Some Thoughts on Utah Phillips

I was watching my baby daughter sleep in her carseat outside of the Sacramento airport about ten hours ago when I noticed a missed call from Brendan Phillips. He's in a band called Fast Rattler with several friends of mine, two of whom live in my new hometown of Portland, Oregon, one of whom needed a ride home from the Greyhound station. I called back, and soon thereafter heard the news from Brendan that his father had died the night before in his sleep, when his heart stopped beating.

I wouldn't want to elevate anybody to inappropriately high heights, but for me, Utah Phillips was a legend.

I first became familiar with the Utah Phillips phenomenon in the late 80's, when I was in my early twenties, working part-time as a prep cook at Morningtown in Seattle. I had recently read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and had been particularly enthralled by the early 20th Century section, the stories of the Industrial Workers of the World. So it was with great interest that I first discovered a greasy cassette there in the kitchen by the stereo, Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.

As a young radical, I had heard lots about the 1960's. There were (and are) plenty of veterans of the struggles of the 60's alive and well today. But the wildly tumultuous era of the first two decades of the 20th century is now (and pretty well was then) a thing entirely of history, with no one living anymore to tell the stories. And while long after the 60's there will be millions of hours of audio and video recorded for posterity, of the massive turn-of-the-century movement of the industrial working class there will be virtually none of that.

To hear Utah tell the stories of the strikes and the free speech fights, recounting hilariously the day-to-day tribulations of life in the hobo jungles and logging camps, singing about the humanity of historical figures such as Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was to bring alive an era that at that point only seemed to exist on paper, not in the reality of the senses. But Utah didn't feel like someone who was just telling stories from a bygone era -- it was more like he was a bridge to that era.

Hearing these songs and stories brought to life by him, I became infected by the idea that if people just knew this history in all it's beauty and grandeur, they would find the same hope for humanity and for the possibility for radical social change that I had just found through Utah.

Thus, I became a Wobbly singer, too. I began to stand on a street corner on University Way with a sign beside me that read, "Songs of the Seattle General Strike of 1919." I mostly sang songs I learned from listening to Utah's cassette, plus some other IWW songs I found in various obscure collections of folk music that I came across.

It was a couple years later that I first really discovered Utah Phillips, the songwriter. I had by this time immersed myself with great enthusiasm in the work of many contemporary performers in what gets called the folk music scene, and had developed a keen appreciation for the varied and brilliant songwriting of Jim Page and others. Then, in 1991, I came across Utah's new cassette, I've Got To Know, and soon thereafter heard a copy of a much earlier recording, Good Though.

Whether he's recounting stories from his own experiences or those of others doesn't matter. There is no need to know, for in the many hours Utah spent in his troubled youth talking with old, long-dead veterans of the rails and the IWW campaigns, a bridge from now to then was formed in this person, in his pen and in his deep, resonant voice. In Good Though I heard the distant past breathing and full of life in Utah's own compositions, just as they breathed in his renditions of older songs.

In I've Got To Know I heard an eloquent and current voice of opposition to the American Empire and the bombing of Iraq, rolled together seamlessly with the voices of deserters, draft dodgers and tax resisters of the previous century.

In reference to the power of lying propaganda, a friend of mine used to say it takes ten minutes of truth to counteract 24 hours of lies. But upon first hearing Utah's song, "Yellow Ribbon," it seemed to me that perhaps that ratio didn't give the power of truth enough credit. It seemed to me that if the modern soldiers of the empire would have a chance to hear Utah's monologues there about his anguish after his time in the Army in Korea, or the breathtakingly simple depiction of life under the junta in El Salvador in his song "Rice and Beans," they would just have to quit the military.

Utah made it clear in word and in deed that steeping yourself in the tradition was required of any good practitioner of the craft, and I did my best to follow in his footsteps and do just that. I learned lots of Utah's songs as well as the old songs he was playing. Making a living busking in the Boston subways for years, I ran into other folks who were doing just that, as well as writing great songs, such as Nathan Phillips (no relation). Nathan was from West Virginia, and did haunting versions of "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia," "Larimer Street," "All Used Up," and other songs. In different T stops at the same time, Nathan and I could often be found both singing the songs of Utah Phillips for the passersby.

Traveling around the US in the 1990's and since then, it seemed that Utah's music had, on a musical level, had the same kind of impact that Zinn's People's History or somewhat earlier works such as Jeremy Brecher's book, Strike!, had had in written form -- bringing alive vital history that had been all but forgotten. With Ani DiFranco's collaboration with Utah, this became doubly true, seemingly overnight, and this man who had had a loyal cult following before suddenly had, if not what might be called popularity, at least a loyal cult following that was now twice as big as it had been in the pre-Ani era.

I had had the pleasure of hearing Utah live in concert only once in the early 90's, doing a show with another great songwriter, Charlie King, in the Boston area. I was looking forward to hearing him play again around there in 1995, but what was to be a Utah Phillips concert turned into a benefit for Utah's medical expenses, when he had to suddenly drastically cut down on his touring, due to heart problems. I think there were about twenty different performers doing renditions of Utah Phillips' songs at Club Passim that night. I did "Yellow Ribbon."

Traveling in the same circles and putting out CDs on the same record label, it was fairly inevitable that we'd meet eventually. The first time was several years ago, if memory serves me, behind the stage at the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia. I think I successfully avoided seeming too painfully star-struck. Utah was complaining to me earnestly about how he didn't know what to do at these protests, didn't feel like he had good protest material. I think he did just fine, though I can't recall what he did.

Utah lived in Nevada City, and the last time I was there he came to the community radio station while I was appearing on a show. This was soon after Katrina, and I remember singing my song, "New Orleans," and Utah saying embarrassingly nice things. I was on a little tour with Norman Solomon speaking and me singing, and we had done an event the night before in town, which Utah was too tired to attend, if I recall.

Me, Utah, Norman, and my companion, Reiko, went over to a breakfast place after the radio show, talked and ate breakfast. Utah did most of the talking, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that his use of mysterious hobo colloquialisms and frequent references to obscure historical characters in twentieth-century American anarchist history was something he did off stage as well as on.

I've passed near enough to that part of California many times since then. Called once when I was nearby and he was out of town, doing a show in Boston. Otherwise I just thought about calling and dropping by, but didn't take the time. Life was happening, and taking a day or two off in Nevada City was always something that I never quite seemed to find the time for. Always figured next time I'll have more time, I'll call him then. It had been thirteen years since he found out about his heart problems, and he hadn't kicked the bucket yet... Of course, now I wish I had taken the time when I had the chance, and I'm sure there are many other people who feel the same way.

