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David Rovics ("Essays of Social Significance")

by David Rovics
Musician, composer, political and social activist   (his website)

http://www.davidrovics.com
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/davidrovics
http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics
http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/davidrovics
http://www.facebook.com/davidrovics
http://twitter.com/drovics
http://davidrovics.guestbooks.cc
 

* previous entry*

http://www.davidrovics.com
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/davidrovics
http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics
http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/davidrovics
http://www.facebook.com/davidrovics
http://twitter.com/drovics
http://davidrovics.guestbooks.cc
 

* previous entry*

* previous entry*

If any elements of the corporate media have been paying any attention  to what's been happening on the streets of Pittsburgh over the past  few days I haven't noticed, so I thought I'd write my own account.

There is a popular assumption asserted ad nauseum by our leaders in  government, by our school text books and by our  mainstream  media  that although many other countries don't have freedom of speech and  freedom of assembly   such as Iran or China   we do, and it's what  makes us so great. Anybody who has spent much time trying to exercise  their First Amendment rights in the US now or at any other time since  1776 knows first-hand that the First Amendment looks good on paper  but has little to do with reality.
 
Dissent has never really been tolerated in the USA. As we've seen in  recent election cycles even just voting for a Democratic presidential  candidate and having your vote count can be quite a challenge   as  anyone who has not had their head in sand knows, Bush lost both  elections and yet kept his office fraudulently twice. But for those  who want to exercise their rights beyond the government-approved  methods   that is, their right to vote for one of two parties, their  right to bribe politicians ( lobby ) if they have enough money, or  their right to write a letter to the editor in the local  Murdoch-owned rag, if it hasn't closed shop yet   the situation is  far worse.
 
Let's go back in history for a minute. After the victory of the  colonies over Britain in the Revolutionary War, the much-heralded US  Constitution included no rights for citizens other than the rights of  the landed gentry to run the show. This changed as a direct result of  a years-long rebellion of the citizens of western Massachusetts that  came to be known as Shays' Rebellion. Shays' Rebellion scared the  pants off the powers-that-be and they did what the powers-that-be do  and have always done all over the world   passed some reforms in  order to avert a situation where the rich would lose more than just  western Massachusetts. They passed the Bill of Rights.
 
Fast forward more than a century. Ostensibly this great democracy had  had the Bill of Rights enshrined in law for quite a long time now. Yet  in 1914 a supporter of labor unionism could not make a soapbox speech  on a sidewalk in this country without being beaten and arrested by  police for the crime of disturbing the peace, blocking the sidewalk  or whatever other nonsense the cops made up at the time.
 
If you read the mainstream media of the day you would be likely to  imagine that these labor agitators trying to give speeches on the  sidewalks of Seattle or Los Angeles were madmen bent on the  destruction of civilization. Yet it is as a direct result of these  brave fighters that we have things like Social Security, a minimum  wage, workplace safety laws, and other reforms that led, at least  until the  Reagan Revolution,  to this country having a thriving  middle class (the lofty term we use when we're referring to working  class people who can afford to go to college and buy a house).
 
Reforms are won due to these struggles   proof over and over that  democracy is, more than anything, in the streets. Yet the fundamental  aspect of these social movements that have shaped our society   these  social movements that have at least sometimes and to some degree  ultimately been praised by the ruling clique and their institutions,  such as the Civil Rights movement   freedom of speech and assembly,  remain a criminal offense.
 
Fast forward another century to Pittsburgh, 2009. For those who may  have thought that the criminalization of dissent was to be a hallmark  of the Bush years, think again. Dissent was a criminal offense before  Bush, and it quite evidently still is today.
 
I was born in 1967, so I can't comment first-hand on things that  happened far from the suburbs where I grew up as a kid, but I can  tell you unequivocally from direct experience that I have witnessed  police riots before, during, and since the Bush years. Most recently,  last Friday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (If you want to read about  previous police riots I have witnessed go to  http://www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com  <http://www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com/>)

In a nutshell, here's how it went down. I drove to Pittsburgh from a  gig in Allentown the night before, all the while listening to BBC,  NPR, CNN, etc. on my satellite radio. Naturally, the coming G20 talks  in Pittsburgh were in the news. The most powerful people in the world,  the leaders of the world's richest nations, were meeting in Pittsburgh  to decide the fate of the planet, to decide how to deal with the  economic crisis, the climate crisis, and other crises caused by  industrial capitalism gone mad, crises which affect each and every  one of us intimately, crises about which many of us naturally want to  do something   crises about which we would at least like to voice our  concerns.
 
Notably absent from the news coverage is anything about the lawsuits  that the ACLU had to file in order to force the local authorities to  allow any demonstrations or marches to happen at all. Permits applied  for months ago by state senators, peace groups, women's groups and  others were only granted in the past couple weeks. Many other permits  were never granted. It doesn't say anything about applying for a  permit in the First Amendment, and in many other more democratic  countries than ours no permit is required for citizens to assemble.  In many European countries where I have spent a lot of time, if  citizens choose to have an assembly in the streets the role of the  police is to escort the march in order to divert traffic and keep  things safe, and no permit is required. But not in the US   not in  Philadelphia or Los Angeles in 2000, not in Miami in 2003, not in  Denver or St. Paul in 2008 and not in Pittsburgh last week.
 
While various progressive organizations were trying hard to work with  the intransigent authorities, other groups took the sensible (but   in  the US   dangerous) position that this is supposed to be a democracy  and we should not need to apply for a permit so that the authorities  could tell us where and when we could and could not protest.
 
The first nonpermitted march that I heard about was Thursday  afternoon. I should mention that I heard about it, but only with a  certain amount of difficulty, because I and many other people I  talked to in Pittsburgh were having strange problems with our cell  phones, problems which started in whatever states we came from and  continued in Pittsburgh right up until yesterday. People I talked to  friends and fellow engaged members of society such as Cindy  Sheehan, Joshua White, Sarah Wellington and others   reported the  same phenomenae. Every time one of us would receive a call we  couldn't hear the callers, though we could hear our own voices  echoing back to us. When we'd call back it usually would work then.  Coincidence? Sure, maybe.
 
Reports I heard over the phone on Thursday from people I talked to  were in between bouts of catching breath and running from the police.  Reports on the local media (the only  mainstream  media doing any  serious coverage of the protests, as usual, mainly because they were  intimately connected to the traffic reports) said the police were   restrained  (what else are they supposed to be?) until the march  reached a certain point, at which time it was declared to be an  unlawful assembly and the crowd was  dispersed.  How? There was no  mention.
 
Usually and outrageously enough, whether in North America, Europe  or other places I've been, if there's a meeting of the global elite  happening you are not allowed in unless you're part of the gang or  you're a lobbyist or a (officially-sanctioned) journalist. Usually a perimeter is formed by the police, Secret Service, FBI, and whichever  other  intelligence  agencies are there, that you can't cross. This  was also the case in Pittsburgh, but like Miami in 2003, St. Paul in  2008, and other occasions in recent years, the authorities were not  just being  on the defensive  and maintaining a perimeter around the  meetings. They were on the offensive.
 
