Yesterday we got our annual email notifying us that starting August 1st our rent would go up by another $100 a month. The timing was kind of amusing, because I had just spent much of the day writing a song about how much the rent has been going up in recent years. I've written a few songs like that, but it was the first one for a while, certainly since the genocide in Gaza began and my musical attentions have been overwhelmingly elsewhere.
As I've been keeping up on the campus encampments sweeping the country, and visiting a few of them, I've also been counting the pennies, almost literally, making sure we have enough money in the bank for the monthly rent check that's due at the beginning of each month. This month, as with various others, this has involved the strategy that is inevitably very familiar to millions of other of my fellow Americans: buying groceries on a credit card.
Two weeks ago I sent out the newsletter titled "We Interrupt Our Usual Programming," which was an NPR-style fundraising pitch for me to keep writing, touring, and recording, which these days absolutely requires some heavy subsidies from somewhere in order to work. Response was heartwarming and helpful, though not nearly enough to reverse the course I'm currently on towards what we might call the eventual "debt ceiling."
Expenses continue to outpace earnings. As the rent has been skyrocketing year after year, we began to qualify for food assistance, which largely offset the rise the rent, while it lasted. Then they decided our household income was too high for food assistance, and that expenses vs. earnings problem rears its head again.
The whole time I've been doing this traveling and guitar-picking thing, I guess it is the case that I've been operating on some kind of vague business strategy. Which is basically if the credit card is getting close to being maxed out, it's time to reevaluate, and figure out how to spend less and/or make more. We're only halfway there. So my plan is to keep on writing, recording, touring, and singing at protests, and hope the base of people who are willing and able to be part of my Community-Supported Art program will continue to grow at least as fast as the rent rises.
In conclusion, thanks so much for the approximately 50 people who have just joined my CSA in the past two weeks. It really has made a big difference, materially and emotionally. If there might be 50 more out there, that would be especially wonderful. But we're at least a few months away from the time when I need to come up with an altogether different income stream, or start driving for Uber. And I mean no disparagement of Uber drivers in that comment, which after all I may some day be myself, realistically. And then when the cars all start driving themselves, I'll move into an old broken-down caravan, like half the other people in this town.
As I watch in the real world as well as through the various other means what is (and isn't) happening on college campuses across the US and beyond recently, a number of thoughts come to mind that seem worth exploring a bit.
1) Taking over physical space and having a protest encampment there is a powerful tactic. It's a tactic that requires collective organization, and the participation of significant numbers of seriously committed individuals. As long as a physical space can be held in some visible form, it can continue to be a magnet for solidarity, more organizing, and popular education, as well as opposition, attacks, ridicule, and more. Past powerful examples of holding physical space and generating a lot of attention, controversy, and even political changes have included the IWW's free speech campaigns of the 1910's, the union sit-down strikes of the 1930's, the campus occupations of the 1960's, Alcatraz Island and other campaigns of the American Indian Movement in the 1970's, the urban squatting movement in many parts of Europe and New York City in the 1970's and 1980's, the Tahrir Square occupations in various Arab countries of the 2010's, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
2) The tactic of occupying a public space is often opposed by the authorities with state violence. Holding physical public space generally involves violating the law on a daily basis. Usually there are laws against setting up tents in public spaces like the centers of campuses or in city parks, and other laws against spending the night in those tents. The authorities in most countries tend to get worried when a whole bunch of people are very publicly and intentionally violating laws, because it undermines what they call "the rule of law" and their authority. If negotiations are even attempted, authorities quickly resort to violence either way, in many countries.
3) If the repression doesn't kill the movement, it can cause a solidaristic reaction, and make it grow instead. There are many examples of social movements that started relatively small, but then after being violently repressed, grew dramatically as a result of the broader community being outraged by the way protesters were treated by authorities, as well as the way they were being misrepresented in the press. This was a pattern that could be observed repeating itself regularly across the country during Occupy Wall Street, as well as during the global justice movement in the decade preceding Occupy.
4) The corporate media is using the protests as an opportunity to try to fear-monger around the supposed atmosphere of antisemitism and general chaos on the campuses. This campus uprising is getting heavy media coverage. Partly this is because of dramatic events, police repression, brutal physical treatment of students and professors caught on camera, etc., and partly this is because an agenda of a given media platform is being served by covering the protests from a certain angle. It's good to bear in mind that protests and even large social movements do not automatically get media coverage of any kind, let alone positive press. And getting lots of media coverage, whether it's positive or negative, comes with major pros and cons.
5) The politicians, especially Republicans, are hoping to use their manufactured crisis as a means to win upcoming elections, a la Nixon in 1972. The only crisis in this equation, of course, is Israel is committing genocide. There is no antisemitism crisis, and there is no chaos on the campuses -- overwhelmingly just peaceable, public campouts of concerned citizens who are doing what they are doing out of outrage against genocide, and at great risk to their personal safety, personal finances, and academic futures. But the reason for the massive media coverage on the part of much of the media is to create the impression of a crisis, either in order to distract attention from any number of other things -- such as the famine that is taking hold in Gaza, or the continuing, daily massacres of children that are now getting far less news coverage on many outlets -- or in order to get "law and order" candidates elected. This political strategy has been used successfully on various notable occasions, such as the pivotal election of 1972, which Nixon won.
6) It is significant, however, that this movement is taking place during a Democratic administration, and can't easily be painted as (and isn't) a partisan phenomenon. Although the conservative, Republican Party-oriented media outlets are painting the movement on the campuses as "woke" and "liberal," the reality is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party leadership is 100% behind Israel, no matter how genocidal the government running the country may be at a given time. My experience with the global justice movement, that began during the long reign of Democratic Party neoliberalism and imperialism in the 1990's, was the fact that it was opposing capitalism and transnational corporate hegemony during a time of a Democrat-led government helped clarify the beliefs and intentions of the movement as a whole, and made us less susceptible to getting distracted by what most of us felt to be the hopeless arena of US electoral politics.
7) The repression against protest and free speech in the past six months has been extreme. Even by the standards set by repressive police states like ours over the past couple of generations, the political atmosphere in the Congress and in the media has been especially rabid and one-dimensional. Whereas during the genocidal American war in Vietnam, despite a tremendous degree of campus activism and mobilization of society in general, for a long time it was a real taboo to call in the riot cops to arrest your students. Fast forward to 2024, it seems to be standard practice.
8) Whether the student-led movement will be able to seize the mantle of defenders of free speech is an open question, and I think a very important one. Without painting the students, staff, or faculty across the US with too broad a brush, it's fairly obvious to say that for many people involved, this is a movement to free Gaza and it's a movement for free speech, against conflating opposition to Israeli genocidal practices with being anti-Jewish, against throttling free speech, canceling Valedictorian speeches on false grounds, or banning student organizations. For other people involved, free speech may not be such a priority. Recent years have seen many left-identified people on campuses across the country protesting against and shutting down events involving speakers identified, rightly or wrongly, as rightwing in some way. It has been normative for there to be a greater concern for "safety" over freedom of discourse. Without an unequivocal support for the fundamental notion presented by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, we stand to lose this argument.
9) If the movement doesn't subside quickly, psy ops tactics to divide and conquer it will (continue to) be employed on a massive scale, and this takes many forms. All successful movements are profoundly inclusive in nature. All unsuccessful ones adopt exclusive attitudes. There are always dishonest actors working for one or another division of the police across the country, along with random wingnuts and brainwashed sectarians, who will be pushing for the movement to behave in exclusive and cliquish ways, always pushing for divisions within the movement to be explored, pushing to denounce people within the movement who are perceived to have made mistakes. This phenomenon must be recognized and opposed through rejecting exclusivity and embracing inclusivity. Movements desperately need to grow, or they die (unless they become successfully institutionalized). This is always the case. This one is surely no exception.
10) There's a big difference between "widespread protests" and "massive protests," and it's important to note this and the perceived atmosphere various media are trying to establish, for whatever varied and contradictory reasons. This movement is getting massive media coverage. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it's important not to mistake massive media coverage for a massive movement. Occupy Wall Street also got massive media coverage. The global justice movement a decade earlier did not. The impact of Occupy getting huge media coverage from the beginning was pretty evident; the movement didn't have time to develop in some organic way, but was just everywhere all of a sudden. This gave it the appearance of being a big movement, but this was only really the case in certain cities. The blanket media coverage seemed to give a lot of people within the movement and outside of it very inaccurate impressions about how big, how organized, or how much potential various local groups had to accomplish what both the media and many participants imagined could be accomplished. Unlike with the case of movements that got virtually no press, such as the global justice movement, Occupy never had large-scale protests in most of the country unless it was a protest announced in advance on local media, and this was also the case with the racial justice movement of 2020. And in both of these cases, although repressive authorities and police brutality played a huge negative role, it was when the media stopped covering these movements that they largely just seemed to dissipate.
