Knowing Where We Stand

It is one of those social conventions that we all understand but often ignore at dinner parties and family gatherings.  DON’T TALK POLITICS OR RELIGION!  That’s easier said than done. After we chat about the weather (avoiding climate change if possible), sports, and our kids, things can get rather quiet.  And even sports can require a referee when it becomes a contest about GOATs and home teams. Knowing all this, I thought it best to write something without political or religious slant as a change of pace for both readers and me. Well that was the intent. But then, in one of those intuitive eruptions we might consider revelatory, insightful, serendipitous or just ill-conceived, my mind was taken hostage by a sound. More precisely, it was the sound a song whose lyrics kept playing in my head in row-row-row your boat monotony. 

I’ve long been amazed at the power of a song to reconnect our now with our then, blending former and current sentiments in some time warp of an eternal now. This awareness is neither surprising nor profound, the human mind a seeming kaleidoscope of sounds and images that pass into and out of our consciousness without apparent cause or explanation. But what if the sound bytes and video clips we hold in memory are signaling, in their release, some subconscious yearnings or unresolved confusions of head or heart? So when the repetitive refrain of a Joni Mitchell song, first introduced to me by my college roommate a lifetime ago, inserted itself into the mental chatter that I take to be thought, it made me wonder: why am I now hearing the song,  “I don’t know where I stand.”

The actual version I am replaying in my head was not from Mitchell’s album but a cover by a group remembered mostly by folk-song enthusiasts, Fairport Convention. Back then I was drawn into this music by its haunting melody and cathartic refrain, touching emotions that were lurking just below the surface of my nineteen-year old, almost grown-up façade. Wrestling with many of the social and romantic dilemmas that young people of that era were experiencing, I had my share of inner doubts about where I, or anyone, might stand with confidence and certainty. 

Now, hearing this music some 50 years removed from the cocoon of my cinderblock dorm room with LP spinning turntable and the smokey scent of incense filling my nostrils, I found myself reflecting once again on how I might now speak to Mitchell’s poetic indecisiveness. Where do I stand, and where do any of us stand who have witnessed the changes, discoveries, innovations and social upheavals of the last five decades? While pondering how I might answer this today, another ancient rock anthem began playing on the jukebox of my recollection, this one a Gerry Rafferty top 10 single for Stealers Wheel in 1972.  

Its’ recurring chorus offered a rejoinder to Joni’s soul searching confession, one that seems to speak to audiences today as much as when it was written:

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

Upon first hearing this back in college I dismissed it as just one of a host of party songs without much lyrical depth. But listening to it now, particularly the refrain, I’m not so sure. In a way it has a hint of the prophetic, both for its time and for ours. If that seems a bit of a stretch, consider what it might have conveyed to those reading between its lines, those who who had survived the ‘60s and were staggering into the ‘70s. These baby boomers and their children had all they could do to process the seismic jolts that had rocked their world: an interminable war that sucked the life out of our national spirit; American cities engulfed in rioting, looting and conflagrations; assassinations of beloved leaders, presidents calling it quits and students desacralizing so many long-held social values. If that wasn’t enough, the price of everything was elevating on inflationary wings, airliners were being hijacked with impunity, and diplomats held hostage seemed beyond our power to rescue or bring home. It was all so unbelievable, yet all so real, never to be forgotten by those who weren’t born yesterday. Consider too what this musical verse might now suggest to those trying to make sense of the political dysfunction and cultural ambiguity of the present age. Maybe what goes around does come around.  And perhaps the more things change, the more they really do stay the same.

Having cued up these two old songs, my inclination was to play them, back to back, in a musical call and response sequence.  In doing so, Joni’s standing room inquiry from 1969 may lead us to the same place when we ask it today. For if truth be told, most of us then, as most of us today, stand within that wide swath of American humanity that eschews the ideologies and tactics of those who position themselves on the extreme edges of our political, social, and moral left and right.  Contrary to the graph below, the folks who live out there are neither crazy nor deplorable, even if, like all of us who share 23 pairs of chromosomes, they sometimes say and do things that appear just a bit unhinged.  Yet, as the chart correctly indicates, those who live on the far left and the far right have more in common than either would ever admit, for they share a passionate devotion to their causes and points of view which often gives them a dogmatic disposition that can brook neither concession nor compromise to “their” truth. Speaking with louder and more strident voices than most of us who live between their battle lines, they have succeeded in capturing the lion’s share of today’s media interest and attention. 

Those of us who find ourselves lumped into the middle two-thirds of the population may appear to our detractors as folks who are, indeed, stuck. But if being stuck in the middle provides some sanctuary from the clowns and jokers on both the far left and far right, then it is really not a bad place to be. In fact, being there has no stuck—ness to it at all. For this, to most who stand there, is home, and home is, as the saying goes, where the heart is.  I believe more of us than polls and pundits recognize or choose to acknowledge do, in fact, know where we stand. It is securely and unapologetically within that company of middlers, of moderates, of those who still rely on the sensibilities and values that we once believed were held in common by most Americans.  As the recent mid-term elections seem to have confirmed, a majority of we the people still stand firmly on this middle ground, no matter how much our political parties and congressional representatives reflect a more outwardly-skewed bell curve.

Songs and lyrics have a predictable shelf life, whether on Billboard popularity charts or in the minds of essayists. And I’m glad that is so, for I’m ready to move away from Joni and the Wheels, at least for now. While it remains important that we keep trying to know where we stand with other people, with their ideas, and with those things we most value, it is just as necessary that we remain open to change and to critical thinking, particularly the honest-to-self kind. For to do anything less really is getting stuck—whether on the left, right, or in the middle-—a condition that is never a good place for any of us to stay or stand .