Jon Wiener | The Nation
Irvine Muslim Students Convicted of Shouting at Israeli Ambassador
In a trial that never should have taken place, ten Muslim students at UC Irvine were convicted Friday of disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador on campus last spring.
The twelve-person jury deliberated for two days before agreeing with the prosecutor that coordinated shouts of protest against Israeli policy had violated a law against disrupting public meetings. The students and their supporters argued that they had exercised their freedom of speech, that Ambassador Michael Oren’s talk had been delayed only briefly and that the students were prosecuted because they were Muslims.
The judge sentenced the students to fifty-six hours of community service and up to three years of probation. The students were found guilty of two misdemeanors, including one conspiracy charge for planning their protest.
Oren appeared on campus (where I teach history) in February 2010. As Oren began his speech, a student stood up and shouted “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!” Police removed him from the room, and then another rose and shouted at Oren, “You, sir, are an accomplice to genocide!” He was removed, and nine more followed. A total of eleven were arrested. (One pled guilty to reduced charges, so only ten went to trial.) The longest interruption, defense attorneys told the jury, lasted only eight seconds, and the total amount of time taken up by the eleven statements—combined—was roughly one minute.
Video of the event shows supporters of the ambassador in the audience also shouting, further delaying the proceedings, but they were not removed, arrested or put on trial. The ambassador went on to deliver his speech after a delay of about twenty minutes.
The convictions made headlines around the world—Google News lists 465 news articles. It wasn’t just the Islamic and left-wing press that objected to the trial. The Los Angeles Times in an editorial called it “a case that never should have been filed.” Even the Orange County Register, a Republican newspaper, said the verdict “chills speech,” and called the case an example of “selective prosecution” that had been “used arbitrarily.”
A group of 100 faculty members, including five deans, had asked Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas to drop the charges, arguing that the students had already been punished by the university—which also banned the Muslim Student Union for one quarter last year—and that further punishment was wrong. The group Jewish Voice for Peace also condemned the prosecution, delivering a petition with 5,000 signatures to the DA at the start of the trial.
The students are likely to appeal, keeping the case in the news for another year or two.
When Cops Lie: A Report From Los Angeles
Cops lie. Under oath, on the witness stand. “I saw him reach for a gun.” “I found the drugs in his pocket.” But what happens when juries refuse to believe their testimony? Do cops ever get in trouble for fabricating evidence or lying under oath? Do they ever get charged with perjury?
The Los Angeles Times in a page-one story today named three LA sheriff’s deputies who jurors in a case in Compton, California, said had told “one lie after another” under oath. They said authorities should investigate the three.
The case involved a 19-year-old man arrested at a party at a house in South Los Angeles. Deputies testified at a preliminary hearing that when they arrived at the party, they saw the man run and then toss a loaded revolver on the roof of a garage. They said they ordered him to stop, and that he walked back to them and they then arrested him.
The defendant pleaded innocent and at his trial shouted, “Fingerprint the gun!” The gun was never fingerprinted.
Defense attorneys found that another guest at the party had videotaped the events, and that the video did not show the defendant running or throwing anything on the roof. The video showed him standing still when the deputies arrived and arrested him. The jury concluded the deputies had lied under oath. And the LA Times posted the video on its website.
Are the three deputies who backed up each others’ testimony going to be prosecuted for perjury? Award-winning investigative reporter Jack Leonard of the Times reported that the sheriff’s captain told him that “the deputies made errors that will be addressed with additional training,” but that “their actions were not criminal.” In the meantime, one of the three has been promoted to detective.
The defendant, meanwhile, spent more than a month in jail awaiting trial, at which he was found not guilty.
Credit goes to Jack Leonard for writing the story, and to the LA Times editors for putting it on page one—this is exactly why we need local newspapers.
Should Israel Arm Kurdish Terrorists?
First came the news that advisers to Israel’s foreign minister had recommended that Israel provide arms for the Kurdish terrorist group PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which has been fighting an armed struggle against Turkey for an autonomous Kurdistan. The idea was for Israel to punish Turkey for expelling the Israeli ambassador, after Israel refused to apologize for its raid on the Gaza flotilla, in which nine Turkish citizens were killed. That news was first revealed a week ago in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and then in the widely read Haaretz (but never published in the New York Times.)
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “did not deny or confirm the plan,” according to Haaretz. His office said that Foreign Minister Avidgor Lieberman was considering only a “theoretical option in case of an escalation” and that “a decision will be made only and if necessary.” Netanyahu added that his goal was to improve relations with Turkey.
