Law and Order Reviews J

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Pride” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This is basically about homophobia and I think it’s a fairly good reply to the homophobes.

“Savages” Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

The Death Penalty 

This episode is about the death penalty, but the main characters, collectively, have mixed opinions about it. I won’t bother describing or analyzing those statements with two exceptions. First, it’s stated that (possibly looking just at NY state and it’s death-penalty situation) there was some kind of trend where the suspension of the death penalty saw a decrease in capital crimes or something like that.

One of the main characters (the senior detective) in a practical but not principled way opposes bringing the death penalty back to NY and says that it will create more desperation among criminals who might become more willing to shoot cops when police try to arrest them if they’re already facing charges that could involve the death penalty.

I am generally against the death penalty. To some small degree you could say this is partly inspired by or reinforced by the fact that my Church opposes it (until very recently I was a Catholic and I am now converting to the Episcopalian church that also opposes the death penalty). I know that the statistics indicate that independent of the thoughts of judges, prosecutors, and jurors, it’s application really is racist and classist. I believe there’s no reason to say that it deters serious crime.

I am open-minded about it being used in one situation. If someone is already serving a life sentence in prison with no chance of parole, where life means life, and they are convicted of a serious crime (murder (and maybe rape should also be included)) and there is no other way to significantly upgrade their sentence to reflect the new conviction, maybe they should get the death penalty. I am not sure how often murder and rape happen in prison, but it might possibly happen less often if what I just proposed was an option for judges and/or juries.

“Jeopardy” Season 6. See this for a plot summary.             

First, the Wikipedia summary is REALLY bad. The dead brother’s business had created a financial vulnerability for his family’s business. There were no rival businesses and there was no stealing of clients.

This is a type of episode that I have only inconsistently high-lighted until recently, but my plan for 1-3 years now has been that I’ll make a brief note about this when it comes up. First, the defendant is a wealthy businessperson who doesn’t seem political at all (i.e. he’s not made to look bad because he’s liberal or progressive, since he’s neither as far as we know- he’s made to look bad because he’s the kind of powerful person who thinks the rules don’t apply to him). Second, his even wealthier Mom uses her wealth-created power to subtly BRIBE the judge who gets the case and then rules in favor of the defendant a few times.

“Angel” Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

There’s 2-3 parts where racism towards Puerto Ricans in NYC is illustrated. The first time, I have to admit, the police don’t seem too offended. That doesn’t necessarily exclude the thing I want to highlight as anti-racist. After a well-attended Coleman-organized press conference is basically told that at that point the police are looking for a Puerto Rican man, the police get flooded with tips. One of the two detectives, while answering calls to the tip line, says to his supervisor: “Since the Colemans’ town meeting every nut job in the city who ever got a bad taco is pointing the finger.” It could be a better objection to what is happening to their investigation- it’s sinking into the muck of popular racism- but the detective is basically caricaturing that racism, saying that any White person who had a negative experience with a “hispanic” person is making false allegations about Puerto Ricans and the disappearance of the baby and are doing so in a way that doesn’t distinguish between different “hispanic” racial and ethnic groups. It turns out that the baby's White mother killed the baby.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews OO

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Prima Nocta” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.

Racism Towards Inter-Racial Couples

One of the rape survivors is in a interracial relationship. I include a note about that sort of thing when doing these reviews because I got the (flawed) impression about 30 years ago that hostility to such couples was sort of the more-widely-acceptable form, and/or pinnacle, of white supremacy (although White hostility towards mixed-race couples IS more common and more intense than the more basic facet of white supremacy (see the next paragraph), the more basic facet is still a massive problem). Another reason I mention it is that I think there is some much smaller degree of hostility towards such couples from some small minority of people of color. As I have explained here, although I understand that calling it racism is inaccurate and unhelpful and I understand that it’s a TINY problem which White people shouldn’t worry about, I believe it does exist. I would say something sort of similar about interracial relationships where both people are non-white- I imagine the frequency that such relationships are treated with hostility by people of color is incredibly low, but it's still noteworthy since they can be described as “multicultural” in a very positive way.

As far as the hate from white supremacist bigots in connection to the first kind of interracial relationship, I WAS open-minded about 1-3 years ago that maybe it’s declining and I should ignore it (part of that math is the fact that the show is set in NY City and there are plenty of minor characters and extras that are people of color, and I already had a policy about this show where I did not high-light everything anti-racist, because of course there are plenty of minor characters who are people of color). But racism has resurged in the last 10-17 years and I believe that white supremacists ARE much more hostile to mixed-race couples than they are to people of color in general (I’ve attached greater value than I used to to a letter the Southern Poverty Law Center published after they received it from a Jewish man in state prison in America and one thing he focused on was the Nazi skinhead-enforced rules about fraternization between different races in prison).

“Fractured” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

First, there’s a fair amount of vague talk about widespread hostility towards the police in NYC, which is probably a continuation of the ramped-up anti-racism that the show started expressing (not necessarily vaguely) in Season 22 about a year after the 2020 Black Lives Matter-aligned protests. 

“Cornered” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

Anti-Muslim Bigotry

In some ways it’s not political but in some ways it is. A minor character that the Assistant DA for SVU had become close to is killed by criminals robbing a bodega and this is I think fairly significant because the character has a first and last name (Ali Imran) that is Arabic and also Muslim. The ADA is so upset that in the next episode (“First Light”) he has a graphic flashback to when his friend is killed. As I have said elsewhere about something kind of similar involving a handful of episodes of Star Trek TV shows, I believe this kind of thing can (at least) chip away at anti-Muslim bigotry in this country.

“Deductible” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

Capitalism and Women’s Sexuality

This episode is basically about something that I don’t think comes up very often in the show. I may have failed to comment on this sort of thing 1-2 times that I should have but didn’t because I thought it was what I have decided to call “pretty basic feminism” (I have no intention of mentioning everything feminist on the show, that content would clutter my posts and surprise no one, so it has to be a pretty significant and/or extraordinary manifestation of sexism). I know I commented on this episode’s topic very briefly with one episode that was a bit different but very similar (“Hell’s Kitchen” in Season 20).

At the risk of greatly exaggerating how intellectual I am, I think it is the kind of thing that can set off Marxist Women Studies scholars. It’s about an insurance business where the boss manipulates female employees into using their sexuality to confirm new clients. He uses his power as a capitalist to exploit not just the labor but also the sexuality of female employees in order to maximize profit. It’s not clear to what degree if at all his male employees are aware of this and/or to what degree if at all they cooperate (we learn that one of his earlier female victims is now COO and helps him- it’s not clear how many of his female employees are not being exploited sexually). The imminently-signing new client featured in this episode seems slightly decent. After being misled by the woman’s boss, he, without permission, tries to give her oral sex and it’s slightly possible he may have gone further without permission if she hadn’t gotten away from him and locked herself in the bathroom till he left. But there are some statements indicating he was far from fully okay with what the boss did. I say that because it seems like, if the show SVU has the pulse of the population, maybe a surprisingly large majority of the male population is against that sort of thing.

What is “that sort of thing?” It’s bad enough that you have exploitation of labor in general with capitalism and then what I believe is called “super-exploitation” of female workers in a non-sexual way. I am, to a large but not blind degree a pro-porn feminist and I believe that sex-work should largely be seen as just another kind of labor. If a woman FULLY consents to let her body be exploited, I’m not going to complain if I get to see pictures of her naked. But basically forcing a woman to put her sexuality to work for the company (a company that has nothing to do with sex and where her official job description says nothing about sex) as a whole and/or her male boss is sickening. Sexuality is something that is usually very personal, private and sacred (unless this protected status is waived BY THE PERSON INVOLVED in a fair and mutually beneficial and respectful agreement (I’ll be honest I can’t think of how to make a comprehensive and legalistic yet general and concise statement about this and I believe it is a little complicated, but what the defendant in this episode does is a GREAT example of what powerful men should NOT use their power for)). 

And it might not hurt if I say something here that I have wanted to say in recent years. At the risk of patting myself on the back too much for being a good feminist, when I think of non-trafficked pornography I am horrified by the possibility that some women do it with little or no enjoyment simply for desperate financial reasons and I think the possibility of that scenario is damning of the fact that women in our society get paid less, are often saddled with ALL the child-rearing expenses, etc. etc.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews NN

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Debatable” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.
Racism/Homophobia

There are two minor items to mention.

1. A Black man (whose son is cleared of the crime SVU are investigating shortly after his Dad’s statement) says something brief but pretty powerful about how Blacks get treated by the police. He says: “give me one good reason why any black man should trust the cops.”
2. One of the detectives says a witness is a total homophobe, and although we already know that that detective is anti-homophobic, it’s good of the show to remind viewers how the people involved in making the show feel about homophobia.

“Truth Embargo” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.
Racism/Criminal Justice System

This is an interesting episode. Towards the end I thought I detected a significant political shift towards the center, but I think I was wrong.

First, the woman, Natalie, who gets raped is a white woman married to another white woman.

Natalie seems pretty uncomfortable with the whole process of helping the police find her attacker. Pretty early we know that the police suspect a black youth. When the charged individual is on trial Natalie testifies and after answering some questions about what happened,  she is asked to identify her attacker, with the defendant seated in the courtroom. She doesn’t answer and after several seconds there’s a recess in the trial. As we learn a few minutes later, she IS certain the defendant raped her and that kind of complicates one part of this that I found politically pleasing.

