entirely safe and fun

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh criticizes Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold’s article in Time (itself railing quite incoherently about the civilian leadership in the Iraq war), in which Newbold says:

In 1971, the rock group The Who released the antiwar anthem Won’t Get Fooled Again [sic]. To most in my generation, the song conveyed a sense of betrayal by the nation’s leaders, who had led our country into a costly and unnecessary war in Vietnam. To those of us who were truly counterculture–who became career members of the military during those rough times–the song conveyed a very different message. To us, its lyrics evoked a feeling that we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it.

Cavanaugh snarkily observes that “there’s no foreign policy question that can’t be solved by considering the lyrics of The Who.” Fair enough.

The things I’m still boggling over are Newbold’s two alternative interpretations for the lyrics, both of which are so wide of the mark as to beggar mere correction. The thrust of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is that every political system is, at its teleological bottom, the same: just a mechanism of control, run by the people who are best at accumulating and retaining power, to serve their own ends. True-believer partisans of the old or the new order who figure that they’ve made some fundamental change or suffered some fundamental loss have missed the point, been fooled. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Newbold wins teh priz0r when he wraps up his paragraph with the following nugget: “It’s 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.” But The Who don’t say that we won’t get fooled again - on the contrary, they suggest we “get down on our knees and pray / we don’t get fooled again,” because that’s exactly what just happened. And they had it right. We will be fooled again, and be ready to believe again, and be fooled again, in some sort of horrible Nietzschean cycle of Eternal Recurrence where every possible ideology has its day in the “sun”.

Someone should probably enlighten the producers of CSI: Miami.