Staying Positive - 4th of July Edition

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

A late happy 4th of July to you and yours.  Above, you'll find the most American song I know.  Mind you, it's not patriotic - quite the opposite, in fact.  Despite the battlefield imagery and the multitude of Civil War references, when the song quotes "The Battle Cry For Freedom", it's dripping in irony.  Titus Andronicus, it seems, feels no great love toward its home nation.  And yet this song, this band, captures perfectly a quintessentially American sense of angst - a sense of being lost and alone in the biggest cities in the world, of being well-educated, angry, and impotent.

Titus Andronicus is a New Jersey punk rock band, and they're simply dripping East Coast iconography.  In this song alone, they namecheck Fenway Park, the Garden State Parkway, and of course Bruce Springsteen.  They are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an American product - born of a highly specific time and place, and frankly impossible anywhere else.  They're also historically minded - The Monitor, their second album and, in my mind, their masterpiece, is essentially a concept album about the Civil War, and being young and lost in modern New Jersey.  And yes, the two have a surprising amount in common.

But as I said before, Titus Andronicus, perhaps as well as any band going right now, captures that prototypical emptiness that so often gets wide-brushed as 'First World Problems'.  They're lost and angry, inheritors of this great tradition that they honestly don't know what to do with.  Listen to the references again - both the Civil War and Bruce Springsteen, Jefferson Davis and the Garden State Parkway.  They're fun, but they're also meaningless - not so much landmarks and guideposts as sights and sounds whizzing by as the car picks up speed, gone after a single instant.  In this modern age, the most dangerous thing is excess; we are inundated with information, with cargo, with people and places and names and things.  It's easy for things to get lost in the shuffle.  How, then do we define what's important?  How do we cut a path for ourselves?  How do we make ourselves heard when there's so many voices shouting?

I sense the enemy, they're rustling around in the trees

I thought I had gotten away but they followed me to 02143

....

None of us shall be saved, every man will be a slave

The slavery mentioned here is, of course, the central metaphor of the song, and the album as a whole.  It's the point on which the entire Civil War/Modern New Jersey concept turns.  He's talking about slavery as it existed in 19th Century American South, and the war fought to end it.  But he's also talking about the same slavery David Foster Wallace was so fond of mentioning - the slavery we keep ourselves in, slaves to our own base impulses, to the rat race, to going through life unconscious and uncaring.  The modern parallel to the Civil War, then, is just that - a war with ourselves, a war inside ourselves.  It's a war within our own heads, fought to keep us aware and active and fundamentally alive.

  Are these 'First World Problems'?  Of course.  There's people in the world starving and dying, who are worse off than we are, or will ever be.  But when I wake up every morning and feel hollow inside, my mind doesn't immediately jump to "It could be worse."  It jumps to, "Why do I feel this way?  How do I make it stop?"  This is, for better or worse, the American condition as we plunge headfirst into a new century - it is a quintessential American Sadness.