Post-Election: Media Reckoning Needed

As I write in late October of 2020, Joe Biden leads in all major polls, with the Real Clear Politics average putting him ahead nationally by 8 points. Biden leads in all the key battleground states that will ultimately decide the election. From the experience of 2016 we know that poll data must be taken with a huge grain of salt, and we know that the Republican party nationally and in most states is working overtime to depress and suppress voter turnout, especially among Black and Latinx voters. So the race has to be considered a toss up.

I've heard it said that if 2020 is like 1932 (the year we were mired in a Great Depression that flummoxed Republican President Herbert Hoover), Biden could win in a landslide. If on the other hand 2020 is like 1968 (when urban riots and violent Vietnam War protests dominated the public mind), the race should be closer and perhaps favor Trump. 

My view is that 2020 is mostly a replay of 2016: Mr. Trump is still the "anti-Washington, anti-establishment" candidate, while the Dems once again nominated someone who for most of his political career has personified the establishment. But unlike Hillary Clinton, Biden is not toxic to large numbers of rural and blue collar voters. Furthermore, we have now had four  years of epic corruption and incompetence that should, theoretically at least, attract  enough swing state Independents to make "not being Trump" enough to win the election. 

In April of 2020 Jim Lardner of the American Prospect compiled one of the most thorough accounts of corruption within the executive branch of President Donald Trump

Regardless of whether the election extends the Trump presidency or delivers up President-elect Biden, the mainstream press needs to face a reckoning over its terrible performance during the Trump years. A step toward that was taken recently in an important special report by Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon in the Columbia Journalism Review, "How the Press Covered the Last Four Years of Trump." Along with two other journalists, the authors have covered media treatment of the Trump presidency daily since 2017 in CJR's The Media Today newsletter. 

The piece by Allsop and Vernon is long. I want to highlight some spot-on observations of theirs regarding press performance of the last last four years, and address four key questions they believe should be asked as we move forward. 

Looking over their own newsletters over the last four years, Allsop and Vernon discovered "a clear picture of an industry whose basic practices and rhythms have conspired, time and again, to downplay demagoguery, let Trump and his defenders off the hook, and drain resources and attention from crucial longer-term storylines. Much has changed since Inauguration Day, both in the news and the media’s approach to covering it. But in other ways, many of them profoundly important and consequential, the press has simply not learned its lesson." 

On some particularly horrifying press habits since 2017: 

Journalists reported on the president’s moods, his television habits, his aides’ personalities and infighting; they expressed anguish over the uselessness of press briefings, and then lamented their absence. Editors dispatched journalists to “Trumplandia” to find understanding in the diners of Rust-Belt towns, and sometimes even allowed right-wing internet trolls (when not quoting them) to dictate personnel decisions.

On how the press dealt with Trump's propensity for lying: 

Seven months into his administration, it was clear that the president was unwilling or unable to change. It was obvious who he was . . . or it should have been. Instead, news organizations continued to fret over whether to call his untruths “lies” since we can’t see inside his head. 

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in a number of reputable publications including The Atlantic and The Intercept

On how obsessive Trump coverage has short-changed everything else: 

Not only has the Trump obsession often drowned out bigger stories—crises like climate change, racism, immigration, anti-trans discrimination, inadequate healthcare, poverty, and gun violence, all of which predated Trump and will outlast him—it has forced us to see them, when we see them at all, through the distorting, flattening lens of the man himself. A not-insignificant portion of the punditocracy, in particular, seems to believe that America’s problems—the biggest ones, anyway—begin and end with Trump’s tenure in office. Many reporters seem to believe that, too, if less overtly. The truth, of course, is that the systemic problems that Trump came to personify were here before he arrived and will last long after he’s gone; he was simply their embodiment. Journalism’s failure to consistently grasp that difficult, fundamental fact means that laying the groundwork for a meaningful reckoning with these last four years may continue to be pushed off into the future.

Pete Vernon is a freelance journalist and teacher. He's the former author of the Columbia Journalism Reviews "The Media Today" newsletter and previously worked for Reuters News Agency

Four key questions moving forward: 

1. Will the brilliant investigative scoops of the Trump presidency—already the preserve of papers that can afford to invest in them—inspire a new golden age of muckraking? Or will they dwindle if future administrations prove less overtly tumultuous?

2. Will the Trump cabal, in the administration, media, and politics, be held to account for what they did? Or will the calls to “move on” prevail?

3. When a future president—Biden or someone else—threatens to drag the US into a foreign war with no demonstrable evidence, will otherwise-hawkish cable pundits think twice, as many of them did in January, after Trump assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassem Suleimani? Or will they insist that we shouldn’t be concerned, because of the new president’s temperament and qualifications? (Last year, one of the great undercovered stories of recent times, the Post’s “Afghanistan Papers,” reminded us that presidents of all stripes tend to lie about war.) 

