Van Morrison’s Latest Record Project, Vol 1, an excellent and most-abundant album if judged by purely-musical standards, was nothing short of revolutionary in its message. Morrison had largely avoided politics in his songwriting, and thus, despite his explorations of non-Eastern spirituality, those of his fans who wanted could assume he still belonged to the camp of left-leaning Bohemia—in fact, a couple of his songs from his 2016 and 2019 albums celebrated the beatnik heyday of North-Beach San Francisco. But in the autumn of 2020, he became the first major artist to release an anti-lockdown song and to attempt to organize against the shutdown of live music. Now of course, that stance is far more consistent with the classic Bohemian, beat-poet, and hippie one than the icily silent authority-obeying stance adopted across the music scenes these days. And then with the album—see my full review of it--, he delivered a sustained attack upon what our technocratic and progressivist elites had become, namely, an oligarchic network characterized by mendacity, skullduggery, and endless insistence on our all affirming an official Narrative. He denounced this set of “Dupers” as corrupt to the core, noted their hostility to democratic freedom, manliness, and the West in general, and called on one and all to fight them.
While Latest Record Project, Vol. 1 did not become a bestseller, probably due to publicity- and airplay- squelching moves by gatekeeper-tastemakers, in the longer run it will become regarded by most critics as an impressive late-career achievement; moreover, assuming a good portion of the progressivist half of the public eventually shakes off its lingering Covid-Narrative stupor, it will become widely recognized as being the heroic stand for the free and the honest it really was.
Morrison is about to drop a follow-up album, What’s It Gonna Take? While its title and cover-art indicate no backing away from his political stand, the three songs from it that have been released so far, including “Pretending,” suggest it will display a Morrison who in the aftermath of his big stink-making is a bit wounded, and less able than a year ago to believe that the side of the right will prevail. Then, he was rolling out the freshest protest songs anyone had heard in years, gleefully trolling the elites with certain numbers, and was projecting eventual victory in some lyrics—e.g. “My Time after A While.” It all had the feel of a Moment of Rebellion, wherein the oppressed break free from their mental chains, and encourage others to do likewise. A rush of confident creativity and spirit was coming from Van.
And man, did we ever need that!
But in these three new songs, we get two references to his struggling with depression, and in this song, he says he’s been
Pretending it’ll be all right in the end,
pretending everyone is my friend,
pretending there’s hope around the bend,
pretending that you’re not out of your head!
That one stanza displays the basic lyrical program of “Pretending.” It is a definite hit, transmuting a depressed feeling into something wry and blues-like, deliciously punctuated by the sort of cool-jazz horn-riff Morrison has long loved to deploy.
Human society has always run by means certain conventions and manners that involve pretense, a fact Van acknowledges in the song’s chorus,
Pretending makes the world go ‘round,
people love it when we wear a mask…
but what makes this song so timely is that we are in a season of rather extensive use of pretense, and even of what I’ll label brazen pretense.
Pretense, as Morrison describes it, is different from other common forms of truth-veiling and falsehood. Outside its use by institutions such as the CDC which are tasked with fully informing the public, it seldom shades into the treachery of full-on deception. Rather, in many cases it is a kind of transaction in which it “takes two to tango.” Person A pretends that the delusion or pretense of Person B reflects reality, and B in turn pretends that the pretense of A about B’s pretense (or delusion) reflects reality also. Of course, self-delusion can begin to afflict both parties the longer such transactions are used.
Again, though the phenomenon is perennial, we need to underline the unprecedently brazen character of our era’s pretense-games. The most vivid instance of this is the way so many official types, especially in media, have been acting as if Biden were a standard sort of president, and one competent to perform his basic duties. It is such a brazen pretense that, as we recently heard from a former editor of Rolling Stone, it may be unsustainable:
There’s only so much you can sweep under the rug, and even if you cover it, the stench of the crap fills the room. It’s unavoidable. Joe Biden and his son did dirty deals. …Modest Joe is rolling in it with $5.2 million in undisclosed income… You can’t keep this game up forever, guys.
That ought to be right, but hey, in the 2020s, quite a few pretense-demanding games have been kept up way beyond the initial expectations for them, so who can really say? Three of the other big ones being run at present are these: the one on the Election Steal (have any readers seen 2000 Mules yet?), the one on the Vax Disaster, and the one on the Aggression/Insanity of the Transgender Movement.
