Yesterday I watched a bit of a documentary called 1971: the Year That Music Changed Everything. And there’s a bit of Boomer pretentiousness, right? Changed everything! For crying out loud, Won’t Get Fooled Again, What’s Going On? and Ohio were pretty good tunes but they changed precisely nothing. And, anyways, if you want a song with refrain of “what’s going on?” the 1993 song What’s Up? is actually superior (though I may be biased as the songwriter/singer is a contemporary and so the song speaks more to me than Boomer political slop even though it is more overtly Left in tone than Marvin Gaye’s song).
But what caught my eye is that it opens with Chrissie Hynde talking and until I watched I didn’t know she had been present at Kent State during the riots there (her work with the band The Pretenders not starting until 1978). Hynde is, of course, a life-long far Left person – but she’s also one of the few intelligent people on the Left and so when cancel culture got started she condemned that because how can you arrive at truth if people aren’t allowed to be offended? Anyways, she’s talking about Kent State very matter of factly – no high emotion just saying they had burned down the ROTC building because they felt that the Army shouldn’t be on “their” campus…and you could tell in the talking that she was looking back on it all and wondering just how they came to believe the Army was the problem and that the campus on a taxpayer-funded college belongs to the kids? And then as she finishes talking the video cuts to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing their very famous song about it, Ohio. You know it:
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in OhioGotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
Apparently, Young wrote this in a flash of anger after hearing the news of Kent State. It was released in 1971 (so, of course, included in a documentary about 1971) even though the events happened the year before and…it did just ok. Peaking at number 14 on the charts…which makes you wonder just how much of everything the song could have changed?
I don’t know if the documentary producers meant it, but the juxtaposition of Hynde’s reasonable reminisces and Young’s shouting contemporary screed is very interesting. She was there. She knew what happened and what they had been up to. Young wasn’t. He saw the TV news reports about it. The song wasn’t about the events at Kent State but about how Cronkite and other news-actors presented it to Young. One recalls another Young song called Southern Man which made out that white Southerners were just racists who didn’t want white women having sex with black guys…and this was ripped to shreds by Ronnie Van Zant in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Sweet Home Alabama which has the line:
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow
To Young’s credit he did later admit that he richly earned that slam and it is one of the best lines ever written in a pop song (the best line in a pop song is “Many dreams come true And some have silver linings” in the Led Zepplin song Over the Hills and Far Away – I will not be taking questions about this assertion). And perhaps if Young had actually found out a bit about Kent State – or even just thought about it a bit, the song Ohio would have been different? Probably. But that is kinda the problem, isn’t it? People just reacting – especially reacting to dramatic video presented in a way designed to elicit a conditioned response. After all, Hynde one day decided to write a song about Ohio and called it My City Was Gone (you remember it as the opening music for Rush Limbaugh’s show).
I went back to Ohio
But my city was gone
There was no train station
There was no down-townSouth Howard had disappeared
All my favorite places
My city had been pulled down
Reduced to parking spacesAy, oh, way to go, Ohio
No mention of Kent State which must have been a formative and very shocking event in her life…because, of course, it was in the end, nothing. A tragedy in four deaths but a farce about why they happened. For heaven’s sake, the Army wasn’t the problem. No matter how much you hated the war in Vietnam, hated Nixon, even hated America…the Army is not in charge of deciding things. And the kids burning down the ROTC building were exact contemporaries of the kids in the Army at the time. Were they evil? The Left would have people believe so…and worked up events to convince people it was, but it was all stupid and any really thinking person looking back on it would be appalled by their participation in a stupid riot that ended up getting four people killed. And so the thinking person’s song is about urban sprawl.
On and on it has gone over the decades…provoked action, manipulated media reporting, emotional reaction. And it goes into the Book of Liberal Lore as canon…never a modification or a bit of reflection…it was Nixon who killed those kids at Kent State just like Brown had his hands up and was saying don’t shoot. When its all a very long time past, someone will make a documentary about it and will just rehash it all…just wait: in 2034 there will be “20 years after” documentaries about the Ferguson riots…and the 2045 documentaries about the anti-ICE riots will be a thing to behold! If, that is, the Left is still around to spin the Narrative. I’m starting to think they won’t be.
I think it is rather played out now – and with the money being cut off, the sinews of propaganda will weaken. And I think we’re all rather tired of it…this pretend world where those who set fires are heroes and the firefighters are the bad guys. Just perhaps by 2045 we’ll have a new version of Hynde singing an interesting song…rather than regurgitated slop about Fighting the Man? Hope so. It’ll be like being liberated.
