Here are lyrics to a song I posted on an old journal of mine. The song is by a remarkable band that recently reunited. They had a few singles years back with “Eye of Fatima” and “Take the Skinheads Bowling” (revived more recently by it’s use in Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine). The lyrics truly speak for themselves and the ironic tone and message are most certainly appropriate at the very moment we are in right now.

“Might Makes Right”
by Camper Van Beethoven

I’m crawling through the brush, we’re teched up to the hilt
Compared to us these poor guys should be wearing shorts and kilts
I’ve got a living breathing shadow crossed up in my scope
My partner gives the signal, pull the trigger, then there’s smoke

Might makes right
Yeah might makes right
I guess that God is on our side and makes us mighty
Yeah might makes right
Yeah might makes right
They say that God is on our side I don’t believe them

They want us from the villages, they want us from the towns
Who could really blame them, shit blows up when we’re around
We fly above their houses with our Huey double-props
We scare the crap out of their kids, their mothers and their pops

Cash by Johnny Cash is a perfect portrait of the storyteller in his later years. He talks about his early days and his final years and everything in between, but the prevailing voice throughout the book is the voice of the mature, old, gray JR, waiting for that day when he can meet his Lord face to face. That isn’t to say that the man in black sounds like he yearns for death, not at all. In fact, it is to say that the gray and worn JR Cash is a content and peaceful man that can’t keep the Lord and the Lord’s will out of nearly every anecdote in the book.

Sure, he talks about drugs and his affair… but there always seems to be the tone and feeling that God got him through it all. No matter what he is talking about, he drifts back to reinforce his faith to the reader.

The book is not some Christian inspirational book, though. It reads, primarily, as a collection of anecdotes about Cash’s tours, friends, family, and views on the world. In one breath, he talks about the best guitarists he’s ever seen and, in the next, he looks back at the fear his family felt when their house was robbed at gunpoint. He rehashes his days on the road, his courtship of June, the pride he has in his children, and the influential people he has had the pleasure of working with. …more… »