Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [86]
Hail to the Thief’s opening track, “2 + 2 = 5,” can be read as a commentary on Arendt’s interpretation of power and revolution. Yorke’s lyrics seem to be a back and forth dialogue between a brain-washed, impotent citizen and a ruler who is asserting authority. The citizen is torn between wanting to stay home under sand-bagged safety and the comfort of a brain-washed world where “2 + 2 = 5” and the reality that she has “not been paying attention” to the political situation that has allowed the king to become a thief who boldly dares citizens to “question my authority.” Yet the call of not paying attention can equally be applied to the king, who, though he has been swatting detractors like flies, like flies “the buggers keep coming back.” As Arendt understands it, the king’s violent attempts to dispel dissent will only create more dissenters, leading to a revolutionary situation. The mocking “ahhhh diddums” found at the end of the song’s lyrics in the Hail to the Thief booklet, then, seem pointed at the king, and not the citizens. We can easily imagine the mocking sentiment of this childish phrase in this way: “You poor thing, your majesty, it seems the people are on to your thieving ways.”
The Fear Is Holding On
Despite the mocking tone of the end of “2 + 2 = 5,” the real political situation “where violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control,” is a reign of terror. Arendt sees “the use of terror to maintain domination” as the ultimate end result of power’s abdication, and the logical result of a rule by violence. Terror is the final stage in violence’s rampage—power is completely destroyed by the violence of terror. Citizens in this situation, as Yorke’s unsettling melody on “Like Spinning Plates” relates, are being “ripped to shreds” while leaders “make pretty speeches.”
Arendt thinks that, unlike merely tyrannical rule, the rule of terror is the true essence of totalitarianism, a government only realized by a situation in which everyone, even friends and supporters, becomes targets. Since everyone can become a target, even the secret police and those closest to a totalitarian leader, then “potentially every person one comes into contact with” can become an informer. Like the paranoid narrator of “Life in a Glass House,” there’s always the chance that “someone’s listening in.” Because the government has become afraid of all forms of power, even the power of its friends, then it “begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim.”
The sweat meats and the young blood of all citizens become a feast for the totalitarian police state, where the national anthem might easily proclaim, like Kid A’s “National Anthem,” that “everyone has got the fear.” The totalitarian ruler, like Yorke in “Where I End and You Begin,” might muse that where he ends and the other begins is actually the space in which the ruler will “eat you alive” so that “there’ll be no more lies.” This moment, where everyone becomes a target and where everyone is suspected of lying and plotting, is “the moment where power disappears entirely” (p. 55). When violence reaches its zenith, power has learned how to disappear completely.
Rising Up
On The Bends, album opener “Planet Telex” describes a situation in which an unnamed force eludes control: “You can force it but it will not come / You can taste it but it will not form / You can crush it but it’s always here / You can crush it but it’s always near.” This “it” is genuine power, as Arendt understands it. The more that empowered violence attempts to force its citizens to submit, the more its own power, which rests in these very citizens, will slip away until it is gone and power is transferred to a new leader or governing body. For Arendt, revolution and resistance are always part and parcel of political