No. 650 – We Work the Black Seam

Performer: Sting

Songwriter: Sting

Original Release: The Dream of the Blue Turtles

Year: 1985

Definitive Version: Bring on the Night, 1986

Remember my admonishment at the start of the blog about songs that might elicit political commentary and how certain comments either with me or against me would be stricken from the record? Well, this is one of those songs. If, during an election year, you feel as though you can’t go without responding, please skip this post and come back tomorrow.

We all good now? OK. Even though I had a working knowledge of U.S. history and thus politics when I was growing up, I wasn’t really a political person until the late Eighties. Before then, I never paid much attention to news that wasn’t sports-related.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what was going on for the most part; it was no interest to further engage in it. For example, when the Challenger blew up, I knew about it right away, but I didn’t watch any of the coverage on TV. I didn’t need to watch the disaster on an endless loop to get a sense of the tragedy. I got it, and I didn’t want to subject myself to it. Doing so only would make me upset. In retrospect, I can’t say my life was the poorer for my relative ignorance.

Of course, after you decide to pursue a career in journalism and get a job at a newspaper, the news is unavoidable. You literally can’t do your job, or at least, you can’t advance in your career past being a copy runner, if you aren’t aware of the news. And by the time I was getting into the game, jobs for copy runners were long gone.

Needless to say, my transformation from general optimist to skeptic and cynic was eye-opening. The Panglossian ideal I had held that this is the best of all possible worlds constantly was being exposed as fraudulent. The trigger on the switch really was the Iran-Contra affair.

I grew up, more or less, a Republican—not that either of my parents were hard core when it came to politics. In fact, most of the time they steadfastly refused to discuss it. In olden times, there were two things you never discussed in public company—politics and religion. Now we do both endlessly. How’s that working out for us in terms of our relationships with our fellow Americans and fellow men and women?

(A slight digression: Mom once mentioned off the cuff that she and my grandmother used to get into big political arguments during the 1960 election. I knew my Mom’s political bent and guessed at my grandmother’s, so I said, you fought because you (a 20-year-old) wanted Nixon and she (a 46-year-old) wanted Kennedy. I found that amusing. Mom said nothing but gave me a “damn you” look that confirmed my analysis.)

Anyway, after Reagan beat Carter in 1980, I bought into the message that it was a time of American renewal, and in 1984, I voted for Reagan even though in all candor I paid almost zero attention to actual policy.

Then came Iran-Contra, and as it unfurled, it became clear to me that even if Reagan didn’t have a direct hand in covering it up, a la Nixon, there was no way that Reagan wasn’t at least aware of what was going on. This to me was a clear violation of the ideals that he had come to embody, laying aside the larger issue of whether the Contras ought to be funded by selling arms to an enemy. I mean, if you can’t trust Reagan to abide by the law, who can you trust?

One of Reagan’s better lines, of course, was trust but verify. Iran-Contra seemed to indicate that he wasn’t trustworthy, and the more I started to look at other issues—the verification—the less trustworthy he became in my eyes, and the further I moved from the beliefs I held as a youth. During this time, I had discovered What’s Going On and was listening more to Sting, who began writing with a lot more social conscious, and the music resonated with me during my political awakening.

So, yeah, I’m politically Liberal now, with a capital L. I make no apologies for it. I know liberal has become a dirty word in today’s political climate, but that’s because weak individuals have allowed certain parties to define the term in ways to befit their self-interest. In short, no I’m not interested in confiscating all of your income in the form of taxes. I’m not a Communist.

One of Webster’s definitions of liberalism is “a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.” I believe in that. If you don’t, perhaps you should ask yourself why you don’t.

Hmm, maybe there’s still hope for that rose-colored optimist of days gone by after all.