In conclusion, in case it's not abundantly obvious, I hope to see this movement grow dramatically, and bring our bipartisan, genocide-enabling political leadership to its senses, and soon. But if that has any chance of happening, this movement will have to find a way to overcome a lot of major obstacles.
There has been a rapid contagion of encampments sprouting up on university campuses across the US and in several other countries in opposition to the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people and in support of the students, staff, and faculty being beaten and arrested in large numbers on so many campuses. The widespread expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians, coupled with demands for institutions with endowments and investments to divest from corporations involved with facilitating the aerial slaughter of the people of Gaza, are now being represented in the inescapable public eye in the form of encampments in the centers of the campuses.
From what I've observed, holding public physical space in the middle of everything like that is a powerful tactic that generally elicits repressive responses from the authorities, and we've seen an awful lot of that across the country over the past few days.
The kind of repression that authorities often resort to in the face of people holding public space like that tends to then leads to much larger demonstrations and other developments against this kind of repression. If the authorities then don't back off from further repressive tactics, the movement is likely to grow.
These are the kinds of patterns that became firmly established during the Occupy Wall Street movement of latter 2011. My suspicion is the encampments protesting the war on Gaza have more potential for exploding into something bigger and more sustained than that last effort at taking over public spaces to make extremely sensible and urgent demands, because of the simple and depressing reason that with each new day the world hears new stories of mass murder and mass graves in Gaza. Each new atrocity is fuel for the next protest.
While "Boycott, Sanction, and Divest" is a song of the moment, there are too many echoes of 2011 in the news lately for me not to reintroduce folks to "Stay Right Here" if you haven't heard it in a while.
Listen to this song, and take the red pill, friends.
While I spend most of my waking hours banging my head against a wall, figuratively speaking, occasionally I get reflective. I've noticed that reflection can occasionally be useful in helping us figure out how to bang our heads against the wall more effectively.
I suppose the most depressing thing about being a middle-aged radical approaching senior citizenship is coming to terms with the reality that despite my efforts to build a movement that would lead to an anti-capitalist, internationalist revolution, things generally just keep on getting worse, and the movement I've dreamed of for my entire adult life is very far from happening.
To paraphrase my friend Pol Mac Adaim, the best thing we can do is to leave behind bread crumbs that point the way forward, so future generations might benefit from them. That's the mind frame I'm in, as I write now -- and often on other occasions as well.
So in the name of reflection, I find myself taking a little survey of what I've been trying to do, and how that's been going. Mainly, how I've applied my time and effort has been through writing and recording songs, and playing them for audiences. The last reflection on a song I wrote was about "St Patrick Battalion," a song about international solidarity and against imperialism, which is pretty clearly the song I've written that's gotten out there the most, been covered the most, and overall, the one that's been heard the most.
But a close competitor with that one, and my most popular song on Spotify, is "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You," which I wrote sometime around 2007.
The song is a satirical statement mocking sectarianism, in some -- but far from all -- of its familiar forms. If the main topic is sectarianism generally, the subtopic is a critique of what political punks when I was young called "lifestylism" -- or in today's lingo, the kind of orientation that would fall into the category of "virtue-signaling."
Given its pithy nature, it's hard to say whether "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You" is a particularly well-written song, although by my standard measure of audience reaction, it apparently is -- each verse tends to elicit knowing laughter, often along with furtive glances in the direction of someone in the room the verse might somehow apply to. Generally, the people you might most visibly associate with the group I'm making fun of in a particular verse is the group that will tend to react most effusively, and positively, to it.
The fact that this song is one of the most popular ones I've written is itself a tremendous source of optimism for me, and I hope for some others, too.
The experience I have at shows where I sing the song is mirrored in a vague, statistical way at least, on Spotify and YouTube. On both of these platforms, my audience is primarily young. This is also true of my physical audiences, in many parts of the world. We can probably assume the young folks listening to this music online are basically the people I'm playing for live -- just that online there are more of them.
If this assumption is accurate, what does the popularity of this particular song among my youthful and leftwing audience tell us? And to slightly complicate the question, if this cohort of largely young radicals is the same cohort that has made "St Patrick Battalion" my other most popular song -- and by my observation at shows, measuring by how many people sing along with which songs, it is -- what does that tell us?
Add to these observations of audiences and analysis of online statistics a mental survey of the sorts of conversations I have with these same young people before and after shows and even online, my conclusions are inescapable. Which is, "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You" is popular in my circles because in my circles people tend to feel very strongly that sectarianism, arrogance, and virtue-signaling suck and instead what we need is real broad-based, inclusive organizing. And "St Patrick Battalion" is popular in my circles because people think imperialism sucks and solidarity and empathy are beautiful and admirable -- especially the kind of solidarity that puts your own life on the line to oppose a war of aggression, and/or to support the cause of freedom and justice and things like that.
In a world where there seems to be a lot more nationalism than internationalism manifesting, and in a society like the US, that seems to be so characterized by division much more than by common ground or common vision, these qualities in my audience seem very positive indeed. If internationalism and inclusivity represent where people in my youthful leftwing circles are coming from, perhaps there are a lot more people out there who feel like that.
I sure hope so, because I have increasingly come to believe that internationalism and inclusivity are the two most important orientations for any person or people who harbor any real hopes for creating a better world. These are also the two perspectives that seem to be most under attack by those forces in society who seek to maintain their power and control over the rest of us.
In a world where a relative handful of people own most of the wealth, leaving the vast majority of the rest of us to squabble over the scraps, the plutocrats in control are completely dependent on successfully keeping us divided, at each other's throats. History demonstrates amply that as soon as we stop fighting each other, only the most extreme forms of violent repression can keep a disenfranchised population like ours from holding the banks and billionaires responsible for their actions.
By the time I wrote "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You," I was just about 40 years old. I had already been touring and playing for various gatherings of radicals for well over a decade -- and it had been a very long and busy decade. When I was in my twenties, if I had had the idea for this song, I probably wouldn't have written it, because I was still pretty sectarian myself. By the time I wrote it I had developed a much more ecumenical orientation politically, but even so, I was really worried I was going to alienate a lot of friends and fans with this song. And it has been so heartening to find that even if I did alienate a few sectarian-oriented people in my social circles, the song energized and basically had the opposite effect of alienation for many more people.
The things I thought, said, and did during my most sectarian phase, in my early twenties, can be pretty horrifying to recall.
Many people seem to be just realizing that there are people with some really bizarre ideas out there, and they're realizing this because of the internet, and social media in particular. But prior to social media being around to amplify the rantings of anyone with a Facebook or TikTok account, I can tell you that the little group of fellow hippies and punks in my little milieu of radical youth when I was one of them had a lot of crazy ideas that we shared among each other. Thankfully, we didn't often get around to trying to communicate these ideas beyond our little clique, unless it was to contribute to a zine or something, in which case there was often some kind of collective effort involving some form of curation, much like the Indymedia Centers that were all the rave among radical online youth prior to Facebook, which tended towards improving statements and making them less sectarian in nature.
Because of the way social media can serve as a means of amplifying the most sectarian, divisive, condescending and bizarre notions that any idiot might manage to get algorithmic traction with, there's something very reassuring about seeing how the stats break down in terms of my audience's demographics and musical preferences. But recalling my youth, there's no doubt that none of this is new -- whether we're talking about sectarianism or the widespread desire to move past it.
And then, taking the longer historical view, for me at least it all becomes abundantly more obvious that successful social movements are always inclusive and broad-based. They fall apart when they take a sectarian turn. And the forces of control in our society -- and the algorithms and other technologies of division and control that they increasingly employ -- are always working hard to make sure to emphasize the internal contradictions that cause social movements to turn inward and drive away potential participants and supporters.
Looking at the past, everything tends to seem more obvious. Like how the internationalist, radical labor movement of the early twentieth century was derailed by the nationalism of World War 1, and the opportunity this gave the capitalist class to repress the forces of internationalism and labor militancy.
Or how the same ruling class and its mouthpieces in the tabloid press stoked divisions back then between the supposedly radical, brick-throwing immigrants who were allegedly behind all the labor organizing, and the supposedly law-abiding Americans who had no interest in such socialist, communist or anarchist ideas.
Looking at more recent times, like the times I've lived through, seeing what's happening with regards to the efforts of the ruling class to maintain docile tranquility, making sense of what's going on seems much murkier and prone to misunderstanding. But the pattern that repeats itself seems to do so with more and more predictability. Every time an inclusive movement is building, a controversy -- or many of them -- develops, calling into question whether some segment of the movement belongs in it, or is taking up too much space within it, or "centering themselves" too much, or causing problems for other people within the movement. These controversies then do their daily, grinding work, in collaboration with the algorithms of control, to erode and destroy the movement, one after another.
A hundred years ago they were telling the native-born workers to
be suspicious of the foreign-born workers, and for the whites to be
suspicious of the Blacks. And that kind of messaging stuck with
us, and continues to be one of the major factors hampering the kind
of class-based movements that have led to such prosperity in so many
European countries.
But then we can add to that kind of ruling class divide-and-conquer messaging around race and nationality the many other ways we are so chronically divided. When I was young and organized left groups and parties were more commonplace, it was a wonder if you'd ever see members of different parties amicably talking with one another at the same demo. As inclusive as the 1960's New Left tended to be, there was the impact of the propaganda that was to some extent successfully promulgated among the general population that the youth had the answers, and the older generation were just hopelessly stuck in a repressed worldview.
Bizarrely, two generations later, this patently fake, corporate, generational breakdown of who has power and responsibility to make changes in society is still ever-present, a cult of youth that permeates social media. Two generations after it was used to confuse the Baby Boomers, the same divide-and-conquer strategy still works like a charm, perhaps better than ever, making sure the younger generations are well-prepared to reject any wisdom that might have been there to build on from older generations of radicals.
In so many ways, social movements have followed a pattern of coming into existence and growing because of the horrendous situation at hand -- be it a movement centered around opposing a genocidal war, stopping climate change, ending police brutality or many other examples -- and then the forces and factors that tend towards division and dissension seek to dominate the discourse and collapse the movement in question.
It seems like a statement of the obvious to many, but to others the idea is shocking, that the movements that are able to be mass movements that can sustain themselves and have a real impact tend to exhibit the kinds of inclusive qualities typical of any modern labor union. Not only can people of different races, genders, nationalities and religions be part of the same labor union, but even if some of the members believe in the right to abortion and others think abortion should be illegal, they can still be in the same union. Even if some members believe their race or their nationality or their religion is superior to others in the group, even if some of the workers support Trump, others support Sanders, and others want to violently overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat, if they all believe in equal pay for equal work and other basic principles all the union members need to adhere to, the successful union finds a way to work with such a disparate membership. Some may be trans and others may believe all LGBTQ people are going to hell. But they can still be in the same union.
Why? Because of the basic reality that with the alternative of shunning large segments of the working class because of their perceived impurities of one kind or another, these shunned people aren't going to disappear. They'll be the strikebreakers you encounter, next time you really need the solidarity of the entire working class, and you won't have it. That's a divided and conquered people right there in a nutshell.
What if we had a union where our priority was not on organizing the working class, but on having a safe space that only union members who fit certain qualifications could be part of? Our workforce has lots of immigrants and people of color in it, so we can't have any Trump supporters, they're not safe. There goes half the membership. Our workforce has ardent supporters of Israel in it who think the pro-Palestine people are antisemites. We'll have to keep out those genocide-supporters. Our workforce has people in it who support sending billions of our tax dollars to pay for Ukraine's war against Russia, so we'll have to keep out those militaristic NATO-supporters. Or do we keep out those authoritarian Putin-supporters? Maybe both...?
I first became a sectarian thinker as a teenager, and went in deep. I embodied every cliche in the song. I barely tolerated the existence of meat-eaters in my circle of friends, and had to harangue them regularly for their sins. I believed in the necessity for some kind of violent revolution, and I thought pacifism was the gateway to fascism or something like that. I had no interest in unions because I had grown to believe in the Maoist theories of the labor aristocracy, or at least my warped understanding of them as a clueless teenager.
As I thankfully emerged from this pit of black-and-white thinking by my mid-twenties, it was plain to see the impact of others who were struggling with this kind of sectarian thinking amid the ranks of the environmental movement and later in the ranks of the global justice movement, the movement against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the Palestine solidarity movement circa 2000 onward, and later in an even more pervasive way in what the media called the racial justice movement, and in other movements rooted in the completely dysfunctional arena of miscommunication that we call "socials" nowadays.
What personal perspective as well as historical perspective and direct observation and participation in social movements over the past 45 years or so has taught me, beyond any doubt, is the way forward is inclusive and all about finding common ground and organizing to achieve it together. And this way forward means that our focus needs to be on dwelling on the things that unite us, and not so much on the things that divide us. It means solidarity and empathy between people, rather than competition for who has the sharpest analysis, who has the healthiest lifestyle, who has the deepest understanding of intersectionality, who is using the right or wrong vocabulary, who is more oppressed by whatever measure, or any of the other similar intellectual rabbit holes that can get a movement lost.
As time goes on, the matrix of control led by the gigantic tech corporations and their government minders seems more and more like the movie, the Matrix, to me. Humanity, particularly in the more obsessively-"connected" societies like this one, seems more and more disconnected, atomized and alienated.
I often reflect at shows before I sing "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You" that I wrote the song before X/Twitter existed, before most people were on Facebook, before the corporate control over our means of communication became completely hegemonic, to paraphrase the late Glen Ford. Now, with the extent of anonymous trolling culture and antagonistic behavior being so much the norm on so much of social media -- that is, where we live and communicate -- the song seems to have an innocence about it, like it's from another age, and, truly, it is.
It's from an age when it was still a great challenge to communicate and find common ground, where the forces of division were very active in all kinds of arenas, from the schools to the TV to Hollywood to the Counterintelligence Program that heroic activists exposed when they raided the FBI offices in Pennsylvania back in 1971 -- a program which has undoubtedly continued to this day, a claim for which copious evidence exists.
But it's from an age before Indymedia was hijacked by "social media," before the commons of the free internet was replaced by the online equivalent of hanging out at the mall, before we basically moved into the Matrix, continuing to think we're having real conversations with each other, while actually just feeding the algorithms of conflict, control, division, and addiction.
As I write, the movement against the genocide in Gaza is gaining steam in this country and around the world. The future of this movement, as with the future generally, is unknown. But if it or any other movement has a chance, it will come from engaging with the broader society to join us, in the real world, such as with the campus occupations cropping up everywhere, rather than in having ideological arguments inside of the Matrix about who among us is Jewish enough or Muslim enough or ideologically pure enough to speak (or sing) at a rally.
The story behind the song, "St Patrick Battalion."
In recent months, Google has regularly alerted me when my name has come up because someone has written a short essay talking about why they like one or another of my songs. Once it was a review of a song that, to my knowledge, doesn't exist. Sometimes called "the story behind the song," the essays are always posted anonymously, they always seem to be almost exactly 500 words, and they have a well-written, somewhat formulaic quality to them that makes me wonder if they're being generated by AI. But they've inspired me to write one myself, which I promise I've written with no AI assistance.
178 years ago this week, the US invaded Mexico, eventually forcibly annexing most of it, turning the "great northeast" into the "great southwest." Still today, there are lots of Mexicans in Mexico, whether "new" Mexico or "old" Mexico, whose families have been living there since long before their area was invaded and annexed by the United States.
The Democrats, also known to their supporters way back as "the Party of the White Man," and the one that would ultimately support the Confederacy in the American Civil War, had been voted into power. The propaganda of the time to support the invasion of Mexico -- it was the "destiny" of the United States to grow, the Mexicans weren't doing much with their land anyway, there were too many Catholics there -- doesn't hold up well over time, and didn't even hold up well back in 1846 either, for many.
As the Biden administration is now apparently seriously considering some kind of closure of the US-Mexican border, as the inevitable refugees resulting from the US's centuries of efforts to maintain control over Latin American resources and societies by transnational corporations head northward, it seems like a good time to reflect on one of the major earlier chapters of this saga.
The "official story" as we might call it, that there was some kind of "border dispute" north of the Rio Grande between the alleged nation of Texas and the nation of Mexico that somehow resulted in the US military having to invade and annex most of Mexico as a result, is patent nonsense, of the sort that no serious historian can defend. This is why the way the US expanded in the century following the American Revolution until it literally spanned the continent, "from sea to shining sea," is a history that is studiously ignored in whatever passes for the education of the youth in this country. Far too many inconvenient truths to try to reckon with.
The reality was so much more insidious than the propaganda -- despite the propaganda being blatantly imperialistic, racist, and anti-Catholic. In reality, the invasion and annexation had nothing to do with any lofty concepts about destiny or God or even border disputes. It was all about slavery.
Far from any notions about the USA bringing democracy and freedom to countries it invades, the trouble with Texas being part of Mexico was that Mexico had abolished slavery, and the Mexican government had made known its intentions to free the enslaved people of Texas, along with those enslaved in the rest of Mexico. The Anglo-American Texas settlers wanted to keep profiting from their plantations and their enslaved workforce. That's what it was all about -- like it or not.
For more than a century following the invasion and annexation of so much of Mexico, the US-Mexico border was as porous as the US-Canadian border, with people freely going back and forth (among those from the non-enslaved population who were free to move at all). Though discrimination against Mexicans -- particularly darker-skinned Mexicans -- was enshrined in law in parts of the US from the beginning, such as in the state I live in, Oregon.
As little-known as the Mexican-American War of the 1840's is to the general population within the United States today, even less well-known is the resistance to the war from within the ranks of the US military. Many thousands of soldiers deserted from the ranks of the military, and moved to Mexico. Hundreds more deserted and then formed a foreign legion, many of whom died in battle against the US Army in the course of five engagements, under the leadership of John Riley, who was from the occupied and starving land that most of the members of the foreign legion came from -- Ireland.
I was in my early thirties, sometime around the turn of this century, when I first heard about the St Patrick Battalion, known and loved in Mexico as the San Patricios. I remember the evening reasonably well. It was a church somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was listening to my favorite local historian, Howard Zinn, give a speech. I might have been there regardless, but I was doing a little musical opening set for Howard, as I did often around those years of the global justice movement.
I had read books and essays by Professor Zinn, but if he had mentioned the San Patricios, I didn't remember it. But when I first was reading Zinn I wasn't thinking like a songwriter, a storyteller. By the time of this gig in Cambridge I was, and the story jumped out at me immediately as one I needed to tell in the form of a song.
I don't feel much like bragging most of the time; whatever I've accomplished as a songwriter or as a recording artist tends to feel overshadowed by the fact that I've never had anything remotely approximating a hit, and I've never experienced what they call commercial success. I've never "made it," by the basic definition of making enough money to buy a house, or even to qualify for a loan to buy one. When musicians have hits, historically, and thus experience commercial success, they then buy a house, and enter the ranks of the middle class that way. When they have more than one hit, they start buying houses for their relatives. At least that's what I've repeatedly observed, among those artists.
On my better days, though, I feel like I've won the lottery, if not literally -- the lottery of life and in in some form the lottery of my chosen profession. For I, friends and comrades, have accomplished something which many songwriters have set out to do, but which only some indeterminate few succeed in. I have written a folk song. Yes, it's true that I've written many hundreds of other songs. But I wrote one folk song.
When you set out to write a song, say one you intend to be funny, something satirical, perhaps, it isn't you, the songwriter, who gets to decide whether it's a funny song. That is inevitably for others to decide. A measure of whether they do can fairly easily be found by delivering the song well to an audience that is fluent in your language, and which is seated in a quiet room. If most of the audience is laughing uproariously or at least chuckling hard, you have succeeded in writing a funny song. If they're moaning or sitting quietly, you probably failed in this endeavor.
With a folk song, by my reckoning and that of some others, it's the same kind of thing. You might set out to write a folk song, and many people have. It the early 1960's Greenwich Village folk revival scene, it was something people were more or less open about. Everyone wanted to write a song that sounded timeless, like an anonymously-written gem that you dug out of some coal mine in Kentucky. If people you were singing for assumed it was, or asked where you found that old folk song, you knew this was the first step to the song possibly achieving such status.
For the song to truly become a folk song, however, it has to be sung by other people, beyond your circle of fans and friends. It has to be a song that is generally recognized by itself, rather than one that's associated with the author.
In the modern time, say like the past century or so, it's harder to measure these things, because of the existence of the music industry. The industry can decide that a song is going to become a hit, and this artificial influence of the process that can get a song played on every commercial radio station in a bunch of different countries all at the same time can give the impression that a new folk song has been produced. There will be recordings, songbooks, there will be people learning the new hit songs and playing them in cover bands.
There are probably other ways these things can be measured, and it's probably safe to assume the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan might have produced infectious folk songs of all sorts, without the existence of the music industry to promote them. But when the songwriter is one whose music has never been played on commercial radio, never promoted by a record label with more than one employee, who has never come anywhere close to producing a hit, never had their music used in a movie beyond low-budget documentaries -- never even had a song used for a TV commercial -- then there is nothing interfering with the folk process, as we might call it.
With "St Patrick Battalion" as the search term, a lot of things come up. On YouTube and on the Wikipedia entry, you'll readily come up with a bunch of different songs, including a great one by Damien Dempsey. Arguably, there are better-crafted songs about the San Patricios than the one I wrote, but this isn't up to either Damien or I to decide.
I don't think it's the best song I ever wrote. The melody is infectious, I'll admit, and does sound like it could be an actual Irish folk song. The chorus is good. As for the verses, I remember struggling with each one of them, 24 years ago, somewhere in the midwestern US, engaging in one of my earlier experiences with doing a search on a search engine and coming up with useful and informative results.
Even though I've been singing the song at almost every gig since then, there are still aspects of the chorus as well as three of the verses that still grate on me, and clearly on some others as well. Over time I have changed things in the song slightly, but the newer versions seem to take many years before they circulate among those who are covering the song, out there in the world.
It is fundamentally a song about solidarity, and in particular, international solidarity. I wrote it maybe a few months after my first real trip to Germany, where I was at a protest and heard large numbers of young people chanting, in German, "international solidarity!" like they really meant it. And I had already written a few songs that employed the device of referring to geography to help make your point, such as my songs, "From Kabul to Khartoum," and "Contras, Kings, and Generals." I like the opening line of the chorus of "St Patrick Battalion" -- "from Dublin City to San Diego" -- but maybe I should have picked more relevant cities, rather than just ones with recognizable names.
I had also grown up, at least from my teens onward, steeped in the history of certain social movements, such as the one in the 1930's that led tens of thousands of people from US and many other countries to travel to Spain and fight alongside the Spanish Republicans against the insurgent, coup-plotting generals backed by Hitler and Mussolini. By my early twenties I had become good friends with a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Bob Steck.
In the leftwing circles I traveled in as a young man, those who joined these International Brigades were the most revered members of the 1930's generation, a generation that was still very actively involved with the American left when I was a young adult. Among the leftwing songwriters I knew or knew of, having a song that mentioned the Spanish Civil War and the international nature of that struggle was pretty much required. I avoided the subject for years, but I eventually wrote one myself, called "the Last Lincoln Veteran," which also became one of my best-known songs, though not as much as "St Patrick Battalion."
Among the 1980's folk music scene in the US and in many other countries, when I was coming up, if you wrote politically relevant songs -- if you were a songwriter of the sort like Pete Seeger, Christy Moore, Jim Page, John McCutcheon, or Bruce Cockburn, among many others -- it was also de rigueur to have at least one song condemning all the US-backed military coups in Latin America, in support of the Sandinista or FMLN revolutions of the time.
In my earlier years of being engaged with what Phil Ochs called "topical" songs, I was probably avoiding writing anything that included a few words of Spanish in it, because doing so felt a bit cliche, and I didn't want to be identified with those people that Tom Lehrer described in "the Folk Song Army." By the time I wrote "St Patrick Battalion," good sense had gotten the better of me, over notions of folksinger fashion. Though to my shame, without consulting an actual Spanish speaker, the one Spanish phrase I originally included in the song was wrong. Later recordings have the updated, correct phrase.
Around the time I wrote the song, the man who organized most of my gigs in Madison, Wisconsin, which were also some of my better-attended ones, was an organizer named Ben Manski (now a university professor in Virginia), who said he knew word was getting out about an event effectively when he started hearing about it from friends of his who didn't know that he was the one who was organizing it.
Some of my earlier experiences with "St Patrick Battalion" were like that, involving these looks indicating that people frequently recognized the song, without having known who wrote it. It became clear that it was not an option to do a show without including that song, and it consistently became the song that everyone would sing along with, if it was an audience that was apt to sing at all to anything.
