By Dave Lindorff
Two hugely important people were taken down by COVID-19 this past week. Both have left a legacy, the importance of which cannot be ignored.
John Prine
The first struck down last week is one of the greatest modern songwriters of my lifetime, John Prine. One of my favorite musicians, Prine was a humble, funny and extremely deep and sometimes powerfully political folk musician who had the remarkable ability to infuse his songs with all those characteristics at the same time. He had an ability to could sing about the human condition and about political reality with the same conversational ease, and even to get you to laugh through tears at tragedy.
Prine died of complications from the Coronavirus at 73, an age that was far too young for life to be over, but that was old enough to make him especially vulnerable to COVID-19, even without his also having lungs that were damaged by years of smoking and by a lung cancer and neck cancer both of which he had managed to beat.
Prine will live on through an astonishingly huge trove of songs he wrote and performed himself, which will surely be covered, as most have been already, by hundreds and thousands of musicians, famous and amateur, for decades and generations to come.
Here is a playable list of just 25 of them performed by Prine himself.
Bernie Sanders
The second to go down this past week was Bernie Sanders, the crusty 79-year-old fiercely independent Senator from the state of Vermont who for the second time in four years tried to take on and take over the ossified and corrupt Democratic Party by competing in the nation’s Democratic Party primaries for the presidential nomination. Sanders didn’t die of the Coronavirus, but the pandemic it caused made it impossible for him and his supporters to campaign and make his case for the nomination in remaining primaries in the only way possible in the face of a savagely hostile media and Democratic Party establishment.
For a while last year, after first being ignored by the media again, just as they did early in his primary campaign in 2016, Sanders this time around caught fire. He was aided by the surprisingly large number of other more centrist candidates who also entered the race — everyone from former VP Joe Biden and multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg to Sen. Elizabeth “Capitalist-to-my-Bones” Warren and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang. Their numbers divided the votes that didn’t go to Sanders allowing him to be the leader in polls and later in early primaries.
Declaring presciently, a year before the country was slammed and brought to almost a standstill by the Coronavirus pandemic, that the country wanted and desperately needed to scrap its profit-driven train wreck of a healthcare “system” in favor of declaring medical care a universal human right, Sanders called for a government-run, taxpayer-funded insurance program he called Medicare for All…
For the rest of the article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/honoring-two-men-just-brought-by-the-coronavirus-pandemic/