The Cate Gang remind Jeb Loy Nichols that not all humans are monsters.

We All Got To Help Each Other
The Cates Gang
Metromedia
1970

My old buddy is angry.  He’s always angry.  He calls me up and shouts.  I don’t mind.  I’m angry too.  He’s my friend and if he wants to be angry that’s OK with me.  This time he says he’s angry about everything.

You’re angry about everything?

The way we’ve organised things, he says.  Modernity.  It’s all wrong.  

I picture him raising a finger for each item.

Modernity, he says, (shouting) is all about the public instead of the private.  About being logical and rational instead of intuitive.  It favours things mass produced instead of one offs.  It believes in the future instead of the present.  It looks for universal solutions instead of personal ones.  It believes that people should adapt to machines rather than adapting to nature.  It believes in the control of nature rather than accepting the uncontrollability of nature.  It believes in progress rather than acknowledging that there’s no such thing.  It believes in manmade materials rather than natural materials.  It believes in the need to be well maintained rather than in the nobility of falling apart.  It’s intolerant of ambiguity instead of welcoming it.  It’s for the idea of permanence instead of accepting the beauty of collapse. 

I’m nodding along.

Well sure, I say.

It’s got me all agitated, he says.

I look out my window and see a fox, tail broke and skinny, field weary, a pup no longer, swaggering sideways into the woods, doing its best coyote trot.  It doesn’t know and doesn’t care that there are madmen in power who want to kill him and us and everyone.  There are madmen everywhere.  Lunatics and tyrants.  I watch the fox’s knobbled spine, from neck to tail.  The history of humans is written in blood.  And written poorly, with a slack and hurried hand.  I wonder at the tender slope of the fox’s legs, its toes and nails, its ankles, the tiny bones beneath the skin.   

As a way of reminding myself that not all humans are monsters, I’m listening to The Cate Gang sing We All Got To Help Each Other.  It’s a great song and every word is a heart breaker.  It was made in Texas 55 years ago, produced by the great Mickey Moody and Huey Meaux.  Forgotten now, like most gentle, beautiful things.  It wasn’t, really, asking for much.  Just a little hint of compassion now and then.  But even that, these days, seems hopelessly out of touch and ancient; as if I’m listening to cave paintings or hieroglyphics.  I turn it up, play it again and I’m hanging out with Ernie and Earl Cates and we’re dancing around the room together, singing: See the man along the road, burdened down with a heavy load, we got help him if we can, he looks tired and all alone, got no place to call a home, we got to help him if we can…

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