I dreamed I was with my wife and sister-in-law. We’d arrived at a huge meeting center and were there to protest against government actions and for social justice, freedom and equality. The opposition to these ideals, who believed that others shouldn’t get them because others getting these rights were ruining our country, were also showing up. Armed, they were intent on intimidating “our side.”
But we weren’t intimidated. We assembled to protest. When government leaders appeared, we raised our right hand and formed the letter “C.” We held it up over our heads in silence.
It was amazing for me, in the dream, back in the crowd, to look forward, down, across and back, and see tens of thousands of people standing silently in sunlight with their right hand raised in a “C.”
Why that letter and action? The dream didn’t explain that. We all just knew, that’s what we were to do.
Politics, television, advancement, publishing – I can’t get no satisfaction.
Yeah, baby. The Rolling Stones sing it best. The guitar riff, thumping, unrelenting beat and the Mick’s vocalizing of the frustration with the commercial world all come together fantastic in that nineteen sixty-five rock classic, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Jesus, I was just nine but something about that combination spoke to me. While Mick is singing about being pissed over the world’s increasing commercialization and the things he’s being sold, I get that same sense from the news of the world and my efforts to move myself forward. It’s like one stride forward and a long fall backward.
Seeing it on the old “Ed Sullivan Show” is fun. Simpler times, friends, but isn’t that what each generation notices about how life changes?
“This year will go down in history. For the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
— Adolf Hitler, 1935”
I researched it to verify Hitler said it.
No; he didn’t, or, if he did, it was never documented anywhere. Like other alt news or fake news (see Pizzagate and Jade Helm 15), there are a lot of words generating smoke and fear, but very little truth.
The NRA and gun proponents want you to believe that gun control helped the Nazi Party rise to power.
No; it didn’t.
The Weimar Republic proceeding the Nazi rise had stricter gun control; but the idea that if people had guns, they would have resisted is absurd, as Hitler had high popular support.
Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon had an article that provides an insightful summary.
To continue with the theme of dancing through the first week of the season change, I’ll continue with Don Henley. “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” is one of my favorite Henley offerings. Coming out in nineteen eighty-four, the song was written by Danny Kortchmar.
I enjoyed its tech sound and cynical lyrics. The song is like a war story being told in a bar about a serviceman’s experience fighting in another country. The impression is, the heavy-handed government is locking everyone up and bugging everywhere, battling “wild-eyed pistol wavers” in a long-going engagement. The rebels are using the weapon of revolutionaries before I.E.D.s, Molotov cocktails, mixed up in their kitchen sink. Meanwhile, the serviceman is coping with a local young women. All she wants to do is dance, make romance, and party. She seems oblivious to everything going on. It becomes clear by song’s end, who was oblivious.
I thought it was an apropos song for the time. It came before the Gulf Wars and after Vietnam, during the cold war era when the United States and U.S.S.R. were trying to align other countries, no matter who led them, with “their side,” propping up governments with money and weapons, enriching the countries’ power elite at the expanse of the poor. The Soviets were battling in Afghanistan against Osama Bin Laden as the U.S. armed and trained the revolutionary. Meanwhile, the U.S. buddied up to Saddam Hussein, arming him.
With its heavy beat, this is an excellent song for streaming and tramping around. It’s a bitter reminder, too, about how weapons and places have changed, but we’re still arming and aiding governments to fight rebels.
Although this song was released and charted in nineteen seventy-six, people probably know it, thanks to President Bill Clinton. He used it as the music for his campaign theme in nineteen ninety-two, and then at his inaugural ball after winning. Since then, it’s played whenever he shows up to speak at a Democratic National Convention.
And it’s good for that purpose. Before Bill Clinton used it, I used it, too, to keep myself moving forward, dreaming and hoping. It’s a rousing damn song. Here it is, Fleetwood Mac with, “Don’t Stop.”
Can there be us, if I can’t see what you see, and you don’t hear what I hear, and you fear what might be, while I strive for what could be, and you worry about what could be, while I worry about what might be, and we can’t understand what the other understands, and the present and the past are broken mirrors of success and failure?
