Connecting the dots

Growing up I was exposed to monthly renditions of Tom Lehrer's  record "That was the Year that Was". Looking back many things are clearer now. For example, I had imagined him somewhere on the East coast, I'm not quite sure why, perhaps because my aunt lived in New York. And when I learned that he was at Harvard when began his singing career, that impression was reinforced. That was until I learned from a colleague that he had moved to Santa Cruz in the 1970s to teach at UC  Santa Cruz. So when he sings "the breakfast garbage you throw into the bay, they drink at lunch in San Jose, which I had in my minds eye imagined was somewhere in Central America and the bay being the Gulf of Mexico, I now realize are actually the town in which I now teach and San Francisco Bay. Even the album title is contextualized as a play on an American NBC satire that was copied from a British show of the same name ("That Was the Week That Was" or TW3).

Noting in the opening song that National Brotherhood Week was "celebrated" with the killing of Malcolm X now makes sense in the context of the civil rights movement which, as an 8 year old growing up in England, I was unaware of.  References to the use of the Marines to stabilize foreign regimes "until somebody we like can be elected" speaks to a US interventionist foreign policy.  George Murphy, a Californian senator who started his career in Hollywood makes sense with some (recently acquired) knowledge of history.  Jimmy Crack Corn is a reference that only a child growing up in America would understand (and still makes little sense to me). What Lehrer thought about Reagan and now Trump we will never know (at least not though his songs). "Watch Brinkely and Huntely" is a reference to two news anchors of the day who hosted the The Huntley–Brinkley Report from 1956 to 1970.

Many of the issues he sang about are still with us; pollution, racism, antisemitism, the threat of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation. Some was topical, such as the a lament for the Vice President who suffered the fate of Veep's in general, or his recounting of the life of Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel who died the year before.  Interestingly, in "Wernher von Braun" he alludes to the rise of China seven years before Nixon's visit and long before it was clear to most commentators that China's fortunes were on the rise.

Would I have enjoyed them more in the 1960s had I known then what I know now? Hard to say, but on the plus side I get to enjoy them with fresh eyes 50 years on.