Don Mclean’s American Pie.
As you listen to and watch this rather miraculous musical achievement by the entire town of Grand Rapids, Michigan, ask yourself, “Is America dead yet?”
Well, this 2012 video assures History that this 1971 requiem for the meaning of Sixties America won’t be lost on future generations.
“Helter-skelter!”
Yup, the dark and the fading light of it.
“Satan laughing with delight the day the music died!”
“The Church bells all were broken!”
And the Holy Trinity?
They’ve left too.
Yet … just maybe … Grand Rapids will live … due to the glory of having made this video!
Please watch it full screen, if you can. The soul of Grand Rapids deserves to take our stages entirely for the length of this song.
Why?
Aside from Grand Rapids’ singular achievement, all of Michigan, Detroit particularly, seems to have been marked for some form of grave.
As Lily Tomlin has said, “I left Detroit when I found out where I was.”
I left it as soon as I possibly could.
I’m in my 71st year now and death, of course, is a daily subject for some form of meditation or other.
However, as this video production emphatically exclaims, the music, despite the song, hasn’t died.
The Pete Seeger dream of the Sixties hasn’t died either, certainly not with a Marxist President of the United States.
In 1971, the year American Pie was released, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS had begun to raise its deadly head and Woodstock was becoming more than just a nostalgic thing of the past. That concert seemed to have become The Last Hurrah of something much different from that of a Boston demagogue.
The Communal Dream of the American Sixties resembled the Communal Dream of French Revolutionaries in 18th Century Europe. It evolved eventually into the romantic entrance of Communism into Czarist Russia.
Once Lenin and Stalin had begun to “clean house,”, as it were, the bloom was off the Red Rose and, if the music didn’t die, it was certainly “transformed,” to use one of this present generation’s magical words, transfigured by the very leaders who had promised to resurrect the Communal feeling of Brotherhood.
Right now the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to sell the same illusion about its intentions in the Middle East.
Does Grand Rapids know all the implications of a ground-breaking video that must, by now, be smashing viewing records?
Remember the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago?
It was, perhaps, the most decisive entrance of Law and Order into the Woodstock Generation that the hippies and poets and literary lights, such as Norman Mailer and France’s Jean Genet, would ever see.
Woodstock was over.
Or was it?
Isn’t American Pie, this video particularly, The Woodstock Reincarnation?
Drugs are poring over into America from the Mexican border and the Obama Nation, dedicated to protect something or other, isn’t doing much about it.
Why?
Woodstock!
Drugs can’t possibly be of any major concern for the American people of a Woodstock Generation and their Progressive New World Order, can they? Our First Lady and her husband must feel that bad eating habits are a profoundly more important concern than what might be invading us from Mexico.
Hmmm … so the drugs and illegal aliens poring over the border aren’t as pressing an issue as American obesity?
Why?
Could it be that those illegal aliens will help to re-elect Barack Obama?
The hopes of the Woodstock Generation and what a Woodstock Reincarnation may exist in Grand Rapids’ heretofore silent majority? Didn’t this video involve at least half of Grand Rapids’ entire population whether they appear before the camera or not?
With repeated viewings it becomes more and more moving!
Why?
The American Dream!!
Neither that nor American music will ever die.
We all know that … but we also know how close to suicide the meaning of America has come. The delirium of acid rock being stared at by hundreds of stoned young in the meadow of Woodstock Nation? This became the Left’s First War Cry for the “Fundamental Transformations of the United States of America.”
Yet when the growing numbers in this Grand Rapids video wave at us out of their American pride?
Or when they proudly join the parade?
Everything American?!
Football, cheerleaders, marching bands … all announcing that “this’ll be the day that I die”?!
Why?
It’s the day the music died?!
All of Grand Rapids literally throbs with American Pie, the APPLE Pie of an American song that everyone knows and everyone sings and everyone celebrates.
Why?
Because the message is not true.
And it never will be true.
The day the music dies in America is when the last flicker of light goes out in the Universe.
I’m particularly amused by the T-Shirt, Get Out of Town!
It’s the title of a song, the lyrics of which are begging and threatening a loved one to “get out of town” before the artist makes a damn fool of himself … he is so much in love with America … and, obviously, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I’ve been watching this love affair between Grand Rapids and the meaning of America for the entire month of June, 2011, and … well … the entire meaning of this love song … tells me that if my hometown of Detroit had created something like this, I might have never left Michigan.
I’m now happier than I’ve ever been and living in a small Canadian village that is most likely half the size of Grand Rapids.
Would-be big city Detroit and the mammoth five boroughs of New York never held the naked simple honesty of heartland America.
The song says: “Lenin read a book on Marx” … on the “day the music died”?!
For me the music began to die the day Marx first shook hands with Friedrich Engels.
The music they created was Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. Check out the music of Lotte Lenya/Kurt Weil and Brecht’s lyrics for Mack The Knife and see if they even approach the depths of irony one can both hear and see in Grand Rapids’ video of American Pie.
Brecht oozes complete Communist, violently smug certainty over the eventual destruction of American Capitalism and the ultimate triumph of Marx over James Madison.
Don Maclean’s American Pie challenges us to believe what his lyrics are asking:
Is America dying?
Is she already dead?
From what his song inspired in Grand Rapids, Michigan?
as of the 2010, midterm elections,
has never been more alive!!
Nor more beautiful!!!