4. Will we go back to an era when politicians can convince the bulk of the media to give them an easy ride so long as they pay lip service to the shibboleths of the political establishment?

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In my judgement, Allsop and Vernon are asking the right questions. My preliminary answers: 

1.  Will we have a new golden age of muckraking? If we do, it will probably come from independent journalists working at online platforms like Substack that allow them to escape the tendency of mainstream media editors to de-muck works of muckraking so as to maintain friendly relations with "official" sources. 

2. Will calls to "move on" prevail over calls to hold the "Trump cabal" accountable for their actions? If we get a President Biden, and if history can inform the present, expect some kind of pardon for the Trump family. Biden came of age during Watergate, and no doubt he's already reflected on Gerald Ford's statement in defense of pardoning Nixon: 

“the passions generated by prosecuting him," said President Ford,  "would seriously disrupt the healing of our country from the great wounds of the past.”

 

Moreover, the Obama/Biden administration refused to prosecute bankers responsible for the 2008 economic collapse. It would not be at all surprising if a Biden administration showed a similar inclination to "move on." Will the press let them? 

3. Will the press hold the President accountable on foreign wars? Probably not, though there will be a great need to. Given that the Democrats have welcomed the so-called neocons into the anti-Trump "resistance", and given Biden's hawkish tendencies, I don't see much hope for a winding down of the "war on terror" that has now recklessly cut across three administrations. That is as much a journalistic failure as it is a failure of imagination among policy makers. 

4. Will a Biden administration convince the bulk of the media to give them an easy ride? What I see happening is this: if we have a Harris/Biden administration, the mainstream press WILL be tough on them, but for the wrong reasons. Biden will almost certainly put forth policy proposals inadequate to meet the scale of crisis we face on the pandemic, the economy, and climate. His Commander in Chief vision will be to put complete trust in the bloated military-industrial-complex and the "intelligence" agencies that gave us two failed wars. All of that will worthy of intense media scrutiny, but will probably receive little. 

Instead, the Republicans will harp on the Hunter Biden story for the entire first term, and the mainstream press will dutifully report all the rumors, all the innuendo, and all the lies that emanate from the right wing media ecosphere. That playbook started with with the Whitewater investigation of the 1990s, which consumed inordinate amounts of press time during the Clinton presidency. Russiagate operated within a similar dynamic during the Trump years: the legitimate news value in it got eclipsed by years worth of hyperpartisan harping on every minor detail. Whitewater and Russiagate crowded out scores of vital stories. If Joe Biden does get elected, expect the trials and tribulations of Hunter Biden to become the next installment in this dubious style of "accountability" journalism. 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part X: "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" Edition

Last August 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from Illinois to Kenosha, WI. Considering himself part of a militia whose goal was to "protect life and property," Rittenhouse allegedly killed two people. Militia activity is apparently on the rise across the country, with leaders making explicit attempts to target young males for recruitment. Some can apparently be persuaded to kidnap a governor whose "crime" is attempting to protect her state's residents from a raging pandemic. 

I'm pretty sure that when I was seventeen years old my main concerns in life were: (1) what do I have to do to get girls to like me and (2) will I be able to get into college? (and probably in that order too.). I did follow what was going on in the world, and I certainly rebelled against authority,  but the idea that I would pick up a military style assault weapon to "protect" a used car lot from being vandalized, and that I could somehow be persuaded that my fellow Americans in the streets were my potential enemies would have been too absurd to even cross my mind. 

The deep differences between 17-year-old Kyle and 17-year-old Tony makes sense when you consider the moral state of the country since he's been born. Since 2001 we've been at war continuously, either through explicit invasions of other countries or legally suspect drone attacks. Mountains of bipartisan propaganda and indoctrination support those efforts to this day. The unmistakable message sent to young people this century has been that bullying and extreme violence are perfectly legitimate ways to deal with anyone on the "other side" you consider to be the "bad guys."  My hope for Kyle Rittenhouse is that some day he comes to the realization that he and the people he shot at were actually on the same side, and that he was manipulated by a woeful cast of characters whose bullshit and bluster he probably mistook for principle and courage. 

Seriously, are we really that shocked that the methods used to denigrate entire populations overseas would finally be used to sow division in the homeland? Like school shooters, young Kyle clearly saw himself in a kind of "us" v. "them" struggle of  good against evil with no room for gray area. We militarized our police departments and (too many of us) shrugged our shoulders and offered thoughts and prayers while the schools became literal battlegrounds. So I suppose it should be no surprise that some youth themselves have become militarized. Good job America. 