If this happened in Iran or China it would be called martial law  but here in America we never have martial law, apparently, even when  the military and the police are jointly patrolling the streets with  armored vehicles and weapons of all descriptions and attacking people  for the crime of being on the streets. Any gathering other than the  permitted march (which was a great, festive march involving many  thousands of participants from all walks of life, albeit with a  ridiculously large, armored and menacing police  escort ) was  declared an unlawful assembly and then attacked. I saw it myself on  Thursday night and then again, much worse, on Friday night.
 
And what kind of unlawful assembly are we talking about? Hundreds of  students and other folks, a few of whom may have broken a window or  two at some point during the evening in the course of being pursued  by violence-prone riot police, who were ultimately gathering on the  grass on the campus of the university in the Oakland district of  Pittsburgh. They had no weapons, they were unarmed, mostly youth,  mostly college students from various parts of the country, along with  perhaps an equal group of local college students, most of whom were  just curious and didn't even have anything to do with the protests  many of whom in fact were just wondering what there is to protest  about! They soon found out one thing to protest about   police  brutality and active suppression of our Constitutional rights.
 
I have no doubt that the Pittsburgh police (and cops present from, of  all places, Miami as well as other cities) will in the end have  radicalized many local students who had previously been apolitical,  and for this I applaud them.
 
On Friday night I went to a free concert a local community radio  station was hosting on the campus. It ended around 8 pm. Over the  course of the next two hours there were more and more riot cops  arriving. Why? Because they knew what I knew   that a few hundred  young folks were planning on gathering on the green at 10 pm, many of  whom came by bicycle, after having engaged in a criminal, nonpermitted  mass bike ride around the city. Around 9:30 I had to leave to go to a  different neighborhood, and I returned in my rental car around 11 pm  along with Cindy, Joshua and Sarah.
 
If the police had made announcements for everyone to disperse (as I'm  sure they had at some point) we were too late for that. What we  arrived in the midst of was a police riot. We parked on the street in  front of the campus and walked on the sidewalk on the campus. Within seconds we saw a young man on a bicycle, a student at that very  university, being violently tackled by two riot cops, thrown down to  the ground with the police on top of him. All of the police all of  the time were dressed in black armor head to toe, many of them  driving armored vehicles. Earlier in the evening Cindy and Joshua and  I were hanging around one of the armored vehicles while Cindy harassed  the cops and soldiers strutting around there, telling them her son  died in Iraq because he didn't have an armored vehicle like this one.  (They studiously ignored her, of course.)
 
The young man with the two cops on top of him and his bicycle cried  for help, perhaps not realizing that there wasn't much anyone could  do other than take his name, which he was too freaked out to  pronounce in a way that anybody could understand. Within seconds we  found ourselves running from a group of cops, along with a bunch of  young folks who had their hands in the air, hoping vainly that this  might deter the police from attacking them. It didn't. Off the  campus, a block away, police were running in groups in different  directions, penning people in, throwing them to the ground, hitting  them with clubs, handcuffing them and arresting them.
 
The four of us (an affinity group I suppose) got separated. Sarah and  I were running and were about to be boxed in by police coming in  different directions. After I was myself clubbed in the back by a cop  with his truncheon, we ducked into the front of the lobby of the  Holiday Inn and started talking with guests, other protesters, and  various students who had also gone there because they were quite  naturally afraid to be on the streets. Fifty feet away in either  direction the police were assaulting and arresting people,  individually and in small groups, picking them off the sidewalks.
 
Cindy and Joshua had ended up running in a different direction,  through clouds of tear gas. They ducked around a corner just in time  to watch dozens of young people, running away, being shot  methodically with rubber-coated steel bullets in the back. One friend  of mine there from Minneapolis said he saw someone who had ten welts  on his back from being shot ten times. On both Thursday and Friday  nights the authorities used their fancy new LRAD weapons, a  sound-based weapon that causes people to flee because it hurts their  eardrums so badly. (At future demos, look out for the  noise-cancelling headphones accompanying the goggles...)
 
At every turn you could hear the sound of shocked students who had  never seen or heard about this sort of thing happening, who were  struggling to come to terms with what they were experiencing. They're  just attacking anybody on or near the campus, they're not  differentiating between us and the protesters! Some of them seemed to  think that it might be OK to club protesters as long as you don't club  the students, others had concluded that attacking people for hanging  out on the grass was over the top regardless. (This is not an easy  thing for a sorority girl from a wealthy suburb to come to terms  with, so I was duly impressed at hearing these heretofore clueless  youth having such epiphanies.) What was particularly entertaining was the first-hand realization that the local students could not  themselves differentiate between their  fellow students and the  other ones who had come from out of town. How could they? It is, in  fact, completely impossible to tell the difference between a college  student from Pittsburgh and one from Toledo, even if they do have  very different politics...
 
Eventually, by 1 am or so, Cindy and Joshua were able to move without  being fired on, and they joined Sarah and I in the comfort of the  patio at the Holiday Inn. The people who worked at the Inn, at least  some of them, were trying to keep protesters out. The thing was, though, that if you could afford to buy a drink you were no longer a  protester, but a guest of the bar, which is what we were. A little  while before Cindy and Joshua arrived a convoy of limousines and  other fancy cars pulled up in front of the hotel, and then security  locked the doors. You could still go in or out, though, just not  without security opening the doors for you.
 
We continued going in and out of the bar, passing by none other than  Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, and his entourage, who  were all staying that night in the Holiday Inn (of all relatively  downscale places to stay!) and watching some big Australian rugby  match on TV. In our confusion at having just escaped the riot police  only to find ourselves ten feet away from the Australian Prime  Minister, Cindy, Joshua, Sarah and I were all at a complete loss as  far as what we should say to the guy. We all talked a lot about what  we could say, but by the time we were getting close to coming up with  a plan he had gone to bed.
 
The next day, Saturday, I joined a couple dozen friends and  acquaintances outside the county jail where people had spent the  night, waiting to get out on bond. Most folks got out on bond, others  were (and perhaps still are) being held on a higher bond, waiting for  friends and relatives and comrades to come up with the money. Talking  to people just out of jail I heard more horror stories. One man,  Gabriel, told of being kept outside between 2 and 6 am in the rain,  and then being held in a cell where he was handcuffed to a chair  along with another man, not able to stand or lay down, for 13 hours.
 
I left Pittsburgh in the late afternoon from the jail, heading  towards New England to continue this northeastern concert tour. In  Connecticut this morning I got a call from Cindy Sheehan, who had  just gone to the Emergency Room because she was having trouble  breathing. People around her the night before had been vomiting  profusely as a result of the tear gas. Having suffered injury in the  past from getting gassed in Quebec City, I knew exactly why she was  in the ER.
 
There will be lawsuits, and the lawsuits will be won. People like  Cindy and Gabriel might make a bit of money from their suffering at  the hands of the authorities. Not to worry, though   the authorities  have a multi-million dollar slush fund to deal with these lawsuits.  They expect them, and they don't care. This is democracy in the USA.  It's always been like this, under Democrats or Republicans. If you  doubt me, it's quite simply because you don't know your history.
 
