David did say, "As usual, feel free to share."

Hi folks,

Well, my life over the past couple days has been revolving around my head turning into something like a balloon due to the sudden onset of a tooth infection, causing pain, dizziness, a prescription of antibiotics and an ³emergency root canal,² but I¹ll try not to bore you with such details, and discuss slightly more important matters.

Along with at least a sizeable portion of those of you receiving this email, I was just at the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) protests in Miami and the SOA (School of the Assassins) protest at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. I¹m going to begin this email here with some ruminations from those protests, then I¹ll tell you about some upcoming shows, the death of MP3.com, new songs and other stuff.

Miami was a police state. There were hundreds of people arrested and held by the police and treated very badly, including being beaten and deprived of basic necessities. Many journalists were also shot and arrested, if they weren¹t imbedded (yes, they were using this term) within the ranks of the police. The imbedded journalists wore helmets, supposedly to protect themselves from rioting anarchists. The police looked like soldiers on patrol in Iraq, only better-equipped -- they all were reportedly wearing bullet-proof vests along with their shields, clubs, tasers, and launching devices for plastic bullets and tear gas canisters.

You can read about what happened at <http://www.stopftaa.org/> and <http://www.ftaaimc.org/> , among many other websites. Some great commentary from Dave Bleakney and others on Znet. I haven¹t done a thorough search in the mainstream press, but outside of the Miami Herald the FTAA protests seemed barely to be mentioned. Driving down to Miami I was a bit amused when reading the Tallassee paper, that there was no mention of the fact that the biggest city of the state was essentially under martial law. One might think that it would be of interest for your average guy reading the paper in Florida¹s capital city, that should they want for some reason to travel south to Miami for business, pleasure, or whatever, they might want to know that many large and small businesses in the downtown area will be closed, several exits off the highway leading to them will also be closed, and 14,000 riot cops will be patrolling the streets looking to arrest anyone with dreadlocks or a nose ring.

The weirdest part for me was when I was singing in the amphitheater, a lovely place where the big AFL-CIO sponsored rally was happening. Me, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle and Tom from Rage Against the Machine sang a couple songs each (and they all used my guitar ­ I¹ll never wash it again), then the idea was that there¹d be some speakers and then I¹d close out the thing with a couple more songs. So we sang, Billy, Steve and Tom headed immediately for their hotel, and various speakers started speaking (some of Œem were darn good, too). As the speakers were speaking, many people were leaving the amphitheater. It¹d be pertinent to add here that the vast majority of people who were trying to get into the amphitheater in the first place never did, because the cops declared the place ³full² after it was at about one-fifth capacity. So people were basically joining our brethren on the other side, the majority that never even got in.

At some point or another in there, the cops started attacking people with no provocation, using rubber bullets, clubs, tasers, and tear gas. Somewhere around that point, while I was waiting to go back on stage, a fair bit beyond earshot and not in visual view of the street over the hill (we were, after all, in an amphitheater, if you know what an amphitheater looks like you understand that the whole design of the thing is made for people within it to be out of earshot and out of sight), the violence started (that is, the police started beating unarmed college students and other people). Somewhere around that point, the union people backstage got word that we were being locked into the amphitheater, and those outside the amphitheater were also being locked out. At that point I was in the surreal situation of entertaining an actual captive audience while just beyond a fence lined with riot cops, thousands of people were being attacked for exercising their right to free assembly.

After walking through the abandoned streets of downtown Miami, one of the events happening that night was a concert at a place called Churchill¹s, where people showed each other their collection of rubber bullet wounds (baseball-sized purple welts, generally), taser wounds (marble-sized purple welts), as well as their used teargas canisters and rubber bullet casings. There was a large collection of darn good musicians there at Churchill¹s, many of whom I saw the next day in Georgia, along with many of the protesters who limped with their injuries on and off of the cars, vans and buses going to Georgia.

In Georgia the police were searching everybody¹s bags and wanding us all with metal detectors on the way into the protest area, outside of the gates of our nation¹s main terrorist training base (see <http://www.soaw.org> for details on this venerable institution). This was the second year they¹ve pulled this tactic, but this year they were employing a new strategy, which was to bombard the whole area with military marching music and hyper-patriotic country-western songs through huge speakers they set up just on the other side of the fence, fifty feet from our stage. The end result was a horrific, cacophonous mixing of military music with what would otherwise have been the moving speakers of women and men who had survived torture and massacres, and the beautiful music of people like Pete Seeger and Charlie King. By mid-afternoon for some reason the military decided to turn off their music, and the last two hours of the protest went on without it.

Afterwards the next thing for me was a concert at the convention center in downtown Columbus, Georgia with a whole bunch of stellar musicians. Part of the contract at the Bradley Theater, where we had done things in years past, included a clause saying that no rap or hiphop could be performed, so this year we had a different venue, and our concert included all kinds of great music from North and South America.

So there¹s my skewed musician¹s view of these protests. If you go to places like <http://www.atlanta.indymedia.org/> you can read other perspectives.

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