What’s been done in the name of Jesus?
What’s been done in the name of Buddha?
What’s been done in the name of Islam?
What’s been done in the name of man?
What’s been done in the name of liberation?
And in the name of civilization?
And in the name of race?
And in the name of peace?
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else
Can you tell me how much bleeding
It takes to fill a word with meaning?
And how much, how much death
It takes to give a slogan breath?
And how much, how much, how much flame
Gives light to a name
For the hollow darkness
In which nations dress?
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else
Everybody’s seen the things they’ve seen
We all have to live with what we’ve been
When they say charity begins at home
They’re not just talking about a toilet and a telephone
Got to search the silence of the soul’s wild places
For a voice that can cross the spaces
These definitions that we love create —
These names for heaven, hero, tribe and state
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else
“JUSTICE,” 1981
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/42.
In the face of so much evil done on God’s behalf, it’s no surprise that many thinking and sensitive people proclaim themselves agnostic. I share something with this crowd, coming to the faith as I did from a similarly skeptical place. My own experience taught me that there was a reality behind the overlay of distortion. Without claiming any special understanding, I could stand up and say, “I’m a Christian. You might give it a glance yourself, because it might not be as dumb as you think it is.” That was the message I hoped to impart to a community of people seeking a relationship with God but not necessarily inclined to accept somebody else’s dogma because they’ve been told to. I assumed people might be interested in my own explorations and discoveries, such as they were, just as I was interested in theirs.
I also began to understand that if earth and all of its creatures were indeed God’s creation, then a lot of what I was seeing in my outward explorations amounted to blasphemy.
Way out on the rim of the galaxy
The gifts of the Lord lie torn
Into whose charge the gifts were given
Have made it a curse for so many to be born
This is my trouble —
These were my fathers
So how am I supposed to feel?
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel
Water of life is going to flow again
Changed from the blood of heroes and knaves
The word mercy’s going to have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves
No adult of sound mind
Can be an innocent bystander
Trial comes before truth’s revealed
Out here on the rim of the broken wheel
You and me—we are the break in the broken wheel
Bleeding wound that will not heal
Lord, spit on our eyes so we can see
How to wake up from this tragedy
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel
Bleeding wound that will not heal
Trial comes before truth’s revealed
So how am I supposed to feel?
This is my trouble —
Can’t be an innocent bystander
In a world of pain and fire and steel
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel
“BROKEN WHEEL,” 1981
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/43.
While I waded in the waters of my urban baptism, my erstwhile family was having an adventure of their own. Kitty had hooked up with a new boyfriend who had an interest in the Yukon Territory. They were spending half the year placer mining for gold near Dawson, where the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s had taken place. A couple of times a summer, my status as part-time dad took me there too. Around the time I wrote “Broken Wheel,” I found myself way out on the rim of the North American continent visiting my daughter. It was a long way to go but I loved the wild north, and I would have gone anywhere to see Jenny. Partly for her own reasons, and partly by way of making things easier for at least part of the year, Kitty wintered in Toronto, so I got more of Jenny then, though it was a long time before those visits were free of the large quantity of emotional baggage that Kitty and I, in spite of our best efforts, laid on each other.
Dawson is a tiny place. In the early eighties the year-round population numbered only about two thousand souls. That could swell six to ten times with the arrival of tourists and prospectors in the summer. These provided fodder for the region’s legendarily large mosquito population. You could get there by road if you had the time and a hardy vehicle, but it took a lot of time. The practical way was to fly: Toronto to Vancouver to Whitehorse to Dawson, the aircraft ever diminishing in size. The last leg took you over green rolling mountains, smooth from never having been glaciated. The plane would descend until it bumped along a dirt airstrip, propellers strobing in the portholes. The engines would shut down, and you’d step out the door into an immense quiet, no sound but wind, moving air so free of extraneous matter that it tasted sweet on the tongue.
Kitty and Jenny and John lived in a trailer near their mining site. Occasionally the location would change. Mining was done with a bulldozer and a sluice with a series of increasingly fine screens, the fossil fuel–driven update of the old gold rush placer method. They would scour hillsides overlooking one of the creek beds feeding the Klondike River, then move on when there was no more of the glittering grit.
I’d get a motel room for a few nights, and Jenny would come and stay with me. Usually I travelled there alone, though Judy came once. We’d go out on adventures, savor the twenty-four-hour daylight, fight off the mosquitoes, dine at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Saloon. One time a helicopter pilot took us for a ride. He had a regular route, carrying supplies to several prospectors’ camps in the area. He carried us the equivalent of a three days’ walk from town and dropped us off near a fast-flowing salmon stream, with the assurance that he’d pick us up as he returned from his run. Before landing, we flew a circuit just above the treetops to scout for grizzlies. There were none, but we passed directly over two big young black bears up on their hind legs, engaged in a wrestling match. They both stopped to stare up at us in surprise. The quicker one took advantage of the moment to slap the other across the jaw, knocking him flat. We spent several hours steeped in the music of the rushing water before hearing the throb of the chopper’s return. We encountered neither grizzlies nor fish.
Jenny was sweet, and as cute as all children are in their parents’ eyes, but she was sad. She took the breakup on herself, the way kids do. The whole universe revolves around them, so the bad parts of it also must. That was one of the hardest parts of the separation. One night in a hotel room, early in the breakup, the first summer—Jenny had just turned four—we were talking about the day we had just had when she suddenly said, “Daddy, I think my tears are going to come.” And they did, just like that, and so did mine.
Judy and I also did a lot of travelling. She’s a fan of beaches. I’m not especially, but if the beaches were in interesting enough places, I was happy to go to them. Through the seven years we were together, we spent time in Tobago, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, the Grenadines, the Canary Islands, and Sardinia, all fascinating places. The islands provided song material, or at least the opportunity to reflect and allow songs to flow.
In the fall o
f 1982 I began recording my twelfth studio album, The Trouble with Normal, which came out early the following year. In addition to a strong world-beat influence, the album had a political tone that would last through the eighties. If Humans and Inner City Front set the bar, then The Trouble with Normal leapt it. The song “Candy Man’s Gone” lamented our misplaced faith in the gods of the consumer culture, who sell the expectation that there will always be more, and mislead the disadvantaged into believing that the entitlement will extend to them. Satan in a business suit, “pimping dreams of riches for everybody,” taking from all and giving to a tiny elite—Robin Hood in reverse. The title cut, “The Trouble with Normal,” was a rant with a shouted chorus.
Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs—“Security comes first”
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single-crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World’s kept on reservations you don’t see
“It’ll all go back to normal if we put our nation first”
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When ends don’t meet it’s easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream
As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream
Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse
“THE TROUBLE WITH NORMAL,” 1981
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/44.
Though I didn’t plan it that way, The Trouble with Normal initiated a trilogy of albums focusing in large part on North-South issues, especially the ongoing attacks against life itself—humans, rivers, mountains, oceans, air—for the benefit of an already wealthy few. These songs decry the abandonment by the powerful of a sense of humanness as they inflict widespread suffering, apparently without a second thought.
I, of course, as much as anyone, benefit from this through the lifestyle I am able to maintain, but in all the travels of the period I kept meeting people who were at the other end of the global economic equation. It was easy to feel for them. My take on their voices shows up throughout the albums. The rage in those voices was real, but it was not simply a flail. I tried to tell real stories with real information, and I wanted to make it clear how I felt about it. I didn’t set out to foment anger, but I did want to stir the pot. Somebody had to.
The scum, as they say, had risen quite effectively to the top. Today corporate crime has reached epidemic proportions, and even people in the developed world are finding themselves falling victim to it, though there is still plenty of willful blindness around. The gap between rich and poor is becoming almost medieval in scale, as the ranks of the latter swell and the middle class shrinks. Ecological devastation has become routine to the point of waning media interest, while very rational scholars and scientists are uttering the once fantastic notion that in my young daughter’s lifetime, the planet she depends on may become uninhabitable. Each sliding step down this road brings cries of warning and expressions of dismay. Each new skid downward leaves the previous one seeming acceptable after all. That, indeed, is the trouble with “normal.”
The album title set the tone, but it differed from the other two albums in the trilogy because the information and imagery for the Third World–related songs came more from remote observation: TV, books, and magazine articles, including those passed along by my brother Don.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Don was pleased about my newfound appreciation for politics. Whenever I saw him in the late seventies I could count on him to share political tracts and push issues close to his heart, mostly the need to support revolutionary movements in Central America. In particular, Don was a supporter of a coalition of five populist groups in El Salvador that, in 1980, merged into the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and launched a guerrilla war against the right-wing government that would continue for a dozen years.
