Blake Hall
“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” Bob Marley said that. He sang it, too.
“If music be the food of love, play on / Give me excess of it; that surfeiting / The appetite may sicken, and so die.” William Shakespeare wrote that. He put it in Twelfth Night. You know, the one about those twins Sebastian and Viola who were separated in a shipwreck and fell in love with royals, etc. It’s not Hamlet or Macbeth, but what is?
We’re thinking the United States Department of Defense must have these quotes hanging on walls everywhere at the Pentagon because they most certainly subscribe to their inferred ethos. All you have to do is take a look at their finances.
In 2015 alone, the DoD spent a whopping $437 million dollars on music, more specifically, musical bands. Four-hundred-and-thirty-seven-million.
According to The Wall Street Journal, that’s more than “individual defense budgets of NATO allies Albania, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg and Slovenia.”
“Without music, life would be a mistake,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche once. Ooh Rah?