Canecittà

Compared to the gaseous diffusions of our political discourse these days, the offerings of our songwriters are often a marvel of directness.

If you want to know what I mean, do yourself a favor and go listen to John Mayer’s gem Gravity, from his album Continuum. I won’t quote the lyrics here — fair use and all that — but if you’re in need of a blues hymn to shelter you for a couple of minutes from the storms of bloviation whipped up by our on-all-the-time media, you can’t do any better.

Trust me.

These days almost everyone has an attitude. Very nearly as many have opinions. What isn’t as much in evidence is the rational instrumentation which might, if encouraged, turn all this noise into music.

The id is praised for its power, but also because it can be successfully deployed with so little training. That, at any rate, is what we’re told by all the fresh faces who’ve set up shop in the ruins of the Enlightenment without even the slightest inkling of the catastrophe which befell all rational enterprise in  the last twilit days of the Nineteenth Century, and has harried us ever since.

We’re all perfectly aware by now that the Philosopher King has feet of clay. What we still don’t seem to realize, even after all the trauma of the last century, is that the Warlord, despite his sex appeal, is worse.

This being a free country and all, everyone has his own individual handbasket to ride in. That’s fine with me, but if we don’t figure out how we got where we are, and act accordingly, we’ll all continue on our way to Hell nevertheless. Metaphorically speaking, of course.