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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
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5.25.08
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previous entry * |
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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
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03.31.08 |
