Episode 3: The Power of Art

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Transcript:

It was a cool January evening when I carried my 50 pound amplifier up, a rickety set of metal steps to the roof of the horse and cart cafe. My heart was pounding. Would anyone show up for our rooftop protest? I didn't know it was 2003 and it was the evening of the State of the Union.

Announcer: Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States

George W. Bush: year after year, Saddam Hussein, has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taking great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction whenever action is necessary.

I will defend the freedom and security of the American people.

David DesRoches: Half of President George w Bush's address talked about the war on terror, a full 30 minutes. The United States was on the verge of invading Iraq, and I, like millions of Americans, was against it. I had spent the entire day passing out flyers.

It was gonna be a people state of the union. Keep your ears open. The flyer said. We were planning on getting arrested. Well, at least I was. I gave my roommates all my savings, all 250 bucks to bail me outta jail just in case we succeeded. We certainly didn't have a permit to play a rock concert in the middle of King Street, the busiest neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina, but that's the point of a protest, right, to disrupt something.

Anyway, as the president delivered his more mongering propaganda, we were delivering a cover of Rage against the machines. Killing in the name. If you don't know the song. It's all about defiance against tyranny and it's got an incredible chorus section where he repeats over and over, fuck you. I won't do what you tell me.

We could see about a hundred faces looking at us from the street below. Not bad. I thought our four piece band tore through the song and my adrenaline was outta control. My, I'm pretty sure we played that song and like 200 beats per minute when the cops didn't show up. We kept the music going and when we ran out of songs, we invited a poet to spit some bars while we improvised.

A few guys were throwing tomatoes at us from the street, but that's the worst thing that's happening. Where's the five? Oh, this is civil disobedience. The whole point is to get locked up, but the cops never showed, though. We did end up on the front page of the college newspaper and what we didn't get arrested, which in hindsight I'm grateful for.

It sparked something. I mean, people were talking about the war, about free speech and also about the fact that the horse and cart, this is the bar whose roof served as our stage for the evening. The horse and cart was closing down to make room for a new tenant. Quiznos,

Quizno's song: we love these.

Devnul: What you are witnessing right now is a commercial for Quiznos Subs.

A part of these,

David DesRoches: our favorite local dive bar was gonna be this. A place with commercials this terrible. It was too much, but the horse and cart eventually found a new location in a new name. The Upper deck Tavern, and the war eventually ended, but not without tremendous loss of human life. I am telling the story, not because our silly rooftop protest actually made any kind of difference.

I mean, if anything, it's a fun story to talk about being young and idealistic and a bit crazy, but, but I'm telling it now on this podcast because there is power in art. Even silly art. I mean, just look at artists like Basquiat or Andy Warhol, or the sale last year of a banana duct taped to a wall for over $6 million.

Sotheby's auctioneer: Don't miss this opportunity. It's gonna go and it's gonna go fast at $5 million for the banana. Here it is. It's on sothebys.com, the world's most expensive banana at 5,200,000 at $5,200,000. Jen, the Catalan is yours. Congratulations. Thank you very much indeed.

David DesRoches: It's ridiculous, of course, but. If money is power and that stupid banana sold for a lot of money, then doesn't that mean that stupid banana had a lot of power?

Today we're talking about art and its power to create peace. We're not gonna be talking about bananas or money.

Those sounds bumping in your ears are coming from Ry, a hip hop duo featuring a Palestinian and an Israeli back in May of 2021. Their video, let's talk straight, went viral, garnering millions of views on social media in just a few months. The thing about the song is that, well, it's not very nice. In the video, the two men shout insults and prejudices at each other.

And it gets heated. You can feel the tension between them even if you don't speak their language.

Ora Rosen then kicks off the rap battle laying into Palestine with a barrage of insults in Arabic. Don't cry racism. Stop the whining you live in clans. Fire rifles at weddings. Abuse your animals, steal cars, beat your own women. The lyrics say then takes the mic and spares nothing. As he describes what it's like living under military occupation as second class citizens.

