The fight for the forgotten American
It is often said we should learn from history. We sometimes do learn from history. Sometimes we don’t.
Another oft repeated phrase is that the past is never really in the past. (Thank you, William Faulkner.)
References to these axioms – that we should learn from history and that the past never really dies – were inferred in a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof with the arresting headline, “On their high horse, too many liberals disdain Oliver Anthony.”
What you should know: Anthony writes and performs his own country songs. Until recently he was unknown. Then he got noticed for “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which, in Kritof’s words, “blames the travails of workers on the rich men north of Richmond,” a-not-so-veiled swipe at the lawmakers, lobbyists, and others who swarm around Washington, D.C.
Many on the left have taken exception to Anthony’s lyrics, which include a reference to obese people on food stamps, a complaint about taxes (nothing is more in the American spirit), and this, “Lord knows they all just wanna have total control,” an empty-headed GOP talking-point since New Deal days.
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green has praised the song, calling it the “anthem of the forgotten American.” She has been joined by others on the right.
In response, songwriter Oliver protested the song’s introduction into the canon of postmodern conservative mayhem while columnist Kristof bristles that liberals have allowed the hijacking of a song with Woody Guthrie-like lyrics, including “I’ve been sellin’ my soul all day” for meager wages and “Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground/Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking’ them down.”
Kristof remarked, “Does the left really want to leave battered angry workers to be defended by a GOP that periodically guts unions, targets Social Security, resists health-care coverage and opposes increases in the minimum wage?”
Kristof mentioned that, among others, Bobby Kennedy would have understood the anger expressed by Oliver. RFK (senior, not junior) was tuned into the turbulence of the late 1960s, when the country seemed on the verge of collapse, the consequence of a misguided war in Southeast Asia that was taking hundreds of young American lives a week, the nihilism of a youthful drug culture, campus anti-war protests that frequently turned violent, and the march of fires and racial upheavals across urban America.
To the point: April 5, 1968, was the day following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy, a Democrat, was running for president. Addressing a Cleveland civic organization, RFK delivered powerful remarks suited to the moment: Dr. King was dead and hope for the future may have been dealt a crushing blow; to carry on, Americans needed to make things right by confronting, understanding, and mending “the shattered dreams of others.”
Read in the entirely different context of 2023, his words remain powerful, and pointed. This altered context includes the separation of Americans into hostile political worlds which threatens the destruction of our common democratic institution; the mindless and rapid spread of lies via social media; the malefactions of political actors; the epidemic of white, middle-age suicides; and the sad, old failure to purge American culture of the threads of hate and distrust based on race and personal identity.
For sure, Kennedy spoke on that awful spring day in 1968 of the physical violence that took Dr. King’s life. But, he continued, “there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly and destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night.
“This is the violence of institutions… This is the violence that afflicts the poor… This is the breaking of a man’s spirit….
“(For) when you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.
“We learn … to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear – only a common desire to retreat from each other.”
A man of his times, Kennedy could hardly have imagined his words would carry weight more than a half a century after his own death just two months later, in June 1968.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.