Folk music and the financial crisis

The following is the text of a sermon given at the Chapel of the College of St Hild and St Bede, Durham in mid-2009:

Davey Moore was a boxer. On March 25th 1963 he was killed in a boxing match from a punch from his opponent, Sugar Ramos. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the death of Davey Moore in style of the nursery rhyme ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’, which asks the repeating question of the chorus: ‘Who killed Davey Moore? Why? And what’s the reason for?’

Dylan’s verses call upon five possible answers to the question from different candidates: the referee, the boxing writer, the angry crowd, his manager and ‘the man whose fist laid him low in a cloud of mist’. Each verse starts with the line “Not I!”, and finishes with “It wasn’t me that made him fall. You can’t blame me at all.” So we have the first witness – the referee:

"Not I," said the referee,
"Don't point your finger at me.
I could've stopped it in the eighth
An' maybe kept him from his fate,
But the crowd would've booed, I'm sure,
At not gettin' their money's worth.
It's too bad he had to go,
But there was a pressure on me too, you know.
It wasn't me that made him fall.
No, you can't blame me at all."

The recurring theme of the song is, quite obviously, that the question of ‘Who killed Davey Moore?’ is a complex one, and one in which all parties protest their innocence – ‘it wasn’t me that made him fall, you can’t blame me at all.’

The world is facing rather uncertain times, not least on the back of the global financial meltdown that has entered our collective bloodstream so dramatically over recent months. The immense disparity in earnings between RBS’s executives and its sales clerks is only confounded when your and my tax dollars now pay these wages.

I live and work in London – not in banking, i might add! – and get off the tube every morning at Moorgate station. As i leave the station, i walk past a deep etching in one of the stairwells that reads ‘burn the bankers’, and i don’t know about you, but i didn’t shed a tear when Fred Goodwin’s car was vandalised earlier this year. Largely as a form of masochism i read The Guardian’s comment section most days, which always contains the next piece of vitriolic, tired drivel about how awful everyone else is. This anger is understandable, and i hope not to argue against it. Instead, i hope to offer some insights into the responses to the financial crisis from 60s folk singers, and also from the Easter story – suggesting that both may have something profound to say in our conversations and reflection in this area.

Dylan’s song charts two responses to a terrible situation: firstly, ‘it wasn’t me that made him fall’ – a denial of responsibility for oneself; and secondly, an affirmation of someone else’s guilt. ‘It wasn’t me that made him fall, but it was them’. There seems to be to be a certain amount of this going on in the recession also: the media blame the greed of the banks, who blame the lazy eye of the regulators, who blame the poor financial planning of the government, who blame rich people’s greed, who blame the aspirational who borrow more than they can afford, who blame the media for instilling consumerism in them..... And we’re back where we started. It is always somebody else’s fault.

Two pieces of work by Leonard Cohen will now be mingled with Easter themes in trying to comment on and fill out some of my comments above.

Leonard Cohen – a secular Jew – wrote a poem entitled ‘Everything There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann’, Eichmann being the member of Hitler’s cabinet responsible for engineering and delivering the final solution.


"EYES:..................................................Medium

HAIR:..................................................Medium

WEIGHT:................................................Medium

HEIGHT:................................................Medium

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES:.................................None

NUMBER OF FINGERS:........................................Ten

NUMBER OF TOES:...........................................Ten

INTELLIGENCE:..........................................Medium


What did you expect?

Talons?

Oversize incisors?

Green saliva?


Madness?"



Eichmann is surely one of the easiest people to scapegoat in the history of planet earth. Nobody denies his appalling acts, the wicked genocide of ‘the other’ in the Third Reich’s warped understanding of the world. But to scapegoat Eichmann is perhaps to miss the point – the fact that we neither have talons, oversize incisors or green saliva, but we too can be capable of great evil. I wonder if when we think that Fred Goodwin and his cohort of overpaid bankers as the root cause of the world’s financial problem we distance ourselves from our own greed and our own arrogance. One cannot help but feel that most people in the world would regard you and I as wealthy beyond belief on the grounds of sheer luck, with apparently no deserving reason. Scapegoating places distance between ourselves and those that we do not like – we assert that they are not like us.

The Easter story also has something to say about scapegoating. The sense of Christ becoming the one at whom anger is directed seems clear, and as a result of this Christ’s death exposes a vicious system of religious oppression, exclusive social ordering, and violent responses to quell the radical desires of life’s subversives. Christ’s resurrection transforms, rather than supplants, this experience – violence doesn’t triumph over goodness, women are still to be liberated as the first witnesses of the resurrection, and the prophets’ vision of a just and peaceful society continues to be fulfilled on the road to Emmaus.

Another of the great Easter paradoxes concerns the binding of immense pain and great joy into a single continuum. I can’t help but feel that any simplistic explanations of the financial crisis, in which blame is clearly laid at the doors of an easily distinguishable and clearly guilty party, is surely a crude and unproductive move, for life is just not that simple. If any answer can be provided to the question of who killed Davey Moore, it must surely be that all of the parties in the verses bear some responsibility. Further to this, it is all too easy to pretend that we don’t have huge power to change things – i wonder if what would happen if we all stopped blaming everyone else for the financial crisis and became the change that we wanted to see – whatever it was – that would restore justice to the system. In so doing we affirm both our complicity in the problem itself, rather than palming that off onto someone else; and also empower ourselves to change the things that we find unacceptable, rather than regarding everyone else as the core agents of better world.

In summary, i feel that the ambiguity of the current financial crisis resists easy answers, and that one easy answer – scapegoating – has rather unhelpful consequences, not least in that it pretends that we have nothing to do with causing the world’s problems, and that it disempowers us from changing the things we find unacceptable. On this note, the final verse of Leonard Cohen’s most famous song, ‘Hallelujah’ – which is tragically omitted in the Jeff Buckley version – captures some of the response the life’s ambiguity: the broken hallelujah of Good Friday and Easter Sunday; the broken hallelujah of global inequality, brought to the boil by the financial crisis; and the response of Christ in giving of himself, rather than blaming everyone else – of being the change that he wanted to see in the world, and showing the way of self-giving rather than shifting the blame. Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ finished with this verse:

"I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."

Christ, the giver, became the world’s scapegoat, and showed a new way of responding to the pain and ambiguity of life through selfless giving. I wonder if this sense of giving, rather than ‘it wasn’t me that made him fall’, might be a better response to the global recession that most of those that i have seen so far – to transform the ambiguity, rather than explain it away through scapegoating.