Motions of Grace

Song: “Merry Go ‘Round”

Artist: Kacey Musgraves

Album: “Same Trailer, Different Park” (2012)

Genre: Country

Kacey Musgraves’s 2012 portrait of working-class, or maybe lower-middle-class, ennui is poignant almost to the point of painful. Though Musgraves herself is a liberal, her song pairs well with noted libertarian Kevin D. Williamson’s indispensable essay on Appalachia, which he dubs the “Big White Ghetto.”

Unlike the other songs reviewed here so far, Musgrave’s piece lacks an explicit villain (except for maybe “tradition”). Life in flyover country is just monotonous and dissatisfying in her narrative world. You get married from boredom, you have kids (by 21 years old) because that’s what one does, and you raise them in “tiny little boxes in a row” in some small town or suburb. You smoke some marijuana, commit adultery, and/or go to church to try and cope.

Early on in Friday Night Lights (2004), the best sports movie ever made, some players for the Permian High football team are hanging out at a restaurant. A Permian alum walks up to them and exhorts them to “get you one of these,” as he gestures to his own championship ring. Afterwards, he says, “there’s nothing but babies and memories.”

Of course, the reality is more complex than this. Most of my own experience in small towns and rural areas has been positive. I still sometimes miss living in Clinton County, Illinois. On the other hand, “deaths of despair,” i.e., deaths from alcohol, drugs or suicide, are very real, and they tend to affect rural communities disproportionately. Poverty per simpliciter can only be a partial explanation, especially seeing that, like, Mississippi is probably better off than the United Kingdom on a per capita basis. Musgraves, interestingly, doesn’t even mention poverty directly. For her, what’s wrong is something almost spiritual in nature, but it’s not something you can fix by going to church (she suspects that a lot of folks in the pews don’t believe the Nicene Creed in their heart of hearts). Besides, the “tradition” of marriage and family that church enforces stifles any opportunities to escape the Permian Basins of the world, or else the creativity necessary to revitalize them.

In reality, working-class white people increasingly neither get married nor go to church. Bucking “tradition,” however, has not led to a widespread rural renaissance. It’s not entirely clear what would. The recent phenomenon of “reshoring,” i.e., companies bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, might help. What won’t help is the further atomization of American society. Nor will right-wing radicalization, which corresponds with a decline in church attendance.

Church can stifle; it can also provide life-saving community and purpose. Getting rid of it doesn’t make the world less heartless (Marx). In my opinion, the greatest challenge (and opportunity) facing the American church right now is to rearticulate the gospel in a way that begins rural people back into the fold. Radicalized politics and drug usage are just the “same trailer, different park.” What’s needed is some combination of economic opportunity and spiritual renewal.

Song: “I Ain’t Got No Home”

Artist: Woody Guthrie

Album: Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)

Genre: Folk

Featured image is “Dust Bowl, Cimarron County, Oklahoma,” by Arthur Rothstein (April, 1936)

In the 1930’s, a combination of severe drought and bad farming practices led to the “Dust Bowl,” vast dust storms that devastated large swaths of the American Midwest, already reeling from the Great Depression. Among the thousands of “Okies” who traveled west in a desperate search for work was one Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie.

Guthrie, already a talented musician, eventually found a spot in Los Angeles’s music industry. He made a point to visit migrants living in camps (“Hoovervilles”) throughout California. At one such camp, the story goes, he encountered the folk hymn “Can’t Feel at Home,” which had been recorded by the Carter Family in 1931. “Can’t Feel at Home” traverses territory familiar to so much of American folk music: that this transitory life is a sojourning on the way to our true home in heaven. 

But Guthrie wasn’t having it. Using the same folk idiom and the same theme of homelessness, Guthrie nonetheless bypasses the solace of religion in his “I Ain’t Got No Home.” There may or may not be a world “beyond the blue,” as the Carters sang, but we know for sure that there is trouble in this one. In between harmonica riffs — the harmonica is always weirdly cheerful in a melancholic way — Guthrie’s narrator sings of a world of sharecropping, repossessions, privation.  

And this world has its villains. A “rich man,” likely a banker, took the narrator’s house when the latter couldn’t make payments. As he wanders from place to place seeking employment, the local police give him trouble. Guthrie’s narrator is a working man in a society stacked against working men: “The gambling man is rich /  and the working man is poor.” The American Dream, it turns out, is nothing more than a dream. There is no place for him, never mind how hard he tries. 

