Critical Race Theory and why country music sucks today

I’ve been thinking a lot late lately about Critical Race Theory, country music and the GI Bill.

They all go together. Bear with me here.

I am fascinated by the street-level history of the US between the world wars...There was a HUGE white underclass at that time -- immigrants in the northeast and the not yet Rusty Rust Belt.

Those folks were plenty, um, “restive” — think Sacco & Vanzetti, miners’ wars, the assassination of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak (who unintentionally caught a bullet meant for FDR), the Wall Street bombing of 1920.

Meanwhile, my own people, the po' white trash all over the South, many of them still illiterate or close to it, were committing mayhem without anything like a political focus. As has ever been the case with my people, it’s all about number one. I guess you would call us an anarcho-capitalist bunch.

Instead of immigrants or first-generation kids of same, you had the dispossessed whose ancestry went back to convict transportation and indentured servitude. The trash Great Britain took out and dumped on our shores before we kicked them out and they turned to Australia for the same purpose. The vast majority of my own ancestors got here before the Revolution, and the vast majority of them were of this rabble — the descendants not of people coming here in search of religious freedom but rather on order of the Crown — Gallows or Transport.

By the early 20th Century, huge numbers had been able to work themselves out of this class, mostly by moving west, but still a great many remained behind, locked in poverty and ignorance. And by the early days of the 20th Century, some were very violent and extremely dangerous, not least because they now had access to both firearms and easily stealable automobiles. Crime rose to historic levels in the 1920s and much of it in Texas was at the hands of dead-end white sharecroppers' kids.

By the 1920s they were being rendered obsolete by farm technology, so they were pouring into Texas oil boomtowns like Borger and Kilgore and cities like Houston and Dallas, where they were building shantytowns on the fringes, where you had all the usual vices in plenty. Perfect breeding ground for crime, organized and of the Saturday night special variety.

Watch this documentary if you have time; it tells you all you need to know about the old weird feral Dallas that produced Bonnie & Clyde.

Below is the trailer; thanks to reader Edward Burns for providing me with the link to the full documentary.

Poor Prince Albert, seminal influence on Texas music, was just another dead cracker in a long line of same…They were all uprooted from their old support systems and extended families in the fields and piney woods...To make a long story short, Bonnie & Clyde were just the tip of the iceberg and very late to the game. The Great Plains and South were crawling with little roving bands of white robbers who'd kill you in a heartbeat if you stood in their way.

It got so bad the Texas bankers' association put out a $5k bounty on dead bank robbers, the overwhelming majority of whom were white. Not for live ones -- just dead ones. And so of course you had people finding the town drunk or junkie or some convenient minorities, shooting them, and then trying to arrange their bodies in such a way as to make them seem as if caught in the act of robbing a bank. Ranger Frank Hamer — the man who ambushed Bonnie and Clyde, eventually — loathed the bounty system; he investigated more than a few of these killings, and finally, despite a white-hot hatred of the media, Hamer called a press conference to denounce these killings.

So….you’ve got immigrant white folks up north bombing Wall Street and assassinating high-level politicians, and native white folks down south roving as natural-born anarchists…Communism was gaining footholds everywhere. America was on full boil.

And then along comes the war. We win, and then there’s the GI Bill and bada bing, bada boom, the vast majority of this huge White underclass were basically welcomed into the American Dream while Blacks were explicitly not invited. Korea took care of some more of these white folks, Vietnam some more, and even as more Blacks were able to avail themselves of the bill, white America still maintained redlining in the real estate market so that the Blacks would be kept “in their place.”

So what we hear from country singers like George Jones, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Paycheck are the last relics of that age of a genuine white underclass, meaning a group of white people born on the bottom who had it ingrained in them that they would stay on the bottom no matter what they did.

They’d never heard of the American Dream. What dreams they had were subject to the whims of heaven, like a hailstorm destroying a years’ crop. (My great-grandfather’s effort to break the Lomaxes out of this cycle was delayed by a couple of years by a flood that destroyed a wheat crop he’d hoped would spring him from rural Bosque County.)

Meanwhile, I mean, check out “The Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised":

I can't sell my mama short on loving me

I guess that's why she let me go so far

Mama try to stopped me short of stealing

I guess that's why I had to steal that car

She told me not to smoke it

But I did and it took me far away

And I turned out to be

The only hell my mama ever raised

Well, I rolled into Atlanta, stolen tags and almost out of gas

I had to get some money, and lately I'd learned how to get it fast

Those neon lights was calling me and somehow I just had to get downtown

So I reached into the glove box, another liquor store went down

Can you imagine a country singer who came of age in the last 40 years singing such lines so casually and believably? Hell no. Back to the song.

And I sing 'Precious memories', take me back to the good ol' days
Let me hear mama singing, 'Rock of Ages' cleft for me
She tried to turn me on to Jesus, but I turned on to the devil's ways
And I turned out to be the only hell my mama ever raised

When they put them handcuffs on me, Lord how I fought to resist
But they just clamped 'em tighter, 'til that metal bit into my wrist
They took my belt and my billfold, my fingerprints, and the profile of my face
Then they locked away the only hell my mama ever ever raised.

Again, how many of the latest crop — meaning those that came of age since Nam — of country singers have violently resisted arrest for an armed felony? And the thing about it is, Paycheck hadn’t even done that when he recorded this song. YET. That would come later, when he shot a dude in the face in a beer joint argument over a class distinction vis-a-vis the suitability of turtle meat in soup.

Since then, yeah, you had Billy Joe, but who the hell else? The white underclass was made to disappear. At long last the white trash were allowed up and out, leaving only the Black folks behind.

And so now we associate Black people and other minorities now with crime, and there are those stats your Republican friends love to wield, but the fact is, those at or near the bottom of any society tend to commit the most crime, and especially so when there is a very justified sense among those people that they have been cheated, swindled, dealt a shitty hand, and all that less by luck than by deliberate policy and historical fact.

This is the difference between poor Black culture and immigrant culture of every race -- their are cultural pathologies descended from slavery and Jim Crow that cannot be stamped out in a few short years. Enforced generational poverty does not end within one generation.

LBJ's reforms were a good first step but not as sweeping as the GI Bill had been. I really wonder what America would be like today if the GI Bill had been applied and enforced equally to all Americans after WW2. And if we stuck with true integration of public schools for more than about five or ten years. But that's a whole other deal...

But…the prison we’ve constructed at the bottom of our society is designed first and foremost to entrap Black people. Never forget that.