My Last Letter (I Hope) to Senator Clinton

Yesterday I had the singular displeasure of receiving a politician's filthy virtual smile and slime-ridden handshake via email. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) placed a letter to her mailing list puporting to elucidate her current position on Iraq.

I have not heard from Senator Hillary since 2002, when she sent a form letter back to me explaining her reasons for---illegally, remember---authorizing the Christian Fundamentalist and avid golfer George W. Bush to use force against the men, women, and children of Iraq. As one of her constituents back then (having apparently been temporarily insane when I voted for her instead of writing in a stinking pile of dogshit, for example), I had written to ask her to please not authorize the use of force.

So I checked out the issues page at her website just now. As of today "Iraq" does not rate as a main issue for Ms. Clinton on her website. Glad to know the likely Democratic frontrunner in the next presidential election is so in touch with the pulse of the nation and, indeed, the world. (Kind of reminds me of the Christian Fundamentalist and avid golfer George W. Bush, or his frat-boy colleague at Yale, John F. Kerry.)

However, from the issues page if you click on National Security and Foreign Policy, you can find, at the top right (today at least), a link to the text of the letter she sent out. Scan the letter quickly, and then read below my letter to Ms. Clinton. Feel free to use any part of the letter in your own correspondence with this deranged and sickeningly power-hungry individual who---I sincerely hope---will never win another election or play any further roles in the decision making processes of the United States. I also hope this is the last goddamn letter I have to send her requesting she not be such a deplorable human being.

The Hague, 30 November 2005

Dear Senator Clinton,

In your letter yesterday (11/29/2005) on Iraq policy, you wrote "I do not believe that we should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end. Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately."

Senator, I should not have to remind you that it does not matter what you believe. You work for the people of New York State, and the will of your constituents should be the only thing that drives your participation in the Senate.

As to the first part of this statement of your "beliefs", that the US occupation of Iraq could possibly be an "open-ended commitment without limits or end": this is entirely the fault of lawmakers, such as yourself, who voted---illegally---to authorize George W. Bush to use force against the men, women, and children of Iraq. I do not care about the reasons for your vote in 2002, which you go into great detail explaining---the so-called faulty intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, the apparent brutality of Saddam Hussein and so on. None of those reasons excuse the brutality of the United States, which, in launching this vicious pre-emptive war has followed in the undignified footsteps of the German invasion of Poland (1939) and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941). Your suppport of the Bush Administration's war-mongering stance did not reflect the will of your bosses (I refer now to voters in New York State and not corporate lobbyists and wealthy donors).

Regarding the second option in Iraq you brush away without any consideration ("Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately"): Senator, the US military must leave Iraq immediately, and take its prisons and torture centers with it. There are two reasons for this:

1). it is the right thing to do and
2). we say so, and you work for us.

In addition to removing our instruments of war and torture from Iraq as quickly as possible, the US should begin to make war reparations to compensate the Iraqi people for the damage we have caused to their environment, their precious archeological sites, their quality of life. This will be a massive payment, and I suggest that the money for this fundamentally moral undertaking be collected, first of all, by repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and, secondly, out of the salaries of you and your colleagues in the US Congress. It has been cowardly and criminal what you have done, and you don't deserve a cent of the tax dollars of hard-working, misinformed Americans.

Concurrent with the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the members of the former Iraqi regime we hold captive (including Saddam Hussein) should be turrned over to an impartial, international court not of our designation. The US is playing too many roles in this tragicomedy: aggressor, judge, jury, and executioner. This is inexcusable conduct and it is inexcusable for an elected representative of the people with any self respect to do anything but reject this scenario.

In your letter yesterday you wrote "there are no quick and easy solutions to the long and drawn out conflict this Administration triggered", a falsity on two counts. Firstly, it is you, Senator, and your colleagues in the Senate who gave the Bush Administration the "trigger" to pull in Iraq. Secondly, there is of course a quick and easy solution. Pursue an immediate end to the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq. Close the torture centers. Recall the machines of war in forward positions and cease the production of new ones. Give the men and women who enlisted in the US military meaningful, fulfilling, and life-affirming work to do.

And please, unless you are able to adopt a platform of peace, justice, equality, and environmental sanity---and disregard the iniquitous demands of donors and lobbyists---spare me the displeasure and remove me from your mailing list. Without an ounce of contrition following egregious and despicable acts, which you enabled and have failed to properly address, you expect New Yorkers like me to stand with you.

Not a chance, Senator. How disingenuous of you to suggest you oppose a war of aggression you attribute to the Bush Administration alone. How many times did you vote to cut off the funding for this war? How much effort did you put into removing from office those Administration officials---Rumnsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Bush himself---responsible for the deception in the US and violence in Iraq? What kind of work are you doing to inform American troops about your complicity in their plight as the hired guns of blood-thirsty, money-hungry chickenhawks in Washington, D.C.?

No more letters, Senator Clinton. No more letters, no more lies, no more blood of innocent people around the world on American hands. Every day, Senator, you have an opportunity to be a decent human being. When will you take it?

Experimental Music vs. American Thanksgiving

The following is a slightly edited version of some prepared comments I made on 24-11-05 (American Thanksgiving), preceding a concert of solo saxophone improvisations I performed at <>TAG in The Hague.

