A letter from Greenville, S.C.
The Column: 04.01.24
I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.
I am comfortable in the South. I’m okay with not talking politics with crazy people. Yes, in the rural areas, they display the Confederate flag, but I’ve got junk in my closet too. I see no need to remove statues of Civil War heroes: just paint their uniforms olive drab and enlist them in the U.S. Army. A good summer job for teenagers.
I love the warmth of the people. At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky. After that and “Amazing Grace,” I can get them to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and lay down their arms.
For the stand-up part of my act, I grieved over the mild winter in Minnesota, the lack of ice fishing, snowmobiling, the loss of the Fellowship of the Jumper Cables, the lack of adversity that gives us northerners our sense of identity, and I brought Carolinians (many of them exiled northerners) to genuinely feel the loss. And having accomplished that, I set out to convince them that aging is the best thing that can happen to them and why they should embrace it. It’s an impressive feat when you get millennials to buy into this.
And then my singing partners Heather Masse and Christine DiGiallonardo joined me in singing songs by my fellow octogenarians Jerry Garcia, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, McCartney & Lennon, and when we sing in three-part harmony, “These are the days of the endless summer, there is no past, there’s only now,” I believe in it though I’m twice my singing partners’ age and have so much past from back before they were born.
And in the course of doing these shows I feel a profound mystery: it’s much more fun being an old has-been than it was to be a big success. When I was briefly a big success forty years ago, people stood in line to interview me and ask how it felt to be so admired. It felt fearful, like looking over the edge of a cliff and a thousand feet down to rocky beach and surf.
Four decades later, I’m wading in gentle surf, singing “Under African Skies” and “In My Life” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with Heather and Christine and Richard Dworsky at the piano. He is Jewish but plays gospel very very well. We do “Nearer My God to Thee” and people in the front rows are ready to come forward.
A showman gets old, the audience goes into assisted living, the crowd shrinks, and I can see I’m coming closer and closer to what my mother prayed I would be, a preacher. When I’m 90, I’ll be standing on a street corner in Greenville, South Carolina, Bible in hand, preaching, “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His mercy endureth forever,” and if you hear me singing, come stand close by and join in. There’ll be no collection, just sing with me, darling.
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The idea that "government" can do no good is a pernicious idea that the corporate-capitalist sector of America has cleverly and insidiously infused into American society since Reagan's term began in 1981.
The corporate-capitalists hate government regulation of their businesses because it interferes with their unfettered profit making. The corporate capitalists have two main goals in their quest for ever greater profits: cut taxes on themselves as much as possible and remove government regulations as much as possible. In order to achieve these two goals the corporate-capitalists had to CONvince average Americans that "the government" or "big government" can do nothing right and that "the government" was the peoples' enemy.
When in fact the peoples' REAL enemy is corporate-capitalism itself. Without government regulatory agencies like e.g. OSHA the capitalists would run roughshod over the environment and the American people. I'm old enough to remember back in the 1960s when rivers in the mid-west were so polluted they would catch on fire. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/ Government regulation ended this problem.
When the banks were deregulated in 1999 under the direction of President Clinton's Secretary of Treasury, Robert Rubin, the former CEO of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, the financial crises of 2008 was the disastrous outcome. As a result of this "financial crisis" trillions of dollars of public tax payer wealth was shifted into the pockets of private banks in the "too big to fail" bail-outs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail#:~:text=For%20America's%20biggest%20banks%20the,and%20%244%20billion%20for%20AIG. Much of this done behind the backs of the American people. Banks had been strictly regulated by the federal government between 1933 and 1999 pursuant to the Glass-Steagall Act.
Without government oversight corporate-capitalist America will run roughshod over the American people. In a democratic-republic WE are the government. The American people have forgotten this.
The corporate-capitalists, on the other hand, care nothing for the American people. They have only one goal and one mission: to maximize their private profits. They lobby Congress to keep the federal minimum wage so low as to be a wage-slave rate of $7.25 an hour. They lobby Congress to cut their tax rates so the federal government and the American people bear the burden of a 23 trillion dollar debt. The corporate-capitalists in the iteration of the pharmaceutical companies infiltrate their government oversight and regulation agencies such as the Federal Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration so "Big Pharma" can foist dubious, hastily made, poorly manufactured vaccines on the public during the Covid hysteria making tens of billions of dollars of profits for themselves. (And such esteemed public intellectuals as Jeffrey Sachs is on the record stating that the Covid virus was probably deliberately manufactured in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-evidence-jeffrey-sachs/)
In a democratic-republic "we the people" are the government. Semi-literate, propagandized by Fox News, poorly informed Americans need to get over the modern myth (or urban legend might be an appropriate term) that the government is the enemy. The government is the only thing that keeps their "capitalist masters" (to borrow a term from Karl Marx) from running over them roughshod.
Wake up, America! You have nothing to lose -- as Marx also said -- but your chains!
The problem, Americans need to overcome the Fox News propaganda and understand, is not "Big Government" and we don't need to "get the government off our backs" as Reagan used to spout so glibly. The problem is the economic system of corporate-capitalist private greed.
My first "tour of duty" down South was from 1987 to 1992. We moved frequently and lived in a lot of little towns. When we first moved to a town, everybody, and I mean everybody, asked us which denomination we belonged to. I was raised a Chicago liberal, but my political beliefs fit in nicely with what was called a "Southern Democrat."
My second tour of duty in the South started in 2016, after living for 24 years in the Adirondack mountains. Some things have changed since my first tour of duty based upon observation and interaction with these welcoming folks. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has asked us which denomination we belong to. For whatever reason, it appears that the evangelical edge has gone away. And so have the Southern Democrats. Well, they can be found, but you have to warm up to folks, gain their trust, and have heart-to-heart discussions around politics. Based upon the discussions I have had, the Southern Democrats felt politically homeless by both parties, and in general, feel the least uncomfortable with the Republicans. So that is where they are. A terrific group of people lost politically.
I wish the Democrats were truly inclusive, and at the same time, I wish that Republicans could show some sign of compassion. But these wishes of moderation will have to wait until we are inspired by a leader that can reach out to us all. Kind of like what you do Garrison.......