The Beatles, Obama and Real Change…
Posted on 14 September 2009
I was at a young peoples’ party the other night (late 20s, early 30s). The Beatles were playing pretty much the whole time – still fresh, after all these years. It got me thinking about experts, specialists, the elite classes that now pretty much run our country, the “brightest and best,” for instance President Obama (Harvard) or Yale (Bush), or Princeton, whatever – Larry Summers, Geithner, Greenspan. What have these “brightest and best” delivered to us, as opposed to, say, the Beatles who delivered something quite new (maybe birthed is a better word)? And the “fab four” weren’t elite at all. They made that very clear. They were just normal guys who joked and played around like the rest of us. After all, they’d come from Liverpool (a third rate city in a lesser part of England), but they delivered real change.
Change would be good about now.
For instance some real reform on a profoundly corrupt Wall Street (it ain’t gonna happen), even as those gentleman (and a few ladies) drain the US Treasury thanks to a docile Congress, President and Federal Reserve. (And it also ain’t gonna happen that the Federal Reserve is going to be taken to task for it’s massive blunders – or crimes – of the last fifty years.) And then there’s health care (thank you, pharmaceuticals, you’ve taken a page from Wall Street; your CEOs, managers and lobbyists are going to make out like bandits.) Then there’s Afghanistan, Iraq, even Iran flickers, not to mention Pakistan. And let’s see if Guantanamo Bay ever closes after all the fancy talk.
Yeah, change would have been good, but it ain’t gonna happen despite the Obama hope still shining in so many of my progressive friends’ eyes. Real change would have had to hit the ground running during the Honeymoon period. It would have had to have happened like the Beatles first songs hit us. It would have had to have been brash and maybe a bit humorous, but with a working class toughness as underpinning, a real melody with a driving beat, not just words.
It had to have happened even before Obama with his majority of Democrats took office, dogging the hell out of Bush right after their landslide victory which was supposed to have been all about change, not about embracing Bush’s cohorts who had constructed the nightmare that our country was becoming.
And frankly real change would have needed a deeply wounding recession that collapsed General Motors and Chrysler, swept away the Goldman-Sachs-black-widow-bullies, the AIGs jokesters, the banks that were rotten. It should have exposed the Federal Reserve for the devious, cruel and thieving cancer that now makes the Teapot scandal look like a teapot.
But it ain’t gonna happen. And for what it’s worth what do we think is going to happen now? Seriously. What do we think’s going to happen with two wars still cooking in the middle east, with gas over three dollars a gallon and climbing, with 6 million new people (not counting those that have given up) out of work, with California sinking and not even the Terminator being able to salvage it, with a blind New York governor replacing one of the only guys who had tried to blow the whistle on this mess (funny how Eliot Spitzer got knocked just off when he did, poor horny bastard – only we’re the poorer for of it and the fat cats are a hell of a lot richer.)
What’s going to happen when half a million more jobs are lost every quarter for the foreseeable future and the media continues to crow about things getting better because it’s not six hundred thousand? (And of course things do feel better at the higher reaches of our nation – those guys at the top are getting trillions of government cash; they’re all on a high-end-welfare-ride with no consequences. But ask those half a million people every quarter and counting how they feel, how their families feel. Ask them as their health care continues to suck as the Pharmaceutical CEOs continue to take home millions in bonuses like their buddies on Wall Street.
And what’s going to happen when those once again wildly happy Wall Street fellas finally hit another wall and there’s no more money in the treasury to bail them out and we finally have to admit to stuff like global warming? What happens then?
It ain’t gonna be good.
And then somebody around here had better have one hell of a tune with a great melody, which I believe will happen (after some really nasty bumps), but I believe those melodies will in no way come from the guys (and few gals) at the Harvards or Yales. I believe they will be coming from places more like Liverpool.
4 responses to The Beatles, Obama and Real Change…
Yes we can? Yes. Change will happen, but it won’t come from the top, it won’t come from a Government controlled by big money special interest groups, and it won’t come quickly enough. Change will come from grassroots organizations when you join with us and make it happen. Small streams fill great rivers and great rivers are powerful indeed. Stream on!
We’re not going to agree on Obama, but I do like this blog.
You know, to those of us out here reading what you write, you don’t seem very “Liverpool.” I don’t mean that negatively; I mean it practically. There is a lot of power in your last name. You live and work in a world where you’ve made connections most of us can only dream of. You have the enviable option of posting your thoughts to a huge audience at The Huffington Post…and yet you write here, on your own blog. You probably know some of your readers personally, but I would guess that a sizeable number are strangers who are neither powerful nor well-connected.
There are horror stories of the Beatles, especially in their younger days, being carted around to elitist receptions and dinners where “upper-class” citizens would snip locks of their hair without permission or treat them as if they were mentally incompetent. They’d walk out of those dinners; they weren’t aiming to impress those people anyway. Their power was with the masses. The people who bought records.
