What the song always meant to me was the contrast between modern life and earlier times, and what we've lost. In the past, even helpless innocents would be adopted and cared for. Today, although we have iPhones and flat screen TVs, innocents are murdered, or allowed to starve. It's harder and harder to find peaceful waters. And then Prine--the genius that he is--personalizes it. He multiplies the contrast, as not just between the native Americans' treatment of innocents and our modern-day, inherent violence and vulnerability, but adding in the statistical fact that we can't even manage to take care of and nurture those we have sworn to love in our personal lives. "What a beautiful world it once was," Norman McLean said in A River Runs Through It. What a cold, cruel, and messed-up world we've built to take its place, I think John is saying.
What the song always meant to me was the contrast between modern life and earlier times, and what we've lost. In the past, even helpless innocents would be adopted and cared for. Today, although we have iPhones and flat screen TVs, innocents are murdered, or allowed to starve. It's harder and harder to find peaceful waters. And then Prine--the genius that he is--personalizes it. He multiplies the contrast, as not just between the native Americans' treatment of innocents and our modern-day, inherent violence and vulnerability, but adding in the statistical fact that we can't even manage to take care of and nurture those we have sworn to love in our personal lives. "What a beautiful world it once was," Norman McLean said in A River Runs Through It. What a cold, cruel, and messed-up world we've built to take its place, I think John is saying.