Legal Commentary

Barricades of Heaven

While wondering why, according to my site meter, one of the Internet's most popular bloggers would come to this small corner of the blogosphere, read one of my posts, click on a link in the post to the subject of my post, draft the popular blogger's own post on the same article, and fail to acknowledge the source through the customary "hat tip," I got to thinking about a related topic: how we spin our own stories about ourselves and our pasts. For many, revisionist history is a full time occupation.

Jackson Browne is a master of it. That's not a criticism, by the way. We all do it. We all re-evaluate the incidents of our past through the faulty memories of the present and try to make sense of them through "a glass darkly." Only when we see "face to face" will we fully understand, and that's not an occurrence for the here and now, is it?

Browne's politics are on the opposite end of the spectrum from my own, although lately, I've been inexorably pulled toward a more moderate place by an irresistible force that gains traction when acts of my will move me out its way. Regardless of the distance between us on other issues, on the issue of artistic temperament, I've been an admirer of Browne's for decades, since the late 1960s, when I first saw his name as the songwriter of a tune that I thought was especially powerful on a Tom Rush album. While there was a time when politics influenced my musical tastes, I eventually decided that if I listened only to conservatives, I'd be drinking in a musical desert.

In his song Barricades of Heaven, Browne writes longingly of a vanished youth, when "life became the Paradox, the Bear, the Rouge et Noir, and the stretch of road running to L.A." As is the case with most of us, I'm sure his recollection is 90% bullshit. Yet, the 10% he gets right is likely more true, more insightful, than anything he realized at the time he lived the lyrics.

I'd like to tell Browne that neither he nor any other human being needs to bring his own redemption when he comes, and that the only barricades to heaven that exist are those each of us erects to bar his own path. I doubt that he'd listen to a lame lawyer from the Lone Star State.

Regardless, I love the song.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on May 05, 2008 (boomark / email).