Thinking about Music, Age, and Being Politically Surprised by Summer

I stopped by Wichita’s main library the other day, looking to pick up some cheap media from the summer clearance sale, because I still use the sorts of media—CDs, DVDs, even VHS tapes—which the library had available. For 50 cents I picked up a copy of a great album that I’d had on cassette for years, but which had finally broken down: Gerry Rafferty’s wonderful City to City. I popped it into the CD player (because, yes, our 2014 Nissan Pathfinder has one) as soon as I left the library, and it made me think.

It was a hot day, and while running some errands—dropping off our recycling at an independent processing center in south Wichita, picking up some kimchi at a Korean market on the city’s east side—before making my way back to our home on Wichita’s west side, I was found myself drawn to the street scenes all around me. People in cars, on bikes, or just walking, down sidewalks or through parks or cutting across the streets, with everyone and everything seeming to move more slowly than usual. But of course that would be the case, right? It was late July, the “dog days” of summer, or at least that’s what seemed obvious to me, especially when Rafferty’s “Baker Street” came on, a song that I have, for decades, weirdly associated with the not-quite-end of summer, with those hot tired days when you’re back from whatever vacation you’d looked forward to and you’re kind of getting tired of the heat and you know school will start soon—but you still have a week or two or three left, before the routines of real life return. It’s a bittersweet time, with the end last days of summer worrying you, but also knowing that you have some dull, mindless, empty summer days left to enjoy yet.

Before my family and I moved to Kansas, 18 years ago next month, summer wasn’t my favorite season. As a perpetual student, then graduate student, and then college professor, summer vacations were always an important part of my internal calendar, and of course summer activities were fun. But when I compared the bright sun of June and July and August with flowers in the spring, or foliage in the fall, or snow in the winter, summer just didn’t impress me.

Coming to Kansas, the Sunflower State, changed all that. People complain about the heat, humidity, and wind here in Wichita and throughout the state, but I found it all quite wonderful. As a bicycle commuter, getting on my bike and hitting the long, straight city and county roads during the summer months changed my outlook. As always, it is music, the soundtrack playing in my head, which guided me here, specifically John Denver’s “Matthew,” the version on An Evening with John Denver, recorded 50 years ago this August, being the recording that I always go back to: “gold is just a windy Kansas wheat field / blue is just a Kansas summer sky.”

I got out there on my bike, riding to my office at Friends University, but also out and around Sedgwick County and beyond, and what I saw were just that: golden wheat fields, plus rolling green pastures, all of it framed by a broad and blue horizon that stretched out before me, with sunflowers along the way. It was beautiful, and still is. It made me a firm fan of Kansas summers.

Falling in love with Kansas summers, though, did involve some adjustments. Among other things, the dog days changed, a change that affected me not just as someone living--as every human being in temperate climates does--in the midst of seasons, but as a scholar of politics as well.

Where I grew up in Washington state in the 1970s and 1980s, the public school year ended in mid-June, and began again after Labor Day. August was thus the tired, tail-end of summer, the time when everyone mentally checked out, after all the summer camps and vacations and trips to the lake all through July. I carried that assumption into my professional life, beginning with graduate school in Washington DC. Living and studying there at Catholic University of America in the 1990s and 2000s, I heard August regularly complained about or mocked or disregarded or embraced with a kind of exhausted acceptance. Many who lived in DC delighted in the humorous call to abolish it, and would forward it to everyone they knew, year after year. August, in short, was when the all the political parties and interest groups and government agencies seemed to be just mopping up unfinished business, if they worked at all, as they waited for politics to re-ignite in the fall. That’s what I took with me as I became a college professor, and despite encountering differences in every university I taught at, my mental calendar remained locked in.

But then we arrived in Wichita, Kansas, and settled in to raise our kids and stay. Kansas’s approach to the calendar had historically followed agricultural patterns distinct from any that I’d experienced before in my childhood or young adulthood. With the wheat harvest complete before the end of July, schools and governments throughout the Sunflower State had tended to look to August as a time to get back to shake of the business—the work and the play—of summer and return to a normal routine. And so, as the past nearly two decades have gone by, I’ve had to accustom myself to treating late July, rather than August, as that particular lazy, doggy time to truly tune out and reset one’s internal clock.