Protest, however, matters. The end of slavery, the banning of child  labor, the fact that most working class people live to be past 30  these days, is all a direct result of protest   of democracy  happening in the streets. Marches, strikes, rebellions, and all  manner of other extra-parliamentary activities. The authorities are  well aware that democracy in the streets, no matter what they say  that's why dissent is criminalized. Because as soon as we are allowed  to have a taste of our own power, everything can change. It has, and  it will again, but the powers-that-be will continue to do what they  do best   try hard to make sure we don't know how powerful we are.  They require the consent of the governed, the consent of those  students in Pittsburgh, and they have now lost it, at least for many  of those who were in Oakland last Friday night. They would have lost  it a lot more if they had done mass arrests or used live ammunition,  which is why they didn't do that.
 
We don't have freedom of speech or assembly and we never have, but it  is through all kinds of  unlawful assemblies,  from Shays' Rebellion  to the Civil Rights movement, that change happens. So here's to the  next Pittsburgh, wherever it may be. I hope to see you there, on the  streets, where our fate truly lies.

http://www.davidrovics.com

http://davidrovics.guestbooks.cc

http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics

http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com
<http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com/>

http://www.myspace.com/davidrovics

http://www.facebook.com/davidrovics

http://twitter.com/drovics
 

* previous entry*

David is performing at at a house party in Somerville, MA tonight! Monday, 9/28/09. Here for RSVP details.

Hi folks,

As of today there are 21 new songs and poems online for free download at http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics . In a couple weeks they will also be out in CD form. All 21 are solo studio performances with Billy Oskay as engineer and producer at his gorgeous studio in Corbett, Oregon, Big Red Studio, and they sound really good.

The next step for me is my grassroots, DIY attempt to publicize this new recording. I don't have a publicist, radio promoter, manager, or (fill in the blank), so this is where you come in! Basically, I'd say this: if you like my music and you think other people should hear it, feel free to peruse this email and take a few minutes (or more) out of your life to do something described below.

Why free download?

There's a lot of confusion around this (thanks in large part to the confusion-sowing efforts of the corporate music industry). People tend to assume that I put up all my music for free download out of principle in order to get the music out there and reach the widest audience possible. This is true. People also assume that because I put up all my music for free I must be living off of a trust fund since I couldn't possibly be making a living this way. This is not true. However, in order to make a living at music without any help from the music industry   and in fact while flouting everything they stand for   it absolutely requires the active participation of lots and lots of people like YOU.

Spreading the word

Now, if I put my music up for free download (in the form of high-quality MP3's, not just streaming, I might add) and my serious fans could just download everything instead of buying my CDs, this would definitely not pay the bills. What makes the difference is if those fans are big enough fans to enthusiastically tell other people (LOTS of other people) to listen to these songs. The pragmatic aspect to this is my theory that for every 1,000 people who become fans of my music ONE of them is going to organize a well-attended, paying gig for me somewhere in the world. I'm absolutely convinced that this theory works and is the main reason I'm making a living off of music. However, it requires a lot of people doing a lot of well-targeted networking for it to really work.

There are lots of ways to do this which just require a little of your time. There are other ways that require more time, and still others that require money. Whether you have a little time, a lot of time, no money or a lot of money, there are very useful things you can do, and I'll lay out some of them below.

Tweets and updates

Here's a real easy one. Do what I did this morning and do a status update on your Facebook page or blog or anything else like that you might have and tell folks to check out my new songs on SoundClick. Write a little review of the songs on your blog.

More targeted networking

If you go to http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics  and click on  music  you'll find all the new songs and poems right there. If you click on  full song info  for any of the songs you'll get to a screen that has the various ways you can download or stream the song and you'll also see a URL that, when pasted into your web browser, will bring you directly to that page just for that song. So are you involved with or interested in a specific issue that I may have written a song about? You know other people with those interests? Consider sending a link just to the song about that issue or putting a link up on your website if you've got one.

More specific ideas along those lines:

Do you know anyone with a particular interest in US, Canadian or Australian labor history? Send them a link to  Berkshire Hills,  Song for Ginger Goodwin,  or  Song for the Eureka Stockade.  Tell them to feel free to spread the song around wherever they see fit or to put the song up on their websites -- or to hire me to do a show at their union halls or universities! Know anyone involved with pro-choice activism? Send them a link to  In the Name of God.  Got any friends who are way into pirates? Send them a link to  Pirates of Somalia.  Know anyone who was a friend or a fan of slain Indymedia journalist Brad Will? Send them  Brad.  Know anyone in Lebanon? Send them  Lebanon (2006).  Know any history buffs who are way into the American Civil War? Send them  John Brown.  Know any militant environmentalists? They might like  Free  or  East Tennessee.  Anyone involved with immigrant rights? Send them  Guanajuato.  Anyone involved with gay rights? Send them  I Know A Man.  Know any Chileans? Send them  Santiago.  Anyone who is a fan of the music of the late Al Grierson? Send then  Song for Al Grierson.  Anyone who spends a lot of time alone in cheap hotel rooms? They might like  Travelodge.  Anyone who just got dumped?  Now That You're Gone might allow them to have a good cry. Etc.

Radio and other media

Do you know anyone with an acoustic music or politically-oriented radio show of any kind? Let them know they can download MP3's for free and if they like them they can email me and I'll send them a free CD. Call in and request that they play a track of mine. If they do it once they might do it again without prompting next time... Know anyone who does music reviews or some other kind of journalism? Ask them to consider reviewing my new recording or otherwise doing a story on me and my music. Perhaps they'd find the free download angle interesting, since it's not how most musicians do things. Ever wonder why I've never been interviewed on the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or Fresh Air? Don't ask me   ask them!

Where money comes in

I rely mostly on my fans to spread the word about my music. However, I'm also going to (temporarily) hire a publicist to help me get the word out. Whether I hire her for a week or for three months will depend on the people reading this. If you want to help get the word out about this CD and you have some disposable income, whatever you send me via the  make a donation  button on my SoundClick page (or in the  support the arts  section and various other sections of http://www.davidrovics.com  or by check will be used to pay my publicist so she can work at this more, or less, depending on how much interest (represented by your hard-earned money) there is in getting my music out there. If you want to mail a check please make it out to me and send it to:

David Rovics
PO Box 86805
Portland, OR 97286

Every little bit counts, but if you're in a position to make a $500 contribution you get a free house concert next time I'm in your area (if you want). And don't worry about any larger contributions being wasted   for time and materials it will cost me $5,000 to hire a publicist for three months. If contributions end up being greater than that sum, no problem   a full-page ad in a music or political magazine costs anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per ad. If you might like to sponsor an ad in a particular publication and help promote the good things you do in the process, this is also most welcome!