I will be more political than Morrison ever is, and spell out, with respect to these four big issues, what public gestures are required of you if you are to do the “respectable” and “smart” thing of abiding by these games:
if you wish to be thought of as progressive, you are required
--to a) deny the problem exists, b) insist on the evil motives of those who point to it, and c) disqualify/ignore as disinformation all evidence they present about it, and to demand persecution or de-platforming of said disinformation-spreaders--
if you wish to be thought of as centrist, you are required
--to do a lightened version of a), whereby the problem is admitted to exist in small part (but only when you are directly asked about it) and a lightened version of c), in which de-platforming is not called for in all cases—
if you wish to be thought of as respectable-conservative, you may
--omit c) and slide into greater vagueness on a), but you now must add gesture d), whereby you never act as if those who say they believe the falsehoods in question are voicing an extreme or bizarre position, but rather, you must act as if it is a perfectly respectable one which you merely “disagree” with; and you must also add gesture e), where you denounce any Republican (or heretic liberal, such as Naomi Wolf) who will not perform gesture d).
otherwise, you shall be Officially Classified as an uncivil, Trump-compromised, and anti-democracy bigot. As Morrison is.
This pattern of brazen pretense demanded by our garbage elites becomes particularly ugly, and outright deception, when it occurs in our health establishments, as this recent post from Steve Kirsch underlines:
75% of the radiology department at MarinHealth/UCSF have requested and received religious exemptions from the booster. I guarantee you that the religious community did not target these workers. [i.e., did not organize these workers] These are the people doing the cardiac MRIs, etc. They are smart enough to put two and two together and save THEIR lives, but they are NEVER going to tell YOU that. …How did I find out? From someone who works at the hospital. I can’t tell you who it was or he/she would be fired. None of these medical facilities will say a word to the public about what they are seeing.
What pretense schemes of this brazen 2020s type do to the minds and souls of those who capitulate to them, is a central topic for understanding and—with God’s help!--rescuing our nations from the disaster of our times; but what we have to be more interested in for the remainder of this post, if we are to approach Morrison’s song in the spirit in which he composed it, is what happens to persons like him who detest the pretenses, but who find they must partly go-along with them.
For the pretending happening all around us right now is not simply being done by obedient types. There are many dissidents who decide they must partly play along, lest they wind-up screaming “Doom!” in public six days a week.
Here are about two thirds of the song’s stanzas. I detect no distance between the song’s “narrator” and Van himself. Assuming that’s right, my interpretive advice is to try to determine how many of the described instances of pretending—I count 31 distinct ones in the song--involve a.) Van seeking to fool mainly himself, b.) Van seeking to fool himself and others, as a matter of cultivating his own brand/reputation, and c.), a kind of transaction of mutual pretense Van is making with another person.
Pretending my life is not in ruins,
pretending I’m not depressed,
pretending I left it all behind,
pretending, most of the time.
Pretending when I’m on stage,
pretending, when I get off…
Pretending that everything is fair,
I’m looking up in the air,
rolling my eyes once again,
pretending you’ve got nothing to gain.
Pretending, you’re on my side,
pretending everything is open-wide,
pretending you’re not just along for the ride…
Pretending we’re on the same page,
Pretending I’m some kind of sage.
Pretending you get the same wage.
Pretending folk-music is all the rage.
…
Pretending I’m not alone,
pretending I’m on the way home...
I counted about eight instances of Van seeking to fool himself, about ten of his seeking to fool himself and others about himself, and eleven of a kind of exchanged-pretense. There is not a single instance of an outright false-witness, i.e., of Van or those he’s with telling a lie when explicitly charged to tell the truth, nor a single one of treacherous deception, where one person gains from the other being deceived, and this other has no awareness of the falsehood.
I don’t want to get into a full philosophic or theological discussion of truth-telling here, but it matters that the Biblical command is against bearing false witness, and is not against leaving unexpressed what you know or feel at every moment. Thus, there are some activities that veil the truth from a certain audience, or which highlight certain aspects of it as opposed to others, that may not violate the commandment. Here are a few: esoteric writing in philosophy or literature, rhetoric in political speeches, sermons, etc., the taking on of certain roles, such as that of the parent, teacher, or music performer, and the deployment of, or the going along with, ceremony.
Regarding just one of these activities, rhetoric, the liberally-educated person will know that sometimes it is completely appropriate and necessary to use. Even the casual reader of Plato’s Phaedrus, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, should have picked this up, as the more careful reader of the apparently all-hostile-to-rhetoric Gorgias (Plato again) will have also. The liberally educated person might also have seen that both Plutarch and Shakespeare, blame the great Coriolanus for eschewing the use of rhetoric with the people, judging this refusal as at bottom conveying contempt, or--with Harry Jaffa’s help--seen that Shakespeare’s apparent heroine of unvarnished truth-telling, Cordelia of King Lear, in fact made a mistake by not recognizing that Lear had devised a politically ingenious pretense-ceremony for delivering the best-possible succession scheme.
