Goons and Tunes

 

The news being live-streamed to the infernal mini-computer in my pocket is becoming too much.

Many Western “democracies” are sliding inexorably into authoritarianism and a renewed form of overt bigotry.

Traditional media is nearing total collapse.

In the past 24 months, almost every newspaper or news broadcaster once considered to be a <relatively> reliable bastion of traditional journalistic values has gone over to the dark side.

The USA and much of Europe is actively aiding and abetting a Jewish supremacist colonialist state in a genocide against the Palestinian people, in real time.

Missiles streak back and forth over the Middle East while the catastrophe in Sudan is largely ignored.

None of these evils – authoritarianism, a cowering press, bigotry, ethnic cleansing, and genocide – are anything new.

This writer was born in 1964, the final year of what some people call the “Baby Boomer” generation.

In my own short lifetime I’ve seen the USA military engaged in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq (twice), Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan.

This doesn’t even begin to include the scores of “interventions”, strikes, and special operations in countries worldwide where the USA helped to prop-up various regimes in furtherance of its interests or the interests of its allies.

The one constant through all of this bloodshed has been the insistence of USA leaders that the US military fights “to preserve freedom, liberty, and the American way of life”.

For many reasons, many Americans (of a certain complexion) have always believed this, and believed deeply in the innate “goodness” and “exceptionalism” of the USA.

The kindest take on this would suggest that many US citizens are among the least well-informed people on earth.

But many Americans do not want information. They want a gang leader.

Throughout history, all around the world, people have formed gangs.

In Europe, from classical times through to the Middle Ages, homegrown and foreign warlords led gangs againsts other warlords for control of territory. The most powerful gang leaders or warlords eventually became known as kings or monarchs, who then subcontracted the extraction of wealth from the peasantry to various noblemen who were awarded land grants in exchange for loyalty – dukes, barons, counts, earls, etc.

Most gangs were comprised of people sharing a similar ethnic, linguistic, or religious background, but if a gang became powerful enough, it might be able to impose its control over multiple ethnic groups and regions.

The Romans are probably the most famous example of this.  Muslim Arabs achieved something similar during the 7th century, asserting control over a territory spanning the Middle East, North Africa, and Western Europe.

The French-speaking descendants of Vikings called the Normans did this when they conquered England during the 11th century, and Southern Italy during the 12th.

Throughout history, all around the world, powerful gangs have almost always claimed that their “founder members” are somehow “better” than most other people, giving them license or justification for enslaving, exploiting, abusing, and robbing these various “others” who fell under their control.

 

*****

The Anglo-American colonies which would later become the USA were founded by English “gang leaders” competing in a space already being contested by Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, and French gangs.

By the time the English had established their own settler-colonialist project along the eastern seaboard of North America during the 1600s, thousands of settlers from a myriad of other mostly European and Mediterranean ethnic groups had fallen under the English umbrella.

Between 1607 and 1775, settlers in the Anglo-American colonies included the English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Flemish, Swedes, Finns, Portuguese, Spanish, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews (from virtually everywhere), Italians, Swiss, Armenians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Minorcans, Persians, Turks, Arabs, Berbers, and Gypsies from Spain, Portugal, Germany, the British Isles and France.

To succeed in such a multi-ethnic environment, English “gang leaders” would have found it impossible to simply play the old “my ethnic group is better than yours” game.

Especially when most humans have always been tribalistic in their outlook, and prefer to follow leaders who look and sound like themselves…

How to solve such a conundrum?

For the British colonialist project to remain a coherent and cohesive entity, its settlers would need to be given an identity which they could be convinced to rally around, an identity superceding language, religion, or ethnicity.

So colonial Anglo-America USA drew an imaginary line through its population, and replaced “ethnic groups” with a color-based caste system.

This new caste system would place less emphasis on language, ethnicity, or religion, and focus instead on “race”, allowing one part of its population to exclude, enslave, exploit, abuse, and rob certain “others”.

“Others” of course being Indigenous peoples, South Asians and East Asians, and those of Sub-Saharan African ancestry.

And through revolutions, civil wars, and foreign wars, this rabbit pulled from a tattered old colonialist magic hat has survived.

Most Americans (of all backgrounds) still believe to this day that skin color or “race” is a stand-in for “ethnicity”.

Whether a person’s ancestry is from Aleppo in Syria, or the Arctic Circle of Finland, in the USA they are expected to identify with other “whites” rather than with the Black community, even though culturally speaking, Syrians and the Sámi might have far more in common with much of America’s Indigenous and Black community.

Americans will likewise speak of “The Black Race” without batting an eye, as if such a monolithic thing actually exists.

It is unlikely that one “white” American out of a thousand could name ten, let alone twenty, of the thousands of ethnic groups from sub-Saharan Africa.

Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo? Akan, Hutu, Luba? Songhai, Zulu, Kanuri?

All of these peoples have populations numbering in the millions, but unless they are a recent Nigerian immigrant, you’ll rarely hear someone self-identify as “Igbo-American”.