Not coincidentally, within a few months of writing that song, I was doing gigs in Ireland, some of which were organized by folks who had only recently gotten out of prison. I found myself doing an interview for Sinn Fein's newspaper, An Phoblacht, which was located in the most heavily-armored building I had ever seen up til that point or maybe since. I believe the man who interviewed me was the editor and was named Martin. I remember him saying that he was the only person who worked at the paper who hadn't been to prison.
People I knew were singing the song, and I was hearing about people singing it who I didn't know. When YouTube came into existence, people started making music videos with the song, using footage from films with relevant content, such as One Man's Hero. These videos would frequently get taken down, after amassing hundreds of thousands of views. Others are still up. This seemed like a newish form of the folk process doing its thing with a song.
In the past decade and even more so in the past few years, very professional musical acts have been performing and recording the song, hailing from Ireland, Scotland, England, the US, Chile, and Mexico, from what I've just been gathering in YouTube searches just recently. A brilliant artist in Mexico City has recorded a Spanish-language version of the song, which I think represents a better telling of the story than my version. For many of the bands who can be found doing the song on YouTube, it's the song they do that has the most views.
I plan to live for many more decades to come, but if I were to die tomorrow, I'm sure some people would summarize my life as "the guy who wrote that song about the Irish who fought for Mexico," and that's fine. In this world, for a song existing outside of the corporate-controlled media or record industry landscape to nonetheless get heard by millions of people around the planet, feels like a small victory worthy of mention.
It's probably fair to say that a significant number of the people alive today who know about the San Patricios first heard about them through my song, and that seems like a something worth bragging about despite my discomfort with the whole phenomenon, if only to hold forth an example of how a song can sometimes work, and do the kind of job a song might hope to do.
It seems worth mentioning as well that while I first heard about the St. Patrick Battalion from Howard Zinn, Zinn first heard about the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado from Woody Guthrie's song about it.
If there's anyone out there who actually wants to hear eleven different brilliant renditions of the song recorded by eleven different musical acts, here's a "St Patrick Battalion" YouTube playlist.
And now for a few words on eating and paying the rent.
I really don't actually enjoy talking about myself and especially personal details about how challenging it is to survive as an artist these days, but that's what I'm going to do now.
For those of you from the US who listen to NPR or Pacifica stations, you're familiar with the basic idea. The usual scintillating content gets replaced several times a year by various folks adlibbing about how great they are, along with everything they do. They talk about the amazing, free content they put out there all the time. They use a bit of a carrot-and-stick approach, trying to make you feel a bit guilty if you don't support the station, while encouraging you to get that warm, fuzzy feeling, along with the coffee mug and the tote bag, by becoming a patron, a supporter, a member of this wonderful, beneficent club.
There's a very predictable routine to these fund drives, but at the same time, it's all very real, with the survival of the station at the center of the endeavor. And for me it's exactly the same. Also for lots of other artists out there, but as this is a station break for me, I'll focus on that.
Once upon a time I never needed to engage in this crowdfunded, public radio-style business model, but that was back in the days when rent was cheap, college gigs were plentiful, and I sold several thousand CDs in an average year. As income streams began disappearing and expenses kept rising, many artists quit doing their art fulltime, and got other jobs. Those that didn't were either already doing well enough that they could afford to survive on a fraction of their former income, they were independently wealthy, or they were really good at begging -- or what they call in polite circles fundraising, or crowdfunded patronage.
In the old days, composers and painters would hook up with wealthy patrons, write symphonies in their honor and impress all their wealthy friends, or paint their portraits and impress their wealthy friends that way. In many ways, pop stars and major record labels have had a similar relationship, particularly in the latter twentieth century.
Independent artists like me, however, even back in the twentieth century, didn't used to need wealthy patrons or record labels. If people liked my music, they bought my CDs at my shows. It was a nakedly transactional relationship in a way, and it worked just fine. That ended 11 years ago with real finality, when Spotify introduced their free tier. I have honestly been scrambling ever since to make ends meet, during which time the rent has more than doubled, which makes the scramble a never-ending one.
The response from my friends, fans, and others in my circles when I started doing the crowdfunded patronage thing in 2013, my Community-Supported Arts program or CSA, was amazing. I was ready to look for some other way to pay the rent, but because of the response to this new initiative, I didn't have to do that. And the numbers continue to grow over the years, with approximately 10% of the folks on my email list being paid subscribers on one platform or another (via my website, Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp).
Unfortunately, however, especially in the past year or so, expenses have been rising faster than earnings. This is largely because my family is in a different tax bracket now and we no longer qualify for food assistance, which went from being a substantial part of our income every month, to nonexistent.
So, at this point in the pitch, if we were trying to solicit donations for the local Pacifica station, I'd start telling you about how great our programming is, that you hopefully are enjoying for free on your morning commute. Well, if you're one of the 20% of those receiving emails from me via Substack who opens the emails, you may have noticed that I've spent much of my time over the past 6 months obsessively writing songs and essays related to Israel's war against the people of Gaza.
You can see why the people at the radio stations are embarrassed by doing this self-promotional pitching. The programming you may appreciate on these stations is often about a whole lot of really horrible stuff -- wars, famines, earthquakes, etc. Who wants to profit from that? I sure as hell don't. And really, thankfully, no one is profiting from my work, or at least I'm not -- just attempting to live with a roof over my family's heads. And it's undeniably true that if I don't come up with the rent every month, I can't be spending so much time writing and recording songs about genocide, or anything else.
In the public radio pitch, after making sure you know how great and perhaps even impactful their free programming is, they go for the jugular, asking how much is it worth to you, dear listeners? What's the value of a song?
Although we're talking here about crowdfunded patronage, where no single wealthy patron is commissioning pieces, where no record company is demanding yet another love song with hit potential, I am very happy to offer songwriting on commission! While it's true that there are a couple songs I've taken years to try to deliver on because of particularly challenging subject material, I usually can produce a really good song pretty quickly on most topics.
Starting at the $2-a-month level, patrons who sign up via Patreon or Substack get access to the "Everything" folder, containing everything I've ever recorded in a studio, and lots of other subscriber-exclusive digital goodies. Starting at the $5-a-month level, I'll send you physical goodies in the mail as well, including CDs, vinyl records, t-shirts, stickers, and a subscriber-exclusive, Better Anarchist Club card. Higher levels of patronage include house concerts and song commissions -- and whether you're signing up on a recurring basis or just as a one-off thing, it's all good. Gift subscriptions, too!
For my next missive, we'll either return to our regular programming, or I'll tell you about my new plans to find another line of work.
Following the journalists and others posting updates from Gaza and the West Bank about the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, one thing that's very noticeable is the repetition of the first phrase that seems to come up for people when they get especially exasperated -- "what else is there to say?"
Day in and day out they are describing the same atrocities. Day in and day out they are recording the same unbearable cries of the wounded, orphaned children crying out through their parched throats that universally familiar word into the smoke-filled, toxic air, "mama!" Day in and day out, the cries go unanswered, and they tell us about that, too.
Every day I and other people around the world fantasize helplessly about marching to Palestine to stand with those being slaughtered. To care for the orphans -- and especially, to fight back. But even just getting there to do such things seems so impossible.
Every day I wake up thinking about these things. And faced with the impossibility of physically doing anything useful, rather than resigning myself to being completely useless, I remind myself, I'm an artist, I'll write something again. And then I ask myself the same question the journalists in Gaza occasionally ask the program host safely sitting in some nice office in Doha or London: what else is there to say?
There are always more stories to tell, I can hear some editor encouraging their shellshocked reporters in the field. That's what I tell myself, too. Each one of those orphans has a story, worthy of many songs.
But some days, many days, increasing numbers of days, "what else is there to say" is all I have. Just look at what's happened in the past 48 hours or so, and I'll hyperlink to songs I've already written about that.
When people die, they leave behind many different kinds of echoes.
There were a lot of people back in the 1960's like Ken Kesey who, for philosophical reasons, believed in living life in the moment, rather than being preoccupied with leaving a record of having lived. Long before selfies and putting out public announcements about every aspect of your individual existence every few minutes became routine, some people decided that even just doing things like writing books was way too much of a distraction from living life now, and at least one notably bestselling author wrote two of them, and then stopped to enjoy the rest of his life.
