fumbles and free-falls

Vice presidential debate tonight, 9 pm Eastern. Also broadcast on npr.org.
The New Yorker Festival panel at the NY Public Library: I forgot to mention. The panel was “Political Rockers,” moderated by Sasha, and featuring KRS-One, Henry Rollins, and Krist Novoselic, former bass player of Nirvana; Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney was also scheduled, but she cancelled at the last minute, shrinking the panel demographic to three dudes of roughly the same age and era. (Her track record isn’t exactly scorching: this is the second panel I know of that Carrie Brownstein has punked out on, the first being the EMP Pop Conference. Carrie Brownstein, step your scheduled-attendance game up.)
So, we had three men who’ve all made political music in some capacity, but the discussion ended up being largely about politics only. This was, in part, courtesy Krist Novoselic, who has written a book I probably won’t read entitled Of Grunge and Government: Let’s fix our broken democracy! Its title is representative of Krist’s public-speaking style, all whingo-bingo taglines and inflatable exclamation points, as though he is bent on windbagging his way to a city council seat — the quicker fixer-upper. This was punctuated every four seconds by his declarations that “WE are a DEMOCRACY in CRISIS!” As evidence, he invoked the Teen Dance Ordinance — the law in Seattle that made all-ages shows virtually unhaveable, now overturned.
Meanwhile, KRS-One invoked the Temple only once. Instead — after noting he used to sleep in the NY public library when he was homeless in the late ’70s — he explained his belief that there is no democracy. He described growing up in the Bronx in the ’80s, when off-duty cops regularly sold him and his friends a wide array of military-grade machine guns. Uzis. He described a day-to-day, very immediate type of crisis, growing up in a place that ached with every cut the Reagan administration made. In his place, when the government announced they were cutting funding to parks; the next day, the Parks and Rec trucks rolled up and snatched away the rubber mats from the public playground. That kind of democratic crisis. So when KRS said he’s not voting, you could see where he was coming from (that was his point), even though his logic was cracked — he explained that voting in this election lends legitimacy to a system that never worked for him in the first place.
I get it. I empathize. But voting for Kerry now is as important to America as a tourniquet on a deep cut. It’s an emergency buoy — an effort to stop the bleeding while we prep the O.R.
Krist, for his part, soldiered on, arguing about the democracy in crisis, heating up and essentially stating that increased voter participation will eliminate every problem in America. As though if we all stand up to be counted, the scales of injustice will magically right themselves, and we all will be counted. Krist was also railing against what he sees as cynicism across America — cynicism towards voting — but it feels like a naive stance, the kind of stance that can imply a lack of struggle (or at the very least, a lack of Howard Zinn). I don’t know about Krist’s life, though, and probably won’t ever — I’m really not trying to read his book. Either way, he sounded myopic. I still feel cynical. But I’m voting. Absentee. In Oregon. A swing state.
Henry Rollins was amazing. Sasha asked great questions, including [paraphrased], “Did any of the soldiers in Iraq you spoke to have Black Flag tattoos?”* (Answer: “No.”) (Not Sasha’s most piercing question, obviously, but an unscripted one I liked.) My lottery date cracked some good one-liners, which is one reason why you should buy his book. KRS-One is far, far saner than most rap magazines would have you believe. And anyway, what’s sane about an Uzi?
ADDENDUM 10/13/04: Yes, KRS made the comments about 9/11, they were taken out of context in the news pieces, and I think he was doing it partly to be reactionary. OR he IS crazy as all the rap magazines would have you believe. But while I disagree with him (and think it’s a grave oversight to ignore the fact that most of the people who perished in the twin towers were working class), it’d also be an oversight to simply dismiss him as crazy, because he’s not the only American with that opinion. Like Jadakiss says: “Why?”