“2014: Or, The Year of Unmerited Self-Congratulation” Week 13: Nobody Suffers But Us, from _Patriot Acts_ (EP, 2004) One of the things that frustrated me most in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was the notion that the pain inflicted on Americans (the non-American-ness of many victims of 9/11 was often simply omitted) and on American soil was somehow unique in history. There was a sense that our country had been attacked in a way more brutal and more surprising and more underhanded than any other country or people had ever been attacked. To be sure, the 9/11 attacks were brutal, generally surprising, and underhanded. Despite this, we were not the only people to have suffered such violence, in the history of the world, and as I wrote this song a coalition our president had put together was waging war in Iraq in a way that was seeing a lot of collateral damage. Civilians were dying over there, just like they had died on 9/11 here, and yet so much of the rhetoric on TV and radio and in the newspapers made it sound like our pain and our loss mattered so much more than anybody else’s. This really began to bother me. (https://iraqbodycount.org/) I realize now that this is a dangerous moral ground to inhabit, because it enables all sorts of justifications for inflicting damages, especially when those damages appear to go against your country’s own founding principles (injunctions against torture, unlimited incarceration without due process, etc.) or later international agreements (the Geneva Convention, etc.). A lot of people no longer seemed concerned about that, though, and that concerned me. I felt that the fear of immanent danger was causing us to erode principles in a way that Bin Laden never could have done himself. (More on this idea later, when I discuss “What Our Children Is Learning.”) I knew how much things had changed when, one day, I was discussing Guantánamo Bay with my mother. I mentioned an article I had read suggesting the likelihood that the camp itself represented an immoral circumvention of international and possibly also American law; that there were rumors of torture going on there and elsewhere; and that there were likely innocent men who had been scooped up by our own intelligence services who would never get a fair trial and would instead rot in prison for a crime they might have been wholly uninvolved in. (All of these later turned out to be true.) Her response was, “I don’t care. If it makes us safer, I don’t care.” Now, anyone who knows my mother knows her to be a genuinely kind and extraordinarily sympathetic person. Yet she was reflecting what I sensed was a general and growing attitude in the States at the time: that it was okay to curtail the freedoms of Muslim others—and perhaps even our own freedoms—if it made us feel a little safer. It was a remark she had made in momentary frustration while talking to me, and so it’s probably unfair that I stuck it into this song, but this was the best way I knew to chart the shift in opinion in the States that my song was about. It was also what actually happened, and as a songwriter I like to write what actually happened… The lighthearted music, paired with these dark lyrics, was meant to be ironic, which is probably a perilous game to play when talking about mass casualties, and I’m not sure how I feel about it now. I adapted the lines of a spiritual (“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Knows_the_Trouble_I%27ve_Seen) as an overstated and additionally ironic comment on our ability to forget the sufferings of others; I was trying to link the brutality of slavery in the nineteenth century with the curtailing of Civil Rights in the twentieth century and the curtailing of Civil Rights in the War on Terror in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and I altered the lyrics to emphasize the manner in which religion often seemed offered as a justification for such brutality. I’m also not sure how I feel now about that lyrical move, but there it is. Over the life of this song, the numbers changed, too. The casualty counts in the final verse, of 3,000 dead on 9/11, I had initially written as 5,000, which is I think how they were initially reported before the numbers were revised downward. And the notion of “10,000 dead in Iraq” is now impossible to take seriously. One study cited a number closer to 100,000, and that was still early in the aftermath. But then, nobody suffers but us. On this track, Eric Kvortek recorded the acoustic guitar and all of the vocals (my main vocal and then I think four additional harmony parts that I sang) at The Gasworks in East Brunswick, NJ. I recorded the percussion parts on a cardboard box and with some keyboard samples at home. This song might probably contain the most hit-or-miss singing on the CD or on any of my CDs when it comes to being on key…sorry, but I’m all over the place when it comes to the notes on this one! (On the plus side, no Auto-Tune, amiright?) But it also contains my first foray into clumsily trying to write big Beach Boys-style harmonies (at 1:10) to layer behind the main vocals. I would later do this on a few future tracks, like “Two Wrongs” and “When I Was Young I Never Wanted the Sun.” You can listen to or buy “Nobody Suffers But Us” here: geoffbaker.bandcamp/track/nobody-suffers-but-us or buy it here: cdbaby/cd/gbaker2 or listen to it here: https://play.spotify/album/11NkhCyifcwXhujGRXy4M3 To buy the whole CD, go here, click on “store”: geoff-baker/ Or here: geoffbaker.bandcamp/album/patriot-acts Or here: cdbaby/cd/gbaker2
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 18:26:04 +0000
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