Ominous Clouds: Nuclear Songs Remain the Same

[marmar]

Published on Friday, March 18, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Ominous Clouds: Nuclear Songs Remain the Same

by Randall Amster


In the early 1980s, a group of antinuclear activists and musicians put together an album of protest songs as a statement against the development of the Palo Verde nuclear power plant outside of Phoenix. The plant is unique in that it isn’t adjacent to a large body of water, meeting its cooling needs instead with treated sewage from nearby locales. The main turbines were supplied by General Electric, and the plant has been cited for a number of safety violations in its 25 year history. Situated near the sixth largest city in the U.S., the Palo Verde Station has been the site of heightened security as a potential strategic target in terms of warfare or terrorism. But back in the ’80s, activists had other concerns on their minds.

They titled their protest album “Ominous Clouds,” to indicate the potential safety issues including a possible meltdown and the challenge of cooling such a massive plant in a place where water resources are scarce. The songs on this little-known record cover a range of styles and musical genres, from punk and reggae to folk and western swing, but all gather around the primary theme of a nuclear “accident” rearing its head and reducing Phoenix to ashes. The album serves as a harbinger of the issues surfacing today, with the ongoing disaster in Japan and the concomitant potential for a radiation plume to reach the western U.S. in short order -- including the possibility of Arizona being right in the plume’s path.

The songs on “Ominous Clouds” alternate between the silly and the sad, with a pointed critique of the political economy of nuclear power serving as the baseline. One memorable lyric in particular laments: “We gave up life and land, put the power in their hands.” Now, as then, the issue is less about what someone else has taken from us or done to us, and more about how we have steadily ceded control over our lives and communities to corporate magnates and powerful interests. The storyteller Utah Phillips -- whose pro-labor, movement-oriented collaborations with Ani DiFranco in the late 1990s presaged many of today’s issues and responses -- once observed that “freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.” In the U.S. we’ve barely resisted, and thus stand today largely as mere vassals.

Indeed, shades of feudalism define much of modern life. Our serfdom is often masked by the ostensible “freedoms” and myriad creature comforts in our midst, while the “robber barons” continue to acquire wealth and power at our expense. The net result is what I have referred to as a “web of dependency,” in which we are ensnared by a set of forces that provide us with a modicum of “easy living” in exchange for our willing captivity within its spacious confines. As Pink Floyd once inquired, “Did you exchange a walk on part in a war, for a lead role in a cage?” The answer for most Americans is undoubtedly yes, and the effect has been to render us largely complicit with our own subjugation, as I wrote six months ago: “The hardware of our lives, from food and energy to transportation and shelter, is entirely bound up with the workings of a highly mechanized and digitized global economy. And no less so, the software of our existence -- communications, community, entertainment, education, media, politics, and the like -- is equally entwined within that same technocratic system.” ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/18-2

[snot]

1. K&R'd

[mrcheerful]

2. Yet a few months ago there were posts on DU about how safe and efficient

nuke plants are. My major concern at the time was how nuke waste was going to be stored and transported away from the nuke plants, but I had other concerns about how they were built as we all known contractors are always seeking ways to increase profit at the expense of safety. Then there is the matter of mother nature striking, nukes are not safe and cause more problems then they solve, I see nukes as a quick solution to a problem that needs long term remedies.

[Turner2011]

3. Nuclear Songs Remain the Same

This is fine for nuclear songs.