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In a great addition to our Sunday services, our Associate Minister of Religious Education, Dan Harper, is going to be doing something special in the 9:30 service three Sundays a month. This past Sunday morning he led a chant, a quasi-call-and-response called “Have You Got the Spirit?”
Have you got the spirit? / Oh yeah!
Let me see it in your head!
He drafted our music director to stand beside him and lead the congregational part, and we all shook our heads and waved our arms as called upon. As in education, there are theories that worship should engage the whole person–you want elements that use different modes and appeal to different aspects of ourselves. This one had laughter, using our bodies, music (rhythm), camaraderie, and definitely lots of spirit.
Return engagement is this Sunday, 9:30 a.m. Oh yeah!
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of my heroes, Woody Guthrie. My family and I celebrated in the most appropriate way, by singing lots of his songs, thanks to a sing-along at Reach and Teach, a local company devoted to peace and justice education. Our singing was led by the duo Folk This! and punctuated by occasional passage of Caltrain, as the store’s yard backs onto the train tracks. Since Guthrie spent plenty of time riding the rails with other hoboes, wrote many songs about trains and popularized Goebel Reeves’s beautiful “Hobo’s Lullaby,” the clack and rush of the train seemed very appropriate, though it would have been even more appropriate in the early morning when the freight trains come through.
The scope of what his songs mean to me is beyond my ability to say, so I will go smaller. Certain phrases in Guthrie’s songs have woven themselves into the fabric of my life, the way words will when they shape our thoughts or express something we’ve long felt.
Oh, the gamblin’ man is rich an’ the workin’ man is poor (“I Ain’t Got No Home”)
I don’t think he’s talking about Las Vegas. Guthrie turned 17, a working man, the year the stock market threw the country into the Great Depression. The Glass-Steagall Act not having been passed yet, bankers and investors could speculate wildly with people’s deposits, as they can again today, and I think those were the gamblers he had in mind. What the line always makes me think about is how we tax the income earned from work at a higher rate than the income from investments, which is to say, bets placed on the market. If we valued work the way Guthrie did, I don’t think we would set up the tax system this way.
– – – –
I’d like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of California stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my California stars
They hang like grapes on vines that shine
And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine
“California Stars” is one of the hundreds (thousands?) of songs Guthrie wrote but never recorded; his daughter Nora wanted some of them to be set to music and performed, and Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco wrote the music. It’s my favorite song on the first Wilco/Billy Bragg collaboration, Mermaid Avenue. It has a place in the soundtrack of my life, since I was listening to this album a lot at the time I moved to California and danced to it often in my first weeks here, which were lonely and full of promise. I just love that image of the stars hanging in the sky like grapes. What a wine they would make.
– – – –
Since our daughter’s birth we’ve had Guthrie’s Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, which all sound like songs an astoundingly prolific songwriter might spontaneously invent while taking care of his children. They are full of nonsense and endearments, and talk about topics like burping a baby (“You’ll fly up so high / In the clouds and skies / If you don’t make a blubble . . . Blow a bubble soon”), taking a bath, picking up toys, and this one about the incessant questions in a houseful of young children (“Why Oh Why”):
Why, oh why, oh why oh, why?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because because because because
Goodbye goodbye goodbye
To know why a mouse can’t eat a streetcar, why a cow drinks water, why your grandpa ain’t your grandma, etc., you’ll have to click above and read all the lyrics.
– – – –
I’m moved by “The Unwelcome Guest” (another set to music posthumously, by Billy Bragg), and its paradox of “I’ll still be here after I’m gone.”
Yes, they´ll catch me napping one day
and they´ll kill me
And then I´ll be gone but that won´t be my end
For my guns and my saddle will always be filled
By unwelcome travellers and other brave men
Guthrie uses a similar trope about absence, presence, and immortality in “Tom Joad,” when Tom says goodbye to his Ma and says, “Wherever people ain’t free, Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, That’s where I’m a-gonna be.” And of course it shows up in Alfred Hayes’s song “Joe Hill,” which Guthrie surely knew. It seems to have been the kind of immortality that was most important to Woody Guthrie, who suspected by his 30s that he had the same disease that killed his mother at age 42. It’s the kind of immortality he has achieved, and a kind that’s available to any of us, if we choose to live that way.
