As the cover and title suggest, though it looks like a Maalox advertisement, it is an edgy, percussive album about trying to find sanity in dangerous times and how the oppressed manage to eke out an existence. Recorded mostly in Central America, the work protests the Nicaraguan crisis as well as Panama and the local ghetto. And for all the darkness that permeates the album, he gives us rays of hope with the moving "lovers in a dangerous time", "maybe the poet", and "dust and diesel". AS Cockburn declares,"Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight; you've got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight."