A protest song for our times: “Rich Men North of Richmond”
I put Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond” in Thursday’s “Roundup” post, but I have a lot more to say about it. First, in case you missed it, here’s the song:
I also noticed that commenter “huxley” wrote about the many reaction videos to the song. So I decided to watch a few and they were fascinating. So many people seem extremely moved by the song – almost stunned at first – and often say the same things about it with similar expressions on their faces. Just a few lines into it, their eyes widen with surprise. Then they get very solemn and start nodding. Sometimes they cry. Often they say that the singer is telling the truth and that you know from his voice and his face that he really means it.
Oliver Anthony’s sincerity come across almost the moment he opens his mouth. He’s got that authentic country twang and his voice has a sob in it – not a weak sob, but a powerful one that speaks of years of anguish combined with strength. People get it – people of all kinds. And not just in this country, either; the reactors are international.
The tune is pretty good and his voice is even better, but best of all are the lyrics. He starts the song at full throttle and jumps right in and hits hard. The words have a relentless, driving quality that just keeps on coming and coming. The listener no sooner hears one heartfelt and well-expressed thought when it’s followed by another, and then another. There are no wasted lyrics at all – no throwaway filler rhymes.
Anthony starts with four lines of complaint about hard work for little money, and then segues into an observation on “what the world’s come to / for people like me / and people like you,” drawing the listener in. The message is we’re in this thing together, and that message is immediately received by all the reactors I watched. There’s little doubt that this sense of shared emotions accounts for some of the viral spread of the song, as do the lines “Livin’ in the new world / With an old soul.” I’m not sure whether the reference was intentional, but to me that part conjures up Brave New World, where the inhabitants are subject to nearly complete social control by manipulative elites – and sure enough, Anthony follows it up by a reference to our own rich elites (north of Richmond) who want “total control.” That’s another line that usually gets a knowing nod from all the reactors.
Most of the listeners seem to understand what Anthony means by “Rich Men North of Richmond,” too. It’s even easier to see what he means when you look at a map: Washington DC is located right smack north of Richmond, Virginia.
Then there are lines about fat people eating sweets purchased with welfare checks supported by other people’s taxes – sure to rile a lot of people on the left, but all the reactors didn’t seem the least bit upset by it. There are references to Epstein’s island, without naming his name, and couched in a pun about “miners” and “minors.” Anthony doesn’t leave out the fact that young men are dying prematurely – or, as he puts it, “puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground.” Is that from suicide, drugs, drinking, accidents, or homicide? It’s a brilliant way to refer to self-destructive behavior, and he links it to despair “Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”
I’ve often thought that, as rhymed poetry has faded and is so rarely written anymore, song lyrics – and in particular the lyrics of country music – have taken over. There’s tremendous power in a music lyric because the words-and-music combination can touch the heart and the brain in a different way than prose or even spoken poetry. Songs cut through right to the core.
When I was a teenager, protest songs were all the rage. But they were almost uniformly from the left. Oliver Anthony’s song is a type of protest song, too, but it transcends politics and is almost purely populist. These days, populism is more on the right (and embodied by candidate Trump), but it is hardly limited to the right. “Power to the people!” was one of the cries of the leftist radicals of my youth, and leftists were once the champions of the working class. No more.
Anthony’s song has gone viral very quickly, and I don’t doubt it repels most of those “rich men north of Richmond” and everyone who thinks they should have “total control” of the rest. But for the most part, people don’t want to be controlled. And they see that today’s elites don’t seem to care about them and aren’t even very good at pretending anymore.
Here’s just a moment at the start of one of these reaction videos:
And here are just three out of so many comments I’ve seen at YouTube:
It’s profoundly moving to observe the moment of realization on people’s faces, when what they’ve always known deep within them rises to the surface. The voice of the silent majority, echoing from the heart of the Appalachian mountains, has a resonance that’s incredibly touching people all over the world.
