Peary wrote about these lyrics in the tour guide book from the RTB tour. It was my first Rush concert and I still have that tour book, though not in front of me atm, so I'm paraphrasing what he said.
The fall of Communism made a lot of people happy, but it made Neil Peart MAD. Not because he approved of Communism, but because for years the people living in those countries had wear ugly suits, drive nasty cars, and drink bug spray to get high.... and it was all a mistake?! We were all so proud of ourselves for being on the "winning" side of the Cold War, but he felt that our victory dance was like telling those people living in those Eastern Bloc countries that didn't do anything wrong that the 50+ years of suffering they endured was all for nothing. That's a very heavy price to pay for some mad man's misguided ideology. And that waste of life and time and resources is the ultimate Heresy, which he refers to in the title.
There IS a reference to consumerism, in that people could buy the things they want and "borrow for a little more." Not American consumerism per se, but the kind of free wheeling consumerism common to Western nations, while it has its problems, is still preferable to having nothing to buy at all, and so it became all that we could do for them in the end, to export our brand of consumerism so they can, finally, buy things we take for granted like toilet paper, napkins, aspirin, make-up, and for once they had a choice.
So he was saying it was good for the people that he Wall fell, but also that we shouldn't overlook the terrible, awful cost to those people of our "winning" the Cold War.
Peary wrote about these lyrics in the tour guide book from the RTB tour. It was my first Rush concert and I still have that tour book, though not in front of me atm, so I'm paraphrasing what he said.
The fall of Communism made a lot of people happy, but it made Neil Peart MAD. Not because he approved of Communism, but because for years the people living in those countries had wear ugly suits, drive nasty cars, and drink bug spray to get high.... and it was all a mistake?! We were all so proud of ourselves for being on the "winning" side of the Cold War, but he felt that our victory dance was like telling those people living in those Eastern Bloc countries that didn't do anything wrong that the 50+ years of suffering they endured was all for nothing. That's a very heavy price to pay for some mad man's misguided ideology. And that waste of life and time and resources is the ultimate Heresy, which he refers to in the title.
There IS a reference to consumerism, in that people could buy the things they want and "borrow for a little more." Not American consumerism per se, but the kind of free wheeling consumerism common to Western nations, while it has its problems, is still preferable to having nothing to buy at all, and so it became all that we could do for them in the end, to export our brand of consumerism so they can, finally, buy things we take for granted like toilet paper, napkins, aspirin, make-up, and for once they had a choice.
So he was saying it was good for the people that he Wall fell, but also that we shouldn't overlook the terrible, awful cost to those people of our "winning" the Cold War.