In August a book I was writing got out of control and stopped working, so I bought a forty-nine-key piano keyboard and I began plinking around on it and awkwardly strumming the few chords I knew on the guitar. I worked mostly in my pajamas, in the second floor of my barn, where I could set up a folding table and some microphones. I hadn’t played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I’m writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about—dancing and trancing and love and love’s setbacks. And some were protest songs, because I was disgusted by the C.I.A.’s “secret” drone assassination program and wanted to object to it.
You can register a political objection in a number of ways. You can talk to people you know and try to get them to see things from your point of view. You can write a letter to an editor. You can give money to the A.C.L.U. so that they can sue somebody or some agency of the government. You can write a book or magazine article or a blog post. You can march and hold signs. You can get a sleeping bag and occupy a park.
These are good ways to go, but in all cases you’re basically complaining. You’re saying, “X is wrong, there’s a better way.” And the problem, of course, is that complaints are intrinsically negative and therefore are always slightly irritating. You’re carping. You’re being disagreeable. You’re pointing a finger. You’re discourteously disturbing people’s contentment.
The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony. Yes, X is bad, and the basic fact of my objection to X is discordant, but music, even music performed by someone like me—an amateur who can barely sing in tune some afternoons—is (with some crucial help from pitch-correction software) healing and good. Yes, I am unhappy about X, but I can pin the sodden laundry of my dissent on the clothesline of timeless chordal tunefulness, where it will dry and add a bit of color to the landscape.
It’s two months along now and, although my anti-drone tune isn’t done yet, I’ve written fragments of about twenty songs. The first one I finished was about a beautiful Korean island where Samsung and the Korean government are building a huge military base to be used by the United States to threaten China. It was very simple and influenced by plainchant, and the piano part was so easy that I could play along with myself as I sang.
Then I finished a song about military intervention and aid and how it goes wrong—you give weapons to your friends until their friendship ends. War inevitably gets out of control. Not complicated ideas, I know, but I felt they were worth saying.
Then I finished a song about the whistleblower Bradley Manning. I whistled a lot in this song, through my lips and through my thumbs, mapping the notes to my keyboard, and I used every sampled tribal flute and whistle sound that my software (Apple’s Logic Pro) offered. I suppose I was trying to overwhelm the wrong of Manning’s trial-less imprisonment with such a polyphony of breathy hooting and tooting that it would somehow make things better. At least I’d be thanking him for his sacrifice.
The most recent song is about some women who were killed on September 16th by a NATO warplane while they were gathering firewood—one of the innumerable tragedies in our chaotic adventure of retribution and regime change in Afghanistan. I wanted to take six minutes to mourn their death and say this is wrong, this must end.
