There is an old familiar saying that goes: one of the only constants in life is change. I propose that a second constant in life is war. For a species that talks ad nauseam about striving for peace, we are constantly, constantly, constantly dealing with outbreaks of war somewhere on the planet. The reasons for war are varied, but whatever the cause of a particular set of hostilities…power, land acquisition, religion, ethnic hatred, theft of natural resources, whatever…there is always collateral damage in the form of destruction of the infrastructure required for citizens to live and the death and/or exile of ordinary families who find it too dangerous to exist within the conflict zone. Those who play war games for political or ideological reasons usually care little for those who suffer as a result.
In the early 1980s, the citizens of several South American countries found themselves embroiled in the middle of civil wars that were funded, in part, by the U.S. government. Those of us of a certain vintage will remember watching the Iran-Contra Hearings broadcast on TV. Those hearings made Col. Oliver North a celebrity of sorts, even though he was found to be complicit in funneling weapons into Nicaragua and funding actions that created political instability there. Just to the north of Nicaragua is the country of Guatemala. While not in the media spotlight in the same way that Nicaragua was, civil unrest was the order of the day in Guatemala, too. In fact, the situation became so dire for ordinary citizens of that country that many felt that they had no choice but to flee across their northern border and into Mexico. Refugee camps were established just inside the Mexican border to house and care for the tens of thousands of Guatemalans who arrived there.
While these wars were going on, international aid agencies sought ways to help the dispossessed. In addition to providing food, shelter and medical assistance, these aid agencies believed that the trauma experienced by this particular set of refugees was being under-reported in the media. In order to raise the profile of these victims, the aid agencies first invited politicians from western countries to tour the refugee camps and talk to the survivors. The thinking was that these politicians would be so moved by what they heard that they would return to their respective parliaments and increase financial assistance, as well as apply political pressure on South American governments to cease hostilities. In conjunction with this effort, aid agencies also sought to influence public opinion in western countries by inviting celebrities to tour the refugee camps as well. The hope here was that these celebrities would use their public platforms to appeal to their fans to help raise needed money, as well as to apply political pressure on their own politicians. One such aid agency involved in this effort was Oxfam International. Because Oxfam had a Canadian affiliate agency, Oxfam Canada got to invite some Canadian politicians and celebrities. One of the celebrities that ended up accepting Oxfam’s invitation to tour the refugee camps in southern Mexico was singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn.
Bruce Cockburn grew up in Westboro, Ontario, which is just to the west of Ottawa. Like many children of the 1950s, Cockburn discovered the music of Elvis and Chuck Berry while in his teens. This led him to taking guitar and piano lessons. Quickly enough, Cockburn developed the skills necessary to play publicly in bands that he formed with his friends. After doing that for a while, Cockburn decided that he preferred playing on his own, with just an acoustic guitar for accompaniment. As Cockburn’s prowess with the guitar improved, so did his ability to write a form of poetry that would eventually transition over into song lyrics. Just as Cockburn mimicked the musical stylings of Elvis and Chuck Berry, he did the same when it came to his writing. For that, he turned to the Beat Poets, such as Kerouac and Ginsberg. As the 1960s rolled along, Bruce Cockburn dropped out of music school and began traveling and seeing the world. He busked on the streets of Paris for a while before returning to Canada, where he began earning a living as a folk singer. The beginning of Cockburn’s musical career coincided with the rising level of awareness among musicians of spiritual practices and philosophies contained within religions from the east. Thus, not unlike George Harrison, Bruce Cockburn began to create original pieces of music that possessed a spiritual bent to them. He was dubbed a Christian singer, but in reality, his music imbued a burgeoning sense of respect for the importance of our environment and the sanctity of human life and of peaceful relations among us all.
