This ain’t no party.
This ain’t no disco.

You’re feeling it at the gas pump already.
The supermarket’s next, young lovers.

Trouble in transit. Got through the roadblock; we blended in with the crowd.

David Byrne has explained that he wrote this song, a whole forty years ago now, as a cutting parody against a paranoid prepper kind of mindset that sees everything as a threat to survival and thus is ready to sacrifice luxuries like love and art in the name of avoiding that threat.

In 1983, twenty years old myself, I was totally down with the meta-message and the subtext of that.

Twenty years later, when Talking Heads played the song at their Hall of Fame Induction in the wake of falling towers, the same.

Okay Boomer. Has that changed?

No. Not yet.

But in the weeks ahead it’s gonna. For me and for you too. Can you feel the disturbance in the forces, baby? Have you forgotten how to jump a freight and live in a boxcar?

You make me shiver. I feel so tender. We make a pretty good team. Don’t get exhausted. I’ll do some driving. As long as the fuel holds out, if that’s what it takes. Because we’re not bums. Luck will turn. A Christ or an FDR will rise from the dead and save our essentially good souls, because that’s how things work in the real world, ennit? The cream of justice, always rising.

Salvation myths aside, when these darker truths become self-evident, and you’re tempted to blame all your notebook-burning troubles on Bad Vlad and the Freedom Haters, remember the version Russell Brand told you about back there in the good old days of March, last year of our lord, twenty-twenty-two.

The threat to survival abides and breeds so very much closer to the sweet sanctuary we call home, home on the range or on the sinkhole coastline or down along the frontera where the fat federales are sweeping up the parched bones of skinny brown refugees by the dozens today and every day, just as they’ve always done in living memory.

And Jesus wept.