Fiery Furnaces Frontman Wonders Why More Bands Aren’t Fighting For Health Care Reform

Finally.

That was the word that came to mind when we heard last week that a band is casting aside fears of being categorized as “political” and diving headfirst into the public scrum over health care reform. That band would be the Fiery Furnaces, who are currently swinging through the South with a series of shows that are doubling as calls to action.

Today, we caught up with the esteemed indie-rockers’ main man, Matthew Friedberger, both to give him props and to pick his brain about the health care debate. No, the IndiePit Blog hasn’t gotten around yet to reading the current 1,000-page congressional proposal (we’ll be taking it to the beach this weekend). But after consuming waaay too much news the past few weeks, we’d like to think we have a general understanding about the debate - at least a better understanding than the wackos who are showing up at town-hall events, screaming about death panels, trees of liberty (Timothy McVeigh would be proud) and Nazism.

Yes, we have seen some sickening visuals during this discussion about the health of the country’s citizens. But it’s refreshing to know that the Fiery Furnaces are out there trying to counterweigh the “deathers” and urge progressive bystanders to fulfill their role as patriotic citizens and get involved in the discussion.

Because the debate is evolving so quickly - one minute, the public option is in, the next, it’s out - and because the Furnaces are wrapping the tour Wednesday in Charlottesville, North Carolina, we wanted to bring you the contents of the interview right away. So pardon the whole Q+A thing.

(Full disclosure: Like Friedberger, this writer has been actively involved in pro-’Bama groups, including Organizing for America. So beware, the bias flows unabatedly and unashamedly. Also, we asked Friedberger if the members of the Fiery Furnaces are insured, but he wasn’t comfortable going on record with those personal details.)

Thank you for getting involved in the health care debate. It’s refreshing to finally hear a band voice its support for, and concern about, reform.

We’re not accomplishing much, I’m afraid. Organizing for America, they said what we should do is collect “declarations of support” for the president’s approach. [What we're also trying to do] is to try to push some other bands who are prominent to … [get] involved with Organize for America or MoveOn, to have [those groups] at their merch tables. What I was hoping for is that Pitchfork and a lot of sites would say, “Hey, why don’t you say something?” … But that didn’t happen.

Why not?

What can you say? This is an old thing where the cultural left … mainstream American politics isn’t part of their pop culture. Whereas on the right, their pop culture is mainstream politics. In the last year … with the Obama candidacy, people on the cultural left did get involved in mainstream politics. But when it comes to the individual issues, people aren’t used to taking it on.

I guess the administration has done a terrific job making Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck look like the [leaders of] the Republican Party. Which hurts [the GOP] in terms of getting elected. But it doesn’t hurt them when it comes to this sort of performance politics, getting people whipped up into a frenzy in ridiculous ways. The same energy hasn’t worked on the left - MoveOn hasn’t been able to get too many people yelling.

We just thought the energy on the right … would’ve gotten some people more interested in this issue.

Do you feel like it’s a messaging problem? Since late last year, Obama’s grassroots supporters have been pushing for single-payer, and we all know how that’s gone. Now this public-option possibility keeps shifting every day. Do you find it difficult to push a message without it being coherent?

I think that the administration’s been very concerned about back-room politicking about this issue - and rightly so, frankly. [But] leadership [toward] the grassroots hasn’t been very effective because of that. They’ve been concerned about the lobbyists and the realities of the legislation, and they haven’t focused very hard, it seems, on getting people excited.

When I read stuff on the Organizing Web site, it all seems very cogent to me and well-organized, so I wouldn’t necessarily fault them. But there’s obviously a huge energy gap, and I suppose that’s a leadership problem. [Maybe] that was going to be inevitable - you’re going to have this reaction from people on the right who are just desperate to fight about something, and because they’ve been pushed to further extremes, they’re going to be able to inflame people better.

The Obama personality, which was very important [in terms of getting him elected], doesn’t lend itself to mobilizing people on a single issue the same way. So I don’t know if, reasonably speaking, they’ve made a terrrible mistake. Obviously, in the Obama story of the last two years, lots of times there have been worries that he’s not been aggressive enough. And every time, to some extent, it’s been a misplaced fear. We’ll see how this turns out now.

I am confident they will be able to [insure] get millions of [uninsured]. But that will not, obviously, fix the problem of people having to make life decisions - take certain jobs, move certain places - because of their health care. That won’t change at all.

I was talking to a 28-year-old optometrist at a show in Nashville [on Wednesday]. She has a heart murmur, and she’s going to have to work at LensCrafters or Wal-Mart, and not going to be able to work with people who have diabetes or glaucoma, because she has to take any job right now. Any health care she pays for has to come from out of pocket. It’s going to be $1,100 a month.

If you step back, [health care reform] is almost a non-ideological issue. I’m surprised that more bands - especially with the energy on the right - haven’t tried to endorse it, if not do something about it. Obviously, musicians and a lot of rock-music fans [are] affected by the way health insurance is structured in this country. Younger people who are self-employed, you’d think they’d be very interested in the issue, and galvanized by the energy and a lot of the ugliness on the right.

The deep-seated roots on the cultural left come from the ’60s and even the Cold War [era], I suppose. They’re uncomfortable with how to use social, democratic rhetoric. It has to be muted so you don’t get called a “Socialist” or a “Nazi Socialist,” or whatever you get called now. … Whereas, on the cultural right, they find their actual political dreams much more talked about in mainstream American politics than people on the political left. And the left has to find a way to deal with that.

There was a feeling that once he was elected, everyone could wipe their hands clean of grassroots action.

It never ends. You can always have the clocked turned back. It’s hard for people to realize that you have to keep fighting at all times, and that’s what’s difficult. When you don’t have … socialized organizations like an evangelical church, which has its political action integrated into your social life and your leisure activities, then it’s hard to keep fighting.

