Culture Corner

For the past coupla weeks, I've been haunted by the music from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, notably, "We don't need another hero" by Tina Turner. I figured out why when I looked up the lyrics:

Out of the ruins
Out from the wreckage
Can’t make the same mistake this time
We are the children
The last generation
We are the ones they left behind
And I wonder when we are ever gonna change it
Living under the fear till nothing else remains

We don’t need another hero
We don’t need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

Earlier today, someone on one of Kevin Drum's comment threads (hey, you look it up) started quoting Kipling - "then you will be a man, my son", gag. And I had to respond with Blake:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land, -
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
(from Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday)

and:

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
(from Songs of Experience: London)

More Blake here.