This song was written in nineteen sixty-six, and released in nineteen sixty-seven. The lyrics, though, speak to our times now as much as they did to the era which produced them.
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It’s s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
What’s interesting about that song is that Stephen Stills wrote it about a curfew on Sunset Strip. While they speak to the mood in America in the nineteen sixties and the twenty-first century, they speak to the life and times in the U.S.S.R, Nazi Germany, and other places ruled by fear, paranoia and oppression. People seek rights and freedoms; others squash them to preserve their status and wealth. It’s a cycle as old as humanity, except, instead of a man with a gun, there was a man with a rock, spear, bow and arrow, or other weapon.
Let’s listen to Buffalo Springfield and “For What It’s Worth.”
I believe people reside on a personal spectrum of being fucked up. Where you appear to reside depends on several factors:
Your self-awareness;
Others’ awareness and acknowledgement;
Your attitude toward being fucked up;
The desperation level.
You can be aware that you’re fucked up, but then your attitude kicks in. You can decide:
You’re not fucked up; it’s the world that’s fucked up;
You’re fucked up, but who cares? Just make it work for you.
Of course, some people lie to themselves about anyone or anything being fucked up. They’re the scary ones.
This song reminds me of being fucked up. I’d just returned to America after a four year plus tour of Germany for the U.S. Air Force. The evil Soviet empire had ended its reign, so much of what my military career was about, launching nukes against the evil empire and spying on them, was no longer a factor. While others turned their attention to Southwest Asia and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, I wasn’t allowed to participate, being deemed as mission critical for the now defunct mission of spying on the Soviets. I couldn’t participate in local activities to help the ‘war effort’, either; while my company grade officers who were pilots and navigators and junior NCOs and airmen were busy helping to erect tent city in the mud of Rhein-Mein Air Base, or working in the post office or chow hall, it wasn’t acceptable for me as a senior NCO to do such menial tasks. My offers to help were denied, then I was rotated back to America.
This all left me feeling pretty isolated and frustrated. I remember listening to this song in nineteen ninety-one while sitting in traffic in Peninsula traffic on Highway 101 in the SF Bay Area during a rain storm and having a mini-breakdown. The song is an introspective ode to self-pity, loss, realization and acceptance, so it was perfect for that era of my life. Although outwardly, I was fine by all the normal social measurements, I was an internal mess, drinking too much and having marital problems.
All the factors and your attitude about being fucked up are usually fluctuating. I’m still pretty fucked up, but I know I can shift my attitude a few points in either direction with fluids such as beer, wine and coffee, and activities like writing and walking. I’ve never been so desperate, angry and frustrated about being fucked up that I’ve contemplated suicide or killing others to make everything better, nor have hard drugs or an outlaw life attracted me. That doesn’t change my basic issues of being an arrogant, cynical, egotistical asshole with emotional problems, but it does adjust my attitude toward myself and the world.
Yet, I love this song. Here’s Gary Moore with “Still Got the Blues (For Your),” from nineteen ninety. He was such a talented guy. R.I.P.
Trump is attempting to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. Some say, including lawmakers, say, “It doesn’t matter, God will save us.”
Better get started with your praying then, because where are you going to run to when the water is rising, and the rivers and seas are boiling? Here’s Nina Simone with her powerful rendition of “Sinnerman” to get things rolling.
This protest song, from the nineteen eighties, counters what’s normal for rock, at least as it’s experienced in America. Sure, we have some invasion hits from the Brits, Germans, Dutch, etc., and more than a few from Australia, too.
This one came from Australia with a strong rhetoric against taking the Earth from the people who already inhabited it, along with choice rails against global warm and environmental destruction. Featuring a heavy base line, it also has a fat horn section, pretty unexpected in a rock hit in nineteen eighty-seven. But the lead vocalist’s voice and enunciation will never challenge anyone for smooth delivery.
Know the song? It made news again during the opening of the Olympics in Sidney in two thousand. Sure, it’s “Beds Are Burning,” by Midnight Oil, perfect for a walkabout on an unusually hot spring day – in North America.
Michael Seidel, writer 