patti smith on trampin'
page ten

radio baghdad

A Year Ago in Iraq - March 20, 2004

A little after nine o'clock in the evening on March 20, 2003, the United States began bombing Baghdad. B-2 Spirit bombers, F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter bombers, Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles, and missiles launched from B-52s set off a ferocious display of advanced firepower in Saddam Hussein's palaces and other targets in the city. This was the "Shock and Awe" tactic that the Pentagon had been talking about for months. The explosions that first night were spectacular, and the bombing continued for twenty days, as the American army advanced toward Baghdad from the south. On April 4th, U.S. troops took the Baghdad airport, and the city fell five days later.

The 12-minute epic "Radio Baghdad," contrasts the glories of the ancient Babylonian civilizations of King Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi, with modern day Baghdad, which is currently being most uncivilly ripped asunder. Smith empathetically tells the song through the eyes of an Iraqi mother, who attempts to protect her children from the horrors of warfare, singing them to sleep with a lullaby, but suddenly urging them to run from the "shock and awe" campaign of bombs raining down on the city. In a masterful vocal performance, Smith goes from a barely audible whisper, to a crescendo of violence, crying out "run, run," as if her own daughter's life were in danger. Indeed, that may well be the point, since it's not hard to imagine the outrage the American people would feel if such a situation were occurring to their own children. One only hopes "Radio Baghdad" will do the same for all those listeners who retain an open mind. (Obviously, it won't be appealing to the hawks in Washington D.C.). In fact, back in 1968, when Ginsberg read Blake's "The Grey Monk of Charlemaine" in Chicago's Lincoln Park, FBI agents reported on the performance as follows: "Allen Ginsberg got up and read some gibberish and incomprehensible poetry." So while George Bush (who is arguably the most self-deluded and unreasoning President America has never elected), won't be a receptive listener to "Radio Baghdad," there is every reason to believe that Ralph Nader and John Kerry will be.

Nebuchadnezzar ~ William Blake, 1795
Color print finished in pen and ink and watercolor on paper.

As told in the book of Daniel (4: 31-33), God punished King Nebuchadnezzar-who defiantly built the glorious city of Babylon-by taking away his reason. Driven to the fields to eat grass, the former king became bestial, sprouting feathers and claws. When he finally recognized the superiority of God, his reason was restored. Blake derived the pose of the figure from a Dürer print; he might have intended the subject as a veiled reference to the madness of his own king, George III of England. Similarly, Patti Smith was certainly thinking about the lies and madness of America's President, George W. Bush during her politically charged concert last summer in London. Patti recited The Declaration of Independence along with the following damning indictment of Mr. Bush and his policies, which prophetically noted that the Bush administration was "holding captured Iraqi's in barbaric conditions."

PATTI SMITH: The history of the present President of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation's all having as a direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these United States. To prove this, let these facts be submitted to a candid world:

George Bush has suspended the rights of American citizens to fundamental civil liberties. He has forgotten that the United States was founded on the proposition of the separation of Church and State. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation. A President whose character is thus marked by every act, which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Whether or not I fumble, or stumble over certain words, the truth is just, the truth is here. And we indict George Bush - just as the revolutionaries indicted King George III - so we indict George Bush:

For refusing to abide by international agreements for the protection of the environment,
for abandoning Alaska to the oil companies,
for abandoning Afghanistan,
for humiliating the United Nations,
for squandering a vast federal surplus,
for giving tax breaks to the rich,
for refusing to participate in international courts, prosecuting crimes against humanity,
for flouting the Geneva convention by sequestering captured prisoners at Guantanamo Bay,
for holding captured Iraqi's in barbaric conditions,
where neither their families or the Red Cross have access to them,
for destroying the Baghdad International Library,
for destroying the oldest copy of the Koran,
for napalming Iraqi soldiers,
for killing innocent Iraqi citizens…
FOR WAGING A WAR BASED ON LIES! - LIES! - FUCKING LIES!!

An Iraqi mother comforts her child
"Liberated" by George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq