So Bruce Springsteen – a man I’ve admired since 1978 and The Wild, The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle – is supporting Kamala Harris. Those who follow this site will know my dismay does not arise from an equally deluded view that the Donald is any less committed to backing Israeli mass murder. Or that his being more likely to end Ukraine’s agony need not be weighed against his insane hostility to China and, more immediately ominous, Iran.
Or come to that, that any elected president truly runs the US of A.
Still, when one of the millionaire heroes of your youth comes right out and backs a billionaire-backed millionaire committed to continuing if not stepping up armed support for a genocidally racist rogue state, it kind of sticks in the throat.
It shouldn’t, I know. Didn’t George Orwell – who would himself go on to furnish Britain’s MI5 with the names of communist sympathisers – ask in his excellent essay, Benefit of Clergy, why those who admired Salvador Dali’s art felt they had to defend his vile traits, while those who detested said traits felt obliged to denigrate his work. Why, Orwell asked, is it so hard to accept that Dali was at one and the same time a great painter and execrable human being?
Not, I hasten to add, that Bruce has fallen in my esteem to the level of a fascist with sado-sexual leanings. I’m making a general point is all. In a post on the Rolling Stones nine years ago I said:
The immaturity of genius – from Mozart through Miles Davis to Amy Winehouse – can be dismaying when we muddle our thinking. My flawed but brilliant teacher once put it thus: the creative impulse is utterly impersonal; it cares not whether it enters the world through a Christ or Hitler, only that it does enter the world.
I was rightly taken to task by a reader for my metaphysical way of making it, but the point itself stands. Take Meryl Streep. Since first seeing her, also in the seventies, in The Holocaust then in many a subsequent role, she’s impressed and moved me a thousand times during her long and glittering path as screen diva and more importantly actress. But why would that magically gift her with any remotely well thought out views on Donald Trump? 1
The answer, as George Orwell says, is that it wouldn’t. But every once in a while, if we’re super lucky, we might have the good fortune to encounter a star with a good heart and a political brain that works.
I was fifteen when See Emily Play, from Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets 2 was released as a single. That was a Syd Barret composition, and the tragedy of that tortured man needs no retelling. But I’ve been a Floyd fan ever since, though it would be decades before I realised that the bassist whose driving genius I’d admired so long would draw my admiration for a different reason.
It’s not that hard for a rock star to strike a defiant note. Bob Dylan, John Lennon and a good few others have done that. I can think of few, however – there’s Brian Eno of course – prepared to defy an Israel Lobby well able to destroy careers, or to speak out in defence of Bashar al-Assad and Julian Assange when propaganda blitzes on both saw the liberal left run for cover.
Here, speaking to Aaron Maté and Katie Halper – both of the Useful Idiots podcast and, in Aaron’s case, a Grayzone featured in many a steel city post – is a man of unbending principle. The whole video, which opens with Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli genocide, is well worth watching.
But the point of my post kicks in at 18:05, when Katie introduces Roger Waters.
While here, live in Amsterdam in 2018, is Roger with a song from a 1973 album I’ll wager you’ve heard before.
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- Two points. One, that vlogger still strikes me as brilliant but mistaken in assuming the rise of ISIS and Al Qaeda to be products of US foreign policy ineptitude. Yes, they are – but not in the way he implies. As is now established beyond reasonable doubt, CIA, MI6 and the Mossad intentionally armed both and their cut-outs, above all in Syria to effect regime change. Two, another take on Meryl’s Golden Globes hissy-fit was given by Ricky Gervais while hosting the awards the following year. After a harmless joke which names but is not aimed at her, his real punch comes later and does not name her. If you’ve seven minutes to spare, here’s the whole shebang. If you don’t, here’s what he says at 7:00:
If you win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So just come up and accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God, and [bleep] off …
- The first pressing of this post said A Saucerful of Secrets was Floyd’s first album. In fact it was their second, following The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.