Remembering Trauma with End-Times Pentecostals and Left-Wing Rappers

What do we remember? How do we remember? What good does it do? I started writing this post while the media was hyping the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing as infotainment, but this only made me want to play Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" over and over.

By now the news has moved on to the anniversary of Woodstock. Soon it will be reminiscing about Nixon shooting antiwar protestors at Kent State—or maybe waxing nostalgic about the Watergate scandal, when there still existed Republicans senators with enough integrity to stand up to a criminal President.

In this context, I want to think about cultural memory and how two approaches to it—Scott-Heron's, typically lumped on the left, and another usually lumped on the right—might have more in common than we think. Each, in different ways, points us back before cultural wreckage that began in the 1980s.

End-Times Apocalyptic as Witness to a Better Time

The book about Trumpism that I've been thinking with lately has a section about the Areno family, whose formerly lovely and ecologically rich land—which sustained them both with beauty and food—was turned into a poisoned wasteland by industrial pollution.

They talk about their role as “rememberers,” or witnesses to how it used to be.

Fascinatingly, they do this through an end-times Pentecostal imagination—which contrary to common wisdom does not stop them from becoming green activists. When they speak of heaven they imagine living again among “beautiful trees” that used to surround and sustain them. But they say that such imagery, however resonant, is not strong enough to carry their full weight of grief. They say that only the mind of God, as opposed to their human capacity, is wide and strong enough to cope with the degree and complexity of suffering. They also feel that only a bloody imagery of apocalypse is strong enough to articulate their situation, at least in a way commensurate to the pain and evil involved.

I have argued here that some of the Coen brothers’ best films take a related approach. I also wrote here, ranging more widely, "Against the Stereotype of End-Times Believers as Fatalistic." Although the stereotype is not all wrong, it is a dangerous half-truth. The Arenos give us more leverage to see why this is so. For them, God’s mind includes a sort of half-condemnatory and half-redemptive bank of memory.

Proto-Hip-Hop as Apocalyptic Imagination

Let’s circle back to the Apollo mission and recall how Scott-Heron responded. His poem (here is the whole) begins and ends as follows:

A rat done bit my sister Nell (with Whitey on the moon) Her face an’ arm began to swell (but Whitey’s on the moon) …. Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill (of Whitey on the moon) I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills…(to Whitey on the moon)

Scott-Heron died when he was only 62—the same age I turned in July—and I wrote about him at the time. Since I am consolidating some of my older pieces here as they become relevant, here is a link. This earlier piece has a longer section on “Whitey on the Moon” and reflections that might be worth bringing back.

For today, since we're on the subject of "articulating our situation in a way commensurate to the pain and evil involved," let's agree that we need poems like this, as well as Scott-Heron's classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and his reflection on life before and after the Reagan years, “Winter in America.”

Do young people remember these songs—part of the foundation of hip-hop? Increasingly, at 62, I am shocked to discover how many things I take as baseline cultural competence—as much a part of my toolkit of common knowledge allusions to drop into conversation as the words to “Blowin' in the Wind”—have fallen down a memory hole. Recently I was amazed to hear that my brilliant Ph.D. student did not know James McMurtry songs like “Ruby and Carlos” or “Out Here in the Middle,” even though she studies Southern literature and music. Whoever cannot sing along with "out here in the middle, where the buffalo roam, we’re putting up towers for your cell phones” is culturally deprived. I would say the same about “Whitey on the Moon.”

When I think of the 1960s, I remember that most white and many black working-class people could support a small family with reasonable economic and health care security on one 40-hour-a-week paycheck. I remember that attending college included far more discretionary time to explore extracurricular interests and didn't entail taking on huge debts, even if one worked relatively few hours. In college in the 1970s, I (a fairly poor white kid) did not hesitate of pursue my intellectual interests wherever they led, because I could expect to muddle toward an acceptable quality of life. The undermining of such expectations has gutted what “college experience” means in practice for non-elite students. Universities are reeling from these changes.

This world was deeply undermined by the “Winter in America” that Reaganism ratcheted upward in the 1980s—before today's students were born. Talking with them, I try to recall how I felt in 1977 when I was 20 and my professors talked about life when they were 20. The gap back to 1940 was like traveling to ancient history—but they were talking about a gap far smaller than from now to 1980. Luckily I picked up some great teachers before I wrote off the study of history, and found out how illuminating it is to understand what was going on during these gaps.

In the case of “Winter in America,” Scott-Heron’s refrain says “nobody’s fighting because nobody knows what to save.” Can we remember enough to help us?

Connecting the Dots

Although Scott-Heron's music is not exactly “apocalyptic,” it shares with the Arenos a sort of despair about the ruins of the present, informed by memories of what came before. It also reminds us that if we cannot remember what could be—such as how 1970s students inhabited a different world largely free of worry about debt or climate apocalypse, or how students in other countries are now free from worry about being bankrupted by health care costs as they decide how to launch careers—we will not have a measuring stick to grasp how far we have fallen. We will lack resources we may need to imagine something better, and to articulate it with words and sounds that are commensurate with the ruins of our time.