Whatever the lyrics, whatever side you lean, when a song speaks to EVERY single one of us, it’s powerful & beautiful. We need more artists that make music that brings us all together as we should be. Loved that you were real & honest with your emotions. We ALL have to stick together.
His voice emits the anguish we are all feeling.
Maybe we really are “all” feeling it.
NOTE: The song also made me think of this scene from Network, which came out in November of 1976, shortly after the election of Jimmy Carter:
The beginning of Anthony’s song – “I’ve been selling my soul” – also conjured up the lyrics of another working man’s complaint song, “Sixteen Tons.” I know a lot of different versions, but this happens to be my favorite:
Here’s another reaction video; there are so many more:
It’s a shame that shame has gotten such a bad name
Last night I was thinking about shame.
When I was growing up, shame was a much-used parental and pedagogic device. Parents commonly called their children “bad,” for example. Teachers purposely made us feel ashamed – not necessarily with the old-fashioned dunce cap, but with ploys such as the favorite ones of a particularly nasty teacher of mine who thought nothing of cruel name-calling, and who would hand out our tests after she’d marked them and then call our names from the roll book as we were told to shout out what marks we had gotten and she would write them down. This public self-disclosure punished both those who had done well and those who had done poorly. The latter felt shame for their poor performance, and the former were then subject to the wrath of the latter and felt ostracized for their good performance.
No, it wasn’t a very good system. It had its pluses, but it also caused a lot of people to feel that their every move was wrong and that there was no redemption possible for them. A few years later, the idea emerged that it was better for parents and teachers to tell a misbehaving child that the child had done something bad, and could and should do better, rather than that there was something intrinsically bad about the child’s essence. That still seems to me to be the best middle ground of child-rearing.
Unfortunately, the pendulum then swung too far, into the self-esteem movement. Children were told they were great no matter what, and various excuses were made for bad behavior. Was that behavior even called “bad” anymore? I suppose it depended on what identity group a child belonged to, or whether the school was in a red or blue area. And now, children are even made to feel bad for their race once again, only now the races are reversed and it’s the white kids who are supposed to think they bear some sort of mark of Cain.
At any rate, the context in which the word “shame” occurred to me last night was somewhat akin to Robert Welch’s question during the McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency?” This time, I was thinking about people such as Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith and Fani Willis, who are perfectly fine with stretching the law till it’s unrecognizable in order to charge a political enemy in a transparently partisan move. They don’t care. They probably feel pride. I don’t know much about their backgrounds, but I do know that they are all about the same age: Bragg is 49, Smith is 52, and Willis is 54.
That’s not so very young, but it’s certainly a different generation than mine. My parents were born in the early years of the 20th century, and many of my grade school teachers were born in the late 1800s. Just writing that makes me feel like some sort of dinosaur. It wasn’t the Jurassic, but it was indeed a different world than the one we now inhabit.
Time to revisit this post about the effects of WWI
I noticed in some recent comments that a lot of people believe that World War I was a turning point in the changes we’ve seen in attitudes towards the foundations of Western Civilization. That reminded me of the following post of mine, which first appeared here in December of 2012. The title was “We have never recovered from World War I,” and the first sentence was, “And I fear we never shall.”
What follows here is the rest of the post.
When I was in school, World War I was hardly touched on in my history classes, so eager were the teachers to get to World War II before the year was over. It was only though reading a review of the Paul Fussell book The Great War and Modern Memory when it first came out in 1975, and then being intrigued enough to read the book itself, that I first learned what a cataclysmic event the First World War was, both in terms of death rates and in its psychological and even spiritual, as well as cultural, effects.
The first hint was this quote by Henry James, from a letter he wrote to a friend the day after Britain entered the war:
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.
