Skip to main content

Lyrics to Beyonce song "Freedom"

 




Just for nothin' I'm putting a famous image from Raphael's painting School of Athens, right here. 

But I am thinking as the headline here indicates of the song that has become the new anthem of the Kamala Harris campaign. 

As readers will probably recognize, I'm fully behind somebody-who-is-not-Trump for President. Harris is now that candidate and she is guaranteed my vote.

In that spirit, here are the lyrics to the anthem, Beyonce's "Freedom". 

Freedom! Freedom! I can't move

Freedom, cut me loose!

Singin', freedom! Freedom! Where are you?

Cause I need freedom too!

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

It sounds like an evocation of the police-brutality cases and arguments that clustered in the Trump years, often involving the phrase "I can't breathe!" from a dying man, and the taunt that if you couldn't breathe you couldn't say that.

Yet people about to die apparently can say that.  And people being unjustly handcuffed and shackled can complain that they can't move.  Often the only good they can do for the cause of the simplest sort of freedom, freedom of movement, is to complain about it as it is being taken from them.

And if I am at all right in reading this, if those are the thoughts that are supposed to occur to me as I hear this song -- and the interpretation is rather strongly supported by the video for the song --  then it does seem an odd song for a candidate for President whose identity is closely tied to her being a former prosecutor.  

Comments

  1. Agreed. Rorty,s little collection, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, comes to mind. Maybe we all need a bit of irony in order to be honest with ourselves?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak