It is more than seventy years since Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons and warned, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Watching the television news this week, Churchill might have sunk into a deep sullenness and grumbled to anyone who would listen, “I told you so.”

Ball of Confusion, the 1970 song by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, captured the atmosphere of its time and, had political leaders noted Churchill’s words, would have remained a reflection on a troubled time in modern history.  The lyrics sung by The Temptation attempted to express a profound sense of unease at the state of the world. The song was a narrative of the eclectic and contradictory trends of the time, an impressionistic picture of a society where former certainties had disappeared.

Fear in the air, tension ev’rywhere
Unemployment rising fast, The Beatles’ new record’s a gas,
and the only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation,
and the band played on
Eve of destruction, tax deduction,
City inspectors, bill collectors, mod clothes in demand,
population out of hand, suicide, too many bills, hippies movin’ to the hills
People all over the world are shouting, ‘end the war’, and the band played on.
Round and round and around we go, where the world’s headed nobody knows.

“The Beatles’ new record’s a gas” referred to Let it be, the final single released before the break-up of The Beatles. Like the refrain, “And the band played on,” it expressed a feeling that the world was mostly indifferent to the plight of people who were suffering. In the midst of the massive social upheavals and injustices of 1970, Paul McCartney was singing:

And when the brokenhearted people
Living in the world agree
There will be an answer
Let it be
For though they may be parted
There is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer
Let it be

Living in the United States in 1970, at the time of the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam war, the passive vagueness of Let it be must have seemed a gas. For someone encountering discrimination and prejudice in everyday life, whilst the government sent thousand to die pointless deaths in a distant country, Paul McCartney’s words must have seemed an avoidance of reality. It is much simpler to let things be if one is a multi-millionaire shaped by Eastern mysticism than if one is a poor American struggling through daily life.

Fifty years later, the underlying truth expressed in Ball of Confusion persists.