The Driver's Song

The aspect of this project that is causing me to teeth-grit and jaw-gnash and brow-furrow is the (implied?) overt-narrative aspect of it. It's making me loopy. 

I think it's because I was taught in fiction writing (I was a terrible fiction writer, by the way; _nothing ever happened_ in my stories, though I could -as Rick Bass says- 'describe the hell out of a situation,' but then.... nada; all the characters just kind of got along. for eight pages) anyway, it was drilled into us that we should never _tell_. Instead we were to _show_; to let the situation unspool in real time, to stay off the soapbox, to utilize nuance....

Great songwriting often does that; Bill Morrissey, a brilliant and underrated New Hampshire writer whose stuff has a sense of place permeating it like woodsmoke in a jackshirt, is a master. Some of his work may have political overtones, but that's not how it's presented. It just seems to be about people. 

"The Driver's Song," f'rinstance, could easily be mistaken for a bland, if moderately poetic, travelog. The final lines, delivered deadpan by the narrator, say:

I love these back roads of New Hampshire

They twist and wind like a rolling sea

I feel like a captain who knows no fear 

Everybody goes to sleep so early up here

Cool! Earlier, the guy has been talking about how much he likes the warm lights coming through the windows of the farmhouses and how gorgeous the moon is on the hills; real Woody Jackson turf, y'know?

Except.... here's the shiv in your back, delivered with a shrug: the verse preceding blandly says:

"I stop my truck in the middle of the road

Always the same place each night on this familiar route

I open the side valve, then climb back in the cab

And I drive these roads until that big tank empties out..."

So, no, the guy isn't a tourist. He's someone being paid to dump toxic waste. And he does it by driving his rig up to East Bumfuck, NH, opening up the petcocks, and driving around, admiring the moonlit scenery until the tank's empty. And he's not nervous about it. He's calm. Why? Because "everybody goes to sleep so early up here."

Which is a way of being political without being political.

A crappy songwriter would say something like: "Toxic waste is bad! It makes the planet sad! People from Massachusetts! They think they can use us! Drive up late at night! Dump their waste it just ain't right! No, no, no, no, no,no, no, no!"

Bill Morrissey's voice never inflects that we're to be paying special attention to one phrase or another. We have to discover the horror ourselves. That approach, and that level of skill makes me swoon.

THAT'S the kind of painting I want to do. Oh, Sweet Jeezus, I don't want to make bad op-ed art.

The first idea I've been wresting with is/was to depict people in an 'as is' scenario holding up a picture of what 'might be.' Kind of as if President Kennedy had needed remedial education and ended up with Robert MacNamara holding up flash cards. 

This is making my skin crawl as I type it.

The current idea is... better... maybe. It's to explore the idea of consequences of idealism as it relates to Vermont. And its future.

The equivalent of Jim Douglas of the Abenakis probably thought, "The English! Cool! This expands our trading possibilities so we can leverage the French!" As the English concurrently thought, "Need  a blanket, Chief? We just picked up some nice ones down in Amherst!"

So... we have the First Nations. They see trading possibilities, but get smallpoxed blankets. Then we have Merino wool. Which brings the speculators, and then that unfortunate crash. Next come the railroads! It opens up our trading potential, but results in the depopulation of Vermont when the Midwest opens up instead. Then the Interstates! And that brings us (among many other fascinating items) all those nice drug dealers (from within and without the state) who REALLY appreciate the ability to access Interstate Commerce in a trice....

So now we have the (and who can argue!) very reasonable impulse to bring broadband access to every nook and cranny of the state a.s.a.p.! As a good doomsayer (who enjoys his DSL in Bellows Falls, yes indeed), I'm fascinated by trying to figure what the unintended consequence of _that_ is/are going to be...

I'm thinking it is the utter decimation of our hanging-on-by-their-fingernails downtowns... I watched (in quiet horror) this winter when a friend with DSL needed to buy a nail gun, and he went to the local hardware store and checked out the different models and decided which one he liked best (thank you, local hardware store!). Then he went home, went online (to Amazon! Amazon! of all places) and read reviews of the guns. THEN he went to some morally-craven website where all they do is reduce whatever eager impulse one has into the cheapest place in the world to buy it... and bought it.

Let's think on how to depict _that_ without getting all obvious.

Care for a blanket, Chief? 

Sleep well.