“Think about it: The notional profits of a single corporate project would be enough to provide a hundred days of employment a year at minimum wages (calculated at a weighted average across different states) for 25 million people. That’s five million more than the population of Australia. That is the scale of the horror of neo-liberalism.”
—from Arundhati Roy’s acceptance speech for the Sydney Peace Prize by (from Znet via MeFi).
As reported on At Ease, Thom Yorke is currently reading Alastair McIntosh’s book Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power. McIntosh is a Fellow of the Edinburgh-based Centre for Human Ecology (CHE).
As At Ease reports, Radiohead’s music is now available for download at Tescodownloads.com (go direct to Radiohead). The irony of purchasing Radiohead songs via a grocery store chain is too obvious to warrant comment. Tesco was founded in the UK in 1924, as this page explains.
“They’re getting ready to come in and tell me what for and they walk in and get overwhelmed by the atmosphere, and they say, ‘Man, you’re looking pretty,'” he said. “And therefore you need people to walk in on those days when you’re not looking so good and say, ‘You’re not looking so good, Mr. President.'”
NYTimes.com, November 4, 2004
Ham. Does it not, thinkst thee, stand me now vpon
He that hath kil’d my King and whor’d my Mother,
Popt in betweene th’election and my hopes,
Throwne out his Angle for my proper life,
And with such coozenage; is’t not perfect conscience,
To quit him with this arme? and is’t not to be damn’d,
To let this Canker of our nature come
In further euill?
Now when Squealer described the scene so graphically, it seemed to the animals that they did remember it. At any rate, they remembered that at the critical moment of the battle Snowball had turned to flee.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Move along. There’s nothing left to see. Just a body:
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The third song on Kid A is “The National Anthem.” According to the OED, an anthem (noun) is (third definition): “A song, as of praise or gladness. Also used of the English ‘National’ or ‘Royal Anthem,’ which is technically a hymn,” with a hymn being “An ode or song of praise in honour of a deity, a country.”
“God Save the King” is recognized as the English national anthem, but there is “no authorised version of the National Anthem as the words are a matter of tradition.” The Canadian information page on the royal anthem gives a slightly different history for the song than the English information page above. All accounts note that the song has “has never been proclaimed the national anthem by an Act of Parliament or a Royal Proclamation.” James Thomson’s 1740 ode “Rule, Britannia!” has also functioned as a national anthem, according to Suvir Kaul (1).
Attempting to read Radiohead’s “The National Anthem” as a surrogate anthem, one intended to take the absent national anthem’s place, is problematized by the fact that the basic anthem condition is not filled: the song is not one of praise. Instead, triumphant nationalism is replaced with claustrophobia. Everyone, as the song says, is “so near” and everyone has “got fear.” If a nation’s people can be said to rally around an anthem, the rallying this song envisions is far from positive. Beyond the lyrics, the song’s sonic heterogeneity further troubles any sense of community that an anthem would normally imply: Yorke’s voice sounds metallic, as if it is slicing through the unswerving bass line that is later conquered by the raging, Mingus-like brass section (see Message 121).
Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
