"Hard to Say I'm Sorry"
JFK and LBJ tried, but data show that their big step toward doing right by Black America didn't end up working as intended; PLUS: Mass hysteeeria, and 1991 rattles the Eighties' corroded cage

I meditated this morning. I’m usually good for meditating five-or-so out of seven days each week. The days I miss, it’s usually because I didn’t “sit” early enough. So today I did it first thing.
It’s always a guided meditation; I subscribe to the 10 Percent Happier app, which was co-founded by journalist Dan Harris and thus is far less susceptible to woo-woo-ism and/or hippie-dipitude.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hit me up at dean@ceegees.org if you’d like a free 30-day guest pass to try it out, no credit card required. (And no kickback for me or anything…just may as well use it!)
Today I chose a meditation entitled “Be Simple and Easy.” It’s one of the first ones I tried, almost a decade ago. The very basic idea behind it is to not let yourself get too caught up in the complexities of everyday life. You’ll know when extra care and concern regarding a facet of your human experience is truly necessary. Otherwise, don’t overthink. Be simple and easy.
Easier typed than done!
But in the spirit of Munindraji, the Buddhist mentor who passed down this low-key lifestyle pursuit to such famous disciples as Joseph Goldstein (who was my meditation teacher this morning)—and because I’d like to make this CeeGees entry significantly shorter and less complex than usual—I decided to keep today’s issues-based section super-simple, and super-easy.
You know…nothin’ too heavy. It’s Friday, after all! So for the “filling” of today’s poo-poo panini, we’re gonna chit-chat about…
…affirmative action.
Keepin’ it light, y’all!
But first, a music musing…

THE BOTTOM SLICE: The One Hard Rock Band I Wasn’t First on My Block to Discover (Grrrrrrr.)
I remember reading it in Hit Parader magazine, albeit a couple months after it happened (a couple months being the quickest you could get the scoop on your hard rock heroes back in the day—before hourly MTV News reports, let alone the Internet).
Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen had lost his left arm in a New Year’s Eve 1984 car crash.
I was young enough that I don’t think it even registered how horrific such an event was. I was reading about real life, but still looked at “Heavy Metal Happenings” (the name of the news section in HP, which was my favorite part of the magazine) like it was fantasyland stuff. It was little more than a cartoon comprised of photos instead of doodles to me at that point.
However, I’m sure I felt a certain sadness that Def Leppard’s drummer would never play drums again and would have to leave the band.
Not that Def Leppard was ever one of my favorite bands. And the reason they weren’t is pretty petty (assuming eight-year-olds can be petty).
The band’s third LP, Pyromania, had blown up by the time I discovered Def Lep on MTV. And thus, somehow, infuriatingly…my best neighborhood buddy, Trent, had the wherewithal to have his mom buy it for him just before it was really on my radar.
I mean, I wasn’t that butt-hurt that, for the first time, I wasn’t gonna be the one to give my friends and the older kids in the neighborhood their first glimpse of a popular new record from a cool “adult” band, like I’d done with Synchronicity, Kilroy Was Here, Business as Usual, Toto IV…but…I was pretty butt-hurt about it.
Trent only went on to beat me to four other albums that I can remember: Bryan Adams’ Reckless [a big defeat for me], the Flashdance soundtrack, the Top Gun soundtrack, and, inexplicably…DeBarge’s Rhythm of the Night. Which, by that time I was shying away from groups like DeBarge (publicly, at least). So it was brave of Trent, a guy’s-guy athletic type, to share that he’d secured that particular record for his collection.
I still borrowed it. And dubbed it. But no more showing off dance-poppy records that I’d discovered long before my classmates. I kept the “wimpier” bands I loved a secret ever since some girls in class asked me what I was drawing one day and laughed uproariously when I replied, with entirely inappropriate melodrama—thinking it would impress them—”Boy George! It’s the cover of KISS-ing to Be CLEV-ahhhhh.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: And kids thought I was gay after that! Can you believe that shit?? I mean, his name was BOY George. Not GIRL George. And I wouldn’t call that color lavender, per se. It’s more of a fuchsia, I always thought. Fuchsia. Way more manly-looking word than, like, pink or whatever, no?
OK fine I get it now. Totally fine. Nothin’ wrong with being gay, or being straight but assumed to be gay. But if I were gay I’m not sure I would’ve bought THIS a scant couple years later, would I have? Just sayin’!