A few minutes before Natalie testifies Benson (the woman who is head of SVU) speaks briefly with Natalie’s wife, Brook. We learn from Brook that she and Natalie are “acutely“ aware of racist problems in the criminal justice system and worry that the defendant won’t get a fair trial (I could see how even though they were certain of his guilt, good White allies like them would still worry about that). During the recess Natalie tells Benson and the Assistant DA that when she was growing up she had an adopted brother who was Black. One day at a store when they were about 12yo she dared him to steal something. He got caught (apparently she was implicated by the police) and while she got to go home with a warning, her adopted brother spent the night in jail and got a criminal record, something which had a very negative effect on his life.

It emerges in all of this that the main thing which motivates Natalie’s failure to identify her rapist is her belief that once someone gets convicted, that can affect the rest of their life in many ways that are detrimental. There’s a brief discussion about rehabilitation. I am far from an expert on rehabilitation but I recently wrote that a lot of people in prison don’t need rehabilitation. Although in general it would be really nice if rehabilitation was an outcome of going to prison, I get the impression that it often or usually isn’t, and that having a record and experiencing the nightmare of prison must make it difficult to survive once released.

At one point, I thought this episode was going to be a hatchet job on progressives, suggesting that we believe that racial justice requires that all guilty people of color be acquitted and that there is something wrong with cooperating with the police when a white woman has been raped by a black man.

I have a little more to say about this episode’s place on the political spectrum, but first I want to say this. I imagine it’s difficult to be an anti-racist white person victimized by a crime committed by a person of color. More specifically I imagine that anti-racist tendencies in the feminist movement experience a lot of stress when a White woman accuses a Black man of rape.

My conclusion? There’s a fair amount of dialogue involving Benson agreeing (at least to some degree) with Natalie and Brook. Natalie not only identifies her rapist in court, she pushes back when the defense attorney suggests that she is lying about his client.

“Duty to Report” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.
Police Corruption

I am not sure I should be reviewing this one. There are two incidents where a VERY senior NYPD officer commits a very serious crime against a civilian and Benson (the head of SVU) enlists the Internal Affairs Bureau (which investigates corruption, etc. in the police) in her investigation of a crime that involves her superior’s daughter. Benson apparently gets along pretty well with at least one senior IAB officer- a Black woman who Benson was investigated by a few years earlier. At the end, that IAB leader and Benson agree that she will join SVU. Assuming it lasts at least the rest of this brief season, it’s significant in that it’s only the third time there’s been a woman of color in the squad (there was one in the first season, and then in season 24 there was a RECURRING character in the squad matching that description). 

In general it’s a pretty solid endorsement of IAB which I think is either probably a good thing or definitely a VERY good thing.

Benson does, while laughing, say that together they might even break some rules. At the risk of going too easy on them, I think it might either be an insignificant line that goes nowhere or maybe there are some rules they can break that are bad and that are not foci of IAB. In general I am very happy with this episode.

“Third Man Syndrome” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.
Homophobia

This is a very political episode, as I define that, but there’s nothing very special about it. It’s about a gay bashing that seemed like a possible sex crime (which is why SVU gets it). There’s some confusing dialogue about the gay bashers possibly also being anti-immigrant and I think the fact that one of them appears Latino doesn’t rule that out- weird stuff like that happens, at least in TV and movies and real life. The victim, who is straight but presumed gay by his attackers, is a visitor and future resident from Columbia. His cousin, who’s with him, is an undocumented resident- SVU doesn’t do anything in relation to that.

It’s overall a pretty good anti-homophobic episode.

Star Trek: SNW Reviews D

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“The Serene Squall” Episode Seven, Season One. See this for a plot summary.

There are three political themes to mention.

They/Them/Theirs (LGBTQ+)

Although it could possibly be construed as hostile to non-binary people because the character who makes some good statements about being yourself turns out to be the bad guy, it’s actually pro-LGBTQ+ because the prominent doctor she is impersonating IS non-binary and a good guy. This (the pro-LGBTQ+ statement made by the existence of a character who is a popular Federation doctor and is non-binary) gets a little sharper when there is some talk about how Spock, who is half human and half Vulcan, doesn’t need to choose between being Vulcan and being human:

ASPEN: Spock, you know, all species put things into boxes. It’s like you’re either this or you’re that and sometimes we act a certain way to fit people’s expectations, but that’s not necessarily who we are. And sometimes, like on the bridge just now, it can limit us.
SPOCK: You are proposing I better balance my human and Vulcan natures.
ASPEN: I’m saying maybe you’re neither.
SPOCK: That is nonsensical. If I am not human or Vulcan, what am I?
ASPEN: That’s not my question to answer.

First of all, I think this episode counts as pro-LGBTQ+ and I think that “Dr. Aspen’s” statements above are pretty well written.

I am going to use this as an opportunity to get a little long-winded and also a little personal. On one hand, I have been a fairly good or very good ally of what I call the LGB, since 11th grade. On the other hand, for some reason I have been kind of slow to see what I call the TQ+ as important. I go into a little more detail here when discussing the “Broken Rhymes” episode. This is the first time I have commented on the non-binary part of the population (I have watched every season of Discovery an average of three times (including the last three seasons that include a non-binary main character) but I have yet to do “reviews” of that show- something I’ll do in about a year).

First, if “Dr. Aspen” is talking about Spock identifying as equally human and Vulcan, that seems like a better idea than identifying 100% one way or the other. In The Original Series I believe that Spock identified mostly or overwhelmingly as Vulcan. If “Dr. Aspen” meant creating some kind of brand new identity I have tried to grasp what that would be and it has slipped through my fingers or has been as ethereal as smoke, dispersing into nothingness as I try to grasp it. There’s a good chance I am overthinking this and/or I need to get a firmer grip on the LGBTQ+ identities, so I think I will just move on very soon. The good news is that I think that in the process of typing this I DID improve my grasp of the LGBTQ+ identities.

A Clockwork Red??? (Rehabilitation of Convicts)

(Although I was a fan of “A Clockwork Orange” in 9th grade I don’t think I have watched it since then. Wikipedia’s explanation of the term “clockwork orange” doesn’t help, but it sounds like what some assortment of society and government leaders want people to be upon leaving prison, and I believe we need a progressive view of rehabilitation of convicts)

There’s a brief part of the episode that’s about criminal rehabilitation on Vulcan. It sounds pretty good. When I think of that issue in reality in America, I think it’s probably a really good thing, although it must have some short-comings. Although therapy and vocational opportunities and education and such in prison CAN help with some of what’s wrong in our society, I think that a huge majority of convicts wouldn’t be there if they weren’t poor and I would add a similar statement about an overlapping large minority of convicts who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t people of color. In the next three paragraphs I will offer an abridged explanation of exactly what I mean by that.

I simply assume that there are innocent people in prison- and I mean completely innocent- I will say something about the others soon. This belief is partly just a vague one based on being engaged with American liberalism and progressivism for roughly 35 years. It’s also influenced by a work of non-fiction (The Innocent Man) and at least two works of fiction (The Confession and The Guardians) by the author John Grisham. Although I don’t look for this, about once a year I stumble on to a story about someone being declared innocent years after their conviction- I assume that for every such case I hear about there’s probably something like 100 I don’t hear about. There was at least one statement by a main character in the TV show Law and Order: SVU about there being innocent people in prison. And then there’s the people who are sort of guilty but don’t deserve to be convicted - i.e. abused women who killed their abuser, 18yos who had sex with a 17yo in some of the nation’s states, the character Carl Lee Hailey in Grisham’s A Time To Kill, etc.

To a large degree the majority of inmates who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t poor don’t need rehabilitation. Many are completely innocent and would have been acquitted if they hadn’t been represented by an over-worked, under-resourced Public Defender. Many more wouldn’t have committed a crime if not for one or more poverty-related factors that drove their criminal behavior (i.e. they wouldn’t have stolen a loaf of bread for their family if they weren’t penniless, or they wouldn’t have gotten work selling marijuana if they had been able to afford college). In general, POVERTY, not bad morals or a lack of civic values, is why they committed a crime.

To a large degree the majority of those inmates who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t people of color don’t need rehabilitation. They’re there because a racist cop framed them, and a jury fell for it, or they’re guilty but it’s because the racist nature of this society alienated them from trying to work within the system, because the people criticizing crime were the same ones brutalizing their community economically, physically, institutionally, etc. What I’m talking about is well illustrated in the 1996 non-documentary film “Set It Off” starring Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith. One of the four Black women turns to crime partly because her racist bank employers fire her after a man from her neighborhood tries to rob the bank. Another of the four women turns to crime after her brother, an innocent and unarmed man, is killed by police. There is of course the aforementioned overlap between the population of non-white convicts and the population of poor convicts.

It’s likely that some or most of the convicts I write about above could benefit from therapy and/or vocational and/or educational opportunities while in prison. Ideally there may, in theory, be some way for that to be progressive- i.e. if convicts get therapy and/or college degrees in prison, is the education or therapy compatible with their experiences as (for example) working-class Black Americans? I also wonder how radical books collected by progressives and donated to prison libraries fare when they’re examined by whatever prison official looks at them. When I think about this stuff I worry that at this point, with increasing politicalization outside prisons because of George W. Bush and now Donald Trump, prisons are not creating opportunities for progressive values to be learned or explored or weaponized (depending on which prisoners we’re talking about).

