Today's Stories

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

Subscribe Online

The Musical Patriot

And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

By DAVID YEARSLEY

These days prizes and honors proliferate faster than quack grass after a rain and anti-American attitudes after an invasion. The United States must have the highest ratio of individual awards to population of any country in the world.

The Oscars is perhaps the most tedious public manifestation of the prize-mania that so afflicts our times. Only George C. Scott refused an Oscar for artistic reasons, declining the award because he believed competitions between actors a bad thing. 

In music the radical change began in the 18th-century, and we can see one clear example of it in the watershed figure of J. S. Bach.  In the late 1730s Bach was ambushed by a one-eyed critic named Johann Scheibe, who claimed Bach’s music was overly-complicated and old-fashioned.  Bach’s proxies, presumably in consultation with Bach himself, responded that the composer’s recently acquired honorary title should be enough to silence all detractors: “The Great Augustus, Elector of Saxony, bestows his favor upon Bach and rewards his deserts—this alone suffices for his praise.  Whoever is loved by so great and wise a prince must certainly possess true skill.”

Johann Mattheson, whose 1728 book Der musicalische Patriot inspired the name of this column, chuckled snidely at the silliness of such views. He likened sovereigns dispensing titles and trinkets to farmhands scattering corn for blind hens to peck at. If a musical functionary was lucky or opportunistic enough to get something in his beak, that should hardly elevate him in the esteem of his peers. Rather it was the enlightened opinion of what Mattheson called the Musical Republic—refined professionals and educated amateurs—that really counted.

All this brings me to Wayne Shorter’s recent apotheosis at the San Francisco Jazz Gala, held two weeks ago atop the Four Season Hotel off Market Street, celebrating the twenty-fifth year of this institution. It  brings one of the world’s great jazz festival to the city every fall, organizes a spring jazz season and summerfest, supports an internationally acclaimed ensemble musicians under the banner of the SFJazz Collective, and nurtures young musicians through its vital youth programs. 

The proof of this last, and perhaps most significant, aspect of the organization’s work was the septet of high school students from diverse backgrounds performing their own arrangements of many of Wayne Shorter’s compositions, demanding pieces both for ensemble playing and for improvising over.  Most of these youngeters’ complex and creative music making took place before dinner, as background music to the silent-auction and designer cocktail hour happening in the rooms outside the banqueting hall bandstand. But after dinner and before dessert the high schools did get the attention of the now-seated public, and their complex and creative reading of Shorter’s E. S. P. showed that SF Jazz is cultivating young musicians of promise.  Even Herbie Hancock, who took the stage after the kids had finished so he could introduce his friend Wayne Shorter, was truly impressed. Simply to navigate a tune like E. S. P. without being capsized by the speeding rapids of the tempo and the eddies of its harmony is a feat in itself; to imbue with purpose a form that is already flirting with abstraction is a real achievement for anyone at any age.

Wayne Shorter was himself something of prodigy.  Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he sat in with alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt at the Lloyd’s Manor jazz club in his hometown in 1951 at the age of seventeen after having played the tenor only two years. Stitt immediately asked Shorter to go on the road with him, but Shorter declined the offer so he could pursue his undergraduate music degree at N.Y.U.

Lloyd’s Manor appears in American Pastoral by Philip Roth, that great chronicler of Newark and its destruction. Roth was born in Newark in the same year as Shorter. Both celebrate their seventy-fifth birthdays this year. Lloyd’s was, according to Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, a “place where few whites other than a musician’s reckless Desdemona would venture,” and where teenagers’ were warned by their parents to avoid the place lest they be “stabbed to death by a colored guy ‘high on reefer,’ whatever that meant.” I guess Roth never ventured into Lloyd’s and these two great products of Newark’s unrecognizable past never met during their youth, or perhaps not since then either.

As I sat listening to the SFJazz High School All-Stars with the likes of former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter, nearby I couldn’t help but consider the great gulf that separated Lloyd’s Manor from the Four Season’s Ball Room, and ask myself if Shorter might have been thinking back to his youthful 1951 encounter with Stitt as well. Instead of the chaotic ferment of the urban jazz club, we had the marble floors and climate control of corporate hospitality; instead of heroin and weed, we had Roederer champagne and Blue Coat Gin; instead of barbequed ribs we had Pepper Crusted Filet of Beef, Veal Jus, Served with Wild Mushrooms, Red Wine Risotto and Broccoli Rabe, with Drizzle of Blue Cheese Fondue.

