Rickie Lee's Still Fighting

Thanks to Downwithtyranny I caught up with what one of my favorite ladies Rickie Lee Jones is doing to fight Bushco/Neo-con fascism.

















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"Many political activists know her, or have recently become reacquainted with her, because of the song she did with Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher, "Have You Had Enough?", used in the campaigns that helped elect a diverse array of progressive candidates"

In this article Rickie Lee Jones talks about her project "Ugly Man", what's been happening since the Blue wave elections, and her hopes for a progressive America.

Here's Rickie:

....I must confess that for my part I had lost faith, become politically agnostic as Lee Cantelon put it, and withdrew. I saw my democratic representatives move so far right in their ambiguous campaigns that I could no longer keep my balance in the middle. Suddenly, standing tough, I was part of the new radical left, which was not radical at all. I was not part of any clandestine thought of overtaking the government and feeding it to communists, socialists, or anarchists of any sort. I was part of the radical thought that wanted to protect the money elderly people had paid all their lives for their own old age, to keep all children in preschools and in grade schools and middle schools that provided at least the same curriculum we had enjoyed-- music, art, PE-- in class sizes manageable and safe, in schools no food company could invade, nor political or religious institution could influence. I hoped to see a trend toward inclusive, common sense ideology and away from religious dogma of the sort manufactured in tent revival meetings and Southern Baptist armories, where the Christian soldiers doctrine makes them the sole bearers of the light of god, and all others must fall in their path, never mind that obscure part of the bible that says God is a loving God, or the theme that suggest Christians might be a people who follow the tenants of forgiveness which would lead to an assumption of humility, tolerance, and good manners. Instead these people are best characterized as ignorant, intolerant and very scary....

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...."That's how I feel," and I knew that this is how revolutions are grown, from the ground up. You cannot ever squash out peoples' memory. You can send out all the propaganda in the world and rewrite it so it looks a different way, discredit, rewire. But people know what they experienced. We knew the values and freedoms we grew up with had been absconded, and we sensed the pure evil that seemed to loom behind this impostor. I had spent my life maintaining the mantra 'music and politics are not my bag, baby.' But suddenly they were. I wondered how my heroes could remain so subtle, so silent. Truly. Springsteen? Neil Young? Where the heck were they all in 2002, 2003?....