When Old Sounds New

One of the great pleasures of listening to music for me is the unpredictable sparks sometimes generated by rubbing something well-worn up against the present. Frequently it's a matter of lyrics seeming more apropos than ever or taking on wholly new meanings. A simple example would be Don Henley's phrase "this tired old man that we elected king" ("End of the Innocence"). I've favored that song for years, but it's moved up a few notches in my mental playlist lately. Of course that particular example demonstrates that this pleasure can have a certain bittersweet quality to it - a cynic might even use this example to improvise in the direction of losing innocence over and over again. And it hardly needs pointing out that a primary fresh nuance has to do with the multitude of serious questions about that "elected" part this time around.

Changing scale, I had a chance the other day to be blown away again by Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On." A disk with some serious shelf life, that one. It resonates with me more than ever, both words and music. I have the vague sense that on release it was somewhat of an anomaly, leaving many unsure what to make of it. Now it seems like a terrific inevitable gift, able to create its own context.

And finally, changing media and stretching this theme rather seriously, if you've not yet done so I urge you to attend to the speeches by Senator Robert Byrd in the last week on the Rice and Gonzales nominations. The connection to this post is the grounding of Byrd's opinions in long-established law and tradition, including citations of the Constitution and Federalist Papers. Some of it seems so novel in this age of fun-house mirrors as to resemble an emergence from a fit of amnesia. In the context of all the events of the past four years it is boggling how much dissonance can be set off by a treatise on the balance of powers or any number of other fundamental principles embraced by those wily Founders.

And, bringing it all back home (so to speak), in discussing recent executive overreaching, the Gonzales text refers to "A President placing himself above the law, in effect, crowning himself King."

I think I feel a Tea Party coming on!