Timothy Travis ([email protected])
Fri, 3 Jul 1998 14:27:13 -0400
This is my first post in many months. I've been busy, but have enjoyed
(usually) reading everyone's letters.
I just had to comment, though, about this song, and the confusion
surrounding some of the phrases.
"It's the cops collecting for the cons" means that the police (the authority
figures, if you will) are as corrupt as the criminals (the cons) that they
are supposed to be protecting the public from. This may, or may not, be
also a comment directed at the leaders in certain countries, who preach a
message of peace but practice something else.
Then, one of my "favorite" lines from the song, "the next minute you're
blowing a fuse, and the cartoon network turns into the news." To help
explain this line, there was an article I read recently in the news about a
man who killed his twin children (I think they were around the age of 6)
because they were too slow at getting ready for day-care. He had gone and
gotten a sledge-hammer and had beaten them. Very tragic, but it illustrates
the way many people seem to be reacting lately. It's almost as though there
is an surrealness to life; that we really are in a cartoon, Loony Tune,
world where we can blow someone up with a bomb, or run them over with a car,
and they will get up in the next scene and be fine. That's when the cartoon
network turns into the news.
This whole song, the whole theme, seems to be about the abuse of the
innocent. "The blind" -- and there are none more blind than those who will
not see -- leading "the blonde" -- the innocent, naive ones. In the song,
Bono is crying out for God to send His angels, especially his guardian
angels, to protect them.
I think that this theme is tied in with the line in Please, where he is
describing a scene of violence in Ireland, where a girl has been killed by a
car bombing. Where as, Please is written in anger and pain, possibly even
from the viewpoint of the grieving father, IGWSHA is written from the pov of
the bewildered, questioning spectator. (Could this be why U2 released SBS
live with the IGWSHA single?)
Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.
Timothy Travis
[email protected]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Jul 03 1998 - 11:30:05 PDT