REAL ART (AND POLITICS)
Howard Zinn Meets Radiohead

A weird interview with radical historian Howard Zinn and Radiohead's Thom Yorke from ZNet:

Yorke: This goes back to what should be causing extreme alarm. If there are political programs on TV, yet it takes an artist to actually energize political debate, that tells you something really quite frightening about the level of the political debate happening on mainstream channels-right-wing-biased mothers. One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom. Obviously, the duty of artists is there, but it's more an indictment of the political system that someone like Zinn views artists as the seers, idealizing them as the people responsible [for inspiring] change. I think that would be great, but the reason people think like that is because there is no other element of participation anywhere.

Zinn: True, the political power is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare, in the sense that guerrillas in a totalitarian situation look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect. When tyrannies are overthrown-as, for instance, in fascist Spain or the Soviet Union-it starts in the culture, which is the only area where people can have some freedom. It starts with literature and poetry and music, because those don't represent direct threats to the establishment. They're subtle and indirect, so the establishment gambles that they won't lead to anything threatening, but often they lose that gamble.

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