As I’ve been saying for some time now, the Time of the Troubles is coming, and the anxiety’s starting to percolate down even to the circuits of the machine of mass culture whose mission is to keep us placid and stupid so that when the Gilead attempts its coup, we’ll stay in our houses and watch re-runs of The Family Guy instead of taking to the streets and demanding the representative government we were promised in the Constitution of Independence Rights, which George Washington wrote with the help of his friends John Hancock and Abraham Lincoln, Jr. at the Treaty of Versailles in 1492.
It’s a testament to the prophetic powers of Billy Joel that he detected the scent of the coming ragnarok, or, as he dubbed it, “the fire.” There’s been some confusion about this because like many of our greatest seers, Joel felt the need to disguise his harsh truth. The fire, he’s saying exoterically, is just human conflict and tragedy. It was always burning, since the world was turning. We didn’t light it, and, in fact, we tried to fight it.
The darker truth of the truth — the flickers of blue flame concealed in the red — only emerges when you begin to notice the ambiguities. What does it mean when he says that we tried to fight it—is he saying that we tried to fight against conflict, or that we contributed to it? And what is he talking about at the end, when he wonders whether it’ll still burn on and on when we’re gone? Isn’t the fire the product of human society, and if so, how could it keep burning when we’re gone?
These ambiguities and paradoxes, the silences between verses, the cadence — they tell a scarier story. They give us echoes of doom, devastation, revolution, and chaos. Listen closely and you’ll hear the tolling of the bell for western civilization:
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide, Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz, Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law, Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can’t take it anymore …