Let me just mention how this evening will run. I will say a few words now, and then I'll perform for between 45 minutes and an hour. We'll take a short break to get some drinks, and then regroup to talk for as long as you're interested and about anything that comes to mind (yours or mine). We can discuss the music, what I am about to say, or the weather, whatever you like. I want to mention that I am speaking and performing tonight not only for people at <>TAG in The Hague, but also for a number of people listening via internet, and I would like to thank Mickey Z. in Queens, New York for promoting this concert to his online readers. Check out his important work at mickeyz.net.

Now allow me to explain why I'm performing this concert in this space tonight. About six months ago my friend Fernando Rincón Estrada and I started hatching a plan to get me over this December to Bogota, where he lives and teaches composition, so that I could do a performance and workshop on improvisation, saxophone technique, composition and so on. Since I am one of the audio curators here at <>TAG, I used my enormous power and influence here to schedule a try-out for the Colombia meeting—(which has, in the meantime, been postponed until the Spring).

Some of you may know that a large part of my work is concerned with creatively addressing the critical issue of avoiding a human-instigated global catastrophe. Tough work. Given my preoccupation with global diplomatic and environmental meltdown it might at first seem strange that I then spend so much time preparing a solo concert of experimental abstract saxophone improvisations. We could talk all night about the various ways one might choose to address the horror of our time—indeed of any time—but what I want to mention are two items in particular.

First, experimental abstract saxophone improvisations cease to be either decadent, or benign, or both, when one considers that it would be through such work that I might meet and communicate with people on the other side of the world. I have had some experience in this. In fact, that is what I am doing here now, in a country other than “my own”. I am a visitor, an observer, and a participant engaged in a dialogue with a cultural scene which is radically, I assure you, different from the dominant cultural scene in the country of my birth, and it is only through exposure, through such dialogue that this important fact becomes apparent. I have an Israeli friend who recently had the opportunity to meet and talk in Istanbul with artists from places like Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Such an act is bizarrely illegal according to the laws of their countries (and I suppose shunned in some Israeli circles as well). But it is through such meetings, such communication, that we begin to trivialize inane laws, rabid propaganda-fueled xenophobia, and homicidal, if not suicidal, imperialisms. It then becomes possible to create a space in which we challenge and solve the problems that face us all.

We have to meet. We have to talk. And the pervading atmosphere of xenophobia that has touched all of us in this room is a threat to our future.

And that brings me to the second point. This space, this organization, <>TAG, is explicitly about communication. And not just the communication between artist and observer, but the communication amongst artists, across disciplines, amid different aesthetics and inclusive of various backgrounds. This is damnned important stuff and I am glad <>TAG exists to support it.

In addition to our handful of listeners across the Atlantic, I want to make another connection to the Americas today. In the United States people are celebrating “Thanksgiving”, a national holiday referencing a semi-mythological peaceful harvest meal between Natives and White settlers in 1620 something. We Americans are taught from day one about the greatness of our country, and this is the second great act of American benevolence (the first being the story of the racist pirate Christopher Colombus “discovering” an entire half of the planet and “rescuing” savages from the horrors of non-European civilization).

Anyway, we all know, or should know, how the rest of the story of the birth of the US played out. Over the glorious years of the supposed “civilization” of the Americas millions of Indians were slaughtered to pave the way for European settlers. Before oil was the power commodity of choice a trade in people made fortunes for Enlightenment-era political and business elites. The story continues to play itself out now, with the assumed Euro-American right to the control of resources around the globe the dominant factor in our wars on the environment, on sovereign nations, on peoples’ right to communicate, and on children. I’m not suggesting that our systemic racism—the racism inherent in American society as exposed recently by Hurricane Katrina, and the racism inherent in xenophobia (instigated by corporate globalism via the profitability of the arms trade and the pilfering of resources, for example)—I’m not suggesting that such injustice is unique to the US, or to Western Europe for that matter. I am not exonerating the limits on press freedom in Turkey, or the limits on free speech in China, or the theocratic totalitarianism of Saudi Arabia or Iran. But in the same way that communication starts with us, here, now, the reduction of savage world-encompassing violence begins with us. We can stop it when we want to. We can stand up to injustice not just when it’s convenient, and not just when it threatens us directly, but as a way of life.

I want to clarify that it is not illegal for me to speak with Colombians, for example, and that a meeting about experimental music will not directly prevent the horror, for example, of my country’s horrendous drug wars and its consistent meddling in Latin American affairs. But the ability to communicate, as we’re doing tonight, as I hope I will be able to do in Colombia in a few months, is something precious that must be constantly defended. And we have to defend our right to communicate by communicating. When we fear each other, when we scorch the earth, when we poison the food and water, deprive children of education and healthcare, and systematically ignite hostilities (most often for profit), we implicitly reduce the likelihood of being able to engage in the kind of communication that uplifts us all. I am genuinely thankful for this opportunity to share my music with you, but as long as injustice and violence reign as the building blocks of global society—with my own country at the helm—I can do nothing but work against it, even as a performer of experimental saxophone improvisations. As a resident of the Netherlands, as a citizen of the US, and as an artist at large in the world, I see that as my obligation tonight and always.

I hope to have a link soon to an archived excerpt of the performance, and a transcript of at least some of the lively discussion that followed the concert. The spontaneous informal debate on the role of artists in society and the value of creatively addressing the crisis of communication and humanism raised a number of important questions and lasted for two hours after the concert. My thanks to all who contributed.