In Praise of Paisley, New Yorker

I don’t know why the New Yorker is suddenly doing anthropological research on red-state America … but as this week’s profile of Brad Paisley reveals, it’s not bad research.
Staff writer Kelefa Sanneh, who once penned reviews for the New York Times, contributes a thoughtful piece on Paisley, whom the author describes as “by some counts, the best-selling singer in American history.”
Maybe it’s the persistent popularity of red-state institutions like country music and NASCAR (racetrack star Danica Patrick was also the subject of a recent New Yorker profile) that makes them so intriguing to the magazine staff … none of whom, presumably, would ask their colleagues, “Hey, did you see the ACM’s last night?” or, “Did you watch the Daytona 500?”
Which is what makes it so welcome when the magazine uses its resources to examine aspects of American pop culture that the intelligentsia often ignores. The magazine ventures outside its traditional world of sipping lattes at Starbucks, browsing Proust at the Strand and watching Audrey Hepburn at Film Forum. The results make for entertaining prose. Paisley, Sanneh reveals, disdains agave syrup and venerates Andy Griffith, whose show’s “balance of wry humor and old-fashioned decency has become a touchstone for (Paisley’s) life, and for his career,” Sanneh writes.
When Sanneh goes beyond the external details, however, the results are intriguing. Sanneh has chosen a good subject to reveal the complexity of country music today. Paisley occasionally sings about topics that both blue-state and red-state audiences might find interesting. For instance, his song “American Saturday Night” evokes terms incorporated from other countries to show us how the melting pot works (“Spanish moss, Italian ice, French kissing in the moonlight … Just another American Saturday Night.”) It’s hard to imagine Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer groovin’ to that song.
Sanneh finds Paisley similarly thoughtful on the issue of race. While the author claims that country music, while “not strictly rural music” and “not strictly Southern … remains white music, by and for white people,” this is challenged by Paisley’s song “Welcome to the Future,” which honors the work of advocates for equality such as Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and denounces the Ku Klux Klan for its racial-intimidation tactics. Sanneh notes that African-American Darius Rucker is now a country star, and observes that Tim McGraw evokes “a multiracial form of Southern pride” in his song “Southern Voice,” which also mentions Parks and Dr. King.
Songs such as “American Saturday Night” and “Welcome to the Future” helped endear Paisley to yours truly. When first listening to him on WKLB-FM (102.5) in the Boston area, I found little to distinguish one of his songs from another. Toby Keith had his brash conservative politics (even if I disagreed with them, I found them entertaining), Garth Brooks had his lyricism, Martina McBride mixed toughness with sensitivity. It was only when Paisley started doing the same thing the New Yorker did -- exploring the wider story of America -- that he began appealing to me.
So let’s appreciate Paisley as he is: an entertaining, sometimes thoughtful guy who makes good music. And let’s appreciate Sanneh and the New Yorker for a thoughtful profile.

