When It All Unravels
We live in a nation that’s divided. It’s as if there are parallel realities between two different, disparate camps of Americans. For simplification purposes, I’ll make the line of demarcation binary to a fault: in one camp, the followers of this president think (know?) he is an amazing leader. A man who does what he says, and damnation to anyone who opposes him.
In the other camp, many of these people feel a visceral dislike and even hatred toward Trump. I would be in that group. My late son, Mark, also resided there.
Mark’s final video on his final walk drew a line in the sand in terms of what he thought about a man who would be inaugurated the next day, Mark’s last day on planet earth. Here are descriptors provided by Mark of our 45th president.
Racist
Xenophobic
Ableist
Transphobic
Climate-denier
Gun nut
Hates women
He physically abuses women
He hates minorities
All he wants to do is profit
In some of Mark’s final words, he states,
“If you support this man, you do not support human life on this planet…plain and simple: you do not support the future of Earth as a planet.”
He then utters this as his final video fades out:
“Your ignorance is killing people!”
The president’s state of the union speech was filled with his usual lies and half-truths. Trump as a man claims credit for anything he can, while his followers never bother to fact-check his delusional rants.
Patterson Hood grew up in Alabama in the days of George Wallace’s reign. Wallace, the aggrieved governor of a state in the heart of Dixie, became famous for his racist ways and his stands against the federal government. He was racist long before it became chic among Republicans to hate people of color.
Hood’s band, the Drive-by Truckers, have spent the past 25 years making music filled with stories about the South. It’s not the South that I learned about as someone who grew up in the North. The band’s song, the “Three Great Alabama Icons,” from the band’s epic Southern Rock Opera, is one of the best eight-minute history lessons you’ll ever come across. For me, Hood made me curious to learn more of what the South is really about. I dug into other works by historians like Dan Carter and C. Vann Woodard, to name but two. From this, I learned about the “duality of the southern thing.”
The band just released a brand new record. It’s not intended to be pretty, or uplifting. It’s stark and honest about the state of the nation we’re living in. Not dressed-up to be a commercial for re-election (which is basically what Trump rambling mess of a speech was, last night), The Unraveling tells a tale about a country that’s been unwinding from the spool for awhile now. Only the most foolish of deniers would see our nation as a great place. But Americans are as adept at turning from the truth as any people on the planet.
Elizabeth Nelson is a talented writer who is also a musician and member of The Paranoid Style, a DC-based rock outfit that churns out honest music in a similar vein (in terms of thematic content) as the DBT does. It’s fitting that she chose to write this review and it’s well worth the effort required to read it.
The new record by the Drive-by Truckers, “The Unraveling”
I don’t know what the next nine months will deliver relative to the run-up to the 2020 election. I have no choice but to align with the Democrats, where I’ve hitched my own leftist wagon because I refuse to associate with the party of hate, which is what the Republican Party has become among many other things. Unfortunately, they seem incapable of mustering anything that makes me overly optimistic about countering another four years of hate and division courtesy of the Orange Trumpster.
But, I’ve somehow survived losing my son, abandonment by my family of origin, and coming really close to leaving this planet. Four more fucking years of Trump pales in comparison to that.