I wrote about inclusive lyrics and their limits a few days ago. Some further thoughts on music, based on the vibrant music at General Assembly (GA) last week:
A song leader should use the mike when teaching an unfamiliar song or giving a soloist’s riffs over the congregation. Otherwise, they should back off the mike. When they sing right into the mike, we in the congregation hear them instead of ourselves and each other.
Rock makes people move. Not everyone, of course, but we have a few generations in services now for whom rock is the beat of our bodies. In any case, if you want people to move their bodies, play the music they dance to.
Let the congregation do the interesting stuff. A disappointing aspect of music at last year’s CENTER Institute (continuing education for UU ministers) was that the role of the congregation was that of backup singers to a soloist, and backup singers with a pretty monotonous part, at that. We, the congregation, would chant an uninteresting part over and over while the band would go nuts. I started to feel like wallpaper.
On the other hand, letting the congregation sing the same thing over and over can be really powerful. Too often, we sing something two or three times and just as we’re getting brave about harmonies and really feeling the music, it stops. Repeating a chorus many times lets us in the congregation begin to get creative, and get into that meditative place where a chant can take us. Jason Shelton did this really well with “Wallflower,” a Peter Gabriel song he sang immediately after Karen Tse’s sermon in the Service of the Living Tradition. She had ended with a story about prison and an exhortation to “do the one thing you can do,” and the song (how did Jason think of that song? Stroke of genius!) began with images of prison and ended with the refrain, “I will do what I can do.” He kept us singing it for a long time, allowing it to rise as a prayer and a promise from each of us. For me, in the midst of the campaign to raise UU awareness about slavery, every word of that service was about slavery and my commitment to do something to end it, and I am sure I was not the only person for whom singing those words evoked tears of hope and resolve.
Projecting words on a screen really helps people sing out. Proofread the words very carefully.
Don’t surprise the congregation. If you teach them a song, lead it the way you taught it to them. Small variations are okay–key changes, harmonies, etc.–but if you suddenly throw in a bridge, you have to warn us or we get confused and discouraged, and we don’t sing with the same abandon because we’re watching for further curveballs.
It’s worthwhile to teach songs before the service starts. Not everyone will be there, but those who were will anchor the singing.
The choir can introduce harmonies and rounds that embolden the congregation to join in, if the choir has a “y’all join in” attitude instead of a “be quiet and listen to us perform” attitude. Smiles and other signs of exuberance help. The conductor can transform the choir from performers into song leaders with one simple move: turn and conduct the congregation while the choir continues to sing. Conduct us as if we have never been in a choir, because most of us probably haven’t; keep it simple.
(c) Nancy Pierce
The choir members at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto have heard this from me before: the choir adds so much to the feel of the service when their attire is simple and undistracting. The GA choirs mostly wore all black, or black with bright stoles of various colors. One small ensemble wore shades of blue with various scarves, a mishmash of patterns that was pleasant because coordinated. Some of these groups had been singing together for only a few days, or even only a few hours, but they looked, as well as sounded, polished.
If you have a hundred-member choir, you need risers. Any choir, of whatever size, should have risers steep enough that you can see every singer’s face. It’s distracting to see just the top half of the back rows’ faces, and it has to interfere with their sound.
Having a band adds so much flexibility to congregational music. A trio of guitar, drums, and bass are all you need to make a huge difference. They won’t be called for on every song (not even the piano is used on every song), but they’re great to have.
Put more participatory music in the service. More. Now add some more.
At General Assembly, a music leader gave a heartfelt plea for us to be more creative in our use of imagery in music. “Standing on the Side of Love,” she said, is a wonderful song but unintentionally hurtful to those who cannot stand. She urged us to be more poetic. For example, she suggested that sitting is a powerful image for taking a strong position. This is true, but does not resolve the problem she raised, since there are people who cannot sit.
I have given this a lot of thought in the past, and where it has led me has been to songs that have no metaphor whatsoever, including the “dead metaphors” that characterize so much of our language (e.g., in “I have given this a lot of thought,” the verb “give” is a dead metaphor). I have considered some of the most basic metaphors we use in our hymns and other songs and who is excluded by them, and I must differ with the speaker’s confidence that we will be able to find, create, or rework lyrics that include everyone.
