There is Something in the Air, But It is Not on the Airwaves
By Chris Chandler and Anne Feeney arranged by David Roe
You know, we have GOT it together. There ARE people in the streets.
At the very onset of Oil War Two there were already more people on the
streets protesting than there were at the height of the Vietnam war.
There is something in the air, but it is not on the airwaves.
If there are a half a dozen Jaycees in Cincinnati on a street corner
waving yellow ribbons, Fox news acts like it's A Republican Woodstock.
"By the time we got to Fallujah we were half a million strong."
But put a million people on the street and they build a fence around you and
call it a protest zone.
We like to look at Vietnam through the soft focus of Hollywood ,
which took the blood of war and turned it into rose-colored glasses.
We see hundredss of beautiful semi-naked twenty-somethings putting daises in
the barrels of M16s, all to the tune of Country Joe McDonald singing "One two three what are we fightin for?"
It makes for spectacular video. Sometimes I see these images and I want
to run naked through the streets singing "Why don't we da do it in the
road!"
But I know better.
When the first American troops went in to Vietnam in 1964 there was
barely a soul on the streets, yet people were already singing Blowin'
in the Wind, and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and I Ain't Marchin'
Anymore. These songs were being released on major record labels. Mega
hits would follow. Today we have more people on the streets and yet there has not been a single hit song on the radio. How could this be?
It's not like Barry McGuire was a deep thinking anti-war intellectual
when he sang "Eve of Destruction." No, he was jumping on a bandwagon
made possible by people in the streets. Yet right now, there are more
people on the streets than there was then, but you have to think twice
before jumping on that bandwagon for fear it might be a paddy wagon
bound for Guantanamo Bay .
If you speak the truth on national TV your show will be dropped,
regardless of the ratings...ask Bill Maher. A show doesn't need an
audience as much as it needs sponsors.
Sixties protesters were brought up in the brand-loyal fifties. These kids were major consumers of all
kinds of goods. They queued up to buy groovy Carnaby Street "Mod Gear"
and "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" cosmetics. Today's protester does not
BUY anything. They won't shop at GAP. They boycott Taco Bell. Hell,
they won't even go to Starbucks.
Oh, before the Berlin Wall fell
we loved to talk about how the Soviet Union would broadcast only the songs of the state and we romanticized
that is was our radio broadcasts wafting in from West Berlin that tore
down the wall. .
Yet now, the cell phone is in the other hand. There is a new wall running down
divided America . And it is American radio that is being manipulated by
the agenda of the state, because the state has become indistinguishable
from the corporation – which, as I said before, needs sponsors more
than it needs an electorate.
But I am warning you, there is something in the air, and soon it will
be the people's broadcasts wafting in from The Indie Media and Free
Speech TV, that tears down the wall, and this time it will not be the
Berlin Wall that falls, it will be Wall Street.
Because, the revolution is now.
There is something in the air and we
have got it together.
There is Something in the Air, But It is Not on the Airwaves [1] (mp3)
While downloading is sometimes necessary please do it responsibly and (as with anything you do) consider the repercussions of what you do and if ya must do it – do it with the best intentions. - in other words, I'm hungry - chandler