True

I certainly don't appreciate it. What are you talking about here? Can you break it down for me?

Sure. But let me see if I have anything good in that guided tour thread. That was the first one I wrote, though, and I think it's my worst.

Which of course means everyone else probably thinks it's your best.

Nah, not worth digging that up.

So Comatose as a song is all spit and vitriol directed at George Bush's America. Not Bush, though, or even his active supporters. There's not enough of them to put people like him into power. It's about the dangerous combination of self-righteous self assurance and ignorance that legitimates regressive or irresponsible politics (on environmental issues, class issues, terrorism, whatever). People living their lives in a vacuum (to use his lyric), unaware of the fact that they're driving their country/world into the ground while celebrating an uncritical privileged position that absolves them of any responsibility to think about what they're doing. It's not so much about 'America, Fuck Yeah!' as it is about the more dangerous quiet conviction that we are the freeest, fairest, best nation in the world, and that therefore anything we do is right because we're the ones doing it. Or, alternately, that any attempt to do something contrary to American policy is doomed to failure by virtue of it not being American. America as a theodicy--the best of all possible worlds.


And so within that context you have the description of the American citizenry not as evil, or misguided, as much as comatose--utterly unaware of what it's doing, and totally untroubled by that fact (no fear of falling--just the opposite)

I could go on, but that's probably more than you wanted to begin with, and I need to go learn how to put together a budget.

insofar as it's the shortest, probably

When/if you have time and you want to expand on this, I'd love to read it. Even if its a PM. Only if you have more you want to say. I totally see what you're getting at and I have to say it does improve the context of the song and the lyric if I look at it through your eyes. So, thank you.

I posted that vid for you, Stip.

High five!

It's hard for me to read Comatose as anything besides a lashing out at the forces opposing gay marriage at the time. Without that bridge, it's easier to extend it to American politics as a whole, but that bridge makes it more apparent. It makes sense, too; this was written right after the period when Bush successfully used the issue as a cudgel to garner supporters during the 04 election.

As a quick aside, since it's so clear from the context of the album and its time that we are a people in the middle of a rapid decline it gives the whole song this odd veneer of tragedy--the 'something that you never thought you'd be a part of' becomes a little tinged with a frustrated sadness. The bitterness of being dragged down with other people made worse by the fact that we could have been so much better than we are (which the bridge speaks to).

I open up my American Political Thought course with John Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity (the 'city on a hill' speech), and what people always forget about that line is that the city on a hill line was a challenge--something aspirational. We have the chance to start over and right the sins of the history, and the world will thank us if we do. But if we fail, we deserve whatever punishment god and the world gives us since what we squandered was so precious.

So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and byword throughout the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God's sake, we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

I think Comatose is from the perspective of someone who took the promise seriously, and is watching us painfully and obliviously squander it. That's where the anger comes from, and it's why this song is so interesting.

Clearly that inspired the bridge, but none of the other lyrics really speak to that. I think the bridge needs to be seen itself as a specific example meant to illuminate a larger idea.