While Cockburn began to develop a following in Canada with beautiful, thoughtful songs such as “One Day I Walk”, it wasn’t until he released a song entitled “Wondering Where the Lions Are” that his profile really began to rise. That song became a smash hit in Canada, as well as in the U.S. Having a U.S. Top 40 hit song helped to make Cockburn an in-demand musical personality throughout North America. Because of this sense of recognition and empowerment, Cockburn began channeling his spiritual beliefs in a more political manner. This manifested itself in songs such as “Rumours of Glory”, “Fascist Architecture (I’m OK)” and “Coldest Night of the Year” from the album Humans. And so it was that when Oxfam Canada was searching for a celebrity who they felt would possess the proper mindset to be able to absorb the testimony of the Guatemalan refugees and then properly articulate a public response, they turned to Bruce Cockburn.
The visit to the refugee camps in southern Mexico changed Bruce Cockburn’s life. Before traveling there, Cockburn had been to many countries in the world as a tourist. He felt worldly, in the sense that he appreciated the richness of foreign cultures, especially in terms of literature, music, food and spiritual beliefs. But plunging into the middle of a humanitarian crisis such as the one he faced with the Guatemalan refugees was something altogether different. Cockburn was not a tourist here. He was a witness. Cockburn heard stories of rape and theft and torture. He learned about how many of these families were living lives of indentured servitude due to formal government policies that denied them access to enough land on which to grow enough food to feed their family members. This lack of land caused these families to have to enter into rental agreements with land barons who saddled them with a debt the size of which could never adequately be repaid. The guerrilla fighters being funded by the U.S. were no better. They stole whatever they could find, raped with impunity and often kidnapped young boys and men to fight in their army. For many Guatemalan families, the only safe choice was to flee their homeland in search of peace and safety elsewhere. The first stage of that journey took them across the border into southern Mexico. This is where Bruce Cockburn found them.
While there, he also saw and heard the helicopters. Cockburn (and many others) naively thought that international borders actually stood for something in legal terms. However, in reality, international borders are legal constructs only. With the exception of border crossing stations, most countries have no physical barriers erected between themselves and their neighbours that act as a demarcation point. In the case of the Guatemalan refugees, helicopter gunships regularly flew over the international border and fired upon the refugee camps. The Guatemalan government stated that they did so because rebel fighters were hiding within the confines of the refugee camp. Whether or not this was actually true, the appearance of the helicopter gunships signaled to those fleeing war that they were still not safe. For someone like Bruce Cockburn, he was not only hearing about the atrocities inflicted upon innocent people, he was seeing it and hearing it as a frontline witness.
While still in Mexico, Cockburn retreated to his room where he was staying. He tried to settle his nerves by consuming copious amounts of alcohol. But nothing could assuage the rising sense of anger and sadness he felt. Like all good artists, Cockburn channeled his emotions into his Art. He began writing songs that ended up becoming his most successful album called Stealing Fire. On that album were two of his most famous songs. The first was “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”. Cockburn claims that the inspiration for this song were teenagers experiencing those first yearnings for love and romance that start with holding hands on the playground or on the way home from school. He marveled at the hopefulness of young love at a time when the infinite possibilities of life seem so very real and achievable. Innocence, like Hope, is something worth cherishing and protecting. The second song that became a hit from this album was “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”. This song is no ode to young love. “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” is, according to Cockburn, a cry for those he saw in the refugee camps. The song is filled with instruments native to Guatemala which helps give the song such a rich timbre. The lyrics to the song are filled with an anger and a resolve borne from the hopelessness of watching the victims of war continuing to be victimized. The song possesses four stanzas, each one ending with a series of escalating promises by Cockburn as to what he would actually do if he had a rocket launcher in his hands when the helicopter gunships appeared over the camp. The closing line of the song states:
“If I had a rocket launcher some son of a bitch would die!”
