Not Marginalized in the Least

I recently came across some very innovative new music by a group called Max and the Marginalized. It turns out that "Max" is Max Berstein, the son of Carl Bernstein (as in "Woodward and Bernstein") and writer/screenwriter Nora Ephron. He obviously has an amazing writing pedigree, and it shows. The band's unique concept is to record a new song about something in the news that they feel strongly about every week, and most of these songs are strongly political.

One of Max's songs is about the Bush Administration's tragically wrong-headed "abstinence-only" concept of fighting AIDS in Africa. Max even put out a video for this song ("Lectures for the Dying") focusing on Uganda:



This issue particularly resonates with me, because in the fall of 2005 I attended a presentation by Uganda President Museveni about his country's efforts to fight AIDS at the Hart Senate Office Building in DC. That meeting preceded my trip to Uganda the following January with University of Texas Professor Gary Chapman -- at the request of the President's office -- to help start up a new computer initiative there. In fact, we were told at one of the seven big "revival meetings" (the 10th slide in the slideshow) that Prof. Chapman and I attended out in the Ugandan boondocks that most of the audience members were HIV positive.

It's funny sometimes how things are connected.

Jerry