In any case, for those of us who knew his music, whether from recordings or concerts, for those of us who knew Utah from his stories on or off the stage, whether we knew him as that human bridge to the radical labor movement of yesterday, or as the voice of the modern-day hobos, or as that funky old guy that Ani did a couple of CDs with, Utah Phillips will be remembered and treasured by many.

He was undeniably a sort of musical-political-historical institution in his own day. He said he was a rumor in his own time. No question, one man's rumor is another man's legend, but who cares, it's just words anyway.

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9/11 Truth Movement vs. 9/11 Truth

Or, who are these people and why do they keep yelling at me?

I found myself once again singing at an antiwar rally two weeks ago, and once again being confronted by a red-faced white man with an ominous hand-written sign reading, "9/11 was a lie." Most of the crowd was filing off for the post-rally march, aside from a few of my loyal fans who were sticking around for the rest of my set. Among them was the red-faced man, apparently not a fan, who walked towards the small stage with the wild-eyed certainty of a zealot.

"Wake up, David Rovics! David Rovics, wake up to the truth of 9/11!" He was screaming at the top of his lungs, standing about two feet from me. (I continued with the song.) In case I didn't get the message the first time, the red-faced man repeated his mantra. "Wake up! Wake up to the truth of 9/11!"

People like him, whoever he was, have become a fixture of antiwar and other protests since sometime soon after September 11th, 2001. They regularly call in to radio talk shows, they maintain many websites, produce innumerable documentaries, publish plenty of books, hold regular conferences, and show up with alarming predictability to heckle and denounce prominent progressive authors and activists at their speaking engagements.

Art Bell and company

For over a decade I've made a living as a touring musician. As a hardcore news junkie, when satellite radio came into existence I was one of its very first customers, and since I got one I've been able to saturate myself with BBC World Service and the English-language broadcasts of public radio from around the world to my heart's content. But for the many years before satellite radio, during my many late-night drives across the plains, deserts and corn fields of the US, choices were much slimmer.

In the early morning or late afternoon there was usually an NPR (Nationalist Petroleum Radio) station to be found, or, very occasionally, a Pacifica affiliate where I might listen to my favorite radio news programs, Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News. (At the very beginning, these programs could be heard on satellite radio via the Hispanic Radio Network, but that channel soon vanished from the satellite airwaves -- over one hundred choices offered, but no news channel to the left of Al Franken...)

But late at night, there were four choices. On the FM airwaves, commercial pop anti-music of various prefabricated genres brought to you by ClearChannel. On AM, you could choose from rightwing Christian evangelists, Rush Limbaugh and Art Bell. The evangelists don't really do anything for me, but when I was getting sleepy, I'd listen to Rush, because he's always good for waking me up -- the powerful desire to strangle someone tends to keep you alert. But most of the time, if I wasn't tired, I'd tune in to Art Bell.

For those unfamiliar with Art Bell's show, it was a corporate-sponsored, nightly, several-hour-long show that has since been passed on to other hosts last I heard, and can generally be found on at least two different AM signals anywhere in the country every weeknight, starting sometime after midnight, as I recall. He apparently broadcast from somewhere in Nevada near the infamous Area 51, where he and many of his guests seemed to believe the US military was experimenting with space aliens who had landed there some time ago.

His guests tended to be authors who had written books or made documentaries about aliens from outer space, telepathy, what all the ghosts are up to these days, Hitler being alive and living in the Antarctic, crop circles, and so on. Being a science fiction fan and one who has had personal experiences that have led me to at least consider the possibility that there is validity in some of these claims, about what Art called the paranormal, I listened with interest to Art and his guests, although usually it was fairly evident they were full of shit.

Listening to Art's guests and to the men (and very occasionally women) who called in, I remembered the excitement I felt as a child, before I developed a more three-dimensional understanding of the world around me, before I developed a fairly solid capability for critical thinking, before I began to understand how to read between the lines of the biases of the various authorities, experts and pundits out there in the textbooks, newspapers and airwaves. I remembered the excitement of having secrets with certain friends that only we "knew." My own pet theories as a child included the notion that cows were not as stupid as they looked, standing around chewing cud, that they were actually engaged in astral travel, using their apparent stupidity as a grand cover of some kind. I fairly well convinced myself in the existence of dragons and elves and other mythical creatures, long after I had realized there was no Santa Claus.

But the fantasy life of children can become very odd when practiced by grown men. Many, if not most, of Art's guests and callers seemed to believe that the things they "knew," such as their prevalent idea that the US military was hiding space aliens in Area 51, were phenomenae that only people like them and Art were being honest about. The rest of the media, society, and the powers-that-be were either ignorant about these realities, or, at least as often, were engaging in a huge, X-Files kind of coverup.

Especially in the context of a fundamentally alienated society, especially for a certain class of white men who seem to be somewhat on the margins of the US system of power and privilege, but are white and male enough to believe that they deserve better, the sort of feeling of brotherhood that comes with "knowing" something that the rest of society doesn't know is a powerful one. It's an obvious source of excitement, and gives people a sense of belonging. Without having had access to more rational ways of understanding their place in the world and the complexities of society, current events, history and power structures, they have found some kind of lens through which they can try to understand the world.

It's a faith-based sort of thing. These people are not looking for different points of view, they are looking for further confirmation of what they already believe -- and of course they share this with many, many others who we could call "people of faith," whether they are Christians who believe Jesus was the son of God, Muslims who believe there is one God, Allah is his name and Mohammed was his prophet, neoliberals who believe the unregulated market will make everybody rich, or Maoists who believe the Chinese cultural revolution was the greatest achievement of humankind. No evidence to the contrary will deter these people in their unswerving certainties.

What I always found most interesting as well as most disconcerting about listening to Art Bell, though, was how he would occasionally -- but regularly -- have on guests who were talking about very real and verifiable conspiracies. Things like the CIA's active role in the world drug trade, the State Department's role in overthrowing governments around the world, or the US, Saudi and Pakistani collaboration in creating, arming and funding the Taleban and Al-Qaeda.

Topics which the corporate media would almost never touch could find an occasional voice in Art Bell -- although Art was just as corporate-funded as ABC or CNN. It seemed that if most of the programming was clearly fantasy-based conspiracy theories, the corporate masters felt that it was politically acceptable to allow Art to have the occasional reality check. It would generally go unnoticed by most people, or be discounted as just another wacky conspiracy theory, so it was OK.