I thought about this while listening to folk singer Ed McCurdy's classic 1950 tune  "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream." McCurdy's tune was like a prayer for peace: 

Ed McCurdy: Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

 

 Last night I had the strangest dream

I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the papers all were signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands end bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing round and round
And guns and swords and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground

Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

The extreme crises we are facing right now: the pandemic, the economic depression, systemic racism, climate catastrophe--have perhaps taken our eyes off of war. Paradoxically, every single one of those crises, in different ways, is a product of our war mindset and INCREASES the chances of literal war at home and abroad. We even insist on using war metaphors to address those crises. 

Ed McCurdy's tune is more relevant now than ever. Below, without comment, are ten of my favorite covers of it. 

#10: Simon and Garfunkel. 

#9: Garth Brooks ( Garth Brooks once said, "If I had to make one speech to the entire world, this would probably be the song I'd sing")

#8:  Joan Baez 

#7:  The Hep Stars 

#6:  Mason Proffit 

#5:  The Kingston Trio 

#4:  Serena Ryder 

#3:  Charles Lloyd Featuring Willie Nelson

#2: Johnny Cash (of course)

#1: Tracy Newman (Performed on a public television children's show called "What's New" in 1965. We need a return to that kind of performance for children. Adults too.). 

Previous posts in this Series: 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part I

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part II

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part III: Guitar Hero Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part IV: Dare To Cover Johnny Cash Edition

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part V: I Won't Back Down Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part VI: Bring It On Home To Me Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part VII: The Kennedy Center Honors Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part VIII: Classical Music Covers Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part IX: "Covering" Spoken Words

Rethinking JFK's Edmund G. Ross

In the entire history of the United States only three presidents have been impeached by the House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019. In all three cases, the United States Senate failed to muster the 2/3 majority necessary to remove the President from office. President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 when his allies in the Congress warned him that he probably would not be acquitted in a Senate trial. 

Why is it so difficult to impeach and remove a President from office? The most obvious reason is that the Constitutional standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors" for conviction is difficult to define with any precision. Moreover, the requirement of a 2/3 majority vote to convict in the Senate (67 out of 100 senators) means that a significant number Senators from the POTUS's own party have to vote against him. That's not likely, and any President facing that situation would probably take the Nixon route and resign before facing the public humiliation of a guilty verdict. 

From a media influence perspective, I think a major reason for the rarity of impeachment and near impossibility of removal is the way the failed removal of President Andrew Johnson is typically framed. John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book from 1956 (actually ghost written by his speech writer Theodore Sorenson), Profiles in Courage, identified Kanas Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross' deciding vote to acquit Johnson as one of the great acts of political courage and integrity in the history of the nation. The Kennedy/Sorenson narrative, of a principled Ross risking his political future to stand against the hyperpartisan "Radical Republican" House impeachment managers and Senators, became the dominant way of thinking about impeachment in mainstream pundit circles. As Senator John F. Kennedy himself put it in a 1957 speech delivered at the University of Kansas: 

In 1956 JFK won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage. Ghost written by speech writer Ted Sorenson, the book weaved a narrative of Edmund G. Ross and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson that became dominant in popular media.

"Of all the acts of courage described in my book, Ross' was the bravest of them all. When he rose on the Senate Floor to cast the vote that saved Andrew Johnson from impeachment conviction, he knew he was destroying a promising political career. As he later described it: 'I almost literally looked down into my own open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.' Tragic to say, Edmund Ross was not exaggerating the fury which would fall upon him for his determined position. And yet, he was equally correct when he wrote to his wife shortly after the trial: 'Millions of men cursing me today will bless me tomorrow for having saved the country from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed, though none but God can ever know the struggle it has cost me.'"

Ross and Kennedy had it all wrong. The vote to acquit Johnson hardly saved the country from peril. In fact, Ross' vote reinforced the peril the country was already in, and helped guarantee literally another 100 years of misery for African-Americans who by 1868 were already being brutally denied their human and civil rights that were supposed to follow emancipation. Johnson's constitutionally dubious executive actions taken to reconstruct the union after the Civil War were lenient to the point of virtually reintroducing slavery in the southern states. Southern "Black Codes," which received no opposition from Johnson, effectively denied Blacks any meaningful political and economic rights. Racist laws were so deeply entrenched that not even the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were enough to provide a remedy. 

Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas (1826-1907) cast one of the most consequential votes in the history of the Congress when he joined six other Republicans to acquit Andrew Johnson. The final vote was 35-19 to convict Johnson, one short of the required 2/3 needed. 

House and Senate Republicans in 1868 opposed Johnson not only on the grounds that he abused the powers of his office in a way that allowed for a reintroduction of slavery by other names, but also because they found his conduct unbecoming of what should be expected of a Chief Executive. In 1866 Johnson went on a "Swing Around the Circle" tour of northeastern and midwestern states. At various stops he compared himself to Jesus Christ, called for the hanging of political opponents, and provoked riots. He accused the Republican Congress, which was trying to guarantee voting rights for Blacks, of trying to disenfranchise Whites and provoke African-Americans to take up arms. The New York Herald, up to the tour one of Johnson's major supporters, turned against him: "It is mortifying to see a man occupying the lofty position of President of the United States descend from that position and join issue with those who are draggling their garments in the muddy gutters of political vituperation." 

