Amerika

Who’s gonna tell you when
It’s too late
Who’s gonna tell you things
Aren’t so great.

You can’t go on, thinkin’
Nothing’s wrong, but bye
Who’s gonna drive you home
Tonight?

Who’s gonna pick you up
When you fall?
Who’s gonna hang it up
When you call?

Who’s gonna pay attention
To your dreams?
And who’s gonna plug their ears
When you scream?

You can’t go on, thinkin’
Nothing’s wrong, but bye
Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?

Who’s gonna hold you down
When you shake?
Who’s gonna come around

When you break?
You can’t go on, thinkin’
Nothin’s wrong, but bye
Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?
Oh, you know you can’t go on, thinkin’
Nothin’s wrong
Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?

Ric Ocasek died today. He and his bandmate Benjamin Orr wrote the classic 1980s ballad which captured the razor’s edge of the 1980s: we knew that we were living in an artificial, insane order, and yet no one could yet get their minds wrapped around how to get out.

People want meaning in life. They want love, honor, chastity, faith, and something to believe in. They cannot articulate this because they think they want independence from all these things — “freedom,” “equality” — instead.

It makes them miserable. Round and around we go.

In reality, no one has anyone. Everything is faithless because the individual is king, and when things get difficult, the individual simply moves on, leaving wreckage in his place. We can flatter ourselves talking about how free our society is, but does “freedom” make good?

Instead, it was a very lonely world, and on the cutting edge, people saw that it was based in the pretense of others and their dogmatic refusal to even consider reality. We had gotten away with it! By chasing what was popular, we built a bigger economy, and now prole-rule could expand forever.

However the hollowness shown through, and even in the midst of so much we were striving for and desiring, we would never get what we actually wanted, and got a dying civilization instead. Are we even paying attention to our own dreams?

Tags: 1980s, benjamin orr, ric ocasek