Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan (2020)

 

“The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next for of the future.”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

1. 

Adorno’s well known essay “Late Style in Beethoven” finds common ground with Giles Deleuze’s last essay “Immanence: A Life.” Both attempt to describe a state of being outside the subjective individual expression (both grounded in the artwork: for Adorno Beethoven, for Deleuze Dickens), while retaining something like the singularity of expression. Two passages from each will suffice:

 “Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself. But this subjectivity, as mortal, and in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth.” (Adorno 566)

He continues, with specific reference to Goethe’s Faust II and Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre, “no longer, at this point, an expression of the solitary I, but of the mythical nature of the created being and its fall, whose steps the late works strike symbolically as if in the momentary pauses of their descent.” (566 emphasis mine)

In proximity, if not in agreement, Deleuze’s essay uses Dickens to express what he means by a life as an “index of the transcendental: 

 “The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what comes to pass […] a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things made it good or bad.” (Deleuze 387).

As if almost anticipating where they will disagree, namely the “descent” of the “created being and its fall” that leads unto death for Adorno, Deleuze writes as if he wishes the ethos of the “late work’s” emptying of subjectivity in the work of art could be experienced regularly in art and life:
 

“But a life should not have to be enclosed in the simple moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects” (Deleuze 387)

If we take the two ideas together, beyond good and evil and Adorno and Deleuze’s teacher Nietzsche might say, then the work of art is the space wherein death can be allegorized without having to actually confront universal death, and the incarnation of life through events evaluated as either “good” or “evil.” It can refocus itself on a life while also acknowledging that the descent represented within that artwork by the figure of death is merely one virtually to reflect a life among many. The great reversal is, however, for the thinker Deleuze, it is his own confrontation of life’s “weakness and suffering” that engenders the reflection upon the transcendental field of “a life.” A life contains multitudes.

2.

Bob Dylan’s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, begins with the song “I Contain Multitudes.” He released it a week after “Murder Most Foul” and deep into the pandemic.  The title is a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” There are Blake and Poe references in there as well. Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for literature, so he either needs to prove his literary knowledge, or wants to play with his audience’s expectations for such things. But the song begins with the following couplet:

“Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, too/ The flowers are dyin' like all things do”

As Dylan has gotten older, his lyrics have become much less opaque. One of the ways one could demarcate “late” Dylan from “early” Dylan would be a continued reliance on plain language rather than surreal descriptions for his lyrics. Songs like “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” “Isis,” and “Changing of the Guards” gave way to the simple proselytizing of “Pressing On,” “Serve Somebody” and “Every Grain of Sand.” This has been mitigated by his post-Christian albums with secular versions of such homilies such as “Dignity,” “Most of the Time,” and  “To Bring You My Love,” the last of which is so homely that even Adele herself turned it into a hit. This isn’t to say that Dylan hasn’t always been able to bend his voice to universal truths about love, justice and time, its that he always reserved part of his talent for a lyrical modernism that made him the great inheritor of the American poetic tradition from Whitman to Ginsburg (his fellow rolling god of thunder).

Interlude (My baby/ he wrote me a letter): 

 
While writing this essay on Dylan’s new album, a letter was published in Harper’s Magazine titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Much has been written about the letter and, dear lord, I really don’t want to spend any time discussing its dumb argument. I’ll let the opening paragraph speak for itself:

 
"Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides."

There is so much that I could say about that paragraph but I will offer two reflections. One, the “But this need…” sentence and what comes after is one example of the violence of this letter. What comes before it, a laundry list of social institutions that are in need of reform, justice and equality, would be a task, were it actually implemented, so great that it would occupy us as humans for a long, long while. Yet this collection of “intellectuals” is so dismissive of these protests and calls for change, that they present these lists of demands as if they are so many tasks to be fulfilled by sub-contracted workers before the research reports owed deans are unconscionably late.

