Billy Bragg, Prophet

Billy Bragg wrote the song "Ideology" circa 1990. Its relevance to the current situation in Washington would be downright eerie, except that human nature being what it is, it would probably have been relevant to the situation in Athens in 400 BC, too.

When one voice rules the nation
Just because they're top of the pile
Doesn't mean their vision is the clearest
The voices of the people
Are falling on deaf ears
Our politicians all become careerists

They must declare their interests
But not their company cars
Is there more to a seat in parliament
Than sitting on your arse
And the best of all this bad bunch
Is shouting to be heard
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

Outside the patient millions
Who put them into power
Expect a little more back for their taxes
Like school books, beds in hospitals
And peace in our bloody time
All they get is old men grinding axes

Who've built their private fortunes
On the things they can rely
The courts, the secret handshake
The Stock Exchange and the old school tie
For God and Queen and Country
All things they justify
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

God bless the civil service
The nations saving grace
While we expect democracy
They're laughing in our face
And although our cries get louder
The laughter gets louder still
Above the sound of ideologies clashing
Above the sound of ideologies,
Above the sound of ideologies,
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

An Evolutionary Doggerel

A couple of years back, in response to an awful "poem" promoting intelligent design ideology to children, I composed this piece of amphibractic verse, which was shared with a few friends but never made public. I have decided that now is the time and here is the place to inflict it upon an unoffending world.

So complex and intricate Nature appears,
it's hardly a shock that for thousands of years
our forebears were certain that lurking behind her
there must be a planner, a conscious Designer.
The details would vary from nation to nation,
and each culture told its own tale of Creation,
but all were agreed: "such a finely tuned dance
must be choreographed--it can't happen by chance!"
It wasn't till AD eighteen fifty-nine,
that Charles Darwin dared to suggest the "design"
could be thoroughly explained without need of invoking
divine supervision. "What has he been smoking?"
society wondered; but his explanations,
acutely derived from minute observations,
were made with such force that his "Origin of Species"
changed history, like Luther's 95 Theses.
The theory of Natural Selection he backed
has been tweaked and refined, but its gist is intact.
Opponents who mock it put stress on the random,
but that's half the story--for riding in tandem
with haphazard mutation, selective pressure
preserves the most able and weeds out the lesser.
This process unfolds over timescales so great
that our consciousness, tuned to the short term (as fate
would have it, so tuned by our genomic history),
recoils, and takes refuge in scripture and mystery.
But the facts, found in fossil and DNA chain,
have borne out Chuck's theory again and again:
differential survival (and hence, procreation)
steers life toward an unknown, unplanned destination,
with some mutant genes faring better than others.
Thus each time a variant outlives its brothers,
a new thread appears in the web of "design,"
but the weavers are nothing but life, death, and time.

Precious and Marie

Just saw "Precious." Incredible. Mo'Nique completely deserves whatever she wins for one of the most brutally honest, nearly unwatchable (yet completely riveting) performances I've ever seen.

A facebook post about the movie prompted a conversation about the forgotten and vulnerable girls around us, and this reminded me of something I haven't thought about in a long time, a poem about one of those forgotten girls, called "Concerning the Infanticide Marie Farrar" by Bertolt Brecht. (I think there's a more widely accepted translation out there, but this is the one I know best.)

Marie Farrar, born in April,
No marks, a minor, rachitic, both parents dead,
Allegedly, up to now without police record,
Committed infanticide, it is said,
As follows: in her second month, she says,
With the aid of a barmaid she did her best
To get rid of her child with two douches,
Allegedly painful but without success.
But you, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

She then paid out, she says, what was agreed
And continued to lace herself up tight.
She also drank liquor with pepper mixed in it
Which purged her but did not cure her plight.
Her body distressed her as she washed the dishes,
It was swollen now quite visibly.
She herself says, for she was still a child,
She prayed to Mary most earnestly.
But you, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

Her prayers, it seemed, helped her not at all.
She longed for help. Her trouble made her falter
And faint at early mass. Often drops of sweat
Broke out in anguish as she knelt at the altar.
Yet until her time had come upon her
She still kept secret her condition.
For no one believed such a thing had happened,
That she, so unenticing, had yielded to temptation.
But you, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