It's really uncomfortable to

David DesRoches: watch,

and that's the point.

David DesRoches: Truth can hurt, but it only hurts if you actually listen. But it's almost impossible to listen to someone if you feel that they've wronged you. So how do we listen to people who have hurt us or how can we get people we've wronged to listen to us?

NPR r's. Julia Furlan interviewed psychologist Tanya is Israel about this for the podcast life Kit.

Julia Furlan: Tanya says that listening is especially difficult when you're in conflict or if it's a difficult conversation. Sure, you might be trying to make a very reasoned point about the minimum wage, but your heart is racing and your pupils are dilating because your fight or flight response is on

Tania Israel: our bodies.

Were were built. A very long time ago, like back when the, the threats we were experiencing were things like saber-tooth tigers, and so our bodies respond to all threat as if it's a saber-tooth tiger. Even if that threat is actually somebody disagreeing with us in. An elevated tone. And so we are still kicking into fight, flight, or freeze response.

Mm-hmm. And, and when that happens, you know, our heart's beating faster, we feel flushed, our muscles get tense. And it's very hard to stay present and listen to somebody in that case.

Julia Furlan: So this is where breathing comes in as a tool to help your body. Let go of the saber-tooth tiger and stay present with your family members, Facebook conspiracy theories or whatever.

David DesRoches: Taking a deep breath, relaxing that nervous system that can help. But art, especially in the form of music, can also help

think about We Are The World which raised over $60 million for famine relief in Africa in the eighties, or or the concert for Bangladesh, headed by George Harrison or Sun City, which took aim at apartheid in South Africa or consider the creation of mean own in Japan over 50 years ago. In the 1980s, the organization traveled to 11 countries along the Silk Road learning about the various folk music and dances, and then they created a concert that included all these different styles, and they traveled around the Silk Road performing it.

They also got China and Russia to perform together on stage in 1985 at a time when the countries were on different sides of

Announcer: the Cold War. This event allowed us to deeply understand that musical exchanges can connect people's hearts. And our key to opening heavy doors that have been closed by Division and Differences.

That clip is from the mean owned concert association. We are convinced that cultural exchange of music and dance done with respect towards each other, can overcome differences and become a driving force for peace connecting individuals hearts. We hope to continue to promote cultural exchanges that bridge hearts and encourage mutual respect for humanity as a whole.

David DesRoches: The Dory collaboration also has this spirit. They were inspired by the Joiner Lucas Song, I'm Not Racist, A scathing rap battle between a bearded white guy and a MAGA hat and a black man with jumbo twists and a Wildcats jersey. The men tear into each other with all the racial stereotypes, but the underlying message is simple.

They don't understand each other, but they want to. They want to hear the other person's story, and they're at least in the same room. They've taken the first step by being in the same room. I tried for a while to interview the guys in Dory, but it kept falling through mostly because of the ongoing war in Gaza.

But in 2023, they were interviewed on the YouTube channel, creative Community for Peace. Here's some of that interview.

Sameh 'Saz' Zakout : Of course, we want peace and coexistence. We want things before. You need to go through a process to get, to reach out, to reach this coexistence that we are looking for in the peace. The political situation that happened since the last, I think, 20 years in Israel and Palestine of course, will affect how people react to a, a duo that it's Israeli, Palestinian, ju air.

People are so busy with this kind of hating each other without knowing the other side, makes 'em busy about getting to know the other side.

David DesRoches: Both men say they learned a lot about each other's cultures and stories through this collaboration. Here's where ya

Uriya Rosenman : I was able to become much more familiar and open myself to the Palestinian Earth.

At the beginning, it was hard for me to acknowledge and to understand that this is a legitimate part of history. But after getting to know his family, getting to know his costumes, I, I became familiar with a niche and I feel I'm stronger today because of this.

David DesRoches: When it comes to art, they're hopeful about its power to inspire positive change.

Uriya Rosenman : I see all as a complicated or sophisticated tool to illustrate reality and to to touch people's hearts. If you're able to convey reality in an artistic way, then you are able to evoke emotions in in the audience and to make them care about stuff that they don't have time and

Sameh 'Saz' Zakout : energy to care about. It's not black or white.

