The President's Dead

Conspiracy theory or not, today will be a day to remember. The day Obama declared Osama no more.
            It made me think of an Okkervil River song which quite beautifully captures the "what were you doing when" moment that events like these inevitably produce. So out of the blue and seemingly portentous, yet ultimately, just one insignificant life.
            What Will Sheff, songwriter for Okkervil River, does brilliantly in "The Presidents Dead", is to capture the microcosm in an event of magnitude (the macrocosm). The songs narrative zones out from the present to the narrator's future self looking back on this day in "lets say 30 years" on, noting accurately and beautifully what the human memory really records: sensory experience. No lumbering political message or diatribe; just the "eggs on the plate and the bacon hissin' ",  with "spring on the wind." It's the sights and smells that really shape our experience and how an event is recorded in our minds. And it is events like these that, I feel, give our lives shape, or at least the semblance of it.
 I mean, who didn't flinch today with the 'news' that it was nearly 10 years since 9/11. Ten years..... God! So regardless of their political significance, or lack of, these events serve as kind of pesonal bookends and landmarks. As, indeed, do songs. So in a way its a kind of meta-song; a song about itself.      
                     There is also the unexpected empathy for the individual; the man, not the president. The life lost no matter how misspent that life was. "The early obits say he was a good man, and you cant argue with that, not today you cant." This is where todays events aren't obviously relevant, (who can label, from a western perspective at least, Bin Laden "a good man"!), but nevertheless, a man he was. I think Sheff was envisioning a presdent like Bush or Nixon being assasinated, and these sentiments are spot on. It takes a cold hearted person to rejoice at another humans death.
                                   Anyway its a fantastic song, and its worth checking out the lyrics too.               
See it performed live along with "Black", probably their most accesible song, in quite shambolic footage here.