I teach a college course called United States History Since 1945. It’s a fun class because the students and I get to reflect on U.S. social, political, economic, and military history of the last seventy odd years. It’s one of those classes where I can show the hilarious episode of I Love Lucy called “Job Switching,” where Lucy and Ethel find work in a candy factory while Ricky and Fred stay home and do household chores. The 1950s sitcom is a perfect segue into a discussion about changing gender roles after World War II.
The class isn’t always fun and games, however. Students must also ponder serious moral and ethical questions such as whether dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary. I don’t allow them to revel in self-congratulatory revisionism and abstract compassion for Japanese suffering. (After all, it’s easy for them to say they’re against the bombings now, nearly a century later.) I expect them to set aside their historical presentism and embrace the reality President Harry S. Truman confronted in the mother of all “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” scenarios in July and August of 1945.
I give an exam question that requires them to adopt the persona of President Truman. They are to approach the atomic bomb decision as Truman did, only learning the details of the Manhattan Project’s purpose after FDR’s death in April of 1945. I ask that they consider the bloody battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa that occurred in early and mid-1945 as a small indicator of what might come to pass. I suggest they ponder the fate of the crew of the USS Indianapolis, many of whom were eaten by sharks, when a Japanese torpedo sank the vessel after it delivered the A-bombs to Tinian just weeks before the fateful day. I tell them to look around at their fellow classmates and imagine them as front-line U.S soldiers whom they may order into battle, who stand a good chance of dying gruesome deaths in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. They must weigh just how many of these lives they are willing to risk to avoid dropping the bombs. I challenge them to consider conflicting viewpoints and casualty estimates (some between 250,000 to 500,000) coming from military and policy experts who argued for and against using the bombs. I stress that no matter what they do, tens of thousands of human beings will die.
In this role-playing exercise, most students believe that as the commander-in-chief of the United States, their first duty is to their fellow citizens they swore an oath to lead. They usually decide, just as President Truman did, that they will give the order for Colonel Paul Tibbets to climb aboard the Enola Gay and deliver his payload.
When we get to the unit on the 1960s, I’ve noted that many students romanticize the counter-culture movement and feel an affinity for the college students who protested the Vietnam War. Many are proud that students like themselves opposed the war. They also love the popular music of that era, songs like “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield and “All You Need is Love” by those lads from across the pond.
I remind students that while the anti-war demonstrators got a lot of attention, many more young people outside major colleges and universities faced (and even embraced) a different reality. The young men who didn’t burn their draft cards and the young women who served as nurses and support staff in Vietnam also had a point of view worth considering as well. We usually discuss how much of the debate over Vietnam broke down along class lines. Kids going to college tended to oppose the war. Working-class kids’ reaction was less anti-war/establishment, but they, too, felt conflicted about the reality they were living.
To contrast with the pop music of the 1960s, I play students a few country songs from the era, such as Merle Haggard’s “Fightin’ Side of Me” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. The students enjoy reflecting on these perspectives that represent the viewpoints of other Americans, who were sometimes patriotic but not universally certain the government was doing the right thing. In particular, in “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” the narrator, paralyzed in combat, faces the infidelity of the woman in his life once he comes home from fighting a war he doesn’t understand. He laments:
It wasn’t me who started that old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore
And yes it’s true that I’m not the man I used to be
Oh Ruby, I still need some company.
After they listen to the song, students seem to have a more nuanced perspective on Vietnam. They conclude it’s easy to be against war. Who isn’t? But even those who supported the war (or went reluctantly) had complex reasons for doing so. They weren’t just blindly following orders. They were idealistic themselves, believing in America. Many (at least initially) trusted that their leaders were trying to help the people in South Vietnam. As “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” emphasizes, their allegiance had more serious and far-reaching consequences for them than the average Columbia war protestors’ opposition did.
These days, while celebrities and campus feminists don pink “pussy” hats and decry “toxic masculinity,” another country artist articulates the counter perspective of ordinary Americans. Singer and songwriter Eric Church captures their reality in many of his songs, most notably last year’s hit “Round Here Buzz.” The song and its accompanying video present the story of a young man left behind in his hometown after his high-school sweetheart moves away to chase her dreams of a fulfilling career “where the high risers rise.” Church’s song expresses the sentiments of many contemporary young men and women. Despite hang-wringing over “glass ceilings” and out-of-control misogyny, it’s actually women who are finding opportunities beyond their small towns and leaving behind the young men they grew up with. In contrast, these young men are finding fewer paths to success. Unfortunately, in many instances, neither young men nor young women are finding contentment.
