Some of you will read that one word sentence and recognize the allusion to The Graduate. It comes to mind now as how accurate it was in the movie.
Plastics was said to be the future. The writers (novelist Charles Webb and screenwriters Buck Henry and Calder Willingham) were prescient. Plastics are everywhere, floating and polluting the oceans and other aspects of our environment, and is now found to be in bottled drinking water. What’s that mean to our health? The effects are being studied.
I’ve always enjoyed this song’s beginning. A chorus, a softly strumming acoustic guitar, and then a gentle French horn, each remarkable by themselves but coming together to set you up in an introspective mood.
When I first heard it, I thought, “Is that a French horn? Who is playing it?” Because a French horn isn’t part of the Rolling Stones’ typical composition. Later, there’s organ and piano, and wondered, “Who is on those?” I learned it was Al Kooper on them, along with the French horn. Pretty cool.
The song is, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a well-known Rolling Stones song from that terrific album, Let It Bleed. I like the song’s story-telling style, how it touches on different political and social elements of that period, rising rises from a reflection on a female addict into a rousing anthem for rebellion and struggle.
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need
Let’s start with a wall of sound to blow these thoughts down, the thoughts that arrive after another mass shooting hits the news, another school’s day marked in red.
We’d just returned from living in Germany for four years, courtesy of our favorite uncle, when this song was released back in 1991. Another time? Well, we’d gone to war and were going to war back then, and we’re at war now, so nothing changed there. The Berlin Wall was torn down back then, a great moment in history, but the American border wall is being expanded this year. We thought the nuclear threat was diminishing because the U.S.S.R. had dissolved, but here we are, moving closer to midnight on the Doomsday clock twenty-six years later. Crime was higher then than now, but mass shootings were lower in 1991 than they are in 2018.
The worst mass shooting in 1991 the Luby’s shooting in Killeen, Texas. The gunman killed twenty-three people that day. It was the worse mass shooting in the U.S. at the time. It’s been surpassed. We’ve had five worse mass murders by a single shooter since then, including February 14th’s shooting in Parkland, Florida. That one, at a high school, ranks number one in the number of murders at a high school shooting in America, passing Columbine’s 1999 murders of thirteen people.
Let’s listen to Metallica with “Enter Sandman” and think about our national nightmare.
Tracy Chapman’s first album came out while we were living in Germany. This song, “Talkin’ ’bout A Revolution,” was one of several favorites from the album. We quickly became Chapman fans, and her second album cemented her status in our minds.
“Talkin’ ’bout A Revolution” seems apropos for this mild winter Wednesday. The White House released its budget. Since a budget was signed a few days before its release, the WH budget does little as far as being a law, but it provides insights into their thinking, and the thinking seems to be feed the rich, starve the poor, cut the arts, and increase the world’s largest military and nuclear forces into a larger force. Depressing thinking.
I think Chapman understands the gist:
While they’re standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion
In short, as larger numbers of common Americans have less to gain by maintaining the status quo, and the status quo moves into more conservative modes that favor wealthy individuals and corporations, there’s less vested interest for the multitudes to maintain the status quo.
There will eventually be change. History shows that revolution and change is a dance. The time and beat vary, as do the moves. Sometimes it’s a structured box step, forward, sideways, backwards as changes take place.
In 1971, I was fifteen years old, and entering high school. Richard Nixon was president. The Vietnam War continued, and the Pentagon Papers were printed while the U.S and U.S.S.R. continued their arms race. Protesters marched against the war and the bomb. Although it was a new decade, we hadn’t turned the page socially. The summer of love, Watts riots, and Chicago ’68, among many events, all still resonated through our awareness.
Peace was a major topic. From it came songs, like this one, “Peace Train.” Cat Stevens wrote and released it. He’d soon add to the national conversation by becoming a Muslim and changing his name to Yusuf Islam after almost drowning.
From out of the dreams came some streams, and from the streams came some songs….
This one grew more forcefully shaped and remembered as the lyrics echoed through memories’ canyons and flew over plains of time.
