Polemics – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2026-03-062026-03-15 by David Hughes

Ars Protestationis

Last month I spent two weeks in the Twin Cities, my annual sojourn to my wife Andrea Carney, who lives in Eagan, a suburb of Saint Paul. We didn’t visit memorials to the recently fallen, although we did drive past the Whipple Building where ICE jails abductees (on the way to celebrate our thirty-second wedding anniversary). Local network newscasts continue to cover roundups and reactions. We learned ICE was moving to the ’burbs, but we hadn’t seen that there. Nonetheless, we counseled our Filipina daughter-in-law to carry her passport.

I didn’t take in any live music while I was in Eagan, but I’ve been thinking it’s time to share a few songs sung in resistance to ICE as well as that exhibited in Gaza and the West Bank.

I just missed a January 30 appearance at Minneapolis’s historic club First Avenue by Tom Morello (ex Rage Against the Machine) and others. as a benefit for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Morello was joined by Rise Against, Al Di Meola (!), Ike Reilly, and a (Very Special Guest), documented below. The “boo”s you’ll hear are an indication of the political persuasion of many in Morello’s audience.

While The Boss’s sentiment is pretty pedestrian, he does pay tribute to the fact that, following the earlier killings of Philando Castile and George Floyd, “a city aflame” in 2016 and 2020 now “fought fire and ice,” pun intended.

2025-06-232025-07-05 by David Hughes

Oh, Equality, up yours!

—with apologies to Poly Styrene

Eleven years ago, the Against Equality (AE) collective published a compilation of its three anthologies, critical of myopic topics of “gay pride.”¹ As writers for AE note in the collection’s introduction, the day before SCOTUS trashed the Defense of Marriage Act (the ban on gay marriage signed by Bill Clinton) and California’s Prop 8 (the people’s ban on gay marriage), in 2013, the Justices had trashed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

2025-01-192025-07-08 by David Hughes

Heavy Inauguration Rotation

A few days ago, while cleaning up dead links on this blog, I ran across something included in my 2019 post Vaneigem and Bubblegum, which discusses matters musical, political, and spiritual. “Art on 45” is the lead track on a 1982 vinyl 12” EP called Art • Dream • Dominion by The Royal Family and the Poor. It appears to take its name from Stars on 45, a Dutch act that legitimized what had been a bootleg: a stringing together of popular songs to a disco beat.

2024-09-252025-06-29 by David Hughes

The Wind and the Fury

Danish Language Lobby Poster for Wild Is the Wind

A look at Wild Is the Wind, the film and its theme song.

2023-11-142023-11-14 by David Hughes

You Say Constitution, I Say Country

Here I parse the meaning of the lengthy first line of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

2022-11-272026-02-05 by David Hughes

Deaths

It’s been three months since I’ve posted here. My wife Andrea Carney and I have separated; she’s in Minnesota near her son Alex and his family while I remain in Denver, moving next month from Central Park to the neighborhood named after Sloan’s Lake, the city’s largest body of water, at its western border. Like many places here, its working-class roots show while the peroxide of gentrification blandly bleaches.² Gentrification can be seen as rejuvenation, giving youth to the old. But it’s a kind of death.

2022-08-072025-03-03 by David Hughes

Finlandia, Insania, Tasmania

At about the time that Finland and Sweden were welcomed into the NATO follies, YouTube pushed my way a tune by Canadian band Martha and the Muffins, their hit “Echo Beach.” I in turn recalled getting Martha Ladly’s first solo single in 1981, “Finlandia.” It was anthemic, the sleeve graphics imperial.

Oh Lordy.

YouTube audio was pulled after my posting, but vinyl version is available here.

2022-07-132025-07-08 by David Hughes

I’m not ready to make nice

Just shy of twenty years ago the then-named Dixie Chicks were pilloried for daring to criticize W for his impending Iraq invasion. They responded with their masterpiece of resistance, “Not Ready to Make Nice.” I bought that album for my wife Andrea Carney, who liked the now-named Chicks. She converted me. Rick Rubin’s impeccable production was akin to what he’d done with Donovan’s Sutras and Johnny Cash’s several American Recordings: let the people play!

2021-09-122022-01-20 by David Hughes

False Flags

On August 30, 2006, I received a “don’t break the chain” email from a relative, apparently by mistake. Appropriately it had no subject line because it had no substance. Nevertheless its sentimentalism compelled my response. I offer this as a snapshot in time with which to compare the present discourse.

2021-08-152022-01-20 by David Hughes

Delightfully Brutal

Saturday night, the Fall of Kabul, the Choppers of Cong, the mendacity of “Why didn’t we see this coming?” All I can think about is a poem I heard by chance on KPFK seventeen or eighteen years ago. Haunted then as I am now, remembering little, I wrote to the writer, Los Angeles poet Jan Wesley, asking for a copy.