Giving peace a chance in the way he meant it is a childish denial of reality, as MDC demonstrated. The world is not a nice place. It’s not that hard to grasp.
What Howe and Coser wrote in 1957 remains true: “Between the ‘progressive’ sentiments of Popular Front politics, and a certain kind of urban middle-brow cultural yearning, there was a deep rapport—most of all, a common anxiety and pathos—which the Communists brilliantly exploited. ... Even after the Popular Front lay shattered ... the style of American mass culture retained many of its crucial elements.”
Its echoes in music are ubiquitous. We hear them in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a vapid celebration of moral relativism that, like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” tells us that no cause is really worth fighting for:
Imagine there’s no countries,
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
No religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace.
We hear the echoes, too, in the music of the man who organized the Artists for John Kerry tour: Bruce Springsteen, who specializes in depicting the desolation of American life in albums such as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad (a self-conscious reference to Guthrie). The emblematic Springsteen song, “Born in the USA,” laments the meaningless sacrifice of the Vietnam vet, the ultimate used and abused working-class hero:
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up.
Born in the USA, I was born in the USA
I was born in the USA, born in the USA.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man.
Born in the USA. . . .
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son, if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand?” . . . .
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go.
Born in USA, I was born in the USA. . . .
Juxtaposed with the bleak lyrical narrative of tragedy and indifference, the song’s seemingly celebratory chorus becomes a parody of patriotism, implying the foolishness of the benighted blue-collar victim of the system, naive enough to think that it’s really a good thing to be an American—or, God forbid, that America might be worth fighting for.
It’s tempting to dismiss the politicization of popular music as of limited consequence. But as the Popular Front keenly grasped, culture matters—and music matters perhaps most of all. Allan Bloom, glossing Plato, wrote that “to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or society, one must ‘mark the music.’ ” In America, popular music provides a soundtrack for growing up. And the lyrics of that music too often deliver the message that our leaders are “idiots,” that our politics are corrupt, that bourgeois life is purposeless, that this country is no freer than any other—and probably less so. How can we find ourselves surprised, then, by the cool indifference that typifies many kids raised in times of affluence, freedom, and peace? ..."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html
Agreed. I believe that history shows that the world has been without majors wars for a total of seven years since the beginning of recorded history. I can’t remember where I saw this but it has always stuck in my mind. A good example is to walk through downtown Detroit or Chicago at 2:00AM and see what happens. For some reason, people can’t grasp the idea that they can’t talk their way out of conflict without that “Big Stick”.