Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

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

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From the Archives of the Musical Patriot

The War on Kitsch

By DAVID YEARSLEY

Among the music left in my grandmother’s piano bench is a “war edition” from 1917  of a sentimental love-song entitled “K-K-K-Katy” composed by Army Song Leader Geoffrey O’Hara. On the back page of the single-fold half-folio—a small format adopted says the publisher “to co-operate with the Government and to conserve paper during the War” since “Save! Save! Save is the watchword today”—is an advertisement for some other war-time offerings.  Among my favorite titles are the catchy “Just like Washington Crossed the Delaware General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine”; the forthright “We Stopped them at the Marne”; and my own favorite, “It’s a Long Way to Berlin, But We’ll Get There,” which turned out to be something of a hit when recorded by Arthur Fields that same year.

To judge from the songs, 1917 was  an optimistic year in the United States, far from the realities of Europe: no lyrics about No-Man’s Land, mustard gas, trench warfare.  And no, they didn’t get to Berlin.

The Second World War’s first popular anthem, at least as far as the U.S. was concerned, was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition and We’ll All be Free”—words and music by Frank Loesser; the text was based on the supposed utterance of a chaplain named Howell Forgy aboard the U.S.S. New Orleans at Pearl Harbor. This song may be more hard hitting than its World War One predecessors but it, too, seems hopelessly, laughably quaint now.

One is tempted to think of those as simpler times, to imagine that we would smile condescendingly at my grandparents if they were alive today, expecting similarly buoyant songs like, say, “I’ve Got a Sweetheart in the Northern Alliance” or “Daddy’s a Delta Force Hero.” But who can now deny that the American belief system appears miraculously to be intact?  Love of God (ours) and Smart Weapons (also ours) will deliver us from the forces of darkness.

Such are the prevailing surrealisms that one would hardly be surprised to see a renewal of similarly absurd and catchy lyrics updating the words and melodies 1917: “Rollover Mullah Omar, and tell Ossama the News/Uncle Sam gots a Daisy Cutter that’s Gonna Give Taliban the Blues.”

The mixture of naïve optimism, garden-variety patriotism, and bad taste is the fail-safe and seemingly eternal recipe for propagandistic war music: the grisly business ahead heralded by light, pattering melodies, imminently danceable rhythms, comfortable harmonies.

This is what we expect from the music that accompanies us to wars.  Tin Pan ally would hardly have welcomed a lyric such as Wilfred Owens “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” set so unsettlingly by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem of 1962, a work first performed for the rededication of the new Coventry Cathedral, a building bombed by the Germans in the Second World War.

Indeed, it is entirely appropriate that Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America“— a cancerous paean that had been in fairly stable remission in the body politic with only intermittent and predictable eruptions—should have metastasized into every corner of national civic musical life since September 11, from the 7th inning stretch of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series to Madonna on her Drowned World Tour to aged British rock stars staggering around Madison Square Garden.

Berlin first concocted “God Bless America” in 1918 as a chorus to one of his musicals, then exhumed it for Kate Smith in 1938 in advance of the second big war of the last century. It is a song whose harmonic and melodic profile— particularly the goose-stepping bass-line of the chorus—has always reminded me of the marginally more dreadful “Onward Christian Soldiers,” a hymn  extruded from Arthur Sullivan on a day off from the Savoy. Oh how I hate both tunes, these two steaming musical cesspools! And what a grim sight it has been to watch every musikant from Daniel Barenboim to Roger Daltry jump in with such apparent conviction.

It has to be admitted that “God Bless America” is more singable than the ungainly “Star-spangled Banner,” whose tune is anyway an English drinking song. Many prefer Berlin’s nationalist hymn to the similarly derivative “America”, which takes it melody from the British national anthem “God Save the King.” (Actually the shared ancestry of both sets of pieces nicely symbolizes the seemingly unshakeable geo-political alignment of Britain and the United Stated, an alliance so crucial to the War on Terrorism. “America” is the perfect musical encapsulation of the fact that the sun has still not set on the great English-speaking empire.”)

In the aftermath of September 11th The U. S. Army bands have been busy and Berlin’s ascendant national anthem has been the lynchpin of their repertoire. October 4th and 5th the Army’s marquee band traveled to New York where it received a rapturous reception at their Lincoln Center concert. The Army Chorus with soloist Tenor Staff Sgt. Steve Cramer sang “A Hero for Today” on the today Show, with the audience in Rockefeller Center plaza breaking into a chant of “U. S. A., U. S. A.” before the last of these rousing strains had faded. Tenor, Sergeant 1st Class Bob McDonald sang “God Bless America” at Ground Zero, describing how “the whole place had a sacred feel to it. It’s a burial ground with an element of otherworldliness.  There was also an element of humanity that was so strong.”

Another member of the Army Band claimed that Ground Zero reminded him of his first trip to the Grand Canyon.  “I knew it [Ground Zero] was there,” said Johnny Turpen. “I’d seen photos in magazines, film and video but I was still unprepared for the awesome vista before me when I was actually there.”

(This discourse goes back to Edmund Burke’s mid-eighteenth century account of the Sublime, that uplifting mixture of terror and awe with which European elites first aestheticized the geographies and forces and of the natural world, from the Alps to Earthquakes. The comparison to the Grand Canyon and the ubiquitous descriptions of the sanctity of the site begin to confirm my belief that Ground Zero should be left as it is. Ground Zero is already thronged with memorabilia hawkers and tourists with digital cameras. Terror-tourism could be very good for the New York economy.)

Yes, the early phases of war are filled with musical bluster and banality. A lone tenor emitting the ghastly strains of “God Bless America” over the hallowed hole in Lower Manhattan is the ultimate proof of the centrality of kitsch in propaganda.  Tiny Pan Alley could never have dreamt that one of its penny sheets would be taken up into the national liturgy.

The final gloss added to the Psalm 23 by Todd Beamer, leader of the assault on the cockpit on the doomed September 11th flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania speaks to the new lyric sensibility:  “Though I walk through the valley of death/ I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me, they rod and thy staff, they comfort me. … Let’s Roll!” It’s as if the greatest of Judeo-Christian musicians, the psalmist King David, puts down his lyre and takes up Rambo’s M-1. In his most recent national address, George Bush adopted that final motto with the utter lack of originality that is his trademark.  “Let’s roll!” now suffices for a declaration of perpetual war.

As for our present-day psalm at the top of charts: yes, I’m afraid we will continue to have to endure “God Bless America”—written at the piano by the Russian-born Berlin in the only key he could play in, F-sharp. (Noel Coward mistakenly claimed Berlin could play only in C major.) 

Even without Homer having told of the seductive voices of the Sirens, the attentive among us recognize the transgressive potential of song.  It is this furtive power that led the Army of the Potomac to ban the singing of the popular “When This Cruel War is Over” midway through the America Civil War. As always, truthful music will be a vital delivery system for dissent in the grim years ahead, in the endless, borderless War on Kitsch.

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 Omni. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu  

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