(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . "Rich Men North of Richmond" is still racist trash, but how to handle folks like Oliver Anthony? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-01 Last week or thereabouts, in the midst of Donald Trump getting indicted for the ten thousandth time, the ongoing war on Ukraine, fires and storms and other products of global warming, and the usual chum from the worlds of sport and entertainment, a music video by one Christopher Anthony Lunsford, better known by his stage name Oliver Anthony, went viral. That song, “Rich Men North of Richmond”, was described as a working man’s lament about low wages, high taxes, inflation—oh, and a hard slap at people on “welfare”, with a rather obvious racist dogwhistle thrown in for good measure. In Anthony’s esteem, his troubles were due to various unspecified elites doing horrible things like paying social visits to Jeffrey Epstein, and spending “his” tax money on urban welfare queens, who allegedly are on the dole full time and stuffing their faces with low-end manufactured pastries. The usual complaints, in other words. Needless to say, all sorts of commentators, talking heads, and scribing pens left right and center, went to work on How This Is Bad For Da Democrats™, and how the self-described party of the working class actually repels the voters they seek to attract. (Also the usual complaints). From the left came this piece by Robert Reich, which made some good points, but dutifully reported the usual theory among certain leftists that If Only Democrats Were More Progressive They’d Get the (White) Blue Collar Vote. (Terms like “working class” and “blue collar”, in much of our political discourse, often contain the unspoken modifier “white”. It’s a rather pernicious shorthand that elides some Very Important Stuff, often deliberately so, but it is what it is). To which I responded with this here diary, and then went and enjoyed my weekend. We have company visiting, so I disappeared from Kos for a few days. The diary attracted slightly over a dozen comments, then scrolled off the front page. Everyone moved on. Except… at the GOP debate last weekend, they played “Rich Man North of Richmond”, apparently thinking it to be a rousing attack on liberalism and President Biden, and a defense of rural, (white) working class values. It even came up as a question from the moderator, and the assembled pack of toadies sang its praises—only to have Anthony point out that the fools and charlatans gathered on the stage for the chance to be humiliated next spring by an indicted criminal, were in fact part of the “rich men” called out in his song. In other words, things got complicated. Turns out Anthony isnt, as some folks seemed to assume—another Toby Keith or Jason Aldean, a wealthy Nashville minstrel peddling false consciousness to the folks in our rural precincts, many of whom get their news and entertainment mainly from the radio, most likely a radio station of the I-heart variety. He actually is (or was) poor, living in a trailer, and trying to make some money from his music. He still believes, apparently, in some nasty stuff—he’s into Q, for instance. But he’s not a Republican operative or a hard-core theocratic conservative or anyone of that sort. He might be “gettable”. I say “might”, because I don’t know the man. But this revelation did change the narrative. And prompted another round of commenters, talking heads, and scribing pens left right and center, to go to work on another round of pieces on How This Is Bad For Da Democrats™. And this time, from the center, we got this piece from noted Oregon viticulturalist, wannabe gubernatorial candidate, and occasional New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. The article was the usual mishmash of “Democrats are being mean and disrespectful to the common clay of the West (or the South, in this case)”, once again ignoring the flagrant disrespect and pernicious idpol that comes from across the aisle. But it did contain this lil’ nugget: Yet in this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled “Rich Men” the “anthem of the forgotten Americans,” and Fox News asked participants in the Republican presidential debate to discuss it. Meanwhile, some on the left pounced on it as right-wing propaganda and even as “racist trash.” And guess where that second link goes? My prior diary on this topic! I don’t think I’ve ever been mentioned (even if only by oblique reference) in the same sentence as Marjorie Taylor Greene. I probably should be offended. (I’m actually more amused). And since apparently I now represent “the left” to this man of arts and letters, and have now on behalf of half the country now managed to collectively insult the mamas of the other half, I do apologize if my loose lips are What Gets Trump Elected To A Second Term, because the country is filled to the brim of would-be leftists who would support a broad progressive agenda, if it weren’t for the hurtful and unkind things uttered by the haute bourgeoise, insults that give them no choice but to embrace fascism. Of course, Atrios suspected, and I tend to agree, that Kristof sent a bored intern to the Google with instructions to find some intemperate left-wing source that said rude things about Anthony, and one thing we’ve learned over the past fifteen years (since Obama first got the Democratic nomination) is that calling a white person a “racist” is the Most Vile Slander Ever Uttered. Only if they are wearing a sheet, AND if you can prove that they’re not simply trying on a Halloween costume, is such an infamous charge ever warranted. But even though far more notable sources that I happened to comment on the song in ways that don’t flatter its singer and composer, I was surprised to find that I, a short-haired non-leaping gnome, was the epitome of “the left” in the mind, or at least to the pen, of this gentle agrarian, who fondly tills the fertile Yamhill Valley soil from the the seat of his writing desk in Manhattan. It’s possible, I suppose, that he has a John Deere sticker plastered to his chair. I, of course, stand by my prior piece in regards to the song. It is racist trash; and even if one pretends that “fudge rounds” doesn’t contain a rather obvious racial component, it is a paean to herrenvolk socialism. It is a song that seeks to uplift one poor person by throwing another under the bus. It is a piece that demands the largest scrap cast from the masters’ table, without questioning why both the narrator’s character, as well as the lady allegedly abusing her food stamps, are only receiving scraps. In short, it reeks of false consciousness, as pointed out in the first piece, and the various scolds out there that regard the fight for civil rights as a distraction from class struggle, are only helping to cement the false consciousness that keeps the working class divided. The struggle for economic equality and justice is the struggle for racial justice, so long as wealth is disparately distributed by race. But what of Anthony himself? And of many of his fellows and peers (there are many in my own extended family, and among my neighbors) who are decent people in one sense, and will give you the shirt off their backs, but live in the FOX news/talk radio/right-wing megachurch bubble, and hear time and time again that the dark forces of liberalism are coming to plunder and destroy what little they have? Should they be written off? How do we reach them, when they live in an ecosystem designed to spread and reinforce this lie? When many of the people they trust the most, the authorities they most respect and have been taught to respect since childhood, are repeating the same stuff, in many cases also often innocently? That’s a harder nut to crack. Talking to people individually, and appealing to their better natures (many of them still have them) does help, at least temporarily. But it doesn’t scale well, and once the conversation ends and they return to the bubble, the effects are often lost. But what would happen if Oliver Anthony were to sit down with e.g. a fellow musician from another genre or race, one also struggling to find gigs and get noticed among the flood of people trying to make it in what is often a harsh industry? Can the realization that he, and the woman in his mind eating taxpayer-funded Fudge Rounds, aren’t as different as he thinks and that she too, rather than living in the lap of subsidized luxury, is also trying to survive, and doing it in a place that’s expensive as hell, and where the rural fallback of living in an RV gets you treated like a bum? (Seriously: People who live in RVs, unless they are paying rent in a campground or park somewhere, tend to get counted as “homeless” in our cities, and are often treated accordingly). I don’t know the answer, and the Leonard Leos of the world are spending big bucks to make sure we don’t find it, to teach the Oliver Anthony’s of the world that their miseries are caused by the people below them on the social pecking order. But if Anthony can and has perceived that the “rich men north of Richmond” isn’t just the stereotypical “liberal elite”, there is some hope. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/1/2191051/--Rich-Men-North-of-Richmond-is-still-racist-trash-but-how-to-handle-folks-like-Oliver-Anthony Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/