{"id":2700,"date":"2002-12-01T07:17:20","date_gmt":"2002-12-01T07:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=457"},"modified":"2002-12-01T07:17:20","modified_gmt":"2002-12-01T07:17:20","slug":"the-red-and-the-blue-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2700","title":{"rendered":"THE RED AND THE BLUE, part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u0092ve been thinking about the whole \u0093coast\u0094 \u0093heartland\u0094 thing, as noted by Yglesias<\/a> and others, and had a hard time finding a way into the issue until last night.
\nWe were driving home from the movies, Tenacious G, Middle Guy and I (we saw 8 Mile again, because the two of them wanted to), and I was punching the buttons on the stereo in the Mighty Odyssey Minivan when a discussion broke out.
\nThe top 3 buttons on the stereo are taken up by the three major stations that TG and MG listen to (I tend to listen to the CD\u0092s in the changer because I hate commercials).
\nKCRW, the local NPR station; KZLA, the local corporate-owned country station; and KROQ, the local corporate-owned alternative rock station.
\nThe voting politics are complex. I\u0092m totally fickle. I\u0092ll mostly turn things off; KCRW when it gets too sanctimonious or the World Music interludes become intolerable; KROQ when the grindcore songs come on; KZLA when really bad country-pop gets played. TG likes KCRW and KZLA. MG hates KZLA.
\nSo when we got into the car, some awful Incubus song came on, and I punched KZLA, which was playing a current country hit called \u0093The Good Stuff\u0094. In case you don\u0092t listen, here\u0092s a typical lyric:<\/p>\n

Not a soul around but the old bar keep,
\nDown at the end an’ looking half asleep.
\nAn he walked up, an’ said : “What’ll it be?”
\nI said: “The good stuff.”
\nHe didn’t reach around for the whiskey;
\nHe didn’t pour me a beer.
\nHis blue eyes kinda went misty,
\nHe said: “You can’t find that here.
\n“‘Cos it’s the first long kiss on a second date.
\n“Momma’s all worried when you get home late.
\n“And droppin’ the ring in the spaghetti plate,
\n“‘Cos your hands are shakin’ so much.
\n“An’ it’s the way that she looks with the rice in her hair.
\n“Eatin’ burnt suppers the whole first year
\n“An’ askin’ for seconds to keep her from tearin’ up.
\n“Yeah, man, that’s the good stuff.”<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Middle Guy looked disgusted and asked me \u0093Why the hell do you listen to that stuff, anyway? How can you like the Vines and<\/u> this?\u0094<\/I> That answer\u0092s another issue\u0085
\nBut what I told him was that I liked the sound of good country music, and then started talking about the changes in country since I\u0092d started listening to it, and that today it was almost the last music about love, fidelity, loss and hope, and that I liked that.
\nAnd that one thing that I missed from rock was the hope and yearning that used to be a part of it back when I was Middle Guy\u0092s age.
\nAnd, as these kind of talks tend to do, they got me thinking.
\nI\u0092d been thinking a lot about the Great Cultural Divide\u0085the whole red\/blue thing, and I had a brief moment of clarity.
\nIt\u0092s all about country music.
\nOr, rather, it\u0092s all about the worldview that country music encapsulates.
\nHere\u0092s a counterpoint. My subscription to Harper\u0092s hasn\u0092t run out yet, although I won\u0092t be renewing it in spite of the flood of imploring letters and postcards I\u0092ve received from their subscription service, and in this month\u0092s is a classic explanation of why (not available on the web):<\/p>\n

\u0091Comfort Cult\u0092
\nOn the honest unlovliness of William Trevor\u0092s world
\nBy Francine Prose
\n\u0085<\/b>
\nIf part of what we seek from art is solace and consolation, an interlude of distraction, a brief escape from our daily cares, even a glimpse of happiness \u0096 and who, in these disturbing times does not, or should not want all of that and more? \u0096 it is simple enough to understand why the products of what we might call Comfort Culture should dramatically outperform a writer like William Trevor in the marketplace of analgesic entertainment. The Lovely Bones<\/I> is narrated from heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped and brutally murdered by a neighbor (think Our Town<\/U> with dismemberment) and who receives as compensation for her earthly travails, an afterlife that includes a nice apartment, plenty of teen-girl magazines, a paradisical version of high school, and a front-row seat from which to observe the folks back home coping with their grief and puzzling over her killer\u0092s identity. No such comforts are provided the unfortunate young women dispatched by Hilditch, the creepy serial killer in Trevor\u0092s Felicia\u0092s Journey<\/U>; indeed it is characteristic of Trevor\u0092s bravery as a writer, and of his passionate sympathy for even the most loathsome outsiders and misfits, that a good part of the book is written from the point of view of the demented and delusional Hilditch himself.<\/b>
\n\u0085<\/b>
\n(emphasis added)<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, I can\u0092t help myself, but the idea of a literary critic with the name \u0091Prose\u0092 does give me the giggles\u0085
\n\u0085but to get back to culture; while I can see a sensitive reading of Felicity\u0092s Journey<\/I> and a sympathetic nod to the loathsome outsider as a steady part of the programming on KCRW, and a speed-metal version on KROQ (in fact the song probably already exists), there is no way that sympathy would be found on KZLA. No contemporary country song would celebrate that kind of brutality and despair. We\u0092re talking about a fundamental difference of worldview and taste, and this issue ought to serve as a pathway into understanding the gap between the worlds.
\nIn the next part, I\u0092ll talk a bit about the social and economic realities behind the gap.
\n(added emphasis)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u0092ve been thinking about the whole \u0093coast\u0094 \u0093heartland\u0094 thing, as noted by Yglesias and others, and had a hard time finding a way into the issue until last night. We were driving home from the movies, Tenacious G, Middle Guy and I (we saw 8 Mile again, because the two of them wanted to), and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2700"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}