Vision imagery leaves some people out; some people cannot see.
Hearing imagery leaves some people out; some people cannot hear. (I have always liked “From All the Fret and Fever of the Day” for its use of deafness as a positive attribute, calling on us to be “deaf to all confusing outer din.” But it goes on to say, “Intently listen to the voice within.”)
If we want to be sensitive to those who cannot speak, we should avoid imagery about raising our voices in speech or song. Songwriters love to urge us to sing, but some people can’t voice any sounds, so all imagery of singing should be avoided.
Many people cannot have children or grandchildren, and are grieved by that. We should avoid phrases like “for the children of our children” (“Circle Round for Freedom”).
Some people cannot walk, march, or run a race, and replacing those words with “go” is no help. Some people cannot go anywhere. They live their entire lives hooked to machinery in a bed. “Come and go with me to that land” is no more sensitive to such folks than “We are marching in the light of God.”
In fact, we should avoid journey imagery.
About all that is left to us, the only attributes that apply to every living human being, are that we breathe and our hearts beat. Not without assistance, in some cases, so “Just as long as my heart beats” (Hymn #6) is probably a painful phrase for some to hear, but we could use those images without actually excluding anyone.
The other avenue still open to us is to skip imagery about human beings altogether. In the same service in which this issue was raised, we sang the rousing hymn,
Ain’t you got a right
Aint you got a right
Ain’t you got a right
To the tree of life?
No problems there, in the chorus. The verses were chock-full of imagery such as people on a journey, though.
The fact is that we would have a very short list indeed if we really eradicated all songs that refer to abilities that some of us lack. I suggest that instead of walling ourselves into that corner, we take a different approach. From my own experiences I find that the language makes little difference if we do two things.
First, we use a wide variety of images to portray human experience. They won’t all fit mine, but because we’re using a variety, many of them will, and it will be okay.
Second, and by far the more important: we make our communities places that welcome and celebrate all people, regardless of their abilities in all of these areas. In my experience, songs touch on a nerve of mine when the nerve has already been stomped on by the community. When the community practices justice on all these points, and many songs reflect my experience, the occasional use of imagery that might otherwise seem exclusive just seems irrelevant. Being one of the temporarily able-bodied, I can only extrapolate from my other identities to imagine how I would feel–how I will feel–when I am unable to walk, or talk, or hear, so please correct me if I am missing something.
By the way, the best music-and-sensitivity advice I heard all week came from Fred Small, who led a workshop on songleading and advised us not to identify the origin of a song only in the case of “minority” music, but in all cases (or none). As he pointed out, when we say “This song is from the African-American tradition,” but we don’t say of the next one, “This song is from the Irish tradition,” we imply that Irish is the norm and African-American is a special case. Amen.
I must have listened to the song “Man in the Long Black Coat” a hundred times back when I owned the album Oh Mercy. It’s one of those Bob Dylan songs that admit of many interpretations, and I never pressed too hard to decide what it all means. I like just letting the images wash through my mind, and they’ve meant different things at different times. Recently I bought the CD again, and on listening to the song now, for the first time it is obvious to me that the man in the long black coat is death.
Joy and I had a lovely little mix-up on Valentine’s Day, like “The Gift of the Magi” except with no downside (I always did feel so bad about Jim’s watch): we each surprised the other with a pair of tickets to the April 24 Bruce Springsteen concert.
Laughs and hugs exchanged, and extra tickets sold, we eagerly looked forward to the show, and it did not let us down. Bruce started out strong and ended stronger. I swear, he looked younger and more energetic at the end of the three hours than he did at the start. I was exhausted, and I’m almost 20 years younger than he is. And, I might add, a good 30 years younger than a lot of the people in the crowd. Joy was a little concerned that someone might have a coronary. No one did, at least not in our section. They danced and sang along and looked very happy. I knew we had a great crowd to share the concert with when he sang “Badlands” early on and everyone sang along. Not just on the chorus–on the verses.