Because this line contains a bit of profanity, many radio stations refused to play the song without censoring the profanity out. To Cockburn, this was the ultimate example of misplaced priorities by western societies. From Cockburn’s point of view, the truly offensive aspect of this situation was the mistreatment of an entire population of people due to war, not one word in a song. If the systemic reactionary forces of the status quo so quickly and completely misdirect the emotional response of actual witnesses to war, how apt are we, as a society, to ever learn the lessons we need to in order to finally stop war and give peace a chance to truly become a way of life for us all?!
“If I Had a Rocket Launcher” became Bruce Cockburn’s biggest selling single in Canada and around the world. For his career, Bruce Cockburn has been making music for over fifty years. In that time, he has released 34 albums (22 of which have gone Gold or Platinum). He has record sales into the millions, along with 13 Juno Awards. In 2002 Cockburn was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has been inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, as well as The Canadian Music Hall of Fame. When he was inducted into the Canadian Juno Hall of Fame, one of those who spoke about him was fellow Canadian singer Sarah Harmer. It was not by fluke that Harmer was asked to induct Cockburn into the Hall of Fame. Like Cockburn, Sarah Harmer has also tempered the commercial aspects of her career in order to use her platform to support causes that are important to her. In her case, those causes center around protecting our environmentally sensitive land areas from development by our own form of greedy land barons. *(You can read a previous post dedicated to Harmer here). Bruce Cockburn is a talented singer/songwriter and is highly respected for the content of his character. Here is one example of how respected and influential this man is within the Canadian music industry. The story goes that after the Barenaked Ladies burst onto the Canadian music scene with their outstanding cover of Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”, they honoured his influence by changing the ending of one of their other popular songs, “If I had a Million Dollars” to say in their own cheeky way:
“If I had a million dollars….some son of a bitch would die!”
I have always maintained that in times of darkness, it is the writers and poets and artists and musicians who will shine the light that allows the rest of us to see the way forward. But it isn’t an easy feat to accomplish. Those who profit from war and conflict are very powerful people and have deeply entrenched systems that misdirect anger by misinforming those of us who might actually be able to make a difference. When one watches the events in Israel this past week and you start hearing rumours of Russian involvement as a means of distracting the US government from their efforts to support Ukraine, even if only remotely true, it just goes to show how little value ordinary citizens hold in the eyes of those who profit from war. I am reasonably confident in saying that if given the choice between war and peace, the citizens of Ukraine would prefer to be left alone to live their lives in peace. I am sure that the people of Israel and Palestine would make that choice, too. I also believe, as Bruce Cockburn does, that the peoples of Central and South America feel that way, too. I don’t have much use for war. I don’t have much time for those who advocate for war, either.
I will end this post with a quote from one of the characters from the TV show Seinfeld. You may remember this episode. Jerry Seinfeld’s friend, Elaine, was working for a company called Lippman Publishing. In this particular episode, Elaine and her boss, Mr. Lippman, were picking up a famous Russian author at the airport in a limousine. This Russian author was supposed to be someone who took his work very seriously. Mr. Lippman had urged Elaine to be fully prepared to discuss the author’s work with him during the limo ride. Elaine had failed to do so, and in desperation, she turned to Jerry for help. He gave her some advice which she used in the limo as conversational fodder. The author and Mr. Lippman had started discussing Tolstoy’s classic book War and Peace. Elaine tags on to the end of their conversation as follows:
Elaine: Although one wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it was if it was published under its original name: War: What is it Good For?
Mr. Lippman (looking aghast): What?!
Elaine (smiling and dancing): Absolutely nothing! Say it again!
May your day be a safe and peaceful one.
The link to the official website for Bruce Cockburn can be found here.
The link to the video for the song “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” by Bruce Cockburn can be found here. ***There appears to not be a lyrics version available.
The link to the video of the scene with Elaine and the Russian author from Seinfeld can be found here.
The link to the official website for Oxfam Canada can be found here.
***As always, all original content contained within this blog post remains the sole property of the author. No portion of this post shall be reblogged, copied or shared in any manner without the express written consent of the author. ©2023 http://www.tommacinneswriter.com