 Second, and perhaps the more serious one for pesky things like history, the “illiberalism” which these intellectuals see as somehow equivalent to the “resistance” hardening into “dogma and coercion” are in no way equivalent, and to make them so is the second example of this letter’s violence. As I write this, unmarked vehicles manned by hybrid soldier/police are “Pinochetting” people off the streets where I live in Portland, Oregon. Rather than letting the signatories define what illiberalism is, I’ll let Christopher Browning, historian of Holocaust, define illiberalism: 

"We are at a point now in the United States with Donald Trump where democracy is beleaguered. But it is in the form of a new kind of authoritarianism, what I call ‘illiberal democracy,’ where the whole system does not need to be changed entirely. You don't need a vast army of secret police. You don't need concentration camps. You don't need to lock up all your opponents. Now, in America or other liberal democracies, if an enemy of democracy or a would-be authoritarian manages to tweak the electoral system, infiltrate and stock the judiciary, control information and pollute the public discourse against truth -- using language such as "fake news" -- people basically lose faith. The fig leaf of democratic appearance is preserved. Elections are held but the opponents have no chance of winning. If the standard threshold for an assault on democracy and authoritarianism is set at Adolf Hitler then we are all failing to see how much damage can be done to democracy without getting anywhere near that level. Our guard is lowered because in so many ways Trump isn't anything like Hitler. Yet that does not mean there is not a clear and present danger of another sort to American democracy."

The morons parroting their own idiolect of grievance in this open letter somehow minimize both the uprisings around the country at the murder of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and so many other victims of institutional racist violence, as well as the true resistance to Trump’s illiberalism among those of us who understand how history repeats itself. 

Prior to this week I would have numbered Greil Marcus, one of the signatories of the above letter, as an ally in understanding the seriousness of this moment with regard to both the uprisings as well as the historical echoes of fascism because he’s been writing about race and those historical echoes all my life. As I write this, I’m staring at my copy of In the Fascist’s Bathroom, a collections of essays with the overarching theme that in the 1980s the Regan and Thatcher regimes were the modern day incarnation of fascism. If the person who admired that book way back when had been shown the events of 2020 and asked whether Marcus or Bob Dylan, arguably the figure Marcus has written about the most, would have understood what is at stake, my response would have been: “well, what can you expect from Dylan? He will be 79 years old in 2020 after all.” Yet, Dylan seems to be having his most relevant year in decades. 

My friend Kate, who is in her mid-30s, had, prior to 2020, never intentionally heard a Bob Dylan song. I’m sure, like everyone in my general age group who has listened to a radio before, she has passively heard part of or all of a Bob Dylan song before. However, in terms of a Bob Dylan song she sat down and listened to all the way through, “Murder Most Foul” was the first one and I think that’s wild, of course. She really liked it. Her first response was “fuck our government.” It’s heartening to know that the dude who wrote “Masters of War” so many years ago can solicit that kind of response first time out. From the little evidence that has been released by the streaming services, my friend isn’t the only person for whom “Murder Most Foul” might be their first exposure to Dylan: it was the most streamed song the week it was released.     

But that wasn’t the only thing: Dylan gave a significant and rare interview to the New York Times ahead of his album’s release and, before the interview itself, the first comment from Dylan the reader encounters concerns George Floyd: “It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.” For some reason that I can’t fully articulate, that simple statement from Dylan regarding Floyd’s torture and murder most foul, is worth all of the aggrieved letters that have been, are being and could ever be written.

3.

 Rough and Rowdy Ways follows a formal pattern in Dylan albums regarded as “statements” insofar as it is a double record (like Blonde on Blonde, Time Out of Mind and, yes, Self-Portrait), containing a side-long track (like the first two double records mentioned). Rough and Rowdy Ways is a good to great Dylan record, not as good as his other double albums (yes, including Self-Portrait). If Blonde On Blonde presented Dylan as the newest of the new in 1966 and Time Out of Mind presented him as a swamp ghost from a 1950s C&W AM station picked up late at night, then Rough and Rowdy Ways sounds like a ghost having made peace with incorporeality, settling in to whatever the (after) life has planned. The popularity of Dylan at the moment on Spotify among people who were not even born when Dylan first became old suggests that this stance, inscrutable but certainly not unapproachable, demonstrates Dylan’s continuing canny ability to understand how to shape his image at every moment.

