The story of the US is very sad, really. Tragic more than sad. It often brings to mind that one- liner from a song by Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot:
“I don’t know where we went wrong,
But the feeling’s gone, and
I just can’t get it back.”
I grew up with a sort of childhood crush on the United States that keeps calling itself America. Like so many others I loved its music. I adored Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, The Boss Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, Don McLean, the Doors and all the other rock ’n’ roll greats. And yes, even less rebellious country legends John Denver and Glen Campbell, whose guitar playing genius is little known outside the American South.
I was enthralled by American comics and superheroes. I was mesmerised by the literary genius of Edgar Allan Poe in tales like the Fall of the House of Usher. I never missed an American comedy on TV. I even went through that boy phase, buying illustrated encyclopaedias of American warships, studying them inside out, and marvelling at all their firepower that seemed destined to save the world.
Writing my constitutional law thesis on a comparative analysis and powers of presidents in the world, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson became the new heroes, standing high on pedestals erected in my head. I was seriously considering moving to California. The visions of long-haired flower power girls’ years placing flowers in the barrels of guns of the National Guard during the anti-Vietnam demonstrations was still chiselled in the memory cortex of my brain.
Recently, driving along the Florida Keys, parks and lakes, I simultaneously travelled down memory lane, constantly tuned in to a comedy channel. I was in such stitches of laughter I actually had to pull over, in order to continue listening to the addictive comedians without creating a risk on the road. They had not lost their touch.
Loving history and international affairs inevitably led to a craving to learn much more of the land I had grown up to admire.
Little did I know in those days of blissful innocence that I was to be like a young woman who thought she had found the love of her life, only to realise to her abject horror, as she dug deeper into her relationship, that she had become tied to some deranged individual. Imagine the devastation, feeling duped, betrayed, violated.
That is how I felt.
I went through all the same psychological stages of response; suspicion, followed by fear, denial, trauma, anger, and finally divorce and acceptance of the inevitable. It was not easy.
Some might think it great fun taking a bash out of Big Brother across the ocean.
I don’t. It actually hurts, and maybe always will.
There were years I could not bear thinking, let alone writing, about the “America” I once thought existed; that mentor nation that had shaped me, which I discovered had deteriorated rapidly from golden republic to rapacious empire.
All civilisations rise and fall, but when they morph in such a way, they fall very rapidly off the cultural precipice. In its loss of democratic pedigree and cultural identity, a part of me seemed to have been lost as well. The American idealistic dream was my dream too, albeit in my part of the world.
Poet Don McLean went on to write one of the best-known songs of the 20th century, American Pie. Though we were told that the lyrics were partly about the death of three fathers of rock ’n’ roll in a 1959 plane crash, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, McLean, like most poets, refused to explain the song and spell it out to the public when asked.
Having sharpened a couple of literary criticism teeth on harder nuts like Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, it was a joyful challenge disserting this eight-minute song.
It is all about the loss of American innocence in the 1960s, with its cultural revolution, devastating war, anti-war and anti-racial demonstrations and riots, brutal assassinations of its leaders like the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and the sudden death of many leading musicians like Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. McLean sang about the woeful decline of music itself, which had produced many cultural icons. These included the jester Bob Dylan, who McLean says sang “in a voice that came from you and me”, and who stole Elvis “the King’s thorny crown”.
Something indeed had seemed to go horribly wrong in those pivotal years of the 1960s, which started out with so much promise
Music, the ultimate inspiration of the people and the Cultural Revolution, was suddenly bombarded by a counter revolution, with music that was even turning up the satanic. Mick Jagger of the English Rolling Stones, who calls himself jumpin’ jack flash in an autobiographical song of the same name, for all his jumping on the stage, is mentioned in detail in American Pie:
“So come on Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick ’
Cause fire is the devil’s only friend
Oh and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan’s spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died.”
Don McLean is referring to the Stones’ concert that had been patronised by the Hell’s Angels and featured a series of what appeared to be satanic rituals and symbols on the stage, which seems to have become the rage.
In 1967, the Stones had released an album called Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, with songs like one named the Pentagram Ritual.
Another song entitled Sympathy for the Devil is the opening track on their 1968 album Beggars Banquet.
Jagger and fellow band member Keith Richards starred in and composed the music for short occult movie producer Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of my demon brother, which included footage from his previous film Lucifer Rising. The film, which shows various satanic rituals, was dedicated to Satanist Aleister Crowley. It starred Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer, who was later convicted of murdering music teacher and UCLA Phd student Garry Hinman in 1969, at the behest of Charles Manson. Speak of killing music.
In his book, The Ultimate Evil, Maury Terry wrote that between 1966 and 1967, the Satanic cult called the Process Church, “sought to recruit the Rolling Stones”.
On page 155 of his book Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, Tony Sanchez, who worked for Keith Richards for eight years, wrote: “Mick Jagger listened spellbound as Kenneth Anger turned them on to Crowley’s powers and ideas.”
Something indeed had seemed to go horribly wrong in those pivotal years of the 1960s, which started out with so much promise, yet ended with so much hubris.
McLean had understood it well. He was a poet, musician and idealist, who formed part of the movement of inspiration like so many artists, to bring us into what the band The Fifth Dimension in the musical Hair called the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, which was expected to be built on:
“Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation.”
Whatever happened to those days that were supposed to herald in the golden age of Aquarius?
As the name of the song implies, along with inspirational music that had somehow been sabotaged, went the American dream. That American pie was fast becoming a lie.
In McLean’s view, it no longer appeared to be God’s country as:
“The three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.”
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in history and international affairs.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece