SuperWeed

Isa at Post Punk Kitchen sent me a lot of traffic last week so the least I can do is share some punk music that has something to do with food. So, here’s Communist Radio by — str-e-e-e-e-e-etching for the connection — The Eat.

I love this song for so many reasons. The Eat was… I wish I could say “brief flash in the Florida panhandle,” but they actually were a local band in South Florida. Their sound captures the punk scene I remember from the time, although I was in a different place. They brought out “Communist Radio” on 7″ vinyl in 1979. I remember hearing it, somehow, at the time and I was thrilled when the mp3 blog Something I Learned Today shared an mp3 ripped from a scratchy record. I was even more excited whenl Alternative Tentacles came out with this compilation, from which I am sharing today’s tunes.

Besides the nostalgia provoked by the song, I just love to shout along with it, whether or not it’s actually playing. The refrain is especially fun for me because I once had a communist radio show. Or, at least, a quasi-communist radio show.

Of course, I’m not a communist per se. As an eco-feminist, I know that communists are just as likely as capitalists to see the earth and other animals as mere “resources” to be exploited by people. As an anarchist, I don’t like the statist and often totalitarian ways that Marx’s economic ideas have been implemented by so-called communist governments.

But, as long as red baiting continues, I’ll probably continue to feel the need to periodically proclaim myself a proud pinko. And, I must admit to having a rude affection and grudging respect for activists belonging to the various communist parties, even though their party-mandated machinations sometimes drive me to distraction. I like to call them “party people” since, in their seriousness and relentless goal-directedness, they tend to be opposite of what we mean by that phrase. This song goes out to them.

My version of communist radio was called Tenant Talk. It was a call-in show on 88.3 WCBN-FM Ann Arbor, all the way to the left of your radio dial, as we liked to say. It was a public service program sponsored by the Ann Arbor Tenants Union, which I coordinated for a few years. The idea was that tenants could call in with problems like how to get their security deposits back or how to make the landlord turn up the heat and everybody would get the benefit of the answers. Of course, most renters with such problems just called our counseling line so we didn’t get all that many on-air calls, leaving lots of time for local social justice news, interviews with in-studio guests, information about housing and economics, subversive songs, and anything else I felt like playing or talking about. I always used to think nobody was listening but then I’d staff a booth at a local street fair or other event and find out that I actually had fans!

My favorite show was one where I had invited the mayor and city council to come on the show to debate a local controversy concerning SRO housing. All of the Republicans, and only the Republicans, showed up. I guess they were trying to make some kind of point but it backfired because I used the opportunity to ask the mayor about something she had done behind closed doors and didn’t know that I knew she had done. It was one of those little behind-the-scenes local government decisions that really affect people’s lives but nobody notices. She had, to put it briefly, broken an agreement brokered by the Tenants Union many years before that ensured that equal numbers of tenants and landlords would be on a review board that granted or refused variances to the city housing code. When the term of one of the tenants on the board expired, she appointed a landlord to the seat, thereby quietly assuring that the board would rubber-stamp departures from the code by landlords. When confronted about it live on the air, what else could she do but pretend to have made a mistake and vow to restore the balance?

The other thing I liked to do was help listeners to understand how the boring economic news most people ignore affects all of our lives. In her recent article on GWB’s “Tony Soprano economics,” Carolyn Baker writes:

“Several years ago I had an epiphany that shattered my then-left-liberal/progressive world. I awakened from decades of delusion that I could adequately grasp world and national events without understanding the essential nature of how money works in the capitalist economy in which I live. I realized that until I acquired that understanding, all of the other subjects I preferred to talk about-war, social justice, race, gender, environment, energy depletion, civil liberties, globalization, and many more were inextricably connected with the financial machinations of the imperial beast within whose belly I reside.”

How can you start to understand things like why and how the Federal Reserve uses interest rates to keep the unemployment rate up? My favorite resource is Dollars and Sense, the “magazine of economic justice.” D&S articles are always informative and readable. Check out the archive for selected articles from back issues. Even better, subscribe!

And now here’s a bonus for those of you who’ve read this far. It’s another song by The Eat: M80 Ant Death. The liner notes describe this as a song about animal abuse, which makes me happy, since so few people recognize insects as animals. I can’t understand all of the lyrics but I really empathize with the repeated tag line: “M80 ant death brings it all together.” Yeah, I feel that way sometimes, like assassinated ants on a Florida kitchen floor symbolize everything.

September 12th, 2007 | Category: Economics, Insects, Music | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL