I'm slowly replacing my more favorite cassette tapes with CD's (just in time for some new format to replace them both, I'm sure). Yesterday I got Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles," his first solo album as I recall. I listened to it on the way in to work this morning, and I was struck by how much things have changed since he recorded that album.
Back in 1984 the Cold War was still in full swing. Sting's song "Russians" was a plea for sanity ("What will save us, me and you, is if the Russians love their children too"). Twenty years later we have an entire generation who have no idea what the song is talking about. The Russians, oddly enough, are now better allies in many ways than the French or Germans.
Funny how a song can go from a political statement to a historical footnote so gradually that you almost don't notice. But ultimately he was right. The Russians love their children too, and it turned out no one was crazy enough to kick off "The Big One." I wonder if we'll look back on Arab-Western relations in twenty years and marvel at how things used to be.
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