It's more complicated than people you usually know, and you as an international odyssey have the power like or said, because you can reach out to millions. This poem like that. Hey, when you talk about Israel and Palestine, it's more complicated than you think.

Sean Duffy: What's interesting to me is, and what I find political about this, is that it's pulling in an art form that is not from Israel or Palestine.

Right? Smart. It's, this is hip hop.

David DesRoches: That's Sean Duffy. He runs Quinnipiac University's. Albert Schweitzer Institute.

Sean Duffy: And in the context of the, I am not a racist idea. So it's invoking, it's pulling in the race conflict and, and the pain and agony and discomfort and injustice that has come from our history in the United States of racism.

Yep. By just the format. The format. Right, right. And, but what it does. That. What I do find optimistic about it is the idea of them speaking frankly through these lyrics at each other. It's inviting both, both perspectives in and more importantly, it's inviting both participants in like, okay, we may have these ins, surmounted difficult alternative or oppositional stances here.

What is the way forward? Mm. Well, maybe the way forward is just airing them to start with. Mm-hmm. It's just actually being in the same space together. Mm. It's actually engaging in the context of knowing that this is a situation of injustice, but that, but that it can be a situation of injustice without necessarily meaning that either of us.

Is to be condemned. We're both being, you know, invited into this, um, moment together. That's the

David DesRoches: way I'm interpreting it. I love that. Um, I mean, I love that because it's, um, it is the important step one, probably the hardest step. Yeah. Just be in the same room, air your grievance and hear. Do your best to hear and listen to the other person's grievance, not just wait for your turn to speak your your part.

That's probably the hardest step, but such a critical one, right? If we're ever going to go anywhere toward peace, that's probably what needs to happen.

Sean Duffy: And then hopefully when this gets out there, and I mean, I know it's already out there when this gets out there, the fact that it's in this very popular now global art form.

Yeah. Um. That nonetheless recognizes structural inequality and structural injustice. It makes it both safe and acceptable. Mm-hmm. If still disturbing for members on both sides to listen to this. Right. Because of the format? Because of the format. Because of, because of the sort of. Embracing the fact that, hey, we're acknowledging that this is difficult, that it's structural, that it's, um, connected to deep seated injustices, but we're nonetheless gonna hear from both sides.

David DesRoches: Love that. And it is, it's kind of like a, an um, a musical version of Marshall McLuhan's. The medium is the message. Where there is the message of the fight, but there also is the hip hop message on its own. Yeah. Which stands alone.

And music. It's not the only creative act that can help build peace. Can you describe these for us?

Anat Biletski: Tell me what you're looking at. I know nothing about, that's all right. Art,

David DesRoches: use your logical term.

Anat Biletski: Well, I find, I find, I find it interesting because it's about peace, but the colors are not peaceful.

David DesRoches: That's Anat Baki.

She's a philosophy professor at Quinnipiac and she's done a lot of work around peace building and human rights. We're at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Mexico, and a guy has just come up to us asking us to sign this artwork as a pledge to be a peace builder and to avoid violence. Here's a knot describing the artwork.

Anat Biletski: So there's something going on here with internal conflict. Um, I'm trying to look, there's no blue, almost no blue. And you look at that red and yellow and you think, where's this going? And then on the other hand, you've got the. The white here, that that would have to be where peace is gonna come from, from the white rising above the fire.

Somehow

David DesRoches: it does kind of look like, like, uh, the white parts. It is kind of rising into and taking over almost like I don't like a positive virus, for lack of a, a better metaphor.

Anat Biletski: Yeah, it's, it's not. Frightening at all. That's what's interesting. The colors are, are not the typical, you know, symbols of peace and love and understanding and all of that.

David DesRoches: Right. Maybe the

Anat Biletski: red and the fire gives it some burning urgency.

David DesRoches: Oh, I like that. Yeah. I could see that. Which is certainly, I think, you know, lighting the fire under our soul is kind of help us motivate to do stuff right. To do the right thing.

