Listen to the Wind
McDonald's Ain't Diplomacy
The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.
Henry David Thoreau
Wind might be the only weather phenomenon that legitimately unsettles me.
I like hearing the wind whistling through trees and branches brushing up against the house or a birdfeeder. High wind is majestic. It announces its arrival with haste, and it is not interested in anything other than causing havoc.
I am sitting at my desk right now, staring out into darkness with little to inform me that it is indeed a three-dimensional moonscape I am seeing. Wind’s presence is the only clue. Garbage tumbles down the street, a branch (at least I hope it was a branch) smacks the window, and rain begins to bounce off the street before pelting against the door arrhythmically, making it increasingly difficult for me to tap my foot in conjunction with Mark Knopfler’s guitar tonight.
There is a lot going on.
And then the lights begin to flicker, and that is when I start to feel slight hints of anxious energy emerge. My eyes dart, my concentration wavers, and I want to make sure my phone and computer are plugged in. I ponder what I am going to write about tonight. I have ideas. Do I have any GOOD ideas? Let’s let it ride and see how it goes…
The lights are still flickering. All is good.
“Hold tight
Wait till the party’s over
Hold tight
We’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house!”
— Talking Heads, “Burning Down the House”
Contrary to popular misconceptions, it does not rain in the Pacific Northwest all the time. It holds off for long periods in the summer and fall. We have the luxury of about three months of warm weather from July through September.
Hurricanes and tornados wreak chaos in other parts of the world. We are spared in the upper left corner of the country from any extreme weather events, and I am grateful for that. Anyone who lives here and is NOT grateful for it needs to move to the Mississippi Delta for a couple of years to regain some respect for Mother Nature.
Wind, though, we never escape wind. It is hard to tell exactly how blustery it is until there are hints of losing power, and you hear the house absorb the blows from branches, pebbles…garbage. I am grateful Friday is garbage pickup day and not tomorrow. Garbage needs to be stationary.
Thoreau’s quote leading off is a benign one. It is something a poet would write, and it captures a very pleasant thought…creation, the springing up of ideas, the wish for someone to hear (or read) what we have to say.
It is a cliché to talk about “winds of change” regarding world events. As much as I love Bob Dylan, I am not writing about “Blowin’ in the Wind” tonight. Too obvious.
But it DOES feel like we are in the midst of repeated gusts of wind coming from all directions. No matter what your political leanings, shit is unsettled and shifting. And it steered me toward another song from Talking Heads.
(Sidenote: I am probably on my eighth listen of the final five minutes of “Telegraph Road” as I write this…that guitar solo is transfixing)
Mojique holds a package
In his quivering hands
Mojique sends the package
To the American man
Softly, he glides along the streets and alleys
Up comes, the wind that makes them run for cover
He feels, the time is surely now or never, more
The wind in my heart, the wind in my heart
The dust in my head, the dust in my head
The wind in my heart, the wind in my heart comes to
Drive them away, drive them away
— Talking Heads, “Listening Wind”
David Byrne is not everyone’s cup of tea. For someone who made some of the more entertaining videos of MTV’s golden age, he is pretty dour and serious in his interviews. He also seems a bit…unfocussed and haughty, like he is putting up with the interviewer because he has to give an interview to support his latest project. He just wants to stick to music. Unlike Bono, who never met a microphone he didn’t fall in love with and who gives the best interviews in the history of rock.
This quality of not actually caring too much for how he comes off makes him seem even cooler.
“Listening Wind” was written in 1980…almost FIFTY YEARS AGO…and its genesis – at least according to Byrne – would be apropos today. “Listening Wind” is about Mojique, a foreign terrorist who carries out a bombing of American colonialists.
Sounds a little on the nose, eerily so.
Years later, Byrne said this:
“I don’t know if I could get away with performing that live anymore!… I understand why America is not universally loved. That’s been obvious to me for years and years, but it’s not obvious to a lot of Americans. Their immediate reaction is, ‘They love us, they’re just jealous. They just want McDonald’s.’”
As odorous as our current President is (AND Netanyahu), the ruling clerics in Iran are worse, more evil in every recognizable way. Evil in the most extreme sense. The world would be a better place without them in power. I imagine 90% of Americans – and probably 99% of Americans who were born and live here – have absolutely no idea the hellscape it would be to live under a theocracy 24/7, with a death penalty being a common form of penal justice. Women only began to have the right to an education around the time I was 13 years old. It’s only become a little better since.
It would suck to live in Iran. I understand why people are confused that the U.S.A. and Israel are not being welcomed as liberators. Given a choice, a western-style democracy would seem preferable.
But Byrne is 100% right. America is not loved in Iran. Not close. I read different news reports almost on the daily documenting Iranian citizens who hate the clerics, fear the clerics…and they also fear and hate Americans. Without any stated endgame from Israel and America – at least made available to our Persian brothers and sisters – I would feel scared, desperate and probably very alone right now if I lived in Iran. Are Iranians better off now than three weeks ago? Will they be better off three weeks from tonight?
I am not qualified to proffer up any kind of solution. This current state of affairs, though, does not seem like a lasting one.
All that makes it a bit easier to understand why there is a fear and hatred being directed at all sides by the only people who really matter in this conflict…those who actually live in Iran.
Heartfelt and honest writing…as always. Thank you 🙏💛
That Thoreau line feels especially right here. The wind as creation, yes, but also as warning, disturbance, the sound of systems shifting whether we’re ready or not. Your essay sits right in that uneasy space between listening and bracing.
And the turn to “Listening Wind” is brilliant. Byrne’s Mojique isn’t presented as a hero or a monster so much as a symptom of forces larger than himself. The song and your reflection reminds us that history often sounds very different depending on which side of the storm you’re standing in.
What stayed with me most, though, is the compassion at the end. It’s easy to talk about nations, ideologies, “sides.” It’s harder and far more necessary to remember the ordinary people caught beneath those winds.
Sometimes the most honest thing a writer can do is exactly what you’ve done here: not pretend to have the answer, but listen carefully to the turbulence and try to name what it feels like.