[PAA-Discuss] [David Rovics] If I Can't Dance... (An Open Letter to the US Left)

[Juli3 at aol.com]

If I Can’t Dance… 
An Open Letter to the US Left on the Relevance of  Culture 
Being an activist is a hard, relatively thankless, generally unpaid job.  
There are some really wonderful people who are going to be offended by this  
essay, and I apologize in advance if you’re one of them, but what I say here had  
to be said. We’re all hopefully trying to make the world a better place, and  
sometimes that means having open disagreements. I welcome any and all 
feedback,  public or private, and of course feel free to post and distribute this 
essay  wherever you see fit. 
Last weekend I sang at an antiwar protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, on  
the fifth anniversary of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. In both its good and 
bad  aspects, the event downtown was not unusual. Hard-working, unpaid activists 
from  various organizations and networks put in long hours organizing, doing  
publicity, and sitting through lots of contentious meetings in the weeks and  
months leading up to the event. On the day of the event, different groups set 
up  tents to network with the public and talk about matters of life and 
death. There  was a stage with talented musicians of various musical genres 
performing  throughout the day, and a rally with speakers in the afternoon, followed 
by a  march. Attendance was pathetically low. In large part I’m sure this was 
due to  the general sense of discouragement most people in the US seem to feel 
about our  ability to effect change under the Bush regime. It was raining 
especially hard  by west coast standards, and that also didn’t help. 
The crowd grew to it’s peak size during the rally and march, but was almost  
nonexistent before the 2 pm rally. There was only a trickle of people visiting 
 the various tents prior to the rally, and the musicians on the stage were  
playing to a largely nonexistent audience. The musical program, scheduled to  
happen from 10 am to 6 pm, was being billed as the World War None Festival. The 
 term “festival” was contentious, however, and Pdx Peace, the local peace  
coalition responsible for the rally, couldn’t come to consensus on using the  
term “festival.” In their publicity they referred to the festival as an “
action  camp.” The vast majority of people have no idea what an “action camp” is,  
including me, and I’ve been actively involved in the progressive movement for 
my  entire adult life. The local media, of course, also had no idea what an “
action  camp” was, and any publicity that could have been hoped for from them 
did not  happen. Word did not spread about the event to any significant 
degree, at least  in part because people didn’t know what they were supposed to be 
spreading the  word about. Everybody from all political, social, class and 
ethnic backgrounds  knows what a festival is, but certain elements within Pdx 
Peace didn’t want to  use the term to describe what was quite obviously meant to 
be a festival (as  well as a rally and march). Anybody above the age of three 
can tell you that  when you have live music on a stage outdoors all day, that’s 
called a festival.  But not Pdx Peace. 
Why? I wasn’t at the meetings -- thankfully, I’m just a professional  
performer, not an organizer of anything other than my own concert tours, so I  only 
know second-hand about what was said. There’s no need to name the names of  
individuals or the smaller groups involved with the coalition in this case --  
the patterns are so common and so well-established that the names just don’t  
matter. Some people within the peace coalition were of the opinion that the war 
 in Iraq was too serious a matter to have a festival connected to it. 
Because, I  imagine, of some combination of factors including the nature of consensus 
 decision-making, sectarianism on the part of a few, and muddled thinking on 
the  part of some others, those who thought that a festival should happen -- 
and  should be called a festival -- were overruled. My hat goes off to the 
World War  None Festival organizers (a largely separate entity from Pdx Peace), 
and to  those within Pdx Peace who tried and failed to call the festival what it 
was,  and to organize a well-attended event. 
As to those who succeeded in sabotaging the event, I ask, why is so much of  
the left in the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so many  
people on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and 
importance  of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and others on the left 
do  acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on the sidelines? What are we 
trying  to accomplish here? 
