It’s ANZAC Day again and with it comes the annual stew of conflicting feelings you get when you have the kind of complicated background someone like me has.

On the one hand, there’s the sadness and loss you feel for young people, whatever army they found themselves in, for whatever reason, who died young, possibly violently, far from home.

And there’s the respect you feel for the older folk who spent time under arms, charged with protecting us, and now understandably want to honour their comrades who may not have come through.

But there’s also the impatience that jingoistic co-opting of these very valid feelings for nationalistic or political ends. I think it’s one of the lowest acts a person in power can commit — leverage the idealism of the electorate to further their ideological ends.

This blog is apolitical so we won’t dwell on the world leaders who do this, but let’s just acknowledge that Samuel Johnson was right when he noted that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

But things become complicated when you’re not honouring the losses of a time in long-past history, but in your lifetime. And when it’s not only military losses, but the others — ordinary folk like you and me, lacking even the limited agency of a soldier with a weapon, swept up and dumped by the almost-arbitrary forces of war.

And if you’ve attended the funerals, comforted the bereaved, lived alongside the lives damaged forever, the emotions get so mixed you can’t completely separate out the simple bit that can be satisfied with a dawn service or a wreath-laying.

Those activities are good and right, but we don’t do that for all the other casualties down the generations and I’m not sure that’s even possible. So what to do with that stew of conflicting feelings?

This year, I choose to listen to a few really good anti-war songs. Sometimes it’s good to just be anti — to set out your stall as definitively as the jingoistic knee-jerkers out there and say it’s not right, it brings too much sorrow, and those who bring it on us should never do so glibly, with no thought of generations to come.

Let’s start with my geeky bespectacled anti-hero, Elvis Costello.

‘Shipbuilding‘ off the Punch the Clock album gets the sorrowful tone right, recounting the bittersweet sentiments of a community for which war means jobs in the shipyards, but also loss and destruction. It’s shot through with sadness, peaking with a poignant trumpet solo (by Chet Baker — reputedly his last recording).

Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday.

It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
By the women and children, soon we’ll be shipbuilding

Costello also brings us a decidedly more up-beat gallop with his version of Nick Lowe’s ‘(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace Love and Understanding?‘ — the lyric is simple, but it’s the distorted guitar riff and cascading drum-fills that drive the song. It’s questioning, a bit angry, somewhat defiant, and it suits the singer’s rather edgy, sneery voice.

As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity
I ask myself, “Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred and misery?”

And each time I feel like this inside
There’s one thing I wanna know
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

Ireland features again with the Pogues’ cover of a song written by a Scottish-born Aussie (ah, those wars of empire) Eric Bogle: ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda‘. The story of an embittered survivor of Gallipoli, condemned to watch the annual ANZAC Day parade from his porch, stranded due to the loss of his legs.

The marching old soldiers get older year after year, the young don’t understand or really care, and the old veteran thinks about his youth, freely wandering the Outback and wondering how such an outcome could possibly have been worth it.

And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore
They’re tired old heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “what are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question

Of course this blog has to mention Bruce, and possibly one of his best-known songs, famously misinterpreted by conservative politicians, ‘Born in the USA‘.

It’s co-opted by obese draft-dodgers because it sounds like a staunch, upstanding patriotic anthem — but if you mix in the lyrics, that patriotic tone is comprehensively undermined by bitterness of a returned soldier with no job, no hope, and no thanks.

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.

Yes, the ’70s were full of hippie folkie anti-war stuff like Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’, Joan Baez’s ‘Saigon Bride’, John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, or the more rocky ‘Fortunate Son’ by Creedence. But principled as these may be, some come across as a bit wishy-washy, possibly due to an element of bandwagon-jumping — more of a ‘me-too’ response to war.

So instead let’s wrap up with Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Vietnam‘ — sure, it’s a reggae song which means it has a bit of a jaunty rhythm to it, but that’s undercut by the blunt, almost naive lyrics which offer a gut-punch where it hurts.

It was just the next day his mother got a telegram
It was addressed from Vietnam
Now mistress Brown, she lives in the USA
And this is what she wrote and said
Don’t be alarmed, she told me the telegram said
But mistress Brown your son is dead

This brings to mind the closing lines of Wilfred Owen’s sonnet (a form based on song), Anthem for Doomed Youth, which shifts from the hopeless masses of soldiers marching off to the slaughter to the bereaved back home, bringing home the loss — its permanence and inescapability.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Like I said, remembrance is complicated. Last year I was moved to tears by The Last Post; this year, it’s a bit of anger, a bit of melancholy. In Braidwood, today’s beautifully sunny and the trees’ autumn colours are resplendent. It’s hard to imagine how different it may have been if all those young people had not been lost, but I’m willing to bet it would have been — and the musicians above seem to get that.