American Tune. Paul Simon. 1972. Columbia.

 In 1972, the same year that Paul Simon recorded American Tune in London at Morgan Studios, Richard Nixon committed himself and members of his administration to the Watergate break in and its subsequent national convulsion. I remember my mother telling me, on one those occasions when she was being honest with me, that it was the Watergate fiasco that pulled the scales from her eyes, her fall, as an American citizen, from a state of innocence. I don’t think she was alone in her experience. Simon sings, “For we lived so well so long. Still when I think of the road we’re traveling on I wonder what’s gone wrong.” Raised a Catholic and now lapsed of faith, I find the conceit of innocence—outside the realm of jurisprudence, and sometimes within it—inherently ridiculous and unappealing. Not only is it an imaginary state—the ancient Greeks made a more convincing case for the reality of Olympus—but it’s jejune and, on a national level, conceived in bad faith to create a patriot class that will insulate policymakers from transparency and accountability. You can’t hope to benefit from the American dream without first being conditioned into it. In the 1980s America allowed itself once again to be swept up in a new age of innocence; Reagan’s America. It was a campaign narrative that proved so effective there are still Americans who are convinced of his greatness. This form of propagandist king- and myth making was put to winning use most recently by Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, and its hugely successful Make America Great Again slogan, which, as a symbolic tool of provocation, still retains its divisive power. Trump is no idealist. He always knew, as did the marketing team who designed the brand, that making America great again would never work on the scale it did when it won Reagan his presidency, but the red cap would ensure its wearer of tribal identification with that part of the country who sees the equitable gains of progress as a Pandora’s Box that, whatever the cost, must be returned to its original state and resealed. Back in ‘72, in order to describe what he saw happening to his country, Simon devised the metaphor of “the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea.” Half a century later, we aren’t asking ourselves how far out has she drifted but how many global revolutions has the old girl completed. With the rhythm section of Bob Crenshaw (bass) and Grady Tate (drums). Bob James on keyboards.