Fantasy undermining reality

And if giving a wide audience to the real conspiracies become harmless when they're presented within a sea of fictional conspiracies, the flip side of that is that the very legitimate investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersch and Robert Fisk who are uncovering and reporting on things like the US role in funding groups like Al-Qaeda can more easily get lost among the static, lost among the hundreds of documentaries purporting to prove that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled explosives, that the planes that crashed into them were on autopilot and there really were no terrorists on board, that the cell phone conversations passengers had with their loved ones before they died were faked, that there was no plane that hit the Pentagon, and so on.

If you bother slogging through the volumes of books and stacks of documentaries that "9/11 Truth" people will foist on you if you let them, you will find that most of them are propaganda pieces and most of the "experts" are not experts in relevant fields. When you do look beyond this mass of misinformation for real experts, you will easily find pilots who can discount the claims of the Truthers that maneuvering the planes into the towers was a particularly challenging thing for people with only a little flight training to pull off. You will easily find mechanical engineers familiar with the structural flaws in the design of the WTC that allowed it to collapse in the first place, and physicists who can explain why such large buildings would appear to be imploding as if in a controlled demolition, or why people on the scene would have thought they were hearing explosions, etc. My purpose here is not to disprove all the hypothoses presented by the Truthers and their propaganda pieces -- if you want to look into "debunking the debunkers" yourself, there is plenty of information out there, and Popular Mechanics' issue on the subject is a good place to start.

The fact is, the scientific community, while certainly not immune to political pressure, is generally able to function with a grounding in actual science, and is not capable of participating, as a community, in some kind of mass conspiracy of silence or coverup. There is no way to bribe that many scientists. Too many of them believe in the importance of science for science's sake, in honesty. This can be amply demonstrated by the fact that with all the political pressure and money of the US government and ExxonMobil combined, there is still essentially unanimity among climate scientists worldwide that climate change is real, is caused by humans, and is dangerous for our species and others. Even after all the billions upon billions of dollars spent by the tobacco industry to obfuscate reality and bribe policymakers and the scientific community, the scientific community was able to study the issue and determine incontrovertibly the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.

Sowing seeds of doubt

The "9/11 Truth Movement" undoubtedly is made up largely of earnest, decent people, the sorts of decent folks who make up most of Art Bell's guests and listeners. Since thousands of their fellow countrymen and women died on 9/11 and since this event -- whether it was a terrorist attack carried out by US-trained Mujahideen that could have been prevented, or an entirely "inside job" carried out by Dick Cheney with the aide of computers and plastic explosives, as many Truthers claim -- many people in many communities have become justifiably agitated and outraged by world-scale injustices, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.

The old Art Bell listeners who used to be entertained by the fact that most people don't believe there are space aliens in Area 51 are now really extra worked up because the vast conspiracy they have come to believe in are resulting in the deaths of huge numbers of people around the world. And if the rest of us would just understand what they understand, everything would be different. If the media would report on reality as they see it, people would wake up and do something about this situation.

The particularly warped thing about this, though, is that the very media outlets, authors and activists who are doing their best to expose the very real conspiracies that are going on -- people like Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!, David Barsamian's Alternative Radio, Z Magazine, the Progressive Magazine, Norman Solomon and the Institute for Public Accuracy, Noam Chomsky, etc., seem to have become the primary targets of harassment by the Truthers.

Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon and others are now regularly heckled at speaking events, and denounced on websites as "gatekeepers." They are seen, it seems, as being even worse than the corporate media, because while reasonable people know not to trust Fox or CNN, they have faith in the integrity of people like Amy Goodman.

You don't have to know Norman Solomon, Amy Goodman or her producers personally to see what nonsense this "gatekeeper" stuff is. You needn't ever have met Amy to know that she has risked her life, and very nearly lost her life, in her decades-long efforts to report the truth. You needn't know her producers personally to recognize that these are all earnest young progressives working long hours to create a daily news program they deeply believe in. The notion that all of her producers are somehow maintaining a code of silence in exchange for the privilege of having their names mentioned at the end of the broadcast, or in exchange for their nominally middle-class salaries, is preposterous.

However, judging from numerous emails I get and conversations I have with fans and acquaintances from around the US and elsewhere, the efforts of the Truthers to sow seeds of doubt among readers and listeners of progressive media is having some palpable impact. Increasingly, I hear from people who have vaguely heard something about this "gatekeeper" phenomenon, something about Ford Foundation money undermining the entire progressive media.

As is so often the case, there are little grains of truth in here that can fester in the minds of people who are not looking at the information critically. For the cops among the Truthers (of course it's a matter of the public record that the FBI and other such agencies regularly write "newspaper articles" -- propaganda or disinformation of whatever sort they deem useful which they disseminate through newspapers, websites, etc.), undermining the legitimacy of the progressive media is exactly their goal, because they don't want the population to know the truth or to trust those who are reporting it. For the more earnest elements among the Truthers, undermining the progressive media is also their goal, because they don't see it as being distinct from the corporate media anyway -- so whether earnest or insidious, the effect is the same.

The grain of truth, of course, is that government, corporate and foundation money have undoubtedly succeeded in making PBS and NPR a shell of it's former self. Foundation money has also had a debilitating impact on the nonprofit world, since support for essential but illegal activities such as civil disobedience on the part of nonprofits will tend to cause them to lose foundation support. Also, nonprofits are prevented by law from participating openly in the electoral process, or they lose their nonprofit status. If progressive media is being influenced by the relatively small amount of foundation money it receives, I don't see it.

It seems evident to me that shows like Democracy Now! are quite willing -- and indeed, are doing their best -- to make waves as much as possible. If they don't report a story it's because they don't think it's a story, or it's not an important enough one to bother with. In the case of "theories" like the notion that controlled demolition brought down the World Trade Center or there were no members of Al-Qaeda on board the airplanes, this narrative has received little coverage in the progressive media because, upon investigation, most decide it's patently ridiculous.

The real gatekeepers

Sometime in 2002 I wrote a song called "Reichstag Fire," in which I asked many of the questions the Truthers were asking. The point of the song was primarily to say that 9/11 has been used as an excuse for the US to carry out a genocidal crusade on much of the Muslim world, and to further the US government's bipartisan agenda of world domination and control of valuable resources in other countries, such as oil. (This is something Truthers and most other people in the world can generally agree on.) In the song I also posed questions which I now feel have been adequately explained.

Were there really Arab terrorists on board the planes? Yes. Did the CIA know an attack was imminent? Yes. I don't regret writing the song, or becoming a very minor celebrity within the 9/11 Truth Movement, because I think these questions needed to be asked, and answered. But while some questions can only remain unanswered until certain people within the US government become whistleblowers, other questions have been answered, and my answers (and those of most people who have looked into these things) and those of what now constitutes the Truth Movement differ wildly. Particularly because I have been seen by some as part of this movement (although I seem to be increasingly getting lumped into the "gatekeeper" camp), I felt compelled to write this essay.

