Musitorial – Whose Rules?

musitorial n a mashup of music, musings and editorials, music and song that evokes thought and commentary. 

Gosh it sometimes seems like I do a lot of reminiscing. A word or a phrase or a song will come to mind out of nowhere but prompted by a current event or conversation which triggers the memory. Sometimes the rememberings are comical, sometimes tragic, but always worth remembering, if only for a moment (short-term memory being what it is). Now, where was I?

Oh yes, remembering. Readers will know that many of these musitorials recall events, current and past, and sets them to music. Or, it must be said, a piece of music will mysteriously align itself with a memory or an opinion.

What seems like many years ago, my late friend John Eyking (19321-2021), an immigrant Dotch farmer in Cape Breton, made a “toast to the ladies” at the annual ladies night dinner of the Rotary Club of North Sydney. In those days Rotary clubs were exclusively male (for no other reason than female partners and female professionals were afterthoughts. It was just “the way of the world,” in those days, to quote Max Q <see links below>.

Anyway, John’s words drew from a 1988 poem by William Ross Wallace: “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand That Rules the World” <enjoy the information linked below>. John’s point was the idiom (and it is by now an idiom) cannot be true, for if it was, this would be a much kinder, gentler world. After a few more gentlemanly words about the nurturing of family, the innate sensibilities of “the fairer sex,” etc., Rotarians drank a toast to their ladies.

My point (and pun) in just a moment, but my choice of recording of a song by the same name is by Glenn Campbell (1936-2017), a crossover crooner popular in the 1970s-to 1980s especially <YouTube posted recording linked below).

It’s quite a leap, but as I reflected on that adage (the hand that rocks, etc.) I couldn’t help but allow moral politics to disrupt my thoughts, and to reframe it as: “the hand that ROBS the cradle rules the world.” How sad. I leave readers to make a connection with current events.

=30=

Link to Wikipedia article on the poem, “The Hand, etc.”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_That_Rocks_the_Cradle_(poem)

Link to a recording of “The Way of the World” by Max Q on Genius: https://genius.com/Max-q-way-of-the-world-lyrics

Link to Wikipedia article on poet William Wallace and his “The Hand, etc.”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ross_Wallace

Link to YouTube recording of Glen Campbell’s song “The Hand, etc.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2DtEHMJRP8

Link to article on John Eyking (19321-2021): https://www.dal.ca/diff/aahf/inductees/john-eyking-.html