Peace Train

by Cat Stevens

Now I’ve been happy lately,
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be,
something good has begun

Oh I’ve been smiling lately,
dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be,
some day it’s going to come

Cause out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country,
come take me home again

Now I’ve been smiling lately,
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be,
something good has begun

Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy roller

Everyone jump upon the peace train
Come on now peace train

Get your bags together,
go bring your good friends too
Cause it’s getting nearer,
it soon will be with you

Now come and join the living,
it’s not so far from you
And it’s getting nearer,
soon it will all be true

Now I’ve been crying lately,
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating,
why can’t we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country,
come take me home again

To me, part of the problem continues to be that people do not seem to be driven by principle until they experience some pain. IVAW became against the Iraq War because of what they personally saw and experienced during their participation in that war and not because they heard Peace Train or saw film clips of prior wars and said, “No I do not want to participate in soldiering because it is the basis of the ability of nations to fight wars.”

As it is, America has lost a lot of its anti-war energy that was so evident a couple of years ago because American soldiers are no longer dying in large numbers and the pain is not so obvious now. A small percentage continue to oppose the war on moral grounds, but much of the opposition to the Iraq war is/was on grounds related to American pain of loss or of expense. Many, many Americans, including politicans of both parties, continue to support the Iraq War and occupation because they know what it is all about. The politicians know full well that this is a resource war intended to facilitate future American economic growth and consumption. Barack Obama continues to see consumption and a growing economy as the key to American wellbeing and if you have that worldview in today’s world as an American politician, you need to wage wa and occupy foreign resource-bearing lands by military occupation or by proxy.

If you are an Iraqi Veteran Against the War, are you against capitalism, materialism, and economic growth? If not, you are pissing in the wind, my friends.

The only way a real “Peace Train” can get here is if we lay the tracks of a sustainable civilization based on subsistence and not greed.

Stan Moore

WAR
Music & Lyrics by Dougie MacLean. Published by Limetree Arts and Music

Our voice made silent
Our hands made still
But deep and violent wait the ones who wait to kill
The desert’s burning, their reasons pale
For there’s no returning with some golden holy grail

CHORUS
What have they done?
What have they done?
The blood will run to everyone
Oh what have they done?

Is it for freedom?
Or is it for truth
That father’s fall and all the young men trade their youth?
Or are they moved by deception’s hand
That rank and reckless scatters death across the sand?
CHORUS

Is it for freedom?
Or is it for truth
That fathers fall and all those young men trade their youth?
And the deserts burning, their faces pale
For there’s no returning with some golden holy grail
CHORUS

submitted by Stan Moore
Petaluma, CA

Participants of this blog with military experience might find the induction dance of great interest. It is a scene set to the Beatles song “I Want You So Bad/ She’s So Heavy” when a main character is inducted into the Vietnam-era Army and the induction scene is danced with amazing choreography that just has to be seen to be appreciated. It is amazing, including the “She’s So Heavy” part of the song, showing new inductees in their underwear slogging through the swamps of Vietnam carrying a facsimile of the Statue of Liberty as their heavy burden.

There is anti-war and anti-empire rhetoric and scenes reminiscent exactly of actions by the Weather Underground and similar organizations. And there is romance, wonderful acting, wonderful singing and guitar playing. The song “Let it Be” is sung in a setting of a military funeral of a young man killed in the war alongside a funeral of a Detroit black child killed by police in a riot. It is very, very touching.

The best version of the song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that I have ever heard (even better than the original version by George Harrison with Eric Clapton) commemorates the slaying of Martin Luther King.

And there is psychodelia with Bono singing “I Am the Walrus”, Eddie Izzard singing “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and on and on and on.

This is one of my favorite all-time movies and I check it out from the public library when I feel the desire to see it yet again. I bought the music double CD and listen to it because the music alone is fantastic.

The said part of this in my mind is that the lessons against war and against empire that were fought for so hard by a prior generation are having to be relearned, almost as if from scratch. This is no way to change a society and somehow the understanding that empires and wars are a useless part of the human experience need to become deeply ingrained in the psyche of the common man everywhere. We are running out of opportunities to get this right before we finally destroy ourselves.

“Across the Universe” is a great, great movie and I could not recommend it more highly to this bunch.

Stan Moore
Petaluma, CA

I always wondered what would happen if at protests or demos you had people with laptops offering downloads of podcasts. Here in New York, that could really be effective, because there are so many people, and everyone has an iPod. I imagine San Francisco is similar.

It revealed most depressingly how easily it is for “normal” people to allow roles to free them to be as brutal as they envisioned that role might be. (It relates to my comments on the other thread about how, once we abstract ourselves outside of the normal human context–in this case there were “guards” and there were “prisoners”– anything goes.)

But if we can see each other, at all times, in all circumstances, as simply the human relfection of ourselves, then we cannot harm them.

The study is a classic and in my own work (finishing up a PhD in sychology) has a position of primacy in terms of how powerful psychology can be. (We might note the flip side there to the psychologists who have willingly participated in torture, The APA has finally come around on this but it is instructive how long it took and how controversial this “no-brainer” became to a group of people with what we all might assume are good brains.)

http://www.prisonexp.org/

I have not been able to dowload Stans slides, and may be able to do so from the public library or university library. Perhaps the point being portrayed in this excercise is similar to the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” by Dr. Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in 1971. Dr. Zimbardo, a psychologist, wanted to study how “normal” university students would treat other students when posed in the mock situation of jailer versus prisoner. In a very short time, the dynamics of the staged scene became brutal and obscene, which is what power tends to do to the most normal of people. The experiment had to be cut short because the students posing as “jailers” got sadistic and the student “prisoners” were getting abused at levels approaching the very limits of tolerance.

Dr. Zimbardo recently wrote a book on “The Lucifer Effect” in which is demonstrated how the principles he discovered in his experiment related to Abu Graib and other more recent situations.

Stan Moore

STAN: Not my slides. They were part of the blog entry. The faces of the onlookers are very interesting to see. Here is an indymedia clip.