Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has been making himself heard this year, with a forthcoming new documentary and festival sets that included the legendary Newport Folk Fest. Now, in an upcoming interview in Rolling Stone, he’s sounding off about something other than music—GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump.
“He is pig-ignorant and he always was and he always will be,” Waters told the magazine. “He lives in the illusion that he’s admirable in some way. And obviously for somebody like me, he stands for everything that is not admirable in American society.”
Waters, who is English, hammered both the candidate and the wave of seeming insanity that allows Trump to maintain his ride at the top of polls as “American exceptionalism gone crazy.” And it’s not just the blindness of voters he blames for the billionaire’s rising star but also the media.
“The mainstream media in this country tend only to report a very limited section of ideas and views,” he railed, before veering off a little into the land of conspiracy theories. “… It’s perfectly understandable why people would believe Donald Trump’s nonsense, because it’s important to the 1 percent to propagate and disseminate these theories and these system beliefs in order to retain control. It’s organized theft on a giant level, a huge scale, and is extremely efficient and well-organized.”
For those of us lacking the musician’s psychedelic pedigree to see Trump as the Trojan Horse candidate for some sort of Illuminati or lizard overlord plot, especially considering the head shaking and finger wagging he consistently gets from the GOP brass and their lapdog media partners at Fox News, Waters is right when he notes the whole things smacks of a joke that has gone way too far.
The interview then devolved a bit into what could perhaps be described as Waters’s own British exceptionalism, with a jab at the United States’ origins:
“If the Founding Fathers hadn’t been so up their own asses, they might have come up with a system that fell somewhere between republican democracy that was going to work and that had proper checks and balances to prevent it disintegrating into what it has become, which is a country for sale to the highest bidder…”
And, of course, he got in a plug for his movie, Roger Waters the Wall, which he unsubtly hints may well cure the psyche of those who decide to sit through it.
“What I hope is that when they’ve seen it, they may look at one another and even come out and go, ‘You know what? We are a community and we are many, there are a lot of us.’”
Hmmm, a rich, legendarily arrogant cultural icon who thinks his own ideas are the answers to your ills? Sounds like Waters and Trump have more in common than the rock star would like to admit. Perhaps he was being more prophetic than even his saucerful of psychedelics led him to think when he penned this aptly named track “The Show Must Go On,” from Pink Floyd’s opus The Wall: