Americaaaagh

Anyhow, I love you

It’s tempting right now to chant Death to America! but I’m not being bombed, decapitated or soaked in black acid rain so it would be futile and self-indulgent and I try and save those sentiments for my private life. And it was in fact an American children’s television host Fred Rogers who tried to console the little ones with the notion that in times of crisis, look for the helpers. It’s just that this sentiment wears thin when the helpers are parents extracting their children’s limbs from the rubble, and the rubble isn’t from an Act of God like an earthquake but the actions of psychotic men. Or when the helpers are shot in the back for trying to protect a woman being attacked as she slips on some ice while ICE agents force her to the ground.

I like it when words are double freighted but there is something about meme culture that is so contagious it has infected the way we talk about the worst things. You are not suicidal you are ‘sui’. Apparently you can farm a person’s aura now and pleasure has been replaced by dopamine hits as if love is a drug that’s wrong to score.

Yeats wrote that the center cannot hold as the sphinx came to life and slouched towards Bethlehem and Joan Didion riffed on him when she explained Californian hippies in her ice cool book of essays. Oppenheimer realised he was a destroyer of worlds with the creation of the atomic bomb and channeled an ancient hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita as he pompously quoted Vishnu’s words in an interview.

I’ve been reduced to saying, bro, this shit is fucked. It is what it isn’t, if that makes sense? The intertextual has been replaced with texts from friends and family that people can’t bring themselves to answer. Yet, people have enough energy to tell a stranger online that they hope they will die in a grease fire. Not just because of politics but while quibbling over the correct order of putting milk in your tea—when it’s boiling the water first, before the milk, obviously, but most of us don’t even own a hill to die on. It’s important to tell jokes in dark times but like the debate about putting pineapple on pizza that used to dominate Twitter it’s not just performative it is very stale. It’s time to get serious again. I think life has more meaning when it’s double. Not just the tiger, but its shadow stalking around the cage. Plus, you should really text back your Mum.

I wish the United States of America was less united, or that the illusion of the republic could be shattered like a crystal tumbler because the people are crazy with the kool-aid we’re being forced to drink. See, even the kool-aid metaphor is stale. And the people of Minnesota do seem very nice. So nice it’s a trope about their character, and they do tend to vote blue no matter what snake oil is being sold to them. And it’s tempting to say the red states are full of demons pouring gasoline down their throats but it’s not that simple. If only it was. And the only reason people like me can pontificate about the nature of America from a great distance is because of their cultural and imperial reign over the rest of the world. The perverse part is that for all their interference, massacres and extractive practices they know almost nothing about us.

I’ve always had ridiculous dope-fuelled dreams, seedless mangoes was one of them. Another was to have a Big Cat rescue reserve in Texas. This was long before the age of Tiger King and Covid. When I watched the former to distract from the latter I realised that wanting to contain big game is a sign that you are either a meglomaniac or a sexual predator—someone capable of killing your husband. Now I know that only the latter is true. For me, at least. But my fascination with the southern states remains, probably more so now that I’ve realised I’ll never get to test the shag carpets of Graceland. Not in protest, I’m just too scared to go. Given the state of it.

Nostalgia is deadly but then so is life. I remember one my of teenage exe’s mothers had a Ralph Hotere print in the hallway that was full of angry black scribbles and the text screamed ‘Americaaaaagh”. All the nice middle class homes in Dunedin I visited as a teenager had either a Hotere or a Marilyn Webb above the mantlepiece because they chose to live and work here. Like America, we’re not immune from cultural clichés in Dunedin, and we used to have little enclaves where artists could live cheaply. Which brings me, finally, to my actual subject which is this Guy Clark documentary I rewatched last week to distract myself from feeling hopeless and wanting to chant Death to Americaaagh…

Guy Clark grew up in West Texas. I won’t go into his back story too much because I want you to watch this for yourself, and because it goes against the grain of what we might expect a cowboy to be like. Guy Clark was part of the soundtrack to my childhood, my Mum has immaculate taste in music, and her collection of alt-country filled up my ears and eventually my heart. It was Nanci Griffith, Dave Olney, John Prine, Paul Burch, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou, Iris Dement and eventually the great Americana pretender Gillian Welch and Ryan Adams when he was still good and his creepiness was not fully known to the world. Mum isn’t pretentious either, she had all The Judds albums and loved Dolly Parton, before it was fashionable and ironic to state this out loud. What all these songwriters have in common is that the storytelling is so rich. The vibes aren’t limited to just the acoustic feel but also the tale. And that is a good thing. Guy did not like drums to get in the way of his lyrics, which is why he never made it big in Nashville, although people did finally catch up with his buzz when he won a Grammy.

Guy crafted guitars and ran an artistic salon in Austin, Texas way before it was cool. Steve Young, Terry Allen, a young handsome(!) Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell would show up and drink and stay late and get out their guitars and try to out write, out sing and out play each other. In a collegial way. And of course, there was his best friend Townes Van Zandt and the love of his life Susanna, who also wrote a hit for Emmylou, when she wasn’t painting and being mysterious and beautiful. Like any muse she was really her own woman, and she could outdrink the men. Townes and Susanna were also in love and she knew he was dead from the drinking that destroyed him when he failed her in their daily ritual—a breakfast phone call from whatever dive he’d managed to wake up in. After he died she complained of a bad back and Susanna took to her bed and lived there for fifteen years, smoking and popping percocet. It probably goes without saying that she is my idol. A dangerous one. Guy indulged her and there was no Townes there to tease him when his lyrics verged on being commercial like he did when Guy wrote “Desperados Waiting for a Train”. Guy had written the song for Jack, a drifter who attached himself to the grandmother who helped raise Guy from the small hotel she ran, taking him everywhere in his pick up. Jack was the kind of mythic figure Trump was invoking when he grifted off the idea you could make America great again. A place that never existed except in people’s minds.

After Guy Clark died just months before Trump was first ‘elected’ in 2016 his friend Terry Allen made a sculpture of a crow to honour him. It was partly constructed out of Guy’s ashes. Maybe America does need to die, but only so the crow can live, or at least be reborn again.

I think I might be becoming a buddhist. Send help. Or vanilla wafers.