On the down side, there was such a bottleneck getting into the arena that the show had to start 45 minutes late. I don’t know how many entrances there are into the arena but it’s about 25% of the necessary ones. A more significant problem was that, as we discovered, the HP Pavilion in San Jose is a rotten place for a rock concert. The sound was so muddy I couldn’t make out half the instruments. I knew there was a violin in that mix, because I could see the violinist playing, but I couldn’t hear her until Bruce introduced the band and each got a moment’s solo. Today when I told a friend I’d been to the show, she said, “I saw him there a couple of years ago!” and within three seconds we had shared the opinion that the sound was abominable. About the best thing that can be said about the arena is that its seats are super-comfortable.
Never mind. Springsteen said the mission of the band was to make us wake up the next morning saying, “What the f— happened to me? I feel different!” and they accomplished it.
I was saying to Joy the other day how much I love the song “Atlantic City,” and she was a little surprised and curious. So in honor of her first and ultimate religion, Brucetarianism, and in memory of Levon Helm, who covered this song and has just died, here are my thoughts on this multifaceted gemstone of a song.
Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night
First of all, the first line cracks me up. I only had a vague awareness of this song before I heard it on The Band’s Jericho. That version opens with the tinkling of a mandolin and a deep Arkansan accent–it is miles and miles away, in sound, in culture, in every way, from New Jersey or Philadelphia–but I said immediately, “That’s got to be a Springsteen song.” Who else would blow up the Chicken Man in the first line? Who else would know who the hell the Chicken Man is, or think someone with that nickname belongs in a work of art?
The lyrics continue:
–now they blew up his house too
Down on the boardwalk they’re gettin’ ready for a fight gonna see what them racket boys can do
Now there’s trouble busin’ in from outta state and the D.A. can’t get no relief
Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade and the gamblin’ commission’s hangin’ on by the skin of its teeth
OK, the stage is set. There’s trouble. Who’s telling us all this? Someone who’s going to head right into the middle of it as if it’s a hot date. Here’s the chorus, for the first time:
Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
So right off we know a few things: bad shit is going down. This guy, the narrator, plans to be in the middle of it. He’s trying to make light of it; he’s meeting his girl on the boardwalk. But the boardwalk’s where there’s going to be a fight (to the death, if the chicken man is going to be avenged), and he can’t avoid the truth: “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.”
It’s significant that the song is a love song as well as about something grimmer, a Mafia showdown. That’s a rock and roll convention, sure–they’re almost always love songs, whatever else they’re about–but it’s more than that. The interplay between the image of a girl getting ready for a date and the images of violence and death, which will crop up again, sets up the theme of life being a little bit of hope and happiness snatched out of dark despair.
To skip forward to the bridge:
Now our luck may have died and our love may be cold but with you forever I’ll stay
We’re goin’ out where the sand’s turnin’ to gold so put on your stockin’s baby ’cause the night’s getting cold
It’s getting cold out there, baby, in more ways than one.
What death is on his mind? The one that starts off the song (whoever the chicken man is), the ones bound to come in the rumble, the narrator’s own, and something else.
Well I got a job and tried to put my money away
But I got debts that no honest man can pay
So I drew what I had from the Central Trust
And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus
He tried to live honestly, but he’s getting pulled into a life of crime. The line “I got debts that no honest man can pay” is ambiguous: it could mean “I owe so much money that I can’t earn enough to pay it back,” or it could mean he owes something else, like a favor to a mobster, and there’s no honest way to pay those back. So he’s spending his last lone dollar on getting to his new job, something to do with the mob and this unfolding disaster. The “Central Trust” is a homely little detail: the narrator’s taking his money out of a nice, safe, conventional place, just as he’s abandoning a nice, safe, conventional life. And trust is another one of those things that’s dying–we’re out of the realm of trust and into the riskier realm of gambling, where the narrator’s chances are probably as good as the gambler’s chance of beating the house.
I love what a tight songwriter Springsteen can be–he also slides in a reminder that the love story is still in progress with that “two tickets.”
The chorus again:
And everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
The second line is so poignant. A rationalization, maybe; a desperate attempt to reassure himself that the situation isn’t as bad as it looks. Someone or something is going to die, but maybe it’s not the end.
