Sit Down

I think the song is about that moment when you stop and think about the decisions you have made or which you have to take. The war the singer talks about is life itself. And he is almost entirely on auto-pilot the whole journey through life. But now he stops: "I'm still at the front but I don't, I don't fight - I'm gonna sit down tonight". He doesn't despair, he doesn't take any superficial decision. He just stops and starts to hear his own deep thoughts. The result? "Listen to the silence in between - it's louder than the bombs that come screaming in". The silence may be anything: regret, remorse, depression, fear, uncertainty or all together.

It means George Bush is a mother fucking dumbass.

It means George Bush is a mother fucking dumbass.

It's just an anti-war song, not directed towards a particular conflict but to outbreaks of war generally. I think it capture's anti-war sentiment beautifully and hauntingly - despite the inescapability of the conflict ('I can't pull out') the insistence that the singers will opt to 'sit down' (rather than take up arms) is touching. I think it means it something that the characters in this song are only 'keep[ing] the defence'. They're not lobbing grenades or anything.

A war-weary soldier is speaking: he no longer 'buys in' to the circumstances that have placed him into a wartime foxhole (although maybe he once believed in the cause). He has resolved and resigned that, whatever the outcome, he will no longer return fire in answer to the heavy attack he is under. He decides on the defiantly peaceful act of just 'sitting down' and listening for the silence between bomb bursts. In the last verse, when it states 'We' don't fight, it shows that common people do not want war, just a war-mongering ruling class that tries to make common people fight for them. Regardless of them, we all still have free choice not to take up arms against each other..