The Bad Political Music

A blog primarily about music is as much a place to say something about the politics of its country as any other place. Indeed, one can say that the sounds of the politics of the United States are anything but musical. Senators McCain, Obama, and Clinton are making are very far from musical noises. They are also very far from offering anything useful to any one in this country but the corporate elite or the military establishment.

Those who fancy themselves as “progressives” are fighting over whether to support Obama or Clinton. The battles are ridiculous. White, bourgeois “feminists” are falling all over themselves to support a supporter of endless war and military involvement who supports a health-care strategy that only an insurance company could love. They support a candidate who wouldn’t be in this race – let alone the Senate – were it not that her husband was once president. Hillary Clinton is as ready as anyone to bomb Iran, and would just as soon the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan pass down their deployments in those countries to their children and grandchildren. She is so racist with respect to Arabs that she literally gloated and cheer-led the Israeli destruction of Lebanon, relishing every litre of Lebanese blood shed. She’s so “progressive” as to be proud of corporate support, and was, for many years, a member of the Board of Directors of WalMart, the well-known humanitarian retailer. Further, Senator Clinton has resorted to a kind of back-door racism in her run against Senator Obama, with her 3:00 AM ad.

Senator Obama is also an advocate of the never-ending war, though he’d rather it centred in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Iraq. He, too would be open to starting up with Iran. His healthcare proposals are also more for the benefit of insurance companies than citizens. With all the rhetoric of change, Barak Obama is a firm candidate of the status quo. His views on the Palestinian question are not new, and will not lead to anything but the slow genocide that goes on there all the time, with the aid and blessing of the United States. Senator Obama’s views are as pro-Israeli, and pro-Israeli-occupation as Senator Clinton’s.

On the war, both of these candidates have voted over and over again to fund it every time Bush asked. On other issues, these people have no new ideas whatsoever. On the environment, energy, climate change, infrastructure: nothing but the same old same old.

I do have a candidate worth supporting, though. Her name is Cynthia McKinney, and she is running for the nomination of the Green Party. The Greens have several good candidates, as a matter of fact.

There are those of you who will think that voting Green would be a waste of a vote. But consider: all those people who voted in Democrats in ‘06 because they were opposed to the war. The war is still going on, because most of those Democrats VOTED TO FUND IT TIME AFTER TIME. There has been no meaningful social legislation put forward in the last two years, and nothing on the environment, transportation policy, or health care reform. That was wasting votes: voting for people who do exactly what other than what you supported them for. It will ever be thus so long as people vote for Democrats or Republicans. We have a “two party system” only because it is legislated that way through limitations on ballot access, and because we have news media concentrated in very few hands, none of which hands are remotely interested in any kind of social change.

Politics is a matter of elections, but it is also a matter of citizens acting politically in other ways, as individuals making choices, as people working together to effect choices, and as citizens either taking back politics, or turning backs on it to start anew. Voting for Clinton or Obama is voting for more of the growing economic crisis and widening inequalities we’ve been seeing over the past twenty-five or thirty years. It is also voting for inactivity on climate change, opposition to sustainability, and a continuation to addiction to oil.

I want to support someone who not only opposes this war, but war. I want to support someone who thinks of the earth, and how we can live happily and sustainably on the earth, taking care of it and each other. You don’t find that with Clinton or Obama, any more than you do with Senator McCain.

The same old, unmusical sounds have to go. It isn’t even a case of the same old song. I wouldn’t dignify the sounds coming out of Clinton and Obama with the word song. It’s time for some new music here: new music for new times; a new song of peace, and a new song for the earth.

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