Buy a CD or three

I actually have two new CDs coming out. The one I haven't mentioned yet is a  best of  sort of thing called Waiting for the Fall. That and the CD of new songs and poems, Ten Thousand Miles Away, will both be out in physical form around the same time, in early October. They will both be sold on my estore through the  buy stuff  link at http://www.davidrovics.com  for $15 each plus shipping costs. However, if you want to buy 3 or more copies of either of my new CDs (in any combination) here's my promotional deal: buy 3 or more and you can get them for $10 each, directly from me, including postage to anywhere on the planet.  My hope there is that if you're buying multiple copies you're planning on giving at least one of them away. If you want to give the extra CD (or CDs) to a friend, great. A friend with a radio program or a friend who books a festival or something, even better. As with sending a contribution, you can send money via the PayPal ( make a donation  button) link on my website or by mailing a check (in US funds) to my PO Box. (Make sure to let me know with a note or something if you're sending money for this purpose, and also how many and which CDs you'd like me to send.)

Organize a show

Speaking of house concerts, whether or not you're able to make a large (or even a small) contribution, organizing a show is both a great way to get my music out to a wider audience as well as to allow me to make a living. If you're reading this message it is very likely that I'll be touring in your area again in the next year or so. If you have the time and energy, that and a little know-how is all that's required to organize a show for me next time I'm in your area. If you haven't done this before, not to worry! Just go to the  how to organize a show  section of http://www.davidrovics.com and follow the recipe. Do that and it'll work fine!

Come to a show and bring your friends

Tomorrow I'm in Dallas. For the rest of the month I'm in the northeastern US. Throughout October I'm touring throughout the midwestern US (with Anne Feeney). In November and December I'm in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe. In March I'll be doing a west coast US/Canada tour (with Danbert Nobacon of Chumbawamba). In May I'll be doing a tour of Britain (with Attila the Stockbroker). Details about these tours are (or will be) up on http://www.davidrovics.com

If a show is listed on my website then it is open to the public, and you don't need anyone's permission to spread the word about the show. Without even asking anyone you can print out a tour poster from my website, fill it in with the relevant info up on my website about the show, make copies and put them up all over town. Without anyone's permission you are hereby most welcome to tell all your friends about the show and bring them along. If there's a website, calendar, publication or anything else that should have info about the show but doesn't, there's no need to wait and see if the organizer of the show gets the info to them   you can just do it yourself! If the folks that run that calendar hear about the show twice that's OK. In fact it's even better…

OK, I'll stop there! Thanks in advance for any and all efforts you might make!

David
 

* previous entry*

David will appear on
"Makes W I D E Turns"
Sun. Sept. 27, 2009 from 11:30 - 12noon

* previous entry *

As a teenager, in 1984, I volunteered for the Mondale/Ferraro campaign, mostly pushing bumper stickers. An anti-nuclear group was doing this, in the belief that Mondale would be less likely to cause Armageddon. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white, Republican town. I was a news junky from an early age, though, and politically active in one way or another. Of the Democratic candidates my favorite was Jesse Jackson, but looking around me I reasoned he had a slim chance of getting elected.

As an adult, living in urban areas all over the US, I saw little to dispel this illusion. There were more African-Americans getting elected to political office, but usually we were talking about mayors of majority-Black cities or Congresswomen from hotbeds of progressivism like Berkeley. But here I was, hanging out with my
toddler, listening to my favorite local band, the Pagan Jug Band, sitting in a pub in Portland, hearing that Barack Obama has been elected President.

My initial reaction was that of Jesse's. I got a lump in my throat, and tears came to my eyes, thinking about the insanity of all the suffering that has gone down for so many centuries, the homes, dreams, and bodies broken by slavery and racism. And in fact until very recently, on the news broadcasts when they would mention the number of Black people in the Congress, in order to be factually
accurate they always had to include the caveat, "since Reconstruction." More than that is rarely said about this ten-year period of Union Army occupation that allowed something approximating
democracy, and even serious land redistribution, to exist in the South, before the Union withdrew and the South was plunged into at least a century of Apartheid rule.

Whether South or North, the prisons are filled with mostly dark-skinned people from places where you can graduate from high school without having learned how to read, where you can get asthma from breathing the air, where the police shoot first and ask questions later. They're in prison, but Barack Obama's not, he's on
the TV giving a humble victory speech, quoting Lincoln. And this crowd of mostly young white people around me at the pub are all cheering at the TV screen, shouting his name, laughing, crying, and drinking. I'm pretty sure they all voted for him. Or if some of them were slacking too much to get around to it, they would have voted for him.

I had just gone there to hear the music, but it turned into a spontaneous Obama party, at that pub and at pubs and sidewalks and streets in cities all across the US, and apparently in other parts of the world as well. I remember being near the front of a march of tens of thousands of people back in 1985 or so, seeing Jesse Jackson at the front of the march with many of his volunteers lining the marchers, all wearing football-style shirts that read "88" on them, for his next Presidential campaign effort. I remember seeing on the faces and the placards of this mostly white crowd of marchers, an admiration and affection for the man at the front of the march, and I was wishing the whole country could be more like this crowd. And I feel so gratified that all the people talking about the so-called Bradley effect were wrong, that a majority of our eligible voters (not counting those millions of ineligible felons) would really end up voting for Obama.

There was one black-clad young man from Olympia who happened to be at the crowded pub, which was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. He bummed a light from me and started to talk. "This is great, you know, but I just can't help but think, 'meanwhile, in Afghanistan..."

Every party needs a spoiler, and here he was. Too cynical to be entirely swept up in the moment, he was worried about the possibility that Obama might actually follow through with his campaign promises and send more troops to Afghanistan. And then over the past few days, the news gets more and more grim. Rahm Emanuel, a zealous supporter of Israeli Apartheid for Secretary of State. Larry Summers, Clinton's chief advocate for the World Trade Organization and deregulation of the financial sector, is being suggested as an economic advisor. Joe Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, is already his VP.

Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it. NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell during the Clinton years.

Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But he embraced all of that, and much, much more.

On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different. Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon. Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican administrations, social spending has decreased.

There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the population, but among the elite who rule it.

Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked. I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:

It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.

[If Obama wins the election,] he might very well be a fine negotiator for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire. Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to lend money for us to do so.

Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way, I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could be ironic.

The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy -- those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people, of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world, and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.

But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions, and neoliberal economic reforms.

Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above $100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city? Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free education through graduate school like they have in most European countries?

No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between "conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people, I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison population will not get much smaller.

I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on. Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth re-distributor his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges who dominate both parties in the Congress.

And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.

David Rovics is a singer/songwriter and unashamed socialist based in Portland, Oregon.

* previous entry *

Below is the itinerary for my "on the way to the protests" tour. I leave Portland tomorrow and head south to Eugene and southern Oregon, California from Humboldt to LA, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, then back to Portland for a peace rally on September 11th. Details are all below, but even more details can be found at www.davidrovics.com. Some of the details about where I'm performing during the DNC and RNC protests in Denver and the Twin Cities are still being figured out, and should appear on my website shortly, along with one or two other gigs that may materialize along the way.

My DIY guide, Sing for your Supper, is now available for purchase on my online store, if you follow the "buy stuff" link on davidrovics.com. My upcoming children's CD, Har Har Har, will be there next month.

I've been thinking I'd really like to write some songs about some victories. There are too many depressing things going on, all of which deserve to be written about, not to mention successfully dealt with one way or another. But there are also inspiring stories of victorious social movements and campaigns all over the world, and more people need to know about them. I've of course written songs about some of them, but I want to write more. So if anybody feels inspired to share with me a story, whether local to you or from some other place, of a large or small victory of one sort or another, please do.

