This Week in War Mongering

by on November 18, 2010
Posted In: politics

Last week President Obama flew to India to sell them $5 billion for 10 Boeing C-17 cargo planes — the sixth biggest arms deal in U.S. history. As Jim Hightower points out, this deal doesn’t do much to boost American employment (despite administration hopes), but it does help escalate the arms race India runs with Pakistan, its eternal rival and a customer of U.S. arms dealers: “How long before American soldiers get caught in this deadly crossfire of U.S. made weapons?”

This week Thailand extradited Victor Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death” to the United States to face charges of global arms trafficking with clients that include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Undercover DEA agents posed as FARC rebels seeking weapons to shoot down American pilots enforcing the U.S. Plan Colombia policy initiated by the ClintonAdmin oh so long ago and expanded under the BushAdmin.

I just thought that was an interesting juxtaposition.

Also, last month the ObamAdmin announced a plan to sell Saudia Arabia $60 billion worth of arms over the next 20 years. The Experts interpret this deal as a “message to Iran.”

The other day I drove behind a hatchback sporting a bumper sticker with the “O” of Obama rendered as a peace symbol. I had to laugh.

Spread the joy:
Share
└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

Racial Politics of Music Revivalism

by on November 11, 2010
Posted In: politics

While researching for a graphic novel I am developing, I came across an interesting article by Tony Thomas, an African-American scholar and folk musician, answering the question Why Black Folks Don’t Fiddle. Every decade over the past century has seen a revival movement, sometimes spurring newer forms of traditional-modern hybrids, most famously the Folk Music™ of the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone remember the Swing revival of the 1990s? Squirrel Nut Zippers, anyone? Currently we are seeing a new trend toward traditional instruments like mandolin, ukelele, and banjo. Yet here is an odd phenomenon: Despite the African-American origins of most of this celebrated music (the banjo itself comes from Africa), you will find few black members among the revivalists.

Thomas explains why:

Some Blacks see these revivals as attempts to get away from African American based music of the present or to recast older Black musics in white versions. As an African American who writes about and performs old time music and blues, I regularly receive letters from white persons who counterpose “the Black cultural heritage” of Blues or Black string band music to the “bad ” hip hop and rap. Such white folks ignore the fact that the current musics created by the young and African American exist precisely as a continuation of musical traditions of blues and black string band music, and that the purpose of culture is to express the real identity and living conditions of people, so that they should expect Black folks, particularly the young, the poor, and the alienated to create music that speaks of their own separateness, and not the tastes of the non-white, non-young, and non-Ghetto population.

Those of us interested in performing traditional African American music of the past, are usually condemned to performing for largely non-Black audiences.

That is a very lonely sentence. And not only due to the author’s giving it its own paragraph.

Thomas runs a BlackBanjo, Yahoo group on traditional African American folk instruments, seeking to preserve the recorded history, celebrate past practitioners and practices, and highlight current revivals. I imagine he has confronted resistance and indifference in pursuing his musical passion, partly owing to the difficult past this music represents for his fellow African-Americans.

Yet I think there are other factors at play: general indifference to history in popular culture (a marked contrast to ongoing efforts by African-Americans to retrieve and preserve their past) and, even more significantly, the inequities of musical education. Black music is vibrant, deep and progressive — but all in spite of social neglect afflicting education in general and black neighborhood schools in particular. Strong music programs in public schools have become an increasing rarity since the Reagan 80s; fewer students have access to musical instruments of any kind, let alone the violin which tends to get treated as a classical music specialty. No string band or bluegrass fiddle tunes in your standard music curriculum. I reckon there are some class and race politics informing that, too.

Spread the joy:
Share
└ Tags: , , ,
Comments Off on Racial Politics of Music Revivalism

Third Party, Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

by on November 5, 2010
Posted In: politics

Despite the addition of 151K new jobs in the U.S. in October (and 1.1 million jobs since January), unemployment numbers still suck.

Nearly 15 million people are out of work and actively looking, and the unemployment rate, which remained steady at 9.6 percent, has been relatively flat since May.

A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs and people who have given up looking for work, ticked down slightly to 17 percent from 17.1 percent in September.

To get a little personal here (on my blog? The nerve!), I think I am in the latter group. I chose to be a stay-at-home dad, mostly because I could not find full-time or part-time librarian positions that would either accommodate my child-rearing responsibilities or afford before-and-after school daycare. And I am in one of the few parts of the country where libraries are eagerly supported by public levies or by educational institutions. There are still hiring freezes and maintaining productivity with less — “less” being either fewer workers or fewer hours to employ those workers. Perhaps these are special circumstances — especially for creative types like me — that would hold no matter the state of the economy; but I have met more parents in similar situations over the past couple years. I am a lucky ducky to the extent that I am on the on-call lists at two library systems, so I get to pull in some extra bucks at about one shift a week. Rollin’ in the green!

So speaking as one of the under-employed, I get the frustration the rest of the electorate has expressed (if we read the tea leaves correctly) in the mid-term elections. But that only takes me so far. The argument goes that if the Obama White House had done more to create jobs and had done a better job advertising this fact, the demise of Blue Dog Democrats and the rise of Teabag Republicans could have been avoided. There is truth there, but what I don’t understand is why the electorate would put in place people even less likely to solve the country’s economic problems. If the GOP or the Tea Party had actually advanced real ideas about creating jobs and strengthening the economy’s fundamentals, their victories on Tuesday would make more sense. But they didn’t. They espoused only a more extreme version of the same tax-cut-and-small-government rhetoric we heard ad nauseum during the Bush years — an eight-year reign that ended only two years ago, mind you, with disastrous results. They should have been “shellacked” at the polls just as harshly as the Blue Dogs.

But by what? This is a two-party system. If you punish one party, you can only do it with the other. The only virtues of the Tea Party has been their espoused distrust of both parties and their tactical infiltration of GOP. A more reasonable and more productive response by voters would have been to form a strong third party to propose policies and solutions that the other two parties are incapable (by virtue of their corporate backing) of formulating. So far, this has not happened. I won’t rehearse the history of third party failures over the past 20 years (Perot, Nader, etc.), but they have direct bearing on what happened on Tuesday.

If we have no party to articulate alternative solutions and policies, then the only ones we will hear and become enacted are the same old formulas that corporate and political elites are capable of cobbling together. (To wit, Obama’s “infrastructure spending and tax breaks for businesses.”) If no political movement bothers to organize and maintain the involvement of youth and minorities, then those groups will not show up to vote, because they see no positive expression of their interests among the choices available. “Lesser of two evils” is not a sustainable motivation for most people to get involved in the process. Not when one side is bat shit crazy and the other side is corrupt. Or both.

Spread the joy:
Share
3 Comments