What to make of the #occupy “movement?” Well, come to think of it, I unknowingly did say something about it a few weeks back when I wrote a far too long post on Joe Pug’s contemporary folk song I Do my Father’s Drugs. So my contribution to the punditry’s occupation with #occupy will be to provide an edited version of that post here. The song was written around 2008, and here is the first stanza:
When the party starts on Monday,
Christmas starts in June,
when no one minds I’ve just arrived and I’ll be leaving soon,
if I return with eyes half-opened
don’t ask me where I was,
I do my father’s drugs
Pug is saying there’s something odd about these times: we do things by rote, out of proper time. “Partying” is a daily occurrence, not connected to a work-week, not done to celebrate any particular event. The party…no longer seems even about cultivating friendships and connecting, for no-one really cares if our narrator is there or not. The party is on automatic. …
As for the rest of the song, things get “political”:
When every revolution
is sponsored by the state
there’s no bravery in bayonets
in tearing down the gates.
If you see me with a rifle
don’t ask me what it’s for
I fight my father’s war.
This might be a comment on Bush’s democracy-promotion in Iraq…
A more convincing reading is that… …it is particularly the present-day radicalism that is the forced and sponsored thing. It’s the young lefty who gets extra participation points in her Service Learning or Peace Studies course for joining the rally or signature drive that these lines are really meant to speak for. It’s the sense a young protester has that his desire to protest against the Iraq war is all-too-welcomed by his elders. Their struggle against the Vietnam war hovers over everything, so that the cause he has been told he is crucial to turns out to be constantly framed and even organized as a refighting of his father’s “war.” …
When hunger strikes are fashion
And freedom is routine
All the streets in Cleveland are named for Martin Luther King
You will see me at the protest
But you’ll notice that I drag
I burn my father’s flag
The last true excitement felt on the left was given it by the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War cause, and the Sexual Revolution, but now that the freedom sought by the first and last really has been basically achieved, and proves disappointing once it becomes routine, there seems nowhere to go, nowhere to direct those 1789/1917 desires. …
I hold that our times are caught in a cultural cul-de-sac, ever-repeating the same…cycles and styles. The 90s saw the final consolidation, moderation, and normalization of the 60s cultural revolution. …And part of the established pattern is the free person “jumping into politics” from time to time, as Plato and Tocqueville both put it, and typically into leftist causes. But the bottom line is that the causes are tired and have felt ever more so since the late 90s. For a few years, the Iraq War and then Obama breathed new life into progressivism generally, and thus perhaps into rock’s radicalism also, but as Pug’s song witnesses, something about it felt forced, felt dictated yet again by the liberal-boomer culture-rulers.
…The song’s narrator feels obliged to show up at the protest—the protest community is in some way his—but his heart is not in it: You’ll notice that I drag.…
It is unclear what may happen to that drag and that habitual radicalism if a yet more serious and more youth-unemploying failure of the economy now occurs. …
So that’s my self-edit. My explanation, then, of #occupy? In part, it’s due to the real impact of a horrible economy on young people. Of course not a few of them would be angry, and especially if leftist, at their wit’s end.
But in larger part, it’s due to old drugs.
October 15th, 2011 | 3:34 am
This post may be doubled, so I apologize for the redundancy. But Carl I wanted to thank you for the tip regarding the curious (yet good) Joe Pug song My Father’s Drugs. I listened to it last time you posted it, but listening to it again I must admit it is striking in its uncanniness. I think you have the best account (compared to the other competing account you also mention) of the meaning of the lyrics. However, the song is still another cheap Dylan cover in acoustic guitar and harmonica with clever updated lyrics. It is good, but also deserves a yawn. Boring! But that is the point!
Mr. Pug has hit upon a strange doubleness that is also contradictory. The doubleness–my father and me. The contradiction–my father’s drugs are also my drugs, and we’re the same. And drugs seem to be the only explanation for such madness.
