Americana: Gentle on My Mind

John Hartford was born in New York City. You might be forgiven for thinking otherwise after watching that video. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, though, and says his musical tastes where formed by listening to Earl Scruggs.

Through a series of connections that I won't bother making that brings up the thorny issue of origins. There is a whole lot that might be said but I think the important thing is this: neither Earl Scruggs nor John Hartford were folk musicians although both are folky.

For the record, I think folk is all fakesong. There is no such thing. Fake or not, tough, there are people who think they are folk. Not Hartford; there is something, well, something what? It's not authenticity. Everything about that performance is scripted, including the folksiness. It starts with the dialogue, as if they hadn't decided what song to do next.

Hartford wrote "Gentle on my mind" after seeing Dr. Zhivago. He said it wasn't anything particular about the movie. It just gave him a feeling and he wrote the song. He was asked about the song over and over again for the rest of his life and, God bless him, was always gracious about answering questions he must have heard a hundred times before. In one of those turns he said the movie gave him a "lonesome, traveling feeling".

That was a rather convenient thing for a man about to write a bluegrass song to have for lonesome feelings is something bluegrass is rather good at.

But there is something new too. Something you can hear in these lines,

And it's knowing I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that are dried upon some line

Whoever she  was, she gave him sex without marriage. Not just once but lots of it. But he's long gone now. And no matter how bluegrass "Gentle on my mind" is, Bill Monroe wouldn't have sung that.

The important thing about the song is that it's not a song about the woman. It's a male fantasy. Not a sex fantasy, although there is sex in it. There are a lot of songs like that. The thing that tells you it's fantasy is the line about the sleeping bag stashed behind your couch. What, she doesn't have a bed?



Funny thing about it, and my last thought for today, is that the song works better when women sing it. There is an interesting challenge when a woman sings a song written for a man or vice versa. The challenge is how much do you reverse? Consider these four lines:

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother
'Cause she turned and I was gone

The obvious thing to do is to change the last two lines to,

And some other man is cryin' to his mother
'Cause he turned and I was gone 

Krauss doesn't do that even though she fully assumes the narrator's role in the song. The temptation is to say it's morally more acceptable because it's no longer some guy bragging about all the women he's had along the road but I don't think that works. It's something else. The song is still a male fantasy that Krauss validates by assuring us she remembers us fondly even though ... . The important thing about the song is that it's about an experience, an American experience. And that is where Americana starts.

Americana: Why not Canadiana?

A fairly obvious question, and therefore one I should deal with sooner or later, is why I, a Canadian, am so interested in Americana? Why not Canadiana? There is a such a word, although it doesn't have much "content". The Wikipedia entry on the subject is just a stub.

The short answer is simply that, like most Canadians, I've always found Americana much more interesting.  The longer answer is more complicated.

A good place to start the longer answer is to point at an column by David Solway called "Canada: A Dead Country Walking". It's an incoherent little piece in that it begins by saying that Canada never really has had a core identity and then concludes that bad people are tearing apart that core identity; you know, the one that doesn't actually exist in the first place. And then Solway goes on to laud Pierre Trudeau for having invoked the War Measures Act to crush a terrorist movement in 1970s, lamenting that Pierre's son Justin, "has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble." And that tells you a lot—that Pierre Trudeau gets lauded as a great defender of a national identity that doesn't exist because he used brutal and dictatorial methods to do so. That, my friends, is what insecurity looks like.

Twenty-four years ago, then Premier of Quebec Lucien Bouchard stirred up a hornet's nest in the rest of Canada by saying, “Canada is divisible because Canada is not a real country.” The anger wasn't at the "divisible" part of the claim. Very few Canadians even noted it at the time and even those who remember the incident now tend to misquote Bouchard, thinking that he only said "Canada is not a real country." And it takes very little effort to understand why—and Solway makes the point at some length—Canada is divisible in a way that the USA is not. The point neither he nor anyone else seems to be able to make is why it should not be.

