Sunday the 29th will be the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall on the Gulf Coast.
Five years ago, I had just moved from the Gulf Coast, my home for 21 years, to Lubbock, TX. During the first week of classes the hurricane hit. I knew my family was safe, but I had friends who couldn't find family members until days afterward. And they were the lucky ones.
If you've never been through a hurricane (and Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 out of 5), different areas have to worry about different things. My family lives on high ground but amidst lots of trees, so we worry more about wind. New Orleans on the other hand, being below sea level always has to worry about floods. Some places along the Mississippi Gulf Coast had to worry about both. When you worry about wind, it doesn't really matter how long the storm sits in one place, but with flooding you want a storm to pass fast. Katrina sat there.....and sat there.....and sat there. And the levies broke.
1,836 people lost their lives in Katrina along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast. But the bigger tragedy isn't the devastation that Katrina itself caused; the bigger tragedy is our lack of prolonged attention, our lack of compassion, and our inertia towards protecting, defending, and rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Not just for Katrina, but for the BP oil disaster as well.
Lake Ponchartrain overlooks the City of New Orleans. Appropriated below, the incomparable Paul Brady performing Lakes of the Ponchartrain.
This is another one of those set days. I'm pretty sure this will be the last of the "set" days, although who knows. It's my hope that normally I will post a video of me performing something, but I've just gotten over a cold and I have a 2 1/2 hour background music gig, so I'm trying to save my voice.
Music is an art, and yes, can and should exist simply because it's beautiful. Let's be honest, I've devoted my life to studying and performing music, so I'm with you on that one. However, I find music incredibly powerful as a tool: to build community, to comment upon aspects of society that need change, and as an instrument of inspiring change politically and socially. One of the reasons I'm so drawn to "folk" music is because it has historically been used in this way. Look at the 17th century ballad "The Diggers' Song" protesting land rights:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now, You noble Diggers all, stand up now; The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name Your digging do disdain, and persons all defame. Stand up now, stand up now
Look at any number of traditional/folk musicians writing or singing songs in this style today: Dick Gaughan, Andy Irvine, Martin Carthy, and on and on and on. Look at the inspiring African musicians who face abuse, exile, and death both to them and their families: Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, and the radical Fela Kuti.
The more I grow as a person, I realize that this is the type of musician I wish to become: socially and politically conscious and ultimately with something powerful and meaningful to say. All of this leads to Appropriation Fridays: my co-opting of songs, more than likely folk or traditional in nature, that I feel comment on something I see happening today. As folk music proves to us, there's very little new under the sun.
To that end, here's this week's appropriation:
Barrett's Privateers
McChrystal's comments to a Rolling Stone interviewer caused a political firestorm, including the naming of Petraeus to command American forces in Afghanistan and the questioning of our failing doctrine of counterinsurgency. His comments did something good though: they reminded a forgetful nation that we are at war. They reminded the general public that, despite the flight suit stunt years ago, we're still fighting.
I'm appalled by a lot of things about the wars we're fighting, and Barrett's Privateers addresses quite a few of them: misrepresentation of the wars, questionable recruitment policies (including ads like thisone...guys, war is not a video game or a movie), and the lack of support on the ground or when our troops (quite a few of them my friends) get back home. And for the life of me, I can't understand why veterans' affairs aren't a serious political issue for most Americans. If we can't do justice by our veterans, what does that say about us as a nation? We can do better....we have to do better.
