A Song for Those "Who Built Ruins for Themselves"*

Did you hear that Rolling Stone readers have voted Jefferson Starship's 1985 hit, "We Built This City" the worst song of the 1980s...again?

Yea, maybe, so what?

Well, why this particular song?  What about it makes it keep appearing at the top of the list?

Daniel Flynn, for one, thinks it says something larger about the Woodstock Generation and, I am eager to add, their many acolytes both in and out of government who call the Democrat Party home.

"We Built This City" is a painful mirror into the baby boomer soul. It is a sonic reminder of how much a generation of self-professed idealists had sold out. Here is Grace Slick, once the drugged-out darling of Haight-Ashbury, belting out a pop-pandering song (probably written in a boardroom) set to soulless artificial instruments.

 But it's more, as Flynn goes on to say:

If "We Built This City" had merely reminded aging hippies that yet another hippie icon had sold out, it would not explain the enduring visceral response. It is not so much a betrayal as a reflection. The song is a sonic evocation of a whole generation's phony idealism. (my emphasis)

Did you catch that?  It's not just that they sold out.  It's not even that they simply grew up, a youthful naiveté giving way to a more mature realism, or cynicism perhaps.  Rather, it's that it was a "phony idealism" all along.  And, to anyone with eyes to see, its fraudulent nature was obvious all along as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, if that does not describe the ideological disposition of today's Democrat Party leadership, I don't know what does.

How does that tune go again?

*My title comes from a lament of Job's in the Bible (Job 3:14, New King James Version)