If you hack through James’ typically complex syntax, you’ll see a perfect encapsulation of the effect of the war: blood and darkness, giving the lie to what people of that age thought “civilization” had meant. The war caused people to look back at all the years of seeming progress and regard them as a cruel, tantalizing, misleading illusion, a sort of trick played on naive people who now looked back at the history they themselves had lived through, tearing off their previous rose-colored glasses and now seeing a stark and terrible vision.
We have been stuck with that vision ever since. Whether people are aware of the details of the events of WWI or not, they are part of a culture of profound cynicism that took hold of the Western world afterward and has been part of the reason for its decline. Simply put, the West lost a great deal of its boundless confidence in itself.
This article that appeared in American Heritage goes over much the same territory:
This almost unimaginable destruction of human life, to no purpose whatsoever, struck at the very vitals of Western society. For this reason alone, among the casualties of the First World War were not only the millions of soldiers who had died for nothing, most of the royalty of Europe, and treasure beyond reckoning but nearly all the fundamental philosophical and cultural assumptions of the civilization that had suffered this self-induced catastrophe.
For there was one thing that was immediately clear to all about the Great War – as the generation who fought it called it – and that was that this awful tragedy was a human and wholly local phenomenon. There was no volcano, no wrathful God, no horde of barbarians out of the East. Western culture had done this to itself. Because of the war, it seemed to many a matter of inescapable logic that Western culture must be deeply, inherently flawed.
The pre-WWI ethos was quite different. The American Heritage article uses author Edith Wharton’s world as an example, but Henry James would have done just as nicely:
Because of this fantastic record of progress, the people of Edith Wharton’s world believed in the inevitability of further progress and the certainty that science would triumph. They believed in the ever-widening spread of democracy and the rule of law. They believed in the adequacy of the present and the bright promise of the future. To be sure, they fought ferociously over the details of how to proceed, but they had no doubt whatever that the basic principles that guided their society were correct.
Then, all at once, the shots rang out in Sarajevo, the politicians bungled, the armies marched, the poppies began to blow between the crosses row on row. The faith of the Western world in the soundness of its civilization died in the trenches of the western front.
Seventy-five years later, richer, more powerful, more learned than ever, the West still struggles to pick up the psychological pieces, to regain its poise, to find again the self-confidence that in the nineteenth century it took entirely for granted.
Subsequent events played a part, as well. World War II was a very different war fought for very different reasons; unlike its predecessor, the lines of good vs. evil were crystal clear. But that didn’t make the carnage and the profoundly wearying nature of the war any less disillusioning, it’s just that it was disillusioning in a different way, this time about the human race’s propensity for cruelty and hatred and violence. And of course there’s been the long Gramscian march of the left through the West’s basic institutions such as the church, education, and the media, working constantly to undermine the West from the inside. What we see now are the results of all of this. It’s a miracle there’s any vigor left at all.
Open thread 8/19/23
A book on the six-decades long Gramscian march
Christopher Rufo’s new book sounds interesting, and even important. It’s called America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Here’s a review:
The most extreme anti-American rhetoric from the 1960s is now the norm among progressives and the institutions they control, from schools and colleges to prominent newspapers and television networks. The terrorists of the 1960s, decades in hibernation, have awakened to take control of America. …
Several writers, including Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, and (currently) Christopher Rufo, have tried to explain how this happened. Rufo’s excellent new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, gives an account of the New Left’s “long march through the institutions” over the decades and shows how the radicals adopted that strategy in the 1970s when their efforts to bring off a violent revolution collapsed around them.
I haven’t read Rufo’s book, but I think it’s obviously the case that the 60s radicals began by getting their noses into the tent of education at the end of that era (I’m talking about you, Bill Ayers) and they never looked back. They are patient people, as are their successors. In the 1990s the group began to reach critical mass in education – and the rest, as they say, is history. I see education as the key to the entire process, because it influences each young generation which then fans out into the world, ultimately taking its place at the helm of various institutions in many fields.
Watergate also spawned a movement of journalists – not “reporters” – who considered leftist activism their mission. They have amply fulfilled it.
