The Mud and the Blood and the Beer

Johnny Cash, one of the greatest artists of the past century, was born on this day in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. A member of both the rock & roll and country music halls of fame, Cash, with his deep, rough voice and evocative blend of country, gospel, blues, and rockabilly, left an imprint on American music so deep and vast that it virtually beggars description.

He cut his first records in 1955—“Hey Porter,” “Cry! Cry! Cry!” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and others—for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records on 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, the same spot where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison, as well as bluesmen like Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King, got their start. His third Sun release, “I Walk the Line,” hit #1 on the country charts in 1956 and crossed over to the pop charts, where it cracked the Top Twenty.

In 1958 Cash left Sun for Columbia, where spent three decades. There were hits: “Ring of Fire,” written by Merle Kilgore and future wife June Carter, hit #1 on the country charts and #17 on the pop charts in 1963. A new version of “Folsom Prison Blues,” recorded live at Folsom Prison itself, peaked at #1 on the country charts in 1968. “A Boy Named Sue,” recorded live at San Quentin Prison, did the same in 1969, then crossed over to the pop charts, reaching #2. It would be the biggest hit of Cash’s career.

Eventually the hits stopped, as they always do. The country audience was turning towards the same sort of garbage you hear on country radio today. Cash was outcast from the very culture he helped build. Poor sales, bad reviews, mediocre records: times were hard. Then Cash hooked up with Rick Rubin. A native of Queens, New York, Rubin, who founded Def Jam records in 1984 with hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, introduced the world to Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys (Rubin and Simmons also produced Run-DMC’s 1986 masterpiece Raisin’ Hell, the record that started it all for me). In 1988 Rubin formed his own label, Def American, now just American, where he released Danzig’s self-titled debut, Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss, and Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Mack Daddy (featuring "Baby’s Got Back"!), among other notables.

“He came backstage,” Cash told writer Nick Tosches. “I asked him, ‘What would you want from me?’ He said, ‘I want the best Johnny Cash record that we can get out of you, whatever that is.’ I got to thinkin,’ I never have done my best. So we agreed…I’d bring in my guitar, and I’d just sit down in front of a microphone and just start singin’ and see what sounded good.”

The result, 1994’s American Recordings, is a stark, deeply moving collection that captures Cash about as well as anything he’s ever done (excepting only his extraordinary prison albums: 1968’s At Folsom Prison and 1969’s At San Quentin). There’s “Delia’s Gone,” a traditional country blues totally re-conceived by Cash as an unforgettable portrait of sadistic torture, murder, and supernatural terror; it’s simply magnificent. “Redemption,” a sparse and stunning profession of faith, is as openly and beautifully religious as anything I’ve heard. “Drive On,” a rugged first-person narrative voiced by a haunted Vietnam Vet, is the sort of gripping story-song that Cash has built his career with. There’s much more to recommend, particularly the brooding majesty of “Thirteen,” which was written for Cash by punk/metal icon Glenn Danzig, but you’re better off listening for yourself.

Three American releases followed, each containing a number of electrifying performances: 1996’s Unchained, 2000’s American III: Solitary Man, and 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around, before Johnny Cash died in September 2003.

The older I get, the more his music means to me, and the more I realize just how long a shadow he cast. Thus the great punk band Social Distortion, whose phenomenal version of “Ring of Fire” first introduced me to Cash, come into focus as the heirs to America’s glorious honky-tonk tradition. Then there’s Bob Dylan, who made his television debut in 1968 on The Johnny Cash Show (they performed “The Girl from the North Country,” their duet that appears on Dylan’s classic Nashville Skyline album). From the Dustbowl ballads of Woody Guthrie to the blue yodels of Jimmie Rodgers and the country blues of Blind Willie McTell, Dylan—like Cash—both draws from and expands upon the common roots of popular music. To put it another way, Johnny Cash’s songs are like a history lesson, revealing the hidden currents that shape American culture. I can’t really say enough about him, and I certainly can’t say anything good enough to do any justice, so I’ll stop trying.

Happy birthday, Johnny Cash.

