Military intelligence and other seeming paradoxes
Lou Marzeles
News Editor
Quick quiz: You're in a special place, a unique location where, as if in a Disney movie (when Walt was still alive, that is), everything is just wonderful. People are friendly and peaceable. Everybody does for each other. Kindly conversation and good deeds spring up spontaneously like wildflowers of the heart, and you almost wonder if suddenly everyone is cramming for their finals in life. Where are you?
Some of you will name some mythic, halcyon landmark of a fondly remembered youth. Some will scratch heads, wondering where to find such a fabled place. Some of you will say Goldendale. Some of you will say, why, the Bluegrass Festival, just this past weekend.
There is no right answer, of course, even though for working purposes we'll say there is. For illustrative reasons (work with me here; there's a worthwhile payoff), let's say that the right answers are actually both of the latter two choices: Goldendale and the Bluegrass Festival.
Goldendale and bluegrass. I hear head scratching again. Next I'll be saying there's such a thing as military intelligence.
As it happens, I actually trained in military intelligence years ago, which I'd like to think makes me a sharp enough cookie to know that Goldendale and the culture of bluegrass music really do have a great deal in common. I traversed the rows of RVs at the festival on Saturday, and I came across musicians who I would've sworn had been playing together for years, and doing it with great skill. (That's coming from a former music editor at a major metropolitan newspaper.) I found out they'd met only minutes before. But music that arises inherently, organically, from the land tends to draw people who are inherently, organically, drawn to each other. One of the musicians, knowing not a thing about me, handed me his $2,000 guitar and expected me to start playing it. And I did, starting a song centuries old that all present joined in on without a split-second's hesitation.
I'm not preaching bluegrass here. I'm saying its culture is, on the whole, most benign and kindly. Much like Goldendale-to bring us full circle. And let the Circle Be Unbroken, to paraphrase the song we played on Saturday. The people of Goldendale are benign and kindly.
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