campaigns and PTA meetings, and of textbook debates and day care decisions” from the early twentieth century until the 1970s, and implies that this seepage has not yet been stopped. Similarly, Ta-Nehisi Coates persuasively traces a history of the consequences of institutionalized racism after the passage of the seminal Civil Rights Act, particularly with regard to housing discrimination and predatory loan practices. He notes what he calls America’s “compounding moral debt”: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.” Decades of exploitative and discriminatory housing and banking practices have followed.

These problems exist alongside the many famous instances of police brutality against blacks, from Michael Brown, who was shot by policeman Darren Wilson in a city where the police sent emails to each other comparing blacks to monkeys and dogs, to Philando Castile, who died when he reached to show a police officer his permit to carry a gun. Police officers are three times more likely to subject black Americans to the use of force than they are white Americans, and unarmed black Americans are three times more likely to be shot by police than unarmed white citizens. When it comes to searches and seizures, black Americans are a third more likely to be stopped by police than white Americans, and their chances to be searched at the stop are also three times higher than is the case for white Americans, even though white Americans are found carrying illegal items or substances at a 50 percent higher frequency during pedestrian stops. A similar trend is found in drug arrests: though black drug use is the same or only incrementally higher than white drug use, black Americans are five times more likely to be placed under arrest for possession. All of this occurs against the backdrop of the following statistic from the Bureau of Justice: “1 percent of blacks overall (about 2 percent of black men) commit a violent crime in any given year.”

Undue discrepancies of treatment extend into the realm of medicine, as well, with infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates among black women and children dwarfing those of white Americans. They even exceed rates in Mexico, where half of the female population lives at or below the poverty level. Similar trends are found in the area of education as well.

It is unacceptable that citizens experience the application and consequences of the law differently when we are supposed to be equal before the law. And it destroys civil society when those committed to public service, such as doctors, teachers, and police officers perpetuate this unequal treatment. Yet, on the right, these important and real issues too often get lost amid accusations of special pleading and frustrations with identity politics. It is to this dynamic that I now turn.

The Conservative Response to Institutional Racism: Protesting Too Much.

There is clearly much reason to believe that the experience of liberty in America is different for white Americans than it is for black Americans, whether we are talking about liberty before the law or in the realm of civil society. Yet the conservative response to this phenomenon has thus far been insufficient, and is often almost totally reactive and defensive.

Complaints about identity politics often miss the mark in our current political situation and are often a way of intentionally or accidentally dismissing a true political problem: the problem of institutionalized racism. Though warnings about the dangers of tribal politics are important, I suggest it is disingenuous to claim, as some have, that the increase in white identity politics is a response to an unreasonable agitation and demand for more equality on the part of blacks. This kind of response fails to recognize the very real and often determinative inequalities that black Americans experience, and the validity of their demands for change as a righteous and republican self-assertion.

While implicit bias, the cause of much of this inequality, is a difficult problem to confront, conservatives seem rarely to acknowledge its existence and its consequences, much less offer suggestions about how to counter it. Sometimes, as a conservative, it feels like we fixate on a mosquito that’s buzzing in our ear while fellow citizens are being stung by hordes of bees. When our first response to cases like Walker’s or the Philadelphia Starbucks customers’ is to complain about the oppressiveness of political correctness, to immediately scrutinize the motives of the black persons involved while leaving the motives of involved others untouched, or to balk about special treatment, something is wrong.

Think here of the common conservative response to accusations of police brutality: the impotent and tepid invocation of the occurrence of “black on black” crime, in spite of the fact that white people are statistically more likely to commit crimes against other white people, because humans tend to be violent toward those with whom we live in closest proximity. Or consider the constant debates on the right about Collin Kaepernick’s protest against the American flag, when compared to the dearth of any serious attempt at understanding the reality of what Kaepernick is protesting. A similar problem appears in the right’s response to the Hamilton cast’s peaceful speech to Vice President Mike Pence. On the whole, we bemoaned a loss of civility and discourse without treating the problematic relationship that the Trump campaign, and the Trump administration, have with race with any comparable attentiveness.

These kinds of examples suggest the weakness of American conservatism in the face of institutionalized racism and represent a major source of tension between conservatives and members of ethnic and racial communities. Understandably, they often take this kind of misdirection and attention to tangential issues as a kind of cluelessness, or worse, malice. It is read as a hesitation to condemn injustice and a willingness to maintain the status quo, a status quo Tocqueville suggests is deeply touched by the county’s original sin of racism in a way that benefits American whites at the expense of American blacks.

In an effort at self-scrutiny, we should ask ourselves what our first response is in the face of evidence of institutional racism, and then ask ourselves what it should be. What would we want the response to this treatment to be if we were the ones who were being arrested for waiting for a friend in Starbucks, or it was our children being shot at for knocking on a door and asking for help when they are in need? Perhaps if we spent as much time decrying what happened in the Philadelphia Starbucks or at the Zeiglers’ house as we spend critiquing responses to such events, the problem of race in America would not be so aggravated in the first place… (by  Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo).

Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo is assistant professor of political science at Texas State University.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/04/21367/