The Road to Damascus

Apples of Discord - Changing Course

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Apples of Discord

An example of how literature can get us to think and feel more deeply about a country’s decision to go to war can be seen in the 2007 lyric “The Long Road Out of Eden” by the Eagles. The final two stanzas provide a powerful, ambiguous, universalized response to the Iraq War, although the lyric can be reworked slightly to get at the Ukraine War as well.

I can imagine at least two reworkings of what one might call the primal political sin of massive violence, an evil that the US and Russia have engaged in at the most dangerous levels over the last hundred years. Lately, the Russians are engaging up to their eyeballs with their threats of using tactical nukes against Ukraine and conventional nukes against the West. The first reworking is directed (more specifically than in the original) at the US: 

The second is directed at Russia:

And yet the final verse is the same for both:

Both the US and Russia have bitten deep into the apple of warfare technology. They continue to develop their nuclear arsenals, and Russia repeatedly unnerves the world with the possibility of their actual use. Much of the world tries to stay out of this nuclear club, while nations like Iran and North Korea strive to become members.

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Changing Course

In all the versions of “Long Road Out of Eden” that I imagine, Damascus stays the same. Damascus is of course the Syrian city we know today, vexed amid the present nightmare of the Middle East — with the Russian airstrikes of cities opposing al-Assad, the Hamas slaughter of Israelis dancing in the desert, the Iranian missiles exploding overhead, the Israeli bombings and assassinations, the needless suffering in Ghaza, etc. Yet the road to Damascus has also symbolized something very specific for the last two thousand years: Saint Paul’s change of heart from persecuting to embracing Christians. In general, the road to Damascus symbolizes a change of heart leading to a change of course.

I don’t know if Putin can ever change course, but what of the other Russians? And what of the other players in this dangerous nuclear game — the Americans, British, French, & Chinese? When will they look up into the sky and wonder if maybe they’re headed in the wrong direction? When will they look deeply into the wide blue sky above us, with its notes of birds and its smell of napalm in the west wind, and see beyond it the endless black night in which we all spin?

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