A Cheerleader Without A Team

One more chapter in the tragic story of the League of Canceled Cheerleaders.

I don't remember when I first heard of or thought of the term, "cheerleader for the left," but that's what I always used to say I was, when people would ask what I did.  Sometimes people would seem perplexed; they'd see me singing at some anarchist event or some communist event, they'd get the impression that I was some kind of professional, and they'd wonder how I possibly made a living as a musician, in the context of this or that group.  

Was I a member of this group?  Depending on the group, the answer was usually no.  Then what was I doing singing at their event?  I'm a cheerleader for the left, I'd explain.  If there are people trying to shake things up in one way or another, whether they're doing civil disobedience to try to stop a pipeline, or having a protest rally against an imperial war, or trespassing onto the floor of an arms factory to smash up the equipment, or just having a conference in a lecture hall, or any number of other initiatives, I'll write songs about the fine things they're doing, and sing them at their events, along with other relevant material.

My model for this career, such as it was, was Pete Seeger.  I always thought of myself as probably having more militant politics than Pete, but the ecumenical way he did things was inspiring for me.  He was a big advocate for nonviolent civil disobedience a la Martin Luther King, Jr, and is responsible for writing the version of "We Shall Overcome" that most of us are still familiar with from studying the history of the Civil Rights movement.  But you'd also find Pete singing lots of songs glorifying the armed struggle of the socialists, communists, and anarchists who fought fascism in Spain, and saying nice things about all sorts of participants in rebellions and revolutions from throughout history, including very contemporary ones.

Sometimes people would look at what seemed like fairly erratic behavior on the part of Pete, playing at so many different sorts of events, for different sorts of groups, and they'd try to pin him down as being part of one political tendency or another.  This would often be a frustrating endeavor for people, since Pete was so ecumenical in his support for what would at some point have been called "Movement activities" and so interested in building bridges between disparate communities that his politics could seem very slippery, from the vantage point of an ideologue.

In the 1940's and early 1950's, when Pete was in his twenties and early thirties, he was really famous, as a member of the hit-producing folk sensation, the Weavers.  Then the McCarthy era fired up and the Weavers were blacklisted from TV, banned from commercial radio, etc.  So Pete spent most of his thirties, in the 1950's, making a living traveling and playing on college campuses, for the sorts of student groups that weren't bothered by such bans or blacklists.

Although I had never been famous and therefore never had an opportunity to be blacklisted, coincidentally I also spent the entirety of my thirties traveling around the US and playing largely on college campuses, for the sorts of student groups that were interested in the sorts of things people like Pete or I sang about -- peace, justice, equality, the environment, and things like that.

I had wanted to follow in Pete's footsteps by being an ecumenical cheerleader for the left across the US and elsewhere, for popular struggles, for the labor and environmental and peace movements, and I did just that, with the aid of the student groups, and the college gig economy.

I didn't know it at the time, but the end of my thirties was to coincide with the end of the college gig economy as me and my contemporaries knew it, as it had been known at least since the days when Pete was touring the campuses when he was young.  The end of my thirties also happened to coincide with me becoming a parent, and moving to Portland, Oregon, where Leila's mother wanted to move to, to go to medical school here.

Before actually moving and holding down an apartment in this city, which was also before I had a kid, I had been making a habit of doing at least one, sometimes two, full-on driving tours around the country per year, where I'd go by car, stopping every few hours in a different town to do one or more gigs there, and I'd cover 25 states that way on a typical tour.  The only parts of the country where I'd usually be driving more than a few hours between gigs would be the Dakotas, or Nebraska.  Otherwise the gigs were everywhere where there were colleges, and there are thousands of colleges in the United States.

The year before I actually moved to Oregon I remember as being a typical visit to this state.  In the course of a week or so, I played concerts for students at Reed, at Lewis & Clark, at PSU, at some little Portland branch of the University of Oregon, along with the bigger campus in Eugene, and at the big university in Ashland as well.  And that's not including the other gigs I did just over the river, in Vancouver, Washington, and all over the state of Washington.