I still feel confident that the American voting public triumphed last November, but I agree that there’s far too much game-playing and political maneuvering for our government to be truly efficient. The Harvards and the Yales of the world don’t bother me; it’s the people who get sucked into the little world of Washington (or the world of British wealth and society in 1964) where the insiders feel superior to those who live outside of it. And without getting into it in any depth, that same attitude is one often felt projected from Hollywood. That same bubble. That same assumption that the people outside of it aren’t quite as important somehow…
I’m not lumping you into the latter category! But I have thought about this in connection to some of the overly harsh comments I’ve seen people leave you, wondering about that backlash and the irony of it coming as you fight back against those same perceptions in a different circle. But staying true to yourself and forging your own path…that is the Liverpudlian way. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if only there were more people out there as extraordinary as the Beatles…
Thank you for your thoughts — they go right to the heart of the matter. I wonder what you think of the blog that follows — even harsher re Obama, not because he’s a bad guy at all, but because I don’t believe he really knows how to deal with the bad. The Beatles, for reasons we’ve both been discussing, did have a clue about how to deal with “bad.” — bad being: greedy, insular, arrogant and pretty much totally lost to the beauty of other people. I agree with you that I’ve wandered through a very rarified world in my day — but I think there’s really a real value in experiencing it, in experiencing what happened to me because, yes, I did get sucked into it to the degree that I could, frankly — it’s heady stuff (as drugs are.) I never really totally fit, maybe I wasn’t quite smart or sharp enough or maybe nobody every quite fits into a world where simple humanness isn’t all that important, even when the very top has been reached — say, being President. Nevertheless I was able to observe what this world did to me (somewhat discussed in the blog of the next day.)
I think it’s really worth looking at what made the Beatles extraodinary. “Liverpool,” becomes almost a term for that. a way of looking at it. And I agree with you about Harvard, Yale, etc, but there is this strange aspect of Harvard graduates — with the exception of one or two they always let me know they went there with in a few minutes of my meeting them. And it’s a little intimidating, I’ve found — in other words I have bought into the hierachy of it as much as they have. And the problem with buying into it is, if we use the example of the Beatles and we absorb the lessons of what the “brightest and best” have delivered to us — endless wars, global warming, the gobbling up of the working people’s hard earned cash, the corruption of the financial, industrial and banking structure, then we may be in real trouble. We are in real trouble.
It’s a way of thinking that has to change. I would almost call it post intellectualism — not anti intellectualism — one must be powerful intellectual — but there is something beyond the supremacy of the intellect, the next paradigm, perhaps (it actually was much of what the Beatles were exploring.). Beyond intellectualism. There’s far more to discuss on this subject.
Oh, and by the way, all those really nasty people where one person. It took a little while to figure out. I think criticism is good, profoundly important, but not when six or seven voices are masking just one person, which is why we removed that one person’s diatribes to allow for interactions like this on.
Hmmm…the blog that follows this one did make me think…I really liked what the commenter said about the young and powerless putting President Obama in office and the “powerful” trying to stop him now that he’s there. Did you happen to catch the interview he gave on 60 Minutes last Sunday? He admitted flat out that he had made some errors in his quest to change the tone in Washington and that he’s still learning. I just don’t feel the disillusionment that you do. Not about him. And maybe I’m naïve…but of the two of us, I’m not sure who is the more idealistic…
But I don’t think we’re going to agree on any of that anyway. And that’s fine!
Back to elitism…I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but the academic snobbery of my college could have given any one of them a run for their money. I have a reunion coming up next month and I plead guilty to projecting onto what you’ve written because I’ve been thinking about these things so much myself lately. I bought into it while I was there and took my classes with some pretty “elite” people (financially, socially, scholastically). If I’m going to be completely honest, it was Hollywood, a few years after I graduated, that really brought me down and made me assess who I was and what my place was in this world (and wow, is that a different story). But for all my rationalizing, I still find the hierarchy intimidating, even though there was time not long ago that I was entrenched in it myself. Our culture is so fixated on status we almost have to retrain ourselves to be impressed by actual substance.
I think that after the glamour of feeling superior is stripped away, we all struggle with our personal irrelevance in a world with almost 7 billion people. What absolutely floors me about the Beatles is how young they were. Paul McCartney was my age (to give my age away…and I hope that doesn’t make you take me any less seriously) when they *broke up*. There’s a fascinating interview with Ringo on the Beatles Anthology where he talks about coming back to Liverpool after the Beatles really made it big elsewhere in England, noticing that his friends and family treated him differently. *They* bought into it, but he was cognizant enough, at 23 or whatever he was, to recognize it for what it was. And that just makes their story even more remarkable; that they stayed “Liverpool” after seeing both sides of the equation – those who looked down on them and those who groveled in front of them.
That was entirely too long (and personal), but I’ll end by saying I’m glad you figured out who was behind the negative comments. I’ve been there, too, and I know it’s a relief to get rid of unnecessary trouble-makers.
And thanks for commenting back.