It seems as if the ethnic history of Black Americans is seen as having no interest or importance, as if “Black” says everything you need to know about that person’s identity.

The few “white” Americans who do not see “white” as an ethnic identity, and do try to reclaim a specific pre-American ethnicity, might identify as “Irish-American” or “Italian-American”.

But even this may not say anything meaningful about their actual ethnic ancestry, because Americans tend to conflate ethnicity with citizenship or nationality.

Ireland and Italy have always been home to multiple ethnic groups.  Sardinians and Venetians are not the same people.

The simple truth is that most non-Indigenous people with pre-Revolutionary roots in America – African, European, or otherwise – are too genetically and culturally mixed by now for pre-American ethnicity to have any real meaning.

And when we say “mixed”, that includes inter-ethnic mixing among people of all skin colors.

Yet certain idiots will speak of their pride in “The White Race”, as if the aforementioned English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Flemish, Swedes, Finns, Portuguese, Spanish, Jews, Gypsies, Italians, Swiss, Armenians, Poles, Czechs, Persians, Turks, Arabs, and Berbers are somehow “one people” gathered under one “white” racial-cultural banner, and these same idiots will convince themselves that none of their ancestors were Brown or Black.

 

*****

 

There is no point in beating around the bush. The current actions being undertaken by ICE all across the USA perfectly mirror the actions of Nazi brownshirts in 1930s Germany.

 

This is not hyperbole.  This is not pearl-clutching.  We are witnessing an attempt to reassert the boundaries of who gets to be a “real” American.

In the absence of full ethnic-cleansing or a complete genocide, dominant settler-colonialist groups will always “inherit” some of the people who were already present on the land they have appropriated through force.

The post-Revolutionary USA “inherited” various Indigenous peoples, Métis, and a mixed-ethnic Spanish-Indigenous population (aka Mexicans) in various territories it annexed, just as the Zionist project has “inherited” indigenous Palestinians.

The continued presence – the very existence of these people – serves as a constant and living reproach, a Ghost of Truth Past knocking on the door of nationalist mythology, the physical embodiment of an historical crime scene.

The people who believe there is an endangered “white race” want as many Brown and Black people as possible gone from their sight.

They have already achieved this in part by forcing most Indigenous peoples onto so-called reservations.

Recent attacks on DEI programs are another way to reduce the visibility and presence of Brown and Black Americans in traditionally “white spaces”.

Current activity by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is racial profiling, plain and simple.

I can already hear the angry ripostes from MAGA types swearing it’s about illegal immigration, not “race”.

That would be more believable if we had seen ICE agents raiding places where British or Irish people had overstayed their visas – not to mention the curious lack of outrage on Fox News concerning the 100,000 or so Canadians currently thought to be flying under the legal immigration radar.

“Non-whites” are characterized variously as gang members, rapists, “bad hombres”, ex-convicts, drug dealers, and devourers of domestic pets.

This is a 400-year-old “in-group” versus “out-group” danse macabre, with the ultimate destination being the graveyard of US democracy.

But on the way to the graveyard, there are plenty of hyper-propagandized, ill-educated, hate-filled and insecure goons from the manosphere lining-up to join America’s brownshirts.

 

These are exactly the kind of men who loved a certain song about “small town” ethics and vigilante justice from a couple of years ago.

*****

 

The people who talk loudest about “free speech” or “law and order” want neither of those things as universal principles.

Much like the Puritans of Massachusetts 400 years ago, they want certain “rights”, BUT ONLY FOR THE “IN-GROUP”.

The Puritans cried endlessly about religious persecution, but it was always about THEIR particular religion being persecuted, not the dozens of other cults and sects being persecuted at the same time in 1600s England.

Once safely across an ocean, away from the power of The Crown, Puritans were happy to whip and hang Quakers, for example.

I thought about this type of parochial vigilantism masquerading as “law and order” the first time I heard the country singer Jason Aldean‘s pathetic, dumb-strutting number called “Try That in a Small Town”.

I’m over 60 years old.

I grew up in a small town.

An actual small town that had 2000 people in it back when I was a kid – a town that still hasn’t broken the 5000 population mark yet.

Mill ponds on rivers that flooded us out.

Gas wars.

Demolition derbies.

Five-year-olds being allowed to set-off bottle rockets and Roman candles and Black Cat firecrackers on the 4th of July.

A chicken house, and a pile of old railroad ties with copperheads living under it.

Being made to go to Sunday School on Sundays AND Wednesdays.

Having an acre of beans you and your brother planted and hoed yourselves eaten by deer in a single night.

Winters so cold the coyotes tried to get into the house.

I don’t know when things changed to the extent that people growing-up in cities like Macon, Georgia (with over 150,000 people) got to start claiming and singing the praises of “small town” culture.

But then again, I never understood why country singers from Southern Appalachia and The Ozarks who made it big in Nashville suddenly stuck cowboy hats on their heads.