I kept at the task of being a cheerleader for the left even when the college gig economy collapsed, which also coincided with the rise of social media.  The college gig economy had begun to collapse before the rise of social media, and was a phenomenon that was not necessarily a consequence of it, but I'm sure in many ways these things are also connected.  In any case, to think of the loss for the colleges and universities of all those people like me who used to travel and speak and perform and participate in workshops, seminars, festivals, teach-ins, etc., that used to happen regularly on college campuses across the country when there was the college gig economy, is really overwhelming.  It's a loss that has largely gone unnoticed and unmeasured, as far as I know, but I think it's been a huge one.

By the time the rest of the economy for indy musicians trying to make a living in the United States collapsed, with the introduction of Spotify's free tier in 2013, I had to stop doing those driving tours around the country.  There were too many big spaces between gigs, and too many of the gigs I was doing were not well organized and didn't pay enough.  With the college gig economy, if a gig were badly promoted and badly attended, it still paid, but that's not how it usually was outside of the colleges, in the USA.

I became a cheerleader for the left mainly on the internet, and in some countries in Europe, where touring still works financially.  2013 was the beginning of the days for me when I began to feel like a spectator rather than a participant, when it came to anything happening in the US.  I would fly to other countries and do gigs for a hundred enthusiastic leftwing teenagers, and sing at peace or labor-related rallies for sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, then go back to Portland to hang out with my kids and live in relative obscurity.

As good as tours continued to be in other countries, I was no longer the cheerleader for the American left that I had once set out to be.  But, tantalizingly, unable to tour in my own country, I regularly get word about signs of life.  People report hearing my music played through sound systems before the speeches start at a rally somewhere, in some part of the country I haven't been to in over a decade.  I get regular messages from people asking when I might ever be playing a gig near where they live, so they can come to it.  Spotify reports that of my 18,000 monthly listeners, a disproportionately large number of them are Americans in their teens and twenties.

With my world shrinking, at least in terms of what's happening on the ground in the United States, unable to go anywhere else very often, what I have to go on, what I see mostly, is Oregon, and especially Portland.  Sometimes I start to take it personally when I never get asked to sing at a rally in this city, until I actually attend the rallies, and discover that not only are there no musicians performing at all, but the sound system the organizers are using is completely inadequate for hearing someone speak, let alone hearing anyone sing.

And then the pandemic hit in 2020, and here in Portland it still seems to be happening.  Downtown is still a shell of what it once was, not that it was so impressive before that.  And at the rallies, there's an even lower likelihood that there might be a live performer involved than there used to be.  And the sound systems are still awful.

I miss the cheerleader of the left role that I once had all over the US, and I occasionally try to revive my role in that regard, only to get swatted back down in one way or another, when it comes to efforts here in Oregon.

During the heyday of Portland Tenants United I was providing the sound and singing a few songs at their public events, but then PTU founder Margot Black became a subject of vilification for completely bizarre and ridiculous reasons, canceled in a cancelation campaign of the sort that have become completely familiar here in Portland and many other places, in left/alternative milieus in particular.

Around the time of Margot's cancellation, it was also becoming evident at rallies that happened downtown, connected to PSU groups, that if there was a rally happening, anyone speaking or singing had to be clearly connected to an oppressed group of some identifiable sort, and white people like me who didn't want to play the Jewish card were not welcome to get behind a microphone.  For me this was only a little relevant because really there just was hardly any live music happening at rallies anymore anyway.

Over the years I've made efforts to let different people know that I have a sound system and can provide it for rallies, so the speakers can be heard, but my speakers mostly just gather dust in my apartment.  In 2020, my friend who was providing the sound for all the protests downtown borrowed my equipment whenever the cops took his.  2020 involved some good sound, while Rabble was doing it, but 2020 was the year of no live music because of the fear of singers infecting audiences, so there was even less of that than there had been, despite the uprising that year.

When the genocide in Gaza began last October and I figured that there would be sustained protests against US support for Israel, I crowdfunded an upgrade to my outdoor, battery-powered sound equipment, and contacted folks who were organizing rallies, to offer up its use.  This happened once, and then it stopped.  The last rally I heard about reportedly had a terrible sound system.  In the space of a few months, whatever has changed within the ranks of the folks involved with organizing around stopping this war, keeping the phone number of the guy who offered to provide sound gear is apparently impossible to do.

