“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance/Everybody thinks it’s true.” – Paul Simon
“You would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses.” – Rep. Mike Pence
Years back, in a magazine interview, the singer-songwriter Paul Simon spoke with particular pride of his song “Train in the Distance,” which bothered me a bit. Simon is a fine singer and brilliant songwriter, but his considering this one of his finer efforts speaks to a real problem in our society and culture.
The song opens with the lyrics, “She was beautiful as Southern skies/ The night he met her/ She was married to someone/ He was doggedly determined that he would get her/ He was old, he was young.”
So the protagonist meets a married woman and is determined to steal her away from her husband, thereby wrecking a marriage. Perhaps that marriage has children, perhaps not. Simon doesn’t say, but the fact that he is “doggedly determined” to have her for his own, despite her already having a husband whom she seems to be happy with — his next line is “From time to time he’d tip his heart/ But each time she withdrew” — is a sad commentary on our deteriorating respect for the institution of marriage.
In the next verse his determination pays off and “Eventually the boy and girl get married/ Sure enough they have a son.” But then, “And though they both were occupied with the child she carried/ Disagreements had begun.”
Followed by “And in a while they fell apart/ It wasn’t hard to do.” Meaning that, if I have my timeline right, in just over a year they got married, she got pregnant, they start to fight and the marriage ends.
Another sad commentary on modern marriage because ending it “wasn’t hard to do,” as opposed to trying to make a marriage work through sacrifice, better communication, acceptance of each other’s imperfections, and staying together “for better or worse” — which definitely is hard to do.
Which is not to say that there is never a good reason for a divorce, and after bitter arguments about alimony and child support — “Disagreements about the meaning off a marriage contract/
Conversations hard and wild” — Simon’s now-divorced couple remain friends.
But it is to say that the institution of marriage and family is the very foundation of a healthy society. And if it continues to weaken — and divorce rates in America today are around 35 – 40 percent, and single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births are skyrocketing — then that “Train in the Distance” you hear will be the sound of a cultural and societal train wreck.