Spartacus (Slavery)

Although it turns out to be a red herring deployed by the bad guy, at one point the crew of the Enterprise thinks that they’re going after slave traffickers. It would be a good story if there WAS an ST episode about going after such scum. About 3-6 years ago I watched the movie “The Birth of a Nation,” which is based on a true story of a major slave rebellion in the American South, and it is a really good movie. I also watched, about 6 years ago, the movie “Harriet” about the Underground Railroad, and I have it in my collection. ST has reminded us of the issue of slavery several times in it’s life, but an episode just about fighting slavery would be great- one story possibility would be a StarFleet crew helping maintain a sci-fi version of the Underground Railroad. About 33 years ago I read a The Next Generation novel called “Spartacus” about the Enterprise encountering a ship adrift with a bunch of android slaves.

Support Starbucks Strikers and Oppose Racism

UPDATE 11/13/25 Although I could explain why this is less damning of me than most would think, I got it wrong- it's an indefinite strike. BOYCOTT STARBUCKS! 

 

Below is a guest opinion I got published in the Daily Camera Wednesday the 12th. Thursday the 13th is the strike. What they published is here. There is an even longer essay focusing on my theory about unions and racism here.

 Tom

 

On Nov. 13th many Starbucks workers, hopefully thousands, will strike for one day and you can support them by not buying from Starbucks during the strike. Although, nationwide, more than 12,000 workers there are represented by Starbucks Workers United, the company has, for four years now, barely come close to engaging in the legally mandated collective bargaining process where a contract is negotiated.

As the City of Boulder, and to lesser degree Boulder County, become more and more middle-class, it’s unclear how many readers are pro-union. I’m not sure how many readers will be swayed by talk about health care benefits, wages, and respect for unskilled workers on the job, three of the several issues on which unions do great things for the workers they represent. Consider that, to one degree or another unions often play a critical role in getting Democrats elected- not in Boulder, of course, but in more working-class places whose elected Dems contribute, for example, to their leader becoming Speaker of the House. Unions also can play a crucial role in making a workplace more democratic (as you might call it) when it comes to equity for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and religious minorities.

There is one aspect of this issue that I am very passionate about and which I believe will resonate with the more middle-class Boulder liberal readers who think unions do nothing for them. I believe that unions, inside and outside the workplace, help stop or at least slow and reverse the spread of racism in the white working-class. The labor movement overall became very anti-racist with John Sweeney as President of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009 and with subsequent AFL-CIO leadership. I believe that if, after 1995, the unionization rate hadn’t continued it’s long decline and had instead increased, Donald Trump would have been defeated in the Electoral College in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

Although I’m sure there is something similar in the statements of the American labor movement I have rarely heard of them and this theory I have was initially inspired by an analysis of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In a column included in a 1998 collection of his work in previous decades, Northern Ireland journalist Eamonn McCann wrote that the labor movement had the most potential to eradicate religious bigotry in N. Ireland. He wrote: “No other institution brings Catholic and Protestant workers together on a regular basis in pursuit of a common purpose, which is antipathetic to sectarianism.” McCann’s columns have been published by an average of 1-2 professionally staffed and edited publications (magazines or newspapers) at any given time in the last 40 years and he has held senior positions in Ireland’s labor movement in recent decades and he was one of the main leaders of the N. Ireland civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2016 he was elected to the N. Ireland Assembly and in 2019 he was elected (from a very progressive and very working-class urban district) to the local government of Derry and Strabane. He is an expert on fighting sectarianism in N. Ireland and believes that organized labor has a crucial role to play.

Many people believe there are great similarities between the conflict in N. Ireland during The Troubles and the conflict over racism in the United States. This includes people like Angela Y. Davis and, in 1972, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I believe unions here play a role in combating racism and that that can be greater when the unionization rate returns to where it was before it's decline began about five decades ago. If racist working-class whites see multicultural, anti-racist unions negotiating collective bargaining agreements that help them, many will start to question racism.

Unfortunately, many fiscally moderate and conservative Democrats refuse to vote in favor of strengthening unions. I’m sure these Democrats are alarmed at the rise of Donald Trump and at the existence of the Proud Boys. What’s more important to them: protecting capitalism or fighting racism?

Please support the Nov. 13th Starbucks strike.

(I am more a supporter of Sinn Fein than I am a supporter of Eamonn McCann, but he is the one who made that statement) 

Mexicans, Immigration, And The Irish

I submitted the Guest Opinion below to the Daily Camera about three weeks ago. I am not sure why it wasn't published- probably because they have a policy where in any rolling 365-day period no one can get more than four Guest Opinions published, and I think I had about 1-2 months left before it started over for me. The essay is a little TOO honest about something- I AM behind on staying informed about political developments here. I kind of HAD to say that, at least because of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

 

I think it has some potential, more or less, to get more Irish-Americans to support immigrants, and to emphasize that for some reason(s) we are not hearing about white undocumented immigrants being deported.  

 

Tom 

 

I am a bit behind on reading articles about current events and politics, but I did some research for this, I have a 2003 CU-Boulder BA in Ethnic Studies, and I was with the “Irish Solidarity Movement” in America between 1997 and ending somewhere 2005-2020 (the ISM were people, some non-white, concerned about Northern Ireland Catholics).

Because I am about 2.5 months behind (I have a system where, for example, I save today’s articles until I read yesterday’s articles) I only just now read something that concerns me greatly. GOPers, including many in the Trump administration, are expressing hostility towards the Mexican flag, which has become prominent at many recent protests in America. 

The main thing that needs to be said is that I don’t hear any GOPers complaining about the display of the Irish flag at US demonstrations, etc. in the 70s, 80s, 90s. For about a year in college I displayed a very visible Irish flag outside my house. I took it once in the late 1990s to a progressive pro-Zapatista protest at the Mexican consulate in Denver and was welcomed.

I haven’t heard anything from GOPers about how in Colorado (and maybe elsewhere) there are special license plates you can get that have the Italian flag and a note that the driver is Italian-American. And the thing is, that statement, especially in the Denver area, could be described as incredibly offensive. I don’t know much about this parade post- 2000, but I am sure that many people with that license plate were involved with or supported the Denver Columbus Day parade, which was a celebration of the genocide of American Indians. I have not heard of American Indians and their allies denouncing those license plates as racist and trying to get them banned- but I wouldn’t blame them if they tried. Genocide is A LOT worse than the worst thing Mexico has done to the US.

Going back to Ireland and The Troubles, it wasn’t just British patriots who said that when Americans displayed the Irish flag, it was often in support of what some mislabeled a “terrorist” organization- the Irish Republican Army (the one associated in the past with Gerry Adams, and the one that bent over backwards around 2000 to help the Peace Process). I have, in an April 2014 post on my blog, proven objectively that the IRA were not terrorists (that is, I explain in detail the math and analysis involved). There is no Mexican organization attacking the US the way that the IRA attacked the British, and most of the people angered by the Mexican flag being displayed here would never feel that way about the Irish flag.

There are strong connections between the Irish struggle and the chicana/o movement here. A veteran chicano Denver activist I used to know named Leo Griep-Ruiuz told me that “politically aware” chicanos don’t think it’s a coincidence that IRA member Bobby Sands died on hunger strike MAY 5TH 1981. In 1998 or 1999 I attended a Cinco de Mayo fund-raiser in Denver for the Chiapas Coalition (which was supporting the Zapatistas in Mexico). I asked if I could speak for a couple minutes about Bobby Sands and they agreed. The audience, probably hundreds of Zapatista supporters, responded very positively.

I have also been wondering, have there been any white undocumented immigrants arrested and deported in the last 7 months? Between the fact that I HAVE read a TON of articles about Trump’s agenda between January and June and I recently consulted some friends, I get the impression that there haven’t been so many that it would reflect their numbers here, or any at all. Specifically, any Irish? I know that there must be a lot of undocumented Irish here, partly from the fact that around 10-20 years ago at least two large Irish political parties (SF and Labour) frequently called for legalizing them. Various other facts I’ve come across also contribute to my certainty that there is a substantial population of them.

The double standard we see among GOPers when it comes to Mexicans on one hand and the Irish on the other, is simply racist.

How I Became A Socialist

 In High School I was, as I put it, transitioning towards being a socialist. In Jr. High, if I was political at all I think that I was probably pretty close to being a neoconservative (I’m not sure if Tom Clancy was a neocon or not, but I think he may have been close to one and in Jr. High probably 25% of the political material I read (fiction and non-fiction) were books by him; I also was, without doing any research, vaguely zionistic). The Summer after 12th grade I went to a protest rally against the “Promise Keepers,” a conservative Christian thing. One of the groups listed as a sponsor of the rally was the (local) Democratic Socialists of America. That might be why, when I saw flyers on the CU-Boulder campus (where I went to school starting in the Fall of 1994) for the campus chapter, I got involved.