I…I will begin again
I…I will begin again
Sometimes, when events took me down, I took strength from music, and lyrics like these. I take strength wherever, however I find it, as it seems like life drains my strength so quickly. It’s good to remember that at the rate that our bodies replace our cells, we’re always being reborn.
Does an early morning telephone call kick a worried hiss into your mind, “Oh, no, what’s gone wrong? Who died?” Do you sit and think, if there’s a disaster here, how will we survive? Do you ever wonder if you left something on, such as the oven, after you departed the house, or if you closed the garage door, or locked the doors after leaving?
If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you might be suffering from disaster mind.
Disaster mind is a chronic condition that afflicts millions of Americans. It can strike at any time. Recent studies conducted on the Internet estimate over ninety-nine percent of Americans suffer disaster mind. Although the middle-aged and elderly suffer disaster mind more often, students, professional athletes, sales managers, single people, married couples and parents are frequently prone to disaster mind.
Disaster mind affects more women then men, except during football season. Symptoms include worrying, anxiety, and eating comfort food to cope with worries. Extreme cases of disaster mind cause some people to drink more than one glass of wine or beer a night, complain, and wish for the “good old days.” People suffering from disaster mind tend to dawdle, read a great deal, and watch television and movies. Disaster mind sufferers often follow politics, and self-label as “political junkies.”
If you think you might be suffering from disaster mind, doctors suggest you try not to think about it. If that doesn’t work, indulge in wine or beer with pizza, followed by ice cream or pie, and lose yourself in a good book or movie. Chips with guacamole and cheesy foods also work well.
Of course, when I thought of this song, it was winter, and I was in a women’s march, organized by women to remind the POTUS and America that they’re here and displeased, and want to continue the agenda of change in America that’s been going on, an agenda that includes equality regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation or preference, religion, ethnicity, skin color, and many other things that America claims to be free and equal about.
It was ironic, and a little disappointing when thinking of protest songs, that “Street Fighting Man” came to mind. Where’s the street fighting women? I was surrounded by them.
Mick Jagger said that events in the United States and France inspired the song when he wrote it. It seems like an indictment of the pervasive male oriented society that only men were mentioned from that era of protests in the 1960s. Despite its inherent sexism, the song, with its driven rocking beat and discordant sitar and guitars, is a powerful protest anthem, powerful enough that Chicago radio stations didn’t play it in the summer of 1968, fearful that it would incite more rebellion and violence in a city that was already struggling with the violence emerging in the shadow of Democratic National Convention as anti-war protesters and police clashed.
Stream forward through time a few years, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers display the American Government’s hypocrisy and cynicism, a reminder that emerges through the recent film, “The Post.” Watching that film, the calls for change and to shake up business as usual sharpen with understanding, along with the bitter taste arising from the belief that our government, no matter which party dominants, is failing us. Those parties apply lip-service to our demands, but their actions often sustain the status quo and business as usual. Most Americans want change, but often split about the shape of change desired. It’s the struggle of democracy. The path seems clear, but it’s messy an slippery.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
~ Frederick Douglass
That’s why I joined those women and marched to demand change. I want change. I served in the American military to forward the ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality, with the simple truth that all people are created equal. I slowly learned how those words and sentiments are often more of a propaganda slogan and less of a governing ideal, and that many people, including our leaders, lack the principles and moral courage to fully embrace the ideals behind these words.
In the song, Mick asks, “What else can a poor boy do,” and adds, “There’s no place for a street fighting man,” a suggestion about the frustrations of limited options.
Don’t know about you, but Gospel music often talks to me. Aided by a dream, this song streamed into my consciousness from the year 1972. “I’ll Take You There” was a great song for the time because its slow beat allowed a close, swaying slow-dance with a girl, something that I sought when I was a sixteen year old boy. It’s like a feel-good song of hope, not for love alone, but for progress and civil rights.
Today, a warning from Montana, where malt hops are grown. They’re not faring well there, and climate change is blamed.
Without malt hops, we’re going to have some problems with beer production. Hopefully, more will now start paying attention. The Guardian puts it in perspective in this article, from 2015.
Michael Seidel, writer 