Bob Schleuber: The art that you're talking about was made between 1988 and 19 95 4 by the, uh, fiber artist Roland Paska.

David DesRoches: Bob Sle Huber runs a group called Peace Building Connections. He's the one who told us about Deery the hip hop duo we heard earlier. Take your

Bob Schleuber: picture. So he did fiber art with like three inch thick cotton installations, and then he made this series on, uh, stone prints. Uh, there's 15 different pieces in the series.

Uh, so you're looking at two of them right now. So you draw the image you want on stone, which will take you about two weeks to etch that into stone. And then it'll take you, uh uh, basically each color on here was individually layered on that stone, like a stamp. And he made 150 copies of each of the 15 pieces in the series.

And so you have this big kind of press system that you pull down. He did 40,000 press pulls, uh, to make the entire series. And so now just 35 years later, there only remains a handful of, uh, prints left from that original series on stone. And I've been gifted a handful of them by the family of the artists who passed away about seven years ago.

Um, and to travel with. So they roll up into tubes. I get to the city I'm in and then I unroll it, get a, a little board to set it on. Uh, and then I collect signatures wherever I am.

David DesRoches: Bob's been traveling around the world for 12 years. He's been to 90 cities in 15 different countries, collecting signatures from people.

Trying to encourage us all to commit to peace.

Bob Schleuber: Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. I always think of, uh, Dick Gregory, he said if you wash your clothes in, uh, water, uh, you end up with just soggy clothes and you need a detergent, you need a catalyst. And so I hope with our projects like this and the other, uh, events that I organize serve as catalyst to inspire, to mobilize and to engage people around the concepts of peace.

David DesRoches: The peace Conference in Mexico was full of moments like this. Meeting interesting people, doing really cool things and people like this person. Hi. Hi, how are you? I'm David.

Adelina Garrity: Nice to meet you. David. I'm Adelina. Adelina. Yep. What's your last name? Garrity. So I'm originally from England, um, but I've lived 14 different places since then and I ended up in San Antonio to go to.

The medical school that's associated with, for University of the Incarnate Word, school of Osteopathic Medicine, which is a mouthful. Great. I run the Street Medicine volunteer program at my school. Um, so I coordinate like volunteer medical students to go out to the streets of San Antonio. And meet unhoused people where they are.

So we'll literally go like, we'll get a call from a social worker and be like, oh, there's community under this bridge. Let's go meet them. We'll bring wound care supplies, we'll bring like harm reduction kits and Narcan, clean syringes. We go out there and just take care of people where they're at. Um. So

David DesRoches: Adelina is one of several students I spoke with from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

And as I'm interviewing them, a tiny older woman with white hair is bouncing around among us, smiling and just beaming with this magnetic energy. Eventually she introduces herself. I'm David David.

Martha Kirk: Hi David. And I am Martha Ann Kirk. San Antonio, Texas. Pleasure to meet, and I am absolutely delighted that you're interviewing my students.

Thank you. Thank you, thank

David DesRoches: you. Thank you. Martha is maybe five feet tall with wild hair and an incredibly bright face that belies her years. She's wearing a loose fitting black dress, decorated with these adorable embroidered flowers. Martha is simply a force of nature. At some point, a kid happily sucked into a vortex, starting with an elevator ride.

Martha Kirk: I get in elevators at our university and I say, is this the party elevator?

Quizno's song: I

Martha Kirk: love that. And they do. Everybody loves it. You know, even if they're going to take a test, if I say it's the party elevator, then everybody's mood gets better.

David DesRoches: That's awesome. I love that. I might steal that. Okay. I love it.

Martha Kirk: Okay. I'm leading you.

Yes, leading me.

David DesRoches: Where are we

Martha Kirk: going? All right. This is very exciting. We are going to lead him. To our banners and we're going to point out

David DesRoches: one of the projects that Martha works on is called Artistic Bridges. It's a partnership with the charter for compassion, which grew out of the Iraqi art exchange that Martha started in 2007.

