Is There Anybody Alive Out There?
Next month, after playing Sunderland, Manchester and the Isle of Wight, Bruce Springsteen heads for London, England, as his European "Wrecking Ball" tour continues. The show happens a week before the most aggressively corporate Olympics Games ever staged take place, and on the centenary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk protest.
Why is it always Springsteen, and at this level of stadium rock and record sales, only Springsteen, who expresses rage against the political sharks, investment vultures, and war hawks– those thieving, oil-stealing, money laundering, drug peddling, arms dealing, tax evading criminals —who have stolen the very hearts and futures of the middle class, Machiavelli-style, and aimed their poison-tipped arrows at the middle class workers themselves? Where are the singers and students who should be stirring the already muddy waters and agitating the weary masses to rail against the very inquisitors who created this hell in the first place? What’s the saying? “If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”? Don't look now, but somebody has us by the balls.
It's good to see someone notices these things, but to those of us who have followed Springsteen over the years, it's nothing new. I've often lamented that no one in the public eye today takes any initiative to set the American public straight. Michael Moore is the closest we have to an investigative journalist and film maker who'll take on the land barons (so to speak), but unfortunately he can get loosey-goosey with the facts. Sascha Baron Cohen does a good job of holding up the mirror, but no one who needs to get his message understands it or, even sadder, will go to see his movies in the first place.
I come from a generation that had a great deal to protest against and the cajones to do it. Whether it was as simple as daring to grow our hair out to protest arbitrary and restrictive edicts in school (as I did) and thereby subject ourselves to ridicule, scorn, and in some instances, violence; or to take far bolder steps and place ourselves in front of National Guardsmen sporting rifles and live rounds to protest a war that even most of the combatants didn't understand, the end result was essentially the same: the future unfolded in spite of our well-intentioned efforts, exactly as it was meant to.
There are those who will argue that the protests of the 60s altered our nation's history, its music, and its culture; that if not for the "summer of love" and Woodstock and Sergeant Pepper, blah, blah, blah, our country and its people were destined to perpetuate, with some variance of course, the blithely utopian belief system of the 1950s. All the world except the U.S. was Communist and evil, God blessed America before all others, there was an endless supply of good times, energy, clean food, clean air, and clean water, and all the girls were virgins until the day they got married.
But that's not how it was, and as history showed us, it was not how it was destined to be. Saigon was destined to fall; politicians were destined to retain their stranglehold on power until they got caught, the people be damned; racism was destined to continue and intensify; immigration was destined to explode the myth that America was truly a homogeneous melting pot; the U.S. would not learn its lesson in Vietnam; the food, water and air would continue to be sullied by people who had had it too good for too long and who assumed the "good times" would always continue; and a new generation would be born who neither cared about nor understood what the First Amendment freedom to protest was about because they didn't pay attention to the world around them and had no reason and/or initiative to kick up a shit storm. "It's all good," they were told. Substituting Juicy and Pink shorts that look as though they've been spray painted on, skinny jeans, tattoos, piercings, rave parties, and cocaine for saddle shoes, poodle skirts, pony tails, drive-in movies and hops, the adage that "those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it" has hung its rabid snout up over the fence and is threatening to leap out of its pen and devour us all. That is, unless we start giving a damn.
You see, as abject a failure as the 60s Peace, Love, and Happiness moniker may have been; as quickly as all the gains at Woodstock were wiped out two months later at Altamont when the Rolling Stones pulled arguably the most moronic publicity stunt in American history by hiring the Hell's Angels as their security detail for a free concert that was destined to devolve into a riot; as pathetic as my generation turned out to be when it came to personal responsibility and recreational drug use which spawned an entirely new generation of party animals whose vision is limited to the diagonal span of their flat screen TVs and their parents' liquor cabinet, there is one thing that can be said for us: we kept a wary eye on the "military-industrial complex” —a catchy pseudonym for the 10% who control 90% of the wealth and power in this country. Our singers and students raised their voices and pumped their fists, sounding the alarm that ours was a damaged world and needed immediate attention. It needed fixing, and if we didn't treat it soon, we were all going to pay a price we could not even imagine. Maybe no one who heard them at the time cared, maybe no one was even listening, because history unfolded as it would and very little has changed since then.
In his seminal 14th century manifesto, Machiavelli said the way for a leader to stay in power is to keep the masses educated enough that they believe themselves to be in charge of their own lives, that the decisions they make actually matter, but at the same time keep them ignorant enough that no matter what decisions they make they can do you no harm because, in reality, their decisions don't matter.
So tonight I'm watching the news and wondering the same thing Springsteen shouts at some point in every one of his shows:
IS THERE ANYBODY ALIVE OUT THERE?
