On March 9th, Greg Lukianoff, the president of free speech organization FIRE, tweeted a challenge to his followers. “Name a musical artist of the last 20 years whose music best highlighted an anti-elite/anti-snobby rich/anti pretension POV?” My first impulse was to name Kid Rock. The comments revealed a variety of suggestions, and after reading them, I thought of country artists such as Carrie Underwood and Jason Aldean.
I’m in DC, and on the plane ride here I listened to Aldean’s 2010 song “Fly Over States.” As I looked over the patchwork of fields and saw the snow disappear somewhere between Albany and Maryland, Aldean’s lyrics made poignant sense.
The song is about two first class passengers on a flight from New York to LA. They don’t understand the appeal of the heartland, but Aldean makes it clear. He sings about what it’s like to “take a ride across the badlands / feel that freedom on your face / breathe in all that open space,” and that “you’ll think Heaven’s doors have opened / you’ll understand why God made / those flyover states.”
Carrie Underwood’s 2015 single “Heartbeat” conveys a similar message. She sings about being at a party “downtown” with her lover, but wanting to “drive so far, we’ll only find static on the radio.” She yearns to see the way he looks “in a firefly glow … a cricket choir in the background, underneath a harvest moon.” The ultimate destination is somewhere “we can’t see those city lights.”
Both songs contain a longing for pre-urban reality that is reminiscent of the Romanticism that emerged in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. There is the sense that the subject recognizes the dominance of a coastal, city-based standard of living but suffers some urge in the soul to return to a setting that is more natural, boundless, or divine.
Just as poets like Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley responded to the shock of mechanized advancement by emphasizing the irrational, the emotional, and the elemental, today’s country music represents a true resistance to the overwhelming imperatives of life and status-chasing in our nascent Internet age. This body of artists (including other singers like Thomas Rhett, Kip Moore and Luke Bryan) is perhaps the answer to Lukianoff’s lighthearted question.
It is not only country artists whose output is steeped in “return” rhetoric. Such language can be found all over our civic life, from “Make America Great Again” to “Build Back Better.” It is as if our entire society, unable to cope with the lightspeed development of all that tech has wrought in the last thirty — or even ten — years, is consumed with a necrophiliac yearning for a homeostasis that can never come again.
A comment on a recent New York Times piece that makes the case for a Covid memorial calls attention to this sense of compulsive nostalgia.
Even attempts to envision a future beyond the tech explosion, beyond the Trump era, beyond the pandemic itself, are characterized on both the progressive left and the religious right by the “re-” prefix, whose Latin origin “indicates repetition” and “withdrawal.”
The word “reimagine” has become prevalent in social justice and Democratic circles in the past few years. The website letsreimagine.org, which describes a holistic approach to grief, talks about how to “face adversity, loss, and mortality, and channel the hard parts of life into meaningful action and growth.” The Obama Foundation has an initiative called the “Reimagining Policing Pledge.”
Language on the right instead invokes “renewal.” It is a word that carries a more religious energy, that feels less like the utopia of imagination and more like a baptism in long-tried truths and realities. Twitter philosopher Wokal Distance explains, “I think the ultimate answer is spiritual renewal,” claiming that “regular people crave revival” (another word with religious significance). The Center for Renewing America, a think tank, aims to reinstate “a consensus of America as a nation under God.” And at last week’s annual lecture for First Things, the conservative Catholic magazine, Georgetown professor Josh Mitchell spoke about the renewal of genuine Christian values as a pathway to restored civilizational health.
I am, of course, sympathetic to such pleas, but my fullthroated agreement is hindered by the inconvenient reality that not all Americans are Christian. We have a beautiful pluralistic society, one that has most recently been affected by a common phenomenon: Covid-19. Like so many Americans, I feel that something ineffable has been lost. I felt this before the pandemic, too. I do not know how to name it or how to get it back. But I am certain that I have not yet “processed” all that the pandemic has meant (a hideous term that is more apt for the preparation of meat than for the mulling of emotions). Quite suddenly, the media has moved on, obsessed with a new war. Has our reckoning with the past two years even started to come to fruition?
Carl Jung wrote that “the greatest and most important problems of life … can never be solved, but only outgrown.” In witnessing patients who overcame issues that seemed intractable, the psychoanalyst called “this ‘outgrowing’ … a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It is not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life urge.” America seems, mercifully, to have given up on zero-Covid. We are a people that wants to barrel forward at the same time that our rhetoric is riddled with backward motion.
Over the past year, both online and off, I have made a point of trying to cultivate friendships with both progressives and conservatives. A wellness leftist will respond to my Instagram story with “blessed” while a Catholic integralist replies with “based.” We may use different terms, but we are all trying to adjust to a new future. And many of us are still heartsick from the past.