Or there are other things happening, like I'm not someone folks want to associate with.  Hard to know what to attribute to disorganization and what to attribute to cancel culture, but there's a lot of both of those things going on around here, no doubt.

While I'm so glad to see people trying to do any kind of public event or make any kind of effort to highlight and oppose this genocide, it's so sad to see the context from which people are having to act, the reality of the left in 2024 that people all find themselves having to try to navigate.

For one thing, the best organizers, both Jewish and Palestinian, from the Palestine solidarity movement that has existed in this city since I moved here in 2007, have been canceled -- targeted by cancelation campaigners for their supposed transgressions, and unable to effectively organize anymore.  Part of the reason people might say this is a youthful movement in this city, anyway, is because the slightly less youthful organizers that anyone who lived here 10 years ago would expect to see are absent, due to their cancellations.  Not due to them having moved out of town, though some of them did that, too.

Nonetheless, when the campus occupations started happening all over the country, I once again thought -- and still do -- that I should be going to those locations, and being a cheerleader of the movement.  I have, after all, put out two albums in the past few months that are all or mostly about the genocide in Gaza.  There are actually millions of people who have heard some of these songs, as some of them are being shared widely online in the Middle East in particular, where I've been a guest fairly regularly on Arabic-language TV stations, and I'm receiving daily messages of praise for my songs from that part of the world, as well as from around the US.

Last week my friend Al Glatkowski called to ask me if I would like him to send me a 16'-long banner that says "stop the genocide, permanent ceasefire now."  Al is not only a long-time member of Veterans for Peace, but in 1970 he participated in a mutiny on a ship transporting massive amounts of napalm bombs to Vietnam, and spent eight years in prison for it.  I'm proud to know Al, and of course I wanted one of those banners.

I posted on social media a picture of the banner, with Al holding one end of it.  I mentioned that I would soon have that banner in Portland, and if anyone wanted to go out on the street somewhere and hold it, I'd bring a sound system and a guitar and play appropriate music for the occasion.

The post got a lot of response.  I posted it a little over a week ago, and looking at Facebook now, I see that post has gotten over 9,000 comments.

About 98% of those comments are from pro-Israel trolls.  Since February I've been targeted by some kind of troll farm.  I got a notification from Facebook recently congratulating me for having gotten 27,000 comments on my Facebook Page in the past 30 days.  That's how it's been.

Despite this, I have to look at the comments, and especially at the messages on my Page, most of which are also from vile pro-Israel, pro-genocide trolls, who hurl the most awful insults, that I support raping women and beheading babies and killing all the Jews, and those are the very sanitized versions of the kind of content I'm seeing constantly.  I have to look at the comments and messages because other people, who aren't Hasbara trolls, are still using my Facebook Page as their main platform for communicating with me about gigs they're organizing in Australia, or a campus occupation they'd like me to sing at.

I got one such message from a student at a campus in the state of Washington who was in touch with students in Eugene at the University of Oregon who were putting together cultural activities and looking for more musicians to sing there.  Given that I have a lot of songs on the subject, I'm a fairly obvious person to be part of such a program, and I was happy to volunteer to participate, although Eugene is a 100-mile drive to the south of Portland.

I'm always especially glad to get invitations to sing at occupations or encampments.  Having sung at hundreds of them around the world, whether it's people occupying a factory, occupying a coal mine, occupying a building, keeping a picket line moving, barricading a road, or doing a public encampment like a lot of what's happening on the campuses lately, one thing these sorts of endeavors always have in common is they involve a lot of people spending inordinate amounts of time in one place.  From the perspective of a performer, they tend to make great audiences, because they desperately need more things to do, generally.

Occupying spaces like that has a lot in common with warfare, from what people often say, in that you're spending most of your time doing nothing or not much, possibly being very bored, and then you spend a small amount of your time involved with some kind of often terrifying confrontation with police or counter-protesters.  But during the time that you're not involved with such confrontations, people need things to do, and entertainment.  Also, occupations in public places are great opportunities for doing popular education, and for putting on public programs involving musicians and speakers who can do a good job of amplifying the message of the occupation in so many ways.

