Yes, this is one of my periodic gratuitous Andrew Jackson posts. Steve Clemons, whose blog I quoted in the previous post, has been on a roll lately. Someone just sent him some lyrics from a song Steve Earle. Apparently this was his first exposure to Steve's work: "**** Yeah Americans" Backlash? 11/18/04.
Now, I have to say that Clemons is definitely "unclear on the concept" about what Jacksonianism is all about. See "America **** Yeah!" 11/03/04. He seems to be influenced by the frivolous misinterpretation of Walter Russell Mead about what Jacksonian democracy is. Someday, I need to do a post on the 50 ways in which Mead's version of what "Jacksonian" means is a reactionary, Federalist-Calhounite smear masquerading in Whig "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" fakery.
Will the economic royalists and their spokespeople ever stop trashing Old Hickory? Not likely.
But now that he's discovered Steve Earle, Clemons seems to be tuning in to what real Jacksonian democracy is about. In his 11/18 post, he reproduces the lyrics of Earle's song "Rich Man's War" (a few lines of which which long-time readers of Old Hickory's Weblog have seen quoted before).
Clemons says, "this song sounds like it's tapped into a genuine Jacksonian, ****-Yeah American current." And he's absolutely right. If he gets the album and listent to "F the CC," he'll think even more that Steve Earle represents that viewpoint.
"F the CC" was the song that Steve Earle opened with when I last heard him play, at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival last month in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The chorus is pretty explicit (Dick Cheney has joined Richard Nixon in adding a euphemism for profanity to the English language thanks to his infamous comment on the Senate floor to Patrick Leahy, "Go [Cheney] yourself):
[Cheney] the FCC
[Cheney] the FBI
[Cheney] the CIA
Livin' in the [expletive deleted] USA
I don't want to give the wrong impression. Steve Earle's songs are normally not bristling with profanity. And he's not only a great singer, but one of the most talented popular songwriters alive today.
Steve Earle isn't the only Jacksonian singer around these days, either: Linda Ronstadt, hummin' an outraged tune by Alysa Gardner USA Today 11/17/04.
Don't get her started on the recent presidential election. "People don't realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves," she says. Of Iraq in particular, she adds, "I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqis, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers."
She also comments in this article about that strange alleged incident in Las Vegas:
"No one threw drinks or anything in the concert hall," Ronstadt says. "I don't know what people did in the lobby, but if they behaved like naughty schoolboys, that's not my fault. I doubt it was the first time they had drunk people in Vegas, you know?"
[S]he has no regrets about the incident — "It made me look rather good, I think" ...
But this is not the first time Linda's name has come up in American politics. Back when Jerry Brown was governor of California and preparing for his second run for the White House, Linda was his girlfriend. In those days, it was standard advice for single men running for office that they do something to reassure voters who might be concerned about such things that they weren't gay. Having one's mother appear with them at campaign events was one of the standard techniques. The long-time Democratic Congressman from my home district in Mississippi, Sonny Montgomery, used that approach.
Brown, not surprisingly, had his own approach to this. He took a vacation trip to Africa with Linda - and they were reported to have slept in the same tent. The people that today we would call the Republican Values crowd were outraged, of course. But they weren't going to vote for him anyway. And it reassured others that he wasn't gay.
Although any stigma that attaches to being gay has become more of problem for Republican candidates than for Democrats, it would be silly to pretend that we've moved completely beyond that. I mean, with the Republicans promising to save us from the scourge of gay marriage, how could anyone pretend that? But for whatever reason, as he runs for California Attorney General in the 2006 election, Brown is still reminding voters that he has what by California standards is a downright conservative lifestyle.
A couple of years ago, he moved out of his warehouse commune with the organic garden on top and moved in with the current love of his life, Anne Gust, an executive with The Gap. At his campaign Web site JerryBrown.org, he features an article about her: The woman in Jerry Brown's life by Peggy Stinnett Oakland Tribune 06/09/04.
Brown, at 65, has some years up on Gust. "I'm twenty years younger," she says. I noticed she didn't say he was 20 years older. Obviously, it is not a problem.
Neither Jerry nor Anne has been married before.
So will there be a wedding in the future? I asked.
Her answer: "Who knows?"
One of the songs on Linda Ronstadt's new album is "Never Will I Marry."
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