Woe Is Me: The Unshakeable Pessimism Of The Progressive Mind
The recent Grammy Tribute to Paul Simon features a haunting performance of An American Tune by the songwriter along with singer/ banjo player Rhiannon Giddens. The pessimistic lyrics clearly resonated with a Hollywood audience that looked like a Democratic Party fundraiser.
“I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Oh, but it's all right, it's all right
For we've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong."
Even as it was laying off dozens of staffers, the L.A. Times rushed to canonize the song’s performance. While Simon’s world-weary tone echoes the current zeitgeist in Canada and the West, it’s notable that the song was released in 1973. The world Simon described was a far cry from today’s apocalyptic 1984 when men purportedly can have babies, forest fires are caused by CO2 and the climate is reported to collapse within five years.
The world Simon described in An American Tune was post-Viet Nam, post 1960s rebellion and during Watergate. To him it must have seemed catastrophic to an American liberal culture he knew when the album Rhyming’ Simon was released in 1973. To those of us today, seen in retrospect, the “dreams shattered” are almost nostalgic.
But the real tell in the song’s lyrics is that world-weary ennui has long been the fallback position of the American/Canadian Left. When you hear the apocalyptic Malthusian tones from its current junta— Al Gore, AOC, Greta Thunberg, the Hollywood mafia, Blackrock— demanding that society surrender so many of its norms to satisfy their virtue, you are seeing a precedent dating back to the 70s and earlier.
Put simply, the secularists of the Left, lacking spiritual inspiration, have always found it hard to embrace the exuberance, the positivity of the “American Tune” that Simon hints at in the song.
“For we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune.”
When the song was written, the fashionable people of the Left were in the process of excoriating Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” vision of America. There was a sense of threat from Reagan’s embrace of capitalism and sentimental patriotism. They saw Reagan’s talk of strategic defence systems and waving the flag as an impediment to their Jimmy Carter love.
In the End Of The Innocence, Don Henley lamented the "Tired old man that we elected king”. He described Reagan turning “plowshares into swords”. Simply Red mocked Nancy Reagan with, “Did the earth move for you, Nancy?” Bruce Springsteen’s bitter 1984 opus “Born In The USA”, a sad ode to Viet Nam indifference, summed up the alienation during the Reagan age.
“Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just coverin' up.”
Many others, like Simon and Springsteen, would see something lost and nothing gained despite Reagan ending the nuclear threat of the Cold War. In short, this is what the Left does about everything that frightens them. Don the sack cloth and look for people to blame. Or, in Reagan’s case, try to assassinate him.
Saturday Night Live consistently mocked Reagan as the doddering old man that Joe Biden has morphed into. But the 70s radicals hadn’t captured the culture industry as they have today, when they can shove their bizarre values down the throats of a bewildered population. And so their hour passed.
The Born In The USA children were thick on the floor in the Grammy Show, clearly supporting the fashionable agenda of this day. Grey-haired, stooped, botoxed, Invisaligned teeth— they knew all the plaintive words to Simon’s songs played that night by Stevie Wonder, Garth Brooks, Sting and so many others. (They were a generation that also knew the lyric and the meaning of, “Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” )
Now, 50 years later, they have the whip hand. They should be no need for lamentations after railroading an elected GOP president from office through nefarious operations with the FBI, CIA and DOJ. They have installed a Pride Month where there is a single Remembrance Day or Veterans Day. They have cowed the corporate world into making the interests of five percent of the population into the overarching narratives of the day.
And yet they still see themselves as put-upon and under threat of right-wing extremism. The spectre of The Handmaid’s Tale spooks young women of extreme privilege. The trans movement makes progessives see themselves— or their kids— in the wrong body. They live in fear of cow farts and gas stoves. The fading American dream is now just the hook to a popular Paul Simon song.
“But it's all right, it's all right, all right,
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
The baleful blubbering is exhausting. It’s cynical. It’s predictable. Remember that next time your friendly media shill tells you that the current forest fire is a symptom of climate change. We’ve been here before. Many times.
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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx