Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Take 'Em Away

It's not the first time putting my music on random shuffle has enabled the synchronicity fairies to work their magic. Here's what popped up today.


Of course, what I immediately noticed was the corvid so prominently featured on the album art and in the band's name. (As for the rest of the band name, well, isn't "old ... medicine" more or less the opposite of a "novel ... virus"?) The chorus is consonant with the totalitarian conditions under which most of us are living in the post-birdemic world.
Take 'em away, take 'em away, Lord
Take away these chains from me
My heart is broken 'cause my spirit's not free
Lord, take away these chains from me
That relevance diminishes, however, as one listens to the verses, which make it clear that the "chains" refer to grinding poverty and the necessity of backbreaking work -- quite different from the current situation, where people are locked up at home and not allowed to work! Perhaps an entirely different song is more appropriate, as so many of us have been shanghaied into that infamous gang of scallywags, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything,


Note: I should mention that I myself live in Taiwan, which is still a tolerably free country, and that my work has continued uninterrupted. I post this in solidarity with those who have not been so fortunate.

1 comment:

Bruce Charlton said...

One of the ways in which Brave New World was a better prediction than 1984 is that there is very little in the way of chains - or, the chains are in the minds, rather than on the bodies.

David Icke has noted that both Orwell and Aldous Huxley were ultra-establishment insiders in their background and connections (both attended Eton, for example) and were not predicting on the basis of extrapolation or intuition; but because they knew what was being planned by the Establishment.

Terry Boardman - in his very long *videos* on the causes of the First World War, shows copies of primary source material dating back to the late 1800s (from the very highest echelons of global power), that track the shape of the current situation back for five generations.

It's not that They always get what they want when they want it (Their power is limited, and They require cooperation and consent on a large scale); but that there is no doubting what They want - and that the strategy is extremely long term, across generations.

Most people explain this in terms of hereditary 'blood lines' - such as the Cecil family, which arose in the time of Elizabeth I and continue to be very influential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cecil_family. But I don't find this sufficient, given the fickleness and fragility of humans (and the extreme destructiveness of the program - which poisons the world for descendents), and regard such extreme long-termism as indirect evidence of ultimately supernatural guidance.

Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney

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