House on Fire

House on Fire

“Watch out you might get what you’re after
Cool babies strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

Hold tight wait till the party’s over
Hold tight We’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house”

Thus read the first two stanzas of the hit rock song, “Burning Down the House.”   Despite the driving, clanging beat that obscure the lyrics, I’ve long been fascinated and slightly troubled by these words. Their significance had smoldered in the back of my mind for a couple decades, never rising to the place of careful consideration. Until about 10 years ago when I wrote the essay, below.

Then, on a summer day in 2026, I stopped at the same park as where this essay was inspired, and took note that at 11:30 in the morning it was 97 degrees.  The nauseating heat prompted me to repost that essay (with postscripts based on our world twelve years later).

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Today, I was returning from an errand to the ReSource Yard to pick up reclaimed lumber for educational displays I was making. On my way back, I pulled off at Legion Park, a hilltop oasis overlooking Boulder, the front range of the Rockies and Boulder’s Valmont Power Plant. Even with the aged red brick edifice and stacks of the power plant in the foreground, the scene is stunningly beautiful. While munching a sandwich, I contemplated the coal being burned,* the massive amounts of energy being used all around me and my own role in all of this. “Oldies” wafted from the radio, a background to my reverie.

Suddenly, that familiar, clanging beat arose out of musical background. Hold tight, wait till the party’s over; Hold tight, We’re in for nasty weather; There has got to be a way; Burning down the house. “No, it couldn’t be,” I thought as the words gathered like a haze over the Valmont stacks. From this cloud, a question slowly condensed in my mind: “Why do those of us who believe that climate change is real find it difficult to do anything about it?  Why are we collectively burning down the house?”

Back home, I couldn’t wait to research the lyrics. According to Wikipedia, the words for “Burning Down the House” were “backfilled” into the song. In an NPR interview, David Byrne of the Talking Heads said that the song started simply as an instrumental jam. Using a technique favored by band member, Brian Eno, Byrne would “just write words to fit that phrasing.” This seemed odd to me. Could these lyrics possibly be nothing more than random, meaningless nonsense selected for their sheer compatibility with musical phrasing?  I couldn’t believe it!

With great skepticism, I read the lyrics again and then embarked on further research. More fascinating facts emerged. These supposedly pointless, hollow words were placed on Clear Channel Radio’s list of possibly inappropriate songs after the infamous September 11 attacks!  And, Brian Eno of the Talking Heads is a passionate and long-time advocate for action on global warming! Eno has organized events to call attention to climate change. Coincidence?

Eno has said “. . . artists can create a sense of what is cool and what is not, what is acceptable, exciting, timely… I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.” Juxtapose that with the claim that the lyrics of “Burning Down the House” have no meaning at all!

Well, if it’s true that those lyrics were not chosen for their meaning, then so to is the adage that nature abhors a vacuum! If the Talking Heads could backfill meaningless lyrics into an instrumental jam, then I can backfill meaning into that void. So, here are the lyrics of “Burning Down the House” with my Interpretations shown in bold italics immediately after each stanza:

Watch out you might get what you’re after
Cool babies strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

(We’re all in this together, ordinary people, burning down the house)

Hold tight wait till the party’s over
Hold tight We’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

(We can, indeed, just wait until the party’s over, but we’re in for nasty weather. There has to be another way).

Here’s your ticket pack your bag: time for jumpin’ overboard
The transportation is here
Close enough but not too far, Maybe you know where you are
Fightin’ fire with fire

(We’re all playing the growth game, hoping our ticket will be enough to get us through . . . we’re fighting fire with fire.)

All wet hey you might need a raincoat
Shakedown dreams walking in broad daylight
Three hun-dred six-ty five de-grees
Burning down the house

(Every day of the year, all around the globe, we’re following the dream of growth.)

It was once upon a place sometimes I listen to myself
Gonna come in first place
People on their way to work baby what did you except
Gonna burst into flame

(We’re all playing the growth game, just going to work, hoping to come in first place . . . Gonna burst into flame.)

My house S’out of the ordinary
That’s might Don’t want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house

(We practice might, not right; we don’t want to hurt nobody, but we’re burning down the house)

No visible means of support and you have not seen nuthin’ yet
Everything’s stuck together
I don’t know what you expect starring into the TV set
Fighting fire with fire

(It doesn’t seem like we’re connected to something bigger, but we are. Can’t get that from a screen, where all we learn is to fight fire with fire.)

I actually can’t believe that my interpretations weren’t in the minds of the band in advance as they came up with those lyrics.  Then, during my research, I was further amazed to find another angle on this  – that Brian Eno coined the term “The Clock of the Long Now” which led to the Long Now Foundation.”  On this site, we find:

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed . . . where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.”

Our society’s “pathologically short attention span” is a major impediment to our ability to move towards healthy and lasting ways of living – sustainability, if you like. The Long Now Foundation posits that we “need a mechanism or myth which encourages the long view.”   Unfortunately, a long view seems forever over the horizon. And, with an increasingly abbreviated attention span, our society rushes like lemmings towards all manner of cliffs including that of climate change.   So-called “climate deniers” make it harder for us to collectively see the cliff even exists. More disheartening, though, is how those of us who think climate change is real and human-caused still knowingly run towards this precipice!

In the face of a horrible future, which we continue to demand and use huge amounts of fossil fuels for our travel, food and myriad goods and services.   Why would we do this? At least part of the explanation is that our entire society – climate change believers and naysayers alike – is caught up in an economic system that demands growth for its own sake to consider itself successful. Even those who profess wanting to steer away from the cliffs of climate change, the mantra of growth-at-all-costs drag, push and compel us towards the danger.

Back to that mechanism or myth of a long view.  In Eno’s  inspiring 2000 essay entitled “The Big Here and Long Now,” he wrote:

“Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” , he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently – as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.”

It’s a new mindset we’re in need of. One in which we see ourselves as a seamless continuum of a living planet. A perspective that allows us to slow down and see alternatives. Into the daydreams we still occasionally enjoy in the midst of our rushed lives, perhaps we can backfill this awareness. Into whatever we’re doing, whatever we’re thinking, wherever we are, we can plant the seeds of new possibilities.  Let’s envision and create alternatives to all elements of our current economy, including growth for growth’s sake, and avoid that cliff. Let’s put that fire out and save our house!

***

Postscripts:

* Valmont power plant has been burning natural gas for most of the years since that first essay.  Natural gas is a “cleaner” fuel than coal, yielding more electricity with relatively smaller amounts of carbon dioxide emitted.  But, temperatures continue to rise.

* A large solar array to the east of the Valmont Reservoir, installed in 2000, generates 4 Megawatts (MW) of electricity.   The entire Valmont Power Plant complex produces 227-229 MW.   This seems like a large number compared to the solar array, but consider that Valmont Power Plant is a very small plant by modern standards.  Today, most power plants produced between 500 and 3,000 MW.   What implications do these numbers carry?   Can we envision and create an economy that requires less, not more, energy?

* In the past year, I created Geo sapiens with the stated purpose of  Connecting People, Planet, and Purpose through the integration of environmental education, energy education and job readiness.

* Geo sapiens finds its practical impact through the ALL Careers Approach to Education.