The Left
“Obama and the suicidal left”
William Jelani Cobb asks: “Why it is that a group of progressives would spend about 40 minutes discussing how to critique Barack and virtually no time discussing how to elect him?” Perhaps the most biting irony is a kind of reverse affirmative action, where Obama seems to face a higher bar for support than the white candidates who preceded him.
Israeli musicians bullied, not bowed
Many an unkind word has been said about the late scholar and radical Palestinian activist Edward Said, but at least he firmly believed in the necessity of cultural contacts between Arabs and Israelis, so much so that he co-founded (with Daniel Barenboim) the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, one of the most notable peace-oriented artistic endeavors ever to have come out of
Project Censored PS
Peter Phillips of Project Censored has responded to my critique, in which I point out that the director of an entity nominally devoted to fighting censorship actually supports censorship, as long as it’s done in Cuba. You’ll find Phillip’s largely boilerplate response, which fails to engage any of the points I made, at the bottom of the original post. He
Herbert on Project Censored
While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship… I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list
Readers respond
In the September ’08 Jazz Times, there are two letters in response to my column on jazz and politics (pdf here). Both focus on my unsurprising and by now barely controversial endorsement of Barack Obama. The first letter is a classic: Regarding David R. Adler’s recent Solo guest column: Although most jazz devotees may reside on the left, there are
Blasted from all sides
As you probably know already, protesters disrupted an Obama speech in Florida and held up a banner saying, “What about the black community, Obama?” Marc Ambinder reports the meat of the exchange here. The thing to note about these protesters is that they do not represent the black community — they represent the Uhuru Movement. Their banner sporting this URL
Know your enemy
And über-fashionable leftist author Naomi Klein does not, according to Jonathan Chait’s dismantling of The Shock Doctrine: Klein’s relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. She pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she
Greens part two
Rosa Clemente, the hip-hop activist who is now Cynthia McKinney’s vice presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket, made an acceptance speech this weekend during which she offered unequivocal praise for the Weather Underground, Mutulu Shakur (currently serving a 60-year term for his involvement in the BLA’s notorious 1981 Brinks heist) and other supposed paragons of progressivism in America.