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I would be surprised to see CNN pick this one up anytime soon. Ohio was one of the dirtiest moments in election rigging in recent history, the dirtiest of the 2004 election–Florida 2000 seemed trivial to me after it.
On GNN, there’s this page linking to this article from The Inquirer (of Great Britain, not the tabloid). Check it out.
Preface: I know I’m going to get shit for this, but that’s alright. This whole election is a disaster like the last one and the one before. The shitstorm can’t be avoided, so here goes.
I remember my parents teaching me that voting was a private, personal issue: that one has the right (and duty, I assumed from what they said) to not reveal who you vote for. Even when I was young, I thought this was a bit silly; now it makes me think about the unwritten law–or has it been written down?–that employees not share their salary information with co-workers. Is it really voters and employees that are afraid to talk about these things?
I believe in supporting what I have determined is the best choice, what is socially, culturally and morally the best option available. Unfortunately, I have never seen a Republican or Democrat come anywhere near the white house that I could vote for. Kucinich was out long ago. Richards too. John Edwards, who had started to say some reasonable things about the economy, was sidelined in the debates and ultimately pushed out of the primaries.
I used be completely fatalistic about politics. Everything was hopeless, beyond my control, and any actions or words were just futile motions. Every once in a while, though, I am inspired to be more active politically. Each time this has happened, I have been surprised that people like Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn can make me feel that something can be done by myself and other individuals to improve the society that we live in. I think too many people lack any sense of political agency; and many that do not are missing a deep enough understanding of history and the realities of politics, economics and war to be truly outraged at the worsening developments in our country and world.
I’m still mostly fatalistic. I don’t have that much hope in anything good for this country (and the rest of its crumbling empire) coming out of this year’s election. But what I don’t want to have is too much fear or despair either. What bothers me most in today’s political rhetoric is the insistence on “electability.” This kind of thinking is as damaging to the political process as the “better of two evils” argument. In my opinion, bad candidates, bad policies, and bad platforms are just that: bad. A candidate should simply not be “electable” if there is nothing of substance behind his/her words and actions.
I am supporting Ralph Nader whether he ends up on the ballot in Indiana or not. He is the only candidate that represents any progress toward a better society here and a better foreign policy abroad. I had to write in his name on the 2004 Illinois ballot, and I can do it again if it comes to that. Here is a link to his official campaign website, if you’re interested.
The Dalai Lama has said that “Kindness is society.” I didn’t know what to make of that for a while; society has always seemed rather brutal and opportunistic to me. I feel more and more that this is right, though. Whatever wrong and horrible things the greedy and the wrathful who are put into power do, to both the citizens of this country and the citizens of the rest of the planet, there is a basic kindness in all peoples which seeks to maintain communities that function smoothly to benefit themselves as a whole. I believe in that. I really do. No matter who becomes the next president.
A friend of mine showed me a few books he had about improvisation this morning, a subject that both of have share an interest in. Improvisational music has for years now been a thorn in my side, or foot, or wherever–I’ve just never been able to get over some personal obstacle that is in my way of being able to really practice it, be it in a “jazz” medium or some other setting.
One of the books was Derek Bailey’s Improvisation: it’s nature and practice, which I flipped through until I came to the section on the ‘new’ free improvised music of the 60’s and 70’s. Bailey is himself a seminal figure in this movement, some of whose more recent albums are among my favorites in his output.
Here is the conclusion of a discussion between Bailey and Eddie Prevost of the group AMM:
[Bailey] And the reasons for the survival, so far, of improvised music in an apparently hostile environment?
[Prevost] Alienation strategies. One thing many of us experienced when we began playing ‘free’ improvised music was a sense of alienation from the available models – playing models – mainly jazz and classical music. The critical response to what we did was, ‘its[sic] not jazz’. In some very important sense those remarks were so wrong, but I won’t go into that. But irksome though they may have been, those hostile attitudes helped. I suspect that most of us didn’t care what it was called, we just wanted to go on playing – and finding out about this new activity in which we were engaged. Being forced to cut what were, in fact, imaginary bonds helped us to recognise our wider cultural and social bearings. It is then that you can begin to calculate where you really want to go. Before, you had been traveling along in someone else’s dream. Even if our music began as a negation it seems to have transcended and superseded those earlier formative aspirations – those unfocused ideas of ‘being a jazz musician’. We have gone beyond all that and its attendant imprisoning ethos. This music, of which AMM is a part, goes on, survives and grows. Precisely because it has these reasons for being, these meanings. I get more of an appetite for it as the years go on. I can’t think of anything else I would rather be doing. (131)
I can’t help but relate this to what has been happening with ‘experimental’ poetry, or other sidelined movements in literature. There is plenty of interest in a ‘freer’ idea of poetry, one that resists the tradition of ‘bummer lit’, the resists the simplicity of such labels as ‘lyric’ and ‘narrative’, and searches for something else, some dream of its own. I think there are plenty of serious artists and poets that I think would tell (or have told) similar stories. Jackson MacLow would be one of them. It’s a good thing these activities are labors of love.
