Throwing it All Away

Throwing it All Away

          Bohemian Rhapsody is back in vogue with the release of the movie by the same name. Who doesn’t like Freddie Mercury and Queen with their effusive, enthusiastic and expressive songs?  The lyrics are simple, memorable and speak to many of us.  There are even certain lyrical phrases that actually invoke the melody of the phrase when they are said. Let’s try it just for fun:

Mama, just killed a man

I don’t know about you, but I can hear the paced rhythm of that line and it hangs at the end like a good opening sentence in a story, you need to hear more.

But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away

This line is even better, because it brings the emotion of the sentiment up into your throat.  I can hear Freddie bringing this out of his gut, wrenching it with the fatalistic angst that transcends the loss of the life he has taken, but about the life (his own) that he has ruined.

As if nothing really matters

This twinge has a trailing off quality.  The man has gone through the stages of grief and has accepted its nihilistic outcome.  Again, the melody runs through every single line.  I can’t read or write music, but I feel every one of these notes and I feel I could write them on a musical bar in musical notation.

I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all

These finishing ten notes that accompany these nine words move from a trudging and factual reality and turn into the real lament of the song. This is the very human characteristic of wishing away all our sins and missteps, but in the most dramatic and less than fully believable statement.  It is intentional hyperbole.  He wants it all back for a redo, but of course that can’t happen and rarely if ever does happen.

          That all goes to the rhapsody, and the Bohemian is the explanation for it all.  Freddie was unconventional.  Nothing he did was by the book and he relished in the individualistic artistry of it all.  Hence, Bohemian Rhapsody.

          Fasten your seatbelts, because here comes the switcheroo you didn’t see coming.  This song came to mind this morning when I read several editorials in the Financial Times about the multi-pronged attack on globalization that we are encountering worldwide.  It has been 75 years since the historic and critically impactful Bretton Woods Conference that was held as the Second World War was winding down to its end.  Think about that, the nations of the world, while engaged up to their necks in an existential crisis of proportions never before seen, coming to the collective decision that they had to stop the madness and figure out how to get along on all levels.  What resulted was 75 years (more or less depending on how you discount the most recent years of unraveling) of the Golden Era of growth, prosperity and peace (not perfect, but pretty damn good).

          Bretton Woods was not only politically important and stage-setting for economic success of historic levels, but it was enlightened in the realization that human beings needed to care for one another everywhere in the world in order for everyone to be safe and peaceful.  It formed the basis of the global developmental trend that blossomed after the War and built theretofore backwater “shitholes” (as our beloved Bigot-in-Chief likes to call them) into prosperous nations of consumers that have driven growth for most developed nations.  Bretton Woods changed the world as I know it for the better.  I have had the distinct good fortune to have lived during those 75 years.  I can honestly say that my mother, one of the world first and foremost developmentalists, driving jeeps into the mountains of Venezuela in 1946 and ending her career as a Director of FAO in Rome, was one of many people that helped realize the dream of Bretton Woods. 

          I realize that by using a Venezuela example, I open myself up to the criticism that this help was not always sustainable, but for every Venezuela there two of Chile or China.  And you can even say that there has been a pretty volatile path even for those, wracked with authoritarianism and pseudo-communism, and you would be right. No progress occurs without bumps and falls, but progress of great proportions we have had nonetheless.

          And as for peace, some would say, speak for yourself.  I was too young to experience Vietnam, too old to get roped into the Gulf wars, and while I have travelled the emerging countries of the world far more than most, I have managed to avoid direct involvement of the various warlords and civil strife that has cast shows over many lives.  But still, taken on the geopolitical whole, the past 75 years have been a wonder for the record books on most of the dimensions espoused at Bretton Woods.  The world, for better or worse, stands at nine billion people in a world that demographers predicted could not support seven billion.  Technological advances, again for better or worse, have created a near-utopian platform for global equality and all we have to do is figure out how to make it safer and more positive than invasive.

          So, now we stand on a precipice and those Freddie Mercury words ring in my ears.  We are on the verge of throwing it all away.  Nationalism and self-centered, wall-building, protectionism (political, economic and fervently ethnic) is welling up using tactics that most enlightened people consider despicable.  The pragmatic amongst the enlightened want to fight fire with fire.  Those with more grace than practicality want to take the high roads and defeat the trend on an ethereal level.  I just want my Bretton Woods.  Rather than nothing really mattering, I would say that everything matters.  We need economics, politics, ideology and morality all at once.  They form a cohesive and effective bond.  Bretton Woods should have taught us that.

          My approach is enlightened self-interest.  I tell everyone I can that it is in their best interest and the interest of their grandchildren to be globalists of the sort defined by Bretton Woods (on all levels that is).  We do not have to throw it all away, we can carry on, carry on as Freddie would say.