You Know Al…

Sunday evening when I talked about the Fishbone song, I mentioned that there were a lot of apocalyptic songs running around during the 1980’s. And there were.

On top of Party at Ground Zero, 99 Luft Balloons, and Cities in Dust, you had Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, All Fall Down by Migde Ure, Land of Confusion by Genesis, Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel, Minutes to Midnight by Midnight Oil, Russians by Sting, Seconds & Unforgettable Fire by U2, Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears and the list goes on and on and on.

In fact, here is a page that lists all the song about nuclear war from the 1980’s. It will surprise you how many there were.

Thing is, no one singled these songs out as being political. They were played on radio station regularly with Duran Duran and Bananarama with no one saying boo beyond, “cool song”. The threat of nuclear holocaust was such a common and constant part of life that artists sang about it with the aplomb artists of most era would sing about love or the way artists of today sing about malaise/ennui. Truthfully, no one thought much of it.

Now during those 50+ years we lived with the idea that one man had the power to wipe out all of human civilization with the push of a button, we did get paranoid once. We did allow the government to run away with our fears, once. Then the Attorney General for the Army stood up to Joe McCarthy and the Congressional Committee and said, “Have you no decency, sir?”

Last week, the nation's Attorney General claimed that people who attacked the Warretless Wiretapping program as limiting American freedoms (and indeed it fly directly in the face of the Fouth Amendment)…

"But this view is shortsighted," he said. "Its definition of freedom one utterly divorced from civic responsibility is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."


(Anyone like the 1984 “goodspeak” there? “Curtailing of freedom is liberty”. Orwell would be so….utterly dejected at being proven right.)

Joe McCarthy went after due process by allowing people to be dragged before the congressional committee based on anonymous hearsay and spraying invective and innuendo on innocent people's good names. That’s it.

The Bush administration has attacked rights Joe McCarthy wouldn't even dream of touching. He has allowed torture, he has closed hearings of terrorism suspects to the public (the McCarthy hearings were on TV), he has fostered the program to spy on American citizens, he has done away with the right of Habeus Corpus paving the way for arbitrary arrest and indefinite detainment all because we are supposed to be terrified of what?

A bunch of guys with box cutters and IEDs?

More terrified of them than we were of Khrushchev, a man with a nuclear arsenal who banged his shoe on the podium at the UN and said of America “We will bury you!”

The fact is America said to McCarthy, “Y’know even if there are communists in the government (and you haven’t proven there were) it’s not worth giving up the ideals this nation was founded on. Shove off.”

And look what happened: We rested our faith in the American freedom and democracy and lo and behold, the Soviet system collapsed under it’s own weight. We were right.

Why can’t we have that faith now? Why can’t we entrust that American freedom and democracy will prevail over the murderous thuggery and religious zealotry of terrorism. Why have we lost faith in America such that believing in our freedoms is seen as being “utterly divorced from civic responsibility”?

Have you no decency Attorney General? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?