Something 4 The Weekend # 135

Woods: Songs Of Shame: "Military Madness" [mp3]

I shouldn't have to tell my fellow Americans (and most others around the world) what today is, so I won't...

The question has been asked before by others, but where have all the anti-war and protest songs been this past decade? Aside from Bright Eyes' "When The President Talks To God", I'm having a hard time thinking of any others...

("Military Madness" is a Graham Nash song from 1971, btw...)

While the Cheney administration was bullshitting the American public into a nasty war against the wrong country/regime (Iraq) at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and untold human lives, it would seem the opposition was mostly ineffectual...It's not necessarily true that the anti-war people were completely quiet, but underlying the opposition (at least to me) was the feeling that we were helpless and powerless to do anything, and so we mostly did nothing...

Until the 2008 elections, when the majority of voters put the Democrats back into Congressional power and gave Barack Obama the presidency, which seems to me to be a fairly strong repudiation of the past 8 years...

And now President Obama and the Democrat-led Congress are attempting to pass some health care reforms, including a public option and insurance coverage for those of us who cannot afford insurance in any form, and dammit if Republicans and those with conservative political ideologies aren't storming town hall meetings and screaming bullshit talking points and trying to stifle any sort of rational dialogue. These are the same people who saw no problem with funding DEATH and WAR to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, but believe that taking care those who cannot take care of themselves, improving their quality of life, and in some instances, SAVING LIVES, is a waste of money, and even worse, SOCIALISM...

Words cannot express the ridiculousness of it all...Maybe that's why there are no decent protest songs these days. Cognitive dissonance is a stone-cold bitch.

Hotcha! Hank