Bands Against Bush

In this issue...

• Rockin' Against Bush
• Stage Left: An Interview with Paula Vogel
• Marxism Reloaded: The Revolution Revived
• Book Review - Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Said
• Poetic License: An Interview with Sam Hamill

In Print...

Rock and roll means rebellion. For some rockers, it isn’t rebellion only for the sake of it; it’s political. Political rebellion against conformity or conservative religious values set to music is, for many, the definition of rock and roll. From Woody Guthrie to Nina Simone progressive rockers have given voice and substance to this discontent, have raised the difficult questions about the system and the establishment and even have offered personal and systemic alternative visions.

Editor’s Note: Paula Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She has written The Baltimore Waltz, How I Learned to Drive, Hot N Throbbing, Desdemona, The Mineola Twins, The Long Christmas Ride Home, And Baby Makes Seven and The Oldest Profession. Elena Mora conducted this interview.

The socialist and communist idea has long inspired the search for a better way of life. Many things that are today taken for granted from Social Security to unemployment insurance come out of this quest. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate its impact. This applies not only to day-to-day working-class struggles but also to the realm of ideas.

The late Edward W. Said was one of the world's greatest literary and cultural critics. This book of interviews is one of his last works. In it Said puts forth his ideas for building a secular democratic Middle East and discusses the role of culture in the struggle of oppressed peoples to attain justice and equality.

In January of 2003, Laura Bush invited a number of poets to the White House for a symposium to celebrate “Poetry and the American Voice.” Peace activist, publisher and poet, Sam Hamill, declined. Hamill said that he “could not in good faith visit the White House following the news of George W. Bush’s plan for a unilateral ‘shock and awe’ attack on Iraq.”

According to the right wing, the liberal and progressive movements in the US are afraid to tell it like it is. They communicate in a humorless, effeminate doublespeak, and seem more concerned with maintaining a touchy-feely etiquette than with engaging the bread and butter issues that drive real-life politics.

“There is very little class consciousness in this country,” said a labor union leader I recently had the good fortune to work with. “So, if the labor movement is going to grow, build strength, win victories and win more political power, we need to build coalitions with the community,” he concluded. If this viewpoint weren’t widely held by many trade unionists, I might suspect him of being a Marxist-Leninist.

Ross Golan and Molehead’s recent CD release Reagan Baby leads the sonic assault on the corrupt, hate-filled politics of the far right. The hypocrisy and lies used to justify war, corporate corruption, apathy, war and commerce, the economic crisis, gun violence, domestic violence and abuses of civil liberties and rights are among the subjects of the debut album of this multifaceted three-piece band.

Film noir is a movie genre with roots going back to Weimar Germany and the Freudian nightmare. Classic noir revolved around the theme of an ordinary man trapped by fate, a false step or a femme fatale. Yet there was another aspect to film noir that shined a light, for those who cared to look, on the underside of the post-war “American Dream.”

George Soros is the well-known, fabulously wealthy speculator who has written prolifically on matters political and global. Readers may recall – as he recalls ruefully here – that in 1997 he made an “unconditional prediction” about the “imminent collapse of the global capitalist system.”