'Johnny Baseball' studies Red Sox sins, successes

Saturday afternoon, my muse and I went to the American Repertory Theater in Brattle Square, Cambridge, to see "Johnny Baseball," the ART's attempt to combine Boston baseball with Broadway showtunes ... and a social conscience, too. Based on the entertaining and thought-provoking show that followed, I would say the ART succeeded in its effort.
If you’re a Boston Red Sox fan, chances are you know that the club went a remarkable 86 years between World Series championships -- from 1918 to 2004 -- a dry spell attributed by some to owner Harry Frazee sending Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920. The lyrics of “Johnny Baseball” ask us whether the Curse was rooted in something more heinous.
The Red Sox were the last major-league team to integrate -- in 1959, over a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. They also passed up chances to integrate in 1945 (when Robinson participated in a dubious tryout for the Sox) and in later years, when future star Willie Mays played on a Boston minor-league team but was not picked up by the big club. This, “Johnny Baseball” argues, and not getting rid of Ruth, is the true source of shame for the Sox.
The play makes its case in the story of its three main characters: Johnny O’Brien, a white fictional Sox pitcher in the late nineteen-teens; Daisy Wyatt, an African-American nightclub singer; and Tim Wyatt O’Brien, their African-American son. All three characters experience the sting of racism in Boston -- most poignantly when Tim, a promising minor-league pitcher, and Mays participate in a sham tryout for the Red Sox … and Johnny shows his frustration at the team’s racism by punching GM Joe Cronin, who subsequently says that Tim will never pitch in the big leagues. This leads Tim to disown his father and place a curse on the Sox.
This revisiting of history, and the subsequent redemption for both Tim and the Sox, help us see America’s game of baseball as both a symptom of and cure for America’s sin of racism. By 2004, as a young Fenway fan tells an older Tim, the Sox are a team that reflects the diversity of the United States, with players who are white, Latin American and African-American. It is time to lift the Curse … which, as we all know, the Sox did that year.
History, of course, is much more nuanced. Although the Sox were the last to integrate, once they did, fans soon became familiar with a diverse constellation of stars, such as the Cuban pitcher Luis Tiant and the African-American right fielder Jim Rice in the 1970s. Yes, racial problems persisted, such as in the Winter Haven, Fla., spring training troubles, but the increasing diversification of their roster and coaching staff (Rice became a hitting coach after his playing days ended) shows that the Sox did try, however imperfectly, to redeem the sins of their prejudiced past.
We should also ask whether baseball’s present is as upbeat as the finale of the musical. Members of the media have noted a declining African-American participation in baseball in general, not only on the Red Sox. It would be sad to see the efforts of the Robinsons and Rices go in vain. And yet on this year’s Sox, the team has seen several African-American players play notable roles, such as Darnell McDonald and Bill Hall. In baseball, as well as on stage, the hard work of redemption and reconciliation evoked by “Johnny Baseball” continues.

A Modern-Day Prisoner’s Dilemma

It is no surprise that the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Concord is located near a rotary. For inmates nationwide, incarceration is a loop whose effects they may never escape. A Pew study in 2008 reported “about half of released inmates returning to jail or prison within three years.” This high recidivism rate means more tax dollars will get “locked up” in the prison-industrial complex and our “houses of correction” will not offer any long-term correction.
Recently, I heard several powerful voices speak on behalf of prison reform. Ohio State legal expert Michelle Alexander discussed the issue as it pertains to race relations (her book is titled The New Jim Crow) on Tavis Smiley’s radio program while, ironically, I was in a car driving past MCI-Concord (it may have been a rebroadcast). This week, the “World” TV station broadcast a program about the Dhamma Brothers, inmates at a violent Alabama prison who developed positive behavioral changes after learning Vipassana meditation techniques.
In Alexander’s critique of the American criminal justice system, the concern that resonated most with yours truly is that many criminals are disenfranchised -- temporarily while in jail (which I can understand) or permanently. In 2006, Time magazine reported, “Forty-eight states prohibit current inmates from voting, 36 keep parolees from the polls, 31 exclude probationers, and only two — Vermont and Maine — allow inmates to vote.” The magazine noted that “the impact of these laws still falls disproportionately on poor, minority males.” Permanent exclusion from a public practice of democracy amounts to “piling on” for people who have already done their time.
The Dhamma Brothers film is a way to reach people who may never see get out of prison, and rightly so, since their crimes are heinous. Still, I don’t see why the horrible crimes of inmates should mean that their prisons become a Hobbesian state of anarchy. If meditation teachers want to teach them to be peaceable, it would result in a smoother flow of life in prison, and less stress for the inmates and those who guard them.
Prison reform is a dicey issue for the intelligentsia, whose infatuation with the topic often (a) ignores the anguish of prisoners’ victims and (b) brings further tragedies. (Jack Henry Abbott and former Concord inmate, now incarcerated in Maryland, Willie Horton, for example.) Yet there is a difference between naïve optimism for inmates and a more hardheaded hope … adopting time-tested meditation techniques in an unorthodox setting and restoring time-honored rights to those who leave that setting.

Barack, Berlin and the End of Racism?

Berlin Wall Cartoon, originally uploaded by rbtenorio.

Twenty years ago, Communism crumbled with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The intellectual Frank Fukuyama called the fall of Communism “the end of history.” The Devil compares the historical moment of 1989 with that of 2008, when Barack Obama won the presidential election. Does the election of the first African-American president mean the end of racism in the US? Read more in the latest episode of “The Devil Made Me Blog It” – and feel free to weigh in on the debate!