Hank Williams, You Problematized My Worldview

Saturday, cigarette #1

Rebecca Solnit over at Orion wonders why so many people who love Nature have such contempt for the down-home folks who actually live out there in it ("One Nation Under Elvis: Environmentalists might be a lot more effective if they listened to more country music — and especially if they listened more often to country music listeners"):

We were celebrating two weeks of rafting down the central river at the outpost’s big honky-tonkish nightclub, where the DJ kept playing country songs, to which all the locals would loop around gracefully, clasped together. But my compadres kept making faces of disgust at the music and asking the DJ to put on something else. He’d oblige with reggae, mostly, and we’d wave our limbs vaguely, dancing solo and free-form as white people have danced to rock-and-roll since the mid-1960s. Everyone else would sit down to wait this other music out. It was not a great movement-building exercise. How far were you going to get with a community when you couldn’t stand their music or even be diplomatic about it?

Solnit proceeds to make the case that the sort of people who like country music aren't necessarily so different from her hipster friends, but she makes a mistake by trying to make this case by pointing out that there is such a thing as the Liberal Redneck. The most interesting affinities aren't between urban Obama supporters and the Dixie Chicks, but between urban localists like Luc Sante (who, not coincidentally, loves the Delta blues) and honest-to-God conservative Nashville country (i.e. not Willie Nelson, not Johnny Cash). It's not that both Red States and Blue States can accommodate homegrown liberals, but that both can accommodate homegrown irony. Luc Sante's love for New York is as earnest as a redneck's love for Carolina, but the liberal prejudice is that rednecks are too "simple" to have any self-awareness or sense of humor about theirs. Solnit describes the moment she realized this was false:

My own conversion to country music came all of a sudden in 1990, around another campfire, also in Nevada. The great Western Shoshone anti-nuclear and land-rights activist Bill Rosse, a decorated World War II vet and former farm manager, unpacked his guitar and sang Hank Williams and traditional songs for hours. I was enchanted as much by the irreverent rancor of some of the songs as by the pure blue yearning of others. I’d had no idea such coolness, wit, and poetry was lurking in this stuff I was taught to scorn before I’d met it.

Not only does fly-over country express both environmentalism and irony in unexpected ways, the Blue States aren't half so good at either as they think. For excellent politics-of-symbolism and Ansel Adams-bashing, read on:

The environmental movement’s founding father, John Muir, was himself a Wisconsin farm boy, and he did not so much flee the farm for the wilderness as invent wilderness as a counter-image to the farm on which his brutal father nearly worked him to death. Muir worked later as a shepherd and lumber-miller in the Sierra Nevada and much later married into an orchard-owning family, but he didn’t have much to say about work, and what little he did say wasn’t positive. The wilderness he sought was solitary, pure, and set apart from human society, corporeal sustenance, and human toil—which is why he had to forget about the Indians who were still subsisting on the land there. This apartness and forgetting so beautifully codified in Ansel Adams’s wilderness photographs has shaped the vision of much of the environmental movement since them. The Sierra Club, which Muir cofounded with a group of University of California professors in 1892, saw nature as not where one lived or worked but where one vacationed.

I've always maintained that country music, far from being pre-modernism's last gasp, is the most postmodern genre working in America today. One more reason why traditionalism shouldn't look like trying to recapture pre-modern innocence: it never existed in the first place.

Lastly, head over to Nine Bullets for an mp3 of Red Eye Junction's "Anything But Country."