About two months later the National Director of DSA visited Boulder (or at the very least the CU-Boulder DSA, but maybe the local one as well) and at a small gathering in a classroom we went around the table and briefly described how we each became a socialist. Probably about 1/4 of what I said was about reading novels by Clancy and people like him- Stephen Coonts, Frederick Forsyth, Larry Bond, Nelson DeMille, Payne Harrison, and Harold Coyle (I’m not sure when I started reading these authors, but I include them in what I call either the national security genre or the Tom Clancy genre). I am pretty sure I gave people the wrong idea, although it is a little mixed. I believe that what I was trying to do by referring to those authors was describe how I became INTERESTED IN POLITICS. On the other hand, some of those books DID make me a little curious about socialism (in HS one day I briefly checked DAS KAPITAL by Marx out of the school library but read almost none of it) and some of them actually said a few left-wing things here and there (see this).                           

This essay is kind of meant to undo any damage to my reputation that earlier conversation did (I DO realize that probably not a single person remembers that conversation, but I wanted to do this essay for a lot of other reasons as well).

************

I grew up at least kind of if not VERY middle-class. I am also white, a cisgendered male, a heterosexual, and some kind of Christian (I am just starting something kind of formal where I might convert from being a Catholic to being a Protestant). For various reasons that I don’t think should be held against me, I have spent practically all of my life in Boulder and until college I did not interact much with people of color or with poor people. My parents were more or less liberal but not progressive or very politically active- I wasn’t exposed to liberal Democratic politics as a child.

The first thing that got me thinking like a socialist was when I read, around the age of 11, the Children’s Bible THREE TIMES. I can’t remember much and I have never read the entire Bible (the regular one). But I know that there was at least some material about poverty and wealth, about loving your brothers and sisters, etc. I believe that is why, when I was about 12 or 13 I remember telling a kid I was briefly friends with that I thought everyone should just automatically get all the food they need.

I don’t think I made any left-ward progress in Jr. High. I DID start listening to rap music in Jr. High- it was “soft-core” non-political stuff by The Beastie Boys, RUN DMC and The Fresh Prince. I have no idea how I started listening to rap in Jr. High, but I think that is why I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T at the beginning of 10th grade. Below is a section of this essay about the role that MUSIC played in my High School transition to being a socialist. It’s copied and pasted, with a little editing, from a post here.                         

***********

The High School Years: Becoming A Socialist

So, a focus on music and my political development.

One aspect of this that I think about is, why did I come to focus more on racism than other symptoms of capitalism and get an Ethnic Studies degree instead of a Women’s Studies degree? I have no idea how I found myself listening to rap music in Jr. High. I wasn’t watching MTV and my parents were no more than moderately anti-racist. I didn’t have older siblings who listened to rap (actually, I might have been watching a LITTLE MTV because I have memories of watching 1-2 music videos by The Fresh Prince). On one hand, as far as I can remember, the rap I was listening to in Jr. High was non-political but It probably contributed to how I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T in late 1991.

I think that listening to that “Hard Core” rap is a huge part of why I did my first political act (and that may have been AFTER the Ice-T/Body Count concert I went to). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, in early 1992, I walked out of my 4th period class (I think it was 4th period) and joined about 50 of my peers walking around Boulder protesting the not-guilty verdict in a California trial of the racist white police officers who beat Rodney King a year earlier. That night I went to a march and rally for the community in general and/or the CU-Boulder campus and I was actually on the front page of the paper the next day (next to me was someone who later was the first or second person to get an Ethnic Studies degree at CU-Boulder, and there was someone wearing a Primus shirt and one person wearing a Body Count shirt).

This is a little embarrassing because I have heard things here and there indicating they’re not progressive, but I think some political stuff by Megadeth and Metallica nudged me towards the left in High School. Those songs are:

Metallica
“Fight Fire With Fire” is about the need to avoid nuclear war.
“Ride the Lightning” is in opposition to the death penalty.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” could almost be mistaken for an anti-fascist song because it is indirectly inspired by an anti-fascist novel by Ernest Hemingway. The thing is, the MOVIE based on that book retained the anti-war message but not the ANTI-FASCIST message of the book.
“Disposal Heroes” is anti-war.
“Blackened” is about nuclear war.
“…And Justice for All” is basically about politics and power in this country, but I am very unsure about what EXACTLY is it saying. This one may have had no affect on me becoming a socialist.
“One” is anti-war.

Megadeth
“Set The World Afire” is about nuclear war.
“Holy Wars…. The Punishment Due.” The first half I’ve heard might be about international conflicts like Israel and the Palestinians and/or (possibly more specifically) Northern Ireland. Beyond that I’m not sure what to say about it.
“Take No Prisoners” is anti-war.
“Rust in Peace” is about nuclear war.
“Symphony of Destruction” is about politics but I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say.
“Architecture of Aggression” is sort of the same- it probably IS anti-war, but I am less certain than I am when it comes to “Take no Prisoners.” Megadeth just wasn’t consistently and explicitly progressive.
“Foreclosure of a Dream” is I BELIEVE about US federal farm policy in the 1980s. I am just not familiar with farm policy. I DO like the license plates in Colorado that say “No Farms, No Food” but I just don’t know anywhere near enough to comment on this song.

I think that is a pretty complete list of the relevant Megadeth and Metallica songs I listened to in High School that may have nudged me towards the left.

The hard-core rap I listened to, including three Ice-T albums, and 3-4 Public Enemy albums probably had a better effect on me than the Metallica and Megadeth stuff I just referred to. And then there was the (hardcore punk) Dead Kennedys stuff- some of their songs might not inspire progressive politics but about half of them do. And there was at least a couple that were about economic injustice- “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and “Kill the Poor.” There were several other political DK songs whose lyrics I’m too lazy to confirm- with the exceptions of “Police Truck” (police brutality), “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” and “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” (about Ronald Reagan), which I definitely remember (I believe that in High School I listened to 3/4 or 4/4 of the Jello Biafra DK studio albums).

There were a handful of songs by Suicidal Tendencies that contributed to me becoming   progressive:

“Two Sided Politics” is basically contrasting the life of a rich person with that of a working-class person, and there’s some anti-Reagan stuff, etc. One thing I think is noteworthy is that there’s one line that says “I’m not anti-government, government is anti-me.” I like to think that might be in part an anti-anarchist statement.
“Fascist Pig” could be a little more political (that is, deeper) but Mexican-Americans criticizing the police may have pushed me a bit to the left.
“I Want More” is about the class conflict with some references to the minimum wage.
“Give It Revolution” was a little vague but probably nudged me in the right direction.

There were a handful of songs by a thrash-metal band called Nuclear Assault that pushed me to the left in High School. Although I have listened to their other stuff in recent years, in HS pretty much the only album I listened to was “Handle with Care.”
“New Song” which was a fairly good anti-racist song.
“Critical Mass” is a pretty good environmentalist song.
“Inherited Hell” is also like that.
“When Freedom Dies” Although I’m not sure what it’s saying about US foreign policy during the Cold War, it IS saying that freedom and civil liberties, etc. shouldn’t be weakened in the name of national security.
“Search and Seizure” is sort of similar, but basically about law enforcement harassing metal-heads (I’m not sure whether or how the lyrics-writer would generalize that statement to include punks, hippies, etc.)

Another band that influenced me in High School was a “cross-over” hard-core punk/thrash-metal band called DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles). In HS I saw them play live twice and listened to three of their albums.

First there was the album “Definition” which included the following songs:
“Acid Rain” was about the environment.
“The Application” is about multiple forms of employment discrimination and DOES include a line about racism and a line about homophobia, and one about religion and one that is probably about being HIV+.

The album “Thrash Zone” has several political songs.
“Labelled Incurable” might be about AIDS (as far as I can tell DRI were probably anti-homophobic).
“Kill the Words” is sort of generally about censorship and dictatorship but seems to be at least partly if not totally about that sort of thing in the Muslim world; I have no idea if they’re anti-Muslim or just consistently opposing fundamentalism, censorship, and dictatorship (there IS another song where they condemn religious discrimination in employment, so they probably aren’t anti-Muslim)
“Worker Bee” although it’s not written as a socialist song, I think it’s basically about economic justice and is by a band that I’m pretty sure is in favor of social justice as well (I’m suspicious of bands, people, etc. who are economically progressive but not socially liberal).

There was one Soundgarden song about the environment called “Hands All Over.” Although I don’t feel like looking at the lyrics, I believe that there were at least a few L7 songs I liked politically (one example is “Pretend We’re Dead”).

This will require at least one paragraph. Although I’m not real familiar with this, I have gotten the impression that Rage Against The Machine were a bit to my left politically. One social-dem critic told me that the political forces RATM admired either would have told RATM to fuck off, or alternately, should be killed (I think that may have been a reference to the Peruvian leftist army/terror organization called Shining Path). I sort of stumbled onto RATM a little earlier than most of their fans. Somehow I knew that their performance at a small club in Boulder around late 1992 or early 1993 would inspire moshing, so I showed up. I don’t remember thinking about it much but I guess I liked the music enough and the general vibe and bought their album shortly after the show. At some point at least a couple months later they came to Denver with House of Pain and it was great listening and moshing KNOWING that they were promoting dissent in this country. At that concert I learned about Leonard Peltier, and generally drifted towards the Left. (Right before House of Pain came on stage they played the music sans vocals of a song I mention below called “Just Look Around” by Sick of it All). Yes, RATM was alternately politically vague and/or leaning towards the hard-left. But they contributed to me becoming a dissident of some sort and it’s slightly possible that wouldn’t have happened if not for them. And musically they were pretty cool.

