Weep Now, and Keep Standing

[omorka]

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World's kept on reservations you don't see
"It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream
As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream
Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

- Bruce Cockburn, in 1983

We survived Reagan and Thatcher. We will survive this. No giving up on my watch, ladies and gentlemen. I invoked Ereshkigal, Goddess of Thankless Tasks, She Who Complains, on Samhain for a reason.

Comments

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

Tell me it's all going to be okay. Tell me that we haven't crossed the event horizon yet. I see a feedback cycle:

fear -> desire for simple answers -> mindless patriotism -> media frenzy -> bad data -> propaganda -> fear

[omorka.livejournal.com]

It's not all going to be okay. We have four more years of hard work. Actually, we have two years of very hard work, and then we're going to take back the House of Representatives in 2006 (probably by narrow margins, but we will do it), and he will be the lamest duck that ever waddled down the isle, and we will have two years of total legislative gridlock where nothing happens at all. And then we will have to work our butts off to pick up the pieces in 2008. But we did this once before. We survived Reagan. We will survive this.

They don't have 2/3 of either house of Congress. We haven't passed the event horizon yet. People still turn out in droves for Clinton. They remember what semi-prosperity is like. If we keep putting good data out there, it will sink in. Parts of the media are already getting tired of the Bushites kicking them like small dogs. We have enough gravity of our own to pull back. We are almost half the nation, and we are gonna be fucking loud.

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Oooh... Thanks for getting me to listen to this song again. Due to an iTunes data loss a month back, I'm missing a few months of playcounts, and this one is currently listed as unplayed. Need to rectify that. I often like Cockburn's sardonic commentary on politics, but sometimes get weary of his overly Christian pieces.

Out of curiousity, which of his albums do you & the spouse have? I wouldn't have pegged Trouble With Normal as a first or second choice album, necessarily.

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

Bruce Cockburn "Call it Democracy", 1985