It's very understandable why you wouldn't want to withdraw yourself socially for a year or more from what was happening around you during a decade like the 60's in order to go write a book. Maybe if Ken had been a songwriter rather than a novelist, he would have found he could keep up with the craft while also living life, I don't know.
As I get older, life reminds me of death more often. So many people, increasing numbers, engage in this final act, and then they leave all kinds of memories behind. Just looking through my phone's Contacts or searching for a particular friend on Facebook, I encounter more and more accounts of people I know who died, more and more disconnected phone numbers.
I never erase the numbers from my phone. On Facebook, often relatives of the deceased will make a final post. Other times, they don't. Some people barely used Facebook, other people used it all the time, and there are lots of other reasons why someone's account might just be left hanging like that, but it always seems a bit ominous when that happens.
On TV when someone you were friends with dies, you somehow magically find out about it, and you're able to drop everything and travel a thousand miles to go to a funeral, where you meet everyone your friend was close to and have a profound experience. I've been to a funeral like that, so I know it's not just on TV, actually. But it seems much more commonly the case from my years on Earth that when someone I was friends with dies, unless they were famous or we were very regularly in touch and had a lot of friends in common, I might not even hear about it until weeks, months, or years afterwards.
In the movies, when someone is dying, they tie up the loose ends, make amends with people they fell out with along the way, and help those who will be surviving them figure out what to do next. Other times they die young and suddenly, leaving all kinds of unfinished business. (The plot line has great potential regardless.)
I have vague intentions to leave my children something when I die, but realistically, as a middle-aged man with no savings and no assets worth more than a 2019 Nissan Leaf, if I die anytime in the foreseeable future, the only thing I can hope to leave my kids are whatever streaming royalties I'll be owed until the copyrights to my songs expire.
I don't remember if it was a movie I saw, or something that really happened that I heard about on This American Life or somewhere like that, but there was a guy who unfortunately had to go and die young, leaving a teenage daughter behind, and he made arrangements to have her receive deliveries of flowers and recorded messages at various key moments of her life, like her 18th birthday. How different from that kind of scenario might it be for my kids to see each month the source of the extra few hundred coming in, that might just be identified by some cryptic handful of letters like "BMI ROYALTIES," but will be a monthly reminder to whomever might be receiving it for the next several decades that this guy, their father, or grandfather or whoever, was a musician. Whether they'll think that's good or bad, I have no idea.
For a frequently-posting public figure with lots of content hanging around various corners of the internet, probably for a very long time after I'm dead, barring the end of civilization, it's a little weird to look for evidence of someone's existence and find links to a couple of physical books she wrote, and not much else. Books are great, but Linda knew so many people, studied and taught in so many places, and traveled to so many countries.
I met Dr. Linda Wiener in December, 1999, if memory serves. Being reminded of her again this morning -- by an automatically-generated email of all things -- is particularly poignant, because of the circumstances of our meeting.
At the time, I was very actively touring all over the place, as part of the global justice movement in particular. The invitation to do a tour of Israel was one I was profoundly uncomfortable with, but at the time I felt I couldn't pass it up -- I had to see what that place I had heard so much about was like first-hand. I believe I suggested to my friend from the Israeli Folk Music Society that we do the tour in December, because I didn't have college gigs in December, and I figured the Jews didn't celebrate Christmas, so touring there around then seemed sensible.
The organizer of my tour lived by the Negev Desert, in the little town they call Sde Boker, so that was my home base for the two weeks or so I was there, traveling with my girlfriend from Germany, of all places.
As we spent more time in various parts of Israel, it didn't take us long to start feeling very out of place. Israel felt like what I imagined it might have been like to hang out with Klansmen in Mississippi in the 1950's. We met some wonderful people among the Israeli Jews who weren't like that at all, but what was overwhelming was the number of people we met who completely embraced a profoundly skewed, militaristic, and racist version of reality.
The beautiful Negev and the strange little animals in there that I've never seen anywhere else made for a wonderful escape from Israeli society for those of us staying there by the desert. If we saw anybody once we left town, out there amid the shrubs and goat-like creatures, there was Linda and her two happy little curly-haired children, looking for bugs.
Linda went by the handle of "the bug lady," and this was not by accident. She was an expert on bugs, having lots of degrees from prestigious institutions. As she explained it to me, a definite layperson with regards to insects, her specialty was traveling to different countries where they were interested in transforming their agricultural systems to work with the bugs to help grow their crops, rather than using pesticides. She said the only countries where there was a lot of interest in this sort of thing were the poor countries, and I think she had recently been traveling in Latin America and in east Asia, as well as, now, west Asia.
Aside from her happy children and her interesting field of expertise, what bonded Linda and I there in the Negev in particular, I think, was how we were both freaked out by our surroundings -- not by the desert, which was, after all, very reminiscent of parts of New Mexico, where Linda lived and where I had been many times as well, but by the social surroundings, the people. She was diplomatic, but was as disturbed by the casual racism exhibited by so many Israelis we encountered as I was.
As time passes, memories become more vague. I visited and stayed with Linda and her family on a number of occasions when I was passing through New Mexico in the years after we met in the Negev. Before 2006, I had an AOL account, as did Linda. As far as I know, I can't look back at those emails, unlike post 2006, where all of the emails we exchanged can magically be summoned.
In 2008, I know I did a concert in her living room. I was apparently concerned I had said something that upset her husband, and she assured me that I hadn't. I have no recollection about that, but it's in an email I found.
What I know for sure is in the years after 2008, my touring in the US was happening more and more sporadically. With all the college gigs gone by that time, I rarely had reason to be in Santa Fe or Albuquerque -- or in New Mexico at all. There were other people I regularly kept up with in Santa Fe, and in Albuquerque, and in the small New Mexico city of Las Vegas, but over time we've been less and less in touch, as it is with people in so many other parts of the country that I hardly ever manage to visit anymore.
It's probably been well over a decade since I was in New Mexico now, and the same can be said about many other states I used to visit once or twice a year. 2013 was the last year I did a big driving tour around the country, when I realized it wasn't going to work anymore. That was also the year Spotify started their free tier, which was only part of the story, but a big part. It was also the year I started doing an annual-billing crowdfunded artist support scheme I call my Community-Supported Art program, a type of phenomenon that became more familiar to more people as Patreon became more known, later on.
That was in March, 2013. I remember it well, because it was really my last-ditch effort to make this professional singer/songwriter thing keep going, the way the music biz was evolving, as a less and less remunerative one. And I remember how moved I was by the response of so many of my friends and fans, who stepped up to the plate and joined the scheme in their hundreds. Linda was one of them, signing up on April 12th, 2013. I wouldn't remember a specific date like that, but April 12th figures very prominently in a search of my email history with Linda Wiener.
Every so often Linda wrote to say something nice about something I had written in Counterpunch. In 2016 she shared alarming news about her husband being sued by Harvard for copyright infringement, in a case that sounded totally bizarre. I wanted to write a song about it. It was in the middle of the first year of the Trump administration, and I guess I had too many other things on my mind to focus much on that one. Reading online, I see that Harvard lost the lawsuit.
In May of last year, 2023, I had a friend coming over to the US from Germany who was planning to spend a couple weeks in Santa Fe, at the university. She was wondering if I had any ideas for where she could stay, and I thought of Linda. I guess Linda and I hadn't at that point exchanged emails for years, but growing increasingly distant from most of the people I know across the US has been normal for me for over a decade now, so this kind of thing wasn't surprising.
It was only after not getting an answer to a personal email to her, and calling only to find her phone number no longer worked, did I do a search online to find the strange little announcement about her death, of cancer, in 2020. She was just shy of a decade older than me, so she would have been around 63. Looking at her Facebook page it has the appearance of a Facebook account that was not regularly used. In the last photo Linda posted of herself, she's bald, surely from cancer treatment, and wearing a sweater she just knitted in lockdown.
One of the consequences of no longer touring like I used to, in the case of Linda and so many others, is there are not only a lot of adult friends and comrades I don't see anymore, but also their kids. There are so many kids I used to at least get to hang out with once or twice a year, along with their parents. It's not much, but it's enough to be remembered, to be someone in their lives, to be a reference point, to have some kind of relationship.
One of the most noticeable things about Linda, when I first met her, was how happy her children seemed to be, which I tended to attribute to her loving and adventurous parenting style. In her emails to me over the years, as with so many parents, updating me on the accomplishments of her children was always part of any communique. I guess our last exchange was in 2017, when she complimented my cello playing, and the singing career that one of her now grown kids had apparently embarked upon.
