electricpaladin

I have come to an important - albeit completely non-serious - realization.

America is the evil empire, and the world is in deep shit.

Consider it thusly: we have a charismatic moron for a leader, but he is manipulated by shadowy manipulator types, as personified by his mysterious and grumpy second-in-command; we are expansionist, attempting to spread our hegemony, if not our direct rule, all over the globe; our own society is deeply unjust, with a definite elite and a definite underclass, and increasingly little upwards mobility; and we're religious! We're an evil empire dominated by a triumphalist religion!

Does anyone see where I'm going?

And to top it all off, our machines run on death. That's what gasoline is, liquid death. Dinosaurs and their ecosystem died, and the biomatter got squashed and heated and turned into gasoline.

All we need now is for gasoline burning engines to start moaning in pain or for Bush to reveal that the military has a new recipe for supersoldiers that involves dunking men in tanks of gas for several months to give them magic powers, and that's it. It's all over, folks. You're living in the United States of Mordor now.

[Anyone who takes this post seriously deserves what they get.]

This is the Best Song Ever. It's by a guy named Dan Bern, and it's called Jerusalem. Here are the lyrics:

( lj-cut for your protection )

You have to understand, this guy sounds just like Bob Dylan, only with better enunciation and more Jewish. His singing isn't too great, but he puts passion into the words. He acts it as much as it sings, its almost more like a monologue to music than it is a song. The instrumental music is this rhythmic, complex (Bob-Dylanesque) guitar strumming.

And... I don't really know how to describe it. To me, this song is beautiful. It's close to the song my heart sings when I'm happy. It's outrageous and rediculous, and hopeful and unstoppable. It's like gold fire. It's like singing am yisrael chai against the setting sun, and the sky is brilliant red and orange and pink, and the day is dying but you know - you know - that you are going to live forever.

To continue musing, I decided along time ago what the end of the world sounds like. This song is the opposite of that sound. This song is like what I want my descendants to sing against the end of the world, in voices like the rising sun and the morning star. This song, and am yisrael chai, and possibly eli eli. That'll show the end of the world that you don't screw around with the descendants of Mark Simmons.