Now the head of the PKK has announced the group would not accept Israeli arms until Israel apologizes for helping the Turkish government capture the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999.
Of course if Israel did arm the PKK, it could be designated a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” by the US State Department. State Sponsors of Terrorism, which include Syria, Iran, and Cuba, are subject to sanctions by the United States, including a ban on arms-related exports and sales, and prohibition of economic assistance by the United States. That would certainly constitute a change in US-Israeli relations.
The same Israeli advisors who recommended arming the PKK suggested a second way to punish Turkey for expelling the Israeli ambassador: “offer assistance to the Armenians and file UN reports against Turkey for violating the human rights of Turkey’s minorities.” The issue here is that, to date, Israel has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide—in deference to the Turkish government, once its closest ally in the Muslim world. That refusal has been especially galling since Hitler himself considered the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians to provide a model of sorts for the Third Reich’s campaign against the Jews. In 1939, a month before Germany invaded Poland, Hitler famously said “Who today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
In conclusion, I offer two modest suggestions: (1) Israel would be wise not to arm the PKK; (2) truth and justice would be served by Israel finally recognizing the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians.
The End of the Jerry Lewis Telethon—It's About Time
This Labor Day, for the first time in forty-five years, there won’t be a Jerry Lewis telethon on TV. It will be a great day for people with disabilities.
The problem with the Jerry Lewis telethon was not that he tried to help people with muscular dystrophy. The problem was the way Jerry Lewis did it. Yes the telethon raised a lot of money. But it also perpetuated destructive stereotypes. Jerry’s message was simple: “crippled children deserve pity.” His critics offered an alternative: “people with disabilities deserve respect.”
Every year it was the same. Jerry did his telethon shtick, parading little kids in wheelchairs across the Las Vegas stage, making maudlin appeals for cash, alternatively mugging and weeping, and generally claiming to be a friend to the doomed.
The pitch was always for “Jerry’s kids.” But two-thirds of the clients of the Muscular Dystrophy Association were adults, and they didn’t like being referred to as “Jerry’s kids.” That’s what Laura Hershey said in 1997—she was one of the activists who organized annual protests outside the telethon. She died in 2010.
All that money was supposed to find what Jerry called “a cure.” Every year he said “We’re closer than ever to a cure.” But every doctor and nurse will tell you the same thing: there is no cure. In the program for the 2011 annual meeting of the Muscular Dystrophy Coordinating Committee, the word “cure” does not appear.
What people with the disability need is help with their symptoms and with mobility. Their quality of life can be improved, their symptoms can be reduced. They also need “accessible public transportation and housing, employment opportunities and other civil rights that a democratic society should ensure for all its citizens.” That’s what Mike Ervin says—he calls himself “a renegade Jerry’s Kid” who was an official telethon poster child in the 1960s.
Some highlights of the telethon (thanks in part to Michael Sragow):
1973: Jerry holds up a child with muscular dystrophy and announces, “God goofed, and it’s up to us to correct His mistakes.”
1977: Jerry is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian efforts, especially the telethon, by Representative Les Aspin (D-WI).
1983: President Reagan gets in on the act. Photos show him posing with Jerry and the official muscular dystrophy poster child. The kid is in a wheelchair. He is only 6 years old, but they dressed him in a three-piece suit and a bow tie for the occasion.
1986: Jerry responds to critics. When a female writer for the Montreal Gazette described his performance as “hyperactive, dated slapstick,” Jerry tells the press, “When they get a period, it’s really difficult for them to function as normal human beings.”
For me, the worst moment of the telethon came in 1972 when John and Yoko appeared. They played some good music—“Imagine,” and a reggae version of “Give Peace a Chance.” But they were there for a political reason: President Nixon had been trying to deport them for almost a year, and they were desperate to say in the USA. So to prove they were deserving of residency, they stopped hanging out with Jerry Rubin and instead embraced Jerry Lewis. That’s why Lennon told the telethon audience “Jerry is one of our favorite comedians.”
Now it’s over: no more “Jerry’s kids.” It’s about time.
