Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car

This song certainly seems to contain political commentary, but it's important to note that this aspect is inextricably bound with Sam's slight fire-and-brimstone theology. Love is an enormous and essentially all-purpose concept on previous Iron and Wine albums, so the fact that he begins this (comparatively) more aggressive and fiercely played song with the assertion that "Love was a promise made of smoke". One gets the impression that something has happened to the optimism and romanticism that largely dominated Beam's earlier work. Love is also "A bone cold and older than our bodies/ Slowly floating in the sea". This suggests that love, with all of the connotations Beam has draped around it, was dead and out of reach long before he was born. He is now living in a world where "The shiny blades of pagan angels in our father's skies" is a daily occurrence. Though he seems to simply speaking about airplanes, the narrator may be either highly superstitious or paranoid due to his religious beliefs. I think, though, that this is just the narrator's way of expressing the arrogance of man: they can travel wherever they want without necessarily respecting the Creator of the skies through which they fly. The narrator is married, it seems, to a woman who is distressed about the condition of their son. I assume that he has been swallowed up by the apathy of an irreligious world. Possibly he has gotten himself into trouble by engaging in behavior that, had he been upright in God's eyes, would not have happened. He then drifts into memory of when he was a poor young man ("a beggar shaking out my stolen coat"), possibly feeling guilt for crimes that he committed before his mellower years. This next line, however, is where political commentary enters the song, and provides a possible explanation for the troubled (or "pagan", which is the pejorative of choice in this song) world: "... they caught the king beneath the borrowed car/ Righteous, drunk, and fumbling for the royal keys" I believe that this is a direct reference to George W. Bush's DUI, an incident which took place before he was the U.S. president ("fumbling for the royal keys"). The borrowed car indirectly refers to his father, and the fact that George W. did not come from a generation that had to work for positions of governmental or intellectual prominence. He is described as everything that we loathe in our fellow man, let alone in our Commander in Chief: "righteous" instead of humble, ungrateful for his inherited affluence and still assuming that he could follow in his father's footsteps as a leader and an influence over legislation.

The second stanza starts with a beautifully complex metaphor: "Love was a father's flag and sung like a shank/ In a cake on our leather boots". The image of a trampled flag blended with the image of a shank baked into a cake, an image usually associated with the smuggling of instruments of death to prisoners, suggests a complex combination of betrayal. That is, by scorning and trampling the values of our forefathers into the dirt, we created a world in which such deception as a "...shakn/ In a cake" can take place without our knowledge. Considering the end of the last stanza, I believe that George W. Bush is the shank, the instrument of death and the starter of wars, who was slipped into the office under the guise of piety (the cake). This maneuver was easy for politicians to make because U.S. culture has become, like the "unholy child" of the first stanza, ignorant of the ethical and moral systems (Christianity, it seems) that would allow us to see Bush as inherently violent and dangerous. Indeed, what's left of the beauty and the ethical power of Christian sentiment is one single "feather floating down/ To where the birds had shit on empty chapel pews". The image empty, befouled pews should put to rest any doubts that the narrator is blaming our culture's crookedness on the mass abdication of service, prayer, confession and faith. Much like the planes that ominously fly overhead in the first stanza, here "Every morning" there is "... one more machine/ To mock our ever-waning patience at the well". Here the well suggests purity, as well as an antiquated way of acquiring nourishment (physical and, it seems, mental). The development of technology seems concurrent with the shrinking of Christian faith. Even his wife, if the "she" is the same woman mentioned in the first stanza, has become vengeful in her frustration: she takes joy in "stealing socks" (probably just a metaphor for stealing, a grave sin, things that this probably poor family needs). He also sees her "... singing something good where all the horses fell", possibly enacting an archaic metaphor for war (horses have historically been animals of war) and suggesting that she revels in the death of soldiers who have died at the hands of an arrogant, faux-religious impostor. In this man's world, everything has become turned around: the world is agnostic and apathetic about their condition, his son has been lost to this world and the evils that can subsequently sneak in, and his wife has become angry and bitter. So, in one of the last images of the poems, he casts himself as the snake (normally the ultimate figure of evil, as the serpent destroyed our state of perfect happiness and created original sin), hinting "every possibility" to his wife. In a world where the "king", the worldly representative of God, is terrorizing foreign countries and using an inherently peaceful religion as justification, he becomes the snake who whispers that there is knowledge outside of the restrictions of the "king". This is spark of optimism, and a beautiful image of hope and faith coming from a man who has every reason to lay down his sword and give up the fight. However, the song does not end on this note. A figure called the "pagan angel", a term previously given to airplanes in the sky, appears with a gun to utter some of Beam's most ominous and devastating lines: "'My love is one made to break every bended knee". I see the "pagan angels", the planes of the first stanza, as war planes. Right as this man is whispering what would be defined as "blasphemy" in the ear of his emotionally turbulent wife, he is confronted with the guns of a war plane pointed right at him. His resolution to "...break every bended knee" is a confirmation of what others may see as this man's paranoid religious fanaticism. The powers that be have outlined their programmatic plan to eradicate the faithful (those on "bended knee").
This song is one of the most effective criticisms of the Bush area, despite one's own particular faith, and has all of the subtlety and moral passion that make songwriters essential and worthy of our admiration. Beam also makes it a pity that Iron and Wine will never be lauded along with Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen's as a master of melding sound and phrase to form a complex, astoundingly beautiful and profound commentary on U.S. culture. Though he is among the more popular in his singer/songwriter or indie rock genre, I cannot see him receiving awards or changing the hearts and minds of the Americans about whom he writes songs as prayer and exhortation. That's my take.