Hold Onto Sixteen As Long As You Can

John Mellencamp

Classic rock radio stalwart John Mellencamp got an unwanted attention boost this week when a month-old video of him abandoning the stage went viral. Apparently Mellencamp paused to speak directly to his audience, something musicians frequently do, but an audience member heckled him to shut up and resume playing. An outraged Mellencamp quit playing partway through “Jack and Diane,” leaving an arena audience in the lurch.

Several sources, including Fox News, spun this event as Mellencamp feuding with the audience over politics. Like most “heartland rockers,” including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and John Fogerty, Mellencamp’s politics skew left. This should surprise nobody who’s listened to Mellencamp’s lyrics—but apparently, several audience stalwart haven’t done so. Listeners are often gobsmacked to discover that their favorite heartland rockers are progressives who don’t just love being rural.

This spotlights a growing rift between artists like Mellencamp, and the largest number of their fans. We saw something similar when former New Jersey governor Chris Christie mentioned his love of Springsteen, and Springsteen responded by duetting with comedian Jimmy Fallon to mock Christie’s performance as governor. These rockers maintain the leftist, anti-establishment passions of their youth, while their audiences have become more conservative and revanchist.

Pop history tells us that “heartland rock” emerged in the middle 1970s: Springsteen’s first hit, “Born to Run,” hit the Billboard Top 40 in 1975, while Tom Petty’s first hit, “Breakdown,” barely creased the Top 40 in 1977. However, this ignores that both artists never developed legitimate star power until the 1980s. It also disregards both Bob Seger, and John Fogerty’s original band Creedence Clearwater Revival, which had their first hits in the 1960s.

Bruce Springsteen

From its origins, heartland rock bore a contradiction. Though its chief songwriters have pressed progressive politics and a disdain for capitalism into their lyrics, their musical stylings were persistently conservative. Fogerty deliberately channeled musical stylings from Delta blues and Memphis soul, while Petty’s sound grew, like Spanish moss, from the swampy slumgullion of influences in his inland northern Florida upbringing.

Thus, conservative audiences who don’t listen deeply have always thought their favorite heartland rockers spoke directly to them. The most famous example, of course, must be Ronald Reagan’s attempt to conscript Springsteen into his 1984 reelection campaign. But my personal favorite comes from TikTok. A whyte-boy in a backward ballcap and a pick-em-up truck shouts “Thank God my mom didn’t raise no f**king liberal!” before tearing off scream-singing with CCR’s “Fortunate Son.”

The complete failure to understand the left-leaning message in these lyrics might seem baffling, except that I once shared it. I’ve written about this before: listening to classic rock radio during my rebellious teenage years allowed me to consider myself forward-thinking because I engaged with the injustices of the Vietnam era. By pretending to care about injustice back then, I allowed myself to passively participate with injustices occurring right now.

There’s nothing innately conservative about consuming media shallowly, but in my experience, people who don’t parse for greater depth usually have conservative politics. Conservatives love surface-level readings. My lifelong Republican parents encouraged me to reject deeper textual analysis of literature, even when high-school English teachers graded me for doing so. Listening to classic rock at the surface level often rewards conservative readings of its time.

Heartland rockers were classic rock before the “classic rock radio” category was invented.

John Fogerty

Surviving heartland rockers like Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Melissa Etheridge continue recording, but they haven’t had Top 40 hits since the middle 1990s. Fogerty, who’s always had a contentious relationship with the recording industry, hasn’t meaningfully charted a single since 1985. Though they all continue touring, they’ve become oldies circuit staples, their concerts consisting primarily of songs first heard forty, fifty, or more years ago.

Like the artists themselves, their audiences have continued aging. The greasers and slicks who got energized for Springsteen’s fight against small-town malaise in 1975, now have mortgages, student debt, and children. Such material investments in the status quo encourage, if not principled conservatism, at least a desire to ensure they didn’t invest themselves in hot air. The audiences have grown away from the artists they admire.

Perhaps the most telling fact is whom these artists now influence. Jake Owens’ “I Was Jack (You Were Diane)” and Eric Church’s “Springsteen” were massive country hits, channeling the artists they name-dropped. But both songs reduce their tribute subjects to mere nostalgia for whyte audiences. These artists, now in their seventies, have become the thing their teenage selves rebelled against. There’s no coming back from that.