One wishes to be be oneself (ME!), and one wants to make it real through, say serious political action. Failing serious political action, one at least has one’s own shelf of Noam Chomsky, which provides a studious and in certain circles noble image of dissent and self sacrifice (except for the actual celebrity lives of Mr. Chomsky or Mr. Zinn or even Mr. Parenti in their short lived immortality). One has perhaps seen the documentary movies of protest from the 60s, and if one is a Gen X, then one’s Baby Boomer teachers had constantly told you that life was better back then–the music was better, the drugs were better, the sex was better–back in the ’60s. It was all good making it for yourself which simultaneously made it for everyone else. Parents, let alone any of the forms they inherited regarding making the transition from childhood to adulthood less traumatic, suck!
The irony of events is that the case for taking paths untaken for one’s self turn out to be well-trod paths, and even end up in a morass of the drugs of one’s father. One should just say no to drugs in the first place, but this would be the path of taking no path if one believes one’s hippie teacher. Obviously drugs can include intoxicants other than actual herbs and chemicals. They can mean intoxicants of the general ideology told over and over again of changing the world. But I wonder, what’s wrong with the world?–to quote Chesterton.
But that is not the path that Joe Pug’s alleged “father” took when he took all of his drugs that would lead him to a realm beyond paths already trod! Etc., etc. of course, not everyone’s father was a Baby Boomer. Some fathers included the interstice of self-importance that goes by the name of the Forgotten Generation–similar in lack of self-importance as the Gen X as it turns out, except the typical Gen Xer wants to let you know he is forgotten or unlovable and hence unsatisfied. We Gen Xers always though the baby Boomers teachers were full of shit, and we still do. Unfortunately it was our attitude toward our father’s (or at least teacher’s) drugs which seems to have demographically bankrupted the nation as a whole. Their drugs of total freedom led to a situation where Gen Xers wanted to slack out.
So this song My Father’s Drugs calls into question the idea of whether one should take a path in the first place. Joe pug is no Gen Xer. He has the look of a cowboy shirt wearing, emo, video game playing millennial. His anger is modulated by a Dylan revival two decades too late, which is not surprising in that as Baby Boomers found themselves, they didn’t have children until they were much older. Had he been a Gen Xer he would have been Husker Du. But instead of new life without drugs, Joe Pug has clever lyrics, built into a Dylan schtick.
BTW–the video of Joe Pug is at TT the Bears Place. In my alleged days of solidarity with the 99% at the Central Square stop on the T back in the ’80s, I saw many a show there. Ah my salad days! Unlike my Baby Boomer teachers, I rarely speak of those days, but leave it to a Gen Xer to tell you about how real it was back then.
Nonetheless, if only the Dead Milkmen or Alex Chilton were there at TT’s to moderate the political enthusiasm and radicalism of Occupy Wall Street that Joe Pug seems to call into question. Whatever enthusiastic radicalism may have existed in my days with the 99%, it apparently had only a negative influence on me.
So was the TT the Bears crowd and the Middle East too hip for occupy radicalism back in the ’80s and ’90s? Or did it recognize the dubious ideological lie that undergirds the whole thing? I suspect that Carl is right. The current songs like even Joe Pug are all right with OWS. I think that that’s why I stopped haunting these places back then because I found myself with a crowd that I wished not to be with. Even if it was on a “lifestyle” level or on a sincere “anarchy” level, it was a life I was not willing to live. It was a life that liked the drugs they were taking, and they were at the end of the day more or less the same drugs their parents took.
October 15th, 2011 | 5:44 pm
John, fun ramble. Don’t get me started on the Dead Milkmen, though. I’m Gen X myself.
And I don’t have a huge problem with people being derivative, i.e., with Joe Pug assuming that “Dylanesque folk-singer” is simply a style. Michelle Shocked, for example, assumed the same thing back in my Gen-X day (also Roger Manning, Cindy Lee Berryhill…etc.), and got a fine album or two out of it, before wisely drifting country-wards. Pug is doin’ a good job of workin’ the style. He’s just one young man and guitar, after all.
October 18th, 2011 | 2:20 pm
Nice lyrics, so I went and looked it up on Youtube to hear it: what a God-awful song. He forgot to write a melody!
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