Best Years of Our Lives. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. 1993. Virgin.

 March 27, 2023 marked the day of the 129th mass shooting of the year in the United States. On that Monday, American historian and professor of history at Boston College, Heather Cox Richardson, wrote on her daily Facebook blog, “Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today's Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.” We are a nation of fetishists and totemicists, endowing killing objects with sentimental, romantic projections of our wildest fantasies of American identity. Our chaotic conception of Christianity reaches us from across an Old World European distillation of biases and hatreds that have devalued human life since at least the time of the Inquisition. Violence, these hardware fetishists assure us, is only a means of last resort to protect themselves and their values, but we know they communicate in bad faith; violence frames their values, adorns them and gives them context. Without the veil of violence to cloak them in the God-given sanctity of social identity—they worship a judgmental, sky bound burning bush—their ideology loses the gloss of its Old Testament, religious madness, and they become mere advocates of 21st century democratic law like the vast majority of us. Social identity is also a component of the function of pop music, especially relative to its audience, which isn’t terrorist but celebratory of its shared tastes. The songwriter and bassist/vocalist Andy McCluskey, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s one consistent member since its founding in 1978, humanizes the rhythmic homogeneity of electronic music with melodies borrowed from the pop lexicon, and, like his contemporaries Pet Shop Boys, fleshes them out with a singing style that lovingly amplifies the social value of inclusion over alienation.  Of pop music’s many uses—when it isn’t explicating our roles as lonely and isolated inhabitants lashed to nature’s vast, monolithic indifference—is its erection of complex, illusory and seductive kaleidoscopes that attempt, often successfully, to convince us that we have a place in the worldwide ghetto. Pinballed by reality between the two poles has jarred many of us into living with a form of social schizophrenia that is, amid the mounting casualties of our cold civil war, already well outside of our ability to properly manage it.

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