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Kenneth,

I could make a case that there is no such thing as ownership at all. How can we own something? We can, maybe, control things for a while, but then we die and they're out of our control.

But, ownership is one of man's earliest concepts. He probably trapped or killed an animal, then fought off anyone else who wanted to eat it. Fast forward to the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. People began to question ownership. They went way past socialism to communism, and called it a collective ownership. But still, the big, tough humans controlled everything, and the worker's paradise became a killing field for vodka drinking alcoholic megalomaniacs and bureaucratic sadists.

Now, folks who would have been sixties radical peace and love, hippy flower children have turned a cynical edge and have embraced chaos and entropy over love and peace. They see unlikely conspiracies and rube goldberg machinations as motives and reasons for the ills of our society, when actually we've been Jackson Browne's "happy idiots...struggling for the legal tender" just trying to buy a few minutes to sit in the tree and play the flute. And what does the new revolution do? Does it give us the "level playing field" and the chance to compete with the "big boys?" No. At a time when a songwriter could create and produce sounds that can compete with anything their idols once spent fat cats' money to do, the very light within them is turned into a thief. The spark that moves the speakers sets all the products out onto the front lawn in a mock eviction and lets the neighbors walk away with our dreams and hopes and trade them like cheap baseball cards. Oh, some musicians get famous. The lucky ones who are good at entertaining. They're young and pleasing to the eye. Clever and fast on stage, talented fingers flying over keys and frets, dancing feet and smiles with perfect, blue tinted, Crest strip teeth that sing dead on pitch thanks to that box on the floor and who appeal to their frat brothers and sisters in a hazing of lost morality, jaded youth, and the best speakers Sam Ash has on sale that week. Meanwhile the unlucky, the merely gifted, the ordinary looking next door neighbor, the hot stop clerk who is neither tragically handsome nor fashionably nerdy, punches the clock to get home and cheat his family out of a few minutes of "quality time" to write that new song that's been chewing its way out of his brain since lunch break. Once, oh so long ago, the unlucky saw a new world full of promise. A place where they could sell some music without it costing the price of a new house to produce. A place where they could reach the public without supplying the radio guy with hookers and cocaine. A place where music lovers and musical lovers could meet and appreciate each other. But it was never to be. The very sparks that could have created the place burned holes in the fence of the ball park. The fans didn't have to buy a seat. The homerun hitter looked up at the ragged, empty bleachers. He thought, this one is for the hungry children at home, and knowing there would be no bonuses, there would be no salary, there would be no endorsement deals, he knocked the ball out of the park. As it sailed out into the streets beyond, the crowds there cheered mightily. Then they stole the ball.