"Roaring silence" resurfaces

In my December 2020 post "Here come the twenties," I proposed as a theme song for the whole decade a track from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence.

Did you know that the oxymoronic idea of a "roaring silence" is actually biblical? I didn't until my recent engagement with the Penitential Psalms: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long" (Ps. 32:3).

Recently the sync fairies have been drawing my attention to the old They Might Be Giants song "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" -- the first track from their first album (1986).

The bridge contains these lines:

You know everything that I know, 

so I know you've heard the voice 

that makes the silent noise

They don't actually use the word roar, but the concept is similar -- and the silent roar syncs with another TMBG theme: a lion in space:

In the spaceship, the silver spaceship,

The lion takes control

In a lion were in space, his roaring would naturally be silent, as They remind us in another song:

I heard they had a space program

When they sing you can't hear, there's no air

Sometimes I think I kind of like that and

Other times I think I'm already there

On a whim, I ran a search for can't hear the roar, and it turned up a Science Daily article about how the paralyzing power of a tiger's roar may come from the part we can't hear. The article is dated December 29, 2000. I found it today, December 29, 2022 -- the same date, only in the Year of the Tiger.

Here come the twenties

Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.

-- Daniel 2:37-38

Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

-- Revelation 12:12

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

-- 1 Peter 5:8

The final decade of the 19th century was known as the "Gay Nineties." Back in the 1990s, I used to joke that that decade would be remembered by the same name, for entirely different reasons.

Google can confirm.

We've gotten used to using the number 2020 as shorthand for the current dystopia -- but there are less than two weeks left in the year, and I daresay the dystopia is going to last a bit longer than that. Get ready for the second coming of the Roaring Twenties.