Secret Society

MLK 2007

Last year on MLK day, I posted an excerpt from a speech King gave here in New York at the Riverside Church on 4 April 1967. The speech is called Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence and it contains some of the most powerful rhetoric ever delivered by the 20th century's greatest orator.

If anything, it is even more painfully apparent in 2007 that this administration remains intent on reenacting the Vietnam tragedy in full, including their recent intimation that extending the war to Laos and Cambodia Iran and Syria will somehow help end the war more quickly. ("We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.")

This year, Taylor Ho Bynum has also linked to King's Beyond Vietnam speech. I thought about choosing another passage to excerpt this time, but really, there is no substitute for listening to King's delivery -- reading his words without hearing to his voice is like looking at a Coltrane transcription without hearing the record. So just go listen.

The People United Will Never Be Defeated

The world is finally rid of Augusto Pinochet.

And how does the Washington Post react? By publishing a literally stomach-turning eulogy for a dictator, in which they blame the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende for "creating the conditions for the 1973 coup." I mean, didn't you see how he was dressed? Flaunting that social justice all over the place. He was totally asking for it.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the Post's revolting sophistry. And Hilzoy handles the Pinochet necrophilia that's all the rage in the fever swamps of the right-wing blogosphere. (Did Rob call it or what?)

UPDATE: Oh, boo fucking hoo. As a great man once said:

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the Lord your soul to keep
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap
'Cos when they finally put you in the ground
They'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down

Good morning America how are you?

Bay Bridge Silhouette, originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.

We are not afraid of you and we will beat your ass

VOTE!, originally uploaded by neuroticjose.

I don't care who you are or what's in your dayplanner, you do not have anything more important to do tomorrow than to go vote.

"Oh, but both parties are corrupt... ," "Nobody's speaking out about the issues I care about... ," "Voting implicates me in a corrupt system... ," "What's the point, they're just going to steal it anyway... " Listen, I don't want to hear it, okay? Just shut up and vote. Drag a friend to the polls, too, while you're at it.

As a noncitizen, I can't pull a lever myself, but I'm going up to Westchester to knock on doors for Andrea Stuart-Cousins. Why this race in particular? Lots of reasons, but primarily because I'm furious about this. They are desperate, and are clearly resorting to voter suppression and intimidation and dirty tricks all over the country, in an effort to nationalize the tactics that worked for them in Ohio '04. Don't let them do it. If you see a problem at the polls, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE right away, then report it here. And if they do try to steal it, be ready to get all Orange Revolution on their ass.

But fercrissakes vote.

"I recorded two hours of bombs + trumpet from my balcony yesterday night"

Trumpeter Mazen Kerjab blogs from Beirut. Please go read, especially this post.

[via Mwanji]

Boycott Delta Airlines

ANAblog and Violinist.com have the details.

I, myself, am no longer an angry man

"Shameful" doesn't even begin to cover it...

[via Lawyers, Guns, and Money]

Jean Rohe on Radio Nation

Jean was interviewed by Laura Flanders on Radio Nation last night. As expected, she is thoughtful, passionate, and polished -- click here to listen.

Meanwhile, Senator McCain's hired lackey responds.

UPDATE: Jean won't be bullied.

Sit down, stand up

Jean Rohe: Why I Spoke Up

In my speech yesterday I had hoped to talk about social responsibility in a time of war, but in much more oblique terms. I wanted to speak about communication, and how I have found that one of my strongest and most enjoyable methods of communication is music. I wanted to talk about the New York City public school preschoolers with whom I work each week and how they've been empowered through music, how they've been able to learn linguistic and social skills by singing together. I wanted to talk about my grandfather, who, despite the fact that he has Alzheimer's disease and cannot remember even my name, still knows all the songs he sang in his youth. I wanted to talk about music as a powerful tool for peace. I wanted to encourage everyone to identify his or her talents and to always use them for the greater good.

Unfortunately, a certain not-so-dynamic duo of "centrist" politicians foiled my standard graduation speech and forced me to act. Until just the day before commencement I really hadn't understood the gravity of the situation. I suppose I should tell the story.

Read the rest.

All Things Considered's coverage includes some audio from Rohe's speech.

You say that you're tired of me protesting

Massive, massive props to Jean Rohe for taking John McCain to task for the smug, condescending speech he gave yesterday the New School, the take-home message of which was essentially "y'all are young and foolish and ought to know your place." Rohe ably preempted McCain's sophistry in her own address to the New School Class of '06:

"Senator McCain will also tell us about his strong-headed self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others, and in so doing he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions.

"I am young, and although I don't profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong," she said.

The entire political blogosphere is abuzz with news of Rohe's remarks. But did you know that Jean Rohe is a jazz singer? And a very fine one at that. She has a regular duo with guitarist Jai Villnai, and she also sings with Darren Solomon's electronica project Science for Girls.

And, as Atrios notes, she will be appearing (with Villnai) at Rockwood Music Hall this Friday, May 26, from 7-8 PM.

UPDATE: More info on Rohe from the Daily Record:

Jean Rohe is quite familiar with the Minstrel Coffeehouse. Her parents are long-time members of the Folk Project, and her family was performing on the Minstrel stage as the Rohe Family Band starting when she and her brother Dan were children.

"Back when she was 8 years old she could sing blues effectively," said Mike Agranoff, the coffeehouse chairman.

She also took part in the group's festivals and evenings of music as she was growing up.

"Those are some of my fondest childhood memories," said Rohe, who is 20. "I was just at their most recent festival this past weekend."

At Nutley High School, she sang in a folk duo and in a female a cappella group called Accent that recorded a CD and performed at Lincoln Center.

Now she attends the New School University in New York City, where she studies jazz.

"I've sung in a lot of different settings," she said. "A lot of folk music, a lot of my own music, which runs the gamut from pretty jazz-oriented stuff to more folk to I don't even know what you would call it."

On Monday she took the stage at Sweet Rhythm, a jazz club in New York, as a member of The New School Afro-Cuban Jazz Ensemble.

Her brother Dan is three years younger, "but nowadays people ask us if we're fraternal twins," she said.

"We'll probably do a couple of my original tunes," she said. "We're going to do a couple songs by some bands my brother really likes; he's into indie rock. We might through in a classic sort of folk song like 'Sally Gardens' that we've reworked to suit our fancy."

Roll over, Ted Nugent

... and tell Pat Boone the news: there's a new generation of wignut "rockers" come knocking: The Right Brothers. I keep hoping for a band with the balls to actually call themselves Neocon Death Cult, but no. Instead, we get this:

"But what you gonna do to fight three chords and the truth... "

Because nothing rocks harder than a sniveling plea for greater civility in electronic correspondence.

[via Lawyers, Guns, and Money]

UPDATE: You must see this. "From songs that will make you laugh to songs that will make you cry... "

[via Sadly, No, who got the party started here.]

State of Fear

I just watched Pamela Yates's gripping documentary State of Fear. So should you. (Watch the trailer here).

Apparently, though, American TV networks (including PBS, the Sundance Channel, the National Geographic Channel, etc) feel otherwise, as they have all refused to air this important film. So -- for now -- you will have to see it the old-fashioned way. It's currently at The Quad in NYC and will be coming to additional theatres around the country in the next few weeks. Don't miss it.

MLK

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

— Rev. Martin Luther King, 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, NYC. Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence

Radio City Rally

Today at 5 PM, the New York musician's union (Local 802) is holding a rally against Cablevision, the new owners of Radio City Music Hall. Cablevision are trying to undercut the musicians' contracts for the Radio City Christmas show. One of the lovely strategies they've devised to this end is to try to attract displaced musicians from New Orleans to play the show, offering them steady work for the Christmas season -- albeit at cut-rate wages. You can always count on corporations like Cablevision to prey on the desperate while lining their own pockets, and then dressing it up as "charity."

You may well be thinking, "Who the hell cares about the Radio City Christmas show?", but you have to understand, a lot of creative musicians -- including several Secret Society co-conspirators -- are only able to finance their creative musical endeavors by playing well-paying, union-protected gigs like these. Nobody's paying their rent with gigs at Zebulon or the 55 Bar. So when a big corporation like Cablevision tries to bust the NY musicians union, that means fewer opportunities for you to hear independent music in the city, because the players who used to pay their rent with Radio City gigs now have to spend all their time hustling up paying gigs elsewhere, and have to turn down the more creative work they'd rather be doing, and that you'd rather hear them doing.

The rally is at 5 PM today in front of Radio City Music Hall (6th Avenue btw 50th & 51st Street). Please come out and show your support. The pep band for the rally features some of New York's finest players, including Secret Society co-conspirator Jon Owens.