Tone-Deaf, North of 44th Street and West of 5th Ave

NRO's Mark Antonio Wright thinks Oliver Anthony is merely complaining about his paycheck.

Approximately two weeks ago, Oliver Anthony rose in a matter of days from a songwriter no one had ever heard of to the most streamed and downloaded musician on the internet. He owes this immaculate ascension to the chord he struck with tens of millions of listeners who feel the wretchedness of a world run by the villains in his hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Like lightning sparking dry tinder in a drought-stricken forest, Anthony’s powerful lyrics, powerfully delivered, started a word-of-mouth publicity phenomenon the “music industry” could not even dream of.

Not surprisingly, the corporate media has largely dismissed the song as “racist,” “punching down,” stereotyping welfare queens, and our favorite, “fat-phobic.” It’s a doggerel “dog whistle,” a right-wing “screed,” a “Republican anthem.”

It is true that celebrity conservatives have been outspoken in their praise, while progressive notables have been fairly consistent in their obloquy. But thousands of YouTube “reaction videos,” each with hundreds of comments, attest to the song’s popularity across ethnic and racial lines, and even national boundaries, among both of the two main genders, and many of the rank and file along the whole continuum of political leanings. The disdain from news organs that typically defend the political class in Washington, a.k.a, the Rich Men North of Richmond, as contrasted with the overwhelmingly heartfelt approval of fans from all walks of life, gives credence to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s observation that today’s politics is not about “‘left v. right’ so much as ‘pro v. anti-establishment.’”

The review by National Review Online’s Executive Editor, Mark Antonio Wright, is particularly noteworthy for being a criticism from the right (Those of us accustomed to thinking of the right-left division between monarchists and regicides in l'États généraux have never been at home with modern American usage, but for the sake of this discussion, it will have to do ). It is not difficult to imagine the torrent of epithets and vitriol he evoked after publishing his 14 August review of “Oliver Anthony’s Fuzzy Lament.” In it, Mr. Write lavished praise for the artistry and passion in Anthony’s meteoric bluegrass sensation, but expressed his consternation with “the adulation on the right for this song’s message” Wright begins his criticism with the opening (and closing) lines:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

The song only gets sadder from there, as Anthony mournfully sings of a nation in decline. The signs are everywhere: morbidly obese people on the dole, hungry people in the street, suicidal despair, and a class of rich, privileged rulers having no accountability for themselves, yet grasping for ever greater control over everyone else.

What incited the furor against him was Wright’s recommendation that Anthony sober up and find better paying employment. In fact, he dismissed all of the songwriter’s complaints as being basically fixable for anyone willing to confront them. Readers responded with an online pelting, charging him with being snobbishly out of touch with ordinary Americans, i.e., being pro-establishment. The following day he doubled down with a defense of his original position in an article entitled “It’s Not Condescending to Speak the Truth.” There he offered his workingman bona fides:

For the record, I’m not a rich man living north of Richmond. I’m an Okie, living in my hometown. I was raised in a middle-class family. I worked my way through college. I mowed lawns, built fences, and stood the closing shift at a convenience store. After school, I roughnecked in the west Texas oilfields for two years to pay off my student loans. Later, I joined the Marine Corps and served in the infantry. I’ve followed work to four different states and moved my family three times in seven years. My hands are rough and calloused. I know blue-collar work and what it’s like to make ends meet on blue-collar pay.

To give him his due, Wright at least acknowledges the destructive forces of Washington in what he considers Anthony’s otherwise “fuzzy lament”:

I’m neither callous nor indifferent to the suffering out there. I’m not attacking Oliver Anthony personally or disparaging his character. Indeed, I called the epidemic of overdoses, suicides, and deaths of despair a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe.” And, as I wrote, I don’t think that the federal government or our national leadership has been an innocent bystander in any of this. Of course the government has wasted avalanches of money, stoked inflation, and made it harder for your dollar to stretch to the end of the month.

But he gives it short shrift. “You won’t convince me that the first-, second-, and third-most important factors in the fracturing of our society hasn’t been — us. We the People have been the cause of our decline.”

In the Panglossian world of a National Review editor, if “you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’” the solution is simple: stop blaming others, and get to work on improving your situation. Instead of just complaining, Mr. Anthony “should consider singing about what makes America a great land — a land of opportunity, not of guaranteed success.”

Of course, Wright is not wrong in insisting that we are each responsible for our own well-being. That is the indispensable foundation of self-government. But collectively, self-governing individuals also require a regime of laws to which they give their consent, and which equally bind those who, through supposedly free and fair elections, have been delegated the authority to enforce them. Both governors and the governed must adhere to the rule of law.

The Rich Men North of Richmond behave as if they are under no such compunction. They are above the law, living prodigally without consequence, courtesy of the taxpayer. There are even plausible rumors that the most power drunk among them indulge in a sick appetite for children — of which Anthony unflinchingly accuses them: “I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.”

Wright passes over this sinister pun without comment, while insisting that we, “as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and popular culture.” It’s a matter of getting on “with living the good life: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.”

If Write, as he claims, is not being condescending, it is hard to imagine how his criticism could be more tone-deaf. It is emphatically the elements of the good life that are under threat by the Rich Men North of Richmond, and it is getting too obvious to ignore:

Lord knows, they all just want to have total control,
Want to know what you think, want to know what you do,
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do.

And how does Anthony know that you know? Because of the twin injustices which even the dullest of peasants inevitably can see for themselves, inflation and oppressive taxation. The song expresses the situation with raw clarity: “Yer dollar ain’t shit, and it’s taxed to no end.”

