Jeffrey Foucault in his latest newsletter (quoted in full):
I’ve been having trouble writing this thing. I mean, if we pulled on our boots and wrapped up in heavy jackets, drove down to the falls below town to walk the access road to the No. 2 dam, I’d have my opinions. After a while. After a decent interval. But I’d want to hear what you’ve got going first. I’d want to hear about your folks, and your work. Your kids. Probably I’d hesitate to get into the heavy stuff. A stray barb and a dark chuckle might be all.
I wake at three, humming like a tuning fork, vibrating with the collective churn of a few million other souls, everyone wondering where the ship of fools is headed. I get up and dress, start the water for coffee, go out to make kindling in the moonless dark. Empty the pan from the stove into the fire scar out by the barn, and watch as the sparse coals from the night prior blaze up as they fall. I kick the snow from my boots in the front hall, twist last years newsprint into the stove, and absently note outrages I barely remember now, splashed across the front pages in heavy type.
I read Takahashi, and Larry Levis. Set them down to fight through a chapter of science, until, distracted by an unfamiliar word, I find my notebook, and begin a poem. Or maybe it’s a song, or a grocery list, or nothing. Eventually I’ll locate my phone and check messages, look at the news of the world. The stove ticks and the light comes up, inexorable as an artesian spring.
My heart is sore, like yours. There was a story that most of us believed about this country, regardless of party, about who we were, what we did, why did it, and what it meant. That story was our culture, and it wasn’t always true, but now we don’t even tell the story. Not to ourselves, not to each other, and not to the rest of the world.******
Still, there are things we all agree on. In our country, no one is meant to be above the law, and because officers of the state have the law on their side, they don’t wear masks, they wear uniforms. Masks are for outlaws. We don’t threaten our allies with wars of territorial aggression, or depose the leaders of other countries in order to expropriate their sovereign resources.
Those of you familiar with our history will know that we have, in fact, done these things. In the second half of the last century alone we interfered with the governments of forty-plus nations and deposed democratically elected leaders everywhere from Iran to Chile to Congo, when they didn’t fall in line with our cold war policies. We lost fifty-eight thousand Americans – and killed two million Vietnamese – in a war prosecuted on the basis of lies. But when those and other things came to light – usually through heroic journalism or civil disobedience – we held hearings, fired people, and passed laws. It was messy, and too late, but it’s what we have. It’s how we preserve the story, and the story is everything. We have to tell it over and over.
Righteousness is dangerous, and I don’t want your approval. I don’t confuse anything that happens on the internet, where nearly every available platform is a corporate tool for data surveillance, with my moral stature. I could get on the socials and ask the thirty thousand people who already apparently approve of me to approve of me again, over this, and some people would applaud, while others would quit me, or send irate letters (I have a folder of these). In either case, I’m not famous enough to give a shit. I just feel conscience-bound to tell whoever I can tell: what’s happening right now in our country is wrong. If you live in a state with Republican legislators, they need to hear it from you directly.
I don’t write what people like to call protest songs. The last thing in the world I want is to have a lot of people who think they agree with me show up to agree with me in person, in order to feel the thrill of having a correct opinion, without the work of having done anything. Music is a mystery, as strange as dreams, or laughter, and at its best it enlarges the space for our common humanity, our sense of the soul and of aesthetic possibility, in a world full of blindness and pain, and joy. By that definition, every song is a protest song.