12 September 2005

BEIRUT: The man blinks and nods his head. "I wrote a song about that." Beirut has a long history of welcoming other countries' dissidents and this week it hosted one from the U.S., albeit for just a few days. David Rovics belongs to a tradition of American performer-activists who use folk music conventions - the totemic acoustic guitar in particular - to deliver political commentary. So it's not unusual that a conversation about contemporary politics from Kabul to New Orleans to Caracas would be punctuated by the refrain, "I wrote a song about that."

Rovics and his guitar played a personable, often amusing, gig on Monday evening. It was held at Nadi Liqa - a left-leaning cultural club across the street from the Qasr Jumblatt in Clemenceau - and sponsored by Beirut's Independent Media Center. Nadi Liqa's compact space was full somewhat beyond capacity with Lebanese and foreigners more or less familiar with Rovics' work.

"I'm here because I write a lot about U.S. foreign policy," he says. "These days that policy seems to be felt a lot in the Middle East. I wanted to come and see the places that I write about." Beirut is the first leg of a self-financed trip that's taking Rovics to Amman and Palestine.

Born in New York City, Rovics grew up to describe himself as "a middle-class radical from the suburbs of Connecticut." He's released 13 CDs, three in 2005 alone - he says the speeches of George W. Bush inspire him.

Rovics has invoked 20th-century Marxist playwright Bertoldt Brecht to say that music "can be a tool for selling products ... or part of the stockpile of ammunition necessary to build and maintain a social movement." These days such sentiments may reverberate more amongst America's sectarian right than they do skeptical secularists. The singer is wary of the U.S. system's inviolability.

"It's not unrealistic to imagine a mass movement in the U.S. of the sort that has overthrown regimes in Latin America," he says. "There's so much to be hopeful for.

"Look at a case like Venezuela. The U.S. sponsored a coup against [left-populist President] Hugo Chavez. They had the generals on board and acting as if it were a done deal. Then Chavez' supporters took to the streets in such numbers that the generals didn't have the stomach to put them down. The coup collapsed. Chavez just won another term with 70 percent of the vote or something.

"The fact is," he continues, "the reason there are so

many people living so comfortably today is because of

social movements."

American critics of their country's foreign policy turn up in Beirut from time to time - though their presence is more transient than the standard-bearers of U.S. policy, particularly in the days since the political ferment Washington dubbed "the Cedar Revolution."

Lebanese who straddle the gulf between the U.S. and Middle East sometimes remark upon how many of America's American critics come here for speaking engagements that simply rehearse speeches written for American audiences.

The analysis is erudite; the jokes entertain - as folks here know very well, the most-successful dissidents lace their comments with sardonic humor at the regime's expense. The afterglow, if there is one, is reaffirming and emotive - as if you'd been to a great concert or an inspiring church service. Those hoping to have the argument advanced or modified to suit the context are disappointed.

For audiences less tuned in to what's going on in the U.S., the dissidents' dialect can seem more parochial than that of the regime. Rovics sees his audience as a mutable thing.

"I want to have an impact on the audience," he says. "I'm trying to inspire people to keep resisting. I'm interested in building a community. Anyone who understands English should be able to relate to this music.

"In America I get my best responses from Arabs and Latinos - who are stereotyped as being "terrorists" or "shiftless." They seem to be happy that someone's talking about this stuff in English."

He says he wants to write songs that have "universality" to them, though he also streamlines his gigs to appeal to individual audiences. "I wrote a song called 'Vanguard' making fun of the sectarian right in the U.S.," he says. "But only leftist activists who've had to deal with American fundamentalists will understand what it's about.

"I like to take issues that the mass media has made accessible to a wide audience and then give them a more sensible interpretation. Like the way Michael Moore [responsible for the film "Fahrenheit 9-11"] takes accessible images and analyses them in a way contrary to that of the corporate media.

"I wrote a song about a fire-fighter who dies inside the World Trade Center in 2001. Most Americans would be sympathetic to its depiction, then I add a twist at the end that I hope will allow them to generalize their grief beyond New York on September 11."

Another song describes how a Palestinian child grows to become a suicide bomber. "I don't name or gender the speaker and have him describe himself in a way that most Americans would relate to, having grown up in a farmhouse that was taken away from his family.

"Personally I have no problem understanding why someone would become a suicide bomber and I think Americans wouldn't either if they could look at it in terms of the injustice that leads up to the decision - the loss of rights, the family's inability to make a living - rather than the bomber's religion.

"In the end I think it's an effective song because the audience can't help but identify with the boy."

Leftist activists like Rovics, and secular politics generally, used to be much more visible on the radar - globally and in the U.S. - than nowadays. The Bush administration's millenarian policies correspond to an audible increase in sectarian rhetoric in that country. Rovics doesn't feel that secular humanists are an endangered species, though.

He says he can understand why, after the failure of secular and left-leaning governments, people in this region would try to find something else.

He attributes the rise of sectarianism in the U.S. to the fact that people feel increasingly alienated from one another - living fearful in the cities or fleeing their fear of urban criminality for the isolation of the suburbs.

"It's an increasingly ignorant society," he says, and one of the culprits in this is the sensationalism and monochromic bias of America's corporate media.

Nor does he equate Bush's re-election with a massive rightward swing in the U.S. He does acknowledge that he is disturbed that so many people voted to renew Bush's term.

He believes Americans are becoming more critical of their government's policies, though - a major reason being that by now over half a million soldiers have served in Iraq and emerged Bush skeptics. "This has vastly increased the number of people who - because of their veteran relatives or friends or acquaintances - now convey a very different version of U.S. foreign policy than that represented in the mainstream media.

"Cindy Sheehan [who is holding an anti-war vigil outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas] and other soldiers' mothers are representative of the trend I'm talking about.

"I used to get hate mail from [non-combative] military personnel and their wives," he says. "Now it's only fan mail. I think the people who hated my work thought I was an arrogant elitist who was against their friends and relatives serving in Iraq. Then I responded to their e-mails. Usually within three e-mail exchanges, they've been convinced to my point of view.

"American patriotism. It's a mile wide. And an inch deep."