Martha went to Iraq during the second Gulf War, the very war I was protesting against back in 2003 on top of that roof. But unlike me, she went there as a peace builder in the middle of the fighting. Seeing the devastation and its impact on children inspired her to act.

Martha Kirk: So as a professor, I often go to Jerusalem and do research.

So I went from Jerusalem to Aman Jordan because I heard there were about a million Iraqi refugees there. And a Catholic church had, um, a place for children, Iraqi refugee children to come after school and they had opportunities to do art. And I have a master's degree in art education and it was so touching that at first the children's art.

You could see their fear, you know, like the bombing and the tanks and the dark colors and the fear. But after the children did art for several months, they started to be like normal children again. Uh, drawing cars and trees and things like that. And obviously. Art invites us to go within and we get, uh, in touch with our feelings and then we can start to heal or we can start to have a sense.

Self control, uh, over things. We can make things, we can do things. So, um, starting in 2007, I did five trips back and forth. I brought art from these children to our city, and then I would get children in our city to do art, and I would take it to the Iraqi children. And it was a very profound experience because on television you would see Iraqis are the enemies and they are killing the US soldiers.

Or when I was going around Iraq, a lot of those families had known suffering. But there was such open-heartedness the children could feel with children on the other side of the world. And isn't that what we want? We want for children to develop. Empathy to start to get a sense of being one human family.

Um,

David DesRoches: this really resonates with me this. That that art literally is saving lives. This is art saving lives.

This isn't some woowoo thing either. When done correctly, art therapy can decrease anxiety. It can improve depressive symptoms. It can boost self-esteem. It can even help kids recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. Okay. Artistic Bridges is also working in Ukraine, in Uganda, and. In Gaza.

Martha Kirk: In Gaza, and I get pictures of the children, the little children of the family that I know, and sometimes they're hungry and sometimes they're fleeing again from.

Another bombing. And I would love to say, oh, I'm an art teacher. I get children to make pretty pictures. I am a human being who feels with people who are suffering. I also happen to be a Catholic sister, and the central idea of our group of Catholic sisters is. If people are suffering, we should reach out our hands to help them.

So

David DesRoches: as Martha's talking, Frida, whose last name remains a mystery to me, Frida tells Martha that they need to work together. Together.

Frida: I really love what you're doing. And I have over 7,000 students and drawings already done. That can be submitted.

Quizno's song: Wonderful.

Frida: And I think what will be better Uhhuh to let them create whatever they want.

Yes,

Martha Kirk: yes. Don't limit them. Their imagination. Yeah, and they can, they can just say, this is my picture, you know. My name is Juan,

David DesRoches: the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Was intense. I mean, the panel discussions, the workshops, even the side conversations. But in between all of this, the organizers made a point to include these little cultural interstitials, these traditional folk songs and dances from various parts of the country and, and the world

Now. I don't wanna disparage the organizers, but there were tons of technical problems with translations and interpreters. Either things didn't work or translators weren't available, or AI was doing the translating. We all know how that can go, and this was happening as some pretty big names were speaking it.

It was pretty messy sometimes. So I think a lot of the conversations were lost in the audience. I only mentioned this because the only times when there was clear communication was during these little interstitials, these little cultural moments with music and dance. Like one of the dances involved five people dressed up like older men.

They were wearing white pants. They had all these really colorful ponchos and these kind of strange masks and hats that had colored tassels dangling from them. And at first they moved around the stage slowly looking, kind of old and feeble using their canes to support them.

Eventually they started dancing while leaning on their canes. And when one of the songs ended, one of them laid on the ground and then sad music started to play and there was a sort of resurrection or ascension.

The point is there was a story here. It was visual. It was oral. Sure, there might have been some difference between interpretations among audience members, but that's, that's how art is, right? We, we each see what we're looking for. But at least with these dances, there was an opportunity for any sort of interpretation.

