Today's events makes Trent requried Sunday listening

As protestors swarm airports and injunctions are passed to allow green card holders to come back to the country that they call home, I get torn between outrage that should make me take actions that might have real consequence (good or bad, or both), and shrugging my shoulders and saying "Well, what did you expect? Do you dimwits get it now?"

Yes, the majority of this country doesn't agree with this crap, and we can be naïve enough to think that the checks and balances that have already stopped some of these detentions will work out. But Trump and his puppetmasters don't care about checks and balances, and there are 25-35% that largely agree with them, because they only think government and the economy should work FOR THEM, without concern for anyone else.

This song has defined the mindset of the small-dicked GOP authoritarians for more than 10 years, and seems as relevant as ever.

Less concerned
About fitting into the world
Your world, that is
'cause it doesn't really matter
Any more
No, it doesn't really matter
Any more
None of this really matters
Any more

Yes I am alone
But then again I always was
As far back as I can tell
I think maybe it's because
Because you were never really real
To begin with

I just made you up
To hurt myself
I just made you up
To hurt myself
I just made you up
To hurt myself
And it worked
Yes it did

There is no you
There is only me
There is no you
There is only me
There is no fucking you
There is only me
There is no fucking you
There is only me

Only only only

Trent Reznor wrote this song appears on after kicking drugs and in the nadir of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" attacks on civil liberties and the nation's fabric. Which explains a lot about the album it appears on, as he mentioned in this 2005 interview.

"After I got clean it felt like I'd landed on a different planet somehow. It looks the same, kinda, but everything is different," [Reznor] explains. "Learning lessons from listening to people, realising the humbling truth that I don't know everything and that my way isn't necessarily the best way. The idea was for the record to start from a place of panic and fear and gradually find a sense of acceptance. It's a difficult journey that begins with a nightmare, the nightmare of what I was going through. Shortly after I got clean 9/11 happened," he sighs, tackling another key influence. "It feels like we're in this weird police state now. The government isn't telling us the truth, fear is now being pumped into our homes as a great motivator to just do what you're told."

This sentiment is most clearly expressed on the brutal martial force of With Teeth's first single, "Bite The Hand That Feeds". It's as close as Reznor feels he can get to a hectoring anti-Bush track, and one he admits "is very close to bashing people over the head with the message". As a protest song - and as a NIN song, also - it's fine, a Molotov collision of fist-pumping rhetoric and pneumatic noise.

Like so many NIN tracks, it is the sound of sensitive souls stung into action by an all-enveloping disgust.

And yes, "The Hand that Feeds" seems to stand up as well. Especially as it goes out to the downscale white people who'd rather kick down and repress the "others" rather than fight for a better life for everyone, and kick out the corporatists and GOP politicians that are holding them down.