Sunday morning.  Arrived at a local coffee shop, along with a few early-bird bike riders.  The coffee, excellent, and what better venue with a hum of voices in the background for wrestling with words to express inchoate thoughts.  The mind is like that: associations rapidly intersecting in unpredictable fashion.  You search for words to bring order to the sensory input of the body, words you’ve received from others, images traced upon the retina by light, lately felt heat of summer days to come, etc.  It does not end.  What does it mean to be alive, to feel?  More life means more meaning from what is felt.

Yesterday I attended via Zoom along with over twenty others from around the world, a seminar hosted by Dr. Richard Gilman-Opalsky.  The topic was parallel to professor’s book, The Communism of Love published in 2020 by AK Press.  After a session to provide context, the floor was open for comments, for exchanges between the participants on the parameters of the idea and practice of love.  What does love as a social dynamic, have to do with a critique of our capitalist society?  How does love as a variegated practice offer the possibility of a alternate future, a future not marked, or to say it plainly, a future not scared by the wide gap between the few who “own” great excess in wealth and influence, and the many who struggle without end for the basic necessities to support their lives?

I do not know.  But I am convinced this is a conversation we must have.  My instinct tells me that the professor and the band of conversational participants on Zoom are “onto something.”  I also am sure that the odds are quite long.  We have imbibed the ethic of capitalism, — everything, absolutely everything is subsumed in the service of profit.  In fact here in America, such an outlook is understood to be guaranteed by our Constitution.  A conservative friend of mine stated the principle succinctly, “you/I have the freedom to do whatever we desire as long as we do not harm someone else.”  The “fly in the ointment” is precisely the difficulty that comes with knowing whether harm is being done to anyone else.  Goods and services are usually generated at such a remove, by a global supply chain, and it is impossible to know whether those involved were fairly compensated, under humane working conditions.

Pause to think and you will recognize that the valorization of profit almost always means that workers are unfairly compensated, and they labor under severe conditions in the work place.

Finally, I am quite unable to believe that Americans can easily be persuaded that our ethos of excess is unsustainable, that we do not “deserve” to continue a carbon intensive way-of-life…  We will continue as a society to stagger from crisis to crisis, unmasked, happily returning to Disneyland.

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There’s always a tune to carry us forward into the day.  Starship’s great anthem, We Built This City serves that purpose.  No need to comment upon the lyric lines.  If you listen carefully, you will understand the paean of resistance, the rejection of commodification, of subjecting the wild freedom of art to serve profit.

We Built This City
By Starship

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

Say you don’t know me or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night

Marconi plays the mambo, listen to the radio
Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

Someone’s always playing corporation games
Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names
We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page

Marconi plays the mambo, listen to the radio
Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

It’s just another Sunday
In a tired old street
Police have got the choke hold, oh
Then we just lost the beat

Who counts the money underneath the bar?
Who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars?
Don’t tell us you need us ’cause we’re the ship of fools
Looking for America, coming through your schools

(I’m looking out over that Golden Gate bridge on another gorgeous sunny Saturday and I’m seein’ that bumper to bumper traffic.)

Don’t you remember? (remember)

(Here’s your favorite radio station, in your favorite radio city, the city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps.)

Marconi plays the mambo, listen to the radio
Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city (oh)
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

(We built, we built this city) built this city (we built, we built this city)
(We built, we built this city) built this city (we built, we built this city)
(We built, we built this city) built this city (we built, we built this city)
(We built, we built this city) built this city (we built, we built this city)

Lyrics by Bernard Taupin, George Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, Peter Wolf