first round

(4) Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me with Science”
sunk
(13) World Party, “Ship of Fools”
292-181
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/8/23.

Camellia-Berry Grass On “She Blinded Me With Science”

The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids and [other-than-human persons] are inert.

—Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).

In the music video for “She Blinded Me With Science,” a bunch of men dressed in British academic tweeds and formerly-starched shirts—the smell of pipe tobacco practically redolent even through the distance of time and YouTube—all gallivant in the yard of Thomas Dolby’s destination: the Rest Home for Deranged Scientists. The first of these burnt-out, gone-mad men of science that we see is a dude on the roof of the Rest Home, with a Wile E. Coyote ACME catalog-looking jetpack strapped to his back, looking shifty and nervous, wearing a white vest and grey slacks. I was reminded of this figure the other day on Twitter, when I saw a discussion thread populated by a few “anti-degrowth socialists” who were insisting that we don’t have to abandon economic growth and forward progress despite ongoing anthropogenic climate change, no, all we gotta do is hold out until its viable to mine our solar system’s asteroid belt for rare minerals.
The data, the evidence, the climate and energy Science! all add up to that political position being naïve (to put it kindly)…so why do I feel like the loony one? Why does pleading with others to take seriously the crisis of collective action that imperils all of us make me feel like I’m the one alienating my colleagues and neighbors? This isn’t even the first time I’ve made such pleadings in an essay for March Xness. I imagine readers already clicking the button to vote for “Ship of Fools,” already tired before I’ve reached my second section, before I’ve played my lil tricks that you know are coming, before I’ve laid out the course of my thinking. The eyes glazing over. This is all in my head, I am aware. Or am I.
The thing is (and please read this with a Dolbyesque growl): I can hear machinery! I know why I have been made to feel this way, I know what lights the lamps so to speak. I can detect the rhetorical emissions from the persons and the structures that would deny me truth. I know why I have been made, purposefully & deliberately, to feel crazy.

*

The extent to which we don’t know shit about consciousness is unreal. “Unreal,” of course, being common parlance for something that doesn’t comport to reality. “Reality,” of course, being a consensus rooted in knowledge derived from the scientific method. It was a good thing while it lasted. Scientific consensus reality, I mean. A valiant attempt. The mechanistic turn has produced lots of statements that we call knowledge. Plenty of workable, viable models. It’s also produced, in tandem with capitalism and the nation-state, a presently-ongoing mass extinction. But hey! We know so much about brain chemistry! Or so we think.
I’ve become friends with a tree. We’ve built a bond over shared songs, drinks, time. We’ve grown close and almost entirely nonverbally. We both show each other our care and our growth. We both let others speak through us. We see each other eye to eye, branch to branch, and through it all I better know the cycles, the feeling of pollination.
I moved to my present neighborhood in June 2020, fresh off of my entire world being ruptured and also the pandemic. I positioned my bed next to one of the two windows in my room, with not so much a “view” of the tall sidewalk tree out front as much as a scope. Its tendrilly branches wash the whole window in yellow-green, and when the breeze swirls through off the Delaware River the leaves stroke and scrape against the wire screen; a caress. An oaken exfoliation.
Sawtoothy, as I like to call them, is a Sawtooth Oak. I love their long, jaggedy leaves. Dense & fibrous & a little pokey, like dangerous tea. They are shaped like a wyrmtongue, like a child’s crayon drawing of a fire, like a black sheep banana leaf. I love their lil acorns nestled under their canopy of stamenic sproutings.