While the brutality of the military was a fact of life during the 1970s in El Salvador, it escalated dramatically in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the United States. It was no coincidence that the FMLN launched its first major military offensive (with troops made up almost entirely of poor, landless peasants, including women and the elderly) against the Salvadoran government in January 1981, two months after Reagan’s election.
The pattern of atrocity was already in force by the time Reagan took office. A pivotal event occurred on March 24, 1980, when the military, at the instigation of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, assassinated Catholic archbishop Óscar Romero. According to the United Nations, “After speaking out against U.S. military support for the government of El Salvador, and calling for soldiers to disobey orders to fire on innocent civilians, Archbishop Romero was shot dead while celebrating Mass at the small chapel of the cancer hospital where he lived. It is believed that those who organised his assassination were members of Salvadoran death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas.” During the popular cleric’s funeral, death squads opened fire on mourners, killing up to fifty people.
Don also kept me aware of a successful revolution against another U.S.-backed dictatorship, this one in Nicaragua, El Salvador’s southern neighbour, where the United States was carrying on a campaign of “low-intensity” warfare against the new, populist Sandinista government. America was simply protecting its investment, of course. In 1937, after decades of attempting to gain total control of Nicaragua, the United States installed Anastasio Somoza García as dictator of the country. By World War II Somoza, a sociopath, was the largest landowner in Nicaragua. (In 1939, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”) The Somozas ruled Nicaragua with utter brutality until the summer of 1979, when the Sandinistas finally routed the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the son and heir to his namesake.
Aside: The Sandinista movement was founded in 1962 by Carlos Fonseca, a teacher and librarian, along with Tomás Borge and Silvio Mayorga. It was named after Augusto Sandino, who led a campaign of resistance against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua in the twenties and thirties. (Interestingly, Don discovered that one of Sandino’s generals bore the name Adolfo Cockburn. He was the son of a Scottish immigrant and a Miskito Indian woman.) Fonseca and Mayorga were killed in the mid-seventies.
The administration of U.S. president Jimmy Carter, which was in office at the time of the revolution, initially supported the Sandinistas—or at least chose not to promote an active resistance to them—but when Reagan took office, he funded and trained a counterrevolutionary force of terrorists that became known as the Contras. Reagan claimed that revolutions in Central America would establish a “Communist foothold” in America’s “backyard.” In truth, the administration was concerned that a successful people’s revolution would inspire similar uprisings throughout Latin America and elsewhere, thereby diminishing Northerners’ access to cheap labour and natural resources. Fundraising for the Contras, who were doing their best to drown the revolution in its own blood, was partly accomplished through the clandestine sale of arms to Iran, in violation of an arms embargo that the United States had facilitated.
Not long after the Sandinistas took power, Don gave me a small volume of poetry by the eminent Nicaraguan writer Ernesto Cardenal, a Jesuit priest who served as minister of culture in the new government. Despite pressure from the Catholic hierarchy, Cardenal continued to be both a priest an
d a Sandinista. His passionate and sharply drawn poetics portray the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and since American physician-attorney William Walker and his mercenary gang of “filibusters” seized control of Nicaragua in 1856. (The government of Honduras executed Walker in 1860 after he was captured and turned over to them by British troops. The British wanted Central America for themselves.)
Cardenal’s poetry is beautiful and painterly, done in a “documentary” style that piqued my interest in the region and its struggles, and contributed to my songwriting in both form and content. To read him is to be transported in much the way a film takes you out of your seat and into the life force on screen—only better, because you get to fill in the pictures yourself. With vivid strokes the poet recounts events of the moment, and of history, holding forth the creative heart of his people’s aspirations for a life of meaning and self-determination.
Through his simple but vivid and shattering lines, Fr. Cardenal transports us to his homeland and the realities of imperial cruelty. He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been there, in Nicaragua, participating in a unique and powerful societal transformation. His writing, among other things, helped me grasp the importance of witnessing. I sucked the stuff up like a thirsty quarter horse.
Rumours of Glory Page 20