The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.

Modern Economics as a Moral Instrument

Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

Most wage-earning workers with house payments and bills know the current economy cannot survive much longer. People working overtime cannot afford groceries, and housing prices are more exorbitant now than immediately before the 2007 collapse. But with Cold War rhetoric still discoloring all economic discussions, what alternatives exist? What, importantly, has worked in real-world scenarios?

Nick Romeo is a journalist, not an economist; he doesn’t postulate alternative economic models from dust. Instead, he travels to places which have implemented economics beyond the dictates of neoclassical capitalism, to report on what works, and what doesn’t. This may mean cooperative models, like the Mondragon Corporation of Spain’s Basque Country, or the direct democracy of Cascais, Portugal. Everything described here has worked somewhere, and could hypothetically work elsewhere.

In his first chapter, Romeo briefly stops through American postgraduate economics programs, examining how academicians teach contemporary economics. The discipline he encounters is self-righteous and exclusionary, with a strong historical disdain for history and the humanities. It assumes humans are rational and amoral, and mathematics can describe economics better than anything else. But an increasing number of academic economists are recognizing how purblind this approach is.

Only in this first chapter does Romeo engage in abstruse theorizing; everything else focuses on real-world accomplishments. But this theorizing helps establish Romeo’s thesis statement, further expounded throughout the book, that economics isn’t a science (he uses the term “pseudoscience” generously). Economics originated a moral enterprise and a branch of philosophy, and Romeo aims to recapture that humane foundation.

Not for nothing, Romeo writes, was the Mondragon Corporation founded by a Catholic priest, not an economist. More a federation than a centralized corporation, Mondragon deploys the skills of diverse workers, who have democratic control over their employers. Mondragon eschews love of money or worship of hero CEOs, both hallmarks of American capitalism, preferring to empower workers to take ownership of their work and workplace.

Despite his talk of morality, and his lavish praise of Mondragon’s Father Arizmendiarrieta, Romeo’s economics isn’t religious. It is, however, humanist, prioritizing workers whose labors turn raw material into wealth, and not either money or economic “laws.” For Romeo, economics should focus on getting food, shelter, and necessities to humans, and protecting the natural environment. Mathematical models fail if they don’t achieve these goals.

Nick Romeo

Romeo’s moral calculus emphasizes economic outcomes excluded from textbook considerations. Are jobs merely a nicety provided by the ownership class, he asks, or a social entitlement? When workers’ productivity and ingenuity create corporate wealth, should workers own equity? Does “making a living” mean mere subsistence, or does the economy owe workers something more? These aren’t theoretical questions, and Romeo boldly proffers field-tested answers.

However, this creates some fuzzy outcomes. Romeo admits that morally minded economic models, like True Cost, must make flying decisions about what constitutes meaningful externalities, and therefore its titular “truth” remains open for interpretation—and, sadly, misinterpretation. Likewise, he praises purpose-driven corporation models which protect workers’ rights, housing access, or environmental restoration. He politely elides the idea that corporations might harbor bad purposes.

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), a democratic model Romeo describes across several chapters, he finally admits isn’t a single system. Some ESOPs give workers complete ownership over the companies their work has created, but others grant only nominal equity, less than a 401(k). Economic liberty, Romeo admits, comes from diligence, not from assuming the monied classes care about your outcomes.

Also, approaching his denouement, Romeo admits that economic circumstances change, and responses must change commensurately. He began writing during and immediately after the pandemic (mostly written thus, “the pandemic,” as though afraid of its scientific name, like saying Macbeth). As pandemic furor dissipated, the economy moved from stagnation to inflation, and he admits it’s necessary to back-construct responses from the models he’s previously explained.

Consistently, morality matters first. Throughout the Twentieth Century, politicians and economists have sought economic models they could deploy and ignore, like a well-oiled machine. Romeo instead describes economics as a moral instrument, to be nurtured, tended, and when necessary, replaced. I’m reminded of Distributism, a similar morally-minded economic model, which uses agrarian metaphors. We farm the economy, not grease its wheels.

Romeo shows economic models which prioritize care, cooperation, and human dignity. He doesn’t invent new systems from cloth, though he admits countless further untried systems exist. Instead, he encourages us to read economics as an opportunity to increase human flourishing, build stronger communities, and preserve the environment. We only need to treat economics as a liberal art, as it is.