NOTE: You might want to take a look at this older post of mine about the end of the Constitution and the patience of the left, and how long they’ve been planning and coordinating a takedown of that document.
Vivek and Tucker
I haven’t written much about Vivek Ramaswamy yet, but I’ve paid some attention to him and watched short clips of things he’s said. For the most part, I’ve thought he seems pretty smart and – as a political outsider – somewhat different than the rest.
Last night I decided to watch a long video interview of him with Tucker Carlson. Here it is:
I find myself lukewarm about him. I wasn’t as impressed by him as I expected to be. It may have been partly because Tucker Carlson was interviewing him. I have mixed feelings about Carlson, too (I’ve written about that before, for example in this post), mostly disagreeing with him on foreign policy and agreeing with him on many other issues of the domestic variety.
But this post isn’t about Carlson; it’s about Ramaswamy. What was my problem with him? He seemed to – as Carlson often does – oversimplify the problems, especially on foreign policy. My impression is that he sees no reason whatsoever to intervene in a place such a Ukraine, even by arming them, and is perfectly fine with abandoning them to Russia’s tender mercies. Same for Taiwan, once we manage to get our dependence on Taiwan for semiconducters remedied – then it’s bye-bye Taiwan. At least, that’s my impression of his position.
It’s not that those positions are crazy. It’s that they are clean and simple, and don’t take into consideration the possible effects of what would be perceived as weakness and American withdrawal from the international field. Ramaswamy is all for strengthening our nuclear defenses, and I’m in agreement with that.
Tucker and Vivek (especially Carlson) spend some time from minutes 32:47 to 33:30 in snarky laughter at neocons, of whom they use Bill Kristol as an example. Kristol was never a neocon in the classic sense of changing from left to right, although he certainly did (and still does) support armed intervention in various foreign conflicts. But since 2016, Kristol has been no sort of “con” – no sort of conservative, that is – at all. If anything, he’s been a neo-leftist for the past seven years, a changer from right to left. I don’t think he’s an example of much of anything except the mind of Bill Kristol.
The video reminded me that Vivek Ramaswamy is only 38 years old. He’s a man of very high achievement, but that can give a person the idea that he can fix anything and that the solutions are rather simple. That’s the impression I got, anyway – of a certain low-key arrogance. None of this means I wouldn’t vote for Ramaswamy if he was the Republican nominee. I definitely would. But it means I was somewhat disappointed when I got a large dose of him. Your mileage may differ.
On laughter
Ammo Grrrll is sensitive to noise, and she tells you all about it in a very funny piece at Powerline. If you need some laughter as relief from all the angst, I suggest taking a look.
It got me thinking, too. Ammo Grrrll writes:
I have no idea why – perhaps because I was evicted untimely from the womb after barely six months to relax — but I was born with a low tolerance for noise and an inordinate capacity for hysterics. Luckily, the hysterics include both the laughing kind and also the less popular shrieking kind.
Lord knows, I have tried to work on it over the years and sometimes it almost seems to have succeeded. And then, like many addicts, criminals, and other unfortunates in the grip of something beyond their control, I will relapse. No One Year Lunacy Sobriety Pin for me!
I don’t have a low tolerance for noise, except at highly-amplified concerts. But hysterics? Yes, especially the laughing kind; the shrieking kind only when sorely pressed and extremely necessary.
I’ve been in churches and synagogues and theaters of all kinds when something has pressed my laughter-hysterics button, and I’ve had excruciating difficulty trying to stop. But stop I must, or leave the venue – which can be very challenging in theater or pew when there are people in the way. Of course, by that time they’re probably happy to see me go.
What’s so funny, you might ask? It can be something quite minor, especially when I was pregnant. When pregnant, I even had trouble going to the movies because I would end up making so much noise laughing that I’d end up having a fake coughing fit to try to cover it up.
