egyptianeskimo, I think you're very close. I'm not sure that this isn't supposed to be written mostly literally - as in, really from the perspective of a child. You can sort of see him trying to step into shoes that are too big for him, getting the military haircut and playing with switchblades and butchering livestock. The warning at the end of the song - "no one lives forever and the devil never sleeps alone" - comes across like the advice of a Cassandra figure, accurate and yet useless until it's too late. It seems to me to have two applications in this song: first and most obviously the people who started this war that's taking people away never to return; but also, and ironically, those of us who remain who are so caught up in our own tragedies that we lose sight of the fact that other people need help (trying to garden in freezing weather, refusing even to lend someone a quarter to make a call).
There is, similar to the rest of the album, a feeling of frustrated escapist longings: train tracks that run into the sea, a telephone you can't use, a bunch of people too afraid to cross the street, and, of course, nothing on the radio to take one's mind off of what's going on. There's clearly something rudderless about the person talking in this song, and I think it's relatively obvious that, as people have been saying, the radio isn't the real problem. Rather, the problem is our weird belief that radio and other pop media can serve as legitimate substitutes for things like parents. The radio, then, is playing the same stuff it always has been and always will be, but situations like this demonstrate how little that stuff is needed.
egyptianeskimo, I think you're very close. I'm not sure that this isn't supposed to be written mostly literally - as in, really from the perspective of a child. You can sort of see him trying to step into shoes that are too big for him, getting the military haircut and playing with switchblades and butchering livestock. The warning at the end of the song - "no one lives forever and the devil never sleeps alone" - comes across like the advice of a Cassandra figure, accurate and yet useless until it's too late. It seems to me to have two applications in this song: first and most obviously the people who started this war that's taking people away never to return; but also, and ironically, those of us who remain who are so caught up in our own tragedies that we lose sight of the fact that other people need help (trying to garden in freezing weather, refusing even to lend someone a quarter to make a call).
There is, similar to the rest of the album, a feeling of frustrated escapist longings: train tracks that run into the sea, a telephone you can't use, a bunch of people too afraid to cross the street, and, of course, nothing on the radio to take one's mind off of what's going on. There's clearly something rudderless about the person talking in this song, and I think it's relatively obvious that, as people have been saying, the radio isn't the real problem. Rather, the problem is our weird belief that radio and other pop media can serve as legitimate substitutes for things like parents. The radio, then, is playing the same stuff it always has been and always will be, but situations like this demonstrate how little that stuff is needed.