I don’t know how you got up this morning. None of my business. I turned against the rising light, and with the end of dreams began humming something from long ago.
It was from Marvin Gaye’s now-ancient album, “What’s Going On.” It stays with me, released almost on this day in 1971. I was living in Ann Arbor then, learning several things and subject to the draft upon college graduation. Our little cadre of males was wondering with some apprehension about what was going on in the news from Southeast Asia. There was the real if middle-distant prospect that it might very well consume us.
Marvin’s attempt to ascertain the flow of events produced a concept album. An actual record made of vinyl. It was something from the days of mighty Motown, our local musical powerhouse. In one of those accidental bits, we listened the soul of our industrial city blasted back at us from another sovereign nation on the AM 800 frequency on one of the buttons on the car radio. It was broadcast from CKLW, the Canadian giant broadcaster immune from American regulations across the river from the Motor City, where we still had social embers smoldering from the riots in 1967 and 1968.
It still had many citizens wondering what the hell was going on, and for those of us on the educational conveyor belt, what was going to happen to us next.
Marvin made the situation approachable. His album melded one song into the next in something the critics deemed a “song cycle.” In it, the individual tunes contributed to the story of a Vietnam Vet returning home to witness hatred, suffering, and injustice. The lyrics of each song explored the underside of what was happening, a young citizen performing a controversial international mission, and with that perspective then looking at what was going on at home: drug abuse, poverty, and the list of ecological issues.
It wasn’t a great deal different from the song cycles of today, provided you include “systemic race” in some explicit manner. Back then, Marvin was making the case that optimism and love could overcome hardship and heartache. Now, what is going on seems to be something different. Marvin sang about misery with hope. Now it is “overthrowing” a system allegedly based on intrinsic evil to make us free.
Like you, it makes me a little confused. The age factor is part of it, of course. We grew with Federal Law that changed many things. I remember it vividly as “reality,” not someone’s recent re-imagination of the history we learned. There were earnest discussions about Civil and Voting Rights stuff in the mid-1960s, a decade filled with the sort of social tumult we experience today. It was worse then, widespread, and more central cities burned than what was going on last summer. But that is one reason (among several) that what is going on seems uncomfortably familiar.
But that is just going on as the background motif for everything else that is going on. We have a major social issue about biology. Seriously. We were energy independent just a little while ago, and now something else from memory is back and going on: gas lines. Major resentment is expressed about systemic racism in cities controlled by one party for as long as I have been alive. You would think they might have done something about it, but that is just what is going on.
Gas is short, and we are told to buy electric cars. Which run on batteries charged by old fashioned coal power plants, mined by child and forced labor someplace else, with a future guaranteed by energy sources that don’t work when the sun is down, or the wind ceases to blow. It is what some want earnestly to be going on, even as those nations that have tried it wind up depending on pipelines of fuel from places like Russia. And of course, Russia is going on. It seems useful for some reason.
Education is going on, sort of, while the schools seem to be closed and Teacher’s Unions are drafting public health policy. My Mom had views on that. She did not like her union, long ago, and did not join, though the dues were deducted from her paycheck anyway. It was what was going on then, and now is really going on.
There is a surprising tide of anti-Israeli sentiment going on, too. It sounds a lot like things we heard from the bad guys who lost a long ago global conflict. We heard this week that just because one set of angry people fired more than 1,500 rockets at another, the people who got hit should not respond. It doesn’t make any sense, but it is what is going on.
Here at the farm, things are going on all by themselves. The Experts say the cicadas will emerge, maybe this week, which will create local problems having little to do with people or policy. There is something sort of comforting about that. Not as good as shouting at the weather, of course, since that is going on. But it is a comfort that none of us has anything to do with it, except to be prepared.
And the preparation itself is something going on. Our gas tanks are full, but we are not driving, since that would draw down our precious stock. Some pals are concerned about the consumables required to survive unpleasantness.
Masks? That was going on for quite a while, but I think we are done with that until the Experts determine our next emergency. I will keep one in the car and the gym bag, just in case my thought of what is going on is in opposition to someone else’s version. It is what Marvin told us to expect. He passed in the Spring of 1984 and his prophetic voice was stilled. It was a year of uncertainty, a propitious one some other guy named George Orwell picked to demonstrate what he thought was going on. I think he might have been right, even if a bit early.
This strange year, we will have to use our own voices and song cycles to handle things. It is what is going on. Remembering Marvin helps. It is what is going on.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com