Last verse:
Now I been lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find
Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I’m tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end
So honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him
Okay, he’s a loser and he’s tired of it. He wants to change his luck. He’s already acknowledged that this bright, cute relationship is actually on the rocks (“our love may be cold”) and he doesn’t have high hopes (“our luck may have died”), but he’s gambling all he’s got on one long shot. The casino logic is drawing him in, with all its empty promises of “the sand’s turnin’ to gold.” What is it he’s going to do? It can’t be anything good. “I’m gonna do a little favor for him”–well, it could just be running numbers, his first foray into crime, but I don’t think so. With that chorus about death, I think someone’s life is at risk: his own, or, that suspicious “little favor,” someone he’s being paid to kill.
If the latter, there’s another layer of meaning to the refrain. “Everything dies, baby” becomes a rationalization; hey, no one’s immortal, so why not put some money back in the bank by speeding someone along? The hope of resurrection begs forgiveness in advance; if “maybe everything that dies someday comes back,” then maybe killing someone isn’t so bad after all . . .
The other things in mortal danger are his innocence and his conscience, or his soul. It’s not “everyone” dies, after all, but “everything.” So his existence as a good guy trying to work hard and do the right thing is about to die, as he sells his soul to the mob, but maybe there’s still hope. Maybe he can “someday come back” from the end of this road he’s on.
And the song ends in future tense: we don’t know what will happen. The big drama is still to come. The rumble and the date haven’t happened yet (the last line is “Meet me tonight in Atlantic City,” repeated several times). We can’t even be sure she’s going to come along. We just know that he’s going and the outcome doesn’t look good. Is there even really going to be a date, what with the rumble and the ominous job he’s going to do? It doesn’t seem likely, and their love has gone cold anyway, but at the end he’s still thinking about love and the simple pleasure of a pretty woman made up for a night with him. He’s running on denial, but it’s getting him through the night.
Springsteen has a genius for painting a portrait in a few strokes so that we can see someone who might otherwise be invisible to us, like the guy working at the carwash or sitting unemployed in his empty house. The narrator of “Atlantic City,” the lowest man in the mob, a new recruit who might not survive his first job–what do I know about people like that? This song invites us to care about him and hope he and his soul survive.
L. at church reports that according to a note from the wife and daughter of Levon Helm on his website, he is “in the final stages of his battle with cancer.” I’m sad.
I shook hands with Levon Helm after a show once. They had just made my night by playing “Blind Willie McTell,” a Dylan masterpiece that Bob Dylan himself hadn’t performed live yet; he had only released it on the first Bootleg Series, to near-universal cries of “Why in the name of all Dylanesque perversity did he bury this for eight years?!” (Mark Knopfler on acoustic guitar, Dylan on piano, a voice to break your heart. Dylan later claimed it didn’t make it onto the album because it was “just a demo.” I’m inclined to think that on the contrary, it was so good, so raw and real, he couldn’t bear to have it out there.) The Band had then recorded it on Jericho, Helm and Rick Danko doing a stunning version with those crazy mismatched voices of theirs. I wasn’t the only one crossing my fingers that they’d play it at the concert.
It was a very small venue, and I made my way up to Helm afterwards and shook his hand, unable to find any words except “Blind Willie McTell, man! Blind Willie McTell!” He just grinned with very bright eyes and held onto my hand an extra second, clearly high. No way to know whether the high was from performing or from something additional. I was soaring myself, without benefit of chemicals.
You done good, Mr. Helm. May you have an easy passing.
Black History Month, day 13
Our country’s biggest contributions to world music are jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip hop. All four arose largely–in the case of jazz, blues, and hip hop, almost exclusively–from the African-American community. Thanks, black America, for putting my country on the musical map. I especially thank you for funk, too, though I don’t think I can make the case that it has had quite the influence of jazz.
So I don’t think there’s been a decade of US history that was not characterized by black music that would change the musical world. Still, the 20s and 30s were extraordinary. I wrote about some art and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance yesterday and the day before. Another star of the Harlem Renaissance was Duke Ellington, whose music I won’t try to describe; “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” at least when I try it. Ellington himself advised “You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it” (great advice for an artist in any medium), so let’s just let the music speak for itself. If you have an Ellington recording in the house, won’t you go put it on and soak up some of your heritage as a world citizen? And if you don’t, here are a few great recordings: Ellington himself playing “In a Sentimental Mood” with John Coltrane:
Or if you like your jazz tamer, and/or like to hear the words, here’s Ella Fitzgerald a few years earlier:
My favorite rendition is when my wife plays it, but I’m sentimental that way.
