Unprincipled Principals

Song 453: This week the playlist features Lives in the Balance by Jackson Browne, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. A couple of years ago, I  created a Spotify playlist called Dave Elder's Favorite Anti-war Songs (which you can hear by clicking on the title), mainly as a showcase for If I Was You, and recently I started asking people on Facebook for suggestions to add to that collection. Someone mentioned this cut, which is the title track for Jackson's 1986 release, and it grabbed me on the first spin. I had been a big Browne fan during the 1970s, often learning to sing and play his new material very soon after release dates, but I lost track of him during the 1980s, and this tune makes it clear to me that I have some catching up to do. Interestingly enough, I wrote If I Was You in reaction to Reagan's early moves to try to start an over-the-top war with Nicaragua, and Jackson evidently wrote this piece in reaction to Reagan's covert Contra war on Nicaragua, though, as the YT video makes quite clear, the words here could well apply to W's Iraq invasion, like other times where a government lies to a people and a country is drifting to war. So, knowing that they sell us our clothes and our cars, they sell us everything from youth to religion the same time they sell us our wars, like Mr. Browne, I too want to know who the men in the shadows are and I want to hear somebody asking them why they can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are but they're never the ones to fight or to die.