*

Thomas Dolby’s 1982 one-hit wonder is full of microhooks and sound loops to latch onto. It has this sense of early 80s playfulness to it that it ties so directly with, as British nutritional scientist and television personality Magnus Pyke keeps saying in one of the unlikeliest hooks in pop music history, Science! Pyke varies his line readings all throughout the song, from Science! (flat, as if cursory) to Science! (way too enthusiastic) to “She BLINDED me…with Science!” to She blinded ME with science” to “She blinded me WITH SCIENCE!” to Science! (exasperated) and Dolby himself sings the refrain—“She blinded me with science!”—with an intensity that ramps up through the video, as if to say I can’t believe we’re getting away with this and then he literally does say “I don’t believe it!”
All the while Dolby’s vanguard talent for working with synthesizers keeps layering on these warbling, major key noises that sound unhinged in a Looney Tunes way; undeniable earworms from cartoonish, nearly parodic clownsounds. Frankenstein beepboops and upward-lilting digital sax and janky, jaunty swinging quarter notes build up the sanatorial scaffolding that the song progresses through.
I spent most of 2022 housebound—in bed for the most part (avoiding any carceral equivalents of “Rest Homes”)—with various maladies from the long covid-complex. Tachycardia, joint pain, brain fog, a couple migraines each week. If I’m truly honest (and I wouldn’t be in an actual psych consultation, and if you don’t know why I’d protect myself then maybe that’s why I’m writing this essay), maybe some symptoms consistent with a functional disorder on top of that. I’m not trying to write about pain here. Or “psychosis,” and my efforts to avoid the psych ward, not really. I’m mostly just trying to write, trying to piece sentences together with a brain that runs clunkier than it used to. I mean to write about a small gratitude lining my bed rest in silver: the intersection of nonverbal communication and animism. This year I have really embraced my selective mutism. Even as a kid I’ve always had extensive stints of verbal silence, for which I learned to make masks after suffering through various corrective violences. I learned how to use my voice so effectively that it’s gotten me paid through teaching and through performance. But mostly I don’t like to talk out loud. So I wasn’t really doing Discord calls with people from my bed. I haven’t been teaching (not that that was my decision). My voice got to take a deep rest. And in that rest, I learned leaf language.
Sawtoothy doesn’t have vocal cords because Sawtoothy is a literal tree. But they speak to me in other ways, and I to them. They bridge me greetings from birds and squirrels and bees. We share the smell of incense burning by my open bedroom window. I sit on the sidewalk in the morning and share a cup of tea with them, pour water onto their roots. I place my palm onto their furrowed bark and focus my gratitude towards them. I believe that they receive it. I believe that they reciprocate it. My experience tells me as such. I’ve learned the sound of wind rustling through them, and how those sounds correspond to barometric pressure—which is to say I have learned to hear when Sawtoothy is warning me ahead of time about a low pressure system coming through & to prepare for joint pain. I don’t care that there’s working models for a completely materialistic, non-agentic lens to view our friendship through. You don’t know Sawtoothy like I do. Sawtoothy speaks to me and I know because I took the time to listen. We earned each other’s trust.

*

I have not disclosed to my doctors that one of the most important parts of my “support system” is a tree that I perceive in a real way as talking to me. I have not disclosed that I have been helped through some dark nights of the soul by other voices/presences/persons/spirits who I perceive as real. There is more here I could say, about the vast dismissal of persons who have developed post-viral complications and disabilities as a result of the sars-cov-2 pandemic and subsequent socio-governmental abandonment of said persons. About the dismissal too of the interiorities of transgender persons and autistic persons and plural person systems, of the gauntlet of fascistic legislation and fascist-sympathetic journalism that are imperiling so many persons whose interiorities defy mechanistic, “sane” understandings. The Clinic and I are at odds. I will not end up being done by the family and the state what they did to my aunt. Sometimes I deadly seriously, and in a sober, non-conspiratorial way, cannot just trust the science.

* 

Pardon the awful pun, but my experience with a tree is not the kind of interfacing with stem that our contemporary science education & scientific politics wants for us. It has never escaped my notice that the United States’ response to the climate science of the 2000s that broke through to the mainstream (Al Gore had a documentary! Rolling Stone reported on it all the time!) was to put the national pedal to the technocracy metal. President George W. Bush’s administration ushered in the “No Child Left Behind” era of educational policy, and along with it an overreliance on standardized assessment; this was followed in turn by President Barack Obama’s educational pivot towards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) coursework and preparation for STEM jobs. That’s where the economy was experiencing growth after all, and so we accelerated the very fields and processes that were already throwing refined carbon emissions into the atmosphere like there was no tomorrow (which has helped ensure that there might not be a tomorrow, figuratively speaking, for global human order). Science and Technology have taken on a secular-religious position as sites of Salvation from our national sins. Even the left can’t shake this messianic vision of progress. You might recall if you’re a particularly online leftist the memes from a few years back about Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
I wonder when the modernist anxiety of obsolescence started. That fear of being left behind by the ever-progressing march of time. Was it before the [settler-]colonial projects of European empires? Or did it bubble up years later, after the ink dried on all those treaties and those nation-state constitutions, after the guilt started calcifying. Either way, there’s been no stopping that march, that drive forward into progress and growth. There’s been no rest, only being hit with technology—new breakthroughs that mean new ruptures and new growth spurts into the Future (or the Horizon or the Manifest Destiny or what have you).
    I told myself I was going to get through thinking about all this Science! without diving into the anti-psychiatry writings of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (your eyes, their glaze; I’m trying to look out for you, dear reader, dear Xness voter), but I simply have to bring to mind another of Guattari’s interlocutors here, Bruno Latour. Ever the critic of the discursive processes & structural limitations imparted upon his own fields of scientific inquiry (often by his own fields of scientific inquiry!), Latour was not soft about the deep changes that modernity brought to our understandings of time, and the lack of due reckoning about those changes. In his 1993 book, We Have Never Been Modern, he traces our cultural formations of mythologizing the motor vehicle, the plane, the space race, the early internet as inextricably modern story. A new conceptualization of time as irreversible (which it is) AND always progressing linearly (which it never did for pre-modern peoples, having a cyclic understanding of time). We now live in societies where the planned obsolescence of technology is needed in order to provide artificial ruptures. We’re desperate to turn the pages of the calendar, to get to the promised future, to free ourselves from earthly shackles, and I hope that between the lines here you can catch my drift, see how I’m placing parallel the rationalist, Protestant reformation and the scientific disenchantment of our world and lifeways. These things are literally inextricable. Can’t be left behind when the Rapture hits.