Famous cartoonist Thomas Nast lampooned Johnson's "Swing Around the Circle" tour. Note the halo around Johnson's head in the center illustration--a reference to Johnson's habit of comparing himself to Jesus Christ.

By a vote of 126-47, the House of Representatives passed eleven articles of impeachment. Historically most of the attention has been given to Article I, which condemned Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act, legislation which required the president to seek Congressional approval in order to remove a cabinet officer. Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867 in large part to shield Cabinet officers in disagreement with Johnson's reconstruction policies from being fired.  When Johnson tried to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a supporter of Radical Republican policy, he was in violation of the Act. (Note: The Tenure of Office Act was declared unconstitutional in 1926, contributing to the expansion of powers in the executive branch that, in my humble opinion, has been detrimental to the principle of checks and balances. The Trump administration shows us in a disturbing way how easy it is for a president to remove voices of even mild dissent in the cabinet, thus making independent action in cabinet departments almost impossible.). 

For me, impeachment article X by itself should have been enough to remove Johnson. By the way he carried out his responsibilities, the President had made a mockery of his office. Article X said that Johnson's behavior was "indecent and unbecoming in the office of the Chief Magistrate" and brought the office of the President of the United States into "contempt, ridicule, and disgrace." 

In this satire of the Swing Around the Circle tour, Johnson is pictured on the left as traveling in a child's carriage. On the right, he is held up by Secretary of State William Seward--a suggestion that Johnson at times was too drunk to stand on his own.

I get that "indecency" along with contempt, ridicule, and disgrace are subjective charges that don't rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" without providing substantial context and explanation. But for anyone who actually takes the time to examine the context, it becomes immediately clear that Andrew Johnson was a buffoon who had no business occupying the office of the presidency at any time, and especially not at a time when newly freed slaves were literally in a life and death struggle to make good on the promise of emancipation. Reading Kennedy/Sorenson and other pundits, you would think that the Radical Republicans in Congress were mere partisans who elevated policy differences to crimes in order to remove the main check on their ability to pursue their own vision of reconstruction. 

In fact, the Radical Republicans were trying to stop a crime already in progress--the crime of reintroducing slavery into the south. President Andrew Johnson was an active accomplice in that crime. To say that he was involved in a mere policy difference with the Republican Congress is absurd. Imagine being involved in a chess game, and when you take a rest room break your opponent removes your knights, bishops, and rooks from the board and when called out refuses to put them back. When asked to defend himself, he says, "well I guess we just have different opinions on how to play chess." Clearly he has no respect for the rules, cheated and deceived, and thus forfeits the privilege of playing.  

Failure to remove Johnson on the grounds of his bringing the office into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace has made it next to impossible to uphold that standard for any other President. Bill Clinton in 1999 engaged in behavior that even then would have been difficult for any CEO or mid-level manager to survive if the behavior had been revealed. More recently Al Franken was pressured to leave the Senate for less. Yet President Clinton's loudest defenders at the time were feminist movement leaders and allies acting on the rationale that providing interference for a boorish and exploitative Democrat is preferable to handing political victories to a Republican party hostile to their entire agenda. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it's becoming clearer that the mental gymnastics required to defend Clinton probably set the feminist movement in general, and women in the workplace in particular, back twenty years. One has to wonder where we would be right now if, after Monica Lewinsky's name had been released in 1998, someone had tweeted, "If you've ever been taken advantage of by your boss at work, write 'metoo' as a response to this tweet." My guess is that Harvey Weinstein and the more than 260 other big shots accused of sexual misconduct since 2017 would have faced a reckoning much sooner. 

Bill Clinton survived impeachment in part because of the support of the feminist movement. One wonders if the #metoo movement might have happened sooner were it not for the decision to provide cover for a powerful man as long as he has the right positions on policy issues.

And what about President Donald Trump? Without exaggeration, every single day of his presidency has brought the office into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace. The lies, the social media bullying and nonsense, the gaslighting, the inability to empathize with victims of the pandemic, incompetence. Some on social media have speculated that the President's shameful behavior at the first presidential "debate" this year may have been designed to provoke Joe Biden--a man who has been open about his struggles with verbal stuttering--into a potentially embarrassing stutter episode. It's virtually impossible to prove such an allegation, but the fact that a huge majority of Americans would not even be surprised if they found out it was true should tell us something. My guess is that in the future historians will look back on Mr. Trump's idiotic and incoherent phone call with the Ukraine premier and say, "out of all the things they could have impeached him for, they chose that?" 