He also has a canny ability—or at least the younger people who are employed to run his release schedules and social media presence on platforms like Spotify—to release a new album in 2020: trickle out three tracks before releasing the whole thing at a later date. “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” were the important early releases but it’s the third, “False Prophet” that’s the best of the three. What better opening couplet for life in 2020:

 
Another day that don't end
Another ship goin' out
Another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt

But it’s the music that I love: the kind of throw away sloppy blues rock stomp that he’s always seemingly populated his albums, and has always been the highlight of his live performances. They’ve always been the songs that slip between the cracks of his statement songs, but you can’t help but feel that they’re the songs he loves writing and performing, often hiding his most profound truths. “False Prophet” is about that very beyond death state that snakes through late work and the singularity of life that art like Dylan’s is always trying to express, the very heimish unheimlich that only the wandering ghost somewhat at home finally can sing to you with raspy voice:

You don't know me, darlin'
You never would guess
I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest

And then later on:

Can't remember, when I was born
And I forgot when I died

Neither born nor dead, Dylan inhabits the space of Delueze’s a life in his art: empathetic, but singular, living beyond the ascent and descent of life as it is lived in the world of murders (JFK and George Floyd) most foul.

As great as “False Prophet” is, it’s not the best song on the record. For me, that’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” His late in life love songs have been remarkable. If as a young man Dylan the artist sings “I Want You” then Dylan the old man understands that such desire cannot be fulfilled and just becomes unproductively stupid the older the artist gets (just ask “those bad boys from England the Rolling Stones”). The young artist might understand this as well, which is why Blonde On Blonde’s answer song to “I Want You” is “Just Like a Woman”—if she doesn’t want you, fuck her, break her like a little girl, if she doesn’t break first.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” depending on Dylan’s continued productivity, might be the final chapter in the great theme of Dylan’s work: desire. It, more than political injustice or, relatedly, the law of this world and justice in the next, seems to be the career-long lyrical concern of his: he entitled a goddamn album after it. Desire for the younger Dylan suggests a sacrifice to an other: whether the submission of one lover to another (the early love songs), submission to desire itself (divorce and after), and submission to the dark God of faith (Dylan: 1979-1981).  It would seem that giving oneself up to another would be both the larger theme and ultimate final statement for Dylan on desire. Yet, he’s made up his mind to do it. No longer imposing his desire and longing on the world, and taking his revenge when it does not follow, Dylan, ghostly apparition that he is, is content to finally, at the end, give himself to you. 

This doesn’t mean he isn’t a false prophet, or so multitudinous that he couldn’t be anybody giving himself to you. It means that love—the gospel the narrator of the song would preach were he a “snow white dove”—means giving up the desire to possess another but also giving up one’s ego to something or someone else. This emptying out of the subjective agency to shape the world after one’s desire is the final form Dylan’s music and lyrics are taking. It is the mark of late work but not because the subject has been finally done in by the descent of mortal sin and death, but because he understands that his work has been moving to a place wherein the subject becomes universal in its rejection of individualism, only reflected in the multitude voices of death and desire in the songs themselves.  

"Don't Worry About the Government," Talking Heads (1977)

 
1.

The group Talking Heads have a song on their first album entitled “Don’t Worry About the Government.” It’s sung from the perspective of a governmental employee who describes enjoying his rather mundane life, while imploring both the listener and the various people in his life not to worry about him. At the end of the song, as my friend Tom pointed out a long time ago, the lyric changes from “don’t you worry about me” to “it wouldn’t worry about me.” The “it” here is the government itself—don’t worry about the government because “it” doesn’t worry about you.

During the first lockdown of the pandemic, I listened to an episode of the podcast Political Beats about Talking Heads’ catalogue. When they discussed the first record one of the hosts, all conservative btw (this is a podcast produced by The New Republic), pointed out that the lyrics to “Don’t Worry About the Government” anticipated the Regan era pretty well (he meant this as a compliment to Byrne and the band).

It’s pretty morbid positively citing the lyrics “it wouldn’t worry about me” in the middle of a public health emergency in which, precisely, the federal government didn’t worry about us and we have hundreds of thousands of deaths to show for it. But this is the logical conclusion of viewing the lyrics to “Don’t Worry About the Government” in a positive way: neutralizing the government so that neither you nor “it” has to worry about the government or you respectively, means that the government cannot worry about you precisely when it ought to. And, since the relationship is reciprocal, it’s easier for a population to stop worrying about the government when it has ceased worrying about the needs of the population for a long time. Perhaps less a lack of worrying than a pessimistic resignation anticipating that, even in the midst of a global pandemic, we know better than to expect the government to care about us.