Some resources:
“The Kids are Alright”
“From Poster Child to Protester”
“Bloggers Protesting Pity”
Laura Hershey’s website
“Muscular Distrophy: Treatment and Drugs”\
The Trouble With Tomatoes: Slave Labor (and That Cardboard Taste)
The tomato is in trouble. The tomatoes in Big Macs and Taco Bell tacos and in supermarkets, especially in the winter, all come from the same place: South Florida. “Tomatoland,” Barry Estabrook calls it—that’s the title of his new book. Those tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery”—that’s what the chief assistant US attorney there says. And there’s one other problem: those tomatoes taste like cardboard.
Tomato plants don’t like it in Southern Florida. “From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective,” Estabrook says, “you would have to be an idiot” to try to grow tomatoes commercially there. The soil, Mark Bittman writes, is like “a lousy beach,” sandy and poor in nutrients. The humid climate provides breeding ground for voracious insect pests.
It takes a lot to grow a tomato in the sand of South Florida: tons of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers. Florida, Estabrook reports, uses about eight times as many chemicals per acre on tomatoes as California.
Pesticides and herbicides are bad for the environment, and also for the tomato workers. But they aren’t the workers’ biggest problem. “If you have ever eaten a tomato during the winter months,” Estabrook writes, “you have eaten a fruit picked by a slave.” The chief assistant US Attorney in Fort Myers, Douglas Molloy, says that’s not just a metaphor, “that is a fact.” He has “six to twelve slavery cases” in the tomato industry at any given time. In recent years, more than a thousand slaves have been freed there. Undoubtedly, there are many more who haven’t.
The pay is miserable. When two growers offered to pay workers a penny a pound more, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange told them they couldn’t do it; if they did, they would be fined $100,000. The workers live in squalid trailers with faulty plumbing. Child labor and other abuses are rampant.
Yet from October to June, virtually all the field-grown tomatoes in supermarkets come from Florida. One billion pounds of tomatoes. They are picked when they are green; the only reason they are red in the stores is that they’ve been gassed with ethylene, which changes their color.
And there’s that other problem with tomatoes grown in Southern Florida: they have no flavor. They are bred to be indestructible. Estabrook saw tomatoes falling off a truck going 60 mph; when he stopped to examine the tomatoes that hit the road, he says, they “looked smooth and unblemished. Not one was smashed.”
But the tomato workers have a wonderful grassroots group or organizers and activists fighting the growers: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) (“Immokalee” rhymes with “broccoli”) and their Campaign for Fair Food. The campaign has had some huge victories. Four years of protests against Taco Bell culminated in 2005 with the company agreeing to meet all the demands of the campaign, starting with better pay: the percentage of the retail price that now goes to the workers has nearly doubled. Also, an enforceable Code of Conduct has been established, and the CIW is part of the investigative body that monitors worker complaints.
McDonald’s signed an even better agreement in 2007, and Burger King followed in 2008. So did Sodexo, which runs dining halls at hundreds of schools and colleges. All have promised not to deal with growers who tolerate serious worker abuses, and to a pay a price for their tomatoes that supports a living wage.
This year the campaign is taking on the supermarkets. Whole Foods is the only one thus far to join. Trader Joe’s has refused, and the Campaign for Fair Food has made them the target of nationwide demonstrations this summer. The Trader Joe’s Truth Tour just finished up in California, and is now heading east. Next come protests at Trader Joe’s in Washington, DC; Baltimore; Philadelphia; and New York City. Those demonstrations start Tuesday, August 2.
Also targeted: Stop & Shop, Giant, and Kroger, which next to Walmart is the biggest food retailer in the country (and owns Ralph’s in California). The campaign has model letters to send or deliver to these stores.
The Campaign’s Fair Code of Conduct includes informational sessions for workers. Estabrook reports at his website that he went to one recently in Immokalee, along with fifty migrant laborers: “I learned that I had a right to earn a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and could take regular breaks in a shady area provided by the farm, including a lunch break.… For some of my work, I would get an extra penny per pound for the tomatoes I picked—which amounted to a 50 percent raise. I was informed that sexual harassment would not be tolerated. And finally I received a card with the number of a 24-hour confidential help line.” None of this happened before the Coalition’s recent victories.
As for the Florida tomato, it’s possible that modern science will someday come up with a new breed that not only can be transported long distances but actually tastes good. In the meantime, it’s tomato time at local farmers’ markets everywhere, and also in the backyards of those wise enough to have planted their own tomatoes a few months ago.
Gary Shteyngart Interview—The Future, With Fox Prime Ultra and the Bipartisan Party: A Super Sad True Love Story
Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, was named a best book on more than forty end-of-the-year lists. It’s out now in paperback. Jon Wiener spoke with him on KPFK 90.7FM in Los Angeles on July 6.
