feelin’ fine for now goin’ down the road

Since the inauguration I’ve been alternating between a combination of elation and relief and a now familiar anger as the Republican rump continues to assert itself. But first elation and relief and a few observations about current trends in popular culture.

The Tik-tok sea shanty craze has made popular culture icons of old songs like “Leave Her Johnny” and “The Wellerman.” It has also reminded me of the late Stan Rogers, who liked to sing sea shanties and wrote a few of his own. Rogers’ untimely death in 1983 was a loss to Canadians and the to the rest of us as well. A consummate talent, he lost his life in a horrific fire aboard an airplane as he returned to Canada from the 1983 Kerrville Folk festival. Here he is, performing a song by Mary McCaslin, in a live concert recorded just five days before he died.

“Feelin’ fine for now” sums up my present mood, and I love things about this performance a lot, especially when Rogers urges his audience to sing “like an organ.” But my personal favorite Rogers song is “The Field Behind the Plow,” whose theme I have stolen for my title. I want to claim that if there is hope for another season’s promise in our present day politics, that hope may have more than a little to do with American popular culture and yes, with the bashable villains of social media, which make it possible for ordinary folk to combine disparate elements in novel ways, something the pedant in me can’t help but point out was Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘the metaphysical’ in poetry. There’s already a Bernie meme, for instance, that features the grizzled and be-mittened Senator singing “The Wellerman” along with a crowd of other Bernies.

I am thinking now of Amanda Gorman’s fine inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb” with its affinities with slam poetry and Hip-Hop and its evocation of a perpetual and normatively unfinished America. I like that idea and wrote about it in my last post. As Timothy Egan speculates in a recent New York Times piece, it may be possible for Biden to govern in poetry. As Egan puts it, “Why not reverse the political aphorism, and govern in poetry after campaigning in prose?” American popular culture was on full display throughout the inauguration, especially the poetry of popular song; though not without some detractors. Lots of folks noticed Lady Gaga’s switching from 3/4 to 4/4 time as she belted out the National Anthem. I personally thought her performance struck a fine balance between rendering the anthem as a pop piece (what we have become accustomed to at sports events, for instance) and the more traditional rendering we might have expected from a classical singer. And I liked the switch to 4/4 because I took it to be one of several rhetorical devices that gave emphasis to text in what has become for most Americans a forgettable national anthem (parts of which need to be forgotten). And while Amanda Gorman has received well-nigh universal acclaim for her poetry, there are some who have derided her as inauthentic. Here’s an example, for which I have to thank my friend Moumin Quazi who collected it on Facebook. In “The Hill We Climb,” as elsewhere, Amanda Gorman speaks out of various traditions of popular poetry and oratory. One suspects that is part of what this writer finds amiss about her. But the country loved her, as did I, and it was her poem that started the thoughts I am exploring here.

As I say, American popular culture was on powerful display during the Biden inauguration festivities. “What about Yo-Yo Ma?” I can hear someone ask. But Ma is a popular culture icon equivalent to Bruce Springsteen. He is a Rock Star in an age that blurs distinctions between genres. That blurring is the life of American popular culture, however much it may trouble folk who find it inauthentic. In the remarkable display of popular culture featured in last week’s inauguration, the Biden administration stands in sharp contrast to its predecessor, whose central figure didn’t like to be upstaged. But it will take more than blurring to overcome Republican determination to prevent Democrats from governing. The Biden team might consider harnessing the power of popular culture both to promote policies clearly desired by the great majority of Americans, especially policies that pertain to desperately needed efforts to combat the covid pandemic, and also to shame Republicans who need to be held accountable for the growing covid death spiral and the countless other anti-humane policies of the previous administration. Republicans are presently behaving in predictable fashion as though only they have a right to govern: all the way from the Texas lawsuit over immigration and voter suppression measures being proposed in many states to Mitch McConnel’s cynical effort to preserve the filibuster in the Senate. The time has come for Democrats to fight back, and a popular culture campaign may be just what circumstances call for in today’s political climate. The Tik-tok sea shanty phenomenon is a recent development in the history of what Howard Rheingold calls Smart Mobs. I’m wondering what applications of the same might be explored by media savvy Democrats who gave us a memorable virtual convention this past summer. I am thinking here of the ways in which popular culture has been harnessed against tobacco use, for instance.

Back to poetry–Biden’s love of modern Irish poetry is well known. We are told that he recited poems by W. B. Yeats in front of a mirror as part of his youthful effort to overcome stuttering. And his use of a fragment of Heaney’s play, The Cure at Troy, which he has quoted in a number of contexts over the years to advocate for a circumstance in which “hope and history rhyme,” draws on an already iconic item of popular culture and amplifies it. In a recent piece in the Washington Post, Teo Armus points out that “By 2000, [Darach] Ó Séaghdha noted, the line had become famous enough in pop culture that the Irish rock band U2 alluded to it in a song.” “Hope and history don’t rhyme” in the U2 song “Peace on Earth,” but Heaney’s poem had already anticipated the event would take a miracle.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

As I write, Republicans are accusing Democrats of vengefulness in calling for the impeachment of the former president for his role in planning and inciting the January sixth attack on the capitol. And as Biden has proceeded with his ambitious program of executive actions undoing some of the egregious effects of Trumpism, Republicans are seeking political cover in familiar tropes of movement conservatism as though it were still possible without irony to deny the pandemic and plead impecuniousness in the wake of their party’s record of deficit exploding tax cuts. While major parts of the Biden covid relief program can clear the Senate through budget reconciliation, most of the president’s ambitious legislative program cannot. Faced with that fact I see no alternative to abolishing the filibuster. Recalcitrant Democrats need to be brought in line. Lyndon Johnson could have done it; we’ll see whether Chuck Schumer is up to the task.

For the rest, I think it undeniable that the last four years represented a triumph of American Fascism, a thing that has been part of our politics since long before we could call it Fascism. Recent history presents us with two models for dealing with the remnants of that Fascism; The Nuremberg Trials and the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission. Current law enforcement efforts have been directed solely at the foot soldiers who did the bidding of the former president and those of his followers in government who played a role in the the January sixth attack on our capitol. Because of the extent to which Fascism remains embedded in our politics, in states like my own state of Missouri, in Texas, in the Republican Party and elsewhere, I doubt whether the South African model is applicable to our present situation. In fact, I am convinced that we require an American version of the Nuremberg Trials if we wish to recover as a society from the last four years. Conviction of the former president in the coming impeachment trial and barring him from holding public office again is only a beginning, it seems to me. It will need to be a priority of the incoming Merrick Garland administration of the Justice Department to do the rest.