Thinking of these things and looking at what little remains of any public record of Linda's day-to-day thoughts, I see one of her last Facebook posts, in 2019, is very critical of male-to-female transgender athletes competing in female sports. In this post, she seems critical of the whole trans phenomenon, though perhaps I'm reading into it too much. Then a few months later in the typo-filled funeral home announcement of Linda's death, there is a reference to Linda's two sons. Apparently one of her kids is now trans. I hope that his transition wasn't as difficult as it looks like it might have been, judging from what little can be gleaned from a mostly-neglected Facebook account.
When I discovered last year that Linda had died several years earlier, there was a chill that ran up my spine, as I thought about whatever Roger Waters might have been thinking of when he wrote "Ghost in the Machine." I would just assume that when someone dies, whoever takes charge of their bank account would review what's going on with things the deceased might be subscribed to. Did this happen?
Having not heard of Linda's death, I also didn't know if her posthumous ongoing support for my work was intentional or accidental. Should I be feeling this special feeling like I'm getting an annual kiss on the cheek from Linda beyond the grave? Or should I be feeling like a thief who is unintentionally stealing from Linda's estate? Where is this $50 coming from every April, anyway?
I remember after my housemate and dear friend Eric Mark died very suddenly at the age of 26 or thereabouts, we'd get phone calls from collection agencies on the land line that we all shared there in the apartment in San Francisco back in 1993. It felt so profoundly disrespectful to Eric's memory to be there on the phone with some credit card company trying to explain to the caller that the person they're looking for is dead, and won't be paying whatever he owed you. Eventually one of us lost their shit at the caller, who finally seemed to realize this was for real, and then switched gears and asked about Eric's date of death, so he could verify it and close the case. This situation with Linda is kind of the opposite of that.
I've tried to find Linda's husband and her kids, with no success. I thought I'd try putting this out there, and seeing if it might attract the attention of some of Linda Wiener's relatives, friends or acquaintances. Bug Lady, presente.
My pet battalion of pro-Israel internet trolls have migrated their operation from Facebook to X, and refined their emphasis as well.
There are various patterns in terms of level of engagement and types of engagement that we get on the various corporate social media platforms. If you're consistently engaged for years in attempting to use all of the platforms as a means of disseminating your artistic content, as a professional artist, these ever-changing patterns of engagement are very noticeable, in so many ways, probably much more than they are for most people. Also, the more engagement you get on a certain post or type of post, the more you can see the patterns in terms of who is engaging and how.
All of us artists who are old enough to remember the early years of Facebook miss the way it was at the beginning, when it was a truly useful platform for us to promote new artistic content, news about upcoming gigs, and whatever else. Once upon a time there were no algorithms, and no money involved with "boosting" posts, that all came later, once everyone had the hooks firmly dug into our collective mouths.
The algorithms Facebook introduced years ago now not only drastically deemphasized content such as news articles -- in some countries eliminating such content entirely -- but also deemphasized any kind of link or pretty much anything other than selfies, and announcements accompanied by a photo related to events like birthdays, births, weddings, funerals, graduations, or big trips. Thus I have long been aware that even though I'd really like people to listen to my latest album or share my latest music video, the vast majority of my "followers" or "friends" on Facebook will never see posts related to these things. But if I'm going on a tour and I take a selfie from an airport, or if it's my birthday and I post a selfie about that, I know people will see these posts.
On X/Twitter, to date I have not noticed them implementing algorithms that have caused selfies or other photographic content to get seen much more than other types of posts. Posts on X are more likely to be widely seen and widely shared if they pique the interest of people who are interested in a certain issue, such as stopping the genocide of the Palestinian people, or freeing Julian Assange from his wrongful imprisonment. This kind of content can go viral on X, unlike on Facebook, for the simple reason that on Facebook almost no one will see such posts in the first place. That's been my experience, anyway.
So it has been no big surprise -- though disappointing -- that my efforts to promote my latest album and latest music videos have gotten very limited traction. Only the real fanatics will tend to publicly share videos or essays or other material related to very controversial issues such as the Palestinian struggle or supporting a much-vilified character such as Julian Assange. Most people won't even "like" such posts, let alone share them, if they see them at all.
On April 10th I posted a picture of myself wearing a Palestine flag t-shirt with these words:
"I'm 57 years old today, and I feel wiser already. All I want for my birthday is a permanent ceasefire."
It was no surprise that this birthday selfie got a lot of engagement -- this is exactly the kind of relatively innocuous, uninformative little semi-narcissistic post Facebook likes to promote. As a result, it was seen by thousands, "liked" in some form by over 700 people, 288 of whom left comments. The overwhelming majority of the comments came from people I actually know in real life, wishing me a happy birthday.
This wouldn't necessarily be notable except that my regular readers will be aware that I have been the target of an incessant, organized trolling campaign on Facebook since late February -- specifically since the day Caroline Turner started emailing venues in England trying to get them to cancel my upcoming gigs on the basis that they are hosting someone who is promoting racial hatred against Jews and may as a result face legal consequences if they don't cancel me.
Up until my birthday, posting a selfie with me wearing a Palestine-related t-shirt was enough to get hundreds of Hasbara trolls (paid agents or in some cases volunteers promoting an openly racist, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, pro-genocide narrative that supports the positions of the Israeli regime) attacking me, and whoever else might have been in the photo with me. But now, nothing of the sort.
Instead, they have moved on to X. On X, the same post was seen by over 80,000 people in the first 12 hours or so, with more than 800 reposts and more than a thousand comments. This never happens when I post selfies on X, but this time it did, due entirely to the engagement of the Hasbara trolls, who were responsible for hundreds of those comments.
In an effort to counter their bile, pro-Palestinian activists, most of them accounts with Arab names, also reposted and commented on the post, wishing this random guy with a Palestine flag t-shirt that appeared in their feeds a happy birthday, as they participated in what I believe are known as the "flame war."
It's very obvious that the whole point for the Hasbara trolls (and other organized trolling campaigns) is to use their flood of bile to influence and/or stifle the discussion. They want to instill fear, dread, and/or confusion. Anything to dampen the enthusiasm of pro-Palestinian campaigners, or scare them off from sharing content or speaking out, or confuse them by introducing ideas that may cause them to question their positions.
To the extent that the Hasbara troll narrative can effectively confuse people who don't have sufficient knowledge of ongoing events or the history behind them, it's worth noting how the focus of their attacks has evolved over the past six weeks or so.
When there were hundreds of them commenting on posts on Facebook last month, they focused on lots of different points. Generally, categories included the vilification of Muslims, Islam, Arabs, and Palestinians, associating these groups with despicable behaviors of every possible variety, such as beheading babies and raping children; spreading disinformation about Palestinians and Palestinian history, such as the notion that Palestine doesn't really exist as a place with a history, culture, cuisine, traditions, etc., and Palestinians are really Jordanian; spreading disinformation about what life was like in Gaza before October 7th; spreading disinformation about the history of, nature of, and intentions of groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah; insinuating that anyone who supports Palestinians today had never heard of them yesterday, and are just people who like to jump on bandwagons and do what's fashionable; pushing the narrative that if someone started the fight, supposedly, then "they," whoever "they" are, must be prepared to suffer the consequences; and justifying the killing of children as the fault of Hamas for daring to fight from a densely-populated urban ghetto landscape.
Now, with the recent shift of the Hasbara trolls assigned to my case moving from Facebook to X, there has clearly been an accompanying shift in which aspects of the Hasbara narrative they see fit to emphasize. Most of the points they were making last month can be found amid the rest of it, here and there. But they have almost entirely dropped the notion that Palestine and Palestinians don't exist, apparently deciding that that one wasn't working out for them for some reason. And they have decidedly put about 90% of their focus into pushing one singular point: that Hamas is holding hostages, that they should all be immediately freed, and that if Hamas did free the hostages, this would magically end the war and cause Israel to implement a ceasefire.
Given that they and their focus groups seem to have decided that these are the talking points worth emphasizing, to the extent that anyone out there is actually listening to anything I have to say, rather than just having flame wars around my Palestine flag selfies, I'll say some things about the hostage issue myself.
Supporters of the Palestinian people are apt to note that Gaza was being besieged and starved long before last October, and that's all well documented by the UN and others. Palestinians have long been arbitrarily arrested and held indefinitely without charge in Israeli prisons, including Palestinian children. This is all also well documented by the UN and others.