Blogs For Victory 
Rush Limbaugh’s intro song was the The Pretenders song My City Was Gone and Chrissy Hynde at first objected to him using it of course, but her Dad who was a huge fan of Limbaugh asked her to let him use it so she did. Kind of a cool little story.
Didn’t Rush tell the story of running into Hynde in an airport and asking her if it was OK to use the song and she said yes?
Like I said – one of the few sensible liberals out there.
There are a few sensible Democrats out there, but they are the minority. Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, and Bill Maher come to mind but they are the few. The radical, poorly educated, culturally enflamed, and socialistic factions have taken over the party and they have yet to hit rock bottom. People like Jazzy Crockett and Zohran Momdani will just further divide and split the party and I am enjoying the show.
I’m not sure who first said it, but one of my favorite political comments is, “when your adversary is engaged in self-immolation, the best strategy is to hide the fire extinguishers and get the hell out of the way.” The Democrat Party has approached that point a number of times during my lifetime, but I think this time they’re bent on achieving what can only be described as self-destruction based to a great extent on a bizarre combination self-loathing and the delusion of moral superiority. If historians are honest (I know, I’m not holding my breath), I could be fun to come back in 50 or 100 years and read accounts of the first quarter of the 21st century.
Well, “history” still celebrates the French Revolution as a hallmark of liberty and advanced political thinking, so I’m not sure 100 years will provide enough time for “history” to honestly evaluate today’s political circus.
But we do have, in our time, the advantages of contemporaneous record-keeping, which might keep future historians on the path to actual reality and accuracy.
That will be fun – coming back, if we could. Because no matter what happens – even if they manage to destroy the USA – in 100 years the history books will record the absolutely insane disaster which was the first quarter of the 21st century. Not the slightest application of thought anywhere in the West until Trump took office in 2017 and then he’s been fought tooth and nail over it. It even infects the Right – all those “principled” people who are urging a defeat of the OBBB because it isn’t perfect! For heavens sake, when has politics ever produced anything perfect??? Even the Constitution, in hindsight, has flaws (there’s a meme joke out there which has a guy traveling back in times and telling Madison, “write the 2nd Amendment as if you’re speaking to an autistic child”). The OBBB does many things we’ve been dreaming of for decades…sure, there’s some garbage and some fails in there, but take the W’s and then work in the future to peel off more of the garbage and insert more of the good stuff…I mean, seriously: right after OBBB we’ll start working on the FY 2026 budget! Think of all the MAGA stuff we can insert in there! And then we’ll have FY 2027, 2028 and 2029 to work with. Plus anything we can slip in along the way.
The thing is, their claim to being “sensible” or “moderate” is based on the appearance of relative sanity and their refusal to engage in hysteria. They still support, and evidently subscribe to, a political model that has an unbroken history of failure, of economic misery and oppression and too often the murder of tens of millions of people. They may have the outward appearance of being “sensible” because every now and then they pay lip service to an issue that is associated with conservatives, but they still support a system based on consolidation of power in the hands of elites, who then impose their will on the public, a system based on lies and emotional manipulation.
I think it is time to start asking, in public, “Why are you a Democrat?” Because I can guarantee that none of these “sensible Democrats” will lay claim to the true ideology of the Left, any more than any of our old trolls would.
I think Elon Musk is scary smart, and I have tremendous respect for his intellect—except when it comes to politics, where he is evidently no smarter than the average suburban Democrat. He said he used to be a Democrat because he thought of the party as “the party of kindness” and in his spat with Trump he spoke out about starting a new party for those “in the middle”. Those have to be the most politically ignorant statements ever. But when pressed I doubt that Fetterman or Shapiro or Maher would come up with anything better. They will wrap themselves in the allegedly purer mantle of “independent”, which is really just a fancier word for someone who doesn’t understand politics and doesn’t care and isn’t inclined to find out but likes the implied status of being “open-minded” for perching on the fence.
They will wrap themselves in the allegedly purer mantle of “independent”, which is really just a fancier word for someone who doesn’t understand politics and doesn’t care and isn’t inclined to find out but likes the implied status of being “open-minded” for perching on the fence.
Very well put.
I never cease to be amazed at the ignorance of so many people WRT politics. I was at lunch with a group of old high school classmates last Thursday, and overheard one of them, actually the husband of a classmate state: “There is a point where the political Left and political right merge on the Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative spectrum. The farthest Left you go is total government control, not unlike Orwell’s 1984. The farthest Right you can go is total anarchy (no government). I should have asked him how polar opposites can merge, but that might have opened up a can or worms that was best left closed.
