Ozark Mountain Daredevils
‘Jackie Blue’ is not ‘Witchy Woman’
Two-hit wonders in the Ozarks, instead of going to LA to become big rock stars
Sometimes staying home beats going on the ‘Sonny & Cher’ show
The region of the United States called the Ozarks straddles three larger geographic regions. Situated in the north of Arkansas and Oklahoma, the south of Missouri, and a small corner slice of Kansas, the Ozarks can variously be said to lie in the South, Southwest, or Midwest. It is a mostly rural area with two mountain ranges, yet because of human design it also has a significant shoreline. And for more than a century, the music and folkways born of this rather odd geographical crossroads has captured the imagination of Americans.
The Lake of the Ozarks, which boasts 1,100 miles of shoreline, is actually a manmade reservoir created by damming the Osage River in order to provide electricity to St. Louis and elsewhere in Missouri. Completed in 1931 by the private utility Union Electric, Bagnell Dam was the last major dam in the US to be privately built before the New Deal’s large-scale …
Magnolias
The thickness of the shade they offered was like a stone cellar cut deep into the earth
Their peculiarity was undiminished by familiarity
They stood for something, while making boyhood tolerable
“In the pines, in the pines,” the song insisted, but for us it was always “in the magnolias.” There were five on the hill in Nashville where my grandparents lived. The Southern kind, Magnolia grandiflora, bull bays. Elegant and unruly, they stayed green come June or January. Their squat trunks were ten, twelve feet apart, but their branches had fanned out, drooped low, and intertwined. For the squirrels and the barn bats, as for my cousins and my brother and me, they made one wide emerald crown.
Lord, I loved those trees that did not love me back. They gave good cover. You could stand beneath them in a downpour and not get wet. Like a tin roof, they turned the rain’s pummeling into ambient percussion. The trade winds hardly rattled them. Snow and ice — even the sleet storm of ’94 that collapsed powerlines all over Davidson County and kept us out of school for weeks — only burnished their …
Stop Spying on Me, You Creeps
Barack Obama’s outsourcing of the surveillance state
A new model for managing the mental activities of the public
Putting a rationalist gloss on progressive fantasies of control advances the technocratic will-to-power
The supreme irony of technocratic politics is that it requires a charismatic figurehead to reach its full potential. Daniel Bell picked up on this in his study of post-industrial society when he remarked that “no matter how technical social processes may be, the crucial turning points in a society occur in a political form.” A culture of deference to machines does not eliminate human control over politics. Instead, it concentrates power in the hands of ever fewer people, pushing politics back toward an obscure kind of absolutism. “It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power,” Bell concluded, “but the politician.” Barack Obama was that politician.
Yet Obama appeared pragmatic to a fault, almost Spock-like in his unflappable rationality. The furthest thing from a leader interested in overhauling the basic conventions of America’s constitutional democracy. Perhaps that explains why …
