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| From "Is Donald Trump the Modern Nero?" |
Now
that your world has gone turned inside out
And
everything you hold true is plagued with doubt,
If
there’s still a place where life’s wrestled free from fear,
And
there’s a God who loves us,
It
ain’t here.
Look,
you and I both know that mistakes were made
As
the philosopher said even Emperors will,
But
it was telling the Emperor what kings just don’t want to hear
That
got the philosopher killed.
When
speaking lies is safer than speaking true,
Listen
friend. There’s something you can do
Take
your broken wooden heart
And
carve yourself a gypsy violin.
Make
it laugh just like a mother’s crying.
Listen
while it whispers “The world isn’t dying”
And
“Tomorrow‘s really not that far”.
Remember
Tomorrow’s
what we are.
Get
in my car. I’ll drive us down to Ancient
Rome,
54
AD. Emperor Nero ‘s at home.
At
night in his garden, Christian torches* aglow
He
entertained the masses with a fiddle and a bow.
And
like the late Spade Cooley, he kicked his wife to death.
He
killed his brother and his mother, too.
It’s true.
And
before Rome knew what hit her, fires would grow.
Tell
me, does this sound like anyone you already know?
Somewhere
hope can’t hurt you, it only makes you strong.
Somewhere
no one claims a thing’s right that’s just plain wrong.
Somewhere
men know we must walk awhile in another man’s shoes,
And
that a lie is a lie, and not “fake news”.
The
stones on your chest ain’t really new.
These
fallen seas around can rise for me and for you.
Take
your broken wooden heart
And
carve yourself a gypsy violin.
Make
it laugh just like a mother’s crying.
Listen
while it whispers “The world isn’t dying”
And
“Tomorrow‘s really not that far”.
Remember
Tomorrow’s
what we are.
-
February
2017
*What’s a ‘Christian Torch’, I hear you ask? First, take a Christian. Tie him to the top of a long pole. Then douse him with pitch, and set him on fire. An unusual light."
Notes on the song made 6/8/2017: Somehow, present-day evil men often lead to us to comparisions to other men...Nero, Caligula, Hitler, Stalin, Joe McCarthy, Napoleon. Attilla The Hun, Vlad The Impaler, Pol Pot, Trump. The list is dismally dismayingly endless. The persistence if this kind of malevolence married to power challenges notions that hope, while arguably audacious, is actually just perseverating pipedream at best, and incoherent delusional madness at worst. Yet, as with was so brilliantly handled in O'Neal's The Iceman Cometh, hope is a kind of "you can't live with it and you can't live without it" sort of thing, with a special emphasis on the word "and". Hope is the essential paradox of life. Gypsies know about paradox, as well as evil, music and death. So, I guess I would leave you with the recommendation to give hope's fiddler a dram.
A recording on reverbnation
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