While I love to take the opportunity to introduce interesting music as a means of exploring history and culture, this post isn’t really about The Talking Heads masterpiece, “Once in a Lifetime” (perhaps made most famous by the video at the end of this post).
It’s more about what I’m hearing in this song when I look at the world today.
“Once in a Lifetime” was released nearly 40 years ago on the 1980 album Remain in Light. Lead singer David Byrne and cowriter Brian Eno have always seemed to have a deep and thoughtful fascination with the spiritual. Their collaboration on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) is an entire experience peppered with that theme and you will find some…very interesting songs if you give it a listen.
But while “Once in a Lifetime’s” lyrics were inspired by televangelists of the ‘70s, they easily hint at the trap of how we present ourselves today.
“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”
It hits all of the major myths of American “affluence” – exotic travel, expensive car, beautiful house, beautiful wife.
But are we really there?
Let’s face it – a public persona is never going to get anywhere if you aren’t unique in some way. But it’s worse than that. Hot takes and wild stunts on video are a dime a dozen that are literally staged every day. Andy Warhol wasn’t far off with his “15 minutes of fame” quote, but in today’s environment, there are far too many people competing for those 15 minutes that “unique” is nowhere close enough. Trust me, the Kardashians are not the norm, but they seem to have set the standard. They and the rest of the “reality” TV world, so much so that…well, look at who we have in the White House.
But this is anything but reality. And we should know better.
Unfortunately there is no shortage of asininery out there in America and the Lords of our Demogogcracy are always willing to draw from the worst in order to bolster their positions (with the added amplification of outsiders who gleefully stir the pot). The pattern is well-established: a single (or limited), obscure incident(s) where an idiot is captured on camera (easy enough to find these days with the ubiquity of video), picked up by a “major” player in social media and held up as the common actions of “those guys,” and there you have it. It rattles around in the social consciousness and becomes some twisted form of our “reality.”
Except it isn’t. It’s not how the overwhelming majority of people really are.
“And you may ask yourself, ‘How do I work this?’
And you may ask yourself, ‘Where is that large automobile?’
And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house!’
And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife!’
It’s an interesting study for sure. People on the one side convinced that a large portion of our population are lazy criminals. People on the other convinced that a large portion of our population are redneck hicks. And all of it gladly reinforced by select tellings of the story that best reinforce whatever position your side supports.
It just isn’t true. “People of Walmart” can be weird, but when you walk through most any such store, populated at any one moment by a cross-section of hundreds if not thousands of our American neighbors, you’d be hard-pressed in ten-thousand visits to find a man in flip-flops and a star-spangled thong.
We’re all just…normal. We love spending time with friends. We love our families and churches and clubs and we love each other generally, even if we lose patience at times. We eat at McDonalds and Applebees. We’re definitely not jetsetters driving Jaguars to the Gucci store for $700 t-shirts. Very, very few people are!
Sadly, too many people are buying into the myth. Those who are paying too much attention to the worst representations of our culture for their own good – the ones who hang on every word of the professional “unique of the unique” – are being whipped into a frenzy. And frenzies make for easy manipulation.
My only advice is to step outside of it all and look back in (if you even care to). The few times I’ve done that since leaving social media I’ve noticed a clarity. My thoughts are still mildly influenced by those with whom I associated prior to logging off, but more and more I find myself able to step back and say to myself, “that man is full of…poop.”
We can’t keep this up. If the past few years are any indication of our future trajectory, that future just can’t be pretty, no matter who wins the upcoming election. The real question is, can we recover, or will it be the “same as it ever was?”
“You may ask yourself, ‘What is that beautiful house?’
You may ask yourself, ‘Where does that highway go to?’
And you may ask yourself, ‘Am I right? Am I wrong?’
And you may say yourself, ‘My God! What have I done?’”
Good question.
Do yourself a favor and watch this anyway…