Perhaps because I work with young people, of the  thousands of horrific tweets in Donald Trump's feed, the one that strikes me as most revolting is his 2019 mockery and bullying of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. What  kind of man uses a global platform of millions to mock a teen girl whose only goal is to save the planet for her generation? Answer: A man who has no business occupying the White House.

In 1956 John F. Kennedy and his ghost writer Ted Sorenson produced a narrative of the impeachment proceedings of 1868 that gave the titles of principled and courageous to a man--Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross--whose actions were neither clearly principled nor courageous. Author David O. Stewart goes as far as to claim Ross' vote to acquit Johnson was rooted in a corrupt deal. But even if we accept JFK's claim that Ross' motives were sincere, the long term consequence of his act was to reduce Congressional calling out of unacceptable presidential behavior to partisan sniping. Andrew Johnson, like Bill Clinton to a lesser, and Donald Trump to a greater extent much later, abused the powers of his office in a manner that the peoples' representatives are obligated to hold to account. Whether because of corruption, naivete, or caving in to pressure, Ross succeeded in making the impeachment and removal process--a process already difficult due to the rules outlined in the Constitution--into something almost meaningless. 

New Podcast: Running on MT

Matt King, one of my best students of all time, graduated from UW Oshkosh in 1991. After spending several years in K-12 teaching, in 1996 he founded Game Show America. Matt and his crew have educated, elevated, and entertained a variety of corporate, nonprofit, educational, and other audiences. In addition, Matt revisits UW Oshkosh as often as he can to impart real world advice to current students. 

Matt King is the founder and CEO of Game Show America. He brings his gift of being able to elevate, educate, and entertain audiences to the Running on MT podcast

Matt and I reconnected on social media in the late 2000s. Almost every time we conversed, the subject of creating some kind of media product came up. I'm happy to say that this summer we finally followed through and created a podcast, "Running on MT" with Matt King and Tony Palmeri. The podcast features Matt and I ranting on a variety of topics, interviewing guests, and playing/commenting on music. Please subscribe! 

So far we have been able to produce four episodes: 

Episode #1: A general introduction to the show. We also listen to and comment on two versions of "The Sounds of Silence": Simon and Garfunkel's 1965 original and the great recent cover by Disturbed. 

Episode #2: We interview Matt Beringer, concert promoter and venue operator of the Pabst Theatre Group in Milwaukee. Matt talks about what it it like to run concert halls in the middle of a pandemic. We also listen to and comment on Neil Young's "Lookin' For A Leader," his anti-Trump contribution to campaign 2020. 

Episode #3: We comment on the Democratic National Committee virtual convention, as well as President Trump's recent visit to Oshkosh. Matt King talks about the indignities of applying for unemployment insurance in the United States. We also listen to and comment on "Love and Peace," the most recent song from the legendary Seasick Steve. 

 

Episode #4: We interview Pete Pagano, one of Tony's high school buddies. Pete is a 30-year Navy veteran with strong views on politics. Matt, Tony, and Pete demonstrate how to disagree without being too disagreeable. 

We are open to feedback on the program as well as show ideas. Our email address in runningonmt2020@gmail.com  

Please subscribe to Running on MT. --Tony Palmeri 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part IX: "Covering" Spoken Words

Previous posts in this Series: 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part I

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part II

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part III: Guitar Hero Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part IV: Dare To Cover Johnny Cash Edition

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part V: I Won't Back Down Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part VI: Bring It On Home To Me Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part VII: The Kennedy Center Honors Edition 

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part VIII: Classical Music Covers Edition 

Many musical artists over the years have lifted spoken words from their original context and placed them in a song. Sometimes the goal of the musical artist is simply to amplify the lifted words and introduce the speaker of them to a wider audience. Other times, and this is especially true in hip-hop sampling of the spoken word, the goal is to use the lifted words in a way that amplifies the message of the artist doing the sampling. 

While sampling the spoken word might not be a "cover tune" in the way this series has defined the concept, such sampling is most certainly "bold." The artist lifting the spoken word runs the risk of offending fans of the original spoken message, or maybe misinterpreting that message, or even just creating confusion. 

What follows, in no particular order, are ten examples of what I consider to be particularly good examples of setting already existing spoken words to music. 

#10: Mr. Fingers' sampling of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech". Mr. Fingers (AKA Larry Heard) helped pioneer Chicago house music in the 1980s. His major chart success came in 1986 with "Can You Feel It," a dance classic. He produced many mixes of the track, including one featuring the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr.delivering the "I Have A Dream" speech from 1963. The beats and rhythm help us realize just how much SOUL is in that speech. I'd love for someone to put Dr. King's "Loving Your Enemies" to music. 

