:))

From the Annotated Fall
"It's about at least two things - David Blunkett and the Freemasonic initation ritual. The two are quite separate - as often in Fall songs - but have a literary and symbolic effect on each other. It's about forms and images of domination. The blind man has been blindfolded in a masonic ritual, he was on one leg. He's being threatened with death, but in Blunkett's case, is threatening death.


Blunkett's blind eyes look down on the city from what is presumably a campaign poster. Although he cannot see, his power lies in being seen; his image functions as a symbol of an all-seeing power introjecting itself into the psyche of the population. One such poster, created by the opposition, alludes to the '60s tv show The Prisoner: dubbing Blunkett The Imprisoner, it warns that "Compulsory ID cards will mean you are presumed guilty, until proven innocent." Blunkett's sightless glare conveys the threat of a curfew ("I had to be in by 9:30") backed by the threat of government violence in the name of preventing terrorism, the violence of the powerless. Such violence is most brutally effective when it is not being exercised, wagering in its desperation that the power of fear can overcome the fear of power. Calvary, the place of Christ's passion and thus a symbol for the power of undergoing rather than performing violence, is paired with "cavalry," the passive violence of religion both in opposition to and supplemented by the active violence of the State. In another reversal, this same juxtaposition reappears as religious terrorism, which further blurs the distinction between active and passive, or actual and potential, power (the State is powerful enough to preach non-violence and religious tolerance, while the terrorist impotently trumpets violence in the name of religion, and in the name of resistance to the violence of the State). MES himself, finally, is a supplicant "on one leg,"...

In a reversal of the Masonic ritual, Blunkett, the blind man, occupies a position of power while the sighted protagonist asks for mercy, the politician who cannot see compelling the hobbled pedestrian to look at him, his own power of sight betraying him into weakness before the sightless one. Sight is traditionally figured as a capacity or a potency, but here it is an impotent potency, the capacity to be dominated. The politician's incapacity in a certain way makes him invulnerable. Blunkett reverses the polarity of sight, turning blindess into strength and sightedness into weakness, just as Christ reverses the polarity of violence, turning the water of martyrdom into the wine of salvation and, ultimately, world domination in the form of the triumphant Church. Most explicitly, work ("Do you work hard?", the "New Puritan"'s credo turned into an accusation by the singer of "Chicago Now!", here becomes a politician's unrefusable demand, ratifying economic coercion with guilt) is now the utmost weakness, since those who do so, do so for those who do not, as Marx recognized long ago. To work is to literally create the world--and in that sense work is power as such--and to effectively lose one's power over it in the same blow. This is a surprising enough message in a song by a lyricist whose contempt for Marxism has always been paired with the glorification of work, in fact for whom the two have often been inseparable ("Communists are just part time workers"). And yet, "Blindness" is not so much a departure from the ethos of the "New Puritan" (the hub from which every lyrically central Fall song emanates) as it is a continuation and broadening of the latter's themes: "New Puritan"'s convolutions of disipline and decadence become the labyrinth of power and impotence through which the protagonist of "Blindness" blindly winds... MES may say more than he means here which is, after all, the goal of every single Fall song ever recorded."