Dick Cheney's Entrance Music

Mind if I blow my own horn, a little? In April 2008, I contributed this column to The Tyee's Music Picks about the Howlin' Rain album, Magnificent Fiend, writing, "Food shortages, peak oil, climate change, incomprehensible wars and rising chaos in the New World... it really seems as though trouble arrived in earnest with the 21st century."

The piece was linked to the first single from Magnificent Fiend, a beefy, hard rock throwdown drenched in '70s mud and doomy new millennium super-angst called "Dancers at the End of Time."

Notwithstanding that I've developed a real knack for either finding or imagining an apocalyptic subtext to basically everything, especially kid's movies -- or that my brain is prone, as one visitor to the Tyee beefed, "to seek and find Jungian synchronicities" -- I gotta confess to an attack of the flutters when I saw this video of ol' Dick Cheney striding out to a hero's welcome at the Conservative Political Action Conference a few weeks ago -- to the monster strains of "Dancers at the End of Time," no less. Talk about trouble arriving!

Imagine if some invisible psycho-surgeon reached into your brain and gave your pineal gland a cheeky little pinch. That was my initial feeling. Then I barfed. Once I got past all that, I patted myself on the back for my prescience. Because Big Dick is your poster boy for "food shortages, peak oil, climate change, incomprehensible wars and rising chaos in the New World," especially the "peak oil" and "incomprehensible wars" part, if you've been following this guy's notes. Or even if you haven't. Really, Cheney should have made the cover of Magnificent Fiend.

There's a side-issue to this, and that's my dismay at finding that some reptilian-brained thug at CPAC likes the same music as me, maybe even the Penguin himself. It's also not entirely surprising since it's not like taste can be divided along ideological lines (even if it should). Plus, there's a long and proud history of crypto-fascist nutcases co-opting popular culture to support the cause, not to mention all the inexplicably still-popular, pseudo-progressives doing the same thing.

But it still chafes.

Meanwhile, I'm not deaf to the complexity of the issue. Popular music isn't the preserve of the right-minded, or Us (as opposed to Them). But if you were raised inside the gauzy, hegemonic myth of the '60s as some kind of binary standoff between the peaceniks and the generals, with the dust settling into separate and well-defined camps in the '70s, then at some point you have to confront the fact that a Doobie Brother currently works as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense. And hey, maybe he did back then. During his off hours, say. In secret, perhaps. (C'mon, I can speculate!)

In a 1971 radio broadcast, the late, great American researcher Mae Brussell talked about the destruction of the counter culture by spooks and agents provocateurs, telling the story of a strange man who moved to her neighbourhood. "He was dressed as a hippie, but he wasn't a hippie," she says. "A non-hippie from Texas, he lived here for about one or two years, walking down the coast, going to the music scene."

Eventually, she says, he wrote a book lamenting that the flower children had descended into violence -- something that didn't exactly jibe with Brussell's or anybody else's impression. She continues, "He is now at the Navy post-graduate school. He's Navy. He had to be Navy Intelligence. How did he get into the Navy post-graduate school if his undergraduate school was being a hippie on Big Sur road, walking back and forth on the highway?" (She goes on to add a provocative bit about Jack Ruby's lawyer Mel Belli organizing the Stones' "era-ending" Altamont Speedway concert.)

Brussell helped pioneer a line of thought that wonders if a genuinely popular protest movement was undone by covert action, and driven to despair and indolence by state-sponsored domestic assassinations and CIA drugs. I have no problem assuming that something as powerful and influential as the entertainment industry was simultaneously commandeered to re-wire the dissident impulse into a safe commodity.

Forty years later, we live in a world where fake history is taught by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Forrest Gump, and the world swoons at the sight of a corporate White House using corporate entertainment to massage a tawdry and insincere happy ending out of the body politic. It's just not healthy, people. Look at how we're all hating ourselves in the morning.

Dick Cheney ruining Howlin' Rain for me, meanwhile -- that's just a horrible happenstance that I'm forced to live with. There's no plot there. But I'll take the opportunity to post a failsafe blast of unsullied mid '70s rock that's far too obscure and righteously freaky for some genocidal pacemaker-on-legs and his braying pack of brown shirts to hijack from my record collection. In other words, you're forcing me to go deep, deep, deep underground, Dick.

And here I'll stay. Unless I tune into CNN in the near future and there's Sarah Palin announcing her bid for the presidency to a soundtrack of Stonewall's "Right On," from its way-under-the-radar 1976 Stoner album. If that happens, then the gloves are off and I'll be switching to a pure diet of Crass and Woody Guthrie.