991. STEVE EARLE, "Christmas In Washington"
Produced by Twangtrust; written by Steve Earle
1997 Did not make pop charts
I know the dates are screwy, but I'm writing this on 31 December. Last weekend, I went to a huge family Christmas party deep in the bowels of Bergen County, New Jersey. It was hosted by an older cousin, on whom I had a crush when I was a teenager, and her husband of decades now, a kind, pleasant, hard-working man whom I just noticed has a framed picture of himself shaking hands with Rudy Guiliani in his dining room. He also has a copy of one of Rush Limbaugh's books in his living room. Okay, it's a paperback, but the fact is he kept it, and there weren't many books on that shelf that he appears to have wanted to keep.
One of the saddest things for me about politics in my lifetime has been its relentless binarism. I was seven years old in 1968, more focused on the impending moon launch than the war in Vietnam, but sometimes it has felt as if I am going to live for the rest of my life with my older siblings' wars. Individually, locally, there are more than just two political camps, but somehow since the late 1960s, when we raise politics and social action to the national level, it is always Us against Them.
My cousin is a nice guy. He probably shrugs at all the bumper stickers on our car when we park in his driveway, but can he possibly comprehend that the first person that I heard use the abbreviation "p.c." to denote "political correctness" was the vice president of the gay and lesbian society in college, as an inside joke to vent off steam? And could he possibly understand Steve Earle, dedicated acoustic twangboy, declaring that a second term of draftdodging adulterer Bill "Bubba" Clinton wasn't liberal enough for him? When a mohawked urban punk screams for revolution, it fits the established categories, but when a country boy calls for Emma Goldman and Malcolm X to rise up from the dead and take to the barricades, it shortcircuits many people's ideas of The Way Things Are or Ought to Be.
I haven't thought for more than two decades that we need a true Revolution in this country, but we do need (and have recently been promised) Change. First and foremost, we need to burn down the categories: no red America, no blue America, not even some watered-down variety of purple America, even though purple is a lovely color that can, after all, provide us with so many pleasant tints. No Jesse Jackson/Benetton rainbow America either, all 80s pluralism with all the separated shades so nicely defined and demarcated. We just need color, every tint, every shade, wherever it falls. We need to see the national landscape whole, with all its beautiful presences and troubling lacks intact, from both coasts and the heartland at one and the same time. That's all.
Happy Holidays, y'all. Let freedom ring.
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