While out in California, I picked up a U.K. picture disk of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s nuanced treatise on global nuclear armament policy, “Two Tribes.” Records like this were a whole sub-genre in the eighties, and this one in particular was a massive hit; I guess we liked dancing to Armageddon. The picture, which depicts Ronald Reagan getting a wedgie from Mikhail Gorbachev, came from the accompanying music video which was an oh-so-subtly metaphoric wrestling match between the two world leaders. I was never a fan of Reagan’s politics, but one has to wonder what he’d think of today’s state of affairs between our governments, with our leaders appearing to be so buddy-buddy. If nothing else, Putin has disproven the chorus to “Two Tribes”—“When two tribes go to war/One is all that you can control.”