*

I often find myself these days asking what the point is of being a writer with all of this death, this drought, this soil erosion, this grand thanatos we call climate change. Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh has been asking himself similar questions for years. In his excellent nonfiction work, The Great Derangement, (which I discovered just a few weeks ago and on the happy accident of me trying to conceptualize the kinds of people who might make up a 2023 version of Dolby’s Rest Home for Deranged Scientists) Ghosh writes: “I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.”
Just as the tech industry boom has coincided with corporate personhood for oil companies with never ending multinational war with anthropogenic climate collapse, Ghosh points out that his beloved literary form, the novel, has failed to step up to the plate and address this collective endangerment. I would encourage you to read the book in full if you write fiction and/or if you find yourself wanting to imagine better worlds for us all. The novel too has its own anxieties about its own obsolescence, which arguably has already happened and is unable to accept as much.
    I ask you, reader, to take a leap with me (the established crazy person) here: if the mechanistic turn in the sciences—the disavowel of spirit, the small-making of consciousness, the figure of the Human (that is always-already a colonial positionality, an anti-Black product of the Christian great chain of being)—has made it so we as persons are structurally cleaved from kinship with the other-than-human life all around us, the life that we have been driving to extinction by our actions as a species alone, our landscape modifications and our foodways and our Capital-driven systems of extraction…if the mechanistic turn has caused us to do this, to be this? Then what fucking good is it?
I’m distressed too that the sciency-sounding language of therapy, somatics, & bodies keeping scores and such being universalized to all human persons is reifying a mechanistic detachment from our full, flourishing selves. Some people are healed by these stories. Some aren’t. Those who aren’t typically find their resolve in traditional religious spaces. But what if those stories don’t work for you either? What if you can’t simply trust the science, even as you have faith in it? How does such a person find healing stories in such a polarized, captured culture?
    Back to echoing Bruno Latour, the point is not to abandon science (or technology). Its not to return to pre-modernity (as if that’s even possible). No, we need new sites of scientific knowledge production. And these new sites, if they don’t want to render themselves obsolete as well, need to incorporate a plurality of diverse knowledge practices, and that includes the animistic traditional knowledge of indigenous persons that our fields of Science! built themselves up to dominate and overcome. You and I, reader, were born and raised in a context where science has meant necessarily mechanism and progress. Our anxiety over being left behind? Arguably, fear and shame that we will experience what we inflicted on others to get here. Fear and shame of our own judgments rendered back at us. To quote Ghosh once more about it, “Obsolescence is indeed modernity’s equivalent of perdition and hellfire. That is why this era’s most potent invocation of damnation, passed down in an unbroken relay from Hegel and Marx to President Obama, is the malediction of being ‘on the wrong side of history.’”
What if we all made kin with some trees about it. As a starting point. Maybe that’d help us to not leave behind those of us who fell sick during a pandemic either.

*

The thing is, at the end of the day, even with all of my rooftop ravings, “She Blinded Me With Science” is probably just a song about sex. “Now she’s making love to me. The spheres are in commotion. The elements in harmony.” When the music video isn’t going for “look at the crazy people” laffs it is languishing somewhat pornographically on the cheekbones and seductive skirts of the Rest Home’s chief assistant, Miss Sakamoto. Magnus Pyke’s infamous creepy-boss line delivery, “Good HEAVENS, Miss Sakamoto, you’re BEAUTIFUL,” is remembered most “fondly.” But I’m rather taken with the imagery of Miss Sakamoto with the strings and f-holes of a cello painted on her back (otherwise covered in a long, dark dress), in an eerie, empty ballroom with black & white harlequin floor tile. Dolby—quite the attractive lil man himself, with his circle frames and wheatshock of nerd hair—is dressed in a white tuxedo, taking a cello bow to Miss Sakamoto and playing her. Even the video’s last silent film penny arcade title cards—“…and the Doctor…gets his come-uppance!” plays as a libidinal laugh (get it? Come! lol!). And this is good. It’s nice. We don’t get a lot of zany, wacky pop songs that are also erotic these days.
I’m not the biggest fan of Sigmund Freud myself, but his psychoanalytic ideas on libidinal sublimations are coming to mind here, now, at the tail end of this essay. For me the lyric that hits the hardest with respect to all these things I’ve been slantwise disclosing to you from my veritable leather chaise lounge is “When I’m dancing close to her (she blinded me with science, science!)/ I can smell the chemicals!” There it is: the mechanistic turn disenchanting even our eros. Sexuality as formula, reproducible results every time. X amount of pheromones plus Y amount of sensory confusion equals poetry in motion baby, yeah!
Do you even know why you’re attracted to who you’re attracted to? Have you truly thought about the erotic? I don’t mean things like “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” or somesuch concepts that emerged from the Clinic as a way to explain the irrationalities of desire in a supposedly mechanistic world. I mean your actual desires. What gives you that feeling like your stomach is expanding out and joining with the aether? Maybe you’re like me and you hurt yourself and you hurt people close to you because of how shut off you were made to your own desires. How the science (which you Trust!) tells you one thing about yourself and, all the while, socially reproduces a society in which everyone doesn’t know one thing about themselves (and calls “crazy” those who try to know & assert their knowledge). How it hits you with technology.

Camellia-Berry Grass is trying to live. Presently in Philadelphia, she is the author of Hall of Waters (2019, The Operating System). A 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize, her essays and poems have been widely published. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, and has taught most recently in the MFA program for creative writing at Rosemont College. She’s trying to blog more. Sawtoothy says “Hi!”

You Will Pay Tomorrow: Dana Cann on “Ship of Fools”

We’re setting sail

We were still young, but by 1987 our world was shrinking, and us with it. The joys we were implicitly promised and had mostly lived were being stripped away. The political climate had swung wide to the right. We were making money, for the first time, and our taxes were overspent on defense, on Reagan’s six-hundred-ship navy and arming foreign fascists against foreign leftists. Domestically, it was the height of the “go-go eighties,” the progenitor of modern-day greed. The first wave of punk bands had long imploded or become largely irrelevant. Ditto the second wave. X had peaked. The Replacements and Hüsker Dü had peaked but we didn’t know it yet. D. Boon was dead. The Ramones still played a good live show, but their albums had long gone to shit. Only The Cramps, by aggressively leaning into their retro kitsch, had somehow survived intact. There were still good bands, of course, but they were getting harder to find. Pre-internet, we relied on flyers stapled to plywood on abandoned storefronts and telephone poles, zines and alternative weeklies distributed in record stores, and radio, which, by then, was getting sucked into the maw of capitalism. Through a series of transactions, the family-owned, free-form radio station I’d cut my high-school teeth on—WHFS, 102.3 FM in Bethesda, MD, which, from the late 70s to the early 80s, had managed to cater to both hippies and punks—was now well on its way to becoming an alternative-radio (read: top 40 for a cooler audience) behemoth owned by corporate interests.
I was twenty-five at the start of the year, no longer a kid. But I didn’t know how to be an adult, nor did I want to be one. In January we got a foot and a half of snow, which the DC government, notorious then for its dysfunction, couldn’t handle. My bus didn’t run and I walked two miles to and from work through unplowed streets. In February Andy Warhol died. In March we started hearing a song on the radio that caught our attention, that somehow rose above the monotony of synth flourishes and gated snares ubiquitous in rock music at the time. New music on the radio that caught our attention was rare, though there were exceptions (hello Beastie Boys!). This new song was “Ship of Fools,” by World Party, a solo project for Karl Wallinger, who’d previously played keyboards for The Waterboys prior to that band’s U.S. commercial breakthrough, 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues.
“Ship of Fools,” the second single from World Party’s 1986 debut, Private Revolution, would become the band’s only Top-40 hit. A straight-forward, mid-tempo rocker, with piano, guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone, Wallinger keeps the punchy, gospel piano up front and the guitar mixed to the back. The drums sound real—as in, not programmed. “We’re setting sail,” Wallinger snarls, “to the place on the map / From which no one has ever returned.” The vocal is reminiscent of an earlier generation of heroes—Bob Dylan, John Lennon. Wallinger is preaching but not preachy. The pronoun we helps: We’re all setting sail; the journey will be perilous. A few lines later, by the end of the first verse, still singing about the perilous destination, we has morphed into you: “It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need / You sail away from the light of the world on this trip, baby.” We is us. You is us.

