Tag Archives: war

What…? Not this Old Beast again?

Have You Embraced the Beast?

War! What’s it good for?
Say it, say it, say it again…

So… this song, below, is certainly not one of my best songs, by a stretch. And, yet, I’ve posted a slug of versions of it here on the AYoS parade of songwriting shame…

What gives?

It’s this damn war, I tell you.

Like the overwhelming majority of US citizens, I’m sick to death of it, sick of the suffering of others, sick of the squandered sacrifices of our men and women who feel called to fight, sick of the lies, and sick of the excuses of those politicains and legislators who claim they were fooled into supporting it.

That, my friends, is a sock full of shit.

The truth about what US intelligence analysts really thought about Saddam and the supposed threat he posed to the the Middle East and the US was known then, as it is known now.

It was, indeed, in — if not all the papers — certainly in responsible, mainstream publications like the Christian Science Monitor and plenty of others, even if the supposedly liberal New York Times seemed to focus all its energies on promoting this most foolish of modern boondoggles of death, destruction, and cynical profiteering.

And it was well covered in the British and Australian press who had a lot less temerity when it came time to speak “truth to power” and seemed far less worried about offending those whose first response to the 9/11 attacks was to rain death and destruction indiscriminately on any handy villains, guilty or not.

Now… don’t get me wrong.

I did support the incursion into Afghanistan to get the people who our intel officials did think were behind the 9/11 attacks — and who, in fact, were bold enough to take credit for it. Hell, I thought just the act of claiming credit was worthy of some serious ass-kicking…

But there was — in the words of our very own intel and security experts — “little or no credible evidence” of Saddam Hussein’s purported involvement with the attacks.

Yet, there we were, confronted by the sorry spectacle of not just the idiot-president’s own party of warmongering lackies (full disclosure: I am a Republican) rushing to join the gangpile of those willfully ignoring the truth — but the “loyal opposition” — the then-Democratic Congressional leadership joining the festival of deception and disingenuity, rushing to vote for war against a nation for which there was little or no credible evidence of involvement in the monstrous attacks on New York and Washington.

So… yeah… this Old Beast, again…

A note about today’s version: This recording was actually made in early 1998 as part of the AYoS precursor, TK Major’s Song of the Day. Unlike the mostly acoustic/folk AYoS, the SotD project was all over the map, production and style-wise but this song, with its string arrangement (OK, synthetic strings, to be sure, I’d already spent the retirement money I could have devoted to hiring a real string section) and putatively soothing background vocal harmonies, was an odd duck, even for that polystylistic culture jumble.

Have You Embraced the Beast?

more stream & DL options

previous versions
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Thursday, January 11, 2007

lyrics
Have You Embraced the Beast?

Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?

Have you embraced the beast?
Do you serve the war machine?
Have you embraced the beast?
Did you trade in your soul on (for) the finer things?

Have you embraced the beast?
Do your taxes buy bullets for fascist death squads?
Have you embraced the beast?
They’ll be coming to your hometown before too long . . .

Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?

Have you embraced the beast?

Coming to your hometown before too long…

Leave a reply

Have you embraced the Beast?

He never thought he’d be glad to see tanks rolling down Main Street.

But after masked gunmen with machine guns and grenades killed the mayor and half the city council, he decided maybe martial law wasn’t so bad.

The regional authority said it was the foreign fighters but the rumor spread quickly through town that the gunmen spoke only awkward, oddly accented pidgin Spanish among themselves and several times lapsed into what sounded like American English, recognizable even in the chaos of death and destruction.

But there was no knowing. The police had mostly either been killed or had deserted.

When the tanks rolled into town, it was a relief — even if a lot of folks suspected it was the regional authority behind the attacks, anyway.

Six months later and the regional authority had been commandeering private homes to bivouac troops — or extracting exorbitant “resettlement avoidance fees” from those who could come up with the money. The schools hadn’t opened in five months. There was only electricity 4 hours a day most days.