OK, otherwise please feel free to spread the word about my upcoming tour, and at the end of the itinerary below I also include stuff happening later, especially in case anybody else on the east coast of the US wants to organize anything while I'm there for visits in September and in January...

Hope to see you on the road -- and in the streets of Denver and the Twin Cities!

--David

Friday, August 8th, 8 pm

Apocalypse On Broadway
2100 W. Broadway #1
Eugene, OR <mailto:chris.calef@gmail.com>

Saturday, August 9th, 6 pm

Takilma Community Center
Takilma, OR
Me and the great Patrick Dodd! <mailto:smallrevolution@peoplepc.com>

Monday, August 11th, 7:30 pm

Beginnings
Briceland, CA <mailto:hayduke@efmedia.org>

Tuesday, August 12th

Clay Street House Concert
6 pm pot luck and 7 pm music
Ukiah, CA

Wednesday, August 13th, 7:30 pm

Resource Center for Nonviolence
Santa Cruz, CA <mailto:bobguzley@yahoo.com>

Thursday, August 14th, 7:30 pm

Unitarian Universalist Church
1924 Cedar Street
Berkeley, CA <mailto:tjayres@sbcglobal.net>

Friday, August 15th, 8 pm

Main Hall, Unitarian Universalist Church
505 E. Charleston Rd.
Palo Alto, CA <mailto:paul@peaceandjustice.org>

Saturday, August 16th, 7 pm

House concert at 37412 Litchfield St.
Palmdale, CA <mailto:jessxrottenx@hotmail.com>

Sunday, August 17th, 5 pm
House concert and Bar-b-que
776 N. Second Avenue
Upland, CA

Monday, August 18th, 7 pm

North Oxnard United Methodist Church
2300 W. Gonzales Rd.
Oxnard, CA <mailto:josmand@yahoo.com>

Wednesday, August 20th, 8 pm (doors open at 7:30)

AirDance Artspace
3030 Isleta Blvd. SW
Albuquerque, NM
Acclaimed local poet Jeff Hartzer will be opening!
<mailto:jblake0476@yahoo.com>

Thursday, August 21st

Vital Arts
423 Grand Ave.
Las Vegas, NM
show for KIDS at 4 pm, adult show at 7 pm <mailto:patleahan@desertgate.com>

Friday, August 22nd, 7 pm

Senior Center
305 F Street
Salida, CO <mailto:Carollocastro@co-isp.com>

Saturday, August 23rd, 8:45 pm

Capitol Heights Presbyterian Church
11th and Fillmore
Denver, CO
Benefit with me and various other performers including Elena Klaver and George Mann. <mailto:rmpjc@earthlink.net>

Sunday, August 24th

End the Occupations Rally
Denver, CO
Friday, August 29th
French Memorial Chapel
Hastings College
Hastings, NE <mailto:mine71@hughes.net>

Sunday, August 31st, 6 pm

Hawkeye Community College Auditorium
Waterloo, IA <mailto:rosequirk@mchsi.com>

Monday, September 1st

March on the RNC
St. Paul, MN

September 2nd and 3rd at 4 pm
Children's concert at RNC Welcoming Committee's childcare farmhouse
Sunfish Lake, MN

Thursday, September 4th

Peace Island Picnic
Minneapolis, MN

Saturday, September 6th

Cafe Montmartre
127 E. Mifflin
Madison, WI
Bring the Guard Home benefit <mailto:momobooking@gmail.com>

Sunday, September 7th, 1 pm

Greenman Music Hall
215 South Main St., inside the Viroqua Public Market
Viroqua, WI
Show for KIDS! <mailto:lrentenbach@yahoo.com>

Thursday, September 11th, 2:30 pm

Rally at South Park Blocks
Portland, OR <mailto:pcwtom@gmail.com>

Wednesday, September 25th, 11:30 am

Fall for the Book festival
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA <mailto:sweazl@aol.com>

November 11th, 2008 through early January 7th, 2009:

Tour of New Zealand and Australia with Alistair Hulett!

Friday, January 23rd, 2009 (he'll be in MA)

I'll be singing at the Friday night concert at the winter gathering of the People's Music Network. Come for the concert and stay for the rest of the weekend -- I'll also be one of many people doing workshops on Saturday and Sunday.
Greenfield, MA <mailto:diacrowe@yahoo.com>

Friday, February 27th

WOW Hall
Eugene, OR
Benefit for CLDC with various other performers...
 

* previous entry *

Tribute to "Utah" Phillips

I was watching my baby daughter sleep in her car seat outside of the Sacramento airport about ten hours ago when I noticed a missed call from Brendan Phillips.  He's in a band called Fast Rattler with several friends of mine, two of whom live in my new hometown of Portland, Oregon, one of whom needed a ride home from the Greyhound station.  I called back, and soon thereafter heard the news from Brendan that his father had died the night before in his sleep, when his heart stopped beating.

I wouldn't want to elevate anybody to inappropriately high heights, but for me, Utah Phillips was a legend.

I first became familiar with the Utah Phillips phenomenon in the late 80's, when I was in my early twenties, working part-time as a prep cook at Morningtown in Seattle.  I had recently read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and had been particularly enthralled by the early 20th Century section, the stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.  So it was with great interest that I first discovered a greasy cassette there in the kitchen by the stereo, Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.

As a young radical, I had heard lots about the 1960's.  There were (and are) plenty of veterans of the struggles of the 60's alive and well today.  But the wildly tumultuous era of the first two decades of the 20th century is now (and pretty well was then) a thing entirely of history, with no one living anymore to tell the stories.  And while long after the 60's there will be millions of hours of audio and video recorded for posterity, of the massive turn-of-the-century movement of the industrial working class there will be virtually none of that.

To hear Utah tell the stories of the strikes and the free speech fights, recounting hilariously the day-to-day tribulations of life in the hobo jungles and logging camps, singing about the humanity of historical figures such as Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was to bring alive an era that at that point only seemed to exist on paper, not in the reality of the senses.  But Utah didn't feel like someone who was just telling stories from a bygone era -- it was more like he was a bridge to that era.

Hearing these songs and stories brought to life by him, I became infected by the idea that if people just knew this history in all it's beauty and grandeur, they would find the same hope for humanity and for the possibility for radical social change that I had just found through Utah.

Thus, I became a Wobbly singer, too.  I began to stand on a street corner on University Way with a sign beside me that read, "Songs of the Seattle General Strike of 1919."  I mostly sang songs I learned from listening to Utah's cassette, plus some other IWW songs I found in various obscure collections of folk music that I came across.

It was a couple years later that I first really discovered Utah Phillips, the songwriter.  I had by this time immersed myself with great enthusiasm in the work of many contemporary performers in what gets called the folk music scene, and had developed a keen appreciation for the varied and brilliant songwriting of Jim Page and others.  Then, in 1991, I came across Utah's new cassette, I've Got To Know, and soon thereafter heard a copy of a much earlier recording, Good Though.