The truth is, in fact, out there. Much of it is certainly still there to be discovered, but many fundamental, essential truths are already known. The truth -- that, for example, the CIA funded and armed Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, that a tiny minority of very wealthy people control much of the US government and the "mainstream" (corporate/"public") media, that the US military systematically goes around the world overthrowing democracies, propping up dictatorships, and killing millions of people with bombs -- is what the progressive media is reporting on hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. These are the truths that people in the US most need to "wake up" to. These are the truths that are systematically unreported or severely under-reported by the corporate press, which, even in the age of the internet, is still where the vast majority of people in the US get their news, and thus, their understanding of the world.

These corporate media entities and the genocidal, ecocidal plutocracy they serve are the "gatekeepers" that need to be exposed. The truths they are trying to hide from us are the truths that need to be understood, and acted upon. The progressive media that is trying to do just that needs to be supported, not undermined with essentially baseless accusations (legitimate criticisms and suggestions notwithstanding).

The people who are trying, with some degree of success, to undermine these basic endeavors of the progressive movement and the progressive media need to be exposed for what they are -- whether they fall into the category of well-meaning but misguided fanatics or undercover government agents quite purposefully and systematically working to spread disinformation and sow confusion and distrust. And, beyond any reasonable doubt, the "Truth Movement" contains both of these elements. To both of these groups I beseech you -- wake up! Wake up to the real, easily-verifiable conspiracies -- which are extremely big ones! -- and quit trying to distract us with all the nonsense about gatekeepers and controlled demolitions!

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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.

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Raising Leila

Idle ramblings on raising babies and children (and burning down the schools).

I’ve been spending most of my time lately hanging out with a baby – my daughter, Leila. She’ll be two at the end of next month. I’m often with her from dawn to dusk, five or six days a week, while her mother attends medical school. Spending all this time with her, naturally she starts to rub off on me in a big way, like a contact high. In her presence I’m generally in a state of mild euphoria, accompanied by emotional fragility. Like I know I’m very small and new here, but as long as nothing bad happens too often, the world is basically a fascinating and exciting place, there to be constantly rediscovered.

She went through a brief phase of gasping in wonderment at occasions that impressed her. These days she’s more into clapping vigorously and yelling, “yay!” repeatedly, or yelling the word relevant to the impressive event, such as “smoothie!”, “food!”, “doggie!”, etc. When something impresses her quite a bit but maybe not quite enough to make her start clapping and yelling, such as last week when she witnessed a dog run a hundred feet and then jump in the air to catch a ball in mid-flight, she’ll often say, “that’s crazy!” She got that from her wonderful punk rock babysitter, Hannae. She learned other phrases from Hannae, and she uses them all in context. When a friend and I were each holding one of Leila’s hands and “flying” her through the air, she said recently, “I’m so happy!”

With many other phrases, she knows what she’s talking about, but she poses them as questions rather than statements, because these are phrases she’s often heard that seem to be associated with certain activities. For example, if I walk out the back door of my apartment she’ll climb out to join me, saying, “are you coming?” This means, “I’m coming.” One by one, these “questions” start turning into statements, as she starts figuring out which is which. Just as “shoomie” became “smoothie,” and “Eya” became “Leila.”

At no point did anyone try to “teach” her how to properly pronounce her name. No one ever tried to explain to her the difference between a statement and a question. She figures these things out “on her own,” by living, by interacting with people, by watching, listening, trying things out and seeing what happens. She rarely becomes frustrated by her mistakes.

Lately I’ve noticed sometimes when she’s developed expectations about the way something works, and then when it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, this can be a source of frustration. For example, she’s come to believe that when her pants are on, they’ll stay on unless she takes them off. Recently I had a pair of pants on her that were too big, and they kept inching their way down around her legs and she had to keep pulling them up, and after a while growled with frustration at this situation. (And I vowed to try harder to consistently dress her with clothes that fit properly.)

But generally, the world is new and undiscovered, and with an unfettered, creative approach to everything, fascinated by much of what she encounters in the world, applying the scientific method to every new situation, Leila goes forth. The more time I spend with little kids, the more I become convinced that they all start out like Leila – brilliant, graceful, full of enthusiasm for life, full of a desire to discover and enjoy the world, to understand everything there is to understand, to learn every new language they encounter.

Leila speaks two languages, mostly – her mother’s native French and my English. She mixes French and English with whoever she’s talking to, but mostly she tunes in to the language that people speak and uses that one. After a while she learns all the same words and phrases in both languages, but for the first while a new word or phrase will only be in one of the languages. “Cheese” is usually still “mage” (short for “fromage”), “pants” are usually “pantalon.” For some things that especially excite her, though, she learns to say it in both languages, and more immediately, in the hope that one of these words will work and someone will give her some – such as “ice cream” (“glas,” “helado”).

Recently my friend Reiko visited from Japan. I was encouraging her to speak Japanese with Leila. With Reiko’s enthusiastic warmth, I was sure it wouldn’t matter to Leila what language she was speaking anyway. Leila seemed to light up even brighter when she heard Reiko speaking Japanese. It was as if she was thinking, I’ve never heard people talk like this before! This is new and exciting! Let’s see, I’ll repeat what she just said and see what happens, see how people react, see what this means, cool... Within hours she had learned “oishi” (“yummy”), and “moshi-moshi” (“hello” when answering a telephone).

The thing is, nice new people, good food, and telephones are all very interesting, so naturally those are some good first words to learn in any new language. What grownups do – and even more, what older kids do – is automatically interesting. Walking up and down stairs, putting on and taking off clothes, talking (and especially talking on the phone), reading, writing. Other things are just innately fun, like swimming or taking a bath, playing in the park, or drinking smoothies. From Leila’s perspective, it seems, all of these sorts of things should be done often and well, if they are things that require mastery, and to one degree or another everything does.

When Leila encounters something she wants to master, such as, for example, climbing and descending staircases, she sets about the activity like a scientist playing a game. She enjoys the effort, the successes, and never seems to mind the “failures,” which she clearly views as learning experiences. Unless they cause physical pain or the fear of it, like if she falls down a stair or almost falls and needs to be rescued (on the very rare occasions she really loses it, I’ve generally been nearby enough to catch her before she falls down more than one stair). But in the case of physical pain from falling or crashing into something, she usually cries for a second or two, wants a brief hug, and then wants to get down and get right back into whatever she was doing that caused the damage, to figure out what went wrong and do it better.

