Start with the Telegraph Road. I’m just going to post the most relevant parts of the lyric. Go listen to it all.
Well a long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
Made a home in the wilderness
He built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
And the other travelers came walking down the track
And they never went further, no, they never went back
Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their load
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road
…
And my radio says tonight it’s gonna freeze
People driving home from the factories
There’s six lanes of traffic
Three lanes moving slow
I used to like to go to work but they shut it down
I’ve got a right to go to work but there’s no work here to be found
Yes, and they say we’re gonna have to pay what’s owed
We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the Telegraph Road
…
Toward the end of the song Knopfler turns inward to how the System affects us personally even in our most quiet and intimate moments.
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
…
But just believe in me baby and I’ll take you away
And there we are again. Away. From all This.
The hell out of the way. Just have faith in me to make it happen honey, and everything will be alright.
Or not.
***
So that’s a song, trying to grapple with the same questions. Next let’s do a novel. This one’s complicated.
I’ve read the twenty long books of Patrick O’brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series several times. I love them, for various reasons. The first book has been filmed and you can see a relevant clip of that here.
In one of the later books in the series, Aubrey and Maturin spend a considerable time ashore at home in England. A subplot develops in which Jack Aubrey is not just a sea captain, but lord of a particular rural demense, and therefore a member of the Commons. He spends a vast number of pages explaining to his friend Stephen Maturin about how the feudal System still works in the countryside, and on one level it’s horribly dull reading. But now I have a reason to care.
In the end, because this is a novel, Jack casts his vote, and it is decisive, for the ability of the little people to take a good part of their living from the land.
It’s the right thing to do.
It’s fiction, though.
***
And a film. Any decent western will do, but I choose one of the best.
In this one, Charles Bronson is the Good, Henry Fonda is the Bad, and Jason Robards is the Ugly. It’s a story of the coming of the railroad to the wilderness and how that coming changes everything. In the end, spoiler alert, the Ugly, the man who represents getting the hell out of the way, is gutshot, and quietly dies. For the sins, of the rail, and of the Lie of Progress.
Dire Straits has a song by the same name as the film.
Sitting on a fence that’s a dangerous course
Oh, you could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west
That’s enough backstory and prep for now. I need to get myself ready for first light and try to tell this all again.