While people living under occupation have the right under international law to resist, including through armed resistance, they're not supposed to take hostages. These hostages, however, are mostly soldiers, and are thus prisoners of war. In the past, such prisoners have been successfully exchanged for these aforementioned Palestinians arbitrarily arrested and held indefinitely without charge.
Israel has been unwilling to do a hostage exchange like that, and unwilling to declare a ceasefire in order to facilitate any such exchange. The idea of releasing hostages while under constant bombardment and surveillance is obviously ridiculous to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. In fact, when Israeli hostages tried to get rescued, they were killed by other Israeli soldiers, while shouting in Hebrew with no shirts on, raising white flags. If the occupation soldiers don't kill hostages, they'll kill those accompanying them -- they kill aid workers every day, what would possibly prevent them from killing anyone else?
If it were possible to safely release the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, the notion that this would somehow lead to a ceasefire or to Israel stopping the war is nothing but a deadly fantasy. No one has any reason to believe this, and the leaders of the Israeli regime have made it abundantly clear that they're not going to stop killing people and destroying buildings until Hamas no longer exists. As they know, Hamas has tremendous popular support and is fighting a people's war against occupation, and when they say "end Hamas," this is a thinly-veiled statement, in fact, that the war won't end until the genocide is complete.
I humbly submit that the pretense of the leadership of the Democratic Party that it's different because it believes in the rule of law is nonsense.
I had a good time visiting friends and relatives and playing gigs in the northeastern US recently. On one morning at a cafe in western Massachusetts I had a discussion with an old friend where we dwelt for some time on the subject of differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, specifically around the question of "rule of law."
This wasn't the first time we've had this discussion, and as with the other times we've had it, it never reaches any kind of conclusion aside from something like "agreeing to disagree." Each time we have this discussion, I'm taken aback by what appears to me to be my extremely intelligent friend's ability to compartmentalize different aspects of reality in ways that appear to assist his argument, but in the process, also create a warped understanding of how the world works that represents a classic example of what has sometimes been called "false consciousness."
The point my friend makes and the worldview undergirding it is very popular in liberal circles. (I don't mean that as an insult, in particular, but just as a statement of the obvious.) Because of this, it seems like a fine idea for me to put in a little time and effort into exploring the "rule of law" narrative around the Democrats and the Republicans, and why I wholeheartedly reject it.
The basic argument with which any listener to NPR is familiar goes like this: the Republicans don't acknowledge really basic political realities, like whether or not they lost an election, whereas the Democrats do acknowledge such realities, and don't try to hold onto power after losing an election, but rather, they admit defeat and concede. The rule of law, and acknowledging basic realities such as vote counts, is vitally important, and only one of the two parties believes in the rule of law (the Democrats), while the other one openly rejects both the rule of law and reality itself.
On the face of it, with blinders on, this argument seems incontrovertibly true. That is, if we can forget about everything else they have said or done, but focus like a laser on the electoral process in the US with regards to acknowledging the really basic reality of vote counts and election results, one party is in the real world (the Democrats), and the other is in fantasyland, making up their "alternative facts" (the Republicans, specifically the MAGA variety).
My friend -- and many, many other intelligent people -- argue that this question of the rule of law is a fundamental one which clearly differentiates the leadership of the Democrats with the leadership of the Republicans, and that for all their many faults, this question makes the Democrats the obvious choice for anyone that cares about reality and the rule of law.
I hope I have adequately presented the argument here in a way that those who agree with my friend would accept. Now I'll explain, for anyone interested, why I believe the very way this argument is framed is false consciousness, even though it's also correct (at least if it were possible for this conundrum to exist in a vacuum).
First of all, there is no question that the Republican leadership is living on another planet, doesn't believe in the rule of law or acknowledging election results, and seems to be preparing to support Trump as dictator. My argument is not at all with the assessment that the Republican leadership is antidemocratic and disinterested in basic realities such as vote counts, climate change, or any number of other things.
My argument is with the notion that the Democratic leadership is interested in the rule of law. They're clearly not at all interested in the rule of law. This is obvious to me and many other observers of recent events in the world. I'll explain.
But before I explain, let me use another country to help illuminate my point. It's a country that's in the news a lot lately, because it's actively committing genocide right now, with American bombs, American money, American political cover, and bipartisan support.
It is often said that Israel is a democracy. If you arbitrarily chose borders for this country that are not recognized by the country's own leadership, such as where the borders were before 1967, before close to a million Jewish Israelis moved into the West Bank, then you could say this claim to democracy might be true. For those people living within the 1967 borders, along with the many Jewish Israelis living outside of those borders, there is this democracy. But not for the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli military rule.
For the Jewish Israelis and perhaps for the Palestinians living within the 1967 borders, there is what we could call the rule of law -- civilian courts, anyway. But for the actual majority of the population living within the actual borders of the area governed by or militarily occupied by Israel, there is no democracy, no vote, no civilian courts, no rule of law at all.
So, is Israel a democracy? Does it have the rule of law functioning within it? The answer depends entirely on one's ability to put on the right variety of blinders. If you can pretend that Gaza and the West Bank being under Israeli military rule, currently being carpet-bombed, is irrelevant to the question, then you could say Israel is a democracy with the rule of law. However, to say this would be to turn reality on its head, obviously.
The United States, of course, isn't Israel. Rather, it's much, much bigger. It is not only a massive country, but it is an empire, whose military budget is only slightly less than the military budget of the rest of the world's countries combined. The US maintains military bases all over the world, and regularly invades other countries, overthrowing democracies and dictatorships alike, often against the wishes of the United Nations.
If we were talking about a country that kept to itself and did not do any of the things the US does all the time, conversations about which party believes in the rule of law could be perfectly relevant, and the distinctions between parties that do or don't believe in the rule of law could be seen very clearly. But the US isn't that country. Being a global empire, the idea of looking at domestic policy as if it could be separated from foreign policy is just as ridiculous as looking at Israel and calling it a democratic country whose leadership believes in the rule of law.
The illegal invasion of Iraq was popular among the leadership of both parties, and funded by both parties as well. Libya's government was violently overthrown, in large part by the US Air Force, under a Democratic administration. A Democratic administration was responsible for ending the lives of millions of Vietnamese people by burning them alive and destroying their country.
How does supporting the genocide of Palestinians, or carrying out a genocidal war against the people of southeast Asia, or illegally invading Iraq, figure into the rule of law?
The same people who distinguish between the Democratic and Republican leadership on the basis of their support for the rule of law will often also be people who support sending weapons to Ukraine. Once again here their argument centers on the rule of law. The argument is that Russia violated the rule of law by invading another country, and in support of the rule of law and sovereignty of peoples and nations, we should support the Ukrainian struggle against Russian occupation.
Now some people may say that I'm unnecessarily complicating the debate here with the Ukraine example, but really it is at the core of the argument. The belief that the Democrats are more principled, and that this party's leadership believes in the rule of law, is a very dangerous form of confusion, because it can easily lead adherents to then, by extension, support projects that appear to be standing up for the rule of law, such as the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, and to overlook what's really going on.
Now, if we keep those blinders off and avoid the trap of thinking that the US empire can commit genocide in one part of the world and support the rule of law in another, then the argument that political leaders in Washington, DC are actually concerned with the rule of law in Ukraine falls apart. Something else is going on here, clearly. What is it?
Well, current events and history help a lot to make that pretty clear. US foreign policy has never been globally consistent -- far from it. US policies in former Soviet countries have long focused on wooing the societies in the direction of the west -- especially during the period when the USSR was an actually existing alternative economic model.
In countries where US domination was already established, from Guatemala to Colombia to Indonesia, there was very little of this wooing or supporting allegedly democratic institutions, and a whole lot of military funding and genocidal slaughter used to maintain US imperial hegemony.
We live in one world, and it would be wildly misleading to look at US policies in one region while ignoring US policies everywhere else. The carrot and the stick are both wielded by the same entity, for the same purposes. Sometimes it's convenient to pretend you support the rule of law. Other times it apparently seems more efficacious to just kill millions of innocent civilians.
The US -- very much including the Democratic Party leadership of it -- does both of these things, in different countries, and at different times in the same countries, depending on the situation. If you don't look at reality through this lens -- through the lens of actual US imperial practice, rather than through the lens of its propaganda, or by only looking at what the right hand is doing, while ignoring the left -- then and only then can you fool yourself into thinking that the leadership of either of our political parties actually and truly believes in, or practices, the rule of law.