Q: Your novel Super Sad True Love Story is set in “the near future,” when everybody wears a pendant around their neck called an “apparat.” What does the apparat do?
A: It’s a wonderful invention that ranks everybody. When I enter a bar in downtown Manhattan, my entire history is broadcast to everybody, and immediately everyone knows I’m the eighteenth ugliest man in the room but I have the fourth-best credit rating.
What are politics like in your version of “the near future”?
Everything’s great! There’s only one party, the Bipartisan Party, it’s a rabidly right-wing party. The world is divided into two classes: the High Net Worth Individuals—the “H.N.W.I.”, a very small part of the population, and, everybody else, also known as “L.N.W.I.”
Tell us about the media in your version of future.
We have the New York Lifestyle Times, a collection of advertisements. The last two channels are Fox Liberty Prime, which is like our Fox News, and Fox Liberty Ultra, which beyond anything we’ve yet experienced. But mostly what people do is stream about themselves. Everyone has a corporate sponsor, and everyone tries to make funny newscasts about themselves while slipping in the names of their corporate sponsors.
In this world you have placed our hero, Lenny Abramov.
Lenny is not a High Net Worth Individual, but he does have a job—he works for a company that thinks they’ve developed a cure for death. It costs 20 billion Yuan—the dollar is worthless, so most people use the Yuan. The company calls it “indefinite life extension—exclusive immortality assistance for High Net Worth Individuals.”
Lenny’s “hopelessly cute” girlfriend Eunice doesn’t read books. Where did you get this idea?
Like Lenny, I’m the owner of a wall of books in my apartment. A young man in his early 20s came up to repair my cable, and he said “Oh man, why you got all those books here?” Then he looked at my television: “… and you only got a 25 inch TV!” It was very emasculating. I realized that I come from the last generation when books were loved and cherished.
The Wall Street Journal described Super Sad True Love Story as “a funny book about the financial crisis.” Is that the way you would describe it?
I started writing this book in 2006 before the financial crisis. In my original draft, horrible things happen: Lehman Brothers fails, GM and Chrysler fail. Two years into writing this, all these things were actually happening. So I had to make things worse and worse. That’s one of the difficulties of writing a novel these days—there doesn’t seem to be a present left to write about. Everything is the future. That makes writing a novel difficult —it’s much easier to write a blog about something.
The Village Voice called Super Sad True Love Story “the finest piece of anti-iPhone propaganda ever written.”
I was a person like Lenny, fairly analogue, and to research this book I hired an assistant who got me an iPhone, and got me on Facebook and Twitter. I went from somebody who didn’t want to have anything to do with this new technology to somebody who became wildly addicted to it. Then, after finishing this book, I began developing strategies for not being online all the time.
Do you have any advice for people with the same problem?
I am very lucky that, where I live in upstate New York, the main provider for the iPhone is ATT, which doesn’t really know how to connect signals to telephones. When I go to the country, just two hours north of Manhattan, there’s no reception. So my advice is to find an ATT iPhone and then go out into the countryside.
You say it’s important to stay away from your iPhone —and yet there is a Gary Shteyngart iPhone app.
Yes, but I’ve never used it and I don’t know how it works.
Carmageddon in LA: Closing the 405 Freeway This Weekend
In Los Angeles they’re calling it “Carmageddon”: closing ten miles of the San Diego Freeway, the fabled “405,” from West LA to the San Fernando Valley, for fifty-five hours over the weekend to tear down a bridge as part of a freeway widening project.
Half a million cars usually take that route over the weekend, and it won’t be easy to find alternate routes, since the freeway crosses the Santa Monica mountains in one of only four passes, and the other three are two-lane streets.
The construction project will add one carpool lane northbound—at a cost of $1 billion. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said, "It'll help reduce congestion on one of the busiest freeway corridors in the region." But freeway experts and many commuters know that adding a lane never works. As soon as people find out it’s there, more cars head for the freeway, and it ends up just as congested as before. This is an indisputable scientific fact.
In my experience of thirty years of commuting on the 405 between West LA and Irvine, fifty-five miles each way, only one thing has significantly reduced traffic: the closing of the aerospace industry following its peak in 1987. That meant fewer people going to work at the McDonnell Douglas and other plants in Torrance, Huntington Beach, and El Segundo. The one thing that reduces rush hour traffic is unemployment. Firing tens of thousands of aerospace workers cut my commute time by five minutes. It wasn’t really worth it.