You will pay tomorrow

“Ship of Fools” features a simple, functional bridge—“You will pay tomorrow / You’re gonna pay tomorrow”—that links verse to soaring chorus. The conceit seems fair: one must pay, eventually, for one’s sins. But who’s paying and for whose sins?
When I first heard World Party, when “Ship of Fools” was beginning to climb the charts, I played guitar in a band called The Stallones. We were a DC punk band, though not harDCore, as a certain faction of DC punk was called then; we were punk with a DIY aesthetic—more of a sloppy garage band with a few clever lyrics. We were also not very good and made poor decisions, including the band name, which we’d recently changed from Plate of Shrimp. Both names were derived from semi-obscure eighties references—Plate of Shrimp from the film Repo Man and Stallones from Sylvester’s younger brother and perennial punchline Frank. (Coincidentally, Frank Stallone was on the March Fadness longlist for his song “Far from Over,” which reached number 10 on the US pop charts in 1983 but went unselected for the tournament.) All this to say that there was an unseriousness to my band, a self-mocking posture that hindered us.
In the winter of 1986-87 we recorded and distributed a promotional cassette, titled Who’s Gonna Pay?

I don’t remember the genesis of the title, though I’m confident it had nothing to do with World Party’s “Ship of Fools.” Pay for us had nothing to do with sins, and, though we look like toughs in the cover photo, we weren’t kicking anyone’s ass. Still, we liked the concept that payment was inevitable (in a death-and-taxes way), even if it wasn’t clear the price or what the person paying would receive in exchange. We briefly entertained recording dialogue to open the cassette, purporting to be studio banter, as though a pizza had just been delivered—

Stallone One: Who’s gonna pay?
Stallone Two: Not me.
Stallone Three: I paid last time.
Etc., until it becomes apparent that no one would pay except the listener of our shitty cassette.
Haha.

—until we remembered that we were paying for studio time and couldn’t afford such nonsense.
Back then I turned my nose up at art that took itself too seriously. It was a phase, perhaps, though one that endures, if not as predominantly as it once did. Before I became a cynical punk, my rock ’n’ roll heroes included Dylan and Lennon—songwriters who wrote about big ideas, though often with playfulness and humor. I was someone who loved libraries and quiet places, despite being drawn to small rooms that featured loud music. But I didn’t yet believe in myself, in my ability to contribute to that scene or any scene. My irreverence protected me from failure when I ultimately failed, when our band played gigs for our friends and no one else. In retrospect, I was both serious and irreverent. In retrospect, I was a late bloomer and didn’t yet know who I was. By 1987, I was beginning to find out. Within three years I would realize that I’d said everything I could through music and start writing prose.

Save me from tomorrow

“Ship of Fools” is a political song, a category rife with cringe-worthy examples; for every “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” there are a dozen “We Didn’t Start the Fire(s).” The shelf life of such songs may be short. The best political songs transcend time by avoiding polemics in favor of the universal. The best political songs are prophetically timeless. I’m not saying that Karl Wallinger is Bob Dylan, but “Ship of Fools” is more relevant today than it was in 1987.
The lyrics, with their Old Testament references to avarice, lust, and Sodom—as well as more recent imagery of burning crosses—are timeless, if not explicitly political. The song’s original video opens with an ocean liner silently sailing over newspaper print before the song kicks in and the picture reveals Wallinger on guitar, fronting a band, interspersed with images of the then modern world: buildings being razed, cluster bombs exploding in desert landscapes, tanks advancing across a battlefield, trees being felled, oil rigs churning, an excavator mining coal deep in a seam. Humans at war. Humans exploiting the earth.
Climate change, then referred to as global warming, had only begun to enter the public’s consciousness. A year later, in June 1988, The New York Times ran an article on its front page, above the fold, with the headline “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” The article details the U.S. Senate testimony of Dr. James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, who described the human cause of higher temperatures. Many of the findings in Dr. Hansen’s testimony are all too familiar to us now, thirty-five years later, including noticeably higher temperatures between 2025 and 2050 and sea level rise between one to four feet by the middle of the 21st century.
In 2018, World Party released a new video to accompany “Ship of Fools,” with images of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi, immigrants being detained at the border, luxury yachts, refugees, melting ice sheets, wildfires, and flooding. The message is clear, if heavy handed—we have fools as leaders; the people bear the consequences; tomorrow is nearer than ever.

Ship of fools

The concept is ubiquitous in literature and art, and dates to Plato’s Republic and an allegory about a ship captained by a man with impaired senses and poor navigational skills. The ship is adrift. The crew is impatient and vies for the helm. A mutiny ensues. Will no one competent take charge?
Plato’s allegory has become a trope. A satirical parable titled Ship of Fools was published in the 15th Century by the German author Sebastian Brant, roughly contemporaneous with a painting by the Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch called The Ship of Fools:

More recently, Katherine Ann Porter’s novel, Ship of Fools, was a bestseller in 1962 and adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1965 directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Vivian Leigh. Porter’s novel and Kramer’s film came out at a time when popular music was becoming lyrically sophisticated and literate, and Dylan made the leap from folk to rock. The ensuing decades include a steady stream of songs called “Ship of Fools” from The Doors (1970), Grateful Dead (1974), Bob Seger (1976), World Party (1987), and Ron Sexsmith (2006), among more than a dozen others. Each of these songs is distinct (i.e. they’re not covers), and, while I haven’t listened to them all, the ones I have share the allegorical essence of Plato’s source material
Contemporary literature, too, has many examples of novels titled Ship of Fools. In addition, a 2018 political book from Tucker Carlson proves the elasticity of the allegory, which, like a robust internet meme, can be applied to opposing ideologies.

But you don’t pay

A debate has raged in recent decades—beginning in the 1980s, when financier Carl Icahn and various “corporate raiders” were buying companies in hostile takeovers and stripping them for parts—regarding who are the “takers” and who are the “makers.” Income inequality blossomed then, through Reagan’s “trickle-down” economic policies of tax cuts and ballooning deficits. In 2012, the debate crystallized during Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, when the candidate, who’d made his money through the private equity firm Bain Capital and the playbook of buying companies by loading up the acquired company with debt (and sometimes taking dividends with the proceeds), and walking away when that debt proved to be too much, was recorded at a private fundraiser at the Florida manse of Marc Leder, the CEO of Sun Capital, yet another private equity firm notorious for leaving its portfolio companies in ruins, telling the assembled audience that 47% of Americans don’t care about lower taxes because they don’t pay taxes. Romney’s disdain for half the American population, the half that Romney and others might label “takers,” likely doomed his campaign.
The pointed second verse of World Party’s “Ship of Fools” follows the metaphorical ship “over the endless sea,” driven by greed, “in search of no good,” enslaving “all the good people.”  For Wallinger, the 47%—the “galley slaves” in “Ship of Fools”—are the makers, while those piloting the ship, who “don’t pay,” are the takers. Though the song’s bridge promises, “you will pay tomorrow,” it’s not clear whether the captain will go down with this ship.

All aboard now

In his new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, author Douglas Rushkoff recounts a recent speaking gig that paid him a third of his annual salary as a university professor. He was flown out west and driven more than three hours into the remote desert to a compound with its own airfield, where he met five of the wealthiest people in the world. They wanted to know how to survive “the Event,” “their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.” They had their own compounds and underground bunkers and private security forces. They wanted to know if they should hunker down in New Zealand or Alaska. “For them,” Rushkoff writes, “the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”
The ship in Plato’s Republic and Wallinger’s song is the place where we live, the place we work. It may be our city or it may be our country or it may be our planet. We have no choice but to sail on it. It’s a cynical song in that respect, made more so by our continued degradation of the Earth since its release.
“Save me,” the song’s chorus pleads, “Save me from tomorrow.” When I was twenty-five and first heard “Ship of Fools” on the radio, I was obstinate and unserious. Tomorrow was an inscrutable concept. I bought records and listened to records and played music and wrote songs and partied like a fool, with all the time in the world.

Dana Cann is the author of the novel Ghosts of Bergen County (Tin House). His short fiction has been published in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, and, most recently, Scoundrel Time. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and is currently at work on a new novel and an ever-expanding list of half-finished projects.