We don’t own this place, though we act as if we did
It belongs to the children of our children’s kids
The actual owners haven’t even been born yet
But we never tend the garden and rarely we pay the rent
Some of it is broken and the rest of it is bent
Put it all on plastic and I wonder where we’ll be when the bills hit
Chorus:
We can run
But we can’t hide from it1
Of all possible worlds2
We only got one
We gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
Oh no, we can’t hide
I’m dumpin’ my trash in your backyard
Makin’ certain you don’t notice really isn’t so hard
You’re so busy with your guns and all of your excuses to use them
Well, it’s oil for the rich and babies for the poor3
They got everyone believin’ that more is more
If a reckoning comes, maybe we’ll know what to do then
(Chorus)
All these complications seem to leave no choice
I heard the tongues of billions speak with just one voice
Saying, “Just leave all the rest to me
I need it worse than you, you see”
And then I heard . . .
The sound of one child crying
Today I went walking in the amber wind
There’s a hole in the sky where the light pours in
I remembered the days when I wasn’t afraid of the sunshine
But now it beats down on the asphalt land
Like a hammering blow from God’s left hand
What little still grows cringes in the shade till the nighttime4
Words by John Barlow
Music by Brent Mydland
A turn of phrase coined by boxer Joe Louis (Joseph Louis Borrow, 1914–1981), who, prior to a heavyweight title bout with Billy Conn in June 1946, said, “He can run, but he can’t hide.”
The turn of phrase implemented here by Barlow also recalls Porcupine’s maxim, “We have met the enemy and he is us!” The phrase is widely believed to have appeared in Walt Kelly’s Pogo cartoon strip on Earth Day, 1971, but, in fact, it appears dated “8-8” (August 8) in a collection of Pogo strips from 1970, Impollutable Pogo, which bears the subtitle Don’t Tread on Me.
Compare the often quoted line from Voltaire’s Candide (1759): “In this best of all possible worlds . . . everything is for the best” (chapter 1) and its more modern corollary by James Branch Cabell, in The Silver Stallion (1926): “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
Compare the folk saying “The rich get richer, and the poor get babies.”
Barlow originally wrote “like a bad vine.” This sounded like a biblical reference of which Barlow is very fond, and, indeed, there are many such references in the Bible, though not specifically to a “bad” vine as such; rather, there are numerous analogies using vines that bear no fruit, or bitter fruit, as in Psalms 80:8-9:
There was a vine: You uprooted it from Egypt;
to plant it, you drove out other nations,
you cleared a space where it could grow,
it took root and filled the whole country. . . .
Isaiah 5:1:
. . . planted choice vine in it.
He expected it to yield grapes, but sour grapes were all that it gave.
Jeremiah 2:21:
Yet I had planted you, a choice vine, a shoot of soundest stock.
How is it you have become a degenerate plant, you bastard vine?
Studio recording: Built to Last (October 31, 1989).
First performance: February 5, 1989, at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, California.