Of the three songs that have adhered to each other in my mind in this past while: Ooby Dooby, Hokey Pokey, and The Locomotion, the last evokes the greatest complexity of imagination. I knew it in my youth and no doubt danced to it, summer night skies, loud speakers, macadam, girls, but when I heard it driving to work one morning it lifted me up in ways I could not have known when young.
I became one among many dancing in the streets of Detroit stirring up the ashes of dashed hopes, breathing them in, tasting the bitter joke of unkept promises, and laughing at it because the spirit of man cannot be crippled by misfortune or controlled by corporate exploitation. They stuff our mouths with death, they use us and toss us aside, yet we dance. Joyful and defiant we celebrate what we are, what they can never be: human.
In a life grown complex, in an America where big is beautiful and small is fodder for the Corporopolitical machine the hungers of humanity are a nuisance that must be demonized by Religiocorporate puppets who have sold their conscience for cash. Passion has become a dirty word. But I forget myself and have fallen into a Marxist rant remembered, unbidden, from those days in the late sixties when I believed in movements.
Experience quickly made it clear to me that institutions are inherently inhuman, that those gathered under a banner or a flag abandon reason, reflection, and compassion. It matters little whether you call it "The Movement" as we did back then or you call it Evangelical Christianity the goals are the same: destroy all that does not agree with it. It is that part of us that will give rise to a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Pope Gregory IX. It is the abrogation of our own humanity, replacing our personal passions with institutional imperatives, becoming a part of the beast of the machine.
But the truth is none of these subsequent reflections were a part of the experience of The Locomotion in my car on the way to work. No, there was no politics in it, there was only the longing to dance like a fool in the streets, to be with others celebrating life.
I became one among many dancing in the streets of Detroit stirring up the ashes of dashed hopes, breathing them in, tasting the bitter joke of unkept promises, and laughing at it because the spirit of man cannot be crippled by misfortune or controlled by corporate exploitation. They stuff our mouths with death, they use us and toss us aside, yet we dance. Joyful and defiant we celebrate what we are, what they can never be: human.
In a life grown complex, in an America where big is beautiful and small is fodder for the Corporopolitical machine the hungers of humanity are a nuisance that must be demonized by Religiocorporate puppets who have sold their conscience for cash. Passion has become a dirty word. But I forget myself and have fallen into a Marxist rant remembered, unbidden, from those days in the late sixties when I believed in movements.
Experience quickly made it clear to me that institutions are inherently inhuman, that those gathered under a banner or a flag abandon reason, reflection, and compassion. It matters little whether you call it "The Movement" as we did back then or you call it Evangelical Christianity the goals are the same: destroy all that does not agree with it. It is that part of us that will give rise to a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Pope Gregory IX. It is the abrogation of our own humanity, replacing our personal passions with institutional imperatives, becoming a part of the beast of the machine.
But the truth is none of these subsequent reflections were a part of the experience of The Locomotion in my car on the way to work. No, there was no politics in it, there was only the longing to dance like a fool in the streets, to be with others celebrating life.
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