"Powerless, with a guitar"?

In the 1960's, Gűnter Grass published a poem which Michael Hamburger translated as "Powerless, with a guitar". It finishes:

""Impotence puts records on: impotent songs.
Powerless, with a guitar.-
But outside, finely meshed
and composed, power has its way".

Strong words then for a generation (not just the hippies protesting against the use of napalm in Vietnam) which believed in the transformative power of music, in the relevance of Bob Dylan, the counter-culture and protest songs.

There have been a number of powerful politicians since then (some discredited) who, in their younger days, played guitar in groups...or the saxophone. Perhaps they even sang protest songs.

There were many singer-songwriters and other writers in Central and Eastern Europe who helped to create the conditions and circumstances for the activities of Solidarity in Poland, for the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Not to mention Mikis Theodorakis in Greece, Gilberto Gil in Brazil etc. Not so powerless...

I recently came across a blog post by Redrum, who'd updated the poem for the new millennium:

"Powerless, with a blog". We'll see.