Seeing Through the Glass Jar

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Donald Richard Munson Professor White ENGLISH 1301-8023 26 October 2012 Seeing through the Glass Jar The song “Jars,” written in 2009 by Peter and Samuel Loeffler of the band Chevelle, crafts a sardonic song that displays through visual metaphors and a dour view of extremists of the green environmental movement will ultimately achieve the identical end as their primary foe, large oil corporations. The Loeffler brothers use a simplistic jar, which is both lucid and petite, to symbolize how little of an effect we really have on the earth. The green extremists can try to save the earth (collect it in jars if they think it helps) but until we eliminate killing each other over land, resources, politics and religion, stealing from each other, or letting each other die through famine and disease, this planet will live on, but without us. In the opening lines, the Loeffler brothers, highlight one of the green movement’s mottos “Hold on to chance lest, we bleed ourselves” (Chevelle 1, 2), meaning that it is better to preserve the earth’s environment now than to not have it later. This seeds the idea that the extremists within the green movement are the saviors of the earth, but in the following verse “save for the pets, they are the loneliest” (Chevelle 3, 4), which is remarkably over-stated, presents us with the mockingly absurd idea of pets being lonely when in fact most of us are passionate about our animals. However, the word pet, refers to one’s personal agenda, and the idea that when we exaggerate our focus on one agenda, we find ourselves veiled from what the long term outcome is as well as how it affects others. Using the word pet describes the extreme green movement’s personal agenda for power. The following verses, “Put into jars, we’ll save this earth”(Chevelle 5,6), is saying, if you put all the resources, trees, rivers and oceans, in jars, no one

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