Part I.
Democracy, you see, requires compromise, and truly listening to what others have to say so that compromise can be achieved. Because of the authoritarian orientation that closes doors to open discourse and marches roughshod in condemnatory righteousness over “enemies” (Let’s take our country back! We’re the Real America!) – we are losing or have already lost our channels of true bipartisanship. It is increasingly difficult to find common ground in national issues. The disconnect between liberals and conservatives has become a gaping chasm, and authoritarianism is the underlying dynamic, I think, behind why the country has become so polarized, so Red State/Blue, “Us or Them”, most markedly over the last decade.
Part II.
(The Germans knocked down the Berlin Wall on November 9th 20 years ago.)
(Next year will be the 25th (!) anniversary of the recording of "We Are the World" and I find it still moves me, so I've been running the video, and then I realized there had to be a Making Of feature, and there is, and it's in 9 parts. [Jimmy Thudpucker was apparently not in camera range. ;-)] I'm bookmarking everything and (YouTube Willing) will link or post videos next spring.
2 comments:
I don't like "We are the World" because Bruce sounds like a moose in heat. Good God, why did he sing it like that? He could croon like Sinatra when he wanted to!
We AAAAAAAAAAAH the world, we AAAAAAAH the children. Oh dear God.
Asbury Park pronunciation! :P
Not Cyndi Lauper? ;-)
According to the "Making of" video, Bruce never admitted to exhaustion. He does sound fairly ragged. Not being a Bruce devotee (and I'm not; I appreciate and like his music now, but the early religious fervor put me off), I don't know whether he subscribes to "volume=expression=emotion," and I don't know whether he was asked to sing it like that (Dylan pretty much was, which I thought funny).
("Asbury Park pronunciation" doesn't bother me. I've heard much worse.)
Post a Comment