We encourage you to defend Iraq war veteran Marc Hall, who is currently imprisoned for recording a song that expresses his anger over the Army’s stop-loss policy. Stop-loss is a policy that allows the army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts.
Dahr Jamail from truthout.org reports on the circumstances of Hall’s imprisonment here.
The following is an interview that i conducted eleven years ago of a veteran of the Panama invasion. This testimonial by a soldier who was an eyewitness, is a riveting chronicle of the evils of war, and a condemnation of yanqui imperialism. This interview has never been published before.
This jewel from my archive of demos needs some polish. i have written many more songs than i have used, and this is one that was languishing, so i put it up here now for fresh air. The lyrics are based on a poem by Mario Benedetti. I recorded this live and added some harmonies. This is a sketch of a song about our struggle for humanity. The jagged rhythms come from Bartok and The Clash.
What does a Bolshevik do when
he dives into the Red Sea?
You don’t know what a Bolshevik does?
No, tell me
He goes splash!
Poetry Corner. Ezra Pound.
The Cantos
The whole tribe is from
one man’s body
What other way can you think of it?
The surname and the nine arts
The father’s word is compassion
The son’s, devotion
Small birds sing in chorus. Harmony
is in the proportion of branches
The gay face of spring
is set before the world
The sharpness of winter
now flees defeated
In various apparel Flora reigns
And in the euphony of the woods…
…she is hymned in song
Republican presidential nominee John McCain Thursday questioned running-mate Sarah Palin over new second-guessing of the McCain campaign.
The McCain aides were responding to a report on CNN that the governor got a laugh when she told a GOP audience in Alaska she had declined to pray with McCain staffers prior to her debate with Joe Biden, who was elected vice president in November.
Describing the pre-debate atmosphere, Palin told the crowd Friday, she was “looking for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra.”
“And the McCain campaign, love ‘em, you know, they’re a lot of people around me,” she said, “but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray.”
Palin told the audience she meant no disrespect to the McCain campaign, but a former Palin aide told CNN in an e-mail Thursday Palin’s remarks “set off a nerve for sure with a lot of people.”
Don’t Hate The Praya Hate Da Game (Nailin Palin)
Sarah Palin Laid
Missionary Position
Impaled By Her Lie
Haiku By JHM (In The Voice Of John McCain)
The following song about old cheese is by Sineparade:
“…While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads.
But his stealth campaign, which has entertained thousands of normally glassy-eyed commuters and infuriated the police and the companies whose costly ads he has chopped up and scrambled, will probably get a lot harder now. At an art event in SoHo on Saturday, a group of plainclothes New York City police officers finally caught up to and unmasked, at least metaphorically, the man they say is Poster Boy…” New York Times Article Detailing The Arrest Of “Poster Boy”
It’s a tragedy that the Israelis – a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression – are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked “Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it’s the Palestinians”. By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they’ve forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians – with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers – and themselves – with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world – they sacrifice all credibility.
The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.
Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly…and, surprise, surprise – they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?
Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now ‘under attack’ you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn’t possibly reach an accommodation.
And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.
