Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads! – Friedrich Nietzsche
Watching the encroaching forces of neoliberalism engulf English society in the late 1970’s, Ian Curtis of Joy Division dead-panned some bleak advice:
We would have a fine time living in the night
Left to blind destruction, waiting for our sight
He didn’t live to see the full take-over, slipping a rope around his neck just as the soft fascism of the Thatcherites began picking apart the post-war settlement with the characteristic angry glee that’s come to embody the conservative ethos. Now, thirty years later, the neoliberal philosophy is set for its apotheosis: the destruction of the full faith and credit of these United States. But perhaps the advice remains sound. Some years later, surveying the wreckage of what was the English working class, Stephen Duffy of the Lilac Time proffered a similar affirmation of life, even joy:
We’ll face this new England
Like we always have
In a fury of denial
We’ll go out dancing on the tiles
Duffy’s message is also, perhaps, the secret meaning of our other financial crisis, documented so well in Morris Dickstein’s
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. Even where there was despair, there was a kind of joyful approach to it, certainly rendered easily into the so-called “escapism” much despised by the progressive forces of the time, but perhaps worthwhile anyway. As a poet in a letter of the time, “The Comrades, by the way, make a big mistake (for a change, of course!) when they condemn Escape. Seems to me that what we all want is a society that would furnish the maximum—both in quantity and quality—of Escape.” And we can dance, Ian Curtis reminds us.
Well, maybe. But maybe we should. The “comrades” of the 1930’s surely considered anger their special gift, but they forgot that joy is no less important, often more difficult to attain, maybe the greater gift by far. Anger is easy. Dancing is hard. I saw my little daughter the other day. She was playing by herself in her room, talking between some dolls. Then she started twirling and kicking her legs. She didn’t know anybody was watching, and she danced. Anger is a give-away.
So, what to do? If we are truly as powerless as some of our own comrades suggest, then, baby, let’s at least dance. Let’s have Default Parties on Monday night. We’ll play some songs:
I still owe money
To the money
To the money I owe
The floors are falling out from
Everybody I know
- The National, Bloodbuzz Ohio
and
You say it’s money that we need
As if we’re only mouths to feed
I know no matter what you say
There are some debts you’ll never pay
- The Arcade Fire, Intervention
More, more even: What are your default songs? We’ll build a playlist. We’ll have a countdown clock. We'll drink. We’ll talk and laugh. We’ll dance.
Before he reached up for the rafters, facing toward despair, Ian Curtis suggested another direction—one he couldn’t take. But we can. Default may be coming, but we can still, as he said,
dance dance dance dance dance to the radio. . .
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