I went to a wonderful Leonard Cohen concert last night. As I listened intently to the lyrics of his song "The Future" I couldn't help but thing of the disastrous and diabolical doings of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the other malevolent members of the Bush administration.
As you read these lyrics think of all the terrible things these people did from WMD, Iraq war to Gitmo, torture and the mass illegal invasion of privacy on Americans by their White House - just to name a few. None of this has made America safer or more secure, just the opposite.
Thing of how out of touch, isolated and fear-mongering they were and how they used that to justify ignoring and suspension of the American Constitution. It is eerily chilling and comes across as a 21st century protest song in this context.
Here are the lyrics:
"Give me back my broken night my mirrored room, my secret life it's lonely here, there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control over every living soul And lie beside me, baby, that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall give me Stalin and St Paul I've seen the future, brother: it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant
You don't know me from the wind you never will, you never did I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall I've heard their stories, heard them all but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop you feel the devil's riding crop Get ready for the future: it is murder
Things are going to slide ... There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code Your private life will suddenly explode There'll be phantoms There'll be fires on the road and the white man dancing
You'll see a woman hanging upside down her features covered by her fallen gown and all the lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson and the white man dancin'
Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St Paul Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby: it is murder Things are going to slide ... When they said REPENT REPENT ...
Thanks Ken for putting Cohen's piece in your blog. Its very sobering to contemplate all the things that have occured since the invasion of Iraq. The Centre for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union have never stopped pushing the US administration to make Cheney, Bush, Bybee, Rumsfield, Rice and others accountable. Thank goodness for groups like them and others who prefer the rule of law to violence and lawlessness. Now if we could get our government to bring Omar Khadr home then we would also admit to our country's errors and complicity in this period of history. Of course there is also the Canadian citizen who sits in the Canadian Embassy in Syria....another shameful situation. While the Americans have certainly done many illegal and violent things, we can't ignore our own government's actions.
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