By: Hank Kalet
Let’s say goodbye to 2002.
And good riddance.
Yes, we should be thankful that the year just ended lacked that one, defining moment, that single signifying event such as the terror attacks of 2001.
But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that 2002 was anything but a difficult and troubling year.
War drums have been beating and the economy is in the toilet. The president and his attorney general have waged an assault on the Bill of Rights.
And there is the rebirth of the movie musical, with recent release of "Chicago" (I have to tell say I find the notion of Richard Gere singing just a bit disturbing).
In this spirit, I offer you a slate of songs that should be featured in "2002: The Musical":
"War Baby Son of Zorro" by Daryl Hall and John Oates. Do I need to explain this? President George W. Bush, son of a recent president, is prepared to take us into battle in Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein and make Persian Gulf oil safe for Americans. (There also is the little matter of what many in the Bush inner circle appear to view as business left unfinished by the elder Bush in 1991 but I’ve written quite a bit about this recently. No need to belabor the point.)
"Dirty Water" by the Standells. Let’s just say that President Bush does not see keeping America clean and green a priority. His administration which is staffed mostly by men who have made their fortunes in the oil business has nixed an international effort to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (gases that cause global warming), has approved weaker wetlands protections, backs increased logging in national forests and drilling for oil in national parks.
"Money (That’s What I Want)" by Barrett Strong. Let’s see, there were the collapses of house-of-card empires like Enron and WorldCom. There was the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, which told rosy tales of Enron’s future despite the mounting evidence of its impending crash. There was Jack Grubman, the managing director at Salomon Smith Barney, leaving Wall Street under a cloud caused by his relationship with WorldCom and the telecommunications industry, accused of overvaluing their stocks in an effort to win their business for his firm.
And there were Harvey Pitt and William Webster, the Bush administration’s point men for dealing with the Wall Street scandals, stepping down from their posts after their own connections to the troubled firms were made public.
"Money (That’s What I Want)" by the Beatles. Or that seems to be what Courtney Love wants. How else to explain the near-simultaneous release of "Nirvana," the band’s greatest hits package, and Kurt Cobain’s journals?
The disc is a good one, but is generally not worth the cash for long-time Nirvana fans, who already own the band’s four studio and two live efforts. The addition of the previously unreleased "You Know You’re Right" which is good, not great complicates matters, of course, because it is something Nirvana fans have been hearing about for years. The expectation all along was that the song would be included on a larger compilation of unreleased live and studio material (the legal wrangling between Ms. Love and former Nirvana bandmates Chris Novoselic and Dave Grohl has delayed the box).
I am not opposed to greatest hits packages. They can be useful, even interesting, provided the musicians have a long enough career to look back on. That’s what makes the Rolling Stones’ "40 Licks," a 40-year retrospective that features four new cuts, or the two U2 compilations, which each feature a second disc of B-sides and remixes, better investments than the Nirvana disc.
As for the journals, they are not what one might call good reading. They really are nothing more than a heavily edited dose of juvenilia and do nothing to expand upon our understanding of Kurt Cobain.
"Money (That’s What I Want)" by the Flying Lizards. Bud Selig, the owners of baseball’s 30 teams, the 750 Major League players, their agents all of them have proven finally that their strongest allegiance is not to the game, not to the fans, but to the pursuit of cold, hard cash. All the talk of competitive balance, of financial hardship, or players’ rights amounts to nothing when you realize that August’s near-strike has done little to make the game more affordable for the average fan. Nor is it likely to level the playing field because teams like the Kansas City Royals have shown no interest in spending the money they need to spend money provided to them under the new luxury tax system to bring in better ballplayers.
"Money don’t get everything it’s true,/ What it don’t get I can’t use / Well, now give me money, (That’s what I want) / A lotta money, (That’s what I want)."
"Get a Job" by the Silhouettes. There are plenty of people out there looking for work, that’s for sure. There have been more than 1,000 layoffs at Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, in the last two years, many at the company’s Route 1 headquarters. In addition, a slew of other major firms have slashed jobs in the last year or so, including Merrill Lynch (which has major facilities in Plainsboro and Hopewell), IBM, U.S. Airways, United Airlines, AOL Time Warner, a host of Wall Street investment companies and McDonald’s, which plans to close 175 stores and lay off up to 600 workers.
According to the federal Department of Labor, about 8.5 million Americans were unemployed in November up from 8.2 million in October and about 8 million in September and the unemployment rate inched up to 6 percent (it was 11 percent for blacks and 7.8 for Hispanics).
Maybe a better choice would be "Money Blues" by Bob Dylan "Man came around / Askin’ for the rent / Well, I looked into the drawer / But the money’s all been spent."
"The Real Life" by John Mellencamp. Well, maybe not real. Surreal is probably a better word, given the mix of real and contrived that comprise current television programming Ozzy Osbourne, Anna Nicole Smith, the planned-but-nixed Liza Minnelli show, "The Bachelor" and its siblings, "Survivor" and its. Then again, perhaps this is the perfect song: "I want to live the real life / I want to live my life close to the bone / Just because I’m middle-aged that don’t mean / I want to sit around my house and watch TV."
"Know Your Rights" by the Clash. An anthem for the age of Ashcroft and the U.S.A. Patriot Act. It is an era in which the federal government apparently can hold Americans under indefinite detention without charges or access to an attorney if it believes they were connected to terrorism, an era in which foreign citizens in this country legally can be rounded up and placed in secret detention, in which the government can wiretap your phones, snoop into your private conversations, read your e-mails and review your college transcripts all without court supervision.
And, to emphasize that much of what made 2002 such a depressing year will still be with us in 2003, we will close with "Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of" by U2.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

