Van Morrison is a sane man in a mad world

The dopes with tropes are at it again. This time, their target is Van Morrison. But Sir Ivan is, as Billy Joel would say, an innocent man.

Morrison has been called a crank and anti-Semite because of the lyrics to his new single, ‘They Own the Media’. The Guardian, which really does have a problem with Jews, has called him a tinfoil milliner. The Forward, which used to be a serious Jewish paper, claims that Van’s title ‘espouses a classic anti-Semitic trope’.

No, it doesn’t. What the lyrics say is that our media are owned by a small number of people. That their outlets habitually lie to our faces. That they want us to believe that ‘ignorance is bliss’, so let’s leave the decisions to the experts. And that we’ll ‘never get wise’ until we look behind the curtain.

That’s not paranoia. That’s the truth in our brave new world of fake news and false narratives. The world where Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which prints fiction while telling us that ‘democracy is dying in darkness’.

The world where Jack Dorsey can gag the New York Post’s Twitter account for printing the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop, where senior Democrats can get away with calling it ‘Russian disinformation’ because the majority of American media will never call their team to account.

Yes, this is also the world where Mark Zuckerberg can silence a president and set up a digital Supreme Court. And yes, this is also the world where George Soros can tip truckloads of money into electoral races. But if you think Zuckerberg and Soros act as they do because they are Jewish, then you’re the one in the aluminum headgear.

They do it because they can — because the rich, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said, really are different. They want to remain different, so they are using money and connections to make sure that they remain what they are: secure in an unaccountable oligarchy where you can’t tell where the Democratic party ends and its corporate partners and media mouthpieces begin.

Van could have called this album AstraZeneca Weeks. His lyrics describe a world turned upside down by COVID. A world sliding into soft totalitarianism and digitally-enhanced tyranny. A world where unelected bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci overrule elected representatives with the approval of CNN. A world where the media divide the voters by hyping partisanship, distract them by packaging politics as entertainment and cancel anyone who disagrees.

Van’s response is the sane response. ‘Why are you on Facebook?’ he asks. ‘Get a life,’ he replies, like any sensible adult.

‘Where have all the rebels gone?’ he asks. ‘Hiding behind computer screens,’ he replies — and we all know it’s true, and pathetic. ‘Where’s the spirit, where’s the soul?/ … It’s not very rock ‘n’ roll.’

‘Western Man has no plan/ Since he became complacent,’ Van observes in the second decade of the Chinese century. ‘Stopped believing in himself/ And let others steal his rewards.’

This isn’t fantasy: it’s the news that’s fit to print — and the news that our media are too cowardly and corrupt to print. Van Morrison can speak honestly because he’s an artist, and this is what art used to do, before it degenerated into virtue-signaling.

But people confuse the singer and the song. They think every line was written for them and is about them. They miss the jokes, but they get too serious in the wrong places — as if Van looks out of the window as he eats his dinner, sees it’s stopped raining, and says, ‘Well, it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance.’

They shoot the messenger when they don’t like his message. But the Morrison cancel mob are dancing to the tune of the oligarchy that is trashing American democracy. He’s had their number for years.

That’s another reason why he can speak honestly. He was there in the Sixties, and he knows that we should all know better. We should all have his courage to speak out, too. As for his lyrics: read ‘em and weep.