Video: Mr. Fingers "Can You Feel It" (MLK Mix)

#9: Paul Hardcastle - 19 (samples spoken words from the ABC television documentary Vietnam Requiem): I was reminded of Paul Hardcastle and "19" recently by Matt King, producer and my cohost for the new Running on MT podcast. Hardcastle is another electronic music pioneer, and "19" brilliantly dramatizes the plight of the Vietnam vets by taking the words from an important documentary and using music to give them a sense of urgency. We still give mostly lip service to post traumatic stress disorder, but the fact that we got even that far is at least in part due to the efforts of artists like Paul Hardcastle who used their talents to place the issue on the radar. 

Video: Paul Hardcastle "19"

#8: Paolo Nutini's "Iron Sky" (samples parts of Charlie Chaplain's final speech in "The Great Dictator"). The Scottish artist Paolo Nutini is one of the greatest soul/rock singers of his generation. His "Iron Sky" (from the excellent 2014 album "Caustic Love") carries a powerful message of striving for freedom in the face of propaganda and bullying. He includes a portion of the legendary final speech delivered by Charlie Chaplain in his classic film "The Great Dictator": 

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Video: Paolo Nutini: Iron Sky

#7:  Baz Luhrmann's "Wear Sunscreen." In 1997 Mary Schmich wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune called "Advice, like  youth, probably just wasted on the young." The column became one of the earliest "viral" email messages, and somehow got attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. who allegedly delivered it at an MIT Commencement. Vonnegut had to come out and deny having anything to do with the speech, though he did say he would have been proud to write something like that. 

Baz Luhrmann's musical version became an international hit in 1998/1999. What I find fascinating is how unfulfilling the words are in 2020 given the condition of the world. Worse, listening to those words today reminds me of how terribly in denial the United States was in the late 1990s about almost everything that plagues us today--yet could and should have been anticipated and acted on at that time. The Republicans spent that decade practicing and perfecting the "politics of personal destruction," while the Democrats re-branded themselves to become more corporate friendly, Republican-lite technocrats. The results have been nightmarish and catastrophic for all, and led directly to the current mess(es) we find ourselves in. 

Video: Baz Luhrmann: Wear Sunscreen 

#6: Will.i.am, "Yes We Can"  (samples Barack Obama's New Hampshire primary concession speech from January 8, 2008). I generally despise when celebrity entertainers not known for their musical abilities show up in music videos. In this effort, however, Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas found a way to get a range of artists to lip sync the words from one of Barack Obama's most impressive speeches in a way that did not humiliate them or the candidate. In fact, after this video "Yes We Can" became the dominant slogan of the campaign, something no other candidate that year could match in terms of how it energized a base of idealistic young voters. 

Video: Yes We Can 

#5: Frank Zappa, "Porn Wars." In the 1980s Frank Zappa was probably the leading opponents of efforts to put ratings on musical products. He participated in a memorable Senate hearing in 1985 on "Porn Rock," and in typical iconoclastic Zappa fashion ended up placing testimony from it in his 12 minute epic "Porn Wars." Actual voices from politicians and "experts" at the hearing are made to sound like they are in a literal hell. Certainly takes patience to listen to, but worth it in order to get a sense of the sheer absurdity of the politicians' stupidity. 

Video: Frank Zappa, "Porn Wars" 

       

#4:  Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips, "Anarchy." Indie music icon Ani DiFranco in the 1990s released two albums with labor organizer/folk singer/storyteller Utah Phillips called "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" (1996)  and "Fellow Workers" (1999). On both, Phillips tells stories set to DiFranco's original music. There are a number of ear opening tunes and stories on both records. My personal favorite is probably "Anarchy," in which Phillips tells the story being disenchanted after serving in Korea and then having his life changed upon meeting Christian pacifist/anarchist Ammon Hennacy. (Note: This track also samples the Reverend Jesse Jackson's "Please Forgive Me" and other lines from his 1984 Democratic National Convention address.). 

Video: Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips, "Anarchy" 

#3:  Neilio, "Outside This World" (samples a portion of Ronald Reagan's Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York on September 21, 1987). In that speech, delivered before the fall of the Soviet Union was widely predicted or imminent, President Reagan engaged in his typical Cold War posturing. But then at the end he surmised that maybe an "alien threat" could bring us all together: 

 ". . . we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." 

Neilio's mix makes Reagan sound like a kind of Big Brother meets Mr. Rogers mash up. I find it amusing. 

Video: Neilio "Outside This World" 

#2: E-40 featuring Big K.R.I.T "Black is Beautiful" ("Democracy is Hypocrisy" by Malcolm X). Hard to imagine a more appropriate rap given the events of the last few months. 

