This Week with David Rovics

"Jill Stein"

I'm not much for playing Charades, so I never actually got around to voting in an election until Ralph Nader ran for president in 2000. I also sang at various events with him, and at the Green Party national convention around that time, and at the last Green Party national convention online, and many other Green Party events in between.

I've also voted for lots of Greens over the years since I started voting more consistently, here in Oregon, where you're automatically registered to vote when you get a state ID or driver's license, the ballots arrive in the mail, making it all extremely easy, even for an anarchist to bother with.

I wrote this song, "Jill Stein," in 2016. I never got around to making a good recording of the song, but after seeing some particularly offensive posts about Jill on social media, I felt inspired to make a better recording of the song, after changing one word in it. See if you can guess which one!

With concern to the US political system, we can either keep on playing along with the "lesser evil" philosophy and hope to speed towards that proverbial wall more slowly, or we can turn the train around. Given those options, supporting Jill Stein seems like the right decision to me. I understand why other people disagree. It's a hard choice, between the near future and the further-off future. I've always been one for the long game myself, though I can also be very impatient.

They Call It Democracy

I had been thinking that maybe "The Ballad of Donald and Kamala" was all I was going to have to say about this election cycle, but apparently there's more.

One Year On EPISODE 3

Episode 3 of 3 of my audio seminar on the Gaza genocide.  All of the  episodes can be found at davidrovics.com/palestine.

One Year On EPISODE 2

Episode 2 of the Apocalypse in Review. You can listen to episode 1 at davidrovics.com/palestine.

One Year On: the Apocalypse in Review PODCAST SPECIAL

To mark a year of high-tech war being waged against the Palestinian people, there have been many different efforts at putting the past year into context, by many individuals and media outlets. Here's mine -- or the first of the three episodes in the series, anyway. The other two will soon follow.

This first episode is a crash course in the history of Zionism in Palestine, up until October 6th, 2023. The second episode is focused on the fall of 2023, and the third one on 2024.

Writing, recording, and putting together this sort of thing is very time-consuming. If people like it, it's worth it. Either way, it's a relatively new way of presenting things for me, and I'd appreciate your feedback, whether positive, negative, or in between.

Gig Organizing 101

The first time I organized a show for someone, I think five people showed up.

"Arc of Justice" REMIX

The Hawai'i department of the Ministry of Culture has given us a haunting remix of the song I wrote about those Iranian missiles that hit those Israeli military targets the other day.

New song: "Arc of Justice"

Everywhere the Al-Jazeera reporters were reporting from throughout the Middle East during and after Iran's October 1st ballistic missile attack on Israeli military targets, people could be heard cheering loudly. Most of the people I know across the world might not have been cheering, but their hearts were a little lighter, for a little while, at least. I know mine was.

New song: "Whatever They'll Pay (Ballad of Lars Fruergaard Joergensen)"

We interrupt these wars to bring you a Senate hearing with Bernie Sanders calling the shots. I'm still recovering from the shock of hearing a person with a Danish accent utter that much nonsense. Obviously they're not all fine upstanding radical leftists like almost everyone I know in Denmark!

If you've missed the proceedings, the upshot is that half of the expenditures for health care costs in the US these days goes for buying prescriptions of Ozempic, the new, extremely popular weight loss drug from Novo Nordisk. The reason it's so expensive is because the US government doesn't believe in regulating monopolies, and capitalism says charge whatever they'll pay -- it's basic supply and demand, after all.

Canadian Cancellations

If there were any press outlets interested in covering the trials and tribulations of a little-known traveling musician trying to sing any songs about Palestine without having people try to cancel his gigs, what might that coverage look like?