David Rovics
&
David Rovics
From ANDRAS JONES: It’s been one crazy week with David Rovics on Radio8Ball with our guests Jim Page, Elana Freeland, Dan Epstein, Rick Fellows, Skyler Hawley Blake and the FB Posts of Danny Kelly.
If you go down the rabbit hole with this one you’ll learn about David and about me and about Olympia. You’ll hear about rising fascism, labor organizing, white supremacy in Major League Baseball, the death of John McCain, the crimes of ICE, the growing housing crisis and rising rents. You’ll hear about heroes from history and the villains of our time. Oh…and anti-semitism.
Sitting here in my Oly apartment staring out at the snow that’s been falling steadily since yesterday afternoon I’ve gotta say, I’m really looking forward to the Kendl Winter episode that starts tomorrow. It’s not easy walking for a week in David’s songs. I love ’em and the man who wrote them but, damned if this week hasn’t been a lesson in the fractured left. We had Elana talking about the ways she felt ostracized by Olympia for her work with geo-engineering. We had Rick Fellows on who politely avoided discussing his recent scapegoating at Media Island in Olympia. And then of course there were the online attacks directed at me leading to, just last night, a bartender at one of my favorite places in Olympia going on a tear on my FB page accusing me of being a “zionist”, a word she clearly intended as an epithet, even though I have never defined myself with this word. If Olympia wasn’t such an anti-semitic town people would be responding to her and other attacks directed at me as they would if a person of color speaking out against racism was targeted with a racist term, or a woman speaking out about sexism was targeted with a sexist term, or a member of the LGBTQ community speaking out about homophobia was targeted with a homophobic term. But when it comes to anti-semitism Olympia is silent as the snow, and just as white.
It has been suggested by some that I “wanted” this drama or that I orchestrated it. It is true that I wanted and do want a conversation about anti-semitism in Olympia and beyond. Wanting a conversation is not the same as wanting to be lied about and attacked and tarred with inflammatory and inaccurate labels. Wanting my neighbors to understand the experience of Jews in this town is not the same as wanting to feel weird walking into a venue where guests of Radio8Ball perform regularly because the bartender there has made it clear that she holds me responsible for the war crimes of a foreign nation that I do not live in or offer any support to in any way beyond being born into a Jewish family in America.
What I want is to live in a town where a Jew can point out anti-semitism without being attacked by people who insist they aren’t anti-semitic. And I want Olympia to be that town.
May this document of a time and a place and the people in it serve future folks in working this shit out.
POP ORACLE Song of The Day (February 9, 2019): FEISTY HEART “Days Are Gone”
Today in Yemen
There’s a heat wave in Portland, the sun shines down
Sprinklers are running all over town
It’s hot, too, in Yemen, but lucky for us
Nobody here was on that bus
(Where) 29 children died today
Here the buses pass by and they pass by again
In Saada the bus left, came back, and then
A school trip, a picnic as the bombings go on
I guess they should have stayed home, now they’re all
gone
Fragments of bodies and fragments of bombs litter the
market square
On most of the fragments if you wash off the blood you’ll
see “USA” written there
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