Another Ellington classic, played by Ellington:
And here, sung by Billie Holiday:
I encounter a lot of new music via my drawing class, where the model chooses the music from the studio’s collection of over 1000 CDs. For two days solid, I have been singing to myself the bits I can remember from a folk opera of the Orpheus story, Hadestown, by the songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, with Greg Brown, Justin Vernon, and Ani DiFranco among the other singers (arranged by Michael Chorney). Since we usually change the music after each break, and the model takes a break every 20 minutes, I’ve heard the first half of a lot of albums, including this one. So I don’t know whether the end is as terrific as the beginning, but I will when the copy I’ve ordered arrives.
Hadestown puts me in mind of Neil Gaiman, which is always a compliment, as he’s one of my favorite writers. The connection is oblique: no explicit overlap, but a shared steeped-ness in mythology and Gaiman’s knack for moving fluidly between ancient myths and modern events, concerns, and language. Specifically, it’s reminding me of American Gods, even though the memorable underworld scenes there draw on Egyptian and Norse stories, and actually, of the dozens of gods Gaiman portrays and plays with in that brilliant novel, the Greek pantheon barely makes an appearance. But Greg Brown as Hades sounds like the kind of thing Gaiman would approve.
I am not a big fan of Mitchell’s voice, which can attain a level of cute-little-girlishness that makes Nanci Griffith sound gritty, but the opening lyrics were so arresting that I kept listening hard. That first song, “Wedding Song,” sounds like it must have grown over the centuries, as if Mitchell found it instead of writing it. It’s a dialogue:
Lover, tell me if you can
Who’s gonna buy the wedding bands?
Times being what they are
Hard and getting harder all the time
Lover, when I sing my song
All the rivers sing along
And they’re gonna break their banks for me
To lay their gold around my feet
All a-flashing in the pan, all to fashion for your hand
The river’s gonna give us the wedding bands
Lover, tell me, if you’re able
Who’s gonna lay the wedding table? etc.
Photo by Bob Tubbs, released into the public domain
The other song I can’t get out of my head is “Why We Build the Wall.” Mitchell has remembered that Hades, god of the underworld, is also god of money, and when I hear this song I think of all the walls we “haves” put between us and the “have-nots.” Literally walls–why else do I lock my front door, except to keep people with less property from making off with some of the stuff I’ve accumulated?–and then there’s the fence between the U.S. and Mexico, the wall between Israel and the territories it occupies, the Berlin Wall, the wall once outlining a stockade in New Amsterdam that probably gave its name to Wall Street, Robert Frost’s wall that his narrator keeps mending, though he would prefer to let it collapse. Figuratively, it’s about everything that these and other walls stand for: the way we shut others out and, in the same act, shut ourselves in; or shut others in, and in the same act, shut ourselves out.
This song is also in dialogue form: Hades catechizing a chorus that represents Cerberus. (Or as we Harry Potter fans call him, Fluffy.) (ETA: Now that I have the CD, I see that whatever website I pulled the lyrics from was wrong. There is a character Cerberus, but that’s not who is singing; it’s the chorus.)
HADES
Why do we build the wall?
My children, my children
Why do we build the wall?
CERBERUS
Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
HADES
How does the wall keep us free?
My children, my children
How does the wall keep us free?
CERBERUS
How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
HADES
Who do we call the enemy?
My children, my children
Who do we call the enemy?
CERBERUS
Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Just as the “War on Poverty” turned into a war against the poor, the enemy seems to be not poverty itself, but poorer people. Hades says we build the wall “Because we have and they have not!,” and when he asks, “What do we have that they should want?,” Cerberus replies with chilling circularity:
We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall . . .
That same circularity is what keeps the poor always with us. Divide ourselves, conquer ourselves, and fight, not want, but those who want what we have got. That suits the powers that be (the powers that have the most) very well.
Mitchell evokes the irony of how, even while we cut ourselves off from each other and the vast possibilities on the other side of the wall, we’re often motivated by a desire “to keep us free.” The driven, chain-gang chanting of Cerberus makes it clear that it isn’t working.
Sermons in Stones 
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