And of course LA could use $1 billion for the public schools, which sent layoff notices recently to 3,000 teachers, cutting $400 million from the budget.
People who live in the Valley and work on the weekend in West LA or Santa Monica—say, nurses at UCLA hospital—will have real problems this weekend. The legendary Santa Monica Farmer’s Markets on Saturday and Sunday will still be going—the See Canyon Fruit Ranch people from San Luis Obispo, for example, told me today that on Saturday they would be taking the Coast Hiway instead of the freeway to Santa Monica to bring their legendary Blenheim apricots to the market.
LAX will be operating, of course, but when I asked an Armenian airport cab driver for Beverly Hills Taxi what his strategy would be, he said, “Stay home.” He lives in Glendale, twenty miles away.
Staying home is what officials are telling everybody to do. “A good day for gardening and barbecuing” is the line. And with the American women in the World Cup finals Sunday morning at 11 LA time, TV sports will be better than usual. (The hapless Dodgers will be out of town, in Arizona, but on TV both Saturday and Sunday nights, for those who haven’t given up after owner Frank McCourt filed for bankruptcy two weeks ago.)
The other way to spend the weekend is watching the freeway bridge demolition on TV. Once the 405 is closed Friday night, eighty-five trucks will dump a fifteen-foot-deep bed of sand on the freeway underneath the bridge “to keep the lanes from being damaged by falling debris.” Then the bridge will be cut down the middle, longitudinally, and the pieces will be knocked down. "Falling concrete pieces should be no larger than basketballs," they say. Then the sand and the bridge pieces will be carted away, and the freeway will reopen Monday morning at 5 am.
Does anyone think this might not work?
Right now folks in LA are chuckling over the YouTube video of Hitler ranting about how hard it will be for him to get to LAX on Saturday to pick up his cousin.
John Lennon: NOT a Closet Republican
A guy named Fred Seaman is all over the conservative blogs today for a new documentary in which he claims that John Lennon was “a closet Republican” at the time he was shot. This seems unlikely.
First of all, who is Fred Seaman? He’d been a personal assistant to John and Yoko at the Dakota in the late seventies, but he’s also a convicted criminal. He was found guilty of stealing John Lennon’s personal belongings, including his diaries, after Lennon had been killed. He was sentenced to five years probation.
You might say that weakens his credibility.
What exactly were Lennon’s political views at the end of 1980? Late that November, Lennon spoke out on behalf of striking workers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. (The story is told in my book Come Together: John Lennon in His Time.) The strike was against Japan Foods Corporation, a subsidiary of the Japanese multinational Kikkoman, best known for its soy sauce. The US workers, primarily Japanese, were members of the Teamsters. In LA and San Francisco, they went on strike for higher wages. The shop steward of the LA local, Shinya Ono, persuaded John and Yoko to make a public statement addressed to the striking workers:
“We are with you in spirit.… In this beautiful country where democracy is the very foundation of its constitution, it is sad that we have to still fight for equal rights and equal pay for the citizens. Boycott it must be, if it is the only way to bring justice and restore the dignity of the constitution for the sake of all citizens of the US and their children.
“Peace and love, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York City, December, 1980.”
That was Lennon’s last written political statement. It doesn’t seem to be the work of a “closet Republican.”
Seaman says Lennon told him he was disillusioned with Jimmy Carter in 1980. Lots of people on the left were disillusioned with Jimmy Carter in 1980, and for good reasons. That didn't make you a Republican, closeted or otherwise.
In what turned out to be Lennon’s last interview, with RKO radio the afternoon of the day he was shot, he talked about “the opening up of the sixties.” He said “Maybe in the sixties we were naïve and like children and later everyone when back to their rooms and said, ‘we didn’t get a wonderful world of flowers and peace.… the world is a nasty horrible place because it didn’t give us everything we cried for.’ Right? Crying for it wasn’t enough.
“The thing the sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”
That interview was his last. Six hours later he was killed.
Fred Seaman tried to cash in on his Lennon connection with an earlier book, published twenty years ago. That one has been forgotten. This story will be too.
Bay of Pigs, 50 Years Later: The Lessons Kennedy Never Learned
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, April 17-18, 1961, when a CIA-trained army of Cuban exiles were sent by President Kennedy to overthrow Fidel Castro. Their humiliating defeat showed the world that Cubans would fight to defend their revolution, especially against an invasion sponsored by the United States. But that’s not the lesson Kennedy learned from his first great defeat as president.