Sometimes my laughter would set off my husband’s laughter, which made it even worse because we’d lob it back and forth as in a tennis match. Whenever I thought I was getting my hysteria under control, if he started laughing again it would set me off once more. It was especially bad in pews, which – you may not realize this if you haven’t laughed in a house of worship – shake when someone laughs, and that can of course spark even more laughter.
Long long ago in Boston, my husband (then my boyfriend) and I were at the Boston Ballet. One of the pieces on the program was Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony, which isn’t one of my favorites. Here’s a very short clip of the San Francisco Ballet performing it:
In that long-ago Boston Ballet version I saw, the male lead had on a hat like the one in the video, only with a single longish feather as decoration. He was a tall man; and something about his hat, the way he held his head, and his profile caused my husband to lean over and whisper in my ear: “Danny Kaye.”
It was one of those phenomena that once seen cannot be unseen. The man – I’m purposely not naming him, but I remember his name very well – was instantaneously transmogrified into Danny Kaye, and his every move thereafter became screamingly funny. Which meant that I laughed so hard I cried with the effort of trying to stop, choking and sputtering and making a such a tremendous racket that I had to leave the theater and wait in the lobby for the duration of the ballet.
Not only that, but for many years thereafter, until that particular dancer retired, I had to check the casting of the company’s ballets before I bought tickets, because I found that the problem had generalized so much that any time I saw him step on a stage it would start my near-hysterics.
And I wasn’t even pregnant at the time.
What’s more, at least five or six times in my life I have experienced the phenomenon of laughing so hard in my sleep that it wakes me up. It hasn’t happened in a while, but it certainly has happened. The sad thing is that, when I would wake up, if I could remember the thing that was so hysterically funny in my dream it really wasn’t so very funny at all when I was in my conscious state.
As for the men in my life, they have mostly delighted in making me laugh, and those I’ve loved the most have been very very funny. This was very much true of my ex, and it was certainly true of Gerard, who sometimes would take little videos of me doubled over with laughter at something he’d said. And seeing him whip out his video camera or phone to record the scene made me laugh even more.
Open thread 8/18/23
Feet with ball bearings:
Roundup
Another big news day, so another roundup.
(1) North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature manages to override its Democratic governor’s veto of a bill blocking medical treatment of children who identify as trans. And, as Legal Insurrection author Mike La Chance points out, the MSM covers this by saying the bill would ban “gender affirming care” for minors, which is an Orwellian euphemism.
The bill also protects women’s sports.
By the way, back in May a Democrat in the North Carolina House switched to the GOP, which gave Republicans a veto-proof majority in that body. They already had a veto-proof majority in the North Carolina Senate.
(2) One Georgia state representative has done this:
Republican Georgia state Senator Colton Moore just became a political icon… The first Republican to punch back by moving to impeach DA Fani Willis.
“I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors weaponize their elected offices to politically target their…
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) August 17, 2023
The same article at RedState mentions this, too:
Back in April, after Trump’s New York indictment, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer stated that he received two calls from Republican D.A.’s from Kentucky and Tennessee, both looking at ways to charge Joe Biden — and possibly other Biden family members — related to the ongoing investigation into family business dealings overseas.
(3) Rep Comer is requesting that NARA turn over some documents that are potentially extremely interesing:
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today is calling on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to provide then-Vice President Joe Biden’s records regarding his duties as Vice President that overlapped with his son’s activities in Ukraine. Chairman Comer is requesting all unredacted documents and communications in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used a pseudonym; Hunter Biden, Eric Schwerin, or Devon Archer is copied; and all drafts of then-Vice President Biden’s speech delivered to the Ukrainian Rada in December 2015.
“Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware” appear to be among the pseudonyms used.
(4) Hawaiian Electric may be on the hook for failing to repair its aging power lines.
(5) Eighteen million views on YouTube and counting:
The left’s goals for Trump
Commenter “Mike M” quotes me, and then wonders:
[Neo quote] I’ve said many times that the left wants Trump to win the nomination and wants to face him in the general.
