In the 60s, from Dylan and Baez to Country Joe and the Fish, from “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” to “Fortunate Son” to “Blowin’ In The Wind” to (fill in your favorite), our protest, our rage, our growing clamor for change, found expression and inspiration in songs by artists who were equally outraged. Historically, it has been so, from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, and even earlier.
Now, Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez, Jesse Welles and Scared Ketchup are speaking for us and to us, about Minneapolis, ICE, murder and rage, by giving us the musical score for our times.
What is it about music and revolution? We know that music has a more direct line to the brain than words alone. It causes dopamine release, yes, but, it also totally lights up the limbic system… the emotional, feeling center of the brain. The beat doubles the impact of the words and the melody plays to parts of us untouched by rhetoric. Hope, anger, grief, outrage, love.
Music, art, and literature have always inspired us to save ourselves. In addition, playwrights have often chosen to portray many aspects of our history in musicals. The Sound of Music, for instance, takes place in Austria just as the Nazis are poised to take over. As I’m sure we all know by now, the children of Naval Commander Georg Von Trapp, and his new wife Maria, conspire to secretly flee Austria in order to circumvent his conscription by the Fascist regime. In order to do so, they form a musical family group and enter a music competition from which, one by one, they leave, singing “So long, farewell…” and, then, literally, “Climb Every Mountain” to get into Switzerland and then, to the US.
Their eldest daughter, Liesl, has a budding romance with Rolf, a fervent young Brown Shirt, who, like so many young men of the time, is developing a mindless obedience to the nazis, sincerely believing that they are the right way for Germany to go. This seems reflected in our own times in the many young MAGA men who voted for the current regime.
But the times they are a changin’. Young people are pulling away from the cruelty, lying, and relentless violence and racism of ICE and other federal agencies. They are also beginning to abandon their overlord, a never-king who is doomed to suffer the loss of power he so desperately attempted to have and keep. A king who will be mocked and ridiculed.
Remember Shelley’s Ozymandias? Here it is:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
We’ve got Springsteen for our rage, Shelley for our hopes. They’ve got Melania. I’m just saying.
The Leopard’s Spots
In the early 1970s, the once-honest and respected U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against a 27-year-old nepotism hire (the guy now squatting in the white house). At the time, this already-soulless youngster was the inept president of Trump Management. The suit alleged numerous instances of quoting different rental rates and conditions to prospective tenants based on their race, as well as telling them, falsely, that the properties they sought were no longer available, and even instructing employees to code applications “C” for Colored.
Based on that code, they steered black applicants away from buildings with white tenants and congregated them in buildings with other black tenants.
The morality-challenged youngster was represented by one Roy Cohn, the lawyer who had prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and then served as chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy. Cohn later referred to our current white house resident as his best friend (I guess he had to get in line with Jeffrey Epstein), and chose him as the recipient of the last phone call he made before he died. (I guess the next one was the one that came–collect–from the Devil).
Representing the kid in the 1970s, Cohn filed a 100 million dollar countersuit. His client, the orange guy, settled with the justice department and then proceeded to violate all the terms of the settlement.
Not surprisingly, this is the guy who went on in history to send federal troops into American cities with black mayors, high black populations or the greatest numbers of black immigrants.
So, as you can see, the old leopard is still sporting the same spots, and not just on his hands.
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