Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues;” Winners and Losers; This is Not About Ukraine

Sometimes I become addicted to a song and find myself needing to hear it over and over again until hearing it one more time becomes unbearable. The song doesn’t have to be new to me. In fact, the song’s usually familiar. What’s new is that I’ve heard something in it I hadn’t heard before. A lyric, a melody, the singer’s voice combine to make me think the song contains some magic, mythic meaning that matches the mood or the moment I’m in. This week, that’s been the case with Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” 

A beautiful angst haunts the entire song. The poetry of the opening three lines, for example:

“This is the day of the expanding man

That shape is my shade

There where I used to stand.”

Or later,

“I crawl like a viper

Through these suburban streets

Make love to these women

Languid and bittersweet.”

And here’s the song’s well-known chorus hook. 

“They got a name for the winners in the world

(I) I want a name when I lose.

“They call Alabama the Crimson Tide

 Call me Deacon Blues.”

I attribute my still raging “Deacon Blues” obsession to the lines above about winners and losers triggered by an article I read called “Ukraine Can Win this War.” The authors of that article didn’t even attempt to define what winning meant, as if the definition would be obvious and shared by all. As if Ukraine was a monolithic entity, like the territory in the game of Risk, and not a place where forty million people live, each of whom will have had, in the end, their own unique experience of the war. Their own individual assessment of what was won, what was lost, and, for probably all but a very few, some imprecise mix of both.

So it occurred to me that too often we lack discrimination and discretion when we write and say the words “winner” and “loser.” Yes, within my maniacal song world of “Deacon Blues,” it makes perfect sense that Crimson Tide means winning and Deacon Blues means losing, but one can’t live life inside a song. I’ve tried. 

Winning and losing with any sense of clarity and finality is a rare occasion for me. I might win or lose a tennis match or a bet on a sporting event or a game of Codenames.¹ Other than that, real life for me is a series of relationships with people and pursuits, varying in importance and length, always ebbing and flowing, with small victories, small defeats. My most important relationships are as a husband and father, and how can one possibly ever summarize, or finalize, those enormously complex and ceaselessly evolving relationships as winning or losing?

We are in the midst of the Jewish High Holidays, and at the heart of these holidays is the concept of teshuvah, meaning both repentance and a turning away from future “repentable” behavior. The concept of teshuvah is not unique to either Judaism or, for that matter, to religion. All our traditions of wisdom contain the idea that there’s always a path and an opportunity to do and be better, and always a danger of doing and being worse. That wisdom obliterates the idea of labelling a person a “winner” or a “loser.”

When people carelessly affix someone with the general label of “loser,” what they really mean is they dislike an action someone has taken, either because the action offends their values or because it runs contrary to their own interests. The reverse is true of the less frequent label of “winner.”

As compared to “winner” the currency of the word “loser” has been afflicted by a hyper-inflation of overuse. (And I’m excluding the joking, trivial, sometimes ironic use of “loser”)  Instead, I’m talking about the inflation of its use as a whole person insult. It has been Donald Trumps’ favorite insult, and that has certainly accelerated the frequency of its use.

People who indiscriminately and often label people as losers tell us much more about themselves than about who they’re labelling.  And what they tell us about themselves is a tale of a life lived under the burden of an unbending, absolutist view of the world. A view that comports poorly with the complex and nuanced world we actually live in. That cognitive dissonance must be a huge psychological burden to go through life with.

So, to answer the line in “Deacon Blues,”

“(I) I want a name when I lose.”

I propose “human.” As in “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Below is a Youtube of a recording of “Deacon Blues.” I prefer the studio version to any of the live versions I’ve listened to.

1. Codenames is a great word game. Easy to learn, hard to master. Warning: frustration among teammates is a real risk.