So from that point forth, Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Duran Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down, and the Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now” 45-rpm single were all kept under careful wraps.
But anyway. I didn’t own Pyromania until I was in college, probably. I think I bought the cassette for a dollar at Karma, just to have it. (I’d played the crap out of the tape I dubbed off of Trent’s album, though.)
So when I saw the release date for Lep’s follow-up album, Hysteria, scrawled across the chalkboard at the Sound Shoppe, you bet your ass I was gonna get that record the second it came out. (Well, the second school let out for the day, and I got picked up from Grandma and Grandpa’s, and had Dad drive me to Sound Shoppe.)
And…I loved it, obviously. Problem was, now it wasn’t just Trent I was competing with for the distinction of Biggest Def Leppard Fan in Bryan, Ohio. MTV was in every kid’s living room by 1987. And most of the hard rock bands du jour were voraciously playing into the pop-metal vibe.
So, while nobody but me had Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil, everybody at least knew about, and loved (or professed they loved, because it was suddenly cool), “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” when it came out on MTV only a year after I’d gotten the balls to buy Shout.
Quik-Klip War: Shout’s “Looks That Kill” vs. Theatre of Pain’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: It looks lame compared to “Looks That Kill” but that Smokin’ in the Boys Room” video was the absolute coolest thing I’d ever seen at the time…but then, I was pre-pubescent, so…
Certainly zero of my peers liked Kiss when they officially overtook Men at Work as my favorite band in fifth grade. But the cool kids, shockingly, all wanted to borrow my copy of the sickeningly poppy Crazy Nights album when it came out. Just a year earlier they were making fun of me for pretending to have gone to a Kiss concert by wearing a cheap knockoff Kiss concert tee.
(They were half-right—I had most definitely attended the Kiss concert. But the shirt I proudly wore to school the next day was a cheap knockoff that I had my chaperone, one of Mom’s co-workers who let me tag along with her and her son, buy me in the parking lot. Looked cool to me at the time!)
Pretty soon, everybody magically liked Def Leppard, too. And why not. Five Top 10 hits and seven successful singles total propelled Hysteria to 12 million in sales in the U.S. alone. No one was more responsible for the juggernaut that was ‘80s MTV pop metal than the Leps.
Def Leppard released Hysteria four-plus years after Pyromania, partly because drummer Rick Allen figured out a way to rig his drum kit so he could play with just the one arm. The band admirably insisted to their label that Allen remain in the band, so the long layoff made sense.
However, the followup to Hysteria, Adrenalize, took five years to make it to record shelves—or CD shelves, more specifically. My buddy Trent bought Pyromania on vinyl, the premier album format of its time; I bought Hysteria on cassette, the premier album format of its time; and by 1992, Adrenalize was mainly being sold on compact disc.
And if Hysteria was pop of the metal variety, Adrenalize was pop of the…just plain pop variety, really.
Did I buy it? Damn straight. Did I play it much? Nah, I’d largely been poached by the Seattle Sound by that time. Grunge was just as melodic, and often heavier than even Def Lep’s first two records, which were categorized amongst the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, believe it or not.
And heavier meant cooler by the time I was finishing high school. Not that Nirvana and Soundgarden being “cooler” than Warrant and Faster Pussycat had that much to do with my level of enjoyment, really.
OK, maybe a little…
THE FILLING: How Affirmative Was Affirmative Action?
The Bottom Slice you just consumed was a big ol’ fat-ass slice of bread. And I’m serious that I want to try and make CeeGees a more easily digestible endeavor for folks.
EDITOR’S NOTE: TOO LATE!
So all kidding aside, I picked the topic of affirmative action to touch on in this installment because, obviously, there’s no way we’re gonna talk about such an intricate, delicate subject in proper detail in just one sitting.
So I’d just like to point you to a resource I found informative when it comes to this controversial approach to school admissions. And we’ll get into more detail about the ins and outs of the practice at a later date.
Did Affirmative Action Even Work?
“The Morning” newsletter from David Leonhardt of The New York Times is my go-to early-day news briefing. This morning’s featured topic explored the notion that the data behind the recently outlawed affirmative action—universities’ prioritization, to various degrees, of diversity over aptitude in the admission process—might not have actually helped non-White students become more upwardly mobile in the long run.
And contemporary affirmative action certainly didn’t help the demographic JFK and LBJ intended it to—Black and Native American families who’d been horrifically, historically discriminated against and thus drastically disadvantaged by American systems over hundreds and hundreds of years.