While I don’t think this is simply a matter of which political party is in power, the mantra of not worrying about the government is what got us Trump in many respects. And, having an irrelevant government that won’t care for you or, at least, offer you sustained cash payments, is probably what cost Trump the election.  As Peter Beinart effectively argues in this piece https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/07/how-trump-lost/ fiscal austerity probably did Trump in. The refrain of starving the necessary funding of the government that has been the part and parcel of conservative movements around the globe, does go against the authoritarian populism that Trump seems to see as his path to the lifetime presidency. Again, not having the government worry about you means that it’s really hard for you to give up your power for you have not sufficiently worried about it (which, I guess if you are giving any credibility to Regan’s cold war policies, is precisely how deregulation is seen by conservatives as ending a powerful centralized government—the boogeyman of communism/socialism/fascism). So the party whose politics of racism and resentment gave birth to Trump probably doomed him with its case against government spending.

David Byrne had inscrutable politics while fronting Talking Heads. It seemed impossible to know how to feel about “Don’t Worry About the Government.” Was he serious? Did he identify with the narrator? And how did it relate to the track, a few songs later, sung from the perspective of a “psycho killer?” For the most part, Talking Heads rarely sang overtly political lyrics compared to most of their 1977 cohorts, but there are some exceptions in which the lyrics, and music to a certain extent, seem to articulate a kind of vaguely conservative detachment that jibes with someone who might not worry about the government or have to.

There’s the narrator of “the Big Country” who, though perhaps less patriotic than the government employee of the former song, is no more interested in the lives of “all the people down there” as he flies across the country in a plane, while twangy country music plays in the background. Later on, within Washington discourse, the term “fly over country” will be used to describe the vast swaths of land that mean little to either coast. From the perspective of 2016-2020, it’s easy to see the narrator of “the Big Country” less as an alien and more of an entitled asshole who writes for Politico or a Netflix series.

There’s the flip side in “People Like Us” which seems to luxuriate in the very folks the narrator of “the Big Country” could not be paid to live amongst. Yet the narrator of “People Like Us” also seems like the culmination of the narrator’s perspective in “Don’t Worry About the Government:”

We don’t want freedom
We don’t want justice
We just want someone to love

In the bridge, the narrator makes it explicit:

What good is freedom?
God laughs at people like us.

In 1986 two years before the end of the Regan era, it might have seemed heretical to reject such fundamentally conservative catchwords like “freedom” and “justice” and would most likely mark the song as satirical or critical. Yet, the authority that trumps lofty concepts like “freedom” and “justice” is love (not love for your neighbor, but a romantic partner with whom you can grow “big as a house”) and God. But the very freedom and justice man believes he has made for himself, is as hollow as the government described in “Don’t Worry About the Government:” all the government can promise us, now, is ease and convenience. By “People Like Us,” we don’t just not worry about the government, we actively reject it: we’re going to “make it” precisely because “we don’t want freedom/ we don’t want justice.” If the country music backing was echoed through the taut guitars of punk and new wave, the musical backing of “People Like Us” is more traditionally country with added pedal steel and fiddle.


2.

The song “People Like Us” comes from the movie David Byrne wrote and directed True Stories. Inspired by actual news articles from supermarket tabloids, it is also a fictional documentary of a small town in Texas named Virgil, celebrating its 150th anniversary, and growing into larger town with the investment of technological capital. One of the characters we repeatedly encounter is the mayor, played by Spalding Grey. In one of the more striking sequences in the film, the mayor, over dinner, explains how his role is as an elected official is to keep the corporations and the workers in Virgil happy so they won’t leave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjHwl5SRdCo

Byrne shows the admixture of various cultures and religions in the area and the spaces, like malls and work, where the people of Virgil commingle. It seems quite pleasant, at one point everyone gathers at a karaoke bar to lip synch “Wild, Wild Life,” and the social antagonism that might arise from having different cultures, races and religions come together is absent from the film. Creating the seamless work/life operation the mayor imagines at the food laden table.

