Welcome to the resistance…what? Who? David Brooks? Seriously? Milquetoast center-right New York Times columnist David Brooks is calling for widespread resistance to the Trump regime? You better believe it, baby.
In a piece headlined “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal,” the usually somnolent Brooks wrote:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Brooks has always been slow on the uptake, but I’m surprised he would ever reach the point of invoking the power of the people.
John Lennon invoked it quite a lot in the years after he left the Beatles, never more so than on this 1971 single. Recorded during the “Imagine” sessions and written after an interview with anti-war activists, Lennon later said, “I wrote ‘Power to the People’ the same way I wrote ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ as something for the people to sing. I make singles like broadsheets. It was another quickie.”
The single made the top 10 in both Britain and America, but didn’t appear on an LP until the “Shaved Fish” compilation in 1975. By the late ’70s the sentiment seemed naive, and Lennon expressed embarrassment about getting caught up in the moment. But the song lives on, partly thanks to Bernie Sanders, who used it in his presidential campaigns.
