By David Brooks on December 18, 2024
“There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” is a fragment of Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem, and at the dawn of a political and social era that promises to be among the darkest in modern U.S. history, the cracks are essential to be able to illuminate this American twilight.
And in the face of this latest election’s invitation for the ugliest and most barbaric to emerge, an immediate antidote is required. The adults about to take the reins of this country are dedicated to frightening children and harming the most vulnerable. They propose to raid and separate immigrant families, persecute their political opponents, overturn basic rights for women and minorities, reduce what little public assistance there is, privatize public education, ban some books, reverse regulations and measures to protect public health, the environment, and the list goes on.
An initial antidote, even if it cannot immediately cure this infection of evil in American political and social life, is beauty and the invitation to all that is most noble. Therefore, there is nothing more essential and urgent than art at this juncture. It is not the efficient answer, nor the most pragmatic, nor can it stop bullets and bombs and hate crimes, but it is the instant reminder of what needs to be and deserves to be defended, what rescues the conscience of the human being, and what it is to be a human.
Studs Terkel, the legendary interviewer, tells how in the immediate aftermath of World War II in the devastation of Germany and Austria, with people emerging from the rubble and going months without enough food, one of the most important things was to gather the surviving musicians and play, as soon as possible, both for them and for those who lived through the collective nightmare of years, Mozart. Bread was the most urgent thing, but also beauty.
In the historic textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a slogan and a song that summed up the demands of the workers -almost all of them immigrants- was understood in all their languages: bread for all, and roses too(https://youtu.be/D6hIMsd6BlQ).
In one of the greatest acts of defiance against the invaders who came to occupy the United States without Native permission, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890 hundreds of Sioux Indians, fed up with the oppression of the U.S. colonizers that included the prohibition of their rituals and cultural expressions, confronted the federal troops without weapons, and began to dance. This dance was perceived as such a dangerous act that they were massacred.
We shall overcome, the anthem of the great civil rights movement led by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s was created by Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan in the mountains of Tennessee at the Highlander Center Folk Education and Training School, where it was heard by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr; it became part of the soundtrack of social struggles in this and other countries(https://youtu.be/Sr56EOhKwmk?si=oL8ayEUMqEXiyvGd).
In 1999, the first day of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle had to be cancelled, as ministers from around the world and the host himself, President Bill Clinton, decided not to leave their hotels to go to the convention center. The threat was thousands of anti-neoliberal protesters who nonviolently occupied all the roads leading to the convention center with massive dances; on every corner the music was selected, from rap and reggae to rock & roll and more.
The resistance to injustice, the insistence on dignity and repudiation of the inhuman, and to continue singing, dancing, drawing, acting in spite of everything, is at the core of every country, including this one. Here it is expressed in blues, in jazz, in tap, in gospel and rock, in folk, in hip hop, in murals and graphic art, in the gifts that every wave of immigrants bring to enrich this country. All those lights are the antidote and will pass through the cracks, once again.
Leonard Cohen. Anthem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-BT6y_wYg
Source: Rebellion