I am watching America disappear before my eyes, as are you. The progress the country has made in the last 50 years is slowly disappearing pen stroke after pen stroke. Lie after Lie after Lie. Salon has a great recap here: “9 Terrible Things “President” Trump Has Done In Just One Week” (Presidential quotation marks mine).
The only thing that lifts my spirits about the next 6 months are the ideas suggested in this piece by Elizabeth Linder (Update Feb 2025 – link removed as piece deleted from the internet) who writes about the opportunity this “presidency” (again, mine) will provide for new heroes and new storylines to emerge.
In the arc of President Trump’s story, the station of hero – to use Dickens’ phrase – will not be held by Donald Trump. It will be held by someone else – or even more powerfully, by many others. After all, the hero in The Wizard of Oz isn’t actually the Wizard. It is Dorothy Gale, from Kansas. And a rather clever Scarecrow, a splendidly compassionate Tin Man, and a considerably brave Lion. But without the Wizard around whom to frame the story, our Dorothies, our scarecrows, our tin men, and our lions do not spring to life. The absence of a President-hero does not necessarily spell the absence of Presidential-style heroism.
The whole piece is well worth a read, especially if you have been struggling to find the positive in all of this.
And I love that the heroes are already starting to emerge.
In “President” Trump (seriously, can someone help me make these quotations a thing?) we have someone who is so easily provoked, so thin-skinned, that the mechanism that will cause his undoing is staring us right in the face.
If the popular vote started showing up online, offline, wherever we can – and I’m talking the global popular vote here as well, which is an even more overwhelming a majority than that found in the “U”SA alone (too much? yeah, too much…) – then it cannot be long before we push him into the final downward spiral that will eventually undo his presidency.
“But what about Pence?” the people say. “He’s no better.”
Yes, yes he is. Whatever his personal beliefs are he holds nowhere near the swagger or audacity to inflict as much harm as Trump. He has the personality of a tree stump and would be infinitely better warming the seat of the presidency for the next three and a half years.
“But what if we push him too far?” the people say. “He can launch nukes within four minutes.”
I say, first of all, why am I pretending there are people saying things just to make my points, but more importantly, all the more reason to act with haste. A Trump in power for a year may only hold more sway, may only be more powerful and more difficult to take down. He is showing signs of weakness… he is a weak, weak, pathetic man who is so ignorant as to what the history books will write of him that he actually thinks he is currently beyond reproach and out of our reach.
He isn’t.
And every voice matters.
If he can lose sleep over a tweet or an SNL skit, imagine what 3 million halves of onions can do.
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And now we have reached the part where I remind myself that this is a music blog…
Last August I wrote about the power of Protest Songs and about how so many were lacking in my regular, every day engagement with US politics. In that piece I asked why I don’t see contemporary protest songs filling my newsfeed and wondered why people weren’t sharing their political beliefs through a medium that has withstood the test of time.
And then, I did absolutely nothing.
Like many, maybe I thought there was no way Trump could win so maybe I didn’t have to use my voice for anything except for that blog post encouraging others to act.
And then he won.
And I was one of the many who, while fearful of the worst, wanted to wait and see what he would actually do once the power and enormity of what he’d gotten himself into settled in.
And I did absolutely nothing again.
It is not much… in the grand scheme of things what I am doing now is small, but it is something.
Dave Eggers is one of my favourite authors of all-time and you can read his very entertaining account of a day spent at a Trump rally here. In it he notes, among many things, that Trump’s apparent theme song is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and that the rally had more in tune with a Garth Brooks concert than any serious political event. While Trump blasted out Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stone, Eggers muses that those artists support for Trump would be “unlikely”.
It was this experience that motivated him to orchestrate a brilliant movement in October last year – “30 Days, 30 Songs” – in which famous musicians would release new protest songs they had written – one a day for – the last 30 days of the election campaign.
This small something has caught on and now the site is dedicated to 1000 songs in 1000 days; it will publish “original tracks, unreleased live versions, remixes, covers, and previously released but relevant songs that will inspire and amuse and channel the outrage of a nation.”
And I have found the musical mecca from which I will now share and pass on through my own social media efforts.
I’ll be posting a different song every day for the next thirty days across my own social media channels, encouraging people to listen and doing my part in passing on a message from those with much larger microphones than my own.
It’s only the start of what one person can do.
In this day and age you can either sit back and read the news or stand up and be part of it.