Did I mention I love Dar Williams?

We just went to see Dar Williams in Seattle last night with Shawn Mullins. I pretty much only knew his one (as he said Dar called it) "monster" hit: "Lullaby," so it was fun to hear more of his repertoire; he's quite a good performer.

Dar had only a drummer on an African drum and a guy on keyboards, so a smaller entourage than she normally has, but they were quite good.

Her new album "Promised Land" is great; she has one song that stands out in terms of being thought-provoking, about the Milgram experiments at Yale:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

-The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram

The song is called Buzzer, and it's about a woman who participates in these experiments and ends up with a sobering insight into herself:

Right away I knew it was like I failed a quiz
The man said, "Do you know what a fascist is?"
I said, "Yeah, it's when you do things you're not proud of
But you're scraping by taking orders from above"
I get it now, I'm the face, I'm the cause of war
We don't have to blame white-coated men anymore
When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game
I pressed the buzzer
I pressed the buzzer
Here's your seventy bucks, now everything's changed

I had an interesting conversation with our babysitter, a very sweet teenaged girl, yesterday, on the way home after the concert; I shared a little about this song, and she said she had been studying the Holocaust, and that she thought the people who'd done those atrocious things were just evil. And I was like, well, that's sort of the message of these experiments. How much does it take for "normal" people to follow orders and do horrific, unimaginable things?

At any rate, NPR has an interview segment up with Dar where she talks more about the new album and about this song in particular. Some of the links aren't working at the moment (coincidence, surely?) but hopefully this is just a temporary problem.

And of course, Dar being Dar, she doesn't let any of us off the hook. The song ends like this:

But tell me where are your stocks, would you do this again?
I pressed the buzzer
And tell me who made your clothes, was it children or men?
I pressed the buzzer


Links:
The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram, from Harper's Magazine, 1976
Main Dar Williams page at NPR