Rock-tober 29, 2018

 

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise;

This fortress built by Nature for herself,

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

This is an excerpt from Shakespeare's Richard II, Act 2, and my classmates and I had to memorize it for Senior English with Mr. Ladner back at Long Beach High School. I've never read the full play, but I was always moved by this particular passage. Surprisingly, I was still able to recall a bulk of it from memory, considering I sometimes forget to put on a belt before leaving the house.

I've always been an Anglophile. As stodgy as it may seem, some evenings Andrea and I will sit and listen to The British History Podcast while we're having dinner. I'm fascinated by the sweeping breadth of English history which spans over a millennium from the time of Alfred the Great. By comparison, US history barely exceeds a mere two centuries.

Apart from a few dust-ups in the 1770's and again in the 1810's, England remains one of our staunchest allies. Ironically, England is the last and only country to successfully invade and occupy territory on the US mainland.

Another British invasion came over a century later in the form of guitars and drumsticks rather than rifles and bayonets. Starting in the 1960's, an influx of musical acts from across the pond began to rocket up American charts. Groups such as The Animals, The Troggs, and The Hullaballoos formed the vanguard for many others to follow. Numbered among the successive waves is one of my favorites, Dire Straits.

Brothers in Arms was released in 1985 and became the band's magnum opus. It went on to win two Grammy awards and was certified platinum nine times over in the US. The title track is set during the Falkland Islands War and narrates the story of a dying soldier surrounded by his brothers in arms in his final moments.

Now the sun's gone to hell and

The moon's riding high

Let me bid you farewell

Every man has to die

But it's written in the starlight

And every line in your palm

We are fools to make war

On our brothers in arms.

Mark Knopfler may not be Shakespeare, but he still managed to pen some profound and weighty lyrics.