The sequence after the aforementioned dinner scene takes place at church. We see an establishing shot along the highway in Virgil, resting on the sign “Victorious Life.” The church is in a big, nondescript, prefab building that you might see on any highway across the United States. It’s large size anticipates the mega churches that have become political centers as much as houses of worship in recent years, something the preacher in this scene explicitly demonstrates before launching into the song “Puzzlin’ Evidence:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TriaOVgwc1Y

"I’m not a member of the John Birch society or the communist party, but let’s look at what’s happened to the national morals since World War II. We lost the Vietnam War. The TV and the movies are filled with characters I don’t want to know, not in this life. The farmer is in trouble. The small businessman is in trouble. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Texas is still paying for JFK’s death [….]"

As the gospel music plays quietly in the background, a series of film clips plays on the screen behind the preacher. It shows men in meetings, bombers, a dollar bill, etc all the while the preacher continues his sermon:
 

"They have some involvement in all of these. What is the link? What do cars have to do with books, you might ask? The trilateral commission on foreign relations you ever hear of them? Well, I hadn’t either. They have members on the boards of all the large corporations. Not one detail has been left out. Am I right? Do you feel it? Do you know what Bobby Ray Inman was doing before he was running the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation? A CIA director! It’s public knowledge."
        
From here he continues his litany of conspiracy theories: Governor White bringing Inman’s MCTC corporation into the state, turning all the people into mindless robots. Concluding with the warning: “Sleep, sleep, one and one does not equal two, no sir! Silicon gulch! Silicon hills! Silicon Valley! You better wake up! It’s late! It’s late!”

This scene is juxtaposed against the techno-futurism of the dinner scene. The tech companies and their workers that Spalding Grey’s character is trying to keep in Virgil Texas are the very forces the local church goers see as the engine of the conspiracy. And any politicians (like Inman and White) who try to bring these corporations into towns like Virgil, Texas are just trying to get you to fall asleep and not notice the computer world developing all around you: the silicon gulch and valley.  Remember: one plus one does not equal two.

There are a couple of things to notice in this scene: one, there isn’t a single mention of religion, besides a vague bemoaning the loss of morals post-World War II. Instead, the preacher maps out a conspiracy theory involving capital, local elected officials, the military-industrial complex and Hollywood as a singular explanation for America’s downfall. Two, this scene, along with the karaoke scene, demonstrates the diversity of Virgil: the choir is filled with black and white faces, Ramon Radiohead is playing organ, Pops Staples—who practices Voodoo (the Vodun religion) at home—is there too. The entire town seems in agreement with the “puzzling evidence” placed before them, mobilized into their hatred of the silicon valley companies and bland white politicians who work for them.

3.

America’s proclivity for conspiracy theories was hardly new even when Byrne presented it in True Stories. The mention of  the John Birch Society and JFK’s assassination in the preacher’s rant demonstrates already the long-standing history of people believing conspiracy theories as explications for their daily misery. What’s worth noting is the disavowal of any political extremity—“neither John Birch, nor Communist”—in this gathering. The constant calls of “am I right” as well as “do you feel it” call upon an a shared truth that goes beyond facts, beyond ideology into the realm of feeling. They may tell you that one plus one equals two, but in your heart you can feel that it just can’t be right…can’t you? This portrayal of the church as space of truth where all untruths will be revealed reminds me of Heinrich von Kleist’s short story “the Earthquake in Chili”—a perfect society can only be imagined if there is a common enemy and a transcendent anchor for truth.  The preacher in True Stories does not offer faith in Christ nor, even, hatred of other religions but the transcendent anchor of mysterious forces in power out to get you. You know it, not because you’ve been offered evidence, but you’ve been offered “puzzling evidence” that feels like something to you.

We’re all living in the reality of this scene and Byrne was clever enough to figure it out in the 80s. The gulf between the corporations, the local government and the people that government ought to represent grew just as the puzzling evidence continued to be discovered. Older, recessive genes re-emerged as the gulf continued to grow. Why wouldn’t the institution of the church figure out a way to lure the wayward sheep into the fold of the awakening? And here we are. The president’s lawyers are arguing in court all types of conspiracies and grievances against his supporters, the true patriots. It wouldn’t be long before someone was going to capitalize on the conspiracy theories against the government for their own political and financial gain. And it doesn’t surprise me that the Republicans, the party that has actively tried to make the government so irrelevant that we don’t have to worry about it, would switch strategies and make it the malignant zombie that refuses to die, willing to exact any revenge upon the good people of the USA in its bid to hold onto power.

