One of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums. When it first came out, my friends and I talked about it endlessly, but we never came to any conclusions about it.
Only years later, when I got a copy of The Sex Pistols "Never Mind the Bullocks," did I begin to understand the album. The Sex Pistols, and punks in general in Britain the mid-1970's, hated Pink Floyd and everything they stood for: so-called "stadium rock." And The Wall, I think, is Floyd's response. The movie is very clear: British punks were proto-fascists, according to the band. They're the ones that "bleeding hearts and artists" have to "make their stand" against.
"Comfortably Numb" comes before Pink has learned to fight back against fascists. Instead, he drugs himself to conceal his pain. In any case, it's a great phrase; I've used it myself for 25+ years to describe a feeling beyond pain but without the spark of life, a feeling I (and probably most everyone else) have felt from time to time.
