I almost put this in the music forum but......I didn't.
Anyway............enjoy.
I did.
http://www.jetstobrazilonline.com/
March 31, 2003
On Thursday, March 27, students at New York University walked out of class in opposition to the U.S. led war in Iraq. The following people spoke to the crowd on the east side of Washington Square Park:
Molly Nolan (intl sitatuation)
Sherene Seikaly (iraq/palestine/activism)
Walter Johnson (freedom)
Rebab Abdulhadi (israel/us/palestine)
Adam Green (african americans and the war)
Peaceful Tomorrows (9/11 Families Against War)
Robin Kelley (complicity of university?)
Justine Stevenson representing the Peace Coalition
I was invited to throw down alongside them and read the following speech:
SEE HOW WE ARE *
Forgive me if I tell you what you already know. I am not a public speaker. I am a singer who has no song for this time. I have used every match and cannot catch fire. I say this with all due shock and awe:
As a citizen I enjoy more privileges than just about anyone in the world - wonderful products wait for me in the stores; the roads to them are clear and well-maintained; water runs freely from the tap. I don't think anything will happen to me while I sleep. My right to speak and assemble is a sure thing.
The difficulty of being an American might seem ridiculous, even envious, to someone outside this country, who knows only the business or muzzle-end of its stick. Better to be safely behind the hand of democracy than within its pulping grasp.
Here every day is the same - just now birds are chirping; a dog barks; the sun is shining on the buildings; someone is playing a radio for its music.
It is the kind of quiet in which attuned people hear violence, beneath this radiant thrum of calm. Where are the tanks and bombs and bodies and havoc?
The late show hosts have pinned flags to their lapels, a whisper of assent. They make French jokes Ð anything that is not exactly there, not exactly the matter. Everything becomes louder for what is not said. This is the vacuum of the "Living Room War" and its architects could not be happier.
It's like a diptych of truth and illusion: one half Norman Rockwell, the other Hieronymus Bosch. We are handed the Rockwell yet we perceive the Bosch. I doubt the American imagination can exceed the reality of its victims who are now enjoying that nightmare made flesh. So we are told to cling to the Rockwell, that it might come to pass.
But look at history - look at Art History! Rockwell was exploded by Pollock, his tidy lines and white picket fences blown to scribble and elliptical spatter; he exists now in an old folks' home like a delusional uncle.
The dream cannot be sustained because it is without truth : Vodka doesn't make you handsome and guns don't make you stay hard longer. You kiss as good as you kiss. In the end we are naked and pimply and sometimes hot.
Those with sense and feeling now lapse into sur-reality, because the injustice seems to outweigh the beautiful soul of the world.
We demonstrate because they have taken away language and curated the atrocity show with ivory trinkets and heathen caricature.
Paula Zahn is smiling, Wolf Blitzer is scowling. A strapping male anchor has been called away from his duties at the Sports Desk to walk NBC's topographical map of the Middle East and explain our operations to us : he straddles Mesopotamia with one foot in the Tigris and the other in the Euphrates. The situation is this:
We have lost Geraldo Rivera somewhere near Tarzana. Ted Koppel has retro-fitted his wig to suggest sand and bravery. A retired general emerges from make-up with his pointer, ready to articulate the finer points of our new sterling weaponry...
A friend pointed out that if a missile can take out a person on the 10th floor of a building, doesn't that floor then fall through the nine below it and take down everything above it. Did we not see the effects of precision-guided aircraft just two years ago? Isn't each person an integral part of the overall architecture, a floor in the house of the world?
Michael Moore has gone too far : he has offended the Academy by not thanking God or his agent.
We live at such a great distance, the casual observer risks whiplash jerking his head back and forth between the two halves of the diptych. The images and bids for our attention come in from all directions; so we are dazzled and stunned and driven indoors.
And still we are fortunate to have an indoors; to not have our homes turned inside out by missiles or be bulldozed into concussed rubble; to not be counted as acceptable or collateral losses, but rather as viable citizens with working toes and fingers.
If we die, it is likely to be reported. It will warrant space and language, a sorrowful moment in others' thoughts: loving father, esteemed daughter, dutiful son. Landscape gardener, Clairvoyant, Systems Analyst, Student.
I stand here because I am having trouble enjoying my freedoms; because we all cannot go home and wait it out, and do not wish to get drunk and sleep it off somewhere.
I stand here because I am a singer and I cannot sing for the silent screaming everywhere else and now in my head; and because American babies do not shine brighter than Iraqi or Palestinian babies; because the value of life is given a poor rate of exchange in the world market, and the Bank of America does not value my songs or heed those screams calling from every corner of a dissolving world.
I am speaking when I should be singing, and we are huddled beneath a volley of chemical and biological lies in a torn raincoat because that is our weather -- even now -- as Spring breaks from the throat of a newly happened Finch; and because people are dying all the time for the crime of having lived; because the hats have been switched and fastened tight with solemn oaths and sworn affadavits, the fear ratcheted up to a hysteria where "orange" is Morse for "non-white". The hand has been forced, players conscripted, villains shaped and victims made, in the interests of a freedom that cannot arrive Laser-Guided just as it cannot be received by people who have lost their hands to the retractable blade of our good will.
Special thanks to NYU Peace Coalition and Students for Justice in Palestine!
*(Title from a song by X, the band)
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Linear Mode