It wasn’t always this way. Going back a hundred years, before we had a  
significant middle class in this country, before we had a Social Security  system, 
Worker’s Compensation, Medicare, or anything approximating the actual  (not 
just on paper) right to free speech, when most of the working class  majority in 
this country were living in utter destitution and generally working  (when 
they could find work) in extremely dangerous conditions for extremely long  
hours, often in jobs that required them to be itinerant, required them to forego  
the pleasure of having families that they might have a chance to see now and  
then, out of these conditions the Industrial Workers of the World was born. 
The IWW at that time was a huge, militant union that could bring industrial  
production in the US to a halt, and on various regional levels, quite 
regularly  did. It was a multi-ethnic union led by women and men of a wide variety of  
backgrounds, from all over the world. It’s most well-known member to this day 
 was a singer-songwriter named Joe Hill, and he was only one of many of the  
musician-organizers that constituted both the leadership and membership of the 
 IWW. While starving, striking, or being attacked by police on the streets of 
 Seattle, Boston and everywhere in between, the IWW sang. Their publications 
were  filled with poems, lyrics and cartoons. Everybody knew the songs and 
sung them  daily. Some of the songs were instructive, meant to educate workers in 
effective  organizing techniques. Others were battle cries of resistance, and 
still others  celebrated victories or lamented defeats. Their cause was 
nothing short of the  physical survival and spiritual dignity of the working class. 
They put their  bodies on the line and were often killed and maimed for it, 
but they transformed  this society profoundly, and they sang the whole way 
through. Was their cause  serious? As serious as serious can get. And to this day, 
multitudes around the  world remember the songs of Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, 
and T-Bone Slim, long after  their speeches and pamphlets have been forgotten. 
Like many other  singer-songwriters throughout the history of the class war, 
Joe Hill was  executed by a firing squad in 1916. Why? Exactly because he was 
so serious -- a  serious threat to the robber barons who ruled this country. 
A very different, much more rigidly ideological organization that rose to  
prominence during the declining years of the IWW was the Communist Party. This  
is an organization whose early years are within the living memory of close  
friends of mine, such as my dear friend Bob Steck, who died last year at the age 
 of 95, and spent most of his life fighting for humanity. I spent hundreds of 
 hours over the course of many years interrogating Bob about his life and 
times  (at least ten hours of which are recorded for posterity on cassettes 
somewhere).  The Communist Party was very different from the IWW in many ways, but 
in it’s  heyday it was also a huge, grassroots movement, whose leadership and 
membership  took many cards from the IWW’s deck, including their emphasis on 
the vital  importance of culture. 
When Bob talked about the CP’s orientation with regards to organizing the  
revolution in the USA, he said there were three primary components: the unions,  
the streets, and the theater. Fighting for the welfare of the working class 
by  organizing for the eight-hour day and decent wages (largely through the  
communist-led Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO), organizing the  
starving millions in the streets into the unions of the unemployed, and -- just  
as importantly -- fighting for the hearts and minds of the people through 
music,  theater, and art. Among the musical vanguard of the communist movement of 
the  1930’s were people who are still household names today for millions of 
people in  the US and around the world -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul 
Robeson, to name  a few. Traveling theater companies brought the work of Clifford 
Odetts and  Bertoldt Brecht to the people, educating and inspiring militant 
action  throughout the US. I remember Bob describing the audience reaction to 
one of the  early performances of Waiting for Lefty in New York City, the gasps 
of  excitement and possibility in the packed theater when the actors on stage  
shouted those last lines of the play -- “Strike! Strike! Strike!” Ten 
curtain  calls later, everyone in the theater was ready to take to the streets, and  
did. 
Bob and his comrades organized and sang in New York, just as they sang going  
into battle in Spain in the first fight against fascism, the one in which the 
US  was on the side of the fascists. Nothing unusual about that -- soldiers 
on every  side in every war sing as they go into battle, whether the cause is 
just or  unjust. They and their leadership, whether fascist or democrat, 
socialist or  anarchist, know that the songs are just as powerful as the guns 
(regardless of  what Tom Lehrer said). You can’t fire if you’re running away, and 
if you want to  stand and fight you have to sing. Talk to anybody involved with 
the Civil Rights  movement and they’ll tell you, if we weren’t singing, we 
surely would have lost  heart and ran in the face of those hate-filled, racist 
police and their dogs,  guns, and water cannon. Talk to anyone who lived 
through the 60’s -- who  remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the 
likes of Martin  Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions 
remember the songs. Bob  Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were 
the soundtrack to  the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this 
country to this day and you  will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited 
reference to a line in a Bob  Dylan song. (Try it, it’s fun.) 