And on that day, she says, when it was dawn,
As she washed the stairs it seemed a nail
Was driven into her belly. She was wrung with pain.
But still she secretly endured her travail.
All day long while hanging out the laundry
She racked her brains till she got it through her head
She had to bear the child and her heart was heavy.
It was very late when she went up to bed.
But you, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

She was sent for again as soon as she lay down:
Snow had fallen and she had to go downstairs.
It went on till eleven. It was a long day.
Only at night did she have time to bear.
And so, she says, she gave birth to a son.
The son she bore was just like all the others.
She was unlike the others but for this.
There is no reason to despise this mother.
You, too, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

Accordingly I will go on with the story
Of what happened to the son that came to be.
(She says she will hide nothing that befell)
So let it be a judgment upon both you and me.
She says she had scarcely gone to bed when she
Was overcome with sickness and she was alone,
Not knowing what would happen, yet she still
Contrived to stifle all her moans.
And you, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

With her last strength, she says because
Her room had now grown icy cold, she them
Dragged herself to the latrine and there
Gave birth as best she could (not knowing when)
But toward morning. She says she was already
Quite distracted and could barely hold
The child for snow came into the latrine
And her fingers were half numb with cold.
You, too, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

Between the latrine and her room, she says,
Not earlier, the child began to cry until
It drove her mad so that she says
She did not cease to beat it with her fists
Blindly for some time till it was still.
And then she took the body to her bed
And kept it with her there all through the night:
When morning came she hid it in the shed.
But you, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

Marie Farrar, born in April,
And unmarried mother, convicted, died in
The Meissen penitentiary,
She brings home to you all men's sin.
You who bear pleasantly between clean sheets
And give the name "blessed" to your womb's weight
Must not damn the weakness of the outcast,
For her sin was black but her pain was great.
Therefore, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help from every creature born.

Seekers Syndrome

When I was a kid I had the 'Georgy Girl' album by the Seekers and loved it. I recently rediscovered it on iTunes and found that I still love it. The title song is undeniably a little piece of pop froth, albeit a tasty one--a guilty pleasure and nothing more. But the rest of the songs are something else entirely. I had forgotten that the Seekers were actually a band. They had a singer (Judith Durham) with a big ringing voice, robust (if not always letter-perfect) vocal harmony, and a secret weapon in 12-string virtuoso Keith Potger, one of the best guitarists you've never heard of. They lived somewhere in the stylistic and commercial middle ground between Peter Paul & Mary and the Mamas & the Papas, but had a robust Aussie duende that PP&M couldn't touch and a rootsy simplicity that the M's & P's could only dream of.

As I listened I realized that the Seekers are the quintessential example of a particular syndrome in pop music--a band that kills itself with a hit. If "Georgy Girl" had never happened, they would have been remembered best for stuff like "A World of Our Own" and "I'll Never Find Another You"--songs that were commercial only in the sense that they were too tuneful and accessible not to find an audience. But that ghastly whistling hook was enough to cast them forever in the mawkish mold of the Association, the Christy Minstrels, and the Sandpipers.

It's a shame, because the world should know some of this stuff better. It's pop-folk in the "Mighty Wind" tradition, for certain, but with a bracing, unselfconscious energy and not a trace of that self-congratulatory piety that gave folk music a bad name. "Come the Day," with its titanic guitar strums, full-throated harmonies, and unabashedly idealistic lyrics; "All Over the World," a nakedly emotional but never melodramatic torch song featuring a gorgeous vocal from Durham; a full-steam-ahead version of "Red Rubber Ball" (with Potger at his muscular, precise best) that's so much better than the Cyrkle's tepid, pimply hit that it sounds like a different song; superb covers of folk chestnuts like "The Last Thing On My Mind" and "Well, Well, Well"--these recordings deserve a better fate than to languish in the iTunes servers as forgotten extra tracks by "the Georgy Girl group."

Who else has been a victim of Seekers Syndrome, I wonder?