Ultimately, of course, the USA is divisible. Any country can be dismembered and that is probably the inevitable fate of all countries eventually. The problem with Canada is that there is nothing approaching the sort of argument Lincoln made for the union in Canada's case. Lincoln could, and did, argue that breaking up the union would have meant the destruction of a founding idea, conceived in Liberty, that all men are created equal. Canada was created as an exercise of power and, in the end, whether Canada holds together is a simple question of power.

More than that, the USA was created by people who understood that power was a problem. They understood that power dispensed to a bureaucracy to administer a law such as the Stamp Act would create a faction that had an active interest in destroying liberty for that faction's continued existence would defend absolutely not only on its holding onto to that power but on the continual extension of that power. Sir John A. Macdonald, on the other hand, pursued confederation precisely so he could get his hands on that power—the control of patronage appointments. That, and not any identity or any set of beliefs about the dignity of human beings created by God, is the principle upon which Canada is founded. There were people who had different ideas about what Canada might be founded on but it was Macdonald and his lust for power that won out.

As Solway grudgingly notes, there is a Québecois identity. It's an identity whose future is uncertain but it exists and if one wanted to put together a list of "Quebecana" it would be ridiculously easy to do. You could do likewise with Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Alberta albeit in a way that would seem piddle compared to the rich cultural identity of the USA and Quebec. You should be able to do it with Ontario, New Brunswick and British Columbia, although in an even more reduced form, because most residents of those provinces have been taught to hate the their cultural heritage.

And here's the really telling thing: the USA is a much more diverse country, culturally speaking, than Canada is. The claim I'm making here is not that Canada isn't diverse but rather that diversity pales compared to what you see in the USA.

There is a sense in which Bouchard's claim is ludicrous. Of course Canada is a real country. The problem arises when you start to find something real beyond the fact that it's a government that has a country. If you go looking for Canadiana, you'll find some, but it's pretty thin gruel.

Americana: Bernie Sanders

At this point, I don't how the Democratic Party establishment can respond to Bernie without committing suicide. There are one hell of a lot of young idealists lining up for Bernie. I doubt very much that the majority of young people (A term that nowadays means people under 35) have much desire for Bernie. There are a core of young people who deeply believe and a lot more who are swept up in the moment. But, however shallow Bernie's support may be, if he doesn't win it will unleash an astonishing bitterness towards the party.

But let's leave that aside and ask how those of us who aren't in the roughly 25% of the population that forms the core of Democrat support should respond. One possibility that I see a lot on the right is to brand Bernie as a socialist and, therefore, not really American. And I can see why; it seems like a no-brainer. Bernie has declared support for socialism in the past and socialism really is the opposite of what America is about. But I'd like to put another option on the table and that is that Bernie isn't really a socialist. Indeed, most Americans who call themselves "socialist" at one time or another aren't really socialists*.

What Bernie is is where he sits and he sits at the intersection of two deeply embedded American traditions: progressivism and toryism. These are outsider movements, mostly because they have suffered serious defeats in the past. Progressivism's big defeat was the 21st Amendment. Toryism's big defeat was the passage of the Suffolk Resolves. Neither ideology has ever fully recovered from those defeats but neither has gone away either. Combined, they make for a potent mix of moralism and elitist rent-seeking that, left unchecked, will sweep us all into servitude.

Or, to put it another way, he represents something undesirable but not something foreign. The bad things that would come with a Bernie victory are not some funny little foreign dictator we can caricature. No, Bernie represents the sort of injuries we inflict on ourselves.









* Others really are and they are cheerfully willing to exploit useful idiots like Bernie and his supporters but that's another issue.

My Americana

This is the only Lyle Lovett song I listen to much anymore.



That's not particularly notable for anyone but me.

I used to listen to Lyle all the time. In the late 1980s he was my guy. In retrospect, it isn't hard to figure out why.

I grew up in New Brunswick. The local radio station played rock and roll for only two hours a day—between 8 and 10 pm. And that was only six days a week. On Sunday night we got Billy Graham from 8 til 9 and no rock music at all. The rest of the time they played country.