The banner from Al had just arrived in the mail the day before.  I was up earlier than usual Sunday morning, excited for the day's events.  Before moving to Oregon 17 years ago, I imagined that even if I weren't touring as much as I used to before having kids, I'd still be participating in local events.  I imagined I'd be making regular trips to relatively nearby cities like Eugene, whether it was for a paying gig or to sing at a protest.  I never imagined I'd live in Portland and hardly ever go to Oregon's biggest college town for any reason, for years on end.  So it felt good to be going to Eugene for some reason, any reason.

I put it and my sound gear and a couple of stringed instruments in the back of my car, bid my little children adieu for the day, and headed south.  I had plans for Eugene in addition to singing on the campus.  Lunch with an old friend who I knew from the east coast, who I hadn't seen in thirty years.  An interview for the local community radio station, with a long-time activist who's lived in Eugene ever since I can remember Eugene.

Out of habit, I had Google Maps on on my phone, though I wouldn't need it until I got off the long, straight highway between Portland and Eugene.  In any case, since February my phone behaves the same way, when the screen is on; every ten seconds or so the top bit of the screen is taken over with another notification from Facebook, which is generally another insult from a pro-Israel troll.  "You're a terrorist," "Destroy Gaza," "Kill all the Palestinians," "Their children deserve to die, too," "I hope you get beaten up by a Jew."  I know I can turn off notifications, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

After having lunch with my friend just north of Eugene, I got back into my car, preparing to head to the U of O campus to set up and play for the encampment there.  For all kinds of reasons, I habitually check my email inbox far too often, and I did it in the car before heading into town, to find this message:

Some people in jvp [Jewish Voice for Peace] brought up some concerns about associations with a white supremecist and steering committee has decided it would be best if you didn’t perform. I apologize for letting you know so late especially if you were already on your way, there were some miscommunications and I thought someone else had contacted you. Thank you again for offering to perform and sorry it had to be cancelled.

A cheerleader without a team to sing for,  instead of going to the campus, I visited my friend and long-time videographer for the left, Todd Boyle, who was going to film my concert for propaganda purposes, I did the interview at KEPW with David Zupan, and I got back in the car to make the 100-mile drive back to Portland.

This morning I received a Google Alert that my name had appeared in the news somewhere in the world.  It was in an article in the Daily Emerald, what used to be the student paper, with an update about goings-on during week two of the pro-Palestine encampment on campus, updated at 1 pm on Sunday:

The guest speaker talk that was scheduled for 2:30 p.m. with singer-songwriter David Rovics has been canceled.

Talk about hasty, last-minute cancellations, that's about as last-minute as it gets, without being literal.

Needless to say, if anyone were to ask anyone I know, or to take five minutes to look at the types of songs I write, it would quickly become obvious that rather than being a white supremacist, I'm quite explicitly an anti-racist songwriter, very clearly against white supremacy, fascism, racism, settler-colonialism, Zionism, etc. 

But this is not a time of reason, where people can take five minutes and make an obvious determination like that.  Ours is an age -- and this is a place -- when some anonymous troll on social media can link to a badly-written article on a website literally dedicated to praising every dumpster fire that anyone in the world ever starts, and this article on that website denouncing my supposed transgressions, those being engaging in discourse with alleged rightwingers, trumps everything else.  All the hundreds of anti-racist songs are irrelevant, because of a claim made by someone who is quite likely and literally working for the FBI and serving the interests of dividing and conquering the left, as the FBI has verifiably been doing for over a century now.  This is where we're at.  Reality is irrelevant, while false rumors reign supreme, and everyone communicates anonymously on corporate-run platforms.  It is a wet dream for Cointelpro, and if anyone in those compromised circles of the left says what I just said, for stating the obvious they will be accused of "cop-jacketing," whatever that's supposed to mean.

Only the day before I took this bizarre little ride to Eugene, I wrote an article titled "The Silenced Majority and Why It Stays That Way."  One section of that article was titled "Left Capture."  My experience on Sunday was a case in point -- and only one of so, so many others, involving so many good people rendered useless by the hegemony of paranoia, suspicion, and identitarianism.