From the horrible death tolls of natural disasters in both the United States and South Asia, to the reports of crop failure, genocide and starvation in Africa, to the daily bloodshed and chaos of U.S.-occupied Iraq, news junkies like me have been getting violently depressing fixes lately.
With all of the recent unpleasantness in my head, I reasoned that a baseball game would take my mind off the endless news cycle and let me relax a little. Unfortunately, TV presented me with new subjects for anger.After a break in the first inning, a commercial opened with images of Paul McCartney. Beginning with classic, Beatles-era photographs of McCartney the song-writing genius-and continuing with pictures of his post-Beatles life as a father, husband, musician and knight-the ad closed by depicting McCartney as an investor, right alongside the Fidelity Investments logo. Until the ending, the photo history would have served as a great eulogy, beautifully chronicling the life and career of one of rock n' roll's icons.

But Paul McCartney isn't dead. Nope, Paul McCartney just sold out.
OK, OK, I know what you're thinking-Paul McCartney has sold out plenty of times before. But seriously-using classic photos of himself to hawk an investment firm is just disgusting. Hasn't McCartney already earned enough money by playing corporate gigs and selling the Beatles catalog? Is it really necessary for him to keep whoring himself out?

By the end of the second inning of the baseball game, I was still cursing Paul McCartney for selling out and for his utter uselessness in the past 35 years. But then a new commercial began that gave me an equally rude jolt. This time a clip of a young Bob Dylan performing was splashed across the screen as part of a montage of various celebrities. The sponsor of the ad: E*TRADE Financial.

Let's pretend for a minute that it's 1969 again:

The Beatles have recently released the definitive Abbey Road. Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" is tearing up the charts in both the U.S. and the U.K. Woodstock has been an amazing success and become a crucial generational moment. Public opinion has turned against the evils of Jim Crow and the horrors of the Vietnam War. The country appears to be on the verge of fully sweeping away the militarism and empty materialism of the 1950s and creating a culture that once again values the arts, the individual and peace.

Now try telling the young people of 1969, politically and artistically hip as they were, that one day Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney would be featured in competing investment banking commercials. And while you're at it, gently let them know that all of those costly lessons they were busy learning in the jungles of Southeast Asia are quickly being unlearned in the sands of the Middle East.

Suddenly, it hit me.

I now realized why I was so mad about all of this. The selling-out of artists like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney is not so different from the quagmire in Iraq-both are the result of forgetting the lessons that we as a society had learned roughly 36 years ago.

Since 1969, we've forgotten the sacredness of music and art. We've forgotten the problems inherent with brutally invading and occupying foreign countries for lies. And as long as we're busy forgetting the lessons of America 1969, let's pretend that LSD is harmless again so that I can escape the cultural and political wasteland of America 2005.