Emotional pain is far worse than getting the wind knocked out of you for Leila. When she understood recently that I was getting on an airplane to go away for several weeks (for a tour), she was very upset and cried hard and heartbreakingly for quite a while. On a couple of occasions her mom’s housemate’s cat, Oliver, swatted at her when he was tired of being bothered. He’s a bit moody as cats often are, and not the most baby-friendly of them. Usually he’ll walk off in a huff after she tries to pat him for a few seconds, but sometimes he’ll tolerate a bit more of it, while other times he’ll swat at her instead of walking away. Leila doesn’t like it when he walks away, but when he swats at her she feels devastated and betrayed, it seems. When she’s crying about something like that, she seems to want to let me know what it is that’s upsetting her, so the last time this happened, in the midst of her sobs, she was saying “Meow! Meow!”

I felt like crying with her and laughing at her at the same time, but I did neither. What I feel compelled to do when she’s crying is hold her, which she generally likes. But the last time the cat swatted at her it wasn’t what she wanted. While still crying and obviously feeling hurt by Oliver, she wanted to work it out with him. He hadn’t walked away yet, and she wanted to try to work things out with him somehow, figure out what was going on. The truth is, if she figures it out, she’ll be the first, ‘cause he swats at everybody now and then. The rest of us just aren’t particularly bothered by it, because we know he’s a cat and cats can be like that (and anyway, he never draws blood from humans, unlike some other cats I’ve known).

Whether things are hard or easy, potentially painful or not, Leila dives into it. Nobody has ever needed to “teach” her how to do these things. Nor has anyone ever had to encourage her to learn new things, she just does new things all the time out of a love of life and an obvious, unhidden fascination with the world. No one has told her about the scientific method of figuring things out – her little brain did that all by itself, from the very beginning.

During her first year or so she lived in a house with no stairs. Around the time she was figuring out how to walk, we were staying at a place with a staircase for a few months. The stairs became a central fascination. At first, someone would always watch her like a hawk, but that rarely proved necessary, and after a short while it was clear that Leila just wouldn’t do things that she felt might result in falling down the stairs. She desperately wanted to be able to walk up and down the stairs with no hands like big people do, but she knew she couldn’t do this on her own, so she’d want to hold someone’s hand and go up and down the stairs that way. At least her hands weren’t touching the stairs, she seemed to be thinking. But she wanted to be able to do the stairs without help, so she improvised and taught herself how to crawl up them and crawl down them going backwards. She tried going down forwards on her butt, too, but that didn’t work as well so she ultimately settled on going backwards. When she was ready to start doing stairs by holding onto the railing, she did, and did so successfully. After a while she started doing stairs without holding onto anything. Each step of the way she’d challenge herself as much as seemed safe, never more, without ever needing anyone to say “don’t do this” or “don’t do that” or “that’s dangerous,” “be careful,” etc.

Leila is also learning to play the ukelele in the same manner. I have never “taught” her how to hold it, how to pick or strum the strings, etc. I just play it regularly for our enjoyment in my (our) apartment. I have several of them around, and of course they’re small enough for any baby to play. Sometimes she’ll pick one up while I’m playing another, but most often she’ll pick up the one I had been playing after I put it down. She hasn’t started fingering chords yet, but she holds it in the usual position (like I do), one hand holding the neck and the other hand playing the strings. She picks individual strings and strums as well, and sometimes sings while she’s doing these things. She sings beautifully, matches pitches, and may have perfect pitch (I haven’t tried to figure that out for sure and I don’t think it matters either way whether she has it or not). She likes music, and frequently requests this as an activity. I always have a guitar sitting on a guitar stand in the living room. She’ll walk up to it and gently strum the strings (only once accidentally knocking it over, which is easy to do with those little three-legged guitar stands), and she’ll say, “play music?”

Ours is a symbiotic relationship. We’re always doing something that we both enjoy doing, pretty much. If she’s doing something obsessively for a half hour, like climbing up and down a new staircase a hundred times or so (demonstrating brilliantly that babies do not have short attention spans if they’re into what they’re doing), I’ll tend to read the AP wire on my fancy new cell phone. When she’s done and wants to do something more interactive, I just put the phone back in my pocket and we go do something else. It seems to me there’s no particular reason for us to do stuff that one of us doesn’t enjoy, since there are so many things we both enjoy. Often, finding activities of mutual interest leads to me learning new things.

For example, I play music for a living, and it’s good to practice playing, writing songs, etc. (It’s also good for me to get to answer my email on a regular basis so I can book gigs and such, but that’s boring for Leila so I only do it when she’s napping.) I usually play guitar with a pick. But anytime I pick up the guitar and start picking, Leila hones in on the pick, which fascinates her for some reason. (The innate fascination of humans with tools of all kinds, perhaps?) Once she has the pick, she may strum the strings with it a bit, but usually she’s more interested in dropping it in the soundhole and then saying something like, “Oh no! I don’t know where the pick go! Where did the pick go?” (She hasn’t figured out that “went” is the past tense of “go.” I imagine by next week or so she’ll have that one down.) Then I shake the guitar upside-down until the pick falls out, and Leila shouts, “there it is!” Then she immediately drops it back in the soundhole.

I get bored with this game. Her mother is concerned she might eat the pick and choke on it (seems very unlikely, but who knows, babies are reputed to do that sort of thing on occasion), so I don’t want to give her her own pick to play with. When I do, however (watching carefully to make sure she doesn’t actually decide to eat it), she just drops it in the soundhole and demands that I get it out so she can drop it in again. I could stand up so my hands and pick are out of her reach, but that seems like a mean thing for me to do, and when I try that she sometimes just reaches up towards my right hand, saying “Pick? Pick? Pick?” So I stopped using the pick at home, and have been getting much better at finger-picking, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for many years, but somehow never get around to (along with learning Spanish, and many other things).

In our meanderings around town, friends and acquaintances often comment that Leila seems to be exceptionally intelligent, dextrous, engaged with life, and good-natured. I think they’re mostly being authentic when they say these things, not just trying to impress the proud daddy. Perhaps there’s a genetic factor, and certainly there are physical factors – the finest organic breast milk is freely on tap every night (“boobie!” – which of course is just as nurturing emotionally as it is physically), most everything she eats is organic, etc. But more than anything, I’d say her being “exceptional” is more about many other children being “unexceptional.” That is, they are held back by their parents and other grownups in their lives, and especially by the schools. I’d suggest that most parents and the vast majority of schools – public, private, or “alternative” – are failing, often miserably, to allow children to be brilliant. I’m sure that many parents, teachers and school administrators care deeply about their children, but they’re just going about most everything all wrong and they have no idea, to be perfectly blunt.

They’re like mad biologists trying to raise parrots in the Arctic. The parrots are consistently freezing to death, but the biologists keep trying to teach them how to fly faster, do tricks, learn to say new phrases, etc., always hoping something they do is going to help the birds to flourish, but they just keep freezing to death no matter what they do. They start giving the birds drugs to increase their heart rate and keep them warmer, but that doesn’t work either. It never occurs to them that there are fundamental aspects of the environment they’ve brought the birds into which is consistently killing them.

I always knew our society (by which I mean the US, and to a large degree the “civilized” world in general) was messed up, but this awareness has never been greater for me than it’s been since I had a child. There has been plenty of good, widely-ignored and misunderstood research about how children and adults learn, how we maintain, improve or lose our physical, mental and emotional well-being. I’ve been reading about a lot of them lately, but I’m not going to get all academic here, I’ll just use my life in this world as a guide, I think that’s an easier way of describing things anyway. I’ve personally had extensive experience with self-directed learning, as well as many years in a reputedly excellent public school, and many years in a wonderful alternative school. I’ve also known (and know) many children and adults of all ages who have been raised in a wide variety of environments.

It starts at birth. From right at the beginning, although the practice has been widely discredited, including by the doctors who originally recommended it half a century ago, parents are confining their babies in a crib and letting them cry themselves to sleep. Whether consciously or not, this is the beginning of the process of teaching children that they don’t control their lives. The basic, primal notion for a baby, that their calls of distress should be answered by a nurturing older person of some kind, throws things out of whack and sets the stage for everything else. I used to think I was in a bit of a weird leftwing bubble, living on the fringes of society somehow, but I have been surprised to find, now that I have a kid and I’m around other kids a bit more often, that the practice of letting babies cry themselves to sleep is not uncommon within my own circle.

After “learning this lesson” that they don’t control their environment and their distress is not particularly important, within a few months they’re in the playground, where I often find myself with my daughter. Many of the kids are like Leila; self-confident, challenging themselves on the climbing thing but not doing anything that they can’t pull off. Occasionally Leila will fall a couple feet. In all the parks in Portland that I’ve been to, though, the ground is covered with soft wood chips, so it’s all good. But there are always parents who are trying to dictate their child’s every move in the playground. The playground – a place designed for kids have fun in -- somehow is turned into a source of exasperation for both parent and child. The parents create unnecessary boundaries, the children, of course, feel constricted by them, feel like they’re being prevented from growing and learning new things (and they’re right), and they push against them.

If Leila is doing something that a child a year older than her is not allowed to do, and then the other child’s parent decides to let their kid do whatever it is, say, climb a tall staircase (with a railing!), often the child, upon reaching the top, will say, “I’m scared.” Why are they scared? Because their parents have taught them at this early age that they cannot trust themselves. They have effectively stunted their physical and emotional development, already.

And then of course the next step in the process for the overwhelming majority of children: school. Now that many of them have already learned not to trust themselves, they are generally thrown into an environment where everybody else is within a year or so of their age except for the teacher. Regardless of the type of school, the implicit message here is these kids are in this box for a reason – they’re there to “learn,” and the teacher is there to “teach.”

Alternative schools can successfully alter this equation to the point where the overall experience is positive for the children, I’m sure. But the best of the alternative schools are trying (successfully or not) to create a “child-driven, experiential” environment. That’s good, because what that means is they’re trying to recreate the “real world” in a school setting. Because of our widespread societal preconceptions of what school traditionally is – a sort of rigid, “us” (students) and “them” (teachers and administrators) environment – it’s an inherent challenge to try to change the model and create an authentically alternative school. But even if an alternative school can create a situation where learning is actually experiential rather than all “taught” from on high, it’s still no replacement for the rich, infinitely more diverse environment that exists outside of the school building.

Of course, for most parents and others who care about children, keeping the kids out of school may not be a realistic option. Perhaps sending them to an alternative school isn’t realistic either, because of the expense usually involved. I’m not going to suggest that keeping your kids out of school is necessarily possible or even right for everybody. But for those people out there who think school is necessary or important for children, I would like to be one more voice in the chorus that vehemently rejects this notion. No, school is neither necessary nor important. In fact, the vast majority of time it will do far more harm than good. I’m talking about the schools that they usually call “good” schools (with the exception, perhaps, of some of the best of the alternative schools), not just the “bad” schools.

I know something about this subject. I have no degree, and I’m sure I don’t need one. I’ve known many parents and children, adults and young people, all over this world. I’m intimately familiar with the products of a wide range of private, public and alternative educational institutions, and I myself have spent many years as a student in a “good” public school system, an excellent alternative elementary school, as well as a more conventional private college.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve known (and read books about) many young people who have been kept out schools for much or all of their lives. They are consistently brilliant. Not just in terms of their capability for critical thought, but also for creative thought, and in terms of emotional intelligence. They’re fully alive. Oftentimes their parents don’t necessarily impress me as exceptional people, in terms of their academic or life achievements. You wouldn’t be able to pick them out if you were waiting in line at the post office in the Boston exurbs. But to spend time with young people who have not been to school is a profoundly convincing experience in itself. The ease with which they tend to interact with other kids their age, or younger, or older, or adults. The self-confidence, self-assuredness, the bright intellectual spark that shines in their faces, their ease with “adult conversation.”

Many of them are taking courses at a local community college by the time their in their early teens, so they often end up having experiences with conventional educational institutions, but it’s a self-directed contact – usually they’re just taking courses in things that interest them, usually things that are either not taught in most secondary schools, or not taught at a sufficiently advanced level.

Since I had a kid and took a stronger interest in the subject, I’ve been asking the many university professors I know to tell me about their contact with students who have been kept out of the school system up to that point. Consistently, they tell me how impressive these kids are, how far above their peers they are socially, intellectually, emotionally.

From my own experience with school, and with seeing the effects of school on others, this makes perfect sense. What I remember about first grade was that I learned that my needs, feelings and desires didn’t matter. I learned that doing what the teacher wanted was all that mattered, and I learned that this was impossible to do. I felt helpless, confused, and afraid most of the time. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the class feeling that way. It was my first experience with a classroom setting with desks and all that, and it was a potentially spirit-killing experience.

