Last Resort
Two days ago Eagles singer Glenn Frey died. I loved Hotel California, I think because it gave me a glimpse into a grown-up world I didn’t understand but was terribly curious about. I remember feeling the same way about Lou Reed’s Take a Walk on the Wild Side. I found the adult world frightening and fascinating at the same time. Sometimes I still feel that way.
I’ll point out that being 14 in 1976 (when Hotel California came out) was a bit different from being 14 today. I think teenagers grow up a lot faster today, which I think is unfortunate.
My favourite song on Hotel California was Last Resort, about how humans flock to, and destroy, the world’s most beautiful places. Here’s a youtube photo collage that does a nice job of illustrating the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4zR9r9olOg
Last Resort was one of several songs that I felt profoundly captured the dis-ease I felt about economic progress. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi and Chrissie Hynde’s My City Was Gone were two more. You can hear Hynde’s song here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WXcexId5s8
“I went back to Ohio but my pretty countryside had been paved down the middle by a government that had no pride.”
When I see acres of parking lots and shops where once there were dairy cattle or wheat crops, I start humming My City Was Gone. These songs made me so sad--they so skilfully captured the sense of loss I felt whenever I saw bulldozers or pollution billowing out of smokestacks. Little known fact: Chrissy Hynde was from Akron, OH, home to tire rubber factories. She was appalled at how train tracks were ripped up to advance car culture. So appalled that she moved to London, home of great public transport--and punk rock.
My masters thesis was about how securities markets have a role to play in combatting climate change. I chose the topic partly because of my amazement at the lengths energy companies will go to to extract fossil fuels from the earth. Drilling in the arctic, for instance, a hostile, unpredictable environment where there is no safe way to build a deepwater rig and transport billions of gallons of oil. Or clearing the boreal forests of Canada to mine sand and cook it to extract bitumen, producing more greenhouse gases than even coal. Or emptying rivers of millions of gallons of water to be able to crack open rocks to extract shale gas. The side effects of each of these processes are devastating. Yet somehow boards of directors approved billions of dollars in capital expenditures to pursue each of these follies. As the Eagles sang:
"Some rich man came and raped the land. Nobody caught him. Put up a bunch of ugly boxes. And Jesus people bought ‘em. They called it Paradise. I don’t know why. You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye."
And now we have a developer leading in the polls in the states. As Chrissie would say: Eh, Oh, Way to go America.
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