Nothing (Entirely) New Under the Sun

The first of possibly a series of short comments, or maybe not

No, it’s just Tuesday so this Raspberry Patch post is not the start of Chapter 4 of The Age of Spectacle. That will happen on Friday as previously promised. This post is a free interlude, but that’s silly since it’s all free, right?

When I read the newspaper yesterday I experienced an old reflex to comment briefly on an item in a way that might not occur to most readers, and that could possibly be edifying or entertaining to at least a few. When the age of the blog first dawned I used to pop out short comments, and a lot of what I did was well-received in a moment when less-is-more became a “thing” that had spread beyond editors’ craft into the general reading public. Since that old blog was called The Raspberry Patch, like this Substack, I figured, why the heck not do something like that again from time to time? I couldn’t find a “don’t” to serve as an answer to my own question, and so I did.

OK, so the New York Times ran a feature yesterday, July 8, by Ruth Graham entitled “Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America.” Its focus is the Claremont Institute and it relates some of that institution’s leaders leaving Southern California for places like Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and, rather less exotically, Dallas-Ft. Worth. The story is not without granular detail and hence some merit. It reports what those re-settling their families are saying, taking them at their word. It also reports criticism that these folks just constitute a highbrow version of a racist rightwing militia. I don’t yet know enough about it to have a view, but in due course we may acquire one.

What the feature article doesn’t do is give any deeper context. That’s not a criticism of Ms. Graham or her editor so much as an observation of the difference between journalism as it has come to be practiced and scholarship as it is at least occasionally still practiced. By all means read it if you have not already done so. But read it, I would suggest, knowing two things.

First, leaving a place you think is morally deranged or, as Graham put it, is “an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture” for believing Christians to live in, calls to mind—to my mind anyway—the “get off the grid” and get thee to a commune sensibility of good-earth hippies half a century ago. So we have yet another example of a motivation pioneered, at least in our lifetimes—monastical yearnings are of course very, very old—by the cultural Left migrating to the cultural Right. Not unusual: The environmentalist subculture did the same thing already decades ago, giving rise to the “crunchy con” set. The words conservative and conservationist might just share an etymology, you know….

Second, wanting to restore elements of traditional aesthetics—in architecture, clothing, and so on as Graham describes it—as an ambient support system for traditional moral values isn’t remotely new either. Orthodox Jews, Amish, and dozens of faith communities outside North America have done the same for centuries and still do it. Graham presents this aspect of the movement as a kind of weird tic or affectation. Fine; no foul implied or intended. One person’s designer comfort zone can be another person’s irritation.

But the real reason for this note, the reason I just couldn’t resist writing it up, is that I want to either show or remind you, dear reader, of the lyrics to a certain country-folkrock song that immediately insinuated itself into my head when I read Graham’s feature article. Here are the lyrics, the key one slung out in italics just so you won’t miss it.

This old town is filled with sin
It'll swallow you in
If you've got some money to burn
Take it home right away
You've got three years to pay
But Satan is waiting his turn

(chorus) This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain

The scientists say
It will all wash away
But we don't believe them any more
'Cause we've got our recruits
And our green mohair suits
So please show your I.D. at the door

(Chorus repeat)

A friend came around
Tried to clean up this town
His ideas made some people mad
But he trusted his crowd
So he spoke right out loud
And they lost the best friend they had

(Chorus repeat)

The song, if you don’t know, is “Sin City” recorded by The Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969 on their first album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin.” Chris Hillman wrote the words; Graham Parsons came up with the music—and the whole song was done in half an hour. The city was Los Angeles.

You can dial this item up on youtube no problem, and you can also find cover recordings by Emmylou Harris, Dwight Yoakam, and others. If you do dial up the original Flying Burrito Brothers version you might also get a glimpse of the album cover. If so, know that Hillman is on the right as you’re looking at the cover, in the blue suit; Graham Parsons is in the white suit embroidered with the cannabis leaves; “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow is in the black suit with the gold decoration; and Chris Etheridge is behind Kleinow. The two women posed in the door of the shack behind them……no idea.

Now, you might suppose that Hillman, an original member of The Byrds, meant the lyrics as a kind of parody. If that’s what you think, you know nothing about Chris Hillman, then or since. Like most of the more interesting things in life, he and it are more complicated than that.