Around the world it’s the same. Dedicated leftists may sit through the  
speeches of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, but transcendent poetry of Pablo Neruda  
and the enchanting melodies of Silvio Rodriguez cross all political and class  
lines. You will have to try hard to find a Spanish-speaking person anywhere in 
 the Americas who does not love the work of that Cuban communist, Silvio. 
You'll  have to search hard to find a Latino who does not have a warm place in 
their  heart for that murdered Chilean singer-songwriter, Victor Jara. 
Talk to any Arab of any background, no matter how despondent they may be  
about the state of the Arab world, try to find one whose eyes do not light up  
when you merely mention the names Mahmoud Darwish, Marcel Khalife, Feyrouz, Um  
Khultum. Try to find anyone in Ireland but the most die-hard Loyalist who  
doesn’t tear up when listening to the music of Christy Moore, whatever they  
think of the IRA. And ask progressives on the streets of the US today how they  
came to hold their political views that led them to take the actions they are  
now taking, and as often as not you will hear answers like, “I discovered punk  
rock, the Clash changed my life,” or “I went to a concert of Public Enemy, 
and  that was it.” 
Music -- and art, poetry, theater -- is powerful (if it’s good). The powers  
that be know this well. Joe Hill and Victor Jara are only a small fraction of  
the musicians killed by the ruling classes for doing what they do. By the 
same  token, those who run this country (and so many other countries) know the 
power  of music and art to serve their purposes -- virtually every product on 
the shelf  in every store in the US has a jingle to go along with it, and often 
brilliant  artistic imagery to go along with the jingle, shouting at us from 
every  billboard and TV commercial. (The ranks of Madison Avenue are filled 
with  brilliant minds who would rather be doing something more fulfilling with 
their  creative energy.) 
Enter 2008. Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that  
sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill  
music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the  
music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to teach us all 
 that music is something to have in the background to comfort you as you try 
to  get through another mind-numbing day of meaningless labor in some office  
building or department store. It’s something to help you seduce someone 
perhaps,  or to help you get over a breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, 
 action, or feelings of compassion for humanity (other than for your 
girlfriend  or boyfriend). 
There are always exceptions to prove the rule, but by and large, the writers  
and performers in Nashville and LA know what they’re being paid to do, and 
what  they’re being paid not to do -- if it ever occurred to them to do anything 
else  in the first place. But even more potently, all those millions of 
musicians  aspiring to become stars, or at least to make a living at their craft, 
know  either consciously or implicitly that any hope of success rides on 
imitating the  garbage that comes out of these music factories. Of course, there are 
the many  others who write and sing songs (and create art, plays, 
screenplays, etc.) out  of a need to express themselves or even out of a desire to make a 
difference in  the world, but they are systematically kept off of the 
airwaves, out of the  record deals, relegated largely to the internet, very lucky if 
they might manage  to make a living at their craft. Fundamentally, though, 
they are made to feel  marginal, and are looked at by much of society as 
marginal, novelties, exotic.  Although they are actually the mainstream of the 
(non-classical) musical  tradition in the US and around the world, although the kind 
of music they create  has been and is still loved by billions around the world 
for centuries, in the  current climate, especially in present-day US society, 
they are a marginal  few. 
And no matter how enlightened we would like to think we are, the progressive  
movement is part of this society, for good and for ill. Most of us have  
swallowed this shallow understanding of what music is. The evidence is  
overwhelming. There are, of course, exceptions. Folks like the organizers of the  annual 
protests outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia -- School of the  
Americas Watch -- are well aware of the potency of culture, and use music and  art to 
great effect, inspiring and educating tens of thousands of participants  
every November. 
