John Mellencamp’s Top-10 1983 hit “Pink Houses” was such a feel-good patriotic love letter to the American dream that Ronald Reagan wanted to use it as a theme song for his 1984 re-election campaign. Mellencamp didn’t let him.
Decades later, the anti-gay “National Organization for Marriage” tried to vicariously borrow Mellencamp’s patriotism by using the song in their anti-marriage equality campaign. He sent them a cease-and-desist letter, denouncing their bigotry and urging them to “find music from a source more in harmony with your views.”
It’s not surprising that this song would be so attractive to political campaigns. Just look at the video, which is full of the kind of gauzy red-white-and-blue b-roll that used to dominate election ads on TV:
Mellencamp’s video includes a few dissonant notes — signs that the American Dream he’s celebrating is mostly aspirational, and in many ways literally falling apart. The crumbling barns and ramshackle homes seen here wouldn’t make the final edit of a campaign ad. But there’s still more than enough stock footage of heartland Americana, Old Glory, amber waves, and purple mountain’s majesty to piece together a 30-second spot.
They still make political campaign ads with that kind of rah-rah American imagery sometimes, although they’re outnumbered by the apparently more effective ads of the grainy, fear-mongering, two-minutes-hate variety — ads warning that “They” are coming to take away your home and children and precious bodily fluids.
The good news for Mellencamp is that Republicans have now finally given up trying to conscript his song for their political crusade. They used to love “Pink Houses,” but now they reject it as “woke.” It’s a violation of the new administration’s official rules for MAGAfication.
This is partly due to the opening image of the song, which invites listeners to identify with a Black homeowner as their neighbor, their representative, and their compatriot. But the final verse of Mellencamp’s song violates another of the administration’s new rules:
Well, there’s people and more peopleWhat do they know, know, know?Go to work in some high-riseAnd vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico, ooh, yeah
I always figured that line was Mellencamp’s way of insisting this wasn’t just a Springsteen pastiche. These folks aren’t vacationing down the Shore in Jersey. They’re from middle America, in between those coasts, so they head down to the Gulf of Mexico.
But in MAGAmerica we’re not allowed to say “Gulf of Mexico.”
When Trump first muttered something about renaming the Gulf of Mexico during one of his babbling, stream-of-consciousness campaign riffs it seemed like an off-hand joke — a spur-of-the-moment whim that was silly, shallow, ignorant, and kinda racist. Sometimes a 78-year-old man who does lots of Adderall just says things. You know how Grampa gets sometimes.
But Trump’s “joke” has turned into an executive order directing everyone who works for the executive branch of the federal government to henceforth refer to the Gulf of Mexico only as the “Gulf of America.” The executive order doesn’t require anybody in Congress, or in the judiciary, or in any state government, or any private citizen anywhere to use this silly new name. Executive orders are not imperial decrees or magic spells that can change what existing maps say, or what 40-year-old pop songs say, or what everyone in the world has said up until now.
But Trump’s goofily chauvinist attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico serves as a kind of loyalty test for him and for the new “competitive authoritarian” regime he is attempting to create, shredding the checks and balances of democratic government.
It’s a two-part loyalty test, requiring the MAGA faithful not just to refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico, but to actively endorse the pretense that a president’s executive order is an imperial decree and a magic spell and that president’s are wizard-kings capable of altering reality with the stroke of a pen.
Loyalty tests like this are why the reign of Trump is unsettling and precarious even for his biggest supporters. It doesn’t matter if you’re happy to play along with any and every whim that strikes the fancy of the president or his billionaire sidekick. You still have to keep up. Every day. You have to be vigilant and ready to change how you talk — to adopt new words and abandon old ones — at the drop of a hat.
Because if you don’t keep up, you might very easily say something that used to be acceptable but that became unacceptable yesterday. “The Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of America,” you say, signaling your loyalty and your membership in the tier of those who enjoy the privileges reserved for the loyal. But you didn’t keep up. That was last week’s loyalty signal and last week’s loyalty language. You said “Mississippi River” instead of using the Trump-mandated new name, “River of America” and now you must be punished.
As much as liberals and lefties and Democrats have been reeling at the accelerating pace of Trump’s Gleichschaltung, that rapidly changing landscape is even more difficult for those attempting to maintain their good standing as loyal supporters of his new world order. They’re no longer sure, day to day, what they are and are not allowed to do or say or think. Things that were previously unremarkable and uncontroversial have suddenly become partisan flashpoints, culture-war loyalty tests, and new grounds for marginalization and punishment The face-eating leopards are always hungry.
MAGA faithful were prepared to hate transgender people and nonwhite immigrants and 10th-generation nonwhite citizens. But now they’re required to hate cartographers, and Lutherans, and private charities, and NATO, and Canada, and missionaries, and farmers, and Dolly Parton, too, probably. And they have no idea what arbitrary new things they’ll be required to hate tomorrow.
Thinking about this had me re-reading an old post here from January 2016, from just before the Republican primary elections began that year: “A Ted Cruz win could further Bartonize ‘mainstream’ white evangelicalism.” In that post I worried that two mainstream, generally conservative evangelical professors I’ve long read online might become abruptly disfavored due to their excellent work critiquing grifter pseudo-historian David Barton. At the time — early 2016 — Barton was still a fringe figure even among lockstep Republican evangelicalism. His brand of bogus history in support of explicit white-/Christian nationalism was seen as goofy, transparently false, and unrespectable. If that changed — if Bartonism became “mainstream” white evangelical dogma — then my friends would find themselves in trouble — in serious, like, Rich Cizik, Larycia Hawkins trouble.
Considering what has happened since 2016 to both Warren Throckmorton and his former home of Grove City College, that post seems kind of prescient now. Some parts of it haven’t aged well because before those primaries in 2016 I really didn’t think Trump could capture control of the entire GOP.
But there’s a sense in which the now out-of-date parts of that post reinforce the point I was making there, and here. Consider the final paragraph:
But somebody is going to win that Republican nomination, and whoever that turns out to be — Cruz, Trump, Rubio, Bush — the gatekeepers of white evangelicalism will fall in line, and the boundaries will be redrawn, redefining what is and is not acceptable speech and behavior within the tribe. At that point, anybody might become suddenly redefined as “controversial” — whether a Barton critic or an advocate of refugee resettlement like Russell Moore.
The Russell Moore reference there was over-the-top hyperbole. In January 2016 Moore was the unimpeachably conservative chief spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. He was a disciple and protege of Al Mohler — the executor and executioner of the fundamentalist purge of the SBC in the 1990s. Moore was, at that time, best known as a bomb-throwing culture warrior on social media, notorious for blocking anybody who questioned his right-wing pronouncements there.
The bit about refugee resettlement was also over-the-top hyperbole. In 2016, refugee resettlement was supported by ultra-conservative fundamentalist Southern Baptists, as it had been for more than a century. But that long tradition of supporting — and funding — refugee resettlement as “home missions” evaporated and reversed itself over the past nine years. And Russell Moore is now a pariah to the SBC, not because he changed, but because he failed — refused — to keep up with the changes required by MAGAfication.
If that could happen to Moore, it could happen to any other “conservative.” And it will happen to them, tomorrow or next week or next month, if they don’t scrupulously keep pace and keep track and obediently adapt every new change in language and behavior and opinion required of them.
Anyway, here’s John Mellencamp performing “Pink Houses” at Farm Aid in 2005, back when even Republicans were still allowed to say that Farm Aid was a Good Thing:
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