MAILING FROM PHILADELPHIA (and Georgia, Arizona and beyond)

Not long after the turn of a century that so often seems to be spinning out of control, one of my favorite musical artists, Mark Knopfler, released his second solo album. It was six weeks before the seminal Bush versus Gore election, a fissure that has been cracking ever wider since.

Sailing to Philadelphia tells the story of English surveyors George Mason and Jeremiah Dixon on their way across the Atlantic for the 1760s mapping project of their lifetimes, and so it still seems, ours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrLdKYRBOEE On its face, the 233-mile Mason Dixon Line running west and south from Philadelphia was the culmination of dispute resolution that would delineate part of the border between Pennsylvania and Delaware to the north and Maryland and what is now West Virginia to the south. It would quickly become so much more than that, a literal divide between slavery and abolition, a symbolic separator of North and South in these United States. Marked stones placed a mile apart on the ground, the Delaware River, maps with legends, tangents and keys, all evolved into a wall seemingly higher and more impenetrable than anything ever fancied for Mexico.

I love the song itself, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon. It is a role play between two genuine rock stars in their prime, James Taylor’s baker turned stargazer Mason and Knopfler’s fun-loving longtime surveyor Dixon, echoed by Knopfler’s beautifully haunting guitar.

Now you're a good surveyor, Dixon, but I swear you'll make me mad
The West will kill us both, you gullible Geordie lad
You talk of liberty, how can America be free
A Geordie and a baker's boy, in the forests of the Iroquois

Now hold your head up, Mason, see America lies there
The morning tide has raised the capes of Delaware
Come up and feel the sun, a new morning has begun
Another day will make it clear, why your stars should guide us here

We are sailing to Philadelphia, a world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia, to draw the line, a Mason Dixon Line

I am listening to those lyrics again, hearing new meaning, with the backdrop of this past week of nail-biting votes tallied in every corner of this country, and most importantly in the City of Brotherly Love (also known for the rest of 2020 by city resolution in honor of the 19th Amendment, and perhaps forever, as the City of Sisterly Love). The irony and the hope seem clearer to me than ever before. A career public servant, a good man risen from Pennsylvania and Delaware, accompanied by a good woman risen from the battles of history, confronted with the challenge of this generation and all that will come after that. Knocking down walls, blurring lines, changing the arc of history for the better. I’m pretty sure George and Jeremiah would approve. Come up and feel the sun, a new morning has begun. Indeed.