In thinking through all this though, I realize that this year, late July of 2024 has provided—and is still providing—some serious push-back against my assumptions. Specifically, I have in mine a presentation I gave at a local civic group just a few days ago. It wasn’t anything special; as a local political commentator and political observer, I’ve given dozens of these presentations over the years. But on this day—another hot, late July day—I found myself surrounded by older folks, activists who had dedicated years—decades really--of their lives to understanding and promoting the causes and candidates they believed in. It struck me how odd, how incongruous, it was to find these folks—nearly all of them in their 50s, 60s, 70s, or older--spending this summer day packed into a small room, rather than laying down outside in a hammock, taking it easy. But no—they were fired up, anxious and ready and engaged, filled with questions and challenges and concerns.

Their attitude surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. They, like all of us, are swamped by talk about the presidential election. More importantly, in only a little over a week, they’d had to process the news of the attempted assassination of former President Trump, and then the withdrawal from the presidential contest of President Biden, and then rapid (far more rapidly, I think, than even many of those who had been calling for it ever since Biden’s terrible debate performance in June) coalescing of the fractious Democratic Party around Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee. Far from the summer political calendar closing its eyes and taking a nap in the fallow period surrounding the predictable coronations which the Republican and Democratic conventions were assumed to provide, suddenly everything was turbo-charged and dramatic, the news terrible and shocking and inspiring and unexpected. And I, being the willing talking head I’ve always been, suddenly was receiving almost daily calls from different local and regional news organizations; as I joked to some other journalists upon my second late-night visit to a local television station in a less than 8 days, I’m used to this around October and November, not before Labor Day.

Of course, this has been an unusually, and unusually dramatic, ten days or so, even by the standards of American presidential politics. But given that the horrible news of the attempted shooting of a former president was quickly superseded by other news, and then more news after that, perhaps the unusual thing is my determination to hold onto my old mental calendar. The fact is, July is rushing into August, here in Kansas and everywhere in the country, and it’s happening with breakneck speed, with primary elections and possibly even brokered conventions looming. The consequences of all this, even in a quite thoroughly Republican state like Kansas, could well have reverberations—in terms of voter turn-out, campaign themes, and more—that impact even some of the most local legislative races across our state.

In a political culture supposedly built upon democratic debate, with people taking the time to test different political options carefully, that kind of speed isn’t good. I certainly don’t like it—but then, I’m a Luddite wanna-be, someone who rides his bike to the office and still uses a flip-phone (and, of course, listens to music on CDs. Since I think it is highly unlikely we’ll all learn to turn off our phones and act as though not everything always needs to be treated as a desperate emergency, instead we’ll have to make the best of our hurried reality, applying whatever limited breaks we can find as we must. The summer heat is still with us, but maybe not the dog days of old, unfortunately. Thank goodness Gerry Rafferty endures.

On Fascists, Jesus, and Woody Guthrie

I’m awake early this morning, thanks to a headache, after going to bed late last night following 2 ½ hours of talking about yesterday’s terrible news at a local news station, filming comments for their late night and early morning news segments, and I’m thinking about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and also Woody Guthrie’s guitar.

There’s certainly a truth in that statement, and those of us who think Trump was a terrible president and would (perhaps will) make an even worse one the second time around should not be so blinkered as to deny that truth. But it is not the whole truth, and unless one assumes the human beings are machines that simply respond to the inputs they receive, with no conscious thought, no reflection, no personal judgment whatsoever along the way, a larger truth must be insisted upon. And this is where, perhaps especially because this is Sunday, I get religious. (I owe this particular reflection to the late-last-night comments of my fellow Kansas writer, Joel Mathis.)

The story that has come down to us through the text known as the Book of Matthew has Jesus preaching a sermon, where among many other civilization-changing principles, He is presented as saying in chapter 5, verses 43 through 46 (most famously in the translation found in the King James Version of the Bible):

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?”