On the other end of the spectrum are the ideologically-driven people who have 
 turned hatred of culture into a sort of art. I have to smile when I think of 
the  small minority of Islamist wackos who tried to storm the stage at one 
rally I  sang at in DC in 2002, shouting, “No music! No music!” Security for 
the stage  was being provided by the Nation of Islam, who faced off with this 
group of  Islamists, who ultimately decided that throwing down with the Jewels 
of Islam  behind the stage that day wasn’t in their best interests, apparently. 
But much more prevalent, and therefore much scarier, are groups like the  
ANSWER “Coalition.” (I put “coalition” in quotes because I have yet to meet a  
member of a group that theoretically makes up the “coalition” that has had 
any  say in what goes on at their rallies, although the leadership of ANSWER is 
of  course happy to receive the bus-loads of people that their “coalition” 
members  bring to their rallies, which seems to be the only thing that makes 
ANSWER a  “coalition.”) ANSWER, last I heard, is run by the ultra-left sectarian 
group  known as the Worker’s World Party, which I strongly suspect is working 
for the  FBI. (Although as Ward Churchill says, you don’t need to be a cop to 
do a cop’s  job.) 
Millions of people in the US who regularly go to antiwar protests are unaware 
 of who is organizing them. They just want to go to an antiwar protest. 
ANSWER  has become almost synonymous with “antiwar protest,” to the extent that 
many  people on the periphery of the left (such as most people who go to their  
protests) refer to antiwar protests as “ANSWER protests,” as in “I went to an 
 ANSWER protest,” whether or not the protest was actually organized by 
ANSWER.  (Just as many people say “I was listening to NPR” when they were actually  
listening to a community radio station that has nothing to do with NPR,  
broadcasting programs such as Democracy Now!, which the vast majority  of NPR 
stations still will not touch with a ten foot pole.) 
I always find it unnerving and intriguing that ANSWER protests always seem to 
 be mentioned on NPR and broadcast on CSPAN, whereas rallies organized by the 
 bigger and actual coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), almost 
never  manage to make it onto CSPAN or get covered by the corporate media. ANSWER 
 always seems to get the permits, whereas UFPJ seems to be systematically 
denied  them. Anyway, I digress (a little). I tend to avoid anything having to do 
with  ANSWER or the little-known, shadowy Worker’s World Party, but a few 
years ago I  was driving across Tennessee listening to CSPAN on my satellite 
radio, and they  broadcast the full four hours of an ANSWER protest in DC. I sat 
through it  because I wanted to hear it from beginning to end, for research 
purposes, and  Tennessee is a long state to drive through from west to east, had 
to do  something during that drive. There was one song in the four-hour rally. 
Although  I’ve been an active member of the left for twenty years, I 
recognized almost  none of the names of the people who spoke at the rally. Every 
speech was full of  boring, tired rhetoric, as if they were out of a screenplay 
written by a  rightwing screenwriter who was trying to make a mockery out of 
leftwing  political rallies. Judging from the names of the organizations involved, 
very  few of which I recognized either, they were mostly tiny little Worker’s 
World  Party front groups. And since the Worker’s World Party apparently doesn
’t have  any musicians in their pocket, there was no music to speak of. (Or, 
quite  probably I suspect, they don't want music at their rallies because they 
don't  want their rallies to be interesting.) 
ANSWER is an extreme example, but a big one that most progressives are  
unfortunately familiar with, whether they know who ANSWER (or Worker’s World) is  
or not. Inevitably, most people leave ANSWER protests feeling vaguely used and  
demoralized -- aside from those who manage to stay far enough away from the  
towers of speakers so they can avoid hearing all the mindless rhetoric pouring 
 out of them. Contrast the mood with the protests at the gates of Fort 
Benning,  where most people leave feeling hopeful and inspired. 
