https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vCww3j2-w
Be careful what you say around kids. They remember. In this instance months ago I sang the Bruce Cockburn song If I had A Rocket Launcher while playing Halo with the nephews. Two weeks ago Javier repeated the title back to me complete with melody. I thought I would let him hear the song. But as always there's more to it than that. It's a song of intense frustration on the condition some humans live and die. Witnessed first hand by the song's author. I put some information below. Again, music should be a personal moving experience. This song should only be sung by the person who wrote it. Not someone paid to sing it. I must have it so good that I am complaining about that and not some government hit squad being sent out to get me.
Ed
Lyrics:
Here comes the helicopter -- second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they've murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher...I'd make somebody pay
I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate
I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher...I would retaliate
On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation -- or some less humane fate
Cry for guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher...I would not hesitate
I want to raise every voice -- at least I've got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher...Some son of a b***h would die
http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/iiharl.html
Known comments by Bruce Cockburn about this song, by date:
Editorial note: According to an article called "Hell Fire!" by Bridget Freer, FHM magazine, December 1999 issue, "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" was one of the songs played at high volume outside the Vatican Embassy in Panama City in 1989, in order to drive out Manuel Noriega. Along with "I Fought The Law" and "Nowhere To Run" among others, it was not successful because of complaints from the Ambassador. Thanks to David Newton for sending this in.
[If one of "Rocket Launcher's" suggestions is not only that anger can signal a beginning of commitment but that such anger can get out of hand, Cockburn is quick to point out that it reflects a very personal experience.] "Aside from airing my own experience, which is where the songs always start, if we're ever going to find a solution for this ongoing passion for wasting each other, we have to start with the rage that knows no impediments, an uncivilized rage that says it's okay to go out and shoot some one."
[Like "Nicaragua" and "Dust and Diesel," "Rocket Launcher" came directly from Cockburn's visits to Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico.] "I can't imagine writing it under any other conditions." [He had gone to Mexico and Nicaragua in early 1983 with several other Canadian artists at the invitation of OXFAM, the world hunger organization; OXFAM had sponsored a similar trip the year before with members of the Canadian Parliament.]
According to Cockburn, "the idea was to reach a different audience than the politicians by having us go and observe, using the relative visibility that we have to educate the Canadian public to what we had seen and to raise money for projects that OXFAM has in the region." [Cockburn was already involved in the issue, having spent time reading the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal and a report by Pax Christi, the Catholic human rights organization, on its investigation of alleged church persecution in Nicaragua. His three weeks in Central America confirmed some opinions, but also aroused the kinds of frustrations evidenced in 'Rocket Launcher.' Ironically, the political stance it inspired is linked to a similar public position Cockburn took several years ago, when he confirmed that he was a born-again Christian.]
"One is directly responsible for the other," he says, though he insists neither commitment defines his work. "I don't consciously or not consciously write certain kinds of songs," Cockburn says. "In fact, I almost didn't put 'Rocket Launcher' on the album because of the ease with which it could be misinterpreted."
-- from "The Long March of Bruce Cockburn: From Folkie to Rocker, Singing About Injustice" by Richard Harrington, Washington Post, 19 October 1984. Submitted by Nigel Parry.
"If one needed a reason to; needed an example of why there wasn't a Nicaraguan revolution, you can look at the situation in Guatemala, because the situation is, if anything, worse than what was happening in Nicaragua under Somosa, has been for the last 30 years.
Since the military government presently in power was installed with a little help from your neighborhood agents.... the Washington boys. They ran the country on behalf of themselves and a small land owning elite, using everybody else in the country as their personal servants; and with a cheap labor force. The way they do that is they make sure that the people don't have enough land to support themselves on. Aside from keeping them from any access to medical care or education, they make sure that they don't have enough land to grow enough food for a family. Which means that people have to go work for them if they want to survive.This doesn't necessarily guarantee survival either, of course , because if people object in anyway to that kind of situation.....or maybe if they just sort of go about peacefully trying to rectify things on their own.
Getting together with their neighbours to pool resources. Getting together with their neighbors to study the Bible, for that matter. Those attempts are met with acts of incredible ferocity in order to prevent it from spreading. You never knew when one was gonna swing in from the north and start shooting. That situation ---thats the first time I'd even seen anything like that. First hand, you know, you watch it on TV, and it doesn't look the same somehow when you're there. Partly because of the incredible spirit of the people. Because of that spirit and the sense of that spirit and the stories that they told of what they had survived and what they witnessed, it was impossible not to feel great sympathy for and with them. And the ease at which that sympathy slid over to a willingness to kill those who were inflicting that agony on them was a little bit shocking. It's not an answer, especially for us, you know, to go down there and start shooting Guatemalans.... maybe for them..."
Audience member: [unintelligible]
BC: "What's that?"
Audience member: "Helicopters"
BC: " Yeah,well, there are people in them, you know? Which is something that - the thing is, the weird thing about it is they stop looking like people because of what they're doing. I guess that's what makes it so easy to want to shoot them down because they [snickers] make- - -they make you feel like they forfeited their humanity somehow. But they're pawns in it. Anyway, this song is all about that. The one thing I must stress in case anybody's under any delusion that this is so, is that this is not a call to arms. This is, this is a cry..."
-- from an intro to the song at a gig at the Cotati Cabaret, Cotati, Sonoma County, California. Submitted by Bobbi Wisby.
Religion also led Cockburn to spend three and a half weeks in Central America in 1983:
"It was all part of the same process, which is that you can't love your neighbor if you don't know who he is." In Nicaragua he was impressed by the grass-roots support for the Sandinista government, but he was discouraged and angered by poverty, repression and the fear of U.S. interventionism. Observing the horrors of refugee camps along the Guatemalan-Mexican border, he went back to his hotel room and cried and wrote in his notebook, "I understand now why people want to kill." Then he wrote "If I Had a Rocket Launcher."
Since he visited the area, Cockburn has been working nonstop, fueled by the urgency of his message and by his first worldwide hit. And while he's not optimistic about the future of the area that inspired his songs, he's maintained his idealism.
"The universe will continue to unfold regardless of what happens to the Sandinistas, or me and you, or Russia and the States," he says. "I also think that death isn't such a horrifying experience. It's like the ecstatic experiences - I think life is like that underneath it all. It's just too bad the rest of it keeps getting in the way."
-- from "Bruce Cockburn Launches a Hit: Fired by Christian pacifism, the Canadian singer targets new, worldwide success", by Steve Pond, Rolling Stone magazine, 23 May 1985. Anonymous Submission.
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