Beneath, Between And Behind

Sometimes things are so obvious they pass right before you without a second thought and it takes someone pointing it out to you to make you see it.

As a fan of the band Rush, you’d think I had read, analyzed and thought about every word of every song. Truth is, I haven’t. Oh sure, there are the obvious ones - Bastille Day, 2112, Limelight, Subdivisions, etc. But there are others that I just sort of learned the lyrics, sang along (badly), and never really thought about it. Or worse, completely missed the boat.

I was talking to (and probably boring to death) my wife about this song last night and I mentioned that sometimes I have a hard time understanding all of the words Geddy sings and as a teenager, I could spend hours reading the lyrics in the fold out of A Farewell To Kings or the album jacket of Permanent Waves. But, when I started collecting Rush albums, there was a package called “Archives” that was their first three albums together. This set didn’t include lyrics sheets and, of course, this was before all the world’s knowledge was at our fingertips. So, maybe I could be forgiven for not catching the not-so-subtleties of some of their songs.

I’m currently reading Geddy Lee’s memoir, My Effin’ Life, which I highly recommend, he mentioned one such song, Beneath, Between And Behind from their Fly By Night album. A short song, especially by Rush standards.

Let’s dive in:

Ten score years ago
Defeat the kingly foe
A wondrous dream came into being
Tame the trackless waste
No virgin land left chaste
All shining eyes but never seeing

Well, duh. Seeing the lyrics written out, it’s pretty obvious what a song written in 1975 is referring to. Ten score is, of course, 200 years ago and the upcoming bicentennial would have been top of mind for a lot of people, including Canadians touring their basement (ha ha - see people in the US call Canada, the United States’ attic, but we’re really more their basement. Get it?). Anywho, even as an 8 year old I remember what a big deal the 200th birthday was.

So, 200 years ago, we defeated the kingly foe (insert George III from Hamilton here, we still haven’t gone back). We formed a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal* (*your mileage may vary). We expanded westward, and westward, and westward until we hit another ocean. Then we expanded to some islands a few thousand miles away and expanded to a piece of land north of us. Oh, and we’ve unofficially expanded to some other islands both west and southeast, because we could.

Let’s take a look at the second verse and then we’ll talk about the chorus.

Watch the cities rise
Another ship arrives
Earth’s melting pot, and ever growing
Fantastic dreams come true
Inventing something new
The greatest minds, but never knowing

Earth’s melting pot. Boy, don’t tell some people that one. They’ll get upset. The United States isn’t a melting pot where everyone comes and is subsumed into some gloopy cheese sauce that we’re going to dip into with bread or vegetables on really long forks, but really more a stew. Each part of the stew - meat, potatoes, carrots, etc make up this wonderful bowl, but each maintains its uniqueness. Each of it good on its own, but made better by the other ingredients. The idea of our country being more of a stew was one I heard from someone else, I don’t remember who or I’d give them credit. The part about it not being fondue is all me.

Of course, the allusion to cities rising and ships arriving isn’t lost either. I won’t go into the whole history or immigration to our shores, but let’s just say there have been in-groups that become out-groups and out-groups that become in-groups.

And, then we get the chorus:

Beneath the noble bird, between the proudest words
Behind the beauty, cracks appear
Once with heads held high they sang out to the sky
Why do their shadows bow in fear?

I think we all know the bird referenced here. I wonder what are the proudest words? Are they the Declaration of Independence where we learned that all men doesn’t really mean all men and means only men? Are they the Preamble to the Constitution where we seek to form a more perfect union (I assume that by more perfect they meant other than what the Articles of Confederation created)? Are they Washington’s Farewell Address? The Gettysburg Address?

Behind the beauty, cracks appear. Well, not just cracks, but splits. Lofty words about man were written while we enslaved other men, women and children. Later on, as the industrial revolution took hold, we spoiled a lot of the land. Practices like dumping of chemical waste and mountaintop removal has made parts of the country ugly. Beer and agribusiness commercials will show you the amber waves of grain, but they aren’t showing the pools of pig shit or the leaking oil pipeline that are seeping into the groundwater. They aren’t showing the strip mining in the Appalachians or the red algae or oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. There are still plenty of beautiful landscapes in this country, but wherever man has settled and populated, damage is done.

So, why do our shadows bow in fear? In another discussion with my better half, I posited that all one side of the political aisle does is sell fear - they sell it because keeping people afraid does two things - one, it keeps them in power. Be afraid of ______ (insert boogeyman here). Only I can protect you from them/him/it. Two, it keeps you from focusing on the real villains in our national story. If I can get you afraid of a caravan or a terrorist or communists or a caravan full of communist terrorists, you’re not going to be focused on things like corporate greed and influence in politics or a police force with more armaments that some small nations. Fully one third of the nation lives in fear hidden behind fake bravado and semi-automatic weapons.

And, then we come to the bridge:

The guns replace the plow
Facades are tarnished now
The principles have been betrayed
The dreams’s gone stale
But still let hope prevail
Hope that history’s debt won’t be repaid

The guns replace the plow. In the last 6 decades, the number of guns in this country has increased 1000%. There are more guns than people. In between the time I write these words and end up publishing this piece, 13 people will have been shot. Over 325 people are shot every day. Every day.

Has the dream gone stale? I often say that we don’t do great things in this country anymore. We couldn’t build the Hoover Dam or the interstate highway system or even the railroads now. Too much red tape, too much NIMBYism, too many corporations with too much power, too many cowardly politicians, too much division. We do impressive things - in areas like tech or medicine - but we don’t do BIG things. We carry around computers with more processing power than what was used to land man on the moon. We drive cars that can be run by the power of the sun. With a few keystrokes, we can order almost anything and have it delivered to our house in a few days or even hours - anything from a gallon of milk to a car. But, we don’t do big things. And, when we do anything on a large scale, it’s to benefit corporations. Sure, we can build a pipeline that stretches from Canada to Houston, but that’s just laying mile after mile of pipeline that will eventually leak, penetrate the ground water, cause people to be sick and we’ll continue to privatize the profits and the public will pay for the cleanup, if it ever actually gets cleaned up.

While I don’t think this song presages the state of our country now - it doesn’t have the prescience of something like the movies “Idiocracy” or “Bob Roberts”, it does show an awareness of where the country was heading two score and nine years ago (see what I did there?), in the aftermath of Watergate and in the turbulence of the first oil embargo. The words still ring true today and I’m not sure that this same song written in 2015 or 16 would be that much different.

Just a quick addition and maybe something I’ll delve into later - the themes of this song is something Rush will return to again - in pieces like A Farewell to Kings, Closer to the Heart and The Way the Wind Blows. I think that would be a good subject to tackle. So, be warned.

So, that’s my take on this song. I’d be curious to hear what others think about it and if they have other ideas on the meaning of the words.