The institutionalization of jazz could not be more sharply reflected than in a comparison of those evenings separated by an entire continent and half a century. I would not begin to claim that the caliber of the playing in San Francisco was rendered inauthentic by the opulent bad-taste of the Four Seasons venue, nor made harmless by the fact that the threat of violence did not hang in the hotel air. A product of a middle-class musical upbringing, I perhaps self-servingly reject the notion that struggle and deprivation yield more profound music and musicians, though I also recognize that, say, negro spirituals plumb depths unknown in the whitebread hymns of the suburban Episcopal church.  But it is still worth remarking on the fact that Shorter and his teenage successors had learned and displayed their craft under very different circumstances.

The institutionalization of jazz goes hand in hand with the marketing of it.  Out at the silent auction I abjured the high-priced grape juice on offer and duly grabbed a Brother Thelonious Monk, a north Coast Ale whose label kits the be-bop pianist and composer out in a Trappist habit and a stylized version of the fez he often wore, puts a dark beer in a Belgian glass in one hand and a memento mori skull in the other. What would Sphere have thought of it?  The post-modern bricolage is one thing, but the circled R for Registered Trademark hovering off the final S of Thelonious is nowhere, man, just nowhere. To inflict that burning stigma on the great iconclast is a sin for which the brewers will burn in hell.  This didn’t stop me from drinking it, though — dark mahogany and very alcoholic and as bitterly acid as Monk’s piano style.

Thelonius in hand, I meandered through the auction. My vote for most incongruous item went to item 312, the Nascar Package—a $7,500 value.  I imagined Thelonious on the Daytona Speedway infield, basking in the ubiquituous racial harmony and shared musical aesthetic of a Jim Crow afternoon and, like everyone else, waiting for a ten-car wreck to brighten the Florida afternoon still further.  Or how about Charlie Parker cackling like a banshee behind the wheel of the orange and black Home Depot #20?

Farther on, I was tempted by the Fender Strat Squier signed by John Lee Hooker and Carlos Santana, but that auction started at $10,000.  Peanuts for many of those in attendance, but no one had entered a bid.

All this fun and foolishness went towards furthering the good work of the foundation and other important developments now underway, projects that promise to secure the art form’s position high atop the city’s cultural establishment. Donors here want to surpass the prestige and money accorded jazz in New York, especially at Lincoln Center.

I had been graciously included in the evening by two important San Francisco patrons of jazz. I couldn’t help but look over at my hosts as they dined with Shorter and Hancock and various princes of the city. According to Michelle Mercer’s trippy, adulatory, and sometimes insightful 2004 biography of Shorter, he is a notoriously demanding conversationalist, refusing to engage in superficial banter, but instead pursuing often eccentric lines of inquiry. I saw him nod a few times.

This all had much of the royal banquet to it, and after the High School All-Stars had played, it was time for the honoree to receive his crystal achievement award and then grace the audience with some of his own Musique de Table. Shorter will be seventy-five in August, though he looks and plays much younger than his years.  Hancock offered a touching tribute to his best friend, and then Wayne joined the of the SF Jazz Collective, including alumnus of the group and of the High School All-Stars Joshua Redman, a local jazz hero gone on to an already illustrious career. First Redman then Shorter took long and increasingly frenetic solos on a Aung San Suu Kyi, a Shorter composition written more than a decade ago in honor of the eponymous Nobel Peace Prize laureate.  The more contained, even contemplative, version recorded by Shorter and Hancock on their 1997 album 1 + 1, for which both the pair one a Grammy, was here recast as an urgent even joyful dance, the contours of its eastern-inflected pentatonic scale energized by strident syncopation. Heard just a week after the typhoon in Burma, this incarnation of the piece took on an even more marked aspect of the Buddhist Shorter’s search for “indestructible happiness —even in the face of droughts and external catastrophes.” Shorter’s life has been one of many tragedies, including the deaths of a daughter and a wife. But joy seems to well up in his compositions and improvisations even in their most introspective moments. There is something unbounded, even irreverent in his rejection of melancholic.  I marvel at his conviction, perhaps all the more as melancholy is one of my favorite musical topics.

After Shorter’s venerable Footprints closed out the short two-piece set, the tuxedoed and evening-gowned audience rose to its feet.  All nine Grammies awarded Shorter from the music industry were suddenly outshone by the gracious, heartfelt appreciation of princes.  And in spite of the distractions of the court trappings, I couldn’t help but feel the applause as a wave of sincerity.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu  
      

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