In reaction to my deep dismay at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I remembered a song I wrote a while back called ‘Truth is a Refugee’, about wars, and truth. Just piano and vox. And I did my very best to bring it back, and made a recording on Saturday (special thanks to rj fleck for loaning me his beautiful piano studio with its beautiful Beckstein!) of my best effort. It’s far from skilled, but I hope it gets the message across.
[lyrics below]
I wrote this song close to 20 years ago.
Nothing much has changed.
The lyrics – which are about power struggles, and war, and dominance, and their relationship to ‘truth’ – are all just as relevant as they were then, and possibly back through a few thousand years of human history.
The song opens with a reference to ‘Queens and Kings, and Popes and Crusades’.
I’m realising that I likely wrote this about the same time that the US was invading Iraq, which occurred about nine months after Pope John Paul’s visit to Toronto where I was surprised by the huge turnout of youth. While we don’t have so many ‘Queens and Kings’ now in the literal sense and the current Pope has a more generous take on the diversity of human life, we do have them symbolically in leaders who are autocratic, in political families who are like aristocrats, and in religious and political leaders who seem to view themselves as ‘infallible’, and in crowds who follow them.
The chorus through every verse is just about the endless chain of violence of ‘people killing people, because they killed people’. The endless chain of vengeance. It’s also about killing people because they’re ‘worshiping the wrong idols’. Which is a little twist, because there are no ‘right’ idols. An idol – whether it’s capitalism or communism, a free market or state control, Jesus or Mohamet or Buddha, or the Holy Grail or the Wailing Wall or Mecca or Wall Street, or alcohol or cocaine or methamphetamine or fentanyl, or money or power – is really no different than an addiction. Treated as an end in itself it’s a wall to love and truth. Understood and treated with harrowing humility, and seen not as an end in itself but a finger pointing beyond itself, an idol can be a gateway to love and truth. But idols very easily become strategies of evading truth and love, and are distorted and manipulated into rationales for polarisation, xenophobia, hatred and war.
Most wars seem to be about people who worship one idol killing people because they’re not worshiping the same idol; they’re worshiping the wrong idol. They’re glued to the wrong news stations, they’re indoctrinated in the wrong interpretations (Protestant/Catholic, Sunni/Shia, Lenin/Trotsky, Republican/Democrat).
Truth.
What is that?
Where is that?
When is that?
I’m convinced that getting a bearing on what truth might be requires a divestment of the comfort of idols. An exceedingly radical humility, and an exceeding capacity for deep listening. Essentially an ‘enlightenment’ project which radically challenges most of the ego projects that are intrinsic to our desires. The revelation of truth seems to be a journey counter to many of our most basic, deep-rooted, cravings for status and security. Weapons drive it away, overconfidence in knowledge (and the loss of curiosity that accompanies that) drives it away, and truth can never be owned… ever… by anyone, or any institution…
Wars, and the rationales for wars.
The desires for empire and the conquests and crusades that follow those desires, the cravings for possession and superiority, the power plays, the gross proliferation of lies, the inevitable dynamic of the mirroring of one warring faction against another, the build-ups, and the dehumanisation and demonization of people who are really just the same people; frightened, misinformed, angry. The floods of propaganda, the rousing of the young men for cannon fodder, the cannons, the slaughter, the trauma, win or lose, all in the name of a nation, a tribe, a gang, a religion, a faction, a political ideology, all in the name of power and profit; all in the name of idols.
People kill and die for their idols, desiring them and believing in them even more than life or love or truth.
And in the fog of war truth slips away, out of the war zone, an impoverished refugee, a constant homeless nomad, seeking temporal shelters where there is the measure of humility, the kindness, the forgiveness, and the radical acceptance – the love – for it to re-emerge. Such ‘shelters’ are rare… but they do exist… and always have… and, I have faith, always will…
Truth is a Refugee
Queens and Kings and Popes and Crusades,
does anything, anything ever change.
People killing people ’cause they kill people,
they’re worshipping the wrong idols so we’ll topple their steeples.
They’re drawing the wrong conclusions
based on the wrong false delusions.
Racists, evangelists and Nation-States
Zealots praying for the final days.
People killing people ’cause they kill people,
they’re worshipping the wrong idols so we’ll topple their steeples.
They’re glued to the wrong news station,
indoctrinated in the wrong interpretation.
Truth is such a fleeting thing,
you’ll never catch it with your weapons,
you’ll never catch it with your convictions.
It always evades those who
claim it as their own
it always evades those who
think they know it all
it always evades those whose desires are too grandiose.
Maneouvering, build-ups and power plays,
Armies engaging in mutual aid.
People killing people ’cause they kill people,
They’re worshipping the wrong idols so we’ll topple their steeples.
Sucking on the wrong tit,
strung out on the wrong string of bullshit.
Bronze, Gold, Oil whatever’s the going rate,
Convince the fools to fight then we’ll make it pay
People killing people ’cause they kill people,
They’re worshipping the wrong idols so we’ll topple their steeples,
Hooked to the wrong pray station,
Rooting for the wrong myth of creation.
Truth is such a fleeting thing,
you’ll never catch it with your weapons,
you’ll never catch it with your convictions.
It always evades those who
claim it as their own
it always evades those who
think they know it all
it always evades those whose desires are too grandiose.
Truth is just a refugee
on the run from both armies,
she’s long gone by the time the war is won.