"The Wall" in Berlin, 1990 - Anti-American Postmodern Nostalgia and PBS Fund-Raising (...spooky)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Stupid PBS Tricks
While I'm writing this, several civil-service suits from PBS's Boulder, Colorado affiliate are urging me to give them lots of money in exchange for videos, CDs, and DVDs of Roger Waters' multimedia performance of the rock opera the Wall on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If I had lots and lots of spare change (I don't) and were inclined to support what I consider the morally bankrupt political agenda followed by PBS (I'm not), I'd pop for the package that includes ALL of the Wall Berlin 1990 multimedia stuff, and a Dark Side of the Moon CD and a "Making of" documentary on "Dark Side," having been idiot enough to miss Pink Floyd when they did a concert at Louisiana State University and I was there anyway trying to get through a pre-med degree.

But enjoying Pink Floyd and at least some of Roger Waters' dark vision doesn't mean I've gone out and had a lobotomy. I've seen this video four times now, thanks to Boulder PBS (and every time they say it's the "Colorado Broadcast Premiere") and each time, a little of the glamor flakes off, revealing the shoddy thought processes behind it all, masquerading as moral insight.

Somehow, shoehorning Cyndi Lauper and Sinead O'Connor and Bryan Adams and Jerry Hall and Thomas Dolby and the Scorpions and the Hooters and Marianne Faithful and the Marching Band of the Combined Soviet Forces in Germany (I kid you not) and Van Morrison and Alan Parsons (as sound engineer) into this production diminishes it. Too damn many cooks...

Cyndi Lauper's bogus Cockney accent and capering around the stage kind of screwed "We Don't Need No Education (Leave Those Kids Alone!) up beyond saving. Not to mention the weird overtones caused by Sinead O'Connor singing "Mama," asking if her new girl would break her balls... a moment only Melissa Etheridge or k.d. lang might fully treasure.

And the macabre irony of bringing the damned Red Army - who helped throw the Wall up and mine a quarter mile on their side of it and set up machine gun nests to kill any poor East German ungrateful enough to want to get away from the Workers Paradise - to do the orchestral backup only throws the utter stupidity of the people who so fatuously praise the Berlin 1990 performance into razor-sharp relief.

What the perky PBS lady just called a "conceptual masterpiece" may in time become known to historians as a piece of dark, pro-totalitarian propaganda (those poor, poor Soviets - damn our forces for humiliating them, anyway) which rivals Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for technical virtuosity in the service of the enemies of democracy.

Roger Waters is protesting the choking, corrupting power of a State which controls every facet of its people's life with the help of... a state which used choking, corrupting power to control every facet of its people's lives - until the money to do it with ran out. I wonder how much Waters or his backers paid the Russians to stop threatening West Berlin for an evening and do a bit of orchestra playing.

And if enough people had succumbed to Waters' vision for the strong Western states which held Communism at bay to have let down their guard and lay down their guns, how many of Waters' fans would have survived either the resulting war of Soviet conquest or the purge that followed?

But the audience was sure pumped at the end of "I Want A Dirty Woman," when the plaintive "Mrs Floyd" and a nasal operator introducing herself as "the United States" gets hung up on... twice. That showed us nasty Yanks, didn't it? We'll sure think twice about taxing our own economy into several recessions to defend Europe from invasion next time, huh?

And the Red Army was there in full force for "Bring the Boys Back Home," the early parts of which were performed against comic-bookish drawings of wartime tragedy (one of which was helpfully labeled "Vietnam" - for which the Red Army did more than its bit, equipping North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners and interrogating downed American airmen in shithole POW camps, not to mention egging North Vietnam on to invade neighbors at which it was at peace, initiating the hostilities which inspired that comic book page against which Waters emoted so brilliantly). How many Vietnam veterans did Waters check with before using their war - their blood, and anguish, and sweat and valor - as a fig leaf for Communist expansionism?

But Roger Waters is apparently irony-proof, and his audience for the Berlin 1990 concert were apparently just too stupid to see the cognitive dissonance of using a military orchestra that under other conditions might have been marching down that same Potsdamer Platz in triumph as West Berlin and the rest of Europe were crushed under Stalin's (or Brezhnev's, or Gorbachev's) heel.

I have to admit to massive emotional conflict. This music formed a large part of the soundtrack against which my life has played out, and I have watched this production four times now because it is so brilliant, possibly one of the finest pieces of art to which the term "rock opera" has been applied.

And yet it was used to condemn militarism when the only militarism in any way responsive to Waters' arguments - Western militarism in all its efficient and deadly and civilian-controlled panoply - was the only thing defending Europe and Western Civilization from being destroyed by the soldiers of the very same totalitarian monster whose orchestra played so lustily on stage.

Replace the US Army in Europe and Canadian Forces and the British Army of the Rhine and France's forces in Germany, and the West Germans' own army from Germany at any point during the Cold War with Roger Waters and his brilliant conceptual work and all the jerks who condemn militarism by reflex, and the Soviet Army would have been staring across the English Channel at their next conquest a week later.

It would have happened, because the Russian economy never got out of trouble, all the time they were pointing missiles at us and keeping dozens of army divisions just on the other side of the Iron Curtain poised to roll all over Western Europe the minute we became weak enough to make that move worthwhile. All that time, they were hoping to be able to loot Western Europe to balance their checkbook and save their politicians' worthless asses.

Roger Waters - splendid musician, immortal composer and conceptual artist - and complete idiot where geopolitical and moral analysis are concerned.

What the hell, we play Wagner again and again and again even though we know that he had no problem whatsoever with German militarism and German adventurism and the whole line of immoral crap that compelled German armies to tear Europe apart in 1870, 1914 and 1939 - where all that was concerned, Wagner apparently had no conscience.

Their music is just so damn cool.