A Triggered Resonance

A welcome addition to our household this year has been my gift to my wife of the algorithmic source of just about everything—Alexa via Echo.  Headlines, local weather, shopping, and, of course, music, almost anything you can think of is literally at your beck and call. We use it mostly for background music to accompany our household chores.

This morning my wife ordered a shuffle of Paul Simon songs.  After some obscure (to us) songs from the Graceland list, we heard the familiar introductory notes of “My Little Town,” the hit from 1975.  I always enjoyed the song for what back then I regarded (I suppose) as its piquancy, a kind of double-edged lamentation of misguided beliefs.  But then suddenly I heard familiar references to imagery and social contexts that resonate with our current deeply troubling social dissociations and displacements, generally surrounding the hapless clamor for that “America” distilled into #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

The song begins with a soft sentimentality:

"In my little town, I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all.
And he used to lean upon me as I pledged allegiance"

But closes that third line with “to the wall.”  The softness begins to meld to something perhaps defiant.

"Lord, I recall, in my little town,
Comin' home after school, flyin' my bike past the gates of the factories,
My mom doin' the laundry, hangin' out shirts in the dirty breeze."

The song becomes then a seeming incantation, a realization of disillusionment.  Mom is stay-at-home, but the dirty air fouls the clean laundry.  And then things get more dismal.

"And after it rains there's a rainbow and all of the colors are black.
It's not that the colors aren't there, it's just imagination they lack."

The narrator collapses the Oz-like landscape into shadowy, dull enervation.  And then, as though the narrator fears we might miss the hard experience of his thought, he tumbles onto the brink of his nihilism.

"Everything's the same back in my little town,
My little town, my little town.

Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town."

He moves on to personalize the experience, bringing it into the dread of his daily existence and the heritage of violence.

"In my little town, I never meant nothin',
I was just my father's son. mmm.
Savin' my money, dreamin' of glory,
Twitchin' like a finger on the trigger of a gun."

This then prefaces the angry wailing of the chorus, which traditionally should resolve his internal conflict…but not in this denial of the American idyll.

"Leavin' nothin' but the dead and dying back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town."

And so, why bother with this parsing of what for some is an ancient, if jangly, lyric of small town/suburban American angst ca. the 60s and 70s?  I reacted by associating it with the contemporary taunting imagery of the nagging rally chant that urges a return to something that truly never was, to make America great again.  (By the way, “great” comes from Old German, almost whole cloth, meaning "big, tall, thick, stout, massive; coarse."  It has no meaning associated with “excellent”, as in its American English vernacular usage, associated with the marginally literate.)  Paul Simon was unconsciously prescient.  Back then, I will guess, he could not imagine that the cynicism and nihilism of his narrator’s wounded voice could ever become the rallying cry of the fearful descendants of his Little Town, those hurt-filled millions, the forgotten minions, those voices of the Trumpian lemmings gleefully and haplessly marching to their destiny.

I can see now through Simon’s eyes that it must have been a torturous festering indeed, the wound that hasn’t healed.

* By the way, “great” comes from Old German, almost whole cloth, meaning "big, tall, thick, stout, massive; coarse."  It has no meaning associated with “excellent”, as in its American English vernacular usage, associated with the marginally literate.