**************

Probably the main thing that contributed to me drifting towards the left is material that I learned in 11th grade when I took Advanced Placement US History. On one hand, I remember saying something inconsistent with what I’m saying here- in one debate I took some kind of bizarre LIBERTARIAN stance and criticized one of my peers because they were pro-government for some things but anti-government for other things. I also made one or another mistake with the two research papers we were assigned during the year. On the other hand, I got a 5 out 5 score on the final Exam, and I was pushed further to the left when I learned something about the Great Depression, something that might not have been covered in a regular 11th grade History class. At the very beginning of that period the (Republican) administration tried to fix things by lowering taxes on the rich and corporations which they thought would stimulate expansion (building new factories, etc.). The thing is, there was no increase in stimulus spending by corporate America and the Depression got worse. I got the strong impression that the New Deal alleviated a lot of suffering and empowered workers and probably kept the nation from sliding into such a deep socio-economic/political abyss that we wouldn’t be able to climb out of it when WWII started.

***************

As I mentioned above there were some novels that played one or another role in my voyage to the left.

The main one is a book called “Vortex” which had some serious progressive elements as I explain here.                                

“Fire Lance” is summarized here.

I think it was in High School that I first read a book by Harold Coyle called “Trial By Fire.” It’s about two things. First, a pilot program in the US Army involving four female Lieutenants (I know there are two kinds of Lieutenants in Army, but I can’t remember which one leads a platoon) leading ground combat units (platoons and in the case the story focuses on, a Mechanized Infantry platoon). I am, to one moderate degree or another hostile to the US military, but in this paragraph I need to explain that as long as we HAVE an institution, it should involve equity for women. Part of why I say this is that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a large chunk of the male American population who get the wrong idea about equity for women when they see that the US military doesn’t HAVE EQUITY FOR WOMEN. The book is simultaneously also about a conflict between Mexico and the US. I haven’t read this novel for about 5-10 years now but I could swear that I remember Coyle making the pro-war people look stupid- it might even be progressive. I think I will read it again soon and I might publish an essay about it on this blog.

**************

There was one TV show I should mention. I think that in Jr. High and High School I watched about 75% of all the episodes of Roseanne (see this). As you may know, poverty and/or the working-class was a pervasive theme and from a relatively (or in some cases VERY) left-wing perspective. It was overall fairly if not very anti-racist and even more so, feminist. 

1-3 different TV shows that should be here but aren't. Although I LOVE watching almost anything Star Trek (and that started 27 years ago), I didn't start watching the TV shows until 1998. So, I missed The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine (which is probably the most left-wing of all Star Trek series). On the other hand, I am  sort of working on something about how progressives in America could use ST to advance their agenda, and if I come up with some ideas that are worth your time, I'll publish them here and/or email them to some political friends of mine.

*************

That is about it as far as what changed my thinking. On a related note, I am proud of the fact that I was kind of politically active in High School. Below is a list of political stuff I did:

The very first political action I took was in early 1992 when I walked out of 4th period (Spanish) and joined about 50 peers marching around Boulder to protest the acquittal in California of some racist LAPD cops who savagely beat a black man (Rodney King) a year earlier. We even went up to the CU-Boulder campus to show them how it’s done : ).That night I went to a community/CU-Boulder march and rally about the same problem.

In 11th grade my best friend James (of Oregon) and I did a “‘Zine” (a small and unprofessionally written and edited magaZINE). James’ stuff was definitely more creative than mine, and may have been almost as political as my stuff. I did one article (in this case I tried to be as unbiased as possible) about an incident of job discrimination against a gay man in Boulder. IN THE SAME ISSUE I wrote an editorial criticizing Amendment Two (in 1992’s election in Colorado a ballot issue was approved by voters that outlawed gay rights anti-discrimination measures in CO).

In one issue, I did something that was far from creative and maybe even illegal, but I published the lyrics for an an incredibly anti-racist song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers called “The Power of Equality” (it’s close to the only RHCP song I listen to, but it’s AMAZING).

That’s pretty much all the relevant stuff I remember writing in the ‘zine.

I also was transitioning towards being pro-choice, and I wrote a Letter to the local paper (the Daily Camera) in which I expressed some degree of support for a woman’s right to choose.

I joined the Rocky Mountain Peace (and Justice) Center when I was 16 and wrote a letter to the Camera that was sort of pro-Persian Gulf War, but was also critical of the sanctions that had been applied to Iraq. Although that letter was not totally progressive, in response to it the Peace Center invited me to join them at a meeting with the Congressperson for that part of Colorado.

I probably had about 5-10 t-shirts of music groups I liked that were also political. I had a Body Count shirt, a Fishbone shirt that said “FUCK RACISM” (It’s possible it was “RACISM SUCKS” or maybe I had both??), at least one Rage Against The Machine t-shirt, a Public Enemy shirt and probably 1-2 Dead Kennedys shirts.

I think that’s about it. I might type up something about my thoughts about socialism- no, it won’t be very philosophical.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews MM

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“A Better Person” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

Once in a while I actually read the Wikipedia summaries I link to (or copy and paste, 2-4 years ago) (I almost never read ANYTHING in the summaries I link to on the “All Things Law and Order” blog because they are REALLY long, probably around 5-7,000 words). In this case the wikipedia summary is worthless.

It’s about a man whose “son” is killed and it turns out that she was transitioning towards being female and her dad didn’t know that or tried to bury it mentally. This results in him messing with the crime scene (he’s a cop and is the first one to find his daughter dead) to eliminate all the evidence that she was female. He doesn’t seem ridiculously transphobic and with some help from SVU he moves towards recognizing and valuing the change that his late daughter made.

“Jumped In” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

The head of SVU expresses support for a federal investigation of a small part of the NYPD.

“Intersection” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

The couple that gets engaged seems to be an inter-racial one, probably a black man and a white woman. Also, at one point a SVU detective makes an interesting statement. He says something about how humans are just “homicidal monkeys” who don’t respect the planet. I think it’s a non-bigoted environmental statement, but intertwined with it is another statement about how humans treat each other, and I am not sure the writers should have used the word “monkeys” because when NYPD cops refer to humans as “homicidal monkeys” I usually find that very offensive (in this case the detective I’m talking about gets along very well with the character played by Ice-T, so he probably isn’t a racist).

“Dutch Tears” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

One of the two criminals is a Corrections Officer.

“Bubble Wrap” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.                     

They tell a rape survivor that they don’t care if she was using cocaine.

Roseanne Reviews U

 This is a set of reviews of Roseanne episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here.         
I will focus only on the political aspects and will mention what percentage of lines spoken by non-family members are spoken by people of color.

“Halloween V” Episode 6, Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

There were about 50-55 lines by non-family members and none were spoken by people of color.

“Guilt By Imagination” Episode 8, Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

There were about 20 lines by non-family members, and all of them were spoken by white characters.

“The Driver’s Seat” Episode 11, Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

There were about 55 lines spoken by non-family members and they were all spoken by white people (almost all of them were spoken by characters who are gay or bi-sexual).

“White Trash Christmas” Episode 12, Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

There are two things to comment on. First, Dan and Roseanne briefly discuss the possibility that their son DJ is gay. Dan doesn’t seem super excited about the possibility that his son is gay but he seems to be okay with it. Roseanne is totally okay with it. In general the show is very anti-homophobic.

At one point Roseanne says something about her son-in-law Mark trying to get a job and suggests that he might have trouble getting a job because employers MIGHT only be hiring women and people of color. I don’t think Roseanne is seriously worried about that, she’s just worried about her son-in-law getting work. The show is very consistently feminist and anti-racist, and towards the end of the series there’s a development meant to make viewers feel good about affirmative action. My thoughts about AA are here.

“Suck Up Or Shut Up” Episode 13, Season 6. See this for a plot summary.
 

At the very end an actor and an actress from a soap opera IN THE REAL WORLD show up and one makes a bad joke about something he calls a “Mexican divorce.” It certainly sounds like a joke that is a bad fit for the generally anti-racist show.

There were about 40 lines spoken by non-family members and and only 10% were spoken by a person of color. On the other hand, about half of them were spoken by a gay character and a bi-sexual character.

Musical Diversity

In the last 33 years I have probably listened to music an average of four hours a day (how is that possible? One factor is that I did about 40 hours a week, for a total of 4 years, at a job that allowed me to listen to music I chose as I was working). There was one period of about 3 years around 2006 where I didn’t listen that much, but in High School and the last 16 years I listened about 6 hours a day on average.

(The value of this post is fairly low- only about 45-55% of it will be political)

Before I get to the best part of it, let me first explain a few minor details and some background to my addiction to music. I pretty much exclusively listened to cassette tapes until some time around 1999. I also have bought very few CDs (my commitment to being a good fan went down at some point in the late 1990s and has pretty much stayed there in terms of buying CDs, etc. instead of mostly just listening to YouTube which is what I’ve done about 4/5 of the time in the last 7-8 years). I have never had an iPod, I don’t listen to streaming music sites (“muve” I believe is one example, or Last FM perhaps). I have been doing almost all of my music-listening the last 16 years on YouTube. About 2/5 of what I listen to is stuff that I paid for earlier when I bought tapes and/or CDs, and with a big chunk of the stuff I DIDN’T ever pay for, I’m very comfortable ethically with that (see “The Music of my Enemy” below).

When I was very young (about 9) I was a fan of Michael Jackson. At 13 or 14 I went to a massive concert which included Vanilla Ice, I BELIEVE MC Hammer, and I THINK En Vogue. I’m almost embarrassed by that, although in the last 35 years there is one En Vogue song that I really like (“Free Your Mind” (the main reason I like it is the moshing in the official music video)). I kind of liked Vanilla Ice and I just learned some stuff about him that is kind of cool. And in a brief spoken word bit on either Home Invasion or Original Gangster Ice-T said something positive about MC Hammer. But I’m still kind of embarrassed about it.  In one, two or three year(s) of Jr. High School I listened to a lot of rap- of the Beastie Boys (“License to Ill”), 2-3 albums by rappers Run DMC (and 1-2 albums by The Fresh Prince, but I think I stopped listening to him in 9th grade and since then I think I’ve listened twice (in the last several years) to two of his hits, just out of curiosity and/or nostalgia).

At the risk of getting a little personal, in 9th grade my two best friends got into Megadeth and some other heavy metal bands. I was sort of open-minded about it, but not very. For various reasons I won’t go into, at the beginning of 10th grade (1991-1992) we had a falling out. I WAS a little guilty in the first 1-2 months after that of suddenly discovering a strong interest in heavy metal and wearing combat boots and that might have been pathetic. But I kept listening to rap, I started listening to more hard-core rap like Public Enemy and Ice-T, and I started listening to miscellaneous stuff that was labeled “alternative.” The bands labelled that way in the 1990s that I still listen to a LOT today include: Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Fishbone, L7, Faith No More, Ministry, and Biohazard (I didn’t listen to  Biohazard until 1993).

Starting in the Summer of 1992 I listened to the punk bands The Dead Kennedys and The Dead Milkmen (just an amusing coincidence). More recently I started listening a lot to a CELTIC punk band called Dropkick Murphys. Some of the bands that I lazily put in the metal category have some major connection to punk music. This includes DRI and Suicidal Tendencies who I enjoy listening to. Biohazard is also kind of a punk band.

Going back to my ex-friends in 1991/1992, I am, in one way and one way only, proud of the fact that when they started listening to Slayer and some death-metal bands I didn’t follow them (the thing is, since I didn’t follow them in that direction, it couldn’t be called pathetic). In early 1993 I bought one Slayer album (Seasons in the Abyss) and bought no more until 2 years later, when I was in college. Around the same time that I bought the Slayer album I bought one Napalm Death tape (From Enslavement to Obliteration) (Napalm Death are death-metal) but that was it for death-metal until about 25 years later.

In High School the main two heavy metal bands I listened to were Megadeth and Metallica. I listened a fair amount to some others including Anthrax, Sepultura, Pantera, Nuclear Assault, Body Count, DRI, and Suicidal Tendencies (unlike every other band I mention in this essay, I no longer listen to Sepultura).

There’s one minor heavy metal band that I listened to a little bit in High School that really should have been part of me transitioning towards being a socialist (a transition that took place in High School), but I don’t think it was. In a few minutes I’ll talk about how in general listening to music contributed to me becoming a socialist. The minor  band I just mentioned is called Sacred Reich, and even though in High School I had been less familiar with this, I’ve known for 1-2 decades now that they were progressive. In HS I had an EP of their’s with four songs. One was totally non-political and about evil or monsters or something. One was a cover of the anti-war Black Sabbath song “War Pigs.” The one I remember listening to was a (1980s) anti-intervention song called “Surf Nicaragua. The fourth song turns out to be a very progressive song, but I only identified it as such in the last 16 years. “One Nation” is anti-war, anti-racist, and even a little critical of economic injustice (there’s a brief reference to “greed”).

I can’t remember which came first, but the first bit of political activity I engaged in MAY have happened after I took a music-connected step towards identifying strongly with the cause of anti-racism. That step was going to the first concert I care to remember. It was in 10th grade and it was an Ice-T and Body Count concert. I saw the first band play and there was moshing which I quickly decided I liked and I saw Ice-T do some rap (which also inspired moshing), and then I had to leave before Body Count played because I had to get home before it was too late (my parents didn’t know I was at a concert and wouldn’t have believed that what I told them I was doing would go that late). (In High School and college I was into relatively non-violent moshing (and I felt very strongly about picking up people who fell down)).

***********

The High School Years: Becoming A Socialist

So, a focus on music and my political development. If I ever get around to typing it, a future post about how I became a socialist will overlap heavily with this post.

One aspect of this that I think about is, why did I come to focus more on racism than other symptoms of capitalism and get an Ethnic Studies degree instead of a Women’s Studies degree? I have no idea how I found myself listening to rap music in Jr. High. I wasn’t watching MTV and my parents were no more than moderately anti-racist. I didn’t have older siblings who listened to rap (actually, I might have been watching a LITTLE MTV because I have memories of watching 1-2 music videos by The Fresh Prince). On one hand, as far as I can remember, the rap I was listening to in Jr. High was non-political and only about 3/4 of it involved Black people, but It probably contributed to how I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T in late 1991.

I think that listening to that “Hard Core” rap is a huge part of why I did my first political act (and that may have been AFTER the Ice-T/Body Count concert I went to). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, in early 1992, I walked out of my 4th period class (I think it was 4th period) and joined about 50 of my peers walking around Boulder protesting the not-guilty verdict in a California trial of the racist white police officers who beat Rodney King a year earlier. That night I went to a march and rally for the community in general and/or the CU-Boulder campus and I was actually on the front page of the paper the next day (next to me was someone who later was the first or second person to get an Ethnic Studies degree at CU-Boulder, and there was someone wearing a Primus shirt and one person wearing a Body Count shirt).

This is a little embarrassing because I have heard things here and there indicating they’re not progressive, but I think some political stuff by Megadeth and Metallica nudged me towards the left in High School. Those songs are:

Metallica
“Fight Fire With Fire” is about the need to avoid nuclear war.
“Ride the Lightning” is in opposition to the death penalty.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” could almost be mistaken for an anti-fascist song because it is indirectly inspired by an anti-fascist novel by Ernest Hemingway. The thing is, the MOVIE based on that book retained the anti-war message but not the ANTI-FASCIST message of the book.
“Disposal Heroes” is anti-war.
“Blackened” is about nuclear war.
“…And Justice for All” is basically about politics and power in this country, but I am very unsure about what EXACTLY is it saying. This one may have had no affect on me becoming a socialist.
“One” is anti-war.

Megadeth
“Set The World Afire” is about nuclear war.
“Holy Wars…. The Punishment Due.” The first half I’ve heard might be about international conflicts like Israel and the Palestinians and/or (possibly more specifically) Northern Ireland. Beyond that I’m not sure what to say about it.
“Take No Prisoners” is anti-war.
“Rust in Peace” is about nuclear war.
“Symphony of Destruction” is about politics but I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say.
“Architecture of Aggression” is sort of the same- it probably IS anti-war, but I am less certain than I am when it comes to “Take no Prisoners.” Megadeth just wasn’t consistently and explicitly progressive.
“Foreclosure of a Dream” is I BELIEVE about US federal farm policy in the 1980s. I am just not familiar with farm policy. I DO like the license plates in Colorado that say “No Farms, No Food” but I just don’t know anywhere near enough to comment on this song.

I think that is a pretty complete list of the relevant Megadeth and Metallica songs I listened to in High School that may have nudged me towards the left.

As I have said earlier, the harder rap I listened to, including three Ice-T albums, and 3-4 Public Enemy albums probably had a better effect on me than the Metallica and Megadeth stuff I just referred to. And then there was the Dead Kennedys stuff- some of their songs might not inspire progressive politics but about half of them do. And there was at least a couple that were about economic injustice- “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and “Kill the Poor.” There were several other political DK songs whose lyrics I’m too lazy to confirm- with the exceptions of “Police Truck” (police brutality), “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” and “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” (about Ronald Reagan), which I definitely remember (as I was typing this I started listening to the DKs for the first time in about 4-5 years) (I believe that in High School and college I listened to 3/4 or 4/4 of the Jello Biafra DK studio albums).

There were a handful of songs by Suicidal Tendencies that contributed to me becoming   progressive:

“Two Sided Politics” is basically contrasting the life of a rich person with that of a working-class person, and there’ some anti-Reagan stuff, etc. One thing I think is noteworthy is that there’s one line that says “I’m not anti-government, government is anti-me.” I like to think that might be in part an anti-anarchist statement.
“Fascist Pig” could be a little more political (that is, deeper) but Mexican-Americans criticizing the police may have pushed me a bit to the left.
“I Want More” is about the class conflict with some references to the minimum wage.
“Give It Revolution” was a little vague but probably nudged me in the right direction.

There were a handful of songs by a thrash-metal band called Nuclear Assault that pushed me to the left in High School. Although I have listened to their other stuff in recent years, in HS pretty much the only album I listened to was “Handle with Care.”
“New Song” which was a fairly good anti-racist song.
“Critical Mass” is a pretty good environmentalist song.
“Inherited Hell” is also like that.
“When Freedom Dies” Although I’m not sure what it’s saying about US foreign policy during the Cold War, it IS saying that freedom and civil liberties, etc. shouldn’t be weakened in the name of national security.
“Search and Seizure” is sort of similar, but basically about law enforcement harassing metal-heads (I’m not sure whether or how the lyrics-writer would generalize that statement to include punks, hippies, etc.)

