By Thor

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As a person prone to conspiracy thinking I believe I have the inside track on its most glaring problems one of which being its tendency to miss the forest for the trees. The point really isn’t whether JFK was killed by the CIA. It’s that they’ve demonstrably killed foreign leaders before (flagrantly dismissing international law), performed covert operations on US soil (flagrantly dismissing US law), and even though many people high enough in government at the time believed it was plausible  all inquiries petered out and not a single reform was made to the agency (ie: above the law). All of these things separate are enough to indict the system, and all of these things together prove that there is nothing but thread bare decorum keeping the state apparatus from doing basically  whatever it wants. The point isn’t if they killed Kennedy. The point is that there’s nothing that would stop them from doing it. Yet people laser focus on the conspiracy itself. This is what happened with the media frenzy surrounding Rich Man North of Richmond. People are so quick to get out the corkboard and hurl accusations of “industry plant” and can’t just take it for what it is, a total dog brained mess. 

Let’s rewind. For those unaware there’s a new folksy little jingle lighting up the algorithm by ostensible good-ol-boy Oliver Anthony titled “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The song follows your typical haiku style of songwriting with a thesis refrain, the follow-through on those ideas in the center, and then bookended by a repeat of the refrain. Bing Bong you gotta fucking song. And as it starts the song is actually pretty sick. It’s well produced and Oliver’s voice packs a lot of punch. He starts by bristling about classic Appalachian working class angst, working at a shitty job, for longer hours, to make less money than you did before. Classic “Take This Job and Shove It” type stuff, and just as well because we could use more based-ass working class music. The title is even pretty clever; jabbing at the wealthy that congregate around, and stand within, the halls of power.  However when he gets to fleshing out his ideas everything takes an incredibly hard turn into the fucking cornfield. I say cornfield with some irony because the meat of this song isn’t actually about corporate greed, or meat for that matter, it’s about how pissed he is that people are getting fat on corn syrup products with welfare money. To quote the song:

If you’re 5’3’’ and you’re 300 pounds

taxes ought not pay for your bags of fudge rounds

IIlluminating. Very consistent with the overall theme. 

The song has since rocketed in popularity. I’m sure the relative you hate the most has posted it a few times on Facebook. It seems to resonate with (white) folks. And while everyone is so busy trying to figure out which right-wing psy operation backed the song, they’ve all taken their eye off the prize. The prize being: It’s really fucking funny how stupid this hog slop is. Sure the ideas are dangerous-blah blah blah-but no one’s ever been changed politically by a song (see every song played at Woodstock). Songs can only saddle the back of already prevailing ideas, and boy are these some dusty ones.

Anyone with a bit of a bent for political history, or actually lived through the time, might feel this is a bit retro. No this song doesn’t have any keytars or synths, but something does sound a little 80’s. The ghost story about the fat welfare queen was an incredibly popular right-wing trope back in the day, one that has since fallen out of prominence, but evidently not out of memory. 

There’s a clear presumption, so retro now that it’s considered pre-modern, that being fat means you’re living high on the hog. But even sillier is this idea that eating candy every day is something someone is getting over on you. A bit of rascally bamboozling by the type 2 gang. You can point out the obvious hypocrisy that there’s nothing more nanny state than saying you should only get food stamps if you eat your vegetables, or even the MORE obvious thing that cheap food is made out of corn products making welfare basically a government program to feed poor people like livestock, and yes even more bizarre is the fact that the he seems to think the government actually spends TOO much time on child trafficking and Epstein ie: “look out for miners, and not minors on an island somewhere” ( a wild ass take indeed), but another really clownish part is that people with driver’s licenses (and probably guns) think that getting to have candy for every meal is AWESOME, because that’s what children think and they don’t even have object permanence. Let’s not forget that this is all to the service of rich men. So now the refrain, when returned to, is tainted by the rest of the song. Like the real reason your boss won’t give you a raise is because the CEO and your Congressman need a money pile to fuck on while they replace public water with soda. A real toss up on which is healthier depending on the fracking laws in your state. 

The incredible thing is that the majority of the core demo for this song aren’t working class whites. Most working class whites aren’t really interested in politics and so as a block likely didn’t get this song floated to them on the algorithm. Who this is for is the white red state barbeque/gun range owners, and their little Renfields, confused about what working class exactly is. They think being the owner of a small business makes them the center of the moral universe, but the world doesn’t run on boat dealerships. The obvious brain damage from smelling their own farts causes these folks to think of themselves as both put upon working class heroes and captains of industry. Each being total fantasy, but importantly this confusion pervades their whole being. Their haywired world view is why so many conservatives miss the point in such bonkers ways. It’s not as though libs are much better, but they are such killjoys. If you’re going to try and laugh through everyone acting in complete obdurant callousness toward the poor the conservative strand is particularly goofy. You consistently see liberal senators try to fight poverty by offering 3% tax credits on chewing gum if you purchase it with a HSA (revolutionary). It’s its own kind of ridiculous sure, but are they suggesting to fix poverty with a BMI geared eugenics program where the only opt-out is to volunteer for your local pedophile militia? I think not (I was going to say pedophile hunting militias but let’s be real these vigilante groups are often rife with their own minor abuse problems so it removed “hunting”… perhaps should have added “replacing”).

Just like everyone should have known Bush was lying about WMD in Iraq because we would never try to invade a country if we actually thought they had nuclear weapons (see North Korea), we too should already know that Oliver Anthony is an astroturf campaign because you would never grow that beard unless you were going to cash in on being a hick icon (see Duck Dynasty). It comes too at no surprise to anyone that billionaires hate giving money to employees and they fuckin LOVE using that money to fuck up their lives for fun, but isn’t it way more fun to just recognize that this is a total self-dunk, and call it? Definitely some right-wing billionaire grabbed this boy by his then burgeoning charlatan beard and trotted him out to feed the hogs, but isn’t it way more entertaining that the target audience of mostly suburban used car lot owners who mythologize their own position in society responded by going “Yes we are swine and we love eating sloppy little buckets of shit”

At risk of undercutting the clearly better written end to this tirade I wanted to finalize by making the case for one last thing that everyone seems to miss surrounding this. While the media heads postulate back and forth about the orgs pumping money into these fucky little videos and everyone attempts to defend people stricken by poverty on the internet, there are still people out there struggling and they can’t eat rhetoric.  There is no doubt that as funny as these shitheads are, poverty is not funny. All of this is gallows humor and the solutions all seem like daunting super tasks, requiring more power than it seems could possibly be mustered. So laugh a little and maybe try to donate your time to organizations set on helping those more fucked than you.