Discuss: One Nation Under Elvis

Great Article!  I never comment like this on the web, but I feel it hits close to home.  Country music vs. the left, here it is: I am a liberal, and I love the environment in general (I have a science degree and have been in the environmental field for 13 years), etc.  I have also been a musician for 25+ years, some of it professionally, and I love all kinds of music, especially jazz, country, rock, etc.  I am in a country band playing traditional honky tonk country here in the CA Central Valley (we are doing well!).  We play in both liberal Bay Area cities, and in the most “country” and backwoods places we can find, where the people are not exactly liberal.  Everyone in the band is very liberal like myself, and it is hard sometimes not to make comments on stage about our Commander-in-Chief, it has gotten us into trouble!  The article talks about people like Johnny Cash and The Dixie Chicks, etc, which brings me to the point to say that most musicians, from my experience, tend to be more open minded and liberal in general.  No matter what kind of music you play, musicians will always find a way to connect with each other, and with their audiences.  This sometimes leads to a gap between the performer and the audience. Country music may have the biggest gap as far as personal beliefs go, also presuming the new country artists are more liberal at heart than their act may seem.  As a performer, we also get to talk to very interesting people such as cowboys (real ones - mule packers up in the high Sierra, ranchers, bull riders, etc).  Under all of their macho cowboy right-wing tendencies, some of them really love and care about the environment.  It’s very refreshing to meet and talk to people like tha t about the environment and conservation because they often times have a different view of it from their perspective.  On the other hand, we meet some of the most right wing knuckleheads in places you would not expect - Sierra foothills, suburbs, etc.  So it’s not always about north and south, urban vs rural. Many times it is about back-woods vs. suburban, but in reverse as far as who believes what, which is something you would not expect!  Those country music loving cowboys just may be the ones to save your favorite rolling prairie from development, not the suburban dwelling capitalist soccer dad!

One last thing, I have to stoop low for a moment (sorry). To Matt (COMMENT #34) , you must be very young and impressionable.  Listening to your friend who studies music “theory and production” at Berklee (so what? I have a dozen friends who went there!), learning to appreciate “every genre of music”?  There is this thing called a song, which has these things called melody, emotion, and feel, to name a few.  You both need to go back to the school of life. With the exception of some of the new country, “Country is rock-n-roll for retards”?  “...Dumb? - look in the mirror to find that!

PS - Sorry about the long comment!

Solnit’s pitiful attempt to assume that a preference for “country music” has anything to do with “environmentalism.” This is a tenuous thread indeed. Her article is a travesty. I would like to think that there’s a possibility John Muir could rock to Elvis, and that a redneck could grove to Bach’s
B Minor Mass, and could both walk the same trail.

Solnit’s excessive verbiage (‘Grubby, furry, childless pseudo-nomads…”) only furthers the gulf between different unrecinlable ideologies. She isolates just about everyone.

What’s “good for the planet” is a subjective quagmire when we can’t even agree on what an “environmentalist” is. Let’s bury the word. I suggest we stop all this damned rhetoric and examine what English writer Richard Jefferies wrote— “I look at the sunshine and feel that there is no contracted order: there is divine chaos…” And in this divine chaos may be our salvation…

This is a great article and shoul be proliferated widely to everybody on all sideS!

I liked Rebecca’s analysis and have only one small but important point to add. With a few exceptions such as the ancient forest movement, environmentalism started mostly in large towns and cities, and in those dreary in-between areas called suburbs. It was spurred by specific corporate and government projects and proposals. From the time I got involved personally and professionally in the late sixties, and even today, I am still struck by how many people who call themselves environmentalists do not act out of a profound love of or familiarity with nature but out of political, economic and social concerns. They care deeply about their environment and the threats to it, but know little about ecology, habitat, evolution, ecosystems, and most would probably be hard pressed to identify the most common flora and fauna in their area. This is of course NOT true of rural folk, and I think it is a serious handicap to the movement, not least because it can give rise to the “classism” Solnit refers to, and thus create a chasm between city and country. This was not always true as those who know the early (19th and early 20th century) history of the movement, which was inspired by people like Thoreau, Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and later Aldo Leopold and Dave Brower.  How many people have read the incredibly powerful work of Loren Eiseley? How many read Edward Abbey when he was still alive? How about the books of Peter Matthiessen? Carl Safina?
For all of these nature was the inspiration and the crimes against it were what spurred them to action. Today I suspect few Sierra Club hikers know very much about nature or ecology. And we suffer from this.

Todd and Allen have already had a spirited exchange regarding Todd’s post. However the lead assertion of Todd’s initial post that Elvis was a “racist and bigot” should not be left uncountered. Hopefully this article will help illuminate things for Todd and others who hold this unfortunate and unfounded assumption about the complicated person, persona and legagcy vis a vis race perspective and relations of Elvis.
http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/elvis_not_racist.shtml

Oh boy, how frustrated I get with the way this discussions go. The earth ship is in trouble and the lemmings are self congratulating themselves for a job well done.
Wake up!
Robama, billary or Macain is the same old bunch of non starters.
The earth and other species are suffering. We are in the grip of another war (by deception).