Back in my adolescent narcissistic bubble, the months preceding December 8, 1982 was dark. Yeh, I was sixteen, had my driver’s license and pretty much unfettered access to a car. I had a girlfriend and my jump shot got me all kinds of attention in the halls and in the locker room; but I was spending hours upstairs locked inside my bedroom air guitaring for hours to The Who’s Quadrophenia, bathing my mind in the rock opera’s baroque amphetamine-fueled suicidal dreams and existential teenage angst.
The album is a weird, wonderful, conceptual mashup of identity and rage, mixing tensions between the four original band members with a progression of drug use and dissociative identity disorders: specifically schizophrenia and split/multiple personalities.
Just like high school.
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After reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Bruce Springsteen sat down, wrote, and recorded “Nebraska,” perhaps his best social and political work. Zinn once said he decided to write A People’s History after listening to Woody Guthrie’s lyrics about Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre. Guthrie goosed Bob Dylan towards political consciousness who in turn moved Springsteen to consider writing stories “from below” — stories against the grain of the “great men” theory of history.
It’s a nice group, a kind of four horsemen of social justice in a way, who has lost another one it’s members.
I learned of Zinn’s death late last night while checking the news between connecting flights from Denver to Billings. I sat in the plane’s darkness looking out the window at the lights below — cities and towns — but from this height, not people in cars driving kids but abstract patterns, lights, moving slowly below or not at all.
For me, this distance-created abstraction is a Zinn moment. It recalls his commentary on modern warfare, which he oft repeated and goes this way in one of his talks:
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So much of the news from Africa is depressing: famine, aids, wars, orphans, despots, you name it. It’s not just the mainstream media; I’ve been hit recently by a kind of “year-end giving blitz” when relief agencies scramble for your 2009 tax planning largesse. Lots of hungry kids with flies in their eyes. I’m told by my non-profit friends that this is because people only give to tragedy not joy.
I understand this. I don’t blame them, and I don’t think they overstate or outright lie just to raise money, at least as far as I can tell.
What’s lost in that reportage, and in mainstream imagery, is how crazy wonderful the people and place is. Since mid-July, I’ve spent a month in Africa, enmeshed in a couple of pretty serious issues but there’s a great deal of joy.
I don’t want to downplay the problems or fetishize smiling kids. But I get a little tired of how we often fetishize starving kids with flies in their eyes.
The following video is just some videographic ballast. Read More…
