The war is over!

Donald Trump declares the Iran war is over. Decades ago Phil Ochs declared the Vietnam War was over. He got some flak over it at the time. Lady Gaga also sang that song in 2016.

So I see in the New York Times this morning that President Trump has declared the war in Iran is over (for at least the second or third time although I am losing count.)

It reminded me of a great song by the great Phil Ochs back in the late sixties called “The War is Over.” It was a combination of irony, parody, sarcasm, and wishful thinking, all wrapped in one. He wrote it in 1968, at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging and taking American and Vietnamese lives at a very rapid rate. At the time, I was protesting the war at UCLA and marching in the mass mobilizations we had back then.

The song was on Ochs’ album “Tape from California,” which had many other great songs and was a step in transition Ochs was then making from straight protest/folk to a darker and more personal vision. (Bob Dylan made the same transition, of course.)

At the time not everyone liked “The War is Over,” as might be expected. It was a little too irreverent for some seriously dedicated anti-war activists, who had fought with sweat and blood to put their shoulders to the wheel of the war machine, as the Berkeley free speech activist Mario Savio put it in a famous speech. They thought the song was a little too flippant.

The song has never really gone away, as oldie as it is. Lady Gaga sang it at a concert in 2016, although her version was not nearly as good and did not—perhaps could not— capture Ochs’ deep tones. (I speak as a Gaga fan.)

But it’s good that the old protest songs never really go away, even if, tragically, it takes new wars to keep them updated in our collective memory.

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