Whether he's recounting stories from his own experiences or those of others doesn't matter.  There is no need to know, for in the many hours Utah spent in his troubled youth talking with old, long-dead veterans of the rails and the IWW campaigns, a bridge from now to then was formed in this person, in his pen and in his deep, resonant voice.  In Good Though I heard the distant past breathing and full of life in Utah's own compositions, just as they breathed in his renditions of older songs.

In I've Got To Know I heard an eloquent and current voice of opposition to the American Empire and the bombing of Iraq, rolled together seamlessly with the voices of deserters, draft dodgers and tax resisters of the previous century.

In reference to the power of lying propaganda, a friend of mine used to say it takes ten minutes of truth to counteract 24 hours of lies.  But upon first hearing Utah's song, "Yellow Ribbon," it seemed to me that perhaps that ratio didn't give the power of truth enough credit.  It seemed to me that if the modern soldiers of the empire would have a chance to hear Utah's monologues there about his anguish after his time in the Army in Korea, or the breathtakingly simple depiction of life under the junta in El Salvador in his song "Rice and Beans," they would just have to quit the military.

Utah made it clear in word and in deed that steeping yourself in the tradition was required of any good practitioner of the craft, and I did my best to follow in his footsteps and do just that.  I learned lots of Utah's songs as well as the old songs he was playing.  Making a living busking in the Boston subways for years, I ran into other folks who were doing just that, as well as writing great songs, such as Nathan Phillips (no relation).  Nathan was from West Virginia, and did haunting versions of "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia," "Larimer Street," "All Used Up," and other songs.  In different T stops at the same time, Nathan and I could often be found both singing the songs of Utah Phillips for the passersby.

Traveling around the US in the 1990's and since then, it seemed that Utah's music had, on a musical level, had the same kind of impact that Zinn's People's History or somewhat earlier works such as Jeremy Brecher's book, Strike!, had had in written form -- bringing alive vital history that had been all but forgotten.  With Ani DiFranco's collaboration with Utah, this became doubly true, seemingly overnight, and this man who had had a loyal cult following before suddenly had, if not what might be called popularity, at least a loyal cult following that was now twice as big as it had been in the pre-Ani era.

I had had the pleasure of hearing Utah live in concert only once in the early 90's, doing a show with another great songwriter, Charlie King, in the Boston area.  I was looking forward to hearing him play again around there in 1995, but what was to be a Utah Phillips concert turned into a benefit for Utah's medical expenses, when he had to suddenly drastically cut down on his touring, due to heart problems.  I think there were about twenty different performers doing renditions of Utah Phillips' songs at Club Passim that night.  I did "Yellow Ribbon."

Traveling in the same circles and putting out CDs on the same record label, it was fairly inevitable that we'd meet eventually.  The first time was several years ago, if memory serves me, behind the stage at the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia.  I think I successfully avoided seeming too painfully star-struck.  Utah was complaining to me earnestly about how he didn't know what to do at these protests, didn't feel like he had good protest material.  I think he did just fine, though I can't recall what he did.

Utah lived in Nevada City, and the last time I was there he came to the community radio station while I was appearing on a show.  This was soon after Katrina, and I remember singing my song, "New Orleans," and Utah saying embarrassingly nice things.  I was on a little tour with Norman Solomon speaking and me singing, and we had done an event the night before in town, which Utah was too tired to attend, if I recall.

Me, Utah, Norman, and my companion, Reiko, went over to a nice breakfast place after the radio show, talked and ate breakfast.  Utah did most of the talking, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that his use of mysterious hobo colloquialisms and frequent references to obscure historical characters in twentieth-century American anarchist history was something he did off stage as well as on.

I've passed near enough to that part of California many times since then.  Called once when I was nearby and he was out of town, doing a show in Boston.  Otherwise I just thought about calling and dropping by, but didn't take the time.  Life was happening, and taking a day or two off in Nevada City was always something that I never quite seemed to find the time for.  Always figured next time I'll have more time, I'll call him then.  It had been thirteen years since he found out about his heart problems, and he hadn't kicked the bucket yet...  Of course, now I wish I had taken the time when I had the chance, and I'm sure there are many other people who feel the same way.

In any case, for those of us who knew his music, whether from recordings or concerts, for those of us who knew Utah from his stories on or off the stage, whether we knew him as that human bridge to the radical labor movement of yesterday, or as the voice of the modern-day hobos, or as that funky old guy that Ani did a couple of CDs with, Utah Phillips will be remembered and treasured by many.

He was undeniably a sort of musical-political-historical institution in his own day.  He said he was a rumor in his own time.  No question, one man's rumor is another man's legend, but who cares, it's just words anyway.


http://www.davidrovics.com
 

* previous entry *

Hi folks,

Thought I'd mention a few things... First of all, for those of you on the west coast of the US or Canada, over the next month I'll be doing shows in California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. (I managed to get into Canada for a wonderful gig in Hamilton, Ontario last week, with a proper work permit, and hopefully will be able to continue to manage that feat...) I'll be opening for a band here in Portland next week and doing a benefit for IVAW later in the month, doing a show at UC Davis and possibly Nevada City later in the month, a show in Twisp, Washington with the fabulous Danbert Nobacon at the end of the month, and shows in Victoria and Vancouver, BC in early June. Mid-June I'll be doing a show for kids and one for grownups in Danbury, Connecticut. Details on all that and other things that may hopefully come up along the way right there on the main page at http://www.davidrovics.com.

Bjorn-Magne has recently finished doing a fabulous animation to my song, "Punk Rock Baby." You can see that and all of Bjorn-Magne's other animations to my songs at http://www.youtube.com/user/Khezerghul. I'd like to particularly encourage folks to check the animations out there on that YouTube site because I think if more people view those videos that'll give 'em more visibility somehow or other... And if you really want to assist in my efforts to corrupt the youth, you could tell someone about these animations who you may know who's active with a PTA, or works in some capacity at an elementary school or library... That's where the children's gigs are, I hear...

Incidentally, eventually the music for these animations and other songs I've got in the kids' section of my website will have a great band backing me up, so these particular solo guitar versions will soon be collector's items, never to be seen again on the web...

For those of you poking around on the web with nothing better to do, check out http://www.myspace.com/davidrovics. First of all, my friend John picks out the songs of mine that appear there, and the selection currently there does a fine job of reflecting my views on the current electoral process underway. (Particularly "Election" and "Whoever Wins In November.") Then scroll down to the "comments" section, and check out videos from Sacred Oath's new CD, fantastic metal band from Connecticut. And a bit further you can check out a local Fox affiliate's reportage on the controversy surrounding the construction of the I-69 "NAFTA Highway" in Indiana, during my recent visit there.
And maybe you'll get a chuckle from my blog entry there on MySpace, Dinner at the Chaos Cafe.

OK, that's all for now... Hope to see you on the road, in the streets, and on the swingsets!

--David

http://www.davidrovics.com
http://www.davidrovics.com/kids
 

* previous entry *

9/11 Truth Movement vs. 9/11 Truth

Or, who are these people and why do they keep yelling at me?

I found myself once again singing at an antiwar rally two weeks ago, and once again being confronted by a red-faced white man with an ominous hand-written sign reading, "9/11 was a lie." Most of the crowd was filing off for the post-rally march, aside from a few of my loyal fans who were sticking around for the rest of my set. Among them was the red-faced man, apparently not a fan, who walked towards the small stage with the wild-eyed certainty of a zealot.

"Wake up, David Rovics! David Rovics, wake up to the truth of 9/11!"
He was screaming at the top of his lungs, standing about two feet from me. (I continued with the song.) In case I didn't get the message the first time, the red-faced man repeated his mantra. "Wake up! Wake up to the truth of 9/11!"

People like him, whoever he was, have become a fixture of antiwar and other protests since sometime soon after September 11th, 2001. They regularly call in to radio talk shows, they maintain many websites, produce innumerable documentaries, publish plenty of books, hold regular conferences, and show up with alarming predictability to heckle and denounce prominent progressive authors and activists at their speaking engagements.

Art Bell and company

For over a decade I've made a living as a touring musician. As a hardcore news junkie, when satellite radio came into existence I was one of its very first customers, and since I got one I've been able to saturate myself with BBC World Service and the English-language broadcasts of public radio from around the world to my heart's content. But for the many years before satellite radio, during my many late-night drives across the plains, deserts and corn fields of the US, choices were much slimmer.

In the early morning or late afternoon there was usually an NPR (Nationalist Petroleum Radio) station to be found, or, very occasionally, a Pacifica affiliate where I might listen to my favorite radio news programs, Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News. (At the very beginning, these programs could be heard on satellite radio via the Hispanic Radio Network, but that channel soon vanished from the satellite airwaves -- over one hundred choices offered, but no news channel to the left of Al Franken...)

But late at night, there were four choices. On the FM airwaves, commercial pop anti-music of various prefabricated genres brought to you by ClearChannel. On AM, you could choose from rightwing Christian evangelists, Rush Limbaugh and Art Bell. The evangelists don't really do anything for me, but when I was getting sleepy, I'd listen to Rush, because he's always good for waking me up -- the powerful desire to strangle someone tends to keep you alert. But most of the time, if I wasn't tired, I'd tune in to Art Bell.

For those unfamiliar with Art Bell's show, it was a corporate-sponsored, nightly, several-hour-long show that has since been passed on to other hosts last I heard, and can generally be found on at least two different AM signals anywhere in the country every weeknight, starting sometime after midnight, as I recall. He apparently broadcast from somewhere in Nevada near the infamous Area 51, where he and many of his guests seemed to believe the US military was experimenting with space aliens who had landed there some time ago.

His guests tended to be authors who had written books or made documentaries about aliens from outer space, telepathy, what all the ghosts are up to these days, Hitler being alive and living in the Antarctic, crop circles, and so on. Being a science fiction fan and one who has had personal experiences that have led me to at least consider the possibility that there is validity in some of these claims, about what Art called the paranormal, I listened with interest to Art and his guests, although usually it was fairly evident they were full of shit.

Listening to Art's guests and to the men (and very occasionally
women) who called in, I remembered the excitement I felt as a child, before I developed a more three-dimensional understanding of the world around me, before I developed a fairly solid capability for critical thinking, before I began to understand how to read between the lines of the biases of the various authorities, experts and pundits out there in the textbooks, newspapers and airwaves. I remembered the excitement of having secrets with certain friends that only we "knew." My own pet theories as a child included the notion that cows were not as stupid as they looked, standing around chewing cud, that they were actually engaged in astral travel, using their apparent stupidity as a grand cover of some kind. I fairly well convinced myself in the existence of dragons and elves and other mythical creatures, long after I had realized there was no Santa Claus.

But the fantasy life of children can become very odd when practiced by grown men. Many, if not most, of Art's guests and callers seemed to believe that the things they "knew," such as their prevalent idea that the US military was hiding space aliens in Area 51, were phenomenae that only people like them and Art were being honest about. The rest of the media, society, and the powers-that-be were either ignorant about these realities, or, at least as often, were engaging in a huge, X-Files kind of coverup.

Especially in the context of a fundamentally alienated society, especially for a certain class of white men who seem to be somewhat on the margins of the US system of power and privilege, but are white and male enough to believe that they deserve better, the sort of feeling of brotherhood that comes with "knowing" something that the rest of society doesn't know is a powerful one. It's an obvious source of excitement, and gives people a sense of belonging. Without having had access to more rational ways of understanding their place in the world and the complexities of society, current events, history and power structures, they have found some kind of lens through which they can try to understand the world.

It's a faith-based sort of thing. These people are not looking for different points of view, they are looking for further confirmation of what they already believe -- and of course they share this with many, many others who we could call "people of faith," whether they are Christians who believe Jesus was the son of God, Muslims who believe there is one God, Allah is his name and Mohammed was his prophet, neoliberals who believe the unregulated market will make everybody rich, or Maoists who believe the Chinese cultural revolution was the greatest achievement of humankind. No evidence to the contrary will deter these people in their unswerving certainties.

What I always found most interesting as well as most disconcerting about listening to Art Bell, though, was how he would occasionally -- but regularly -- have on guests who were talking about very real and verifiable conspiracies. Things like the CIA's active role in the world drug trade, the State Department's role in overthrowing governments around the world, or the US, Saudi and Pakistani collaboration in creating, arming and funding the Taleban and Al-Qaeda.

Topics which the corporate media would almost never touch could find an occasional voice in Art Bell -- although Art was just as corporate-funded as ABC or CNN. It seemed that if most of the programming was clearly fantasy-based conspiracy theories, the corporate masters felt that it was politically acceptable to allow Art to have the occasional reality check. It would generally go unnoticed by most people, or be discounted as just another wacky conspiracy theory, so it was OK.

Fantasy undermining reality

And if giving a wide audience to the real conspiracies become harmless when they're presented within a sea of fictional conspiracies, the flip side of that is that the very legitimate investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersch and Robert Fisk who are uncovering and reporting on things like the US role in funding groups like Al-Qaeda can more easily get lost among the static, lost among the hundreds of documentaries purporting to prove that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled explosives, that the planes that crashed into them were on autopilot and there really were no terrorists on board, that the cell phone conversations passengers had with their loved ones before they died were faked, that there was no plane that hit the Pentagon, and so on.

If you bother slogging through the volumes of books and stacks of documentaries that "9/11 Truth" people will foist on you if you let them, you will find that most of them are propaganda pieces and most of the "experts" are not experts in relevant fields. When you do look beyond this mass of misinformation for real experts, you will easily find pilots who can discount the claims of the Truthers that maneuvering the planes into the towers was a particularly challenging thing for people with only a little flight training to pull off. You will easily find mechanical engineers familiar with the structural flaws in the design of the WTC that allowed it to collapse in the first place, and physicists who can explain why such large buildings would appear to be imploding as if in a controlled demolition, or why people on the scene would have thought they were hearing explosions, etc. My purpose here is not to disprove all the hypothoses presented by the Truthers and their propaganda pieces -- if you want to look into "debunking the debunkers" yourself, there is plenty of information out there, and Popular Mechanics' issue on the subject is a good place to start.

The fact is, the scientific community, while certainly not immune to political pressure, is generally able to function with a grounding in actual science, and is not capable of participating, as a community, in some kind of mass conspiracy of silence or coverup. There is no way to bribe that many scientists. Too many of them believe in the importance of science for science's sake, in honesty. This can be amply demonstrated by the fact that with all the political pressure and money of the US government and ExxonMobil combined, there is still essentially unanimity among climate scientists worldwide that climate change is real, is caused by humans, and is dangerous for our species and others. Even after all the billions upon billions of dollars spent by the tobacco industry to obfuscate reality and bribe policymakers and the scientific community, the scientific community was able to study the issue and determine incontrovertibly the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.

Sowing seeds of doubt

The "9/11 Truth Movement" undoubtedly is made up largely of earnest, decent people, the sorts of decent folks who make up most of Art Bell's guests and listeners. Since thousands of their fellow countrymen and women died on 9/11 and since this event -- whether it was a terrorist attack carried out by US-trained Mujahideen that could have been prevented, or an entirely "inside job" carried out by Dick Cheney with the aide of computers and plastic explosives, as many Truthers claim -- many people in many communities have become justifiably agitated and outraged by world-scale injustices, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.

The old Art Bell listeners who used to be entertained by the fact that most people don't believe there are space aliens in Area 51 are now really extra worked up because the vast conspiracy they have come to believe in are resulting in the deaths of huge numbers of people around the world. And if the rest of us would just understand what they understand, everything would be different. If the media would report on reality as they see it, people would wake up and do something about this situation.

The particularly warped thing about this, though, is that the very media outlets, authors and activists who are doing their best to expose the very real conspiracies that are going on -- people like Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!, David Barsamian's Alternative Radio, Z Magazine, the Progressive Magazine, Norman Solomon and the Institute for Public Accuracy, Noam Chomsky, etc., seem to have become the primary targets of harassment by the Truthers.

Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon and others are now regularly heckled at speaking events, and denounced on websites as "gatekeepers." They are seen, it seems, as being even worse than the corporate media, because while reasonable people know not to trust Fox or CNN, they have faith in the integrity of people like Amy Goodman.

You don't have to know Norman Solomon, Amy Goodman or her producers personally to see what nonsense this "gatekeeper" stuff is. You needn't ever have met Amy to know that she has risked her life, and very nearly lost her life, in her decades-long efforts to report the truth. You needn't know her producers personally to recognize that these are all earnest young progressives working long hours to create a daily news program they deeply believe in. The notion that all of her producers are somehow maintaining a code of silence in exchange for the privilege of having their names mentioned at the end of the broadcast, or in exchange for their nominally middle-class salaries, is preposterous.

However, judging from numerous emails I get and conversations I have with fans and acquaintances from around the US and elsewhere, the efforts of the Truthers to sow seeds of doubt among readers and listeners of progressive media is having some palpable impact.
Increasingly, I hear from people who have vaguely heard something about this "gatekeeper" phenomenon, something about Ford Foundation money undermining the entire progressive media.

As is so often the case, there are little grains of truth in here that can fester in the minds of people who are not looking at the information critically. For the cops among the Truthers (of course it's a matter of the public record that the FBI and other such agencies regularly write "newspaper articles" -- propaganda or disinformation of whatever sort they deem useful which they disseminate through newspapers, websites, etc.), undermining the legitimacy of the progressive media is exactly their goal, because they don't want the population to know the truth or to trust those who are reporting it. For the more earnest elements among the Truthers, undermining the progressive media is also their goal, because they don't see it as being distinct from the corporate media anyway -- so whether earnest or insidious, the effect is the same.

The grain of truth, of course, is that government, corporate and foundation money have undoubtedly succeeded in making PBS and NPR a shell of it's former self. Foundation money has also had a debilitating impact on the nonprofit world, since support for essential but illegal activities such as civil disobedience on the part of nonprofits will tend to cause them to lose foundation support. Also, nonprofits are prevented by law from participating openly in the electoral process, or they lose their nonprofit status.
If progressive media is being influenced by the relatively small amount of foundation money it receives, I don't see it.

It seems evident to me that shows like Democracy Now! are quite willing -- and indeed, are doing their best -- to make waves as much as possible. If they don't report a story it's because they don't think it's a story, or it's not an important enough one to bother with. In the case of "theories" like the notion that controlled demolition brought down the World Trade Center or there were no members of Al-Qaeda on board the airplanes, this narrative has received little coverage in the progressive media because, upon investigation, most decide it's patently ridiculous.

The real gatekeepers

Sometime in 2002 I wrote a song called "Reichstag Fire," in which I asked many of the questions the Truthers were asking. The point of the song was primarily to say that 9/11 has been used as an excuse for the US to carry out a genocidal crusade on much of the Muslim world, and to further the US government's bipartisan agenda of world domination and control of valuable resources in other countries, such as oil. (This is something Truthers and most other people in the world can generally agree on.) In the song I also posed questions which I now feel have been adequately explained.

Were there really Arab terrorists on board the planes? Yes. Did the CIA know an attack was imminent? Yes. I don't regret writing the song, or becoming a very minor celebrity within the 9/11 Truth Movement, because I think these questions needed to be asked, and answered. But while some questions can only remain unanswered until certain people within the US government become whistleblowers, other questions have been answered, and my answers (and those of most people who have looked into these things) and those of what now constitutes the Truth Movement differ wildly. Particularly because I have been seen by some as part of this movement (although I seem to be increasingly getting lumped into the "gatekeeper" camp), I felt compelled to write this essay.

The truth is, in fact, out there. Much of it is certainly still there to be discovered, but many fundamental, essential truths are already known. The truth -- that, for example, the CIA funded and armed Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, that a tiny minority of very wealthy people control much of the US government and the "mainstream"
(corporate/"public") media, that the US military systematically goes around the world overthrowing democracies, propping up dictatorships, and killing millions of people with bombs -- is what the progressive media is reporting on hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. These are the truths that people in the US most need to "wake up" to. These are the truths that are systematically unreported or severely under-reported by the corporate press, which, even in the age of the internet, is still where the vast majority of people in the US get their news, and thus, their understanding of the world.

These corporate media entities and the genocidal, ecocidal plutocracy they serve are the "gatekeepers" that need to be exposed. The truths they are trying to hide from us are the truths that need to be understood, and acted upon. The progressive media that is trying to do just that needs to be supported, not undermined with essentially baseless accusations (legitimate criticisms and suggestions notwithstanding).

The people who are trying, with some degree of success, to undermine these basic endeavors of the progressive movement and the progressive media need to be exposed for what they are -- whether they fall into the category of well-meaning but misguided fanatics or undercover government agents quite purposefully and systematically working to spread disinformation and sow confusion and distrust. And, beyond any reasonable doubt, the "Truth Movement" contains both of these elements. To both of these groups I beseech you -- wake up! Wake up to the real, easily-verifiable conspiracies -- which are extremely big ones! -- and quit trying to distract us with all the nonsense about gatekeepers and controlled demolitions!

David's website