Poodle Attacks Ukulele While Vandenberg Explodes

Musk Takes Over NASA, Social Security, and Department of Defense

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IT’S GONNA BE A LONG, LONG TIME: For no less than 175 years, the City of Santa Barbara has been forced to carry on without the uplifting and unifying benefit of an official song. Worse, this psychic wound has been self-inflicted. It need not be endured a second longer.

As we enter the era of perpetual sonic booms — a form of violent sonic wallpaper that threatens to become even more perpetual and violent — I’d like to nominate the 1954 classic “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

Seventy years ago, Big Joe Turner was the first to record “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” perhaps the first official rock-and-roll hit to make the charts. I say “official” because the debate still rages which was the first. Apropos of Elon Musk, his sonic booms, and the ever-accelerating number of rocket ships he’s launching from Vandenberg Space Force base, the song’s writer Jesse Stone would record the song, “The Rocket” 69 years ago. Displaying almost psychic prescience when it comes to the impact of sonic booms, Stone would record this song with his own band, named “Jesse Stone and His Houserockers.” | Credit: Wikipedia

This song was originally sung by Big Joe Turner. Some musical historians maintain this color-barrier-crossing R&B hit qualifies as the first rock and roll song ever.

Better yet, the song, sung in Turner’s piercing tenor — for him, the microphone was strictly optional — was ultimately all about “boisterous sex.” Or so our friends at Google tell us. But back in 1954, such salacious allusions had to be cloaked in coded references. to “a one-eyed cat, peeping at a seafood store.”

Subtle, it was not.

My other nominee is John Lee Hooker’s 1961 great but mistitled hit, “Boom, Boom.” I say mistitled because Hooker clearly sings the word “boom” four times in the refrain, not two. I used to sing this song to my son, Isaac, back when he was still hoping to survive his larval stage of human evolution.

Both are truly great songs. And with Elon Musk and his SpaceX rocket ship company having commandeered the Vandenberg Space Force base with his accelerating “cadence” of rocket launches, sonic booms have become very much a matter of the moment.

I have a hard enough time sleeping as it is. I don’t like getting woken up. I am known to react violently. The other morning, I responded by playing my eight-string baritone ukulele so angrily that my neighbors felt compelled to obtain a restraining order.

Not pretty.

I mention Elon Musk not because he’s actually moved here. No, he’s moved to a compound in Texas. It’s because his Falcon 9 rocket ships — truly technological marvels — have all but taken over the launch pads at Vandenberg.

John Lee Hooker was inspired to write the immortal “Boom, Boom” by the bartender of the club where he was frequently late. As he walked in the door, she would point her finger at him like it was a pistol and say, “Boom, boom — you’re late.” | Credit: Wikipedia

It used to be we’d have one blast-off every two to three months. Now — with the number of launches jumping from six to 36 to 50 and soon to 100 — two or three times a week will soon be the norm.

I try not to be too prissy about such things; it’s progress, right? National security, right? And emotionally, I’m a sucker for the parabolic arches these rockets draw across the night sky. It fills my heart with a keening sense of wist.

But less poetically, these booms sound very much like herds of wild racoons drag racing across my roof. I live in an old house; the window caulking is historic, and as a result my windowpanes rattle as Musk’s rockets achieve full tumescence.

Somehow, the phrase “turbulent intercourse” floats indecently to mind.

In recent weeks, Elon Musk has become bigger than God, both the Old Testament Yahweh and the New Testament God 2.0 combined. He donated $140 million to Trump’s campaign and Trump has named Musk head of a nonexistent government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, where he sees his mandate as cutting $2 trillion to $3 trillion from the federal budget, which is roughly one out of every three federal dollars spent.

While Musk is wrangling with a Delaware judge over a compensation package he claims is worth $56 billion — she claims Musk fed his board a diet of rampant lies — the valuation of his rocket ship company SpaceX has just ballooned from $210 billion to $350 billion.

In all this, Musk — the richest man on the planet — is now loudly embracing a very hostile takeover of Social Security by private investment firms. Hundreds of millions of formerly hard-working residents rely upon monthly Social Security payments — calibrated somewhere between modest and meager — to stay afloat.

This too disrupts my sleep.

Here’s the reality up at Vandenberg. About 90 percent of Musk’s launches have no direct military or intelligence application. They are, strictly speaking, commercial launches by a private commercial operator on behalf of private commercial operators.

On Tuesday, October 15, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket holding 20 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base. | Credit: Courtesy SpaceX

But because the Pentagon is technically not capable of launching its payloads into lower earth orbit, it has to rely on Musk, who’s company is extraordinarily good at such things.

As a result, the federal government has totally abdicated control over a vital aspect of our national defense infrastructure to a whiz kid privateer who, it turns out, has been playing footsies with the likes of Vladimir Putin over the past two months.

Whose tail is wagging whose dog?

Local enviros have been clamoring for Musk to mitigate the impacts of his sonic booms on the aquatic life occupying the 150-mile ribbon of water over which the rockets fly. The military — and Congressmember Salud Carbajal — insist Musk is immune from such intrusions because he is operating as an adjunct of the military. Even though only a small fraction of Musk’s launches are military in nature, they insist immunity is like pregnancy; there’s no such thing as a little bit.

To his credit, Carbajal managed to claw $6 million out of some committee to help cover the cost of some as-yet-unidentified mitigations. That seems a drop in the bucket, especially when the richest man on the planet should be paying his fair share. But given who will soon occupy the White House, efforts to change this scenario are tantamount to pissing up a rope. Or perhaps more precisely, to Elon Musk pissing down ours.

“Boom, Boom,” “Shake, Rattle, and Roll.” These are great songs. And you don’t need to squint between the lines.

We’re getting screwed.