Happy Birthday Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, the great novelist and philosopher who championed individualism, atheism, reason, and the “virtue of selfishness,” was born one hundred years ago today in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1926 Rand (born Alyssa Rosenbaum) fled the Soviet Union for the United States. In 1943 she published her acclaimed novel, The Fountainhead, the story of architect Howard Roark and his fierce commitment to individual expression, which was modeled on the life and works of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1957, Rand published her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, an explicitly philosophical and polemical novel celebrating laissez faire capitalism as a moral and economic ideal. It is no exaggeration to describe Ayn Rand as one of the twentieth century's most influential libertarians.

Though an engaging writer and thinker, Rand notoriously attracted (and encouraged) a cult-like following, complete with True Believers who happily excommunicated those who questioned her often-dogmatic style and conclusions. Today, the Objectivist movement (the name for her philosophy) includes some of the most cloistered, self-censoring, and intolerant politicos one is likely to meet. Thankfully, Rand's ideas have exerted tremendous influence without converting every reader to orthodox Objectivism. Her most important impact is probably on those that consider her ideas, absorb what they need or want, and then fight for individualism on their own terms.

In a notable recent turn of events, the academic world has gradually begun to take Rand and her work seriously, with journals and symposiums exploring and debating her contributions to economic, cultural, philosophical, and political thought. The leading figure in this regard is Chris Matthew Sciabarra, a visiting scholar at New York University and author of the remarkable Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, the second volume in his “Dialectics & Liberty Trilogy,” which also includes Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism. In Sciabarra's provocative view, Rand, like Karl Marx, employs a dialectical method of inquiry, rejecting mind-matter dualism and emphasizing context. Sciabarra investigates Rand's intellectual roots in Silver Age Russia, discussing both what she accepted and rejected in the Russian tradition and how it shaped her fiction and philosophy. Needless to say, many in the Objectivist camp have denounced the book (we can only speculate on whether or not they have actually read it).

You can find Sciabarra's website here. In Reason, Cathy Young offers her critical appreciation, “Ayn Rand at 100.” And in the New York Times, there is Edward Rothstein's largely negative, “Considering the Last Romantic, Ayn Rand, at 100.”

UPDATE
More Rand-O-Rama, for those that just can't get enough: a nice piece by the Cato Institute's David Boaz, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, several posts at the always interesting Liberty & Power group blog (scroll down), and "The Illustrated Rand," Chris Matthew Sciabarra's fascinating look at Rand's influence on popular culture, particularly in the work of comic book creators Steve Ditko (Spiderman) and Frank Miller (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

Intervention Abroad, Intervention At Home

OVER HERE: THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND AMERICAN SOCIETY by David M. Kennedy. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson successfully ran for re-election under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” In April 1917, with such campaign rhetoric long forgotten, Wilson informed Congress that America's impending entry into the Great War required “the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country.” Furthermore, he declared, “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of repression.”

Politicians are rarely so forthright. “Organization and mobilization” meant war socialism and conscription. “A firm hand of repression” meant just what it sounds like. There was the Espionage Act, which authorized up to twenty years imprisonment for anyone interfering with military operations and five years' imprisonment for using the mail to further such purposes. The Trading-with-the-Enemy Act mandated that foreign language newspapers submit, in advance and in English, anything (editorials, articles, etc.) referring to the war. Loyalty oaths appeared in the nation's schools while German language classes disappeared. The words “hamburger” and “sauerkraut” were replaced by “liberty sandwich” and “liberty cabbage,” respectively.

In one of the era's more infamous events, Eugene V. Debs, the great labor leader and perennial Socialist Party candidate for President (Debs won a stunning six percent of the popular vote in 1912 in a four-way race with Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft) rotted in federal prison for 3 years after giving an anti-war speech in Ohio that “violated” Wilson's Espionage Act. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who scandalously remains a hero to many modern liberals, upheld Debs' conviction. Warren G. Harding, perhaps America's most under-appreciated chief executive, pardoned Debs in 1921, an act of human decency that the peacemaker Wilson never saw fit to grant.

In his preface to this book, David M. Kennedy cautions readers, “What follows is in many ways a sad story, a tale of death, broken hopes, frustrated dreams, and of the curious defeat-in-victory that was Woodrow Wilson's, and the nation's, bitter lot.” This is actually a significant understatement (and why the qualifier "in many ways"?), but you get the point.