ANOTHER BRICK IN … SOMETHING
It was an
epiphany of sorts, and about as unsettling as they usually are. There I was,
driving along, somewhere south of the last town, and Pink Floyd shuffled their
way into my consciousness. I never really got into The Wall. Perhaps there
comes a time when angsty anti-establishmentism becomes a bit sort of pubescent,
really. Maybe.
Unless you’re
Roger Waters. He stayed angsty, writing songs against the establishment. Good
songs, too. But for most of us the fire goes out, somewhere around that moment
when our first child comes along, and well, mouths to feed, houses to roof.
Still, “Another
Brick in the Wall (Part II)” is one of those songs I couldn’t ignore, even if
like most people I ignored the album. Dark Side of the Moon, yeah. The
Wall? Yeah nah. Life’s too short. But the song? Margaret Thatcher hated it,
so that sold it to me. I’ve loved it ever since.
On this occasion
it broke through something of a dwaal. That’s a
lovely Afrikaans word that will have to be translated by the weaker “daydream”
I guess. But you know … as the kids from
Islington Green School chanted the chorus, “Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone”
I came back from my dwaal and heard the tail of the song as if for the
first time, somewhere south of the last town.
“Wrong, do
it again!” yells a teacher, exemplifying, with the slight sneer in his voice,
the “dark sarcasm” berated in the body of the song. I winced a little. I didn’t
hear those sneers too often, but they were there in the psyches of the Masters
of my childhood. “Wrong. Do it again,” and the thwack of whatever weapon came
to hand across my butt remains a sound indelibly etched in my consciousness.
Wrong. Do it again. Thwack. Hockey stick, sandal, slipper, coal shovel, whatever.
But it was
as the voice started expanding its owner’s logic in naked fury that I realized my
own footprints in the story. “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any
pudding.” It was an order I recalled from those hard days in a bleak boarding
school – though it was more likely to be the limp, dead silver beet that I was
being forced to eat. “If you don’t eat your vegetables you can’t eat
your pudding” doesn’t scan so well, and I don’t recall the abbreviation “veggies”
doing the rounds back then. Not proper, you know.
But the
harsh cry of the dislocated, spaceless, timeless voice doesn’t stop there. “How
can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”
It is the
cry of a man whose universe is crumbling. For him there was an indisputable
logic in his summation of the situation. No meat, no pud. How could it be
otherwise? No water, no swim. No air, no breathe.
But to the
kids his frantic cry was nonsense. He was just another brick in the wall,
holding them captive, incarcerated in old dreams that had died a long overdue
death. “Screw your meat” – or veggies, whatever. And I had been one of them (not
in Islington, admittedly). I had hated what I saw to be the phony values of the
generation before me. No marriage no sex. No military service no citizenship. No
bombs no peace. How can you have any peace if you don’t manufacture your bombs?
The man’s
voice faded away. His eternal truths were crumbling. If the song had been Lord
of the Flies the kids would have overthrown him, torn him limb from limb.
And I was a shit of a kid. I would have mocked him mercilessly as the crowd advanced
and the wall began to crumble. All in all you’re just another brick in the
wall.
It was
wrong and it was right. Perhaps now I’d try to find the compassion to love the
poor man whose world was crumbling. But I doubt it. I fear I would have been a
part of the fickle, angry, hate-fuelled crowd. I still recall with horror a
geography teacher fleeing our class in tears. Another brick in the wall.
Perhaps I
might even have been Alt-Right. I hope not. But I wonder: my psyche dwelt in
furious places. I was never brave; even now when I hope I’ve found
something like compassion I’m not sure I would exercise it when push came to
shove, and the realities of yesterday’s hero began to crumble. All have sinned
and fall short. Welcome to Lent.