Here’s a clip from “The Morning”:
Affirmative action was created in the name of fairness—to address the oppression of Black Americans. That oppression has spanned not only centuries of slavery, but also policies that continued into the 20th century, such as segregation of jobs, schools and neighborhoods and whites-only mortgage subsidies. The white-Black wealth gap remains so large today partly as a result.
As [President Johnson] said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, [and say], ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” Or as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
(That MLK quote, incidentally, is a pretty simple-and-easy explanation for why I support reparations, but that’s for another CeeGee…)
This was news to me. Not the generations-long discrimination part, of course (I still have a rather unhealthy and probably unhelpful tendency toward White guilt). But I just assumed that the only question regarding affirmative action was how much it unfairly excluded worthy students who were not Black or Native American. It never occurred to me that it might not even really be helping Black or Native American kids as much as one might think.
Below is a gift link to the March 15 edition of the newsletter; if you decide you want to click through to any of the Times links Leonhardt references, or the Atlantic articles linked to for that matter, and you need gift links for them (both outlets utilize a paywall), let me know at dean@ceegees.org.
What Groups Need Affirmative Action?
THE TOP SLICE: Pick a Number, Any Number
The number from 1 to 979 Perplexity.ai selected for me this week IS…
167.
The 167th song on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist?
Ha!
Geez O’Pete. I mean, not only did I mention Soundgarden earlier in this newsletter, but I was referring specifically to the Badmotorfinger era of Soundgarden. And “Rusty Cage” is my favorite song from that album.
Last week, I mentioned that my favorite Scorpions song was the first song of theirs I’d ever heard, a lesser-known track called “I’m Leaving You.” Is it my favorite because it represented the first time I ever heard the band? Which happened at a time in my life when the hormones were raging, MTV was new, and hard rock delivered to one’s living room was brand spanking new?
We’ll never know until my body’s handed over to science and my brain is examined by a mad scientist of the heavy metal maniac persuasion. (Man, I hope that actually happens somehow…)
“Rusty Cage” was not the first Soundgarden song I ever heard. It was the fourth. However, it was the first one I “got.”
I saw the video for “Hands All Over” from their previous album, Louder Than Love, on MTV’s 120 Minutes. (And let it be known that, as cool as I may sound for having watched the much more erudite, alt/goth-minded 120 Minutes as a wee lad, I never liked it. But, on occasion, MTV wasn’t sure if some of those pre-”grunge” Seattle band offerings were heavy metal (early Alice in Chains) or goth rock (early Soundgarden…or so thought 120 Minutes’ producers).
So I watched, just in case some real rock snuck through. And I remember seeing “Hands All Over,” and…not quite knowing what to make of it.
And I still hadn’t fully grasped the band when “Jesus Christ Pose,” the first single off Badmotorfinger, started playing on MTV. I knew it was some exotic variation of “badass,” but…
“Maybe I’ll just go give Enuff Z’Nuff’s new CD a listen instead,” is probably the conclusion I came to.
Same with the second single, which was the biggest single from the album, “Outshined” (until years later when Johnny Cash’s “Rusty Cage” brought newfound acclaim to the Soundgarden version).
“Rusty Cage,” though…hell yeah, man. There was no ambiguity with that jam. It fraggin’ rawwwwked. The way that slithery call-and-answer guitar intro built the suspense; and then how the band ripped into the main riffiness; and how they launched into that must-headbang bridge that was more headbang-worthy than anything on Headbangers Ball; and then…
That coda. I doubt any early grunge moment was more responsible for the “grunge” moniker than that monolithic slab of down-tuned guitar nastiness. If my musical path hadn’t been fully altered by Alice in Chains by that point, “Rusty Cage” finished the job.
I’m not saying I didn’t also continue to buy every single Enuff Z’Nuff record that came out for old time’s sake, but…
Look, glam was fun, and the mid-Eighties pop-metal before glam rawked pretty hard usually. But the early Nineties, I soon came to accept, were gonna be a time for heavy, grungy, melodic badassery. The proof being the charge I felt when I first “got” Soundgarden.
The End! Thanks for reading!
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. It is not hard for me to say I’m sorry that I cannot write a short CeeGee to save my ass. I literally couldn’t send this Friday newsletter out before Saturday. And I definitely started writing it during daylight hours on Friday.
P.P.S. It means I really, really care! (Right?)