In 1973, the disastrous Vietnam war was winding down, we were deep in the investigation toward impeachment of Richard Nixon, and Americans were suffering the recession triggered by our first oil shock, which was itself a response to Nixon's policy of unqualified support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
That summer, I graduated from high school, which is supposed to be a happy and optimistic event, into an ominously growing world of shit.
In the midst of this gloom, Paul Simon released his second solo album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon. For me, for everyone, that album arrived as a light in the darkness. Top 40 radio loved Kodachrome and progressive rock radio loved Loves Me Like A Rock and I loved them too, and I played the album over and over; but as a student of classical music, I especially loved American Tune, inspired by a melody in Bach's St. Matthews' Passion. Every time I heard that song, it lifted me up.
Saturday, Curtis Stigers' live performance of it made me cry.
Grab a copy of Stigers' performance and a tissue and join me overleaf.
Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
I moved from Iowa to New York City just a few years later, during some of that city's darkest days in recent history, just after Gerald Ford had told the city to "Drop Dead," and just before the 1977 blackout. Living mostly on the pre-gentrification Lower East Side of Manhattan, and later in the far reaches of Flatbush, I survived for more than ten years in the lower ranks of show business, working for the break that would never be mine, before finally retreating to IT in the late eighties.
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
As time went on, the wealthy in New York City pushed its laboring class (including me) out of Manhattan, tearing down or co-oping and condoing out of their price range the apartments where workers and their families had lived for decades. But I didn't notice this. For me, during the Reagan and Bush years, politics mostly meant no-nuke rallies; even while it was going on all around me, even while it was pushing me around, I didn't see the bankers' policy drive to destroy the security of the laboring class. I was surviving, my friends were surviving, we thought we were okay.
Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
But we weren't all right, and we were getting less all right as time went on.
It took the relative prosperity of the Clinton years, and the reactionary right's jealous rage toward his political and economic policy successes, to wake me up. But it took the disaster of President George W. Bush, and his cabal's destruction of everything that my America once stood for, to activate me.
And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying
So now that I've been activated, I have a new job, my real job, not the one I get paid for. My real job, citizen of the United States of America, is to fight the forces of monarchism that are concentrating wealth in the hands of a few, to the detriment of my America. My real job is to restore the common good against the forces of greed that would drive it into decline. My real job is to work to restore the natural rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution. And when the near-destruction of our nation by those who would strip-mine it for quick gain drives me to tears, when the forces of political division try to drive a wedge between me and my compatriots, when the forces who would unconstitutionally invade my privacy and deprive me of my rights assert monarchical power try to intimidate me, it is my job to turn the pressure from those forces into a drive to action.
But working two jobs is the American Way, or so I have heard.
We all have a long way to go before we can rest.
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
and sing an American tune
Oh, and it's alright, it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest.
Lyrics excerpted from Paul Simon's "American Tune".