Clearly you took the path of wisdom if not clarification. It is fascinating to see how people can buy into pseudo-intellectual blather and accept it (and repeat it) because the terminology sounds, somehow, kinda “smart”.
There is no “Left/Right” spectrum. A “spectrum” is a a broad range of similar things or qualities, so there can’t be a Left/Right spectrum. There can be a POLITICAL spectrum, or a broad range of political ideas, and on that spectrum the range is from the center to either left or right.
If you speak of a different spectrum, that of specific political thought, then there is a Leftist political spectrum and one on the Right. On these, the starting point is at one end, not in the center, and their starting points are different because their definitions are different. The “Left” is defined as a collectivist model based on consolidation of power in the hands of a few and a Central Authority which controls everything and everyone. On THAT specific spectrum, there is a range of moderate control with some power left to the people all the way to total tyranny. But the Right (in American politics anyway) is based on individual rights and responsibilities, rejecting the entire concept of collectivism, and rejection of a powerful Central Authority in favor of government by the people. The two are antithetical to each other, so cannot be on the same spectrum if you are looking at specific political models.
But you can see the confusion in someone who has probably gotten his political education from Rachel Maddow or some other pseudo-intellectual who loves to pontificate on ideas but is always wrong. They pick up on the general concept of a “spectrum” with a range of ideas, grasp the concept that from the center the left goes in one direction and the right in the other, understands the general idea that the level of commitment to either one increases the farther the person gets from the center, even understands the extremes—-and then falls into utter confusion as there is no way, as you point out, polar opposites can merge.
OT, (not related to music per se) but appropos to current events.
Remember earlier this year when the Left and many Never-Trumpers decried the crash of the stock market? The DJIA is within 1-1/2% of it’s all-time record close, and the S&P and NASDAQ both closed Friday at record highs. In your face doubters and doom & gloomers!
The probable election of Mamdani as Mayor of NY reveals one of two things:
There is no other option
Actually, I think electing Mamdani would prove both things.
I suspect everyone who reads this blog knows who Van Jones is. For the few who might not, here is Jeff Childers’ complete and precise description:
It is especially, satisfying, then, that a Democrat of Van Jones’ stature would say something like this about Trump:
TRUMP ALWAYS WINS!
There used to be a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America but I think we have to add Trump to that – it is bizarre that everyone who crosses him gets totally destroyed. Usually by shooting themselves in the foot. Trump never hits first…but he hits back harder. And as I’ve been saying since 2015, the man has a plan. You might not like the plan. You might think its the wrong plan. But it is a plan and everything is prepared for…and here in 2025 he’s achieved total mastery of the political plan.
What in the hell is going on with Ukraine/Russia war??? Zero reports from there …
Russia Pounds Targets Across Ukraine as There’s No End in Sight to the War
I imagine more economic pressure can be brought upon Russia along with anyone who does business with then and probably should. Not sure what is next for Trump and the USA on that end.
https://headlineusa.com/russia-pounds-targets-across-ukraine-as-theres-no-end-in-sight-to-the-war/?utm_source=HUSA_EMAIL_NSP2000&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HUSAemail
It’s time to be brutal against Putin. Cut them off from trade, freeze their assets, expel their dignitaries, and close their embassy.
It is always hard to figure out what is going on there because nobody on either side really says. Pro-Russian accounts say that Russian forces have entered Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Ok. What forces? Going which direction? We talking a few scouts on motorcycles or an armored brigade? Rely on it, everyone knows…there are so many cameras pointing at Ukraine from the sky that nothing is a surprise there. Ukrainians say no Russians are there. Can someone please tell me what the cameras are saying? No. They won’t. They’ll just repeat Ukrainian or Russian propaganda press releases. We’ll know if Dnipropetrovsk Oblast falls.
And it does look like the Russians have been hammering all along the line around Dnipropetrovsk Oblast as if they want to pinch it off and take it prior to agreeing to a ceasefire. It is overwhelmingly Ukrainian so maybe Putin wants all or at least a large part of it as a bargaining chip? You know, take it and give it back in return for Ukrainian agreement on Russia keeping the rest of what they took? I guess we’ll find out – but I worry that Putin really has called in the reserves so he might eventually break the line…and that is disaster for us given how deeply we’ve committed ourselves to Ukraine…so, yeah: time to really bring the pressure on Putin to call it quits.