It is notable, I think, that Jesus is not presented as having said that one’s enemies aren’t actually that—that they are actually your neighbors, actually your fellow human beings, your fellow children of our “Father which is in heaven,” and therefore lovable. No, instead the received text presents Him as saying acknowledging enemies as exactly that: enemies, opponents, those who disagree with and “despitefully use” and even “persecute” those to whom He is speaking (which, for believers like myself, means all of us). He is calling for us to turn away from hate—and thus also, I think it is reasonable to say, violence—when it comes to even those who we see as enemies to that which we hold dear.

This is, in some ways, the most difficult of all Christian teachings. So difficult, you might say, that even the greatest American leaders, even leaders as familiar with the teachings found in the Christian Bible as Abraham Lincoln, chose to lessen its sharpness when confronted with the enormities it implies. In his First Inaugural Address, he insisted as he finished “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Every political expression must, of course, be guided by a sense of prudence, and articulated in reference to both the aspirations and the reality of the polis that one is speaking of—and, in Lincoln’s case, was trying to save—and so I’ve no criticism of what Lincoln was attempting to rhetorically accomplish at that moment in 1861, when the divisions over the evils of slavery had led to the point of secession and war. But it is nonetheless worth noting that Jesus presented a different possibility: that the affection can and should still exist, even if the bonds which tie people together, which prevent them from seeing one another as an enemy, have been broken.

What does that mean, in practice? Well, if worse comes to absolute worse, it may mean pacifism in the face of direct violence, it means showing love even when those being shown love respond with persecution and death. But less than that point, it could mean Woody Guthrie’s condemnation of fascism—with a guitar.

Of course, by the time Guthrie first started writing that message on his guitar, it was 1943, and America’s involvement in the world war against the Nazis of Germany, the fascists of Italy, and the war party which had take control of Japan, had been in full swing for over a year. Yet Guthrie himself connected that message to something much broader than even that global conflict, to a fight that extended back to the Great Depression and the struggle against “economic turmoil and social disintegration” in general. That Guthrie supported the war effort was undeniable. And yet, it remains important I think, that his machine was not a gun, not a weapon, but a musical instrument. A guitar. Which, unless you use it to bash someone over the head, and maybe not even then, can’t kill anyone. But it, and the music it makes, can kill the ideas and movements that make fascists. Who were clearly people that Guthrie regarded as an enemy. He was no pacifist, and made no criticism of soldiers fighting in World War II. Yet still, hold onto that image: the image of fighting fascism with music, not (or at least not only) violence.

As I wrote above, every political action and expression should be guided by prudential judgment: we really should think, as much and as often as we can, about where and when to apply whatever tools and talents we have to promote that which we believe. That’s the churn of participatory democracy, and it’s something I believe in, as both good and wise. It is possible—it’s always possible—that some moment will be revealed as a Rubicon, the crossing of which leaves all conversation and argument and democratic contestation behind and suggests that guitars must be turned into guns. All I can say in the face of that logical point is: resist it, the way Jesus called us to resist it, the way that image of a defiant, guitar-wielding, fascist-“killing” Guthrie resists it. That resistance may, ultimately, be the most prudent, most purely (if naively) democratic action of all.

I’ve been pretty clear that I consider Trump a danger to the flawed but nonetheless real virtues of the flawed but nonetheless still functioning liberal democracy called the United States of America. “Fascist-adjacent” is the term I’ve used, and until and unless Trump himself shares evidence otherwise, I’m going to consider him an authoritarian, or at the very best a quasi-authoritarian threat, to whatever political goods America’s dysfunctional system can still provide. But I’ve also recognized that something similar can be said about practically every American president in my lifetime. That doesn’t wipe away the concern; that doesn’t make me think “oh well, if Johnson and Reagan and Obama were in some ways similar, then clearly our 45^th president can’t be all that different, or all that bad.” I can still, and should still, recognize and respond to dangers when I see them. But I won’t respond with violence, and I denounce anyone who does, or who apologizes for such. Violence can’t save us from a political danger—in fact, it can only result in the closing down of the politics that we are trying to save. That’s the message I take this morning from Jesus, and Woody Guthrie (who were probably more similar, in the end, then latter would have ever expected). I pray it’s a message others will take too.