So this has been.my favorite song of OTEP's since it came out in 2004, and I always thought it was a song about a child's narrative of suffering in an abusive Christian home. But now that I am revisiting the lyrics, I am seeing something totally new.
This song could be gospel of John but from the perspective of Jesus.
Jesus was NOT having a good time up to and during the crucifixion. Everyone in the known world at the time looked to him with fear, admiration or disgust and he was constantly being asked questions. He spoke in "verses, prophesies and curses". He had made an enemy of the state, and believed the world was increasingly wicked and fallen from grace, or that he was in the "mouth of madness".
The spine of atlas is the structure that allows the titan to hold the world up. Jesus challenged the state and in doing so became a celebrated resistance figure. It also made him public enemy #1.
All of this happened simply because he was doing his thing, not because of any agenda he had or strategy.
And then he gets scourged (storm of thorns)
There are some plot holes here but I think it's an interesting interpretation.
As so many practiced diplomats, so too your vaunted laureates, whose access to the higher rungs of the cultural priesthood is hinged upon their flair for sophistry. Well, I vote you the best-equipped to shrink from speech that might suggest any thoughts your key target-market might not have already signed-off on and ratified. And I vote you most likely to clutter your language with so much deadwood that no amount of pruning will reveal your intensive, protracted campaign of saying nothing at all. Your daydreams of black tie affairs at Rideau Hall. Your acceptance speech. Your dramatic pause. Don't forget to thank those bitter ex-musician cum embedded rock-journalists frantically applauding the latest artist-formerly-known-as-iconoclast, giddy from the fumes of a fresh defection, moping to the maudlin beat of a hat rack rhythm section, a tacit understanding of mutual non-aggression enjoyed by every nauseating do-nothing functionary. Really, it's not so much the incessant ruse of assigning profound meaning to the meaningless curios you decorate you sets with in your extraordinarily mundane fictions. It's the (colossal) arrogance of the subtext: the province of human affairs is a field best left to dilettantes with the extraordinary gift for feigning of paralysis. For saying nothing at all. For daydreams of black tie affairs at Rideau Hall. An acceptance speech. Sustained applause.
Lyrics submitted by postlapsaria
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"Ex-musician cum embedded rock journalist" is also poetry if I have ever read poetry.