And we’d better touch on another of these activities, the taking on of an expected role, if we are not to too-readily believe that Van is as troubled about his stage pretending as might appear. Everyone expects the singer to perform his songs and, when necessary, to feign full-belief in them, and full-excitement. Similarly, as a professor, I can’t walk into class and say, “This is the twentieth time I’ve taught the Casey case, and I’m bored with it.” To respect my students, I have to play-up to my role as professor, and heighten the dignity of the subject; although yes, with a class that I’ve won trust with, some moments of confessional honesty would be possible.
Cate Le Bon has a song that expresses worry about the gig-in and gig-out pretending that comes with performing from your same little menu of songs:
Is karaoke taking-up all of my life?
Is karaoke me in a honey-trap?
It’s a problem. It’s a more extreme version of the problem faced by the parishioner tasked, along with the whole congregation, to sing a hymn whose message of hope he just isn’t feeling on a particular Sunday. Often, the solution is to go ahead and play the role, and the spirit of the music or lesson will take over and bring out your deeper harmony with it, but sometimes, it just winds up a purely formal kind of act.
Van surely knows this. But he’s noticing a pattern of the stage-pretending extending out into everyday life. Again, that’s a perennial problem, but I think the key issue in this song is whether we have a society that while it makes necessary room for roles, rhetoric, and ceremony, while it still affords many opportunities to share our inner thoughts with one another, to connect and make friends; or, whether we have society in which pretending and rhetorical angles have taken over, crowding connection out. Or put it this way: a society whose aspirations towards justice, freedom, and nobility are realistic enough even if those ideals are never fully attained, is one thing, but a society whose pretenses do not touch its reality at any point, is something else.
So no, there has never been a society in which some level of pretending doesn’t make the “world” go ‘round. Never one in which you might not trace the roots of some commonly gone-along-with deceits down to dark levels indeed—consider a song like Dylan’s 1965 “It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,”--but still, in 2022, what I know is this: the USA I grew up in circa 1980-1999 was superior to the one of 2000-2019, and far superior to the one forced upon us since 2020. And a basic aspect of the simply unacceptable nature of the present regime, has been a ramping up of usual human pretense into brazen levels, levels now approaching the ones adopted by the subjects of 20th-century communist regimes.
What the song “Pretending” tells us is that in dealing with friends and family, with music-business people, etc., Van has lately felt that just to get along and do his main duties, he’s been forced to play weird pretense games, where he acts like the person across from him hasn’t anything to gain from whatever particular and not-fully-just arrangement is being discussed, like they are playing fair, like they are friends, sincere persons, and thus really on his side, and like we are all still living in those 1970s-2000s times when it was usually safe to say what you felt, i.e., as if everything is open-wide.
But in fact, we now live in quasi-despotic societies, of uncertain destination. And if we are persons who have questioned the main Narrative, the last two years has shown us that at least half of the people around us would be capable, if the media push were plausible enough, of shunning us, firing us, or standing-aside while we were assaulted by a mob or a vaccination-compliance team. In each of the liberal democratic nations, maybe excepting Sweden and Denmark, the idea of shared citizenship has been nuked, even if in daily life it seldom feels appropriate to come out and say that.
We may feel it is necessary to be polite when we first meet the man who claims he’s a woman, or the self-labeled “liberal” who calls for a deployment of government-directed yet corporate-enacted censorship, but in fact, we think these persons are so duped and blinded as to be insane, out of their heads. If they become our regular acquaintance or friend, or if they are a pre-existing one, for how long should we keep the pretense up? How long before we say, “I don’t just think you’re wrong on this, but insane on this, Mass Psychosis on this, Good German on this.”
There are situations where staying mum about that, and maintaining a pretense that we still live in times still basically like the 1970s-2000s, is likely necessary. Family is family, for example. Or consider this one: I taught a politics class in the spring of ’21 where we debated the latest events, and one of the latest was the H.R. 1 bill, and I decided I had to pretend that it was a standard political issue, and not the despotic play for perpetual single-party rule I in fact judged it to be. (And man, was that a close one! Change a couple of votes, and that civil-war-inviting monstrosity would have passed!) Maybe my decision was mistaken, maybe not, but it illustrates the weirdness of our situation.
