And He Stilled The Drumming

Vic Kohring came in with the 1994 Newt Gingrich tide. Four Mat-Su Valley lawmakers rode in on that that wave - Lyda Green, Vic Kohring, Bev Masek, and Scott Ogan. All but one are now beach debris. Lyda Green is proving to be as tenacious as a barnacle. Kohring, looks more and more like an expiring puffer fish, trapped in one of the outgoing tide's draining pools. He's been left behind, which is a scary term in his evangelical world and its Darwin-swallowing fishes.

Back in 1996, Vic and I got into dueling op-eds for a while in the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman. In the late spring of '96, Vic wrote an op-ed that blamed Alaska's artists for the unfortunate deaths on the Denali Highway in mid-winter, of a family whose car became trapped in a snow drift. He suggested that if the government had spent money used for the Alaska State Council on the Arts on communication equipment for the Alaska State Troopers instead, the family would be alive.

I wrote a reply, in which I humanized Alaska's artists as vibrant members of our communities around the state, not the parasitic sea lice Kohring seemed to be imagining them to be. I wanted to say more than what could be said in an op-ed, though, so I wrote And He Stilled The Drumming for symphonic band. When I conducted the Mat-Su College Community Band in the work's premiere - it was the middle movement of my 4th Symphony - Vic had the strangely bewildering grace to introduce the work.

Here are the program notes to And He Stilled the Drumming:

This piece is dedicated to State Representative Vic Kohring, who has been working hard to end state funding for the arts, and even harder to foster hostile attitudes toward artists. I imagine a young man involved in the Native drumming renaissance. State funding which assisted his drumming group ends, and it folds. In his disappointment he turns to drugs. He's arrested by one of the police hired by funding taken from the state arts council. He then is sent to one of the privately owned prisons championed by Representative Kohring. As the young man beats a mournful pounding on the thick wall of his cell, the piece ends.

As Vic's close friend Doug Bartko told me at the time, sort of objecting to my treatment of Kohring, "Dumping on Vic is like kicking your puppy."