Today wasn’t a very cold day in Braidwood, but the blustery wind made it feel much colder. It was the kind of weather that deceives you into going outside without adequate clothing, only to find every blast of wind penetrating to the skin.
After an active weekend involving more electrical installation (lighting this time), we had numerous boxes and miscellaneous packaging materials to dispose of. It’s disappointing just how much crap goes into packaging, even in this era of recycling and sustainability: plastic bags, polystyrene foam, zip ties, odd-shaped pieces of cardboard, plastic widgets and doohickeys.
It fell to me to prepare a large number of boxes and associated packaging for the tip. After three house-moves in just over six months, the properties of the humble cardboard box are no challenge and it was easy to produce a pile of flat sheets using only a Stanley knife. They did display a displeasing wish to become airborne at the slightest gust, but this was easily cured with a few strategically-placed bricks.
The polystyrene pieces were a different story: light but odd-shaped, they also harboured flyaway tendencies if not fiercely disciplined. They rapidly fill up the available bin space, but if you snap them in half, they release a small blizzard of tiny white particles. It’s not work for the impatient or easily frustrated – so things got profane fast.
But you know how it goes – repetitious, mentally undemanding work leads to flights of the imagination, and it wasn’t too long before the wind had me thinking about a podcast that popped up the other day which has proven to be utterly fascinating. It’s called Wind of Change and explores in great depth the idea that the late-80s song of the same name by West German band The Scorpions was funded – perhaps even written – by the CIA.
The timing is right – the record came out a few months before the fall of the Berlin wall, and it was a massive hit in Europe. The podcast recounts how kids in the USSR busily copied illicit cassettes (remember them?) of the song, so that when the band performed in Russia later, everyone in the audience knew the words.
But not only are the vast majority of conspiracy theories more ludicrous than Trump’s coiffure, this kind of soft-rock stadium ballad isn’t really my cup of tea – it’s too much posture, too much cliché, and no matter how faithfully European bands try, they just don’t seem able to mimic the edginess and grit of UK and US counterparts. (Although the Scorpions did peak around the time of a very regrettable late-80s trend for poodle-haired faux-metal guitar bands with regrettable spandex and too many studs, so let’s not be too hard on them.)
It’s a rather comical idea that the Evil Empire of the USSR could have been tipped over the edge by German rockers warbling an AOR hit penned by a bunch of spooks in Langley, Virginia. Where would you find such spies anyway — and do they have a licence to shred?
The burning question is, does this version of history give enough credit to David Hasselhoff’s rendition of Auf der Straße nach Süden (On the road to the South), which he delivered from a cherry-picker on New Year’s Eve 1989 to the protesters assembled at the Wall – which had actually started coming down on 9 November.
Still, whether the CIA had a hand in the Scorpions’ potentially history-changing song or not, whoever penned it nicked the title and concept from an earlier era-defining speech given by a British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, in 1960. In a speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town, he said, “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact,” referring to the growth of African nationalism in Britain’s former colonies and signalling that the UK would not oppose it.
I’ve become persuaded that the die was cast by then, and all the violence, death and heartbreak that followed over the next few decades was impossible to avoid — which is all the more tragic. In effect, Britain, having spent a few centuries colonising and robbing large tracts of the globe, suddenly grew a conscience when things started to look a little iffy and tiptoed away from an intractable situation. Plus la change, I believe the French would say.
What’s this got to do with late-80s soft-rock anthems? Just that I suppose when a lot of people want something to happen, the walls and policies and institutions assembled by politicians can’t stand in their way. And what’s this got to do with Braidwood? Nothing at all, I’m afraid, other than this train of thought left the station here.
Having reached this point, the polystyrene packaging had been corralled into a couple of stout black bin-bags and I was ready for a strong cup of tea in the warm with a couple of Daniela’s restorative choc-chip biccies. Who knows – if the Scorpions could topple the Evil Empire with a lighter-waving anthem, why can’t a blog be the foundation of a glittering literary career?
According to that podcast, much stranger things may or may not have happened.