Sarah Masen’s Official Website : Where Do We Go From Here? The Tired Gladness of Radiohead
An article by David Dark (author of The Gospel According to America)
He quotes Yoder (source unknown, but probably The Politics of Jesus)

It is increasingly being acknowledged that the simple pragmatic determinism with which so much recent thinking has considered social and political ethics, as nothing but the calculation of how to bring the most effective institutional power to bear toward the attainment of obvious short- and medium-range goals, represents a truncated and hope-less vision of the human condition. The mechanistic vision of the social process which is presupposed in the moral justification of violence in the interest of “justice” is correlated in a deep cultural way with a world view which has written off both divine agency and human freedom. The world view which writes off divine agency and human freedom is the self-evident world view of those who today are in control. Apocalyptic literature is written by and for the others.
— John Howard Yoder

Dark goes on thew article:

Apocalyptic shows us what we’re not seeing. It can’t be composed or spoken by the powers that be, because they are the sustainers of “the way things are” whose operation justifies itself by crowning itself as “the way things ought to be” and whose greatest virtue is being “realistic.” Thinking through what we mean when we say “realistic” is where the apocalyptic begins. If the powers that be are the boot which, to borrow Orwell’s phrase, presses down upon the human face forever, apocalyptic is the speech of that human face. Apocalyptic denies, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, the “forever” part.

In our confusion, we’re accustomed to according the titles of good news and “a positive message” to the most soul-sucking, sentimental fair imaginable. And any song or story that deals with conflict by way of a strained euphemistic spin, a cliche, or a triumphal cupcake ending strikes us as the best in family entertainment. This is the opposite of the apocalyptic. Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering before daring a word of hope. And the hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. Is it any surprise that we often won’t know it when we see it?

Yeah, the Powers That Be are aptly named, not only becuase they BE, but becuase they seem to always be talking about “the way things BE/are”.