See also: Why We Need Liberal Arts in the Business World

Trump’s Bible, Part Three

This essay is a follow-up to Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting and Trump’s Bible, Part Two

Howard Thurman

Growing up in White Protestant Christianity, I remember hearing how Jesus never preached against Roman occupation of Israel. This seemed strange, my teachers said, because Jewish leaders of the First Century CE definitely unified around opposition to Roman dominion. But Jesus never said “boo” against Rome, which proved—proved I say!—that Christianity is apolitical, and Jesus wanted to save souls, not start a revolution.

In adulthood, I recognized this belief as specious. As Howard Thurman writes, Jesus wasn’t a Roman citizen, and therefore couldn’t speak freely under imperial dominion. Then as now, empires crushed agitators, and though violent imperial death was probably Jesus’ original intention, he couldn’t risk it happening ahead of schedule. The Apostle Paul, who was a citizen, felt no such circumspection, when he wrote to the Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

My teachers hand-waved the statements against “this dark world” by claiming it meant either demonic powers or “secularism.” But in context, Paul clearly means political, economic, and military forces which dominated ordinary residents’ occupied lives. We fight the forces of poverty, conquest, and subjugation, the same soul-destroying powers which Dr. King called “the giant triplets”: racism, materialism, and militarism.

Early Christianity flourished behind this revolutionary ideology. Where kingdoms brought war, Christians brought meaning. Where empires fled from turmoil, Christians ran into the worst domains, carrying blankets and cold water for the afflicted. Where Rome reduced women entirely to their childbearing capacity, the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla record that women embraced Christianity because it gave them individual, autonomous meaning.

James H. Cone

Then the Constantinian Shift happened. Organized Christianity threw its support behind the Emperor, and reorganized itself to support imperial values. It became the very things its founders inveighed against: imperialist, hierarchical, phallocentric, middle class, and violent. When Christian authority became insufficient to support the putrefying empire, popes and patriarchs stepped into that role, investing kings with earthly authority and blessing campaigns of military conquest.

Yet speaking broadly of “Christianity” overlooks the fissures within. While Romanized Christianity survived, through its alliances with kings—and, not coincidentally, through its near-monopoly on written texts—dissident groups nevertheless arose to challenge human political authority, and also the Church that clothed human kingdoms in religious vestments. Groups like the Albigensians, Bogomils, Waldensians, and Dulcenaeans threatened Roman hegemony, and Rome crushed them violently.

This pattern repeats throughout religious history. Prophetic voices which arise in opposition to state power, eventually ally themselves with human states. Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah railed against kings, before their books got sewn into the state religion. The Buddha rejected his (half-legendary) princely upbringing, but Emperor Ashoka granted Buddhism imperial authority. Luther and Calvin skipped the interregnum and raced straight into relationship with princes.

Italian semiologist Umberto Eco, though an atheist himself, explicated this pattern cleanly. His authorial self-insert, the skeptical Brother William of Baskerville, explained that in attempting to purge Catholicism of heresies, the Church became exactly what the heretics accused: imperial, power-mad, and brutal. Dissident groups that survived did so by compromising their founding principles; those that couldn’t compromise, died in fire.

Donald Trump so badly wants us to see him as
religious that he shared this AI image which,
if you look closely, shows him having six fingers
on his right hand (source)

Which returns us to Donald Trump. His revolting “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible,” apparently actually compiled by Lee Greenwood, represents yet another attempt to sacralize state power. Those Christians who benefit from the existing social order, mostly White, middle-class, and heterosexual, will gobble this trifle up eagerly, despite whether they actually buy the Bible. Because for them, as James Cone writes, Jesus came to bless the old order.

Meanwhile, Christian dissidents who oppose this beatification of power go largely unheard. Like the Cathars and Dulcenaeans which Eco describes, they provide a welcoming refuge for spiritually-minded citizens who reject the power structure; but, like their forebears, they lack necessary access to challenge the state. They provide localized, narrow relief, but are unlikely to change the religious landscape, unless, like Luther, they become willing to partner with princes.

If Trump wins reelection this November, Christian history will certainly remember him alongside the Emperor Constantine. Christians, or anyway White middle-class Christians, want the power which potentates can distribute, and they’re willing to squander their unique spiritual claims to achieve it. We Christians who disavow such Whiteness and conservatism, don’t know how to organize to resist this historic sell-out.

And, like the Bogomils, we’re on track to be crushed by “the powers of this dark world.”

Trump’s Bible, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

R.J. Rushdoony

Let’s assume that most readers outside certain theological circles probably haven’t heard of Christian Reconstructionism. This Protestant sect, with roots in strict Calvinism, deals with relationships between religious truth and political power, in a mostly American context. Reconstructionists believe secular power derives from Christianity alone, and therefore Christians should have political dominion over, well, everything.

R.J. Rushdoony, the theologian who pioneered Reconstructionism, specifically demanded that the law of Leviticus be enshrined in American law. He used rhetorical hand-waving to ignore Levitical laws his modern audience found reprehensible, like the death penalty for disobedient sons. Rushdoony remains little-known outside narrow circles, but his strict dominionist theology has tainted swaths of American Christianity, including the Religious Right and the homeschool movement.

Many Christians find the Levitical law tempting because it provides ironclad definitions of right and wrong. I don’t want to seem unsympathetic, because in today’s morally fraught, pluralistic world, the desire for God-given absolute rules makes sense. Many people might want to follow the law, and therefore avoid making decisions, blind to the long-term consequences; but that’s only possible when we think the law itself is morally right.

However, I also think that’s the attitude religious leaders showed in Jesus’ time. They assumed that, by keeping the forms of law, they necessarily did right, regardless of their actual actions or their inmost intentions. Obeying the Law of Moses, which God purportedly handed down verbatim, allowed them to only shallowly understand the situation directly before them. One simply obeyed, and then succeeded, much like a dead fish floating downstream.

(I realize this statement heavily attributes intent. The First Century CE is a poorly documented time in Jewish history, and Christian scriptures the only source. Let’s stipulate their reliability for this argument.)

Jesus, an observant Jew who did significant teaching inside temples and synagogues, rejected this hierarchical interpretation. No longer could the law apply only inside Israel’s borders, real or metaphorical; the law convicts the contents of your heart, demanding right action even at personal cost. The tax collector Zacchaeus, for example, followed ritual law precisely, but he flourished by taking from others, until Jesus convicted his heart.

Donald Trump

Christianity, therefore, requires a moral order beyond this world. Like Plato, Jesus believed capital-T Truth wasn’t circumscribed by heavy matter, but exceeded this world. God’s Kingdom is perfect, clean, and free of this world’s conflicts and moral compromises. But that world lies somewhere beyond, and we won’t comprehend it or the truths it empowers until we escape this burdensome flesh. We see through a glass darkly, indeed.

We cannot know capital-T Truth, therefore, by following the law. Humans write rules in response to past conditions, but doing right means facing the present, and its future ramifications, without blinders. I must observe the source of Truth, fluid and dynamic, to answer this world, with its frustrating tendency to change. Even in Jesus’ time, Israel had changed into a settled nation with iron tools, no longer the hill-dwelling herdsmen for whom Moses wrote the Law.

Donald Trump was baptized and confirmed Presbyterian, but the church hasn’t much influenced his morality. His actions have equated “right” with “what the law allows,” and his fondness for lawsuits demonstrates an elastic attitude toward even that morality. He’s spent his life pursuing his appetites, at the expense of consequences for others. His pandering Bible salesmanship, forging American law into a Third Testament, reflects this strictly make-do ethic.

The devout must exceed the letter of the Law, and observe the Spirit. As I’ve written before, Levitical law has multiple provisos addressing how we treat the poor, disfranchised, and weak. Our treatment of the poor isn’t hypothetical; it bespeaks whether we honor the spirit of the Law, or only its letter. Merely obeying the Law as written is lazy, passive. Doing right means actively engaging with the Law’s purpose.

Trump’s legalistic morality inevitably gets deployed to hurt those already disadvantaged by human systems. His maltreatment of immigrants, dissidents, and minorities is extensively documented; he’s promised to exceed this, and actively make life harder for the indigent and unhoused. Christians who equate devotion with obedience will go along to get along, as many already have. The consequences for “the least of these” will be dire.

Rushdoony wanted to engrave the Bible into American law. Trump wants to bind American law into the Bible. Both cases reject Jesus’ mission which taught that we must know God intimately, and then act accordingly. One can use Biblical language, these men prove, and still lack a Christian core.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Three