But now as Trump leaves office, there’s a new version of “Don’t Worry About the Government” that’s going around. At the end of November, Matthew Walther wrote the following piece in the Week https://bypass.theweek.com/articles-amp/951933/how-camp-explains-trump?__twitter_impression=true essentially his argument is that the media’s failure to understand that Trump has used camp to his advantage has also allowed people to inflate his malevolence. Using the well-known Cinco de Mayo Tweet of Trump grinning over a taco salad in Trump Tower, Walther explains:

"This, played with a thousand variations over the half decade or so in which he has been at the center of American public life, is the essential Trumpian conceit: playing a poor person's idea of what being rich is (having real linen!), a woke person's idea of racism (liking déclassé foods), a worker's idea of what a boss is (someone who fires people), and doing so without ever acknowledging the performance to any of the not-always overlapping segments of his audience, who in turn refuse to acknowledge it to one another."

This reminds me of a question posed early on in Trump’s campaign: is Trump really a white supremacist or is he using white supremacy to win votes? Such questions should have become moot once he took office and actively started advancing a white supremacist agenda (even if he wasn’t always successful). Yet, it remained a question throughout his presidency as otherwise intelligent people refused to buy into the clear rage that Trump was trying to induce with his policies. A certain group became Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: Nazism should scare you because it has an ethos, nihilism should never scare you because it believes in nothing.

You can see this thinking in Walther's concluding argument:

"For obvious reasons Trump's camp appeal is unlikely to be discussed openly either by his enemies or his ardent supporters, both of whom have, doubtless to his chagrin, committed themselves to the bit. To readers of The New York Times, Trump really is a fascist dictator of the 1930s, albeit one reconstructed from the same half-understood pop culture artifacts by which they and he alike conceive of anything but the most recent past; his followers take him seriously in his winking role as uxorious husband, beloved patriarch, defender of the Constitution and our ancient liberties, champion of the victims of post-industrial capitalism, and so on. As far as I am aware only a small subset of coolly detached reactionaries have even attempted to appreciate him on his own terms."

Never mind that Walther had used Sontag’s essay on camp to compare Trump to Mussolini a couple of paragraphs earlier, by the end we’ve all been lured by “the bit,” whether enemy or supporter. This is exactly what Trump wants. I find it remarkably telling that Walther thinks only the “cooly detached reactionaries” appreciate him on his own terms, i.e. neither adore him nor worry about him.

And so we’re back at the beginning, but this time asking a different question: what makes someone write a song like “Don’t Worry About the Government?” Moreover, did songs like “Don’t Worry About the Government” give rise to the very attitude exhibited in this post-mortem on the Trump presidency (assuming that the presidency est mort)?

There are two stances of “not worrying” in the Talking Heads’ song: we’ve covered the imaged government employ who just wishes you would stop worrying about him and the government because “it wouldn’t worry about you.” If this song weren’t inscrutable in the first place, we would assume that it was simply a parody of the type of person who would work for the government (a kind of updated, mid-60s Kinks' song for the U.S.) But because we are left wondering where the singer stands in all this, it doesn’t come off as a parody. Yet, based on the songs around it and the band performing it, it doesn’t seem to be a conservative call for smaller government.

Instead, it seems to exist in the very “cooly detached” space that Walther reserves for the reactionaries who “get” Trump. As Byrne has shown throughout most of his public life, he’s definitely committed to progressive causes. And he was as critical as anyone during the Trump presidency. But as someone who often has expressed a kind of cool detachment from things, the perspective Byrne communicates through “Don’t Worry About the Government” is an acknowledgment that fear of the government met with the passion of, say, anarchism or a “White Riot,” will only insure that those singing anarchy now will be future Trump supporters later (RIP Johnny Rotten).

And given the list of #Resistance grifters who have emerged to con the masses with fears of Führer Trump, I sympathize with a desire to underplay Trump’s damage to everyday life in the United States. But, the truth is, Trump is now in a growing group of illiberal leaders who have used the organs of liberal democratic societies to both enrich themselves and terrorize segments of the population. Regardless of how campy or conspiracy fueled it seems, or regardless of how little it worries about you, you should worry about the government. Always.