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| Songwriter Bruce Cockburn. |
This series includes some of the most beautiful songs ever written. This isn't a contender, even among Cockburn's offerings. The lyrical pace is only a few beats slower than an auctioneer's, the melody has the same "range" as Trump's EEG and the music has the charm and nuance of a vuvuzela. The "video" is a still picture of an album cover. The text won't thrill prosodists but may work as a rant or as an object lesson.
Viewed in the latter contexts, this is an interesting study in the dangers of normalization. That which we accept, however reluctantly, will flourish.
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| Donald Trump's latest electroencephalogram. |
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first!"...could be countered by Benjamin Franklin's famous quote:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Lyrics for Bruce Cockburn's "The Trouble With Normal" (1981)
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 the ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and the 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
Index of Titles
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