I GET THE HEAT

The WHO's "Tommy" is one of the great musical works of the 20th century, no question about it. since the age of twelve, i have been criminally in tune with this great collaboration with greatness, which i greatly swear in all sincerity. just play the opening to "acid queen" and i'm yours. i watched a deafening pete townshend on the dvd tube tonight as he explained his logic behind tommy and playin with the who. to roughly and unjustly paraphrase him: "i was unhappy with playing in the band, but what sustained me was something that began with 'can't explain'. with that record, we had a success that reached a lot of people, and i was at a point where i was being paid to do that again, so i felt i had a commission, and therefore a responsibility to do something about this powerful position. with 'tommy', i wanted people to get in touch with their spirit of ritual, their embrace of the abstract. you see roger up there singing 'see me feel me' looking like god with those lights behind him, and we can see for the first time since our club days every face in the crowd, as they've been flooded with this really bright light. so when we start singing 'listening to you' we've got the crowd all there for one purpose,. you hear the words come about, 'listening to YOU right behind YOU i get the HEAT' do they mean anything? no, nothing, they're purposefully abstract. so this idea of sprinkling something spiritual on the audience with something also vaguely religious can be very powerful, and we'd end on a crescendo so we coud feel that the audience had breached a wall and reached another level."

so all of a sudden, the WHO go from being a macho fuel band to a group interested in at the very least, uniting people in purpose for some common goal. i wonder if the same degree of theatrics and spiritualism have been heavily apparent in the rhetoric and propaganda of revolutionary movements, for better or for worse.

let's remember that in the same year tommy came out, a group out of the anti-war movement in the states called the weathermen would begin to form what was later known as the notorious WEATHER UNDERGROUND.



they were a force to fuck with, that's for sure. they played it nice until the FBI assassinated their good friend FRED HAMPTON, a young activist and speaker with the black panthers who was killed by the pigs in a staged gunfight that should have inflammed americans, but didn't. so they launched a bombing campaign on the crookkked system reponsible for the atrocity of vietnam in the global climate, and the repression of racial equality and the limitations over freedom of political action at home.

my question is: what is going to be the spark that blows everything up in our faces in this climate of bush? it isn't the fraud election of 2000, which could have been averted if americans were more like ukranians. american voters could really take a lesson from yushchenko, a prime minister who took on the president in ukraine's complex and corrupt government. he was poisoned for it, and his face left disfigured. yet he continued to fight for presidency, not because of his ego, but because the people came out and stated quite clearly that they wanted change, and they wanted yushchenko to be fairly appointed the opportunity to be the new face of democracy in the ukraine. but not americans. they rally around a sod like kerry, who, despite his good intentions, can't convince enough people that he's worthy of turning the country around. they abandoned kucinic and nader and the only real politicians in high places for kerry, who despite a hard fight in 1970 against the bullshit in vietnam (he should know, he fought), could not come out against the bullshit in iraq and the myriad of issues that surround its originators in the bush team.

it's tough to blame those poor folks for putting their hard earned energy into kerry. the system is so removed from the american people that they had little say in the matter. it was easy to adopt the anyone or anything but bush rationale with such little power. but it's time america stops waiting for the next michael moore movie or episode of crossfire to tell them what to do. thanks mike, we love ya, but you're never gonna stop this bush guy alone.

will there be an event that carries the magnitude of kent state in its shocking brutality? what will happen here in fortress north america when the resistance really gets pissed off? will the war come home like it did for the weathermen?

wake up america. how many times do you have to hear it? your country is at war and it's under national attention. your president is your problem for the next four years. we arond the world can kick and scream all we want, but it's up to you ultimately to "free the ballot", as jean st.vil told us at the bush protest two weeks ago in ottawa. "to free the ballot," he said, "we must stop the bully and his bullets." it's up to you to jam the machines that make those bullets, just as it is ours in canada to end our complicity in this movement of death that grows more and more accomodating to bush now that chretien is sitting in his ottawa condo retiring to the great political desk in the sky. and it can't just be students anymore leading the charge.

there are many things we in canad can do to "put our bodies on the line as bodies are being eliminated across iraq," to steal a phrase from andrea schmidt of the iraq solidarity project. i would suggest the follwing:

- put pressure on paul martin to take the same stance as jean chretien on the bush issue: strictly business but no buddy-buddy friendship. such a position onyl puts martin, and canada, at risk of being continually coopted by the republican weldpolitik. this means giving him some flack when he comes to visit instead of feeding him our best foods.

- help was resisters like david sanders, brandon hughey and jeremy heinzman. there's going to be a draft, and we need to help lawyers like jeffrey house put pressure on the gov't to treat war resisters like any other refugee in the legal process, but in the meantime, the only system dealing with the coming influx of resisters is the provisionary one we can come up with until the gov't improves its position.

- end security certificates and other spillovers of US homeland security in our country. stop throwing muslims in jail without charges and extraditing them to the states so they can be further deported to places that will torture or murder them.