I know I have no more hope of influencing the leadership of Worker’s World  
with this essay than I have of influencing the behavior of the New York City  
police department with it. But neither of these organizations are my target  
audience. Those who I hope to reach are those who are genuinely trying to create 
 rallies and other events in the hopes of influencing and inspiring public  
opinion, in the hopes of inspiring people to action, in the hopes of winning  
allies among the apolitical or even among conservatives. The people I hope to  
reach are those who have been unwittingly influenced by the corporate music  
industry’s implicit definition of what music and culture is and is not. 
And, here we go, I would count among this group most of the hard-working,  
loving and compassionate people who are organizing rallies, who are organizing  
actions, who are organizing unions, and who are creating progressive media on  
the radio, on community television and on the internet in the US today. 
I’d like to pause for a moment to make a disclosure. I am a professional  
politically-oriented musician, what the corporate media (and many progressives)  
would call a “protest singer,” though I reject the term. I’m not sure what, 
if  anything, I have to gain personally by publishing these thoughts, but I 
think it  behooves me to point out that I am one of the lucky ones who has 
performed at  rallies and in progressive and mainstream media for hundreds of 
thousands of  people on a fairly regular basis throughout the world, and I would 
like to hope  that my words here will not be understood as Rovics whining that he’
s not famous  enough. I speak here for culture generally, not for myself as 
an individual  singer-songwriter. 
My desire is to reach groups like Pdx Peace and their sister organizations  
throughout the country. These are genuinely democratic groups, real coalitions  
made up of real people, not sectarian, unaccountable groups like ANSWER. 
These  are groups, in short, made up of my friends and comrades, but these are 
groups  also made up of people who grew up in this society and therefore 
generally have  a lot to learn about the power of culture to educate and inspire 
people. It is  not good enough to have music on the stage as people are gathering 
to rally and  as they are leaving to march. It’s not good enough to have a song 
or two  sandwiched in between another half hour of speeches -- no matter how 
many  organizations want to have speakers representing them on stage, or 
whatever  other very legitimate excuses organizers have for making their events, 
once  again, long and boring (even if they’re not as long or as boring as an 
ANSWER  rally). It is not good enough for wonderful, influential radio/TV shows 
like  Democracy Now! to have snippets of songs in between their interviews,  
when only two or three of those interviews each year are related to culture. It  
is a sorry state of affairs that NPR news shows do a better job of covering 
pop  culture than Pacifica shows do in terms of covering leftwing culture. 
The vast majority of the contemporary, very talented, dedicated musicians  
represented by, say, the "links" page on www.davidrovics.com, have rarely or  
never been invited to sing at a local or national protest rally (even if some  
few of us have, many times). The vast majority of progressive conferences do 
not  even include a concert, or if they do, it's background music during dinner 
on  Saturday night. I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard  
Democracy Now! or Free Speech Radio News mention that a great  leftwing artist 
is doing a tour of the US. The number of fantastic musicians out  there who 
have even been played during the station breaks on Democracy Now! is a tiny 
fraction of those that are out there -- of the dozens of  musicians featured on 
my "links" page for example, only a small handful have  even been played once. 
It is shameful that it's easier to get a national,  mainstream radio show in 
the UK or Canada to plug a tour of such a musician than  it is to get any 
national Pacifica program to do this. 
Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not  
sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station  
ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a  
hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute ballad is  
easily equal to any book. (They'll read the book after they hear the song, 
not  the other way around.) 
It is often said that we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the  
people of this country. It is us versus CNN, NPR, Bush, Clinton, etc. In this  
battle, style matters, not just content. In this battle, it is absolutely  
imperative that we remember that it is not only the minds we need to win, but  the 
hearts. At least in terms of the various forms of human communication, there  
is nothing on Earth more effective in winning hearts than music and art. We  
ignore or sideline music and art at our peril. It's time to listen to the  
music. 
_http://www.davidrovics.com_ (http://www.davidrovics.com/) 
_drovics at gmail.com_ (mailto:drovics at gmail.com) 
(503)  863-1177

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