April 15th – It’s very similar to how bad government works.
What you do, you see, is create a climate of fear and suspicion in large
sections of the community the fear of which allows you to do two things.
1) Advertise the existence of a shadowy figure called the
Booger Man as something tangible…but ephemeral.
2) Pass legislation in the name of protecting the people from
this Booger Man.
It’s what happened in the Blair years, the erosion of hard-won, historical freedoms in the name
of the terrorist threat (and we let
them do it…and we’re seeing the use of these powers in the run up to Margaret
Thatcher’s funeral, where the suggestion is that to even upset someone by your
opinion about that odious, greedy, nepotismic, arrogant lady is tantamount to
holding extremist views. That the Blue Rinse and Tiara brigade will somehow
have their sensibilities corrupted if they so much as hear a wrong word about Mrs.
Thatcher). Where everyone who doesn't toe the government line is considered
anti-establishment and their next step, after saying;
“I didn't particularly like her or her policies”,
will be to start hurling various
weaponry at any figure of this establishment…wouldn't you think that anyone with
even half of someone else’s brain (half of ‘Abby-Normal’s’ for instance) would be able
to recognise why the Ding-Dong, the Witch
is Dead movement is such a success, recognise just what it’s actually about and why? No, on second
thoughts, no; that would involve deep thinking not knee-jerk political
idiocy; would require more than the kind of feathered thinking that comes from living a life of
sheltered privilege…
Well, that’s the same kind of
thinking that bans pop songs because of the threat
to the national consciousness. On this day in 1971, the Illinois Crime
Commission (only in America
Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit – using imagery from a
seminal piece of English literature, Alice
in Wonderland and Alice Through the
Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll; story’s that entertained Grace Slick, the lyric
writer, as a child and which she developed into a song that, although
referencing drugs (a hookah-smoking caterpillar, who is already in the books)
was far, far more about developing your imagination by searching for experience
not listening to propaganda:
Procul Harum’s A
Whiter Shade of Pale – about as indecipherable as any pop song concerning
the development of a relationship between a man and a woman can be, apart from
‘MacArthur’s Park’:
Peter, Paul and Mary’s Puff the Magic Dragon – about growing up
and losing your childhood, one’s loss of innocence...like The Snowman....
Well thank goodness the inability of our
rulers to see beyond this fledgling ‘Big Brother’ attitude has meant that all
three songs have gone on to garner the praise and circulation they so richly
deserve, in spite of those interested parties called ‘vested interest’ using their
smoke and mirrors to create shadows to frighten us all with…
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