Narcissism, attitude, and the smoldering rubble of post-America

We've weaponized every last form of human expression

Katherine Jean Lopez, the editor at large of National Review, finds herself a lightning rod at present.

She had the temerity to write a column suggesting that Jason Aldean could have found a more effective way to musically address urban deterioration than his new single, “Try That in a Small Town.”

She gets into some territory I don’t resonate with. She compares Aldean’s record with John Mellencamp’s 1985 “Small Town” in order to make the point that there have been celebrations of heartland life in popular music. Sorry, but Mellencamp is emblematic of a larger point I’ll be making later in this essay - namely, that popular music has for decades been to a lamentable degree about validating one’s lifestyle and demographic identity. The reason people who like Mellencamp do so is that hell-yeah-he-speaks-for-my-experience type of gratification that’s the basis for the appeal of everyone from Cardi B to, well, Jason Aldean.

Lopez is a devout Catholic and focuses much of her writing on the pro-life cause. Imploring modern society to bring more heart and humility to its debates is a thematic thread running through much of her work.

The crux of her message in her latest column seems pretty unmistakably conservative to me - as well as full of Christian heart:

. . . there is the refrain: “Try that in a small town. / See how far ya make it down the road. / Around here, we take care of our own. / You cross that line, it won’t take long / For you to find out. I recommend you don’t / Try that in a small town.”

Aldean at another point in the song talks about a gun his grandfather gave him. Part of the reason some conservatives are defending the song is that there is plenty of other music that is violent that doesn’t get pulled by anyone. The healthy answer isn’t to add more anger and violence. Some of us are old enough to remember former second lady Tipper Gore, a Democrat, and former secretary of education William J. Bennett, a Republican, warning us about sex and violence in music and video games. They were right. And it’s only gotten worse since then. No small part of the reason that young people find themselves getting abortions is that the music they listen to insists that aggressive sexuality is the only way to have a relationship with someone of the oppositive sex. Then if they are not having sex, TikTok videos tell them the solution to their normal middle-school awkwardness is puberty blockers and surgery. Our culture adds cruelty to life that is already challenging.

For her trouble, she’s come in for a white-hot eruption of opprobrium:

“This is no time for Christian charity.”

That was what stood out among the responses to a recent nationally syndicated newspaper column I wrote about a recent controversial country-music song/video. Jason Aldean was singing about how small towns handle violence better than urban areas. He mentioned his grandfather’s gun, as a warning, among other things. I grew up in New York City, strangely enough, listening to country music, so I’m aware that Johnny Cash among others could get dark along the way. But I’m also a consumer as much as anyone of our politics and our culture today, and I know how violent it can be. And we don’t need more of it.

Well, goodness. For saying such a thing, my phone exploded. There was a lot of simple expletives and ad hominems. But there were more disturbing comments that I honestly wish were coming from robots, not people. (Including comments that are hard not to receive as racist.) I remember in the early days of internet commentary, people would fairly regularly email awful things about how they hoped I’d die a slow painful death of cancer, along with all the people I loved most in the world. Occasionally, I would send an email back, thanking them for taking the time to bother to read and respond. Sometimes the reader would double down with profanities, but more often than not, I would get a response from a person horrified that I actually read their note. The person assumed no human would ever see it. He was just venting in a safe place. Today, though, people say some of the same things attached to a public profile. Perhaps their Twitter handles are aliases. But most of us are aware that our phones don’t exactly keep us anonymous.

I’m now going to do something I sort of have a rule against doing. I’m going to excerpt from a Kurt Schlichter column. I need to have a really good reason to give his poisonous worldview an airing, and today I have one.

Schlichter has really honed his style. He ladles out the gratuitous use of coined monikers and over-the-top characterizations of anybody he doesn’t like, which is a major bang of confirmation-bias gratification for his fanbase, but he’s developed the art of leavening that with some I’m-a-pretty-normal-guy imagery (“I'm not saying you must tromp through the woods stalking deer to be a con – post-Army, my idea of outside recreation is sitting on a lounge having someone bring me G&Ts – but it helps to get out a little and visit America and meet some Americans.”)

His column strives to burnish his conservative bona fides by taking the National-Review-was-once-indispensible-reading-for-me-but-along-the-way-they-lost-Buckley’s-fire-in-the-belly tack:

The problem is not that Ms. Lopez does not appreciate Mr. Aldean's tune but that she does not appreciate Mr. Aldean's people. One of the great problems with conservatism, or rather with the intellectual conservative elite, is that so very many of them have never been in a fight. In the real world, most of us have. But NR conservatism grows within the DC/NY hothouse; the idea of it outside in the real world where today's conservatives live would make one of those hilarious fish-out-of-water movies where the guy in a bow tie from the Big City has to milk a cow. I'm not saying you must tromp through the woods stalking deer to be a con – post-Army, my idea of outside recreation is sitting on a lounge having someone bring me G&Ts – but it helps to get out a little and visit America and meet some Americans. Maybe someone on the venerable rag's masthead drives a Ford F-150, but if he does, there's a good chance he does it ironically. 

It's not so simple as "non-NR macho/NR sissy," though that is a useful razor. It is that the kind of conservatism that WFB led became something else along the way, something more concerned with strict adherence to appearances and long-dead notions of propriety. While the new NR was fussing over its principles – norms and rules that were worth using to bludgeon less-worthy cons but were never worth fighting hard for against the left – the people conservatism was supposed to be helping were suffering. Their jobs went to China, and their kids to Ramadi, at least the ones that did not die from overdoses. Kevin Williamson, then at NR (and soon to be at The Atlantic for about 10 seconds), had a prescription – cultural euthanasia, because they deserved every misery inflicted upon them. 

Conservatism that conserves only the middling cachet of a dying brand within the DC/NY political milieu is not worth conserving at all. NR has found out what it is like to lead a movement without adherents. It has been barely scraping by for years, and if you are still on its mailing list, which I am both out of nostalgia and for the occasional good column, you will be dunned for cash even more unmercifully than if you somehow find yourself on the RNC text roster. 

Consider two key lines in what I’ve presented so far. There’s “This is no time for Christian charity,” from one of the responses Lopez got, and then there’s Schlichter’s phrase, “ long-dead notions of propriety.”

This denigration of Christian charity and propriety is all I need to see to conclude that the New Right is not conservative. Sometimes I think its determination to destroy what had been broadly recognized as conservatism may be having so much success that we ought to just let them have the term and come up a new one for our set of principles.

But that would be the surrender of the most descriptive term we have for what we are. Jon Askonas may feel that “we can no longer conserve” but he’s dead wrong.

Conserving was the whole point of the enterprise from the outset.

Isn’t what anyone to the right of center is disturbed about is the abandonment of the unique gifts Western civilization has bestowed on humankind?

If it disturbs you, then it behooves you to get as well acquainted as possible with those gifts. You know, the contemplations on truth, beauty, virtue, moderation and justice that have been distilled into our definitions of those terms.

I know it’s more than a little late to expect an argument for the highest use of human expression to get an airing. We’ve decided that our “art” exists to perform the functions of identity validation and celebration of the crudest instincts of our species.

I didn't mean to pick on Mellencamp in particular a few paragraphs up. He’s just a Boomer from the Rust Belt who had considerably more attitude than education or talent, but, like many of his generation, wanted to make it in rock and roll so he could bellow about his feelings.

A lot of his peers had already done so by the time he came along. I don’t know exactly where to locate the starting point. Maybe it was the topical nature of the material of the folk music boom of the 1940s through the 1960s. (Woody Guthrie famously scrawled “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar.)

The music industry’s general bloat seems to have coincided with its devolving to a lowest common denominator. The 1970s and 80s saw the transformation of a lot of musical acts from phenomena associated with particular locales, heritages, scenes and genres into arena-rock draws whose records all had the same production sensibilities and attendant hype. Consider, for example, the difference between what Fleetwood Mac was about in 1968 and what it had become by 1977.

But before anybody wants to dwell on that point, let me remind you of what I said in a piece I wrote for Ordinary Times last year entitled “Confessions of a Rock & Roll History Teacher”:

I blow hot and cold on whether rock and roll has been, on balance, a force for good or bad. It’s powerful; there’s no denying that. But I think The Who may have made an assessment beyond what they realized when, in 1965, they sang that “things they do look awful cold.” Six years later, after all, they’d determined that they wouldn’t get fooled again.

I’d also mention what I had to say in a recent post about music here at Precipice:

Here’s where we are: most people don’t give much thought to applying standards to music. Their relationship with it is much too passive. It’s aural wallpaper that just happens to them, and some of it catches their fancy. Why that is so is not of much importance to them.

When I go into places of business that engage with the public - banks, dentists’ offices, retail establishments - and hear the content being broadcast on the local classic-hits station, I thank God in heaven above that I no longer report to a workplace where I’m subjected to that aural equivalent of Polar Pop all day long.

I get more dismayed than I probably should when I discern, from social-media posts, what the music tastes of people whose intellects I admire, turn out to be. These are good writers, think tank scholars and the like, and what turns them on musically leaves me aghast, frankly.

I’ve gone pretty long here, and you’re a busy person. And the title of this piece promises “musings,” not firm conclusions. But I hope I’ve started a conversation.

We are an aesthetically starved culture. We have lost sight of one of the greatest gifts God bestowed upon us: the joy of making and listening to a human activity that can put us in touch with our innate nobility, a nobility that exceeds the bounds of space and time.

And in the process of losing sight of that, we created the space for music to be weaponized. Jason Aldean types can get in our faces with their yee-haw vibe, and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion can tout their record “W— A— P——” as empowering to women and deliberately crafted to rile conservatives.

It’s the same with all our art forms. Novels, plays, movies and paintings are targeted toward particular sociocultural categories of people in order to stoke the hell-yeah-this-is-who-I-am attitude that they see as an armor against looking at reality with any kind of boldness.

Every stinking day, on every level of our existence in post-American society, we are unavoidably witnessing the squandering of our birthright. We were made to fashion works of the most sublime nature, but we’ve forgotten that. We think we were made to proclaim to the world, “Check me out. I’m a real badass.”