Pink - Dear Mr President

[Cyre2067]

Have this song myspace, thought it'd be appreciated here as well. Can download it here: http://www.radionewsamerica.com/media/kynd/president.mp3 - Right click and save the file, doesn't stream well.

Dear Mr. President
(feat. Indigo Girls)

Dear Mr. President
Come take a walk with me
Let's pretend we're just two people and
You're not better than me
I'd like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly

What do you feel when you see all the homeless on the street
Who do you pray for at night before you go to sleep
What do you feel when you look in the mirror
Are you proud

How do you sleep while the rest of us cry
How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye
How do you walk with your head held high
Can you even look me in the eye
And tell me why

Dear Mr. President
Were you a lonely boy
Are you a lonely boy
Are you a lonely boy
How can you say
No child is left behind
We're not dumb and we're not blind
They're all sitting in your cells
While you pay the road to hell

What kind of father would take his own daughter's rights away
And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay
I can only imagine what the first lady has to say
You've come a long way from whiskey and cocaine

How do you sleep while the rest of us cry
How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye
How do you walk with your head held high
Can you even look me in the eye

Let me tell you bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way
Let me tell you bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away
Let me tell you bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box
Let me tell you bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
You don't know nothing bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
Oh

How do you sleep at night
How do you walk with your head held high
Dear Mr. President
You'd never take a walk with me
Would you

 

[Lucy]

Thanks for the download and lyrics, Cyre.

MediaMatters.org has something to say regarding comments about Pink that were made by John Gibson on Fox News:

"Gibson criticized singer Pink for her song, "Dear Mr. President." Referring to recent video and audio tapes released by Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Gibson said: "I wonder if they listen to Neil Young and Pink. I doubt it. Do you think they would spare Neil Young and Pink while they killed the rest of us because, after all, Neil Young and Pink are against the war, and they want peace?" Gibson then added: "If Zarqawi and bin Laden are against Bush, they must be against war, right? You might think so if ... all you listen to was Neil Young and Pink."

Just more classic Fox crap that doesn't even make sense.
I can almost laugh about it.

 

[Ottershrew]

Astonishing, isn't it?

I could almost laugh at what John Gibson was saying, too. But it's too close to the bone - too much like how all STS minds seem to work.

He's saying (I think) that the war is all about Us and Them: we're the innocent party, we have the right to be safe and secure, so let's take the war to them. It's lashing out blindly against the support group behind the 9-11 hijackers (according to this sort of baroque and fallacious thinking), because lashing out blindly is better than not lashing out at all. Blanket-bombing all Iraqi and Afghan urban centres (plus Iranian and Syrian ones, if we can find a pretext that will keep Western populations from protesting) is the obvious thing to do. People in the Middle East, after all, don't actually matter - the people there are not Us, they are Them, and we're against Them.

It's so much simpler that way. Only We count as real people. And obviously the American administration couldn't possibly be the agents behind 9-11, because it would destroy the Us vs. Them way of thinking. So it has to be ruled out before any analysis of the events of that day begins.

And, come to think of it, let's not analyse the events of 9-11 at all. There's just no point, unless it feeds our righteous anger against Them.

Furthermore, if you're making your house out of a cardboard box on the street in Washington DC - well, then, you must be one of Them as well, because you're not living the American Dream. You offend me because you have nothing to offer me.

Because, in the final analysis, it's not even about Us and Them - it's all about ME: my sense of safety, my security, my freedom from want, and my freedom from violence that might be directed against me.

Pink, therefore, is cast as another Hanoi Jane. As an artist she's not respectably dead like Van Gogh or Mozart, but vibrantly alive. She offends me, because she has a completely different sense of what is going on: she doesn't understand the very simple basic truth - the truth that actually everything is all about ME. And if she dies, then good. If the guy in the cardboard box dies, then good - he didn't offer me anything; he just got in the way of my stately progress along the sidewalk. And if it-really-doesn't-matter-how-many tens of thousands of children die in Iraq, well GOOD - these are people who would probably only grow up to hate ME, and threaten ME.

Because, after all, it's all about ME. And if I imagine that you might think I am at all undeserving of total comfort - and that only I deserve such comfort - well I hope you die quickly. Because you are just in the way.

It's so telling that Gibson bangs on and on about this Flight 93 movie in the opinion piece quoted by MediaMatters. After all, he could so easily have been a passenger on just such an airliner. Never mind that there was no connection between 9-11 and the Iraq War - for someone like Gibson, this is neither here nor there. It's Us versus Them.

And there must always be a Them, because it's only Us that counts, and the only way I can live with my own ugliness is by projecting it on to Them.

Just kill them all, and let God sort out his own.

The tragedy is that so many people think like this.

But no - it's much worse than that. Gibson and Bush think like we ourselves often think.

It's so useful when the C's say point blank that we're all STS.

Gibson and Bush are no doubt psychopaths, with a very tenuous grasp of reality. Psychopaths are a no-turning-back kind of STS - but they nevertheless hold up a mirror to the worst part of ourselves. The part that whispers to us to stop and sleep when we could just as easily carry on with the Work, to hate when we could just as easily seek to understand, to die when we could just as easily go on growing and live.

In that sense the sort of preposterous nonsense that streams from someone like George Bush or John Gibson is of course starkly useful.

It's like they're saying: this is how I think, and of course, this is how you think too.

We can laugh - and probably we should. But it's still so close to the bone.