Another band that influenced me in High School was a “cross-over” hard-core punk/thrash-metal band called DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles). In HS I saw them play live twice and listened to three of their albums.

First there was the album “Definition” which included the following songs:
“Acid Rain” was about the environment.
“The Application” is about multiple forms of employment discrimination and DOES include a line about racism and a line about homophobia, and one about religion and one that is probably about being HIV+.

The album “Thrash Zone” has several political songs.
“Labelled Incurable” might be about AIDS (as far as I can tell DRI were probably anti-homophobic).
“Kill the Words” is sort of generally about censorship and dictatorship but seems to be at least partly if not totally about that sort of thing in the Muslim world; I have no idea if they’re anti-Muslim or just consistently opposing fundamentalism, censorship, and dictatorship (there IS another song where they condemn religious discrimination in employment, so they probably aren’t anti-Muslim)
“Worker Bee” although it’s not written as a socialist song, I think it’s basically about economic justice and is by a band that I’m pretty sure is in favor of social justice as well (I’m suspicious of bands, people, etc. who are economically progressive but not socially liberal).

There was one Soundgarden song about the environment called “Hands All Over.” Although I don’t feel like looking at the lyrics, I believe that there were at least a few L7 songs I liked politically (one example is “Pretend We’re Dead”).

This will require at least one paragraph. Although I’m not real familiar with this, I have gotten the impression that Rage Against The Machine were a bit to my left politically. One social-dem critic told me that the political forces RATM admired either would have told RATM to fuck off, or alternately, should be killed (I think that may have been a reference to the Peruvian leftist army/terror organization called Shining Path). I sort of stumbled onto RATM a little earlier than most of their fans. Somehow I knew that their performance at a small club in Boulder around late 1992 or early 1993 would inspire moshing, so I showed up. I don’t remember thinking about it much but I guess I liked the music enough and the general vibe and bought their album shortly after the show. At some point at least a couple months later they came to Denver with House of Pain and it was great listening and moshing KNOWING that they were promoting dissent in this country. At that concert I learned about Leonard Peltier, and generally drifted towards the Left. (Right before House of Pain came on stage they played the music sans vocals of a song I mention below called “Just Look Around” by Sick of it All). Yes, RATM was alternately politically vague and/or leaning towards the hard-left. But they contributed to me becoming a dissident of some sort and it’s slightly possible that wouldn’t have happened if not for them. And musically they were pretty cool.

***********

The Last 16 Years

This next section will be pretty brief. It’s about what music I have been listening to in the last 16 years.

Between about 1998 and about 2009 I only listened something like 4 hours a day to music. In 2008, for I think the first or almost first time I got on YouTube. Since then I have listened to almost all of the Megadeth and Metallica that I missed, plus the older stuff. I started listening to practically all Slayer and I started listening to a LOT of death metal. The following bands are the death metal bands I listen to: Carcass, Napalm Death (I love their music and I think that if I paid attention to their lyrics I’d agree with a lot of them), Deicide (MUSICALLY I LOVE Deicide, but I assume I would be offended by their lyrics if I read them), Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, and Morbid Angel.

I got caught up on Body Count albums that I missed after Born Dead and also listened to the first two albums. Although I don’t listen to them much I listen some to stuff I missed earlier from Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, and Testament as well as what I listened to earlier. Although I’ve barely looked at the lyrics I some times listen to stuff I missed by Sacred Reich, and I am even more sure than before that they’re progressive politically.

Yes, my very favorite genre is thrash metal (and/or speed metal- at the risk of sounding stupid, I am not sure what differences there are, if any, between speed and thrash).

I listen to the following Suicidal Tendencies albums, both now and in High School: Their first (self-titled) album, How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today, Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit… DeJaVu, Lights! Camera! Revolution! and The Art of Rebellion. I haven’t listened to any ST that I didn’t listen to in High School. On a related note, I would say the same about DRI albums Definition, Crossover, and Thrashzone.

Today and in high school I listen(ed) to three Ice-T albums: The Iceberg, Original Gangster, and Home Invasion.

Until recently I took a 10-15 year break from listening to more than three songs by Public Enemy.

In the last 5 or so years I listened a little bit to Run DMC (albums Tougher Than Leather, Raising Hell, and probably King of Rock) and the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill and Check Your Head. I listen A LOT to the House of Pain song “Jump Around,” but it has been so long since I listened to the entire album.

I have a huge number of YouTube mix-tape playlists. A large chunk of it is miscellaneous 1990s stuff (some mainstream, some not), and another large chunk is some stuff where the theme of the fan-made video was anti-racist skinheads.

I found a massive playlist of mainstream 1980s pop hits and placed the ones I liked (about 58 of them) in my own playlist. To some extent (not a large one) I was exposed to many of those songs as a little kid (I was born in 1975) when watching a 1980s movie or when I occasionally was listening to the radio. I listen to that playlist about once a week. And one of the songs on it I have kind of fallen in love with- the music, the images in the video, but I have not examined the lyrics. It’s Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler.

I also fell in love with a great song by the Dropkick Murphys called “Out of our Heads.” In the last year I have probably listened to it an average of once a day and I listened to their first three albums once as well.

Since the early 1990s I have been a fan of two Tom Petty albums- Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open.

I was at least kind of exposed to ska starting when I got into Fishbone in High School and I’ve been increasingly curious about it in the last 23 years. Although they might be more accurately called “Ska PUNK,” I do enjoy listening to The Mighty Mighty BossTones for about half an hour a day on average in the last 5 years.

I listen to a small amount of Irish Republican music. I bought an entire album by Black 47 but for some reason, even though I get the impression they’re progressive, all I listen(ed) to were/are the two republican songs (one of which I believe is a Celtic rap song).

In the last several months I’ve started listening to about seven Beach Boys songs, I have fallen in love with the song “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and I like “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by The Robins.

I have studied (i.e. read articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s web-site) skinheads in general and totally opposed Nazi skinheads specifically, and I listen to a fair amount of “Anti-Fascist Oi!” Oi! In general, both fascist and anti-fascist, might bear some resemblance to punk and might be defined by the lyrics (about violence, the working-class, and being a skinhead). The main such band I listen to is The Oppressed.

I listen to a small number of songs by the progressive (largely folk and/or punk) singer-songwriter David Rovics.

In the last 4-5 years I have spent a fair amount of time listening to YouTube playlists of music from the Vietnam era. For some reason I have used that word to find good mix tape playlists of classic rock, including classic rock that I vaguely remember from movies about Vietnam. (I believe that what we did there was wrong and I have evidence from more than just left-wing sources)

Alternative
Rage Against the Machine (the first two albums) Soundgarden (Badmotorfinger and Louder Than Love, and a little bit of some others that I didn’t listen to in High School), Nirvana (all 3 studio albums), Alice in Chains (Dirt and Facelift), Fishbone (Truth and Soul, The Reality of my Surroundings, and Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe), L7 (Smell the Magic, Bricks are Heavy), Faith No More (The Real Thing and Angel Dust from High School, and We Care a Lot in the last several years), Ministry (The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste and ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ), and Biohazard (I didn’t listen to  Biohazard until 1993) (Urban Discipline, State of the World Address, and Mata Leao)

I THINK that covers about 99% of the songs and albums that I should mention here.

**************

The Music of my Enemy

Since late 2008 I have spent probably an hour a day on average listening to Nazi Skinhead music. For multiple reasons, some a little vague, I enjoy listening to the music of my enemy. I stumbled onto it shortly after I first got on YouTube in 2008 and I recognized the name Skrewdriver that I had learned about in 10th grade when researching the racist right for a paper I was writing (primarily about the racist right in this country, but I’m not surprised some of the sources I read mentioned the BRITISH Skrewdriver). Anyway, I liked most of the music (not the lyrics) and just really enjoyed listening to the music of my enemy (yes, I also listen to a small amount of anti-Catholic N. Ireland loyalist music). I also learned a handful of things by studying the lyrics and the imagery in fan-made videos. Crucially, I quickly started to alter the lyrics into anti-fascist poems- in many cases, so that my poems were saying the exact opposite of what the original was saying (when there was a change in topic, there was always at least some conflict between my poems and what the authors of the original lyrics believe (and some times a LOT of conflict- a lot of the N. Ireland poems were based on lyrics by people who supported the British and Unionist causes)). The first poetry post is here.

I wish I could explain in better detail why I enjoy listening to the music of my enemy.

***************

The High School years- the PMRC and “musical intolerance.”

In 11th grade one of my best friends (James, of Portland, OR) and I did a “‘zine” (a very small and unprofessionally written/edited magaZINE). It was kind of political, kind of creative (well, James’ stuff was creative, my stuff less-so but the ‘zine in general (called The Conformist Monthly) seemed pretty popular with our friends and probably about 10% of the BHS students). One thing I did that I am a little embarrassed about is an essay about what I called “musical intolerance.” Although actually typing that and making copies of an issue that contained it is something I probably shouldn’t have done, I DO believe that most of my peers in High School were close-minded about different kinds of music, and at the time I believed that I was better because I listened to metal, rap, alternative, and punk.

Something I wrote for The Conformist Monthly that I AM proud of was an essay about the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC was created in the mid-80s, primarily by Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of senior GOP leader James Baker. It was largely supported by the religious right and practically no one to the left of Bill Clinton supported it. It’s been decades since I studied it, but the main thing it did was successfully push for an industry agreement to place “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” stickers on certain albums.

I really am not insensitive to the desires of many parents (probably around 95% of them) to keep young children from listening to songs about sex and drugs and songs which use swear words (I believe there is a spectrum between two situations- one involving children under 13, and one involving young adults who are around 15, and at the latter end of the spectrum I’ll be honest I am not sure if I care about parents wanting to keep their teenage kids away from that kind of content). And these stickers were a problem. In the past, MANY music stores wouldn’t sell those albums. In the past MANY of the artists negatively affected were people of color, and in general, many of the albums targeted contained songs with political messages that were liberal or progressive. This country might have been a better place in the 1990s if those songs had been heard by more people.

***************

“There Goes The Neighborhood”

(The title of a Body Count song about their presence in the punk and metal genres)

As I near a conclusion, the climax to this is something I want to talk about that is very special to me. That is the intersection of rock (or at least the heavier and/or faster variants of it) and rap (I’ll be honest, I think I’ve always failed to understand that many fans of rap and/or hip-hop define one as corporate and the other as something closer to the street, and I’m just going to use the term “rap”).

I don’t listen to a lot of music made between 1998 and today, so I’m going to focus almost exclusively on stuff from the 1980s and 1990s. Here is I think a complete survey of that topic up until some point in the mid- or late 90s.

1. In 1986 Run-DMC and Aerosmith collaborated on a new version of the latter’s song “Walk This Way.”
2. In 1989 industrial metal band Ministry did a song with a rapper- the song is called “Test” and is a great combination of rap and industrial.
3. In 1991 Anthrax and Public Enemy collaborated on a new version of the latter’s song “Bring Tha Noise.”
4. Shortly after that, Public Enemy and Anthrax went on a national tour together.
5. Ice-T and his musician friends created Body Count in 1990.
6. In 1991, Rage Against The Machine was formed with music that was sort of heavy and/or sort of fast and vocals that would often be labeled “rap.”
7. I am having some difficulty nailing down the details, but in the early and mid-1990s Biohazard, who were more or less a hard-core punk band, did at least two songs with a rapper (Onyx) and, crucially, did music videos for the two songs that involved Onyx that I can remember (one reason this is VERY significant is that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true that Biohazard had, years earlier, toyed with white supremacy as a marketing tactic in NY City’s competitive music scene, and may have done these 4-5 collaborations (including TWO videos) to make up for that).
8. In 1993 the soundtrack for a movie called “Judgement Night” was entirely devoted to collaborations between rockers and rappers.

I could and probably WILL do a lot of research on this topic in the next year or two and write something very substantial, but I have always had very positive political thoughts about this series of collaborations because I THINK they had some potential to positively affect race relations in this country. IF they HAD that potential it wasn’t something permanent, as 35 years later we are struggling to prevent a white supremacist from occupying the White House. I am not sure what is the status today of that potential- I’m not sure I should be making a big deal about the need for such intersections today, especially because there might be plenty in recent years and/or they are having no impact on American race relations.

When thinking about this topic, I wish I had a better grasp of sociology and psychology.

************

Some miscellaneous thoughts

1. For about 10-15 years until recently, I took a break from being a fan of Public Enemy, although in hind-sight that didn’t involve changing the “Favorite Music” section of my blogger/blogspot profile page. I have listened over the years to about four albums by PE, all of which were either in the 1980s or the very earliest 90s. On one of them, there’s a song that includes two lines I have always found offensive, but which really got me pissed off about 10-15 years ago. One line is applauding homophobic VIOLENCE and another one implies it’s okay for a man to beat his partner if he takes her on vacation around the world. I am still very offended by those lines, but decided to listen to those albums from High School again).
2. In the early 1990s there was one song by the hard-core punk band Sick of it All that I really liked and which I have always really liked. For some reason I have practically never listened to any other SOIA songs. The one I listen to is called “Just Look Around.” The thing is, in 2001 I was at a party for progressives and one person asked the room what is the most progressive hardcore punk band? Part of me DID know that the correct answer was Fugazi, but because of that one SOIA song I said it was SOIA. The guy who asked the initial question said something about a pirate flag and slapping women. For some bizarre reason I didn’t respond. But if you look at the lyrics you’ll see that something like 2/3 of the lyrics are completely acceptable to progressives. The other third is some slightly questionable lines (i.e. mentioning anti-Semitism among blacks when that might not be helpful (for all I know it IS helpful)) and the very worst of the lyrics in that 1/3 is a reference to the “workingman” when “worker” or “working person” would be a lot better (this might be what the guy at the party was talking about when he suggested I wanted to slap women).

In the official music video, when the lyrics refer to “diseases and modern plagues of our times” they flash the “Silence=Death” symbol of the movement calling for a better national response to the AIDS crisis. I guess it could be a negative statement, but I have always assumed it was a positive statement about that symbol, which would probably also mean that SOIA are anti-homophobic. Lastly, another song on that album seems to be about attacking Reagan over Iran/Contra.
3. I organized my first fund-raising show (it was a VERY small venue) in 1995 to support the Left Hand Bookstore (in Boulder) and the college-years ‘zine that James and I did (it was called Subliminal Prison). The opening band was called Sonnus and I don’t have much to say about them. The other two bands were A) a High School band from the Denver area who were probably influenced by punk, and an amazing band called D-Town Brown. The latter’s music I have difficulty describing. I believe it was possibly influenced by rock (at least one of the 2-3 times I saw them playing a regular show there was moshing and 1-2 band members had earlier been involved with a band that was either thrash/speed-metal or death metal)) but I think it was more influenced by some other stuff (mariachi perhaps? (There were 4-5 members in the band and all but one were Chicano (the last member was black)). Although James and I did a publicity campaign in waves, very few people showed up. Not sure why.
4. The second fundraiser I did Involved Sonnus, D-Town Brown and a punk band called Dead Silence. It was for the Colorado Coalition for Single-Payer (the Canadian health-care system) and I gave Denver CCSP a LOT of flyers to put up in Denver (the venue was in Denver, where I didn’t live) and I don’t think any of those flyers were put up anywhere. I’m not saying I was totally blameless, but I do think that most of the blame was CCSP’s. The only reason that a significant amount of money was raised is that the owner of the venue (The Mercury Cafe) took less money than she usually did in that situation.
5. In high school and college, when I went to a show/concert I would dress in the spirit of taking nonconformity as far as I could. If I was at a Dead Milkmen show, I’d wear a Megadeth shirt, if I was at a Primus concert I would wear a Public Enemy shirt, etc.
6. You might like a post I did about whether or not Slayer is racist.

UPDATE 12/25/24 I unintentionally left out a handful of bands I should have mentioned, but with one of them I feel like I really need to do this update. In 10th grade I started listening to the heavy metal band Ugly Kid Joe, and after about two decades I just recently re-discovered them. I started listening to their EP "As Ugly As They Want To Be" (their first release) and their first full length album "America's Least Wanted" in High School. They describe themselves as neither glam nor thrash and I think that's accurate. In a minute I have something more important to say, but first a little story. In the Summer of 1992 there was a tour with (from top to bottom) Ozzy, Slaughter, and Ugly Kid Joe. I have pretty much never liked Slaughter, but I have always had at least some positive thoughts about Ozzy and in the last several years probably 1% of all the music I listen to is Ozzy. The concert was at an amazing venue called Red Rocks and although it doesn't facilitate moshing (I THINK I remember that right) I'm glad I went to a concert there. But I got lost on the way there, so A) I somehow missed almost all of UKJ's set (I think they may have started early??), and B) after I heard ALL of Slaughter's set I had to leave after about 30 minutes of Ozzy because my Mom didn't know where I was I and I was afraid if I got lost again I'd get home so late she would worry. BUT I GOT TO SEE ALL OF SLAUGHTER'S SET!!!!! (The important part of mentioning UKJ is that on the first full-length album there's a fairly good anti-racist song ("Same Side"). It's not militant, it's not angry, but I think it's pretty cool despite that. As I was typing this and listening more and more to the song, I started asking myself some critical questions about the idea that it's an anti-racist song and then I remembered that the vocalist, Whitfield Crane contributed to a special re-recording of the Motorhead song "Born to Raise Hell" where he and ICE-T did some of the vocals and in the official music video they appear together)

************

Conclusion

Although there was one gap that lasted about 3 years where I listened to very little music, it was a huge part of my life in High School and college and in the last 16 years. I find listening to it very enjoyable and it contributed to the several factors that led me to embrace progressive political values, and it generally makes me feel very good. Although I don’t think I’ll be expanding my interest in music any further (I don’t think I’m going to try bluegrass for example) I am (perhaps too) proud of the fact that I have fairly wide-ranging interests in music.

Most of the time I was typing this up I was listening to a song from the very early 1990s by a band called EMF. It’s called “Unbelievable” and I think it’s sort of a dance song but could also inspire moshing. The song, and to a greater degree the video as well, is very energizing and I got so much done with the multiple writing assignments I gave myself.