War, What Is It Good for? Absolutely Nothing

Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch: War, What Is It Good for? Absolutely Nothing

It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song "War," sung by Edwin Starr, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, became something of a sensation. Even so many years later, who could forget its famed chorus? "War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing." Not me. And yet heartfelt as the song was then -- "War, it ain't nothing but a heartbreaker. War, it's got one friend, that's the undertaker..." -- it has little resonance in America today.

But here's the strange thing: in a way its authors and singer could hardly have imagined, in a way we still can't quite absorb, that chorus has proven eerily prophetic -- in fact, accurate beyond measure in the most literal possible sense. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. You could think of American war in the twenty-first century as an ongoing experiment in proving just that point.

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WNU Editor: 46 years later .... this song's message is still a contemporary one.