Daily Jam - He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot

“Did you love this world, and this world not love you?”

Sometimes this world disgusts me, the veritable shit whirlpool of bad culture, bad politics, bad ideas, and bad people becoming all too much to bare. There’s an unending downhill flow of problems and inaction, a levee breaking under the strain of an uncertain future, a future dominated by ignorant talking heads spewing their greed and intolerance and outrage to a deafening degree. Climate change deniers. Racists and homophobes. Misogynistic trolls. Assholes. Donald Trump (or pretty much every other politician.)  It’s like somebody flushed a toilet on the world. And it all makes me so angry, the inevitability of our impending failure as a species, succumbing to our very nature.

It’s worse since I became a father.

The challenge in raising my sons is trying to maintain the sense of worldly or universal wonder that all kids should have, while at the same time keeping things in realistic perspective for when they get older. But I don’t want to sound to bleak about it: “Sorry kiddos. Your great grandparents really made a mess of things, and then your grandparents made it worse, and then your parents were just too damn jaded to care about it anymore.” I hope my sons' generation can do better and do more than those that preceded him…they have to…or maybe they’ll just find a way to get off world, to try again someplace far, far away.

Which finally brings me to Grandaddy’s “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” the first track from the 2000 album, The Sophtware Slump. The song is a spacey, downtrodden lament, the narrator calling out to the “2000 Man” floating in space, resisting the calls to land, and refusing to accept our world as it is any longer. When he finally comes back, he finds that nothing has changed, and that the whole of our crumbling planet only urges him to get with the program and join the rank and file. Become part of the shit machine. Rot with the rest of us.

It’s hard not to feel that way in the current climate of our world and culture at large. Everything’s a distraction, and everything stinks. I don’t want it for myself, and I certainly don’t want it for my sons either.

At least the song is beautiful.

“Don’t give in 2000 Man.”

Listen below, our Daily Jam.