I loved rock and roll at the time. Every Sunday I'd go through the same deception. I'd get into my bedroom and pull out my Holiday 8 Transistor radio and turn it on expecting the music I craved and get Billy Graham instead. Here's the thing, though, I never turned off Billy Graham. And every year I'd watch the Daytona 500. I was a hard core Richard Petty fan. And I listened to the country music that played all the time. I loved Buck Owens.

I had good instincts as a kid. Later, when I was in Ottawa to go to university, I listened to the music all my friends professed to like—mostly David Bowie, Roxy Music, Talking Heads, B52s and The Clash—but I also loved the music I grew up on. There was rock music that was partly or largely disguised country music such as the Rolling Stones, The Band and John Mellencamp. There was also country music it was respectable to like: I had a copy of Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music which all my friends at least tolerated; to do otherwise would have been "raaaacist". The same album by a white artist they would have despised.

And then came Lyle. The great thing about Lyle was the irony. It was country but it really wasn't. His tongue was always in his cheek. And I loved that.

Only I can't listen to it much anymore. The song above is an exception. There is no irony in it. It tells a story that a lot of men (and not a few women) can identify with. What it feels like when the woman you love and who still loves you wants out and nothing is going to change her mind. It's a straightforward story this song tells. It's not simple—a lot of artistry went into this song. But a lot of artistry went into almost everything Lyle did. For me, in any case, most of what he did hasn't aged well.

Joshua Judges Ruth, the album this song came from was the last Lyle Lovett album I ever bought. I didn't consciously reject him. He just no longer captured my imagination after that. It was just time to move on.

I said at the top that it isn't hard to figure out why Lyle was my guy. The reason is that he gave me an excuse to love the music I had always loved but was ashamed to admit in front of the cool kids. Lyle was not-really-but-kinda-sorta country. Over time, it was precisely that irony that became troublesome. Looking back, it's interesting (for me) to notice that I started to get tired of the irony in the early 1990s—that is to say years before 9/11.

And I can understand why that happened. I had just gotten out of a relationship that had been about fun but, as so often happens, had come to be love. And there are few things more damaging to the soul than to fall deeply in love with the wrong woman. I got out of that and into a relationship with a woman who valued the same things I did. One of the ironies (in the historical sense of the word this time) was that the friend who invited me to the occasion where I met Amy had done so with some trepidation because she worried that Amy and I would hate one another. Nora figured that I'd fit in with everyone else who'd be present but was worried that Amy and I would immediately clash and ruin everything for everyone. It didn't happen.

It was my fault that Nora thought that. I'd been lying about myself for years. Not surprisingly, my friends had started to believe my lies because, no matter how odious the source for this maxim, it is true that a lie constantly repeated tends to get accepted. Even by me. After 12 years of lying to myself and everyone else about who I was, I was finally ready to be honest.

Anyway, enough rambling. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts about Americana because Americana played a huge role in defining me. That's a troublesome statement because neither term—both "Americana" and "me"—is terribly well defined. I don't expect anyone else to care about me but others might be interested in the Americana issue.

No thank you

Tyler Cowen describes this paragraph as "Very good sentences"

Nearly all of the biggest challenges in America are, at some level, a housing problem. Rising home costs are a major driver of segregation, inequality, and racial and generational wealth gaps. You can’t talk about education or the shrinking middle class without talking about how much it costs to live near good schools and high-paying jobs. Transportation accounts for about a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, so there’s no serious plan for climate change that doesn’t begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work.

I immediately thought  of two possible meanings for "sentence":

1. A grammatical unit that is syntactically independent and has a subject that is expressed or, as in imperative sentences, understood and a predicate that contains at least one finite verb.
2. The penalty imposed by a law court or other authority upon someone found guilty of a crime or other offense.

And then I thought, No! Just no! You can't impose your idea of the good life on us. And no matter how well-meaning Cowen thinks he is, that is what this is about. Just leave us alone and stop meddling. The above looks more like the second meaning of "sentence" to me.

More on current Toryism

I have a week of semi-relaxation—nothing to do but catch up on all the things I'm behind on—and it got me thinking of the last post on toryism.