Luckily for me, my parents recognized that school wasn’t working out for me, and they looked for and found a wonderful alternative school that happened to be right in our little suburb in Connecticut, called the Learning Community. After spending quite some time being reclusive and essentially recovering from public school-induced PTSD, I did well in that environment, and was basically allowed to remain more or less emotionally intact. I can only try to imagine how things might have gone if I had had to attend the public schools or some other conventional school during that fragile period of young childhood. What I know for sure is I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

By the time I went to public school again, from grades 7-12, I was feeling enthusiastic about the experience. I wanted to see what it would be like. I was interested in science and math, and I was under the impression I’d get to learn about these things. To this day, I like to hear a good story, or a good lecture. But being talked at all day long by people who were clearly disinterested in what they were talking about, while sitting in a class with people who were equally disinterested in the subject material, was overwhelming. Day after day, week after week, year after year, I was going out of my mind with boredom. It was like being in purgatory. I never dropped out, but I never accepted this reality either, and I somehow survived the experience more or less intact, though in large part missing six potentially very formative years of my life. For my sister and many of my friends, the public school experience was far worse.

I remember how at the beginning of each school year the students were given the opportunity to choose their class schedule. Each year, many or most of the courses were required, but at least you could choose between “Intro to Physics” or “Intro to Chemistry” (forget about astronomy, anthropology, or other subjects of potential interest to kids). You could choose between western European history or US history (all of course taught from the perspective of the rich white slave-owning Indian-killers, and you can forget about studying history of eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa or Asia). You could choose between French and Spanish, taught by non-native speakers. I’m sure there were not more than a tiny handful of students who were anywhere close to conversational at either language by the time they graduated, and I’m sure most of them were exchange students. But still, we were being offered a choice, and this was exciting. As I realized later, this was the only time during the year that we were effectively being offered a choice, and the choice we were being given was essentially between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.

This was in the early 1980’s, in one of the most well-funded school systems in one of the wealthiest towns in one of the wealthiest counties in the US, a “good” school by most accounts. In fact, my parents moved to Wilton from New York City largely because of the school system there.

But even if the teachers had (at least at some point in their careers) been interested in what they were doing and talking about, I’m still convinced that it’s the basic, hierarchical, teacher-oriented structure of school that is the essential problem. School teaches you that you need teachers in order to learn. It is fundamentally disempowering and dispiriting. The false idea is rife that you need to study “Algebra I” before you can study “Algebra II” before you can study computer programming or astronomy – rather than learning algebra through the study of something potentially interesting and practical, such as computer programming or astronomy. We learn that in order to learn anything really interesting, you first have to bore yourself to death for years by studying other stuff. Gratification is always delayed.

In language classes, for example, the teachers don’t even start trying to get the kids to speak until they’ve given them a year’s worth of grammar and vocabulary tests. With this kind of regimentation it’s a wonder anybody learns anything at all.

People often hold up European public school systems as being far superior to US public schools. I’ve spent a lot of time all over Europe, known many young and old Europeans, and for various reasons, I agree that, for example, the German public school system is much better than ours. But having spent a lot of time in Germany’s second city, the great cosmopolitan city of Hamburg, I couldn’t help but notice that most Germans do not speak fluent English. Many do, usually because they’ve traveled a lot, lived in England, Ireland, the US, or had an Irish boyfriend or whatever. But for those who haven’t had those kinds of experiences, although the vast majority of them graduated from the German public schools and studied English for ten years, they still never became fluent.

In Japan it’s incomparably worse. Japan is widely acknowledged to have an extremely hard public school system, and many students are studying various subjects with tutors on a daily basis, even after their long hours in the schools themselves. As in Germany, Japanese students have all studied English for ten years or more. Yet, from my experience traveling in Japan last summer, it would be very generous to say that 10% of Japanese people can speak English with any degree of fluency.

What explains this failure of the school systems in two of the world’s richest countries? And why the huge difference between English fluency in Germany compared to, say, the Netherlands or Scandinavia, where (by my estimation) about 90% of the under-60 population are highly fluent in English? One difference is in Scandinavia and Holland, many of the movies and sitcoms on TV are from the US. Many of the documentaries are from the BBC. And the most common language spoken by international visitors is English. English is all around them on a daily basis. Experiential learning. In Germany, a much bigger TV and film market than Scandinavia, most foreign programming is overdubbed rather than subtitled, and because it’s a bigger market, much more of the programming is produced in German by Germans. (Same goes in Japan, France, Italy, etc.)

But then, perhaps the Germans and the Japanese just don’t want to learn English, so they don’t learn it, despite the fact that it’s being taught in the schools daily for most of their formative years. Or is it because of that fact? Which is the point. Scandinavians want to learn English because it’s around them in their nonschool environment, in the real world. In Germany, English is largely something forced down your throat in school, so naturally, many people basically reject it, do what they need to do to pass, and little more. They are offered no choice, subjected to a fundamentally disempowering situation, and they reject it because they are human. (Perhaps they also reject it to some degree because it is the language of the countries that carpet-bombed their cities and killed millions of their fellow citizens.)

By contrast, I spent a summer eight years ago traveling around the US with a German woman and her eight-year-old daughter. Her daughter spoke not much more than a few words of English at the beginning of the summer. By the end of the summer she spoke English better than her mother. Her mother may have known some big vocabulary words that she didn’t know, but her mastery of pronunciation and grammar far surpassed her mother’s. For example, by the end of the summer, upon meeting my father, this girl recognized the fact that my dad has a very mild Brooklyn accent, something which many native English speakers wouldn’t even pick up on.

So, you can spend one summer traveling around the Rockies and hanging out in the Navajo Reservation with your mom and become fluent in English, or you can go to school for your whole childhood and probably learn English less well by the end of it.

And this is not just about the much-vaunted (but still widely ignored by most schools) child’s receptivity for learning languages. I’m convinced that to a large extent, we don’t ever need to lose that penchant for learning that children have. In fact, we lose that penchant for learning because of school. Those who stay out of school, from my observations, tend to hold on to that magic spark that all children start out with. (And they probably hold onto it much longer if they can avoid having to get some mind-numbingly boring office job as adults.)

In the Learning Community as well as in the Wilton public school system, music education was negligible. There was no opportunity within the schools to play music, unless it was to learn how to play a brass instrument for the marching band (so you could perform during football games) or the “jazz” band in high school. The overwhelming diversity of music in this world was completely absent from school, aside from castrated versions of jazz standards. (In fairness, I believe both of the music teachers in the public schools I went to were good players who genuinely liked jazz music, but they were no match for the lifeless institutions in which they were trying to work.)

