The World According To The Taliban

Shortly after September 11, 2001, I attended a concert by the prolific and accomplished songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson. He was long ago a major component of the English folk rock band Fairport Convention, along with the late Sandy Denny (”Who Knows Where The Time Goes” is their most famous song). He wrote “Crazy Man Michael” and “Farewell, Farewell”, among others, for Fairport Convention. After leaving the band, his songs included “Valerie”, “Persuasion” and “I Misunderstood” and he recently released a mini-survey of the last 1000 years of popular music on CD and DVD.

At the concert, I was still shell-shocked and wondering if, after buying a home in New Jersey the previous month, I should sell it and buy another one much farther away from New York, so that I could survive any future attacks on New York City by Islamic Fundamentalists (I still am considering that move, but for now we are staying).

During the concert, Richard Thompson introduced a song with comments of sympathy for what we in the area have been going through, and said he had recently written the song to show the Taliban’s view of the world. I found the song to accurately encapsulate the frightening-to-ponder attitude of anti-Western death worshippers such as the Taliban. I was moved by the performance as it was the first satire I had heard and it was an emotional relief to contemplate the evil we face via satirical jabs for the first time. It shows the mystic’s feelings-based rather than reality-and-reason-based philosophy as experienced psychologically by a Taliban. I understand that Thompson considers himself a Muslim, but obviously he doesn’t take the fundamentalist view.

Here are some of the lyrics to that song, which eventually appeared as “Outside of the Inside” on his CD entitled “The Old Kit Bag” in 2003.

A few lyrics from “Outside of the Inside” by Richard Thompson:

“…what’s the point of Albert Einstein
What do we need Physics for? …
Shakespeare, Isaac Newton
Small ideas for little boys
Adding to the senseless chatter
Adding to the background noise
Hard to hear my oratory
Hard to hear my inner voice

Van Gogh, Botticelli
Scraping paint onto a board
Colour is the fuel of madness
That’s no way to praise the Lord
Grey’s the colour of the pious
Knelt upon the misericord.

There’s a message on the wind
Calling me to glory somewhere”