This Is Us, And Them

Us and Them was the second track on side two of Pink Floyd's 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. The song has meant a lot of things to a lot of stoned people. It lacks a lyrical chorus, which I think is part of its power. Pink Floyd just kept stringing new prose together about the sheer hopelessness of the time without one lyrical repetition. The best stanza is:

Forward he cried from the rear

And the front rank died

And the general sat And the lines on the map Moved from side to side

The song has a musical hook that I never realized was interspersed with saxophone solos until I listened to it recently. And, wow. In the mix machine era of hip-pop, this definitely evokes Billy Joel on acid.

At its heart, though, Us and Them is a complicated piece that weeps about war and society. 1973 was rough. The Vietnam War petered out, but Watergate erupted. Billie Jean King beat Bobbie Riggs, but George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees. The World Trade Center opened for business. 2018 is also rough. And I've made a pact with myself to not talk about politics. So let's take that entire elephant in the living room and let her stomp around while we pretend she's not there.

This Is Us is a top rated show on NBC and it is one of the only things that unifies our country right now. I have confirmation of this from social media. The same people who disagree vehemently about values, politics, and just about anything else (such as the true color of the sky) all weep about Jack Pearson's death. Anytime the show is on there is a big virtual group hug online and I watch the hug. I sort of like the hug, because hugs are nice. But I do not trust this hug at all.

The show is about a family that clearly resonates with many cross-sections of our culture. The Pearsons are a heterosexual Caucasian couple that has triplets, one of whom dies during childbirth. In a huge life-altering coincidence, within hours of their childrens' births, a black child who was abandoned by his father at a firehouse shows up at the same hospital. The Pearsons adopt this boy. The actors are great. The plot lines are woven together brilliantly. But. Why is this show so universally appealing? I suppose it speaks to issues of marital strife, addiction, weight, self-esteem, and grief, which are all too common.

But. There is something more, and I think that it is not just the soap opera quality of breath-holding between episodes to see what will happen to our "friends" next, but the idea that the Pearsons raised their kids in the era immediately before technology became the centerpiece of each person's day. The character everyone loves the most dies before the next era happens. Jack was saved from having to see the future. Jack Pearson had a beeper. And they used payphones. This was also the era immediately before everything really started to go awry in pop culture. Like, reality television. The Pearsons came to age as a family climbing the last tread on the the staircase of tectonic cultural change embodied by the anti-Vietnam War movement. So this show pulls at a heart string that every American adult still has and by which the next generation will probably be more confused than moved. Every generation laments the "good old days." But maybe the Pearsons in 1980s Pittsburgh give us hope that there is an "us" as opposed to the "Us and Them," of the Vietnam era. Which begs the question: why would we so universally cling to this hope that there is an "us"? Maybe it is because we are in another Vietnam War era, only we can't identify it as readily because there is no massive overseas war (at the moment), for which boys are being drafted. Perhaps we like the show because it perfectly distracts us from our current war. You know, that war we feel every day when we read the news, that is hard to pin down, like an internal organ on an ultrasound. This war is our angry American culture's spleen. There are no uniforms or even articles of intent in this war. So it is hard to see the sides. In fact, the sides may exist only on the tips of our fingers, that are pointing at one another. The assumption is that everyone who believes something different from what you do is wrong, and by logical deduction that makes you "right."

And of course the whole thing is failing dismally. It fails for the same reasons the Vietnam War did, and for inverse reason that the Pearsons succeed. Because in the end, if you really look it in the face, in the exclamation point at the end of the Twitter diatribe, or the part of the sentence that goes something like "I respect your beliefs, but...."

There is not love.

Love does not flourish within conditions. Love does not grow from seeds strewn carelessly around the soil of instability. So, let the tears flow. Let the front ranks die. And ironically, forty-five years from the end of the Vietnam War, the general sits on his ass, pushing buttons on a television remote control. Moving the TV picture from side to side. And that piece of plastic he's pushing buttons on will be as obsolete as Jack Pearson's beeper in another few years.

So, about that hug.