Just about finished a first careful reading of Patti Smith's Just Kids (2010). This one's a keeper even for a small book collection.
Meanwhile, given the revolutionary events in Egypt, here's a snippet from "People Have the Power" by Patti Smith (and Fred Sonic Smith) from the 1988 album, Dream of Life:
The power to dream to rule
To wrestle the world from fools
It's decreed the people rule . . .
We have the power
People have the power.
Today's Rune: Joy.
2 comments:
I love Fridays if only for the fact that I have a rarity-- my home to myself. No kids, no wife home (usually). About 45 minutes after Mubarak wised up and resigned, Little Steven's Underground Garage played "People Have the Power." The deejay was the old Cleveland deejay "Kid Leo," and I'm pretty certain that the shows are prerecorded; as my best friend Jim pointed out, this was just sychronicity.
I mentioned on Facebook that my master's thesis was on Gamel Nassar, the first president of Egypt. It was based on the fact that while often the military is the impediment to democracy in developing countries, in many cases it is a bulwark of democracies. In Portugal, it was young military officers who were returning from the brutal and pointless colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique, who overthrew the Salazar government. In Ghana, the military overthrew the government in the late sixties and returned power to civilians, if only because they realized that they weren't equipped to govern. The upshot is that often the military is the only educated and organized institution in societies.
Hey, thanks man! Synchronicity is cool~ Totally agree on the role the army class can play and has played in the best cases. May also be why no crowd-killing bombs in Egypt during the mass rallies.
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