What do George W. Bush and Godspeed You! Black Emperor Have In Common?

A few days ago, I went, for work, to a Veterans Day luncheon, which is common for local papers to do. Little else is happening on Veterans Day and veterans rightly deserve to have a few days per year reserved for their veneration. The generally eloquent keynote speaker, a brigadier general in the National Guard, said something particularly interesting. While talking about the Iraq War and why he thinks the Iraqi public would ultimately broadly support it, he nearly -- and, I assume, unintentionally -- quoted the last line in the liner notes to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's 2000 record, "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!": "What does anyone want but to feel a little more free?"

This thought has stayed with me long after I stopped listening to the record, which was a few years ago. It's so poignantly elemental and so true. Really, What does anyone want but to feel a little more free? The great irony of it, I always thought, is it actually sounds like something that could've come from President Bush 43's lips when justifying the war. On one side, a socialist anarchist, all-instrumental collective from Montreal that prefers to perform in the shadows and to avoid all interviews (and, apparently, dissolved); on the other, possibly the U.S.'s most conservative president ever who prefers to avoid all complicated (intelligent?) thought. And yet, there is no way they wouldn't agree with that idea. I suppose it's funny, with a tinge of sadness, how in life, in politics, we share the most elemental ends -- who doesn't want good schools? safe streets? the ability to vote for your political leaders?-- but have this unbridgeable chasm in the means that always pushes us apart.