“The Wall Street Journal stepped in it pretty good,” with an article on Johnny Cash. SavingCountryMusic.com has a good summary of the kerfuffle that erupted last month when the paper published a piece by the “senior culture editor” of the Economist writing more about himself than about Johnny Cash.
The headline for that piece seemed OK, at first — “It’s Finally Time to Give Johnny Cash His Due.” But, wait, what’s with that “finally”? Who is it who has allegedly been denying Johnny respect? And then readers hit the Journal’s disastrous subhed for the piece: “The country music legend can seem deeply uncool. It took years for me to appreciate his profound, plainspoken strength.”
Nobody will ever be upset if you write a piece talking about Johnny Cash being cool because, of course, the Man in Black is and was and always has been cool. But if you write a piece saying “I think Johnny Cash is cool and that makes me cool and special and better than you and everybody else because you and everybody else doesn’t understand that Johnny Cash is cool” then, well, everybody else is going to think you’re uncool and a dim, condescending jerk. Duh.
And so lots of folks were dunking on that article and its author all over social media, including one poster who joked that she’d like to shoot the writer of that piece in Reno, just to watch him die. That is, of course, a line from Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” a famous lyric that people have been singing and quoting and joking about for 70 years.
But despite all of that obvious context, that post also technically ran afoul of BlueSky’s policies about “violent rhetoric” — counting as a violent threat and earning the poster a three-day suspension from the site.
Granted, the imprisoned protagonist of “Folsom Prison Blues” was a violent man, but a lot of Cash’s greatest songs were drenched in violence and one can’t help but wonder if some of his other famous lyrics would also have violated BlueSky’s prohibition on “violent rhetoric.”
Some might have. Responding to the author of that weirdly condescending piece by saying, “My name is Sue, how do you do? Now you gonna die” would also probably constitute a technical “threat.”
But what if one simply said that the writer of that piece, that long tongue liar, that he can run on for a long time, run on for a long time, he can run on for a long time, but sooner or later God’ll cut him down? Or what if one simply informed that writer that, “My friend you’re weighed in the balance and found wanting”?
Those songs — “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” and “Belshazzar” — both foretell violent ends. I suppose one could argue that, technically, they constitute predictions rather than threats, but the end result is still violent calamity. Just because this violence is framed as divinely ordained and divinely sanctioned doesn’t change the fact that it is violence.
“Belshazzar” is a relatively obscure deep cut from Cash’s Sun Records years. The verses are almost a Sunday-school version of the story from the book of Daniel, but the chorus — and the hook — reminds us this is a song about Mene mene tekel upharsin. It is a song about political violence, about the coming downfall of a tyrant’s regime. And it’s a cheerful endorsement of that downfall.
You can’t write a song about the book of Daniel without it being a song about political violence because Daniel is apocalyptic, and apocalyptic literature is always as soaked in violence as any Johnny Cash murder ballad. It is a literature of people who have been the victims of political violence and are crying out for the day when the perpetrators of that violence will reap what they have sown, when those who have sown the wind will reap the whirlwind.
That’s not Daniel, that’s Hosea, chapter 8, verse 7. People lost their jobs a couple months ago for quoting that verse too soon after a man with a gun assassinated a prominent political figure. Hosea 8:7 was, at that time, forbidden speech because it was somehow perceived as a threat of “political violence” — a term reduced to a single, specific meaning and thus dishonestly exempted from the wider, more common, and more impactful meaning it ought to have. But, again, it’s not a threat. It’s a prediction. Or, rather, it’s an assertion of faith and hope that someone or something is somehow weighing all of this in the balance and recognizing that it cannot stand, cannot stand.
I appreciate that ritual condemnation of “political violence” that follows horrific murders and assassinations. It is important and right and good to condemn such forms of violence (“individuals committing violence motivated by political ideology” as Noah Berlatsky describes this stunted definition).
The condemnation and rejection of “political violence” is actually at the violent core of the violent predictions of apocalyptic literature, whether it’s from Daniel or Hosea or Johnny Cash.
“All who draw the sword will die by the sword,” Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel. That’s not endorsing political violence, it’s simply describing it. Jesus offered this description while he was unarmed and surrounded by agents of the state who were carrying drawn swords. And because he was unarmed, and because they were agents of the state carrying drawn swords, they chose to perceive his statement as a threat of “political violence” against them. That’s how this language often gets corrupted and employed, and the end result of that corruption is never a decrease in “political violence.”
Let me give the final word here to Miss Nina Simone. “Sinnerman” is, both musically and lyrically, an ancestor of Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” It is a song about “political violence” — an intrinsically violent song. But it is not a call for violence, merely a call for justice that will thus be perceived as a call for violence by agents of the state carrying drawn swords.
This is, in a sense, Nina Simone’s version of Mene mene tekel upsharsin.
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