Dialogue - Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

In my late high school days (1970-1972), Chicago was my favorite group. In fact, Chicago was one of the first live concerts I attended. Though I had very little disposable income, I had all of their albums. Chicago V was a knock-it-out-of-the-park release and my friends and I wore the grooves out of that record.

One of my favorite tracks from that album was Dialogue (Part I and II) with Terry Kath and Peter Cetera singing the parts of the revolutionary and the slacker student, respectively. I listened to it again today, 45 years later, and it is still relevant. Chicago was a very politically aware group (check out their early lyrics) but they were never in your face with their -isms.

As I reflect on the song, I can see where the reflexive opinion would be that Kath represents the righteous Antifa left and Cetera, the trust-funded college student. What has changed since the song was written is that the college students have, by and large, shifted totally to the left and while they still occupy a huge bubble, would never dare to say that they don't CARE about the poor.

So, where does the Right fit into this song which pits the caring against the care-less? Well, the precinct of the Right in which I exist seems to have become the home to the revolutionary faction. While the left ostensibly seems to care about the downtrodden, poor and forgotten masses, except for having mobile phones, big screen TVs and nicer clothing, not much has changed. It has been 50 years since Chicago began as a group. We have been through waves of Republican and Democrat presidents and the Democrats controlled the House for the first half of those 50 years, but have things really gotten any better?

I think what has changed is that the bottom line has been raised. The entry point for the least among us has gone from having absolutely nothing to having enough to make the poor in under-developed nations want to come to the developed nations and, if nothing else, at least be poor here. It is a much better life.

The progressive-right (or what was called the Alt-Right before the moniker was attached to the Neo-Nazi fringe) wants to revolt against the status quo. This is the same feeling that Kath, Lamm and the rest of the Chicago members epitomized in their lyrics. We are stuck in this horrible dystopia where the haves are happy and just want more and the have-nots can't get what they want. The ruling class (and we all know who they are) want things to stay the same (isn't that the definition of "conservatism"?) and the revolutionaries want to come in and "drain the swamp".

The pendulii of social trends are akin to a biorhythm chart... three or more sine waves which occasionally coincide at the X axis. It is when this coincidence occurs that things happen. We have the wave of who is running things, i.e. the deep state. We have the wave of how feelings are toward charity. We have the wave of consumerism and consumption. We also have the wave of complacency. I think that in many ways we are at a crossover point and that is why Trump was elected and why the left is so butt-hurt over it.

We are also seeing the sexual predation crisis. It was overlooked and allowed for so long because to expose it would have been to open a collective wound which would have affected the "family". From the mainstream media's point of view, it was OK to be publicized as long as it took down conservative thinkers such as Bill Cosby, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes, various teleevangelists, Herman Cain, etc. Once Harvey Weinstein touched the third rail and Gloria Allred got involved, the lid had been blown. No way to put that genie back into the bottle. Now, a reckoning is occurring which will change the course of history. This story is just beginning.

So, to wrap up, this song touches on the fact that radical change happens on a fairly regular cycle but change knows no dogma. It happens when the status quo begins to collapse under its own weight. When several of these collapses happens at the same time, we have a revolution. It remains to be seen if this one continues to be relatively bloodless.