Video: E-40 featuring Big K.R.I.T Black is Beautiful ("Democracy is Hypocrisy" by Malcolm X)

 

#1: Living Colour, "Cult of Personality."  This classic rock track from 1988 features audio samples from Malcolm X, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. In politics, "Cult of Personality" refers to a situation in which the "great leader" is praised and defended by millions who know him (it's almost always a "him") mostly through mass mediated images. All Presidents of the United States develop some kind of personality cult appeal, usually in terms of the enthusiasm of supporters. The Trump presidency is probably the first since President Nixon in which the personality cult consumes supporters AND opponents. As noted by political scientist Greg Weiner in reference to the US response to the pandemic: 

"Mr. Trump — signer of checks, provider of health tips, filter for medical reality — is offering a diluted and delusive aura of a personal relationship with him as a substitute for the true relationships that constitute communities. What is disturbing is the extent to which the public has taken on this perspective, whether through the lens of support or of opposition."

Speaking just for me, the song "Cult of Personality" had pretty much left my playlist in the mid 1990s. Since 2017 it's been back in the rotation. I'm sure I am not alone! (The songs says in part: "I exploit you still you love me/I tell you one and one makes three.")

Video: Living Colour Cult of Personality 

Hope you enjoyed this edition of Ten Bold Cover Tunes! Peace! --TP

Loving Your Enemies: The King Speech We Need Right Now

In his short life (he was assassinated nine months shy of his 40th birthday), Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered and/or issued thousands of messages. The most widely cited include the August 28, 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech delivered at the March on Washington; the "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break The Silence" speech delivered at Riverside Baptist Church on April 4, 1967; and the "Letter From Birmingham Jail" issued on April 16, 1963. Beyond Vietnam and the Letter From Birmingham Jail feature powerful appeals to conscience that have inspired and mobilized generations of peace and social justice activists. The I Have A Dream speech is equally compelling, but like all "viral" messages it often gets willfully misinterpreted by bad faith actors who do not share the vision and are, at best, addicted to what in that speech King lamented as the "tranquilizing drug of gradualism." 

The speech of King's that does not get enough attention, perhaps because it places too many demands on our contemporary troll culture  to look in the mirror before judging and condemning others, is "Loving Your Enemies." I am quite sure that the late civil rights icon John Lewis was familiar with this speech. In Lewis' New York Times op-ed released shortly after his recent passing, he writes: 

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

The young John Lewis would have almost certainly been aware of Martin Luther King's "Loving Your Enemies" sermon. Until his dying day, Representative Lewis tried to uphold King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance as a means of provoking social change. 

Those are all themes endorsed in "Loving Your Enemies." The speech was a sermon spoken by the young King many times in the 1950s when the young Lewis probably became aware of it. Deeply touched by progressive Christian theology, the speech methodically and boldly instructs listeners on how Jesus' pronouncement in Matthew 5:43-45 ("Ye have heard that it has been said, ‘Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.”) is the key for personal, national, and international salvation. (The version of the sermon I am working from was delivered on November 17, 1957 at the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL. King was pastor of the church.)

In a time like the present, when the public performance of rage and bitterness is chic on all sides of the activist spectrum and in the White House, it might seem naive to trot out a message of love and nonviolence. But it only seems naive because most of us have internalized the distorted interpretations of what King said; we've made love and nonviolence into something passive that cannot even get the attention of power, let alone speak truth to and transform it. Let's revisit what Dr. King actually said about HOW we go about loving our enemies, and WHY we should do it. A proper understanding of "Loving Your Enemies" will reveal that we need its inspiration NOW as much we did in 1957; probably even more. 

How do we love our enemies? According to Dr. King, in three ways. First, we have to analyze the SELF. While he does not minimize the fact that some will hate other people just on the basis of race and other characteristics out of control of the target, still he argues we must all reflect on what we do to trigger the "tragic hate response." Failure to do so often leads to hypocrisy and double standards, or as Jesus said, "how is it that you see the splinter in your brother's eye and fail to see the plank in your own?" Quite profoundly for a speech delivered in the 1950s, King applied the same principle to the United States: if we as a nation want to understand why we are hated around the world, we should try and figure out what we might be doing to provoke such a response. 

Self-analysis is sorely lacking in today's world. What we get instead are non-stop analyses of the other, analyses that are often self-serving, misinformed, and close off the possibility of dialogue. Social media appears to reinforce this sad state of affairs in ugly ways. 

The second way we love our enemies is to discover the good in them. King argues that the most hateful, spiteful person has something good in him. The contemporary tendency to divide the world into "good" and "evil" camps with no gray area makes King's admonition seem quaint. But if you think about it, the failure of most of us to see the good in others does little more than produce never ending strife, a condition that benefits only the ruling class that can avoid accountability while the masses metaphorically (and sometimes literally) stab each other in the back. 

The third way we can love our enemies is the most difficult, yet also the most powerful: when the opportunity presents itself to defeat our enemy, that is when we should NOT do it. All of us have opportunities to "get back at" those from whom we have suffered real or imagined harms. For King, real love is to resist the great temptation to strike back. Social media once again makes something like this all the more difficult, as it is rooted in the pathological desire to crush or "own" one's enemies. Perhaps we could get good practice at resisting the temptation to strike back at enemies simply by hitting the delete key more often or counting to ten before we hit send. 

At the national/global level, what would the United States be like today if we had taken King's advice after the attacks of September 11, 2001? We have now lived through almost two decades of foreign policy rooted in striking back at the "official" evil, with no end in sight for the so-called "war on terror." Earlier in July, the House Armed Services Committee, in a bipartisan vote, approved a $740 billion military budget while also trying to impede attempts to withdraw from Afghanistan. We have spent trillions of dollars, lost and otherwise traumatized many thousands of lives here and abroad, and perhaps forever lost the ability to claim a moral high ground as we normalized drone strikes, sacrificed Constitutional freedoms in the name of security,  and kept people incarcerated in Guantanamo for years without charges. I suspect that if King were alive during all of this, he would have urged us to consider not just what our actions did to the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Isis, but what they did (and continue to do) to US. 

Why should we love our enemies? After answering the practical question of how to love our enemies, King then shifts to the more theoretical question of why we should do so. There are three reasons. First, "hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe." King give the example of driving on the highway and being blinded by a driver in the opposite lane flashing the high beams. The tendency is to want to respond by flashing our own, but that only escalates and makes the situation more dangerous. As King puts it, at some point we need to learn how to "dim the lights" in order to ramp down instead of build up hate and evil. 

Second, hate distorts the personality of the hater. As King argued, "We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate." One of the great tragedies of the pandemic is that people have politicized basic health advice and used it to divide us further; I watched an Oshkosh City Council meeting in which some people opposed to masking requirements spoke with a rage that seemed to make it impossible for them to understand how their own behavior impacts other people. Conversely, I've heard some pro-mask advocates openly wish that mask opponents get coronavirus and die.  

The young Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered many sermons at the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955 he worked with Rosa Parks and others to organize the Montgomery bus boycott, a critical event that put civil rights issues on the national agenda. 

Finally, King argues that we should love our enemies because doing so has a redemptive power to it. He argues that the only way to transform people is to love them even when they display outward hate. No one, not even Dr. King, was or is under the illusion that haters can be transformed overnight. But if I hear Dr. King correctly, he's saying that nothing else has ever produced any kind of long term change in the character of individuals or even nations. 

Aware that an argument for loving enemies could be interpreted as giving in meekly to oppression, the final part of King's sermon addressed what kind of civic behavior flows from people operating out of love. Speaking specifically to the experience of African-Americans, he argues that there are three major choices available: violence, acquiescing or giving in, or organizing mass nonviolent resistance. 

King opposed physical violence not just on moral grounds, but as a practical matter. He saw it as futile, and not capable of building the alliances necessary to transform society. My guess is that if he were around today, he would be inspired by how support for #BlackLivesMatter cuts across racial lines. He would also argue that the movement makes its greatest strides when it remains peaceful, builds coalitions, and produces clear sets of demands for change in municipalities, states, and the national level. 

Video: Nina Simone "Why(The King of Love is Dead)"

I think that young activists often reject King's approach to producing change because they view it as a form of acquiescing to power. That's why speeches like "Loving Your Enemies" really need to be put back in wider circulation, because King EXPLICITLY rejected acquiesence as a response to oppression. 

What King supported was the organization of mass nonviolent resistance based on the principle of Love. He anticipated all of the current talk about systemic oppression: "When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system you love, but you seek to defeat the system."

What King struggled for was and is not easy. Love is beautiful, but difficult. It's not clear that we as an American society in the 21st century are up to the challenge of love. Too many of us would rather shout, float conspiracy theories, pander, enable each other's worst tendencies, wait for someone else to do the activist heavy lifting, and be content with short term fixes to systemic problems. In other places I have referred to this as our addiction to bullshit, bluster, and bullying. But if we really want change--meaningful and long lasting change--we can all start by practicing three acts of love articulated by King in Loving Your Enemies: 

*Engage in constant self-analysis. 

*Work hard to discover the good in ALL people. When communicating with them, always focus on that good. 

*Resist the temptation to defeat other people, even when a "golden opportunity" to do so presents itself. On social media, stop being fixated on "owning" or humiliating other people. The short term adrenaline buzz of doing so is not worth losing even the possibility of enlisting that person to support just and fair policies. 

"Loving Your Enemies" will probably never be Dr. Martin Luther King's most widely recognized speech. But it is the one we most need to hear right now. Read it. Share it with your friends, especially if they consider themselves to be activists. 

Video: Martin Luther King Loving Your Enemies (excerpt)