Anti-Revolutionaries

Today Vodkapundit has an article for subscribers that is based on a play on the name of the famous Beatles song about revolution. I don't subscribe so I didn't read it, but I did read something interesting about the Beatles not long ago. It was some remarks by Lemmy Kilmister, the founder, lead singer, and bass player of Motörhead. I won't censor his remarks, which would be very much against the spirit of the man.

“[T]he Beatles were hard men,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir White Line Fever. “[Manager] Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia – a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx.”

He continued: “The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys – they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability."

Hard men they may have once been, for all of the fact that they came to be emblems of the Flower Children thanks to Lennon. I'm prepared to take Lemmy's word on that. It's interest, though, that the song that Vodkapundit is riffing off of contains a cautionary note very appropriate to our own moment. In fact it's repeated three times as variants:

But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out?...

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait...

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow...

The hard men from the sea-faring town didn't want to see things burned down. Neither do the working class of today, for whom all this recent celebration of murder and mayhem is unlikely to be a winning stance. 

Even the real revolutionaries had a note of caution.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I think even most people who really are worried about the current administration recognize that it's a passing moment. Trump is nearly eighty and on his last term; the odds of his work surviving him in a recognizable form are not high. Whoever replaces him, which right now might be many people even if the Democrats lose the next election, that person will be of a very different character. 

It's not the time for blood right now, no more than after the election of 2020. Prudence, often like phronesis being defined as "practical wisdom," indeed dictates. 

This being more of a Motörhead sort of blog, I'll close with them instead.