The song’s opening lines set the scene as the narrator explains how he is, quite literally, going nowhere.
Another Friday night, there’s a line of cars leavin’
Home team’s got an out-of-towner.
Me, I’m sitting on the hood of mine drinkin’
Just a parking lot down-and-outer.
It’s not only the high school football team that’s left town. The speaker’s high school girlfriend, who “caught that out-there buzz,” has gone elsewhere. The narrator, missing his young love, simply drinks until he has a “round here buzz.”
Keep puttin’ ‘em down here
‘nother round here
till my down goes up.
Ironically, the companion video suggests that the narrator’s former girlfriend may also be feeling dissatisfied with her life as a corporate mover-and-shaker. The scene shifts back and forth between the past and present, the couple’s happy youth together and their empty adult lives. Instead of enjoying her success, “Julie,” the girlfriend, is living alone in Los Angeles, feeling just as sad and lonely as he is. However, he’s sitting in his hometown bar, thinking that her life must be more satisfactory than his.
Never had big city eyes, and I’ve never been east of Dallas.
Got no idea where you are now.
If you ever got that penthouse palace.
No, Scotty’s ain’t got no vibe
Got no gas in his neon light
But he’s got two-for-one till two tonight.
Eric Church’s music is reminiscent of some of Bruce Springseen’s best songs about the working class from his Born in the U.S.A album. Springsteen’s grammy-winning record hit the charts in 1984, the summer when Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”-themed presidential campaign was kicking into overdrive. In 1984, Reagan appealed to working class Americans trying to forget the economic hard times of the 1970s and heal the scars left after Vietnam.
Over thirty years ago when Born in the USA hit the charts, many working class men listened to the Boss to reflect on the hardships of the past, but they also gained confidence from the words of Ronald Reagan, who had proclaimed four years earlier that America was back on top. In contrast, Eric Church’s music often focuses on the children of the 1970s, too young to understand all the national angst over Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis. Church expresses nostalgia about happier, more innocent times–“the summer before the real-world started”–when young male friends attend a stock car race together, as expressed in his song “Talladega.” Still, like Springsteen’s songs appealed to late Baby Boomers in the 1970s and 1980s, Church’s music speaks to a new generation of young men from “flyover country” who’ve been maligned and caricatured by the country’s elites. These are the same men who responded favorably to the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan of a New York billionaire running for president, a man who made them believe the country still values and respects them.
Eric Church’s music also gives a new generation of blue and white collar women something to think about. Females my age and younger owe a great deal to feminism for the economic and professional parity with men we now enjoy. Yet the feminist movement has lost its way because it routinely denigrates and broad-brushes men with talk of misogyny, sexism, and hyperbole over the the so-called “rape culture.” Despite complaints about pay gaps and glass ceilings, women graduate from high school and college in greater numbers than men. Women dominate many white-collar professions like education and are making serious inroads in the corporate arena.
Yet it’s still predominantly men who do the most dangerous jobs in America, like building roads and skyscrapers and working on oil rigs. It’s these industries that make the U.S. the most successful and prosperous nation in the world, so it’s disconcerting to see men and women pitted against each other so often in elite circles. Christina Hoff Sommers, one of my favorite equity feminists, loves to use a quote she once heard: “Neither side will ever win the battle of the sexes. Too much fraternizing with the enemy.” Most ordinary women get this, just as the narrator’s ex-girlfriend does in “Round Here Buzz.” A professional career isn’t that thrilling if there’s no one to share success with.
As I watch my young students grapple with all the crises of their age–North Korea, immigration, gender and class strife–I hope they learn to look at the world they inhabit with a healthy balance of idealism and rationalism. I also hope they look to art and music of all kinds to explore the world from many perspectives. Moreover, the Academic Redneck hopes they don’t neglect to consider the opinions of their brethren in flyover country–as expressed in country music–and reject the impulse to view their fellow citizens as “deplorable” and unworthy of concern.
Photo credit: MusicRow