In recent weeks, some cultural commentators have drawn parallels between Guthrie and Oliver Anthony’s chart-topping “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Like Guthrie, Anthony has lost faith in the idea that working men can get ahead in this country. His titular ‘rich men,’ however, are those of a particular sort: namely, the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., who tax his dollars (which already “ain’t s–t” due to inflation) and distribute them to obese good-for-nothings presumably in exchange for votes. It’s worth noting here that Anthony’s scorn appears to be bipartisan — he has, for instance, expressed disdain for Republican politicians who have sought to co-opt his breakout hit. 

For Guthrie, though, the problem is even more fundamental. It’s a “great and a funny” world, not in any positive sense, that systematically disadvantages working people in a way that no tax reform would fix. In Guthrie’s world, the owners (of mines, land, capital) win, and the rest lose. Between them a great gulf has been fixed, one that cannot be crossed without (at a minimum) strong labor unions. 

As Marx noted, capitalism’s problem is not a lack of productivity. It’s ridiculously productive. It lifted South Korea, for example, from a medieval farming culture into a highly developed economy in six decades. Capitalism’s problem is that it necessarily creates winners and losers. And by no means are the “losers” stupid or lazy people. Ron Swanson’s famous dictum that “capitalism is God’s way of deciding who is smart and who is poor” is funny, but it’s simplistic and dangerous politics when taken literally. The fact is that market liberalization enriches a society as a whole while leaving behind individuals, sometimes in large numbers. 

Conservatives are suspicious of mass overhauls of the American economic system — and rightly so, given that forced redistributions tend to be disastrous. What they must do, however, is imagine what it’s like to be the “losers.” It might not even be that hard to imagine — very little of what I do for a living, for example, could not be automated with currently existing technologies. Artists like Guthrie can help here, telling the story of earnest and hardworking people whose skills and abilities are, for whatever reason, not in sufficient demand. Markets work, but they do not work for all people at all times. That’s just a fact. To be conservative, as Michael Oakeshott pointed out, is not blind devotion to an ideology; it’s trying to hold on to what is good about a society (with a certain degree of awe that it has come to exist at all) while incrementally and carefully improving what is bad.

Song: Whitey on the Moon

Artist: Gil Scott-Heron

Album: Small Talk (1970) 

Genre: Spoken Word 

Content Warning: Profanity. 

It was an inspired if anachronistic move to include a segment from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” in the excellent, if overly melancholic First Man (2018). Scott-Heron was not the only, or even the first, person to criticize the United States’s massive expenditures on the Apollo program in the face of its equally massive social problems [1], but he does so with exceptional verve and style. 

“I can’t pay no doctor bill (but Whitey’s on the moon).” Scott-Heron delivers this line beautifully — it isn’t rage in his voice, nor even exactly righteous indignation. It’s not even the same thing as people getting mad at Jeff Bezos for going to space while his warehouse workers fall asleep on their feet from exhaustion. It’s an ancient exasperation, tinged with a finely-tuned sense of irony, of being asked to celebrate the triumphs of a culture that would not find a place for him, that had, for centuries, made “great leaps” at the expense of his people. 

Now, Apollo was a triumph, a staggering feat of ingenuity and courage. It was, and is, a source of national pride and even identity. To have it written off as rich white people playing games is unpleasant — but it’s a good, Old Testament kind of unpleasantness. The kind that can get a person to sit up and pay attention. The kind that teaches us that national pride does not exclude national repentance, and that national repentance does not obliterate national pride. 

A couple of years ago I took my oldest daughter to a local coffee shop, which had some books for children. I picked one out and started reading it to her. The book was called Ron’s Big Mission, about a nine-year-old Black boy in 1950’s South Carolina who loved to read science books at his local library. He was prohibited from checking these books out — until one day he decided that he would not leave the premises without them. The police (for the love of mercy) were eventually called. Finally, the absurdity of the situation impressed itself on the adults, and Ron finally got his own library card. 

The epilogue stated that Ron was Ronald E. McNair, who earned his PhD in physics and eventually became America’s second Black astronaut. On January 28, 1986, he and six others slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God. At this point I was choking back sobs and my daughter had moved on to Elmo, which was totally fair. 

America, the horror and the glory. 

[1] See also, “Reader’s Digest,” by Larry Norman.