My parents, being both very accomplished, professional classical musicians, expected me and my sister to get a classical musical education, too. When each of us were around nine, I remember having conversations with my parents about whether I’d like to take music lessons, and if so, what instrument I’d like to play. I was being given a choice of instrument, but not a choice of musical style. As with the school system that says you have to study algebra before you can study astronomy, my parents felt that you had to have a classical musical education if you wanted to go anywhere good with music. My dear mother also used to say (though it’s been a long time) that if I wanted to really disappoint her when I grew up, I could either join the military or become a rock musician. (She doesn’t recall ever saying this, and in fairness, I may be making it up.) My folks always said that I wasn’t named after anybody in particular, but I always had the impression that I was named after a virtuoso cellist and friend of the family named David Wells. I also loved his playing, he was so passionate and so damn good. I don’t remember my exact thought processes at the time, but the cello was the instrument I chose. (My sister, who was named after a great flutist, chose to play the flute when it was her turn to choose an instrument.)

Although two out of three of my cello teachers were outrageously good players, really nice people, and very sympathetic teachers, I never really took to it, and I basically withered under the pressure. I don’t remember how fully I understood this at the time, but it was the basic lack of choice in the whole situation that I found oppressive. Practicing the cello became a source of conflict at home.

After five years of this I quit. I needed several years of playing no music before I felt moved to explore music on my own. I’m sure that growing up around music and musicians was a positive thing, in terms of having great live music around me all the time, and in terms of the example my parents and their friends set as accomplished players. In fact, one of my most postive musical recollections as a kid was when my dad and I would play the piano together, and he’d make up stories about dinosaurs, using the piano for background music and sound effects. And there were many, many other very positive aspects to my environment at home as a child in terms of providing a rich cultural experience, among other things, but having formal music lessons was not one of them.

I took a couple dozen formal lessons on bass guitar and guitar, but mostly I “taught myself.” By this time I was beginning to more clearly understand that “formal education” was not all it was cracked up to be. From master songwriters and musicians that I met personally, like Jim Page, and from listening to the words of other masters like Utah Phillips, I learned that the way so many of the songwriters and musicians that I had come to revere had learned their craft was by steeping themselves in the musical traditions they were interested in, and then by writing songs, while continuing to listen to other music and be part of the (evolving) tradition that they were in. My “music teacher,” essentially, was the music itself, which, I’d venture, is the best teacher of all, along with your own ears, mind, and hands.

“Teaching myself” in this way, I’ve become a fairly accomplished professional. If this were unusual, it wouldn’t be worth noting. But actually I’m pretty sure it’s the norm. I haven’t taken a poll, but I’d be surprised if more than a small percentage of people making a living in the music world are graduates of Berklee College of Music, Julliard, etc.

I learned to read and write by doing it with my parents, like most people. (As has been well-documented by authors like Jonathan Kozol, very few children of illiterate parents actually learn to read in school, demonstrating once again the failure of many schools to do anything that could be defined as “teaching” – because if no one’s learning, no one’s teaching!) Other skills I learned as a child that I use regularly today, such as typing, organizing mailing lists, and using computers, I learned at home from helping my dad with the workshops he and my mom were running. The rest of what I needed to know about how to do things like book gigs, I learned from watching other people do it. Just about everything I know about current events, history, and pretty much every other subject, I learned outside of school, by reading books of my own choosing, or books recommended by people who knew about stuff I wanted to know about. In all my years in school I barely learned anything of value, at least up until college, where I had a couple of good Marxist professors.

I’m currently in the process of writing a DIY Guide to Writing Songs, Playing Music and Booking Your Own Gigs, for PM Press. I could make it much longer by including lots of autobiographical tales of how a certain song was written or how I got a certain gig or first toured in a certain country, etc., but as it is, as a guide, with tricks of the trade and such, it’s not very long. I hope it will prove useful to people, but the basic message in the book for doing any of these things is to work with and follow the examples of other people who do it well, and then try it yourself, and keep learning from other people and learning from your own experiences.

My childhood memories can be somewhat vague, and I certainly had a generally positive experience with the Learning Community as a kid, but I find it interesting that one of the most vivid memories of my time at that school was when one of the parents got a flat tire. With the teacher’s encouragement, my whole class emptied out into the parking lot, where the car was with the flat tire. One of the older kids in my class had mechanical skills, and many other skills, which he had learned at home. He changed the tire while the rest of us helped out a little or watched. Even though I was only one of the ones watching, it was still a memorable event, I think because it was something that happened in the real world, outside school (even if it was only just outside school).

I’m quite certain that I’m one of many, many people who don’t learn well in forced, artificial environments, but flourish in real-world learning environments. One reason why this makes sense is that humans have been doing experiential learning very successfully for far longer than we’ve had schools. And still today, in the Kalahari Desert or the Amazon jungle you will find teenagers with enough botanical knowledge to fill several encyclopedias. In small towns in the Scottish highlands you will find teenagers who have a thousand tunes memorized which they can play beautifully on five different musical instruments, none of them learned in school.

I think about these things, think about the soul-crushing things most schools do to most students, see how brilliantly Leila has learned so many things and isn’t even yet two years old, and I don’t know what to say to the many people I’ve met who are aghast at the idea of raising a child with no “formal education.” If my kid really wanted to go to a school of some kind, I’d look around for a good one and let her try it. And if she didn’t? I’d no sooner send her to school than send her to prison.

As a professional musician who is happy enough living below the poverty line, I’m very privileged, and I know it’s not an easy thing to figure out for anyone, how to not do school. Schools work well in many, many ways with modern, (post-) industrial society, and of course it’s not just schools that suck, but most jobs people end up having to do. But for those of us who think society has some serious flaws that need serious attention, I’d say that figuring out what to do about the whole concept of school would be a good place to start. And in the meantime, those of us who can may opt to keep our children out of school and give them encouragement and opportunities to live and learn and pursue their interests in the real world.

It seems to me that children need teachers about as much as they need bullies. It seems to me that what they need is fun, respectful, knowledgeable and talented friends of all ages. And trees, grass, and libraries.

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The RIAA vs. the World

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing massive multinational corporations with tentacles in every corner of the global economy including the music business, has just won a lawsuit against a mother of two who refused to be pushed around. Jamie Thomas’ pockets were not nearly deep enough to mount the kind of legal defense for the occasion, but she rightly thought that paying an out-of-court settlement of several thousand dollars for the “crime” of sharing music online was ridiculous. So she told the RIAA they’d have to take her to court. They did, and they won.

The fact that one of these cases actually went to trial, the amount of money involved, and the fact that the defendant could have been your neighbor, a middle-aged single mother of two who was not selling anything, but was just engaging in commonplace song-swapping via Kazaa’s peer-to-peer network, has made this case newsworthy. But what lies beneath it are the ever-growing tens of thousa