Where I grew up, anyone who was “country” probably wore a cap with “International Harvester”, “John Deere”, or “Skoal” on it which they got for free at the local feed store.

Now that I’m approaching Old Codgerville, watching the wheels of the generations turning, I’m beginning to understand the nature of this asinine posturing that many younger “white” American men get up to.

Each generation is moving farther and farther away from actually knowing and speaking with people who were around back in the old days.

And even among those who embrace the “like my daddy and his daddy before” stuff, real history has never been passed-down the generations completely intact, with any real accuracy.

Folks forget things.

Folks hide things.

 

*****

 

In the place I lived as a kid, one of the most popular things on TV was a variety show called “Hee Haw”, which played-up to every “country” caricature in the book, in between showcasing some damn fine musical talent.

It was hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, both excellent musicians in their own right, and both children of real, not imaginary, country people.

Clark was born into a tobacco farming family in Virginia during the Great Depression. His parents had to abandon the farm and move to New York to find laboring jobs to keep their children fed.

Owens, for his part, was also reared on a farm in Texas, until The Dust Bowl and Great Depression forced his family out, too.

“Hee Haw”, for all its silliness, was a show tinged with longing and nostalgia, watched by people stuck in working-class suburbia – people just one generation removed from a self-reliant way of life which had lasted for uncounted generations.

But the wheel keeps turning, and memories of those times get passed down and gilded and curated through selective amnesia.

Many country singers today, and many of the folks who spout the “Make America Great Again” nonsense, are recalling a world they never experienced, and constructing a world in their own heads based on what they IMAGINE things were like, or WHAT THEY WISH THINGS WERE LIKE.

The “small town life” of Jason Aldean songs and the jingoism of the late Toby Keith doesn’t mention alcoholism and opioid abuse caused by violence, trans-generational trauma, and economic despair.

Nor do they mention the children of many so-called “Christian” evangelical parents being made to chew bars of soap for saying “bad words”, or being belt-whipped for minor childhood infractions.

“It never did me any harm.”  Yeah, right.  Take a look at yourself.

We hear no ballads dedicated to local sheriffs who “escorted” people of color over county lines to keep their “small sundown town” fit for “white folks”.

There is no art or music speaking to all of the young boys who were gay and forced to hide it behind performative “masculine” violence, and if they couldn’t hide it, being called “pansies” and getting beaten-up at random after school.

No odes to the put-upon mothers and women with black eyes trying to get the shopping done early in the morning before too many people were around town asking questions.

There were of course many good, decent people in small towns, but boy oh boy…

It was hard to be “good” when you were 12 years old at a local baseball game and all the grown men beside the snow cone stand waited for you to laugh loud and hard at their repertoire of n***er jokes.

But still, a few folks knew the real score.

Most knew of, or had children of their own who had died unnecessarily, because there was just no money for the doctor, never mind the hospital.

Many had family whose land had been taken off them during hard times.

Some had family who had died in the mines.  Others had grandparents who had fought in the coal mine wars, against goons similar to the ones now back on our streets.

Country singers like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and Patsy Cline and Bobby Bare and Dotty West and Buck Owens and Roy Clark and Tom T. Hall and Tennessee Ernie Ford and Dolly Parton were and are from a time when good people, when real people, knew the truth about life in America for the underclasses.

That’s why old country music was full of drinking and heartbreak and disappointment and money problems and prison and trains and loneliness and longing for family when forced to look for work hundreds of miles from home.

We now live in an age where we are beset on all sides by insecure men performing caricatures of masculinity.

Some bro-country dude from a city in Georgia sporting a cowboy hat, far in time and distance from “small town” reality, isn’t a spokesman for modern “country” or “small town” values.

He is riding shotgun with dangerous oafs like J. D. Vance, a fellow cos-player of rural American identity.

Both men are voices for a resurgent white supremacy, and the dog whistles have become foghorns.  Why else would Aldean, a man from a city in Georgia, choose to shoot a video in front of a building in Tennessee notorious for being the site of the public lynching of an African-American teenager in 1927?

 

And ICE, a bunch of pumped-up musclebound goons bullying and terrorizing anyone with brown skin or a Mexican accent in LA this summer, has even less to do with “American values”, “patriotism” or “law and order”.

Working-class men used to have strong arms from a life spent working, not from quaffing pints of Creatine and spending hours lifting weights while staring at themselves in a gym mirror, before heading out to push some young girl’s face into the sidewalk.

Fake men, with a fake identity, clinging to a fake history.  Just like the “Aryans” of Nazi Germany, or the pretend “Hebrews” of modern Palestine.

Nearly every generation is forced to raise a gang of “good guys” to see off the latest outbreak of dumb thuggery being perpetrated by a gang of “bad guys”.

From the coal mine wars, to Franco‘s Spain, to Hitler‘s Germany, to the Freedom Riders, to Kent State, it never stops, and it’s never easy, but it has to be done.