A British singer borrows an American president’s phrase when painting graffiti on Israeli property that is characterized by Palestinians as a land grab. I’m not sure what I am more struck by: the scope of history, politics, music, and culture that came together in that one act, or the fact that some graffiti on a faraway wall made headlines across the globe.
Reuters reports that Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters (“The Wall,” “The Dark Side of the Moon”) “scrawled ‘tear down the wall’ on the concrete panels of Israel’s West Bank barrier on Wednesday.” He was doing some touring before performing a concert that drew an estimated 50,000 Palestinians and Israelis. His red spray paint and marker pen–and the phrase he borrowed from President Reagan’s famous reference to the Berlin wall–attracted quite a bit of attention.
“‘It’s a horrific edifice, this thing,’ Waters told reporters as he stood beside a section of the barrier in Bethlehem. ‘I’ve seen pictures of it, I’ve heard a lot about it but without being here you can’t imagine how extraordinarily oppressive it is and how sad it is to see these people coming through these little holes… It’s craziness.’”
Israel says they’ve built the wall to protect against suicide bombers. Palestinians see it as a thinly veiled attempt to claim more land. Whatever your thoughts or mine, simply the fact that a rock icon made a graffiti comment about it has drawn more attention to the conflict than the latest exposé by “60 Minutes” or “Nightline.”
Waters’s concert, incidentally, was moved from Tel Aviv when some of his fans complained about him playing in Israel. Instead, he performed in the Arab-Israeli village Neve Shalom, which literally means “oasis of peace.” His graffiti and accompanying statements certainly didn’t decrease the number of cars braving the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway and Route 3 between the Latrun and Nahshon intersections to hear another rendition of really old songs by really old guys.
posted June 23, 2006 at 9:36 pm
I’m not sure what writer Doug Howe was trying to infer, if anything, with the last statement in his article referring to Roger Water’s concert as “another reindition of really old songs by really old guys”. I saw Pink Floyd the first time at Carter Finley stadium in Raleigh, March 1985, when we all were really younger, and the price of admission was a ticket and a can of food for the World Food Bank. As anyone who has ever LISTENED to the ‘Animals’ disk (what we old guys used to call albums) or cuts like ‘On the Turning Away’ (a song about folks ability to turn away from other folks pain and troubles) knows that a recurring theme in Roger Water’s lyrics is a very, very old theme indeed. It has been put most succintly by the biggest Rocker of all time, The Rock of Ages, when He said “Love thy neighbor as thy self”. We all know that God created man and Jesus and his diciples created the church, but MAN created organized religion and there have been more people killed over religion and it’s polished, stained glass, thickly layered WALLS than any other reason in our history. Maybe building walls between one another isn’t so great an idea after all, and when we learn to ‘tear down the walls’ that seperate us from our neighbor, we can all live to be “really old guys”. Wayne Spencer>
posted June 26, 2006 at 10:01 am
Roger Waters didn’t write “On The Turning Away” He had famously exited the band by that point.>
posted June 26, 2006 at 10:04 am
And also, I was very young at the time, so I’m not sure what came first, but Mr. Waters may not have been quoting Regan, but rather himself since the phrase “Tear Down The Wall” is chanted over and over again at the end of his album “The Wall”>