The Price of Vindication

Note: I’ll have a new mix in a couple hours but I’m trying to be very good about making it on Thursday afternoon, hell or high water. Props to new producer/engineer Chris Rakestraw for making us sound good again. Go over to SteveAudio’s blog and tell him thanks for setting us up with him.

In about half of the 40 or so discussions I’ve had this week about the economic meltdown, someone has said, in some way or another, that this will finally close the book on the GOP brand of unbridled free marketeering. Just like how Katrina would finally close the book on the idea that shrinking government down to a size where you could “drown it in the bathtub” once hundreds of people drowned along with it. And Abu Ghraib would close the book on the idea that we could win more hearts and minds in Iraq than we were repulsing. Progressive ideas have been proven right repeatedly by last straw upon last straw in the past couple thousand days, and with staggering consequences.

Our new song The Price of Vindication is about the financial crisis as the latest in a series of validations of progressive ideals that have unfortunately long-stopped being fun to get smug about.

(mouseever opens a player)
The Price of Vindication

I heard it meant a change was coming
When the photographs went public of degraded prison subjects
And it surely signaled off the end of something
When the Mississippi waterfalls busted through the city walls
The wringing hands of every morning after
Never turn to fists to break their nose
And that particular final chapter happened a dozen final chapters ago

Righteous indignation’s rotting in the bargain bin
The credits started rolling but the jokes keep pouring in
I can’t afford a smile, just a chuckle now and then
Until the price of vindication goes back down again

I haven’t got a head for economics
What a take from the appearance of an awful lot of zeroes is
Just a life raft to abuse widespread and chronic
With a “Swear you won’t do this again,”
“We swear we won’t this is the end,”

We disappointed vultures come out often
Scatter off with nothing in our mouths
Every final nail that hits that coffin
Splits the wood and lets the corpse fall out

Righteous indignation’s rotting in the bargain bin
The epilogue’s been written, they keep tacking on the end
I can’t afford a smile, just a chuckle now and then
Until the price of vindication goes back down again

Parachutes of platinum and silk safety nets
They made out like bandits and lost every bet
They’ve learned every lesson there is to forget
It ain’t over ’til it’s over, I guarantee it isn’t over yet

I’m tired of mending fences so I’m sharpening my spine
With an appetite for vengeance and a thirst for better times
So I’ll order up what’s mine, and send the bill to them
Until the price of vindication goes back down again

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