Kennedy had campaigned in 1960 promising to remove Castro from power. The defeat at the Bay of Pigs did not change his mind about that. Instead, he ordered the CIA to find other ways to get rid of Fidel—ranging from sabotage of the Cuban economy to assassination. And planning began for another invasion, one that wouldn’t make the mistakes of the Bay of Pigs.
As the 1962 mid-term elections approached, Republicans denounced what they called Kennedy’s “do-nothing” policy toward Fidel since the Bay of Pigs. Reagan, Goldwater and William Buckley led conservatives in arguing for a new invasion, doing it right this time—using American troops instead of Cuban exiles, with massive firepower and bombing. The Senate and House both passed resolutions authorizing the use of the US military in a new invasion.
The Cubans’ response was to persuade their Soviet backers to install missiles on the island as a deterrent against another American invasion. Three weeks before the mid-term election, CIA spy planes photographed the new missile sites, and the Cuban missile crisis began.
Historians and journalists almost always describe Kennedy the winner of a mano-a-mano faceoff with Nikita Khrushchev, praising the way his steely resolve and strategic flexibility forced the Soviet leader to fold his cards and withdraw the missiles. But that perspective is too narrow. Yes, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles, but only in exchange for Kennedy’s pledge not to invade Cuba.
Reagan & Co. were outraged by this concession. Instead of giving up the plans to overthrow Castro, they argued, JFK should have used the Soviet missiles in Cuba as a pretext for launching another invasion of the island. Kennedy’s agreement, they said, would leave Fidel in power for decades. They were right, at least about that part. The real winner of the Cuban missile crisis was not JFK but rather Fidel.
Kennedy thus needed another country where he could demonstrate his resolve to use US military force (and counterinsurgency tactics) to defeat communist insurgents. After being defeated twice in Cuba—first at the Bay of Pigs, then in the missile crisis—he turned to a new arena: he would prove his toughness in Vietnam.
Bob Dylan in Beijing: No Sellout
Bob Dylan did not sell out to the Chinese government when he performed in Beijing on April 6. The “sellout” charge was made in the New York Times on Sunday by Maureen Dowd, along with several other people. The problem: Dylan submitted his set list to the Chinese culture ministry, according to the Guardian’s Martin Wieland in Beijing, and as a result the concert was performed “strictly according to an approved programme.”
That’s the reason, Dowd wrote, why Dylan did not sing what she called his “iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan thus was guilty of “a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family.”
The Daily Beast ran a feature headlined “Famous Sellouts,” with Bob Dylan in Beijing in the number-one spot, and William Langley wrote in the Telegraph that “Dylan without protest songs sounds about as useful as Hamlet without the soliloquy.”
But look at what Dylan did sing in Beijing, starting with “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”: that song describes a place “Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters/Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison/Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden.” You could call that a “protest song” if you wanted to.
He also sang “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” I would say that carries a pretty strong political charge.
And he sang “All Along the Watchtower”: “Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth/None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.” If you were looking for critical commentary on China today, this would work.
Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian who wrote Bob Dylan in America, says the people charging “sellout” are “clueless.” “Apparently, unless Dylan performs according to a politically-correct line, he is corrupt, even immoral,” Wilentz wrote at The New Yorker blog. “He is not allowed to be an artist, he must be an agitator. And he can only be an agitator if he sings particular songs.”
And besides, Wilentz says, there’s no real evidence the Chinese ever told him not to sing “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” All we know is that, like all foreigners seeking to perform in China, his appearance was approved by the culture ministry.
It’s true that Dylan did not follow the example of Bjork, who chanted “Tibet! Tibet!” at her concert in Shanghai in 2008. Maureen Dowd says Dylan in Beijing should have done something similar, like speaking out in defense of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and architect who has been arrested.
But “to demand that an artist make an incendiary statement is the worst kind of armchair moralizing,” Wilentz said in an interview on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles. “And what was the result of Bjork doing that? Foreign acts were not allowed into China for a long time. And it didn’t help Tibet. I don’t think anything Bob Dylan could have said onstage would have helped Ai WeiWei. But the songs he sang were about the kinds of oppression we live with, the kinds of difficulties that are out there—political, and not political. That’s what he does.”
Latest
-
October 1, 2013 - 6:32 PM ET
-
October 1, 2013 - 2:59 PM ET
-
October 1, 2013 - 1:02 PM ET
Blogs
Blog Roll
