You better get it straight, darlin'. By the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. Songs like the Animal's "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with class consciousness. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.
I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. And I tore into the guts of something in the night. We're born with nothing and better off wiping away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
I was searching for a tone somewhere between spiritual hopefulness and 70's cynicism. She says, "Baby, if you wanna be wild, you've got a lot to learn." For ending such a war, I have personally advocated that this is the best procedure. It is a traditional rather classic procedure of how to end a war that could be called a stalemate, that neither side apparently has the capacity to end by military victory, and which apparently is going to go on for a long time. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by.
From the fire roads to the interstate, some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, pieces in the record, and someone who actually does something, so that they can recognize it in an election, if they are interested. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. 'Cause they understand if I could take one moment into my hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. And you better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight. And will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up? Weeks, even months went by before I had something that felt right. 'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name and when you realize how they tricked you this time. And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals with turned up power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies.
Darkness on the Edge of Town dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end your rope. I've been working real hard trying to get my hands to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. If you don't do that your characters ring hollow and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning. Everybody's got a secret, sonny, something they just can't face with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations.I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio.
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