Johnny Cash and Lost America

Just saw the Johnny Cash biopic.

It reminds me how much more divided America has become even since my childhood in the '70's. Growing up, I listened to Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, but also Led Zeppelin and the Who, and also Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. No one ever suggested it was odd to combine an interest in hard rock, country, and folk. And then of course there was funk, soul and disco and all of my parents' music: Steve Lawrence and Edie Gormet, Jacques Brel, Frank Sinatra.

In the 1960's, there were still some radio stations that played ALL of those genres -- without even acknowledging them as separate genres. Once upon a time (as the movie reminds us), Johnny Cash toured with Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Apparently, rural America and urban America, North and South weren't really that far apart from one another -- at least in terms of listening tastes.

Now we are all carved up into separate listening segments. My demographic would never get on the same section of bandwidth with your demographic.

A shame.

It's a sign of the times that the film was too timid, too milky mouthed Hollywood-liberalish to deal with the overwhelming importantance of religious faith in Johnny Cash's life. There are references to the older brother's religiosity, but of course he dies, and the only Christians in the film are portrayed as narrow-minded bigots. The closest Johnny gets to religion is a brief glimpse of him being dragged into Church by June Carter. Did these hosers even listen to the man's music?

At the same time - and for similar reasons - the film failed to portray Johnny Cash's unique importance as a bard of the little man. Since the focus was mostly on his drug addiction and his status as a pop idol, you would never guess that he had written ballad after ballad about the plight of poor workers, that he criticized the Vietnam War, and advocated for prison reform (ok, they did show him saying nice things to Fulsom Prison inmates, but that hardly gets at his importannce.)

Seems like Hollywood missed an opportunity to remind us of a time when being religious, being country, and being -- at least by our standards -- "LIBERAL" was not uncommon.

The Once-a-Month Blogger

Guess I'm doomed to just blog in little unpredictable bursts. Apologies to those of you (all three of you?) checking in for occasional distractions.

I've been working somewhat frantically on a new book. It's about the so-called "Magdeburg Justice Scandal of 1926," in which the Jewish industrial Rudolf Haas was arrested and held on suspicion of killing his former accountant, Hermann Helling. Helling had disappeared on the day that he was to meet with a tax official concerning alleged tax fraud at Haas' firm. The police, the judge, and the tax officials believed that Haas and his co-conspirators, including officials in the Czech consulate in Magdeburg, killed Helling in order to stop the impending investigation.

The judge held by this conspiracy theory - and continued to hold Haas in prison - even after the Berlin authorities assembled an overwhelming amount of evidence implicating a different man, Richard Schroeder. Schroeder was a con man and petty thug with vaguely rightwing convictions. (He used to put a swastika on his letters, right next to his singature.) A Berlin detective, sent by the state government of Prussia, found Hermann Helling's body buried in Schroeder's basement and various bits of evidence that made clear Schroeder had shot Helling in a regular, unspectacular robbery/scam. Schroeder, however, quickly divined that the Magdeburg interrogators were after bigger fish, and cleverly fed the idea that he was just a small piece in a wider conspiracy.

The story is filled with fascinating characters and strange turns: if it were fiction, no one would believe it. The heroes in the story did everything one could hope for. Jewish groups, conscientious Prussian officials, and dilligent lawyers and policemen disproved the theory of the Jewish conspiracy again and again. Somehow, however, the conspiracy theory kept coming back. It was like the evil cyborg in Terminator II who keeps pulling himself back together piece by piece after Arnold blows him to bits.

Most of my scrounging for info has been in Berlin, where 45 files on the case have been preserved in the Prussian state archive, but now I've started going to Magdeburg too, a surprisingly pleasant city of 200k about 2 hours away by train.

But I'm too compulsive -- and too easily distracted -- to give up this blog entirely.