I close my eyes
Every night
And I dream that I can hold you
They fill us full of lies
Everyone buys
About what it means to be a soldier
I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel
About all the blood that’s been spilled
Look out on the street
Get me back home
On the day after tomorrow
from Day After Tomorrow, by Tom Waits
Artists have struggled to make meaningful statements about the Iraq War. Certainly compared to the Vietnam era, artists have been surprisingly quiet, even after early problems with speaking out (ask the Dixie Chicks) subsided. Movies about Iraq have pretty much bombed, no pun intended. Tom Waits got it right by stripping things down to a soldier’s poignant and ambivalent letter home. Great song.