Sandinista, you can hold your head up high You have given back their Freedom You have lived up to your name
Sandinista, may your spirit never die Hold the candle to the darkness You're the keeper of the flame
Sandinista, keep believing in the dream The truth is stronger than the shadows Keep it shining in your eyes
Sandinista, may the soldiers disappear May your children live forever May their laughter fill your lives
Sandinista, los fuerzas de la oscuridad nunca pueden extinguir la puridad de tu llama revolutionara con su terror y sus mentiras con su dinero y sys maquinas la libertad en tus ojus el amor caliente en tu corozon son fuerzas mas poderosas que las armas de la guerra
Sandinista, you can hold your head up high You have given back their Freedom You have lived up to your name
Sandinista, may your spirit never die Hold the candle to the darkness You're the keeper of the flame
That pseudo-country singer-songwriter (w/ a voice <URL: http://www.sfbg.com/36/40/art_music_kristofferson.html > Johnny Cash recalls the first time he heard Kristofferson on tape: "When the song ended, I said, 'That man's a poet, pity he can't sing.' ")has this to say about politics...Dissolution and loneliness don't figure as prominently in Kristofferson's current writing, but politics still does. A Moment of Forever's "Under the Gun" attacks "swollen men, blind with power" who "break the rules, one by one / With their lies, raising the danger / Of their games under the gun." Another recent song, "The Circle," available only on a Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize-inspired compilation, starts with a condemnation of a Clinton missile attack on Baghdad that killed a revered Iraqi female artist and folds her story into that of Argentine mothers of the disappeared. Among the texts Kristofferson consults is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
When it comes to the big picture, Kristofferson isn't hopeful. "It's worse than ever," he says of the current U.S. war on terrorism. "It makes the Gulf War, which was the most cold-blooded piece of business I'd seen since I was an adult on the planet, it makes it look like nothing. We're getting sucked into a cycle of violence now that we're not gonna be able to pull out of. It really is ironic when you see Eisenhower's old warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex, and my god, today they've got a blank check."
Kristofferson's blood still boils at the mention of Kissinger, Rumsfeld, or either George Bush, but it no longer races in time to the frenetic pace of an overdriven professional career. The quality of feature-film projects offered him generally improved after John Sayles cast him in Lone Star in 1996...
-- Michael Pugliese