Charlie Darwin

I think Buck Fastard is on the right lines that the song is a comment on the broken system of global capitalism and credit and the american dream. A world that depends on 2/3rd of the global population living on less than a dollar a day so a tiny minority can attain massive wealth, and where less than a quarter of the population live anything like comfortable lives. Where even in the richest country in the world the USA, millions of people are malnourished, and don't have adequate housing, nor healthcare.

The song is about the false promise that working hard, and striving to achive the dream of success will somehow free you from your poverty or lift you from your station in life. But that the bright horizon, is just that, a false dawn. Hope that can never be fulfilled. That like the pilgrim fathers on the mayflower, half of whom died, the chances of success are slim to none; and that if you do succeed it will mainly be by standing on other people's failure.

The song goes on to ask how it's possible to accept such a flawed system, that's built on Charles Darwin imperetive of 'survival of the fittest'. Where most members of a species that are born, die in order that the strongest, and fittest can succeed. A system that's bound to fail, (and bulit of the failure of the many) eventually as the population grows and resources become scarecer. The pyramid of credit created wealth become unsustainabale.

It goes on to talk about the broken vessel, the ship that is sinking. Your own, as you struggle to make ends meet, or the world's as it sinks deepr into wars, and a scarcity of resource; and that spooning water out of a sinking ship is a futile excercise, and you, it, and the world are going to sink into the cold depths.

The lords of war reffered to are the countries and rulers, the rich, and the corporations that exploit and destroy global resources, in the fight to retain their wealth - the oil wars (iraq) and (for example) resource wars being fought in africa, by the chinese, and so on. Expoliting the lives of countless children, in order to keep the cash flowing, and persuading everyone to spend their lives in the pursuit of (in most cases) fruitless sucesss, in return for low wages.' That in most cases, most people don't 'succeed' regardless of how hard they work. And end up sinking into the cold depths of wasted, brutal lives. Not the cheerist of songs really - but a pretty damming inditement of the American Dream!