‘The Lazy Sunbathers’ – Morrissey: Realities of governance & our own accountabilities

One of my favorite Morrissey songs.

He writes about the bourgeois; the middle-class that are wanna-be elites; the elites, who become detached and are confined to their own pleasure.  I think even if we are not necessarily on the beaches, we are often willing accomplices to violence and extinction and the socialization of these things as ‘normal’ while we pay attention only to small worlds and our so-called ‘personal’ situations and lives.  It’s often a clever way that lives are situated along the freedoms and confines of a life structured for us by historical power-relations and struggles, with their dominances and resistances.  I think, always, of Michel Foucault and others who have written along his thinking, such as Judith Butler for instance, in that POWER is not just a dominance ‘over’ things and people and events and everything, but also produces, creates, makes.

Jaded? Stagnation?  I don’t think so.  I call them sociopaths. And there are too too many in this world.  Most of them are running our governments and transnational corporations.  The large group in the world want to be like that and they work hard at having enough and acting just right in order to access it.  There are activists who are wanting the whole world to become that way and they call themselves social justice workers.  I’m sorry but Freedom is NOT middle-class elitist.  Freedom and empowerment in relation to resources, in relation to attitudes, differences, cultures, etc.  are not about accessing the privileges of the violent.  Let’s *not* do this.  Let’s *not* wish this upon us.  If so, why not change directions, concerns, priorities, worldviews?  Small steps, big steps, steps.

But who am I to say?

Lyrics are below the video.

THE LAZY SUNBATHERS – by Morrissey

A world war was announced days ago
But they didn’t know, the lazy sunbathers
The lazy sunbathers
The sun burns through, to the planet’s core
And it isn’t enough, they want more

Nothing appears to be between the ears of the lazy sunbathers
Too jaded to question stagnation
The sun burns through, to the planet’s core
And it isn’t enough, they want more

Religions fall, children shelled, children shelled, that’s all very well
But would you please keep the noise down low?
Because you’re waking the lazy sunbathers
Oh, the lazy sunbathers, the lazy sunbathers