[From Mike M] I think that theory is now obsolete? They want to destroy him and his supporters. If nothing else works, assassination will become the option. I really hope he has his own security.
Those things are not mutually exclusive, and I believe they are all goals of the left. There are a great many ways it could work, but here are some speculations for a possible chain of events.
(1) The majority of people on the right rally around Trump and he gains the GOP nomination. The believe him to have been a good president, and at this point an unfairly persecuted martyr. They also seem to believe that he can defeat Biden or any other Democratic nominee. I happen to think that is a huge error and that Trump would lose resoundingly in the general, but that’s irrelevant to the point of this post, which is to explore the left’s possible reasoning and plans for several contingencies.
Trump’s trials are timed so that it is unlikely that they will be concluded and Trump sentenced and imprisoned prior to the election. If I am correct about that and about the fact that Trump will be the GOP nominee but will lose the general, then the left – which I fear might get control of Congress in in the 2024 election as well as the presidency – would attempt, after the election, to imprison Trump and let him rot. Or let him be killed there.
And the imprisonments wouldn’t end with Trump. There would be others.
Or, the left’s plan might be somehow to try to break Trump psychologically either before or after the election he loses. Even Trump may have a breaking point, especially now that he’s older. Then the left would magnanimously let him go, once he’s come to love Big Brother a la Winston Smith at the conclusion of Nineteen Eighty Four. I don’t think this particular scenario is very likely, but I do believe it’s a possibility.
(2) But what if I’m wrong and Trump wins the 2024 election? Do you think he would be allowed to become president? I don’t think so.
I don’t think a Trump assassination would be in the cards – unless it’s by a free-lancer – although I would suggest nevertheless that Trump be careful about who prepares his food. But assassination would only allow some other Trump-friendly Republican, Trump’s VP, to become president. The left would consider that far from ideal and in fact unacceptable.
So something else would happen. Perhaps another coup attempt with a more sophisticated version of the Steele dossier, with the FBI and the DOJ cooperating once again to take down their enemy Trump. Chuck Schumer’s warning of January 4, 2021, once again comes into play:
Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,
Several other GOP candidates have talked about dismantling or greatly reforming those same agencies, and if elected, they would be targets too, of course.
(3) And in the unlikely event that Trump were to win and to somehow take office, the left will not cease in their attempts to take him down. I’ve said before and I’ll repeat here that this will be true for any non-RINO Republican president who might manage to be elected. They will lie about him, impeach him if they have the votes, and leak every bit of damaging information they can find.
[NOTE: I keep feeling I should apologize for the dark turn of many of my posts these days. I know that it may not be as bad as what I’m imagining – I certainly hope it isn’t as bad – but I call it like I see it and this is what I see at the moment.]
Where we’re headed regarding liberty – and half the population is just fine with it
I saw this tweet highlighted on Instapundit today:
Facial recognition now required for entering and leaving your neighborhood zone in China's 15-minute cities.
Citizens are literally living in open-air prisons, where their every move is being watched and judged by the draconian Social Credit System. https://t.co/vOqApgJHUE pic.twitter.com/C8gcbSOutM
— Songpinganq (@songpinganq) August 16, 2023
You saw it first in Idiocracy, that great work of prophetic vision:
The COVID lockdowns showed how compliant most people are, and accustomed the populations of the world to more and more governmental control, much of it quite capricious. Objections were labeled menaces to public health, a potent method of criticism.
And lately, I’ve noticed more and more of the people I know mentioning that they’d like a law passed against this thing or that thing, usually a rather minor pet peeve of theirs. Are they joking? Doesn’t sound like it. These are people who used to be – or used to portray themselves, but it seemed sincere back then – as free spirits, more or less on the libertarian side of things. Those days are gone. Now they have no trouble with petty and pervasive tyrannies as long as they are tyrannies that fit their own belief system and desires.