In most writing the passive voice is considered a weakness. There's a sense that the author is removing himself from responsibility, the classic weasely example: "Mistakes were made".  Economists don't seem to mind. 'Inflation' is as a thing that occurs, while greed is an action. The last time someone chose to describe one as the other was in the Soviet Union, but either way the choice serves a purpose. Still, people often avoid the obvious. A few days ago I heard a report explaining that although retail oil and gas prices rose quickly in response to the war's effect on the wholesale market, the decline in the retail price always lags well behind a decline in costs. There was no question why and not even an ironic shrug of the shoulders from the commentator. Greed in this case is considered merely a natural phenomenon.

The fact that the difference between inflation and greed is often rhetorical doesn't mean it's not substantial. In human interaction rhetoric is substance. What's the difference between cutting off nourishment to a terminally ill patient, which is allowed in some cases, and administering an overdose, which isn't?  The difference is in the sense of a buffer zone, illusory or not, between act and result. It's an example of the same passive voice represented by the term "inflation". It's amazing what people will put up with if everything is done to them according to such regulations, rather than by individuals acting on their own. People are distrustful of the power of others but someone who claims to speak for god will gain the respectful audience that someone who claims to be god will not. Doctors who allow patients to die in some circumstances are not the same as doctors who are seen as having killed by action. Is it logical? Psychologically and sociologically, maybe it is.

Anyone who's been reading me for a while knows that systems one way or another are my life. Language, history, craft and art are all systems. Any human communication is the result of them, and my hatred of fascism, and libertarianism, comes from my disgust with people who think freedom from systems will do anything but render us barbarians, though barbarism too has its rules. One system is not as good as another. I'm not an Eisenhower Republican. I have no undue fondness for Gary Wills, though I take him seriously after a fashion. I'm not a monarchist. At the same time freedom as such, as a romantic ideal or a basic goal, is something I've grown tired of.

Serious moral conservatives understand the weight that accrues to any system over time. People allow themselves to be incorporated into systems that regulate them, but rebel when forced to become mere cogs. What else does the failure of hard communism show but that? Survival is not enough. Nonetheless, as I watch history slide by I have to force myself to remember how to shrug. The fact that people become acculturated to their situation means that the notion a 60% (or higher) tax rate on the wealthiest Americans is now considered absurd. The fact that states can be held hostage by corporations is a fact of life. The logic or illogic of such things in any absolute sense is irrelevant.

I've been typing this while listening to Motörhead's "1916." The songs range from descriptions of working class macho theatrics to illustrations of nightmarish grandiosity. And all the songs but the last are hard and loud. But the last song, "1916," describes the life and death of a British soldier in the trenches in WWI and the tone and voice sound as if they're coming to you from the stage of a music hall.

16 years old when I went to war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side, and a gun in my hand,
Counting my days down to zero,
And I marched and I fought and I bled
And I died & I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time, That a year in the line,
Is a long enough life for a soldier,

We all volunteered,
And we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history's pages,
And we fought and we brawled
And we whored 'til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder,
A thirst for the Hun,
We were food for the gun, and that's
What you are when you're soldiers,
I heard my friend cry,
And he sank to his knees, coughing blood
As he screamed for his mother
And I fell by his, side,
And that's how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other,
And I lay in the mud
And the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder,
And I called for my mother
And she never came,
Though it wasn't my fault
And I wasn't to blame,
The day not half over
And ten thousand slain, and now
There's nobody remembers our names
And that's how it is for a soldier.

It's a great sad way to end an album that otherwise alternates debauchery and mock dread. The fear of an amoral—because absolute and otherworldly—horror, described in ways mixing barbarism and camp, is supplanted by a specific and explicitly political narrative of absurdity and class cruelty. If the cruelty of a god is seen as comic indifference, the cruelty of man is criminal. In combination the songs describe our conflicting relations to systems, at least those experienced by the working class (or their famous representatives.) There's nothing new here; Johnny Cash did the same thing. So did Biggie Smalls, though perhaps he was more serious than most. Rock and Roll is capitalism.

I can't say why I popped Motörhead into the stereo this morning—maybe I just needed to wake up in a hurry—but it fits my argument.  '1916' reshapes the songs before it in a very smart and subtle way. I'm not using it as fodder for my intellectual amusement, it works on its own. And since I've taken it as my job to explain the importance of culture to policy wonks, including those who read Eric Alterman, I thought it would be a good way to wind it all up.