Through a glass, darkly

by David Benjamin

“All this time I watched my woman/ Drownin’ in a pool of tears,/ And I’ve seen a lot of good folks die/ That had a lot of bills to pay…”

— “Take This Job and Shove It” (lyrics, David Allan Coe)

MADISON, Wis. — For at least 1,500 days I’ve been trying to psychoanalyze the motives of the people — some of them friends and relatives — who not only voted for Donald Trump but who regard him literally and emotionally as a messiah. Lately, I wonder if I’ve been overthinking this conundrum. 

For instance, as I was ratiocinating the other day, a simple, revealing country-western lyric, released during the Carter administration, popped into my head. Johnny Paycheck’s working-class anthem, “Take This Job and Shove It” seems to capture, succinctly, the seething grievance of Trump’s vast army of pissed-off white men. Applied to politics in the 21st century, it conveys a bone-weary and righteous contempt for every officialdom that has impinged on the fate and livelihood of each hapless shmo who has never had a voice in the decisions made — in his name — by those great distant, invisible forces of government, education, law, finance, trade, economics, media, religion, war and peace, life and death.

As I empathized with the socially tormented descendants of Johnny Paycheck, I recalled an older lyric, one of my favorite blues songs, “Big Boss Man,” composed by “Homesick James” Williamson and made famous by Jimmy Reed. The key passage in the song goes, “Big boss man, can’t you hear me when I call?/ Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all…”

Jimmy Reed and Johnny Paycheck convey, in voices black and white, the same defiance of an authority that was entrenched long before they got hired for this crappy job. The sense of both songs is that the boss is a brute functionary, in charge by no merit or virtue of his own. He was was installed, rather, by a corrupt system that deserves no respect from the working man. Both songs warn that Jimmy and Johnny are ready to forsake this vale of sweat, fling down the shovel at the boss’s feet and walk out into a better world.

Okay then. When?

Herein lies the rub. Jimmy Reed’s lyric is purely wistful as he sings (with all due bravado), “I’m gonna get me a boss man, one gonna treat me right./ Work hard in the day time, rest easy at night…”

Johnny Paycheck’s cri de coeur is bluesier than Jimmy’s blues, when — with faltering chutzpah — he sings, “I’d give the shirt right offa my back/ If I had the guts to say/ ‘Take this job and shove it.’…” 

In each composition, the anger and pathos of the desperate working man is expressed not in direct defiance of authority but in a wish and whisper behind the boss’s back. Each sad song traps its protagonist in the need for a job that both validates and demeans his manhood, in a vicious cycle he dares not disdain as he rages against its drudgery and degradation. 

 There is a visceral pleasure in uttering an in-your-face phrase like “Take this job and shove it.” Millions of exasperated Americans indulged that pleasure with subversive glee by voting for Donald Trump in 2016. It was fun. It showed up all those smartass bosses and liberal snobs. Instead of a disgruntled whisper, it was a thumb in the eye from the top of the heap.

“Take This Job and Shove It” was a hit because it allowed its frustrated fans to take a vicarious swing at  a snooty and unfair Establishment without suffering the consequences — without really quitting a job you could not afford to quit. Voting for Trump — the avowed enemy of the high and mighty among whom he had hobnobbed and sucked up all his life — was a similar species of vicarious thrill. He had convinced millions that — beneath the obvious persona of a pool-hall grifter with a circus-clown hairdo — there lurked a “real Donald Trump,” a lovable outlaw who blurted out thoughts that common folk were afraid to utter aloud as he slashed the tires on the limousines of the elites. 

A vote for Trump was a vote for that imaginary Jimmy Reed boss who’s “gonna treat me right.” What we got, though, was… well, Trumped. Exposed by a series of crises that climaxed in Covid-19, he ain’t so big and he lies about his height. Today, neither the black man singing his blues nor the white cowboy crooning his scorn have a boss into whom they can shove anything, because they’re on the street, wearing facemasks and queuing up at the unemployment office, where the relief money’s running low.

In short, the music’s over. This ain’t a song and Covid-19 is not the Grand Ole Opry. We’re all feeling the blues and our Big Boss Man is the spoiled child of Fred Trump, who has never in his life applied for or lost a job. The hush money he pays to porn stars is enough to support a poor man’s family for the better part of a decade. He puts little brown kids in cages, consorts with pedophiles and pardons bank robbers on TV for fun. He has, true to his word, used his position to destroy much of what we have come to know as the institutional heart of our republic. He is turning our national parks, monuments and wildlife refuges into oilfields. He has handed the public schools over to a laundry-soap heiress who never attended a public school, and the Post Office over to a man who doesn’t know the price of mailing a postcard. He has transformed the Party of Lincoln into an atavist klavern. He has slashed and slandered the foreign service and turned the Department of Justice into a cloister of personal shysters. He has kissed the ass of the last Stalinist mass murderer on earth and prostrated himself — again and again — at the altar of Vladimir the Terrible. 

“Shove it!”, for all its cathartic pizzazz, is a concept inadequate to the times. Johnny Paycheck, who was an actual populist, might not have liked Trump at all. Plus, he’s dead. We need a new song to assuage — and possibly heal — the fears and loathing among Trump’s bellicose believers, perhaps even to dissuade them from adoration of their graven idol. 

These therapeutic lyrics are a passage, bespeaking hope and redemption, that I came across as a child. I return whenever I’m tempted to despair at the folly and cruelty of my fellow citizens: “When I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known.”

We might not want to know this, but we know: If ever there was a childish thing in American politics, it’s Donald Trump.