One thing that has always struck me is the similarity of the division between tories and the revolution in ten American colonies in the late 18th century and the current split between blue and red America. 

Here's a quote from a well-known and respected source:

The American writers were profoundly reasonable people. Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear. They sought to convince their opponents, not, like the English pamphleteers of the eighteenth century to annihilate them.

The source is Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. It comes after a fairly longish discussion of the poor literary quality of the pamphlets.

The obvious comparison here—so obvious that many people have already made it—is to compare the advent of the Internet, blogs and social media, to the pamphlet writing that preceded the revolution. A revolution that was sometimes characterized as a civil war at the time.

And now we go to a really famous quote (and one Bailyn uses as an epigraph for his opening chapter):

What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of thirteen legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers in all the colonies, ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning  the authority of Parliament over the colonies.

That, of course, is John Adams writing to Jefferson. There is a lot there that we might miss for the material is too familiar. Notice, for example, that for Adams the problem was not the British Crown but the British Parliament. No tory, Adams doesn't trust institutions, not even Parliament. Adams is also certain, a little more certain than was warranted, that it was simply a matter of enlightening and informing the people.

Not only at the start, but well through the war itself, the people need to be convinced. There must have lots of people who clung to the tory position or sat on the fence because they thought it would prevail and not because they wanted it to win. They wouldn't necessarily have supported the other side either. Thy had lives to live and they wanted their government to be stable.

But Adams is right  on the fundamental point: the Revolution was not the war.

If you're fan of the notion that the Revolution is an ongoing thing, we might also argue that the war was not necessary. Or rather, that Parliament made it necessary. The same might be said of the current struggle. There need not be a civil war. Whether there is is up to Tory elite. They don't have to conceded defeat, all they have to do is stop trying to annihilate their opponents.

Toryism

A few years ago, before Donald Trump came along and drove David Frum (and establishment conservatives generally) crazy, he made a sound distinction between conservatism and toryism.

Tories can look a lot like conservatives, and often work in alliance with them, but they differ in that they are cynical about human beings whereas conservatives are cynical about reformers and their projects to make life better for everyone. Tories tend to put great faith in institutions because they think these will keep the people in bounds.

A case in point would be Kevin Williamson.

Populists and pseudo-populists Left and Right sniff at the idea of political parties, at the idea that there should be some mediating layer — they call it “the Establishment” — standing between the People and power. From time to time, there are calls to abolish the parties or to supplant them with “nonpartisan” procedures, for example the “nonpartisan” primary rules in California that help to ensure no Republican ever wins an election west of Barstow.

There is a legitimate point here. The United States is not a democracy and that is a good thing. It is a republic. Canada is a constitutional monarchy that works an awful lot like a republic.

Williamson goes on to make the point that the US needs functioning political parties. That's true enough but notice why this is important to him: 'bitch all you like about “the Establishment,” a Democratic party with a functioning leadership would not let Bernie Sanders get within smelling distance of the presidential nomination, not least because he is not a member of the Democratic Party'. Notice the 'not least'. For Bernie could easily join the party. Williamson would want the party to stop him even if he were a member.

And he wanted the same as regards Trump.

Here is Frum back in more sensible days on the subject of Daniel Moniyhan:

At its best, Toryism teaches us the limits of public policy — and that’s the Toryism of Moynihan the thinker. At its worst, Toryism sinks into a cynical defense of political evils, because (it believes) the alternative can only be worse. That, sad to say, is often the Toryism of Moynihan the politician.

 And that is where Never Trumpers now reside. For some, I'm thinking of Ramesh Ponnuru here, were already there long before Trump arrived on the scene.

Yes, we need functioning political parties but the responsibility for making them such lies with the parties themselves. If they fail, then they deserve to die. There is no guarantee they will be replaced by anything better. Everything could fall apart—the natural state of the world is chaos, not order, and it is only constant effort that keeps a civilization from crumbling to dust. The people have the right to tear down the parties they don't like. It is up to aspiring leaders to build something that works; it is not up to the people to support a corrupt establishment just because the alternative might be worse.