When the Nobel Laureates and other panelists spoke, if you didn't speak their language, there was a good chance you wouldn't understand anything. Again, because of these technical problems, and we can insert all sorts of cliches here, right? That music is the universal language, or music brings people together, et cetera, but maybe these sayings are cliche for a reason.

Maybe some cliches are worth holding onto,

and how can we forget the role of songs in the peace movement, all those protest songs and songwriters. Protest music has a long history going back in the West, at least to the 17 hundreds with Beethoven's owed to Joy being used in protests around the world from Chile to China to Germany,

or what about Billie Holiday's? Strange fruit in the 1930s, which painted a bleak picture of lynching in the American South. And in the sixties and seventies as the Vietnam War dragged on protest music took on a fever pitch, and it was made even more powerful by the reality of television. Songs like We Shall Overcome, blowing In the Wind and What's Going On.

These songs became soundtracks of the Peace Movement, but the connection between the music and the movements, at least when it comes to building peace, it seems less prevalent today. As younger musicians focus on TikTok to gain fans, there's concern in some circles that musicians are catering to the algorithm that they're, they're content creators and not artists.

And in cancel culture world, it seems like there are even fewer artists willing to take a strong political stance with their lyrics. Anecdotally, it also seems that Gen Z is more likely to listen to music for the beat than for the lyrics. Or consider recent research that has analyzed lyrics over the last 50 years and found that song lyrics have actually become simpler and more repetitive.

It is something I asked Quinnipiac business school student, Zach Borden about do you listen to music That has like a political message ever.

Zach Borden: Um, it's not something like I go out of my way to listen to.

David DesRoches: So have you ever been like moved to take a political stance from a song or

Zach Borden: not really? I think it's interesting that they, that they can like.

Put it in a music and some people wouldn't ever even recognize that's what it's meaning.

David DesRoches: The rage against the machine was the political band of my generation. They're motivated me, we, and they're incredibly political. There are bands today that I think are singing about political things, but I don't think the listeners are actually listening to the lyrics.

I think they're musical driven. They're driven by the beat, and they don't, they might hear the lyrics, but they don't internalize them,

Zach Borden: I think. I think that's pretty accurate. Even just like on social media, like I, I, like, I saw like this thing about like Green Day in their American Idiot song. They changed their lyrics from like, um, saying like, um, redneck to like maga and.

People are like, music shouldn't be political and like, but like punk rock has always been political and like now they're just noticing that even Green Day, not they're leftists or whatever. And I just think it's like interesting that like they failed to even realize. All along it was political.

David DesRoches: Why do you think people don't want politics and music?

What's the fear? Where do you think it comes from?

Zach Borden: Uh, I think that some people are scared that the artists, they like won't have the same views as them.

David DesRoches: Do you wonder like, 'cause we should hang around people that are different than us, right? It's, we're probably better off when we, you know, hang around somebody who can disagree with us, rather than being around people that's just like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're just reinforcing your biases, you know? Do you feel like you're becoming more and more less likely to do that? And even in our music,

Zach Borden: right? Yeah, totally. It's like polarizing now. Like people, even if like the littlest things, like they don't agree on, like they won't even hang out or talk to each other and like they can't seem to find like a common ground at all, which is like not a good thing.

It's like just causing more separation.

David DesRoches: Now music for me is intensely personal. I play a bunch of musical instruments. I wrote my wedding music. I've done music for dinner podcasts, including this one, and while my days of playing political rock songs on rooftops are probably over, I hope it's not over for you. Get out there young musicians. Get on a rooftop and rock.

Thanks for listening to Dismantling the Divide, which is reported, produced, edited, and hosted by me, David de Roche. The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio in partnership with the Albert Schweitzer Institute. To learn more about this podcast, you can go to quinnipiac podcasts.com/dismantling the divide.

To learn more about the podcast studio at Quinnipiac, go to q u.edu/podcast up next war. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Ira Helfand: When I look at the world today, I see a very big problem, which is the fact that we are on the brink of nuclear war. We are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been, and we're not acting that way.

We're ignoring this problem to a very dangerous degree. This will. The power of art.

David DesRoches: Stay with us.