Since the water plant had been bombed, citizens were dependent on regional authority water trucks — and if you wanted to make sure your four hour wait for water was fruitful, you had to cough up bribes to assure yourself a place in the front of the queue.

Bribes were the rule. And when there was no money or no electronics or no furniture, then people sold what they could; it was a desperate, clawing marketplace of desperation and doomsday carnality.

He found himself obsessing these days on how it all started. Sometimes it felt like it must have been this way for generations — but he remembered the crisp winter day little more than a decade earlier, the abortion of an election and the installation of the loser as president.

He hadn’t thought it was such a big deal at the time — after all, he’d voted for the appointed president along with something considerably less than half the voters. Still, it was close, he had told himself. Someone had to do something.

But , now, every time he traced it all back… that’s where everything seemed to start — like the first mortal error, the first offense against the gods in some epic tragedy.

___________________

Not, you know, to put too fine a point on it (or perhaps too ham-fisted a fist)… but this song below is dedicated to the appointed president — who I –unlike the protagonist in the vignette above, did not vote for:

Internet Archive page for this recording

December 13, 2005 version
February 15, 2006 version

Have You Embraced the Beast?

Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?

Have you embraced the beast?
Do you serve the war machine?
Have you embraced the beast?
Did you trade in your soul on (for) the finer things?

Have you embraced the beast?
Do your taxes buy bullets for fascist death squads?
Have you embraced the beast?
They’ll be coming to your hometown before too long . . .

Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?

Have you embraced the beast?

Iraq Study Group Blues

Leave a reply

Iraq Study Group Blues

I’ve been working with a new tuning on guitar and it’s promising but I’m not there, yet.

That has not prevented me, mind you, from posting the results of those modest efforts about a week or so ago (“My Second Mistake”).

Earlier today, I’d finished some vexing work and I’d sat down with the notion of feeding the gaping maw of A Year of Songs with a little recording… but I was having a heck of a lot of trouble getting going.

Internet Archive page for this recording

Every time it seemed like I got a little momentum, I’d stumble over the finger picking or some basic left hand move. And my overall timing was enough to give a listener heart arrhythmia.

I took a quick break and while I was washing my face I had the radio on. I realized that National Public Radio was doing an hour news special on the release of the Iraq Study Group report and I’d meant to listen.

So when I got back to the computer, I clicked on my desk icon for the live Internet stream from my local NPR station. Since the stream is delayed by 20 or 30 seconds, I didn’t actually miss anything.

I listened attentively but idly picked up my nearby guitar — a typical move when I’m listening to public affairs or news on the radio.

When I noticed absently that my playing sounded a lot better now, I decided to pop the radio stream into my headphones and off the speakers so I could record and listen to the news special at the same time. In fact, while I often do, I didn’t even put my guitar in the headphones, since it just made it a little harder to hear the radio stream.

I recorded one not quite 3 minute improv and thought it sounded okay — but found out I couldn’t listen to it and pay sufficient attention to the radio to follow the story — which I was still intent on.

So I put it aside. As I was listening to NPR, I got the itch again and quickly hit the red button, playing for a little under two and a half minutes.

I’d barely paid attention to my playing and it was my perception that it was probably worse than the first. I put it aside too.

When the show was over I listened to the tracks. The first was indeed much, much better than I’d been doing earlier but it was still disappointing. But the second was almost acceptable.

So almost-acceptable that, with the notion that the theoretically interesting back story might just be enough to make it briefly interesting, I’ve posted it here in today’s entry.

If you listen carefully, you’ll likely hear the mosquito buzz of the news special in my headphones as I listen to it while improvising the single guitar.

With regard to the story and comprehension (as we used to say in my 7th grade speed reading class)… I’d say I’d get a 90 or better on a tough quiz.

download [ 3.3 mb] 192 kbps
play [broadband]
AYoS radio [broadband]

Internet Archive page for this recording