"Pop and Protest"

I watched the PBS program about protest in popular music this evening. It was good to see Chuck D put rap in a historical perspective. It was good that it wasn't a show about white people's music. But watching two hours about protest music on TV didn't do as much for me as hearing a single Phil Ochs song, and Phil wasn't mentioned once on the show. I am reminded of something I wrote to a Boston Globe reporter who had written an article lamenting the "lack of protest songs about the Iraq war." She was looking in the wrong place. Looking for protest music in the corporate industry makes as much sense as it would have made to look for protest writing in the Soviet era among members of the Soviet Writers' Union.

I believe that this is not a fascist country in its heart or its institutions. But it is being run by a fascist regime at the moment. Look up the definition in the dictionary. That's the elephant in the living room, folks. That's the bit of evidence that stuns me into silence, that leads me to being paranoid about one out of every two people I run into, the one who might have voted for W. You can hear this news on the street, but you won't see it on the TV, not even PBS, the poor bastards.