... because the Ramones tell us so.
A conversation with my sister Kathy last night put me in the mind of how everybody has a threshold for the shenanigans of elected officials. I won't rehash her screed point by point, but what the Obama economic team has been doing has made her ready to string 'em all up and let the CPAs sort 'em out.
What she had to say also got me thinking about the Ramones anti-Ronald Reagan call-to-arms, "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)" off of Animal Boy.
(That full-album post is coming soonish.)
A decidedly nonpolitical band, the Ramones just couldn't wrap their heads around why then-President Reagan would attend a wreath-laying ceremony at a German military cemetery to mark the 4oth anniversary of the end of World War II hostilities between the Allies and the Germans. The graveyard at Bitburg is the final resting place of many SS soldiers.
It couldn't help the Ramones' opinion of Reagan's blatantly political play to the extreme right of the Republican Party that two of the boys in the band were Jewish. But even more than that, what comes across in the song is a real sense of disillusion and loss of hope that anything a politician does will ever make anything better.
Seems a lot of the people I know are reaching that psychological breaking point these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment