Free jazz shock....music and politics thread....

What the f*** does free jazz, politics, hope, and fear have in common?  

I am listening to Machine Gun by Peter Brotzmann.  Someone told me that Brotzmann means "loud man" in German, and man, there was never anyone named better.  This album is one of the most blistering, intense free jazz albums ever.  There's no lulls in it.  It's straight out of the box, motherf****r.  

So why am I rambling about a free jazz on a political blog?  

There was a time when I was living in Chicago when I really gave up on things.  I stopped listening to good music.  I was afraid to.  I felt helpless, lost, drifting without any real direction.  Mid life crisis?  Not really.  Just I felt numbed from all the BS about life, the Midwest (a rather dull place to live, at least for me), politics, numbed by Hollywood garbage (both films and music), disappointed in European cinema, scared of everything.  I was a vegetable, watching bad reality TV and just zombying out.  I would have many CD's and DVD's lying about, and I was afraid to listen/watch them as I saw no real point in being involved in the artistry of it all.  Then I woke up one day and said "I had to leave".  I saved up my cash and I moved to NYC.  A great move.    

What does this have to do with politics?  It has to do with the shock and awe tactics of the Bushies and their minions.  After 7 years of Bush's belligerent bullying and after 8 years of Clintonian sycophantictry (probably not a word, so I'll invent it) of the GOP agenda, I found myself again.  The shock has worn off, and I feel that they can do nothing to me anymore.  In reading Naomi Klein's masterful The Shock Doctrine, she said the "shock" can take decades to wear off.  After our "freedom loving" government assisted brutal right wing regimes, they were eventually tossed out, but the countries didn't recover right away.  Naomi's point is exactly right.  After you've been tattered and beaten (both mentally and physically), you just don't get up one day and say "everything's fine".  You eventually come around to it, and when you do, it's the most liberating feeling ever.  Of course, my alienation and suffering pale in comparison to the regressive, sinister tactics employed by right wing governments throughout the world, so I will not equate the suffering.  When you are constantly dumped upon, slammed, tolchocked, bounded, gagged, and royall screwed over, you become apathetic, nihilistic, and an uncaring bastard.  But when that feeling evaporates and you believe in something again, and you are unafraid to believe in it again, it's the most liberating feeling ever.

This country has come out of the shock and awe tactics employed by the US government (mostly the GOP).  There will be euphoria when Bush is out of office.  He's practically out now.  Never in modern history has there been a president so marginalized and forgotten about like Bush.  The country has already moved past him.  His tactics no longer work.  The fear card, the only card that the GOP has ever really played, has been played out.  It's gone.  Finished, destroyed, dead from the, dare I say, the audacity of hope.  No, it's not all Obama's doing, but those words, the audacity of hope, are a wonderful phrase, a poetic phrase, that I love to repeat.  

The great filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said that to be free you simply have to be so.  Hope is very liberating.  Art is very liberating.  Fear is a disease for which there is a massive cure, and that's hope.