[b]Solemn regret, transgressions fill my head
A measure of success is how well to forget
And the past is dead[/b]

The beginning of the song is performed in a melancholic mood, signifying a mourning for something lost. It is lamented that today it seems those who are not melancholic, that is, those who are not attached to the past, tend to be more successful.

[b]Strewn about the battlefield of life are the remainders of history
When convenient we exalt them and pay them such respect
As if we're all in an equivalent trajectory[/b]

The shards of history are a history that is not coherent, and which has no single meaning. Meaning has to be derived from the splintering. There is more here to it however: the imagery of battlefield and remainders suggests trauma. History lack meaning for reasons beyond the mere fact that “everyone has their own perspective”. Trauma, violent impositions on bodies, tears meaning apart, and has to be rebuilt. Often, the rebuilding process is done in the name of nationalism: traumas such as war are incorporated into a nationalist story about heroism. The effect is to forget or betray the trauma, which is in this sense the truth of the repressed and forgotten past.

[b]And trash piles high in the rubble we forgot
The angels of our nature just sit and watch it rot[/b]

I don’t know if Graffin knows this, but in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, an angel is made purely of form, and not materiality, as is the soul. The soul is a collection of images, that is, a collection of our memories that are ordered in our mind by the principles of reason. This line implies that our soul is incapable of addressing a part of the past which is forgotten; the forgotten elements seem to be both part of and not part of our soul, insofar as the angels of our nature seem to sit inept on the trash or beside it.

The use of the theological language here is interesting because the intelligibility of religion is mostly lost today in many parts of the world. The philosophical and theological rigor of today’s fundamentalists is pathetic and reactive in comparison to the classical theologians of the soul, such as Eckhart or Ibn Arabi. Therefore, this line also suggests to me that part of what is lost is a language of the soul that would allow for symbolic coherence of the self within the created world. If the past is dead, it is also because we have lost touch with historical conditions that would make the past intelligible. Today it appears that the past has no meaning for the present. The rupture in meaning would be historical trauma.

[b]Now, the past is dead
Let's focus on tomorrow instead
Oh the tragic present said
The past is dead[/b]

[b]Who can say what constitutes the most important sector of society?
The dominant portion seek an instant gratification
And are proud of intellectual poverty[/b]

This line reminds me of the death of Marxism, anarchism and the utopian left after the failures of communism and the ineffectualness of the “new left”. The old left had a firm belief in history, in historical movement, which indeed rendered the past meaningful and important. Within that world, the working class was the most important sector of society. Today, the (American) working class is hedonistic and far less intellectual than 100 years ago. The failure of the left, the downfall of the unions in the 1980s onward, and media saturation all make connection to the past tenuous if not impossible.

[b]I'd like to be empathetic but I can't
The jeopardy is too great to make a stand
[/b]

The lack of meaning within the current moment in history, the inability to link the present with any struggle or hope, makes us incapable of action and of empathy for one another. Empathy requires identification with others; when a culture is in shards, who is “us” is difficult to determine, and a lack of solidarity among people is replaced by reactive nationalism and reactive fundamentalism.

[b]Now the past is dead
Good deeds won't help you get ahead
The modern signpost read the past is dead
My next great decision is just lying in wait
The action might turn out to be the world's most grievous mistake[/b]

This last verse line is about faith in action. A true act requires faith and is not based in only in reason. This is because a true act attempts to create new meaning which does not yet exist, it is therefore always a risk (compare “someone cried out fuck the government/but his mates couldn’t define what he meant”). New kinds of reasoning require new faiths or new trust, and the faith must persist beyond and within failure. Hence the “tragic present”, a present that requires failure, and faith in the sense of making a totally new world based on new forms of social relations.

[b]The past is dead
More veritable words have never been said
The tragic present said the past is dead[/b]

Veritable means truthful, and also faithful. In this sense, a double meaning of the “past is dead” emerges at the end of the song. Whereas throughout, the death of the past had a melancholic tone, in this line and the one above there is hope that the meaning of the past can emerge with a new act, a new attempt a building a world, which will retroactively break with the past, and therefore create the past anew. Here we are asked to break with the dead past, and as Zizek says (paraphrasing), “fail again, fail better”.
This song is an interesting addition to Graffin's internal battle between faith and reason. He often calls faith "emotion" and denigrates it, but also he often celebrates his emotion and faith as a buttress against reason (as in "apologies to Skinner...having discovered the long time secret of how I feel, so goddam downtrodden", here his emotion is a truth more powerful that the "surface of me", despite that we never the less are "only surface"). Here, we find that reason and faith have important relations to history and distilling coherence and making action in history.