There’s millions of people on the cultural left whose social [lives are] wrapped up in things that have a direct connection to political activism. But there’s millions more people [whose social lives] are not. And there isn’t that institutional support on the cultural left for an activism that’s connected directly to American politics like there is on the cultural right.

It’s very hard [to mobilize] when there’s a gap between what you actually would want the legislation to look like and what you want it to be. That’s a huge problem for the left right now on this issue, because we’re not going to have a commitment to national health care, which is what everyone on the left thinks should happen as a matter of course.

We all think the notion that private business is more efficient than the government necessarily has been exploded by what’s happened in the last two years. But the Obama administration has been very careful for quite a few months to talk as if we don’t have any interest in [a single-payer system]. “Oh, no, well, maybe that’ll be the most efficient way of doing it. But not really, that’s not what we’re talking about. If you like your wonderful health insurance, you get to keep it.” On the [OFA] declaration sheet, that’s the second thing.

Politics is not about gratifying yourself and living in your dream world. It’s about making the best of the situation.

What’s frustrating on a personal level is that if we were conservatives and went to town-hall meetings, we could get on TV and maybe even have some political impact. Whereas, thinking back to March 2003, the biggest protest in human history hardly got any media coverage and had absolutely no political impact. It can be alienating.

Yes, yes, yes. I am very frustrated at The New York Times every day - and that’s The New York Times. But if we’re talking about manipulating the political theater, we have to do a better job. The administration has to do a better job.

[It's] ludicrous [that] with “Cash for Clunkers,” that they haven’t been able to spin that as a runaway, incredible success, as opposed to a failure of poor planning. The New York Times writes the story up as, “They’re shutting down the program because it ran out of money long before they thought it would, what a messy thing.” As opposed to “a tremendous success.” So there’s been some hiccups with manipulating the media for sure.

It’s absolutely ridiculous, the way that it’s been reported on. Forget about the “I want my country back” kind of things, which is obviously motivated by something to do with racism - let’s be honest …

Yup.

… the way everything that people are saying, even without yelling, is exactly what they said in ‘94. … Health care in this country is a mess because of those arguments, and they’re making those arguments again. Well, they don’t hold up anymore. They didn’t hold then, obviously, but they certainly don’t hold up 15 years from now. It’s absurd. Let alone the stuff that Barney Frank addressed the other day with, “What planet have you been spending your time on?” [See below for the equally troubling and hilarious video.]

Huge amounts of money have been spent to get people [feeling] threatened about more inclusive health care systems over the last 50 years. Huge amounts of money.

It’s got nothing to do with arguments. It’s got to do with the way people think of themselves. This is a personal-identity issue. “I’m against the national health care as an American.” That’s why, I suppose, the Obama administration has been so cautious about using bigger rhetoric in the last few months, ’cause they feel like they’re up against something deep.

That rings true.The town-hall protestors come across as emotional, fearful, fragile people. Here’s another question for you: Do you think the legislation should be tabled until 2010 if there’s no public option?

I think there’s two sides to that, right? The one side is the political side, it is dealing with the political theater of the administration being defeated on an issue, and that might have serious political consequences that would not be desirable to Democrats or people who want to work through the Democratic Party. And the second is, I still think that millions more people getting access to health insurance is something that’s so serious and positive that … you wouldn’t want to make the “perfect” the enemy of the “much better.”

So it depends on what the co-op option does look like, but I would be very reluctant to say [as Howard Dean recently did], “If there’s no public option, then we should wait until next year.” It would be so difficult, I think, to present that as a plausible thing to do politically.

We can’t lose sight of the fact that whatever happens, it’s not going to go into effect until 2013 anyway.

That’s right. All the tinkering that needs to be done to whatever happens, it’s going to be very difficult to do. It’ll obviously be a big issue [in the midterms] next year [and] in the next presidential election. Obviously it’s hard to see what the political climate will look like then.

Who knows what other issues will come up. It was disgusting to see, on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) talk about how people are going to die because of the health care plan. People are dying right now.

I can’t remember what it was on, but I was watching someone say, “Job killer, job killer, job killer.” But it’s like, “That’s right. It’s going to be a job-killer - and the plan we have right now is a people-killer.” But they switched the rhetoric: “It’s not a job-killer, it’s actually going to kill people.” They’ve just ratcheted it up - on no grounds of any kind. Tim Russert isn’t there anymore to say, “You’re talking nonsense” [David Gregory, Russert's replacement host, once again dropped the ball on that]. In the media, they’re letting people say whatever nonsense they want and they’re not holding them accountable.

At the beginning of the debate, two months ago or so, someone asked a reporter why they weren’t covering it. And she said, “Because it’s not sexy.” All the media coverage started - and health care became part of the public discourse - when it got entertaining.

That’s right. And that’s just sad. That’s the situation we’re in politically: We can complain about it, but we’re not going to change the way media companies are run. We have to mostly use the way they’re run and the way they function, as opposed to complaining about it. And it’s very hard to do that!

On a positive note, it does seem like the term “public option,” which inherently implies a choice, is sticking. When people are asked if they’d like the choice, the approval rating skyrockets. If we have a Frank Luntz on our side, s/he deserves to be congratulated.

Yeah, they did a great job reframing national health care as a public option. But because of the energy difference right now, they’ve managed to have that shut down - in the media, at least, or in the country at large.

We’ll see what happens. I think things will move quite fast when Congress gets back in session. We’ll see what happens that week. It’ll be a very interesting week. Things might be quite different, for better or worse, then than they are now.

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Do something about health care reform. Get involved with Organizing for America and/or MoveOn.

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