Ep 344 Mamdani, Gaza, Rebel Lyrics, and Us

Episode 344 of RevolutionZ begins with some reflections on Zohran Mamdani's inspiring electoral win. How? By his campaign mobilizing an astonishing 50,000 volunteers. How? By he and his campaign feeling real and honest, and by offering real and meaningful vision. By electoral politics and grassroots activism becoming a mutual aid tag team rather than competing opponents. The episode then moves from Gaza's gut wrenching fascistic horrors to our own American "Twilight Zone" reality that seeks to entrench fascistic tendencies as normal life. The episode then  takes a break from its usual patterns to look at some music, some lyrics, hoping to find some clarity, courage, and, well, dignity. Hoping to find some potential sources for an emerging new youth culture which is something that we all, young and older alike, profoundly need to create, experience, and embrace. Bruce Springsteen's "Youngstown" documents capitalism's broken promises. His "The Ghost of Tom Joad" reminds our moral obligations. But mainly the episode hopes to introduce and propel some emerging voices of today, not only old ones from yesterday. We hear Jesse Wells' and Carsey Blanton's unflinching and yet also moving and eloquent lyrics that directly confront power. "Rich people been fucking us all." Back not too long, we  re-surface Iris DeMent's "Wasteland of the Free" and Bob Dylan's "Gates of Eden" and "Dignity." The point of it all is to celebrate how artists have long conveyed a  vocabulary of resistance that we desperately need today.I hope the songs whose lyrics I offer reveal that cultural resistance isn't separate from political action—it's an essential aid. It helps us imagine and create more just futures. Even more, it can help establish a mood, a disposition, aspirations, and confidence in the face of deadly hate. In the coming months of defense and then in coming years of positive gain, we will need to disobey authoritarianism, eliminate ecological nightmare, and reduce staggering inequality. We will need to entrench in their place self managed participation, productive and ecological sanity, and real solidarity and equity. I hope the lyrics in this episode and others that you go on to find, to sing, and to hear, music and all, can help provide the rebellious soundtrack for our necessary actions. When I was a child we had that. The culture around us propelled us. We didn't win all we needed to, but some. Now new generations have to prevent the elimination of all that and, more, have to expand the victory vastly further. I hope artists and their audiences do their part to help propel all that. It ought to come naturally.Support the show