I won’t predict just how hard our present regime, and our present surreal sense of pretended “normality,” dependent on one brazen pretense game after another, are going to fall once several of their pillars collapse. At least a couple of them will. As I’ve written on this substack, the possibility of an above-one-million U.S. vax-deaths scenario by the end of 2025 is still quite real, even if a remaining-at-around-a-few hundred-thousand-deaths scenario, something our Narrativists might be able to finesse, also remains in play. Biden’s presidency, in any case, will go down as the most shameful one ever. The only way to avoid that historical judgment will be if Biden’s successors could manage to implement a semi-Orwellian despotism soon after he exits the scene. And we can’t yet rule that out! Nor can we confidently predict the overall Fall of the Narrativist regime—we might sense and hope it’s around the bend, but proven villains and their toadies—such as four-fifths of our university presidents and hospital CEOs—still hold most of the cards. Van is right that we could still lose, and the odds on some days seem steep enough that it really could be another kind of pretending to tell oneself that it’ll be all right in the end.
And lest we think our era’s brazen pretense is limited to big political issues, consider the all pretending now going on about daily mundane items you used to take for granted: the reliability of airlines, truckers, supply chains, and the dollars in your account. Pretending, you make the same wage.
So what do lovers of truth-telling and freedom do in this strange period? How should we comport ourselves?
There is a danger of compromising with the pretense-games to a degree that one gets too entangled, or outright confused. But again, few of us are in position to fully opt out of them, and we can miss chances to encourage the emergence of whistle-blowers within our institutions, or to make connections that might later lead to alliances, if our stance is stridently “Cordelia-mode, 24/7!”
There is also a danger, as we can see in this song, of succumbing to despondency about it all. I think it is good to remember that we can’t exactly know, as much as we might take pains to try to predict, What It Will Take to awaken enough of the present sleep-walkers/Good-Germans to the situation. Amid this uncertainty, something the substack writer Chris Bray said recently is helpful, and could help Van:
Protect yourself and your family, maintain real human connections, spend time outdoors, keep speaking, assert your values and your preferences without regard to the appearance of the reception. Show up. Remember that nothing lasts forever, and stay in the fight. Have faith in the possibility that the cycle will break toward health, and act as if.
And if you have a more concrete plan than that, I’d be glad to hear it.
Good words. And I would add this:
“As for the last lines I quote from your song, Sir Van Morrison, about being alone and not knowing whether you’re on any way home, I’ll recommend some words from the Christian man who was the key influence on the PostModernConservative writers, Peter Augustine Lawler.”
Maybe the truth is that they have become so unable to be at home with their homelessness that they have lost what it takes to defend their home.
“That’s from the introduction to his essay collection Homeless and at Home in America. His idea of homelessness comes from Augustine’s reflections in the City of God about how those of faith look for their home in heaven, and meantime ‘make use of temporal and earthly things like a traveler.’ (XIX, 17) Such words bring to my mind certain songs that struggle with home-feelings, such as Hazel Dickens’ “West Virginia, My Home,” your own “Memory Lane,” Ty Segal’s, “The West,” and many others. But Lawler couldn’t help but notice, circa 2007, that the Americans most turned towards the old faith also seemed the ones most “at home” in their nation (a phenomenon especially noticeable in the South). And while he wrote that sentence about “today’s Europeans,” if he were still with us, he’d surely admit that it is beginning to apply about as much to the post-2020 Americans, and hearing your unassuming but profound little song “Western Man,” he’d say it definitely does not apply to all Europeans.”
“Thank you for all these songs, and may God bless you, Van Morrison; may He bless all of us with the faith needed to hope for the heavenly home, and the spirit to defend our earthly ones.”
Carl's Rock Songbook No. 128: Van Morrison, “Pretending”
The tragedy is that personal freedom in the West now has to be considered a "political stand" at all. It used to be plain common sense and the vast majority of popular music reflected the fact. But common sense has long left us...
I’ve been a big fan of Van the Man since the 1960’s. Just amazed how he has written and produced a body of work second to no one among his peers (Including Bob, Leonard, Paul, Bruce) and in all honesty I cannot find even one bad song. Well 2 years ago when he released his protest songs, standing alone as he bore the wrath of the music community and media, it was clear that few others have had the journey like he has avoiding most of the narcissistic creeps who live for their power trips and destructive ways.
Van is a lover of the divine as you can hear in many of his lyrics and we are in engaged in a war between good and evil. I know where his heart lies.