The lyricist’s crude words belie a subtly meticulous wording, to wit, your paycheck is already worthless before it gets taxed. He could have written that it’s worthless because it gets taxed, but “and it’s taxed to no end” adds a further humiliation, delivering the kick to the man who’s already down. Those who might argue that the working man doesn’t pay as much in our progressive tax scheme (as if handing over 20 or 25 percent to the imperial treasury is no small matter) are of course only thinking in terms of income. In fact, if he pays rent, he pays his landlord’s taxes. When he buys groceries, the price includes the per-item taxes on the farmer’s crop sales, the transporter’s gasoline, the grocer’s profits and the margins of anyone providing value along the whole train of transactions. This is on top of the quarter of his earnings he has already surrendered.

What is the point of a better paying job if ever increasing portions of one’s income are, directly or indirectly, surrendered to the taxman?

And what is the point of being employed at all if one’s compensation is in Federal Reserve Notes which the world since 1971 mistakenly refers to as “dollars?”

From the founding until the Nixon presidency, the dollar was always defined as a weight of gold, or gold and silver. It’s still on the books at $42.22 per troy ounce of fine gold, but only because no subsequent Congress has dared declare on paper what it is in practice, a fiat currency backed by nothing but the full-faith and credit of its issuer. Instead of the “Note” being backed by gold, for which it once served as a convenient, but redeemable, substitute, the assets now backing our circulating currency are US Treasuries and Mortgage Backed Securities. In other words, the fiat dollar is an IOU for more debt.

Once set free from a commodity not easily accumulated, the Rich Men North of Richmond could conjure these so-called dollars at will for expenditures well beyond what rapacious revenuers could squeeze out of their blood dry subjects.

But free money is never free. To the wage earner, money is a token of the time and energy that was required to earn it. To the saver, it is a backdated claim on the needs and pleasures that have been forsworn today for the uses and gratifications that can be enjoyed tomorrow. Money extends the realm over which labor can be divided, with each participant earning and storing the value he adds to the world’s wealth in a medium he can exchange for the products and services provided by others; it is pursued almost instinctively by self-governing people as a means of ensuring their freedom from want and adversity in the future. But when it is diluted with counterfeit tokens for which no labor was committed, when the claims of savers are crowded out by the claims of forgers, those actually contributing to the overall stock of wealth have their time stolen and the value of their labor diminished for the the benefit of the government, its favored interests, and its growing ranks of plebeian dependents.

If intentions may be deduced from results, making us all dependent would seem to be the goal. If every dollar is itself a debt, backed by nothing but debts that citizens are expected to repay, the ruin of the average wage worker gets closer with every dollar earned. The paycheck he depends on to keep him and his family afloat is also the millstone around his neck that eventually will drown him along with his countrymen. And he has no choice. By the law of the land he must accept as payment, and vainly try to save, the legal tender in which his property and all his economic transactions are taxed, while the purchasing power of his time and labor dwindles toward nothing. Even in what is left of the so-called private sector, he works for the state, for the Rich Men North of Richmond.

In his second attempt to explain his position, Wright takes issue with a critic to his original article who points to the decline in real wages for those at the bottom. “That’s a debatable assertion at best,” he contends, referencing but not elaborating on Michael Strain’s book, The American Dream Is Not Dead. He cites data from the US Chamber of Commerce regarding unfilled jobs and the shortage of skilled workers. For those without skills, Write helpfully suggests joining the military and shipping off to boot camp.

Whatever statistics that academicians and corporate lobbying associations might produce as proof that Americans are living in the best of times, the rest of us go to the grocery store and see fewer goods for sale, at higher prices, in smaller packages. House prices have never been higher relative to income. Practically anyone not generating gains from inflated financial assets is falling behind, out of savings and further in debt. And with scores of thousands of rules and regulations obstructing economic decision-making in every direction, opting out to start a business — the original American dream — is increasingly less attractive.

To the tone-deaf critic who assures us America has never seen better days, that life-changing improvements are merely a pay raise away, the only consideration is the quantity, not the quality, of the money being used in payment. But a single example suffices to show that our dollar “ain’t shit” compared to what it used to be. When President Johnson ordered the removal of silver from US coinage in 1965, the minimum wage was $1.25 — five quarters. The silver contained in five quarters already in circulation at that time, those minted in 1964 or earlier, would, as of this writing, command a melt value of $21. If and when silver is once again demanded as a monetary metal, it will take far more than twenty-one of today’s shitty dollars to buy those “junk silver” coins of yesteryear.

Thus, it is beyond dispute that, measured against real money, real wages have declined, and with them, the freedom of citizens trapped in the legal tender regime that borrows, spends, taxes and inflates away the fruits of their labor. “Give me control of a nation’s money supply,” Mayer Amschel Rothschild is alleged to have said, “and I care not who makes its laws.” With the coming launch of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CDBC), programmable fiat dollars can direct credit toward politically favored projects, attach expiration dates to prohibit savings, and deny spending on the part of anyone suspected of “conspiracy”, “misinformation” or showing insufficient hatred against the enemy du jour. With one’s ability to buy and sell made contingent on cooperativeness and social credit score, centralized control in this dystopian nightmare will be close to total. They will know what you think and know what you do.

A pervasive feeling of futility explains, at least partially, the nation’s rising rate of suicides, a damning bombshell Anthony delivers at the song’s crescendo. Not surprisingly, Wright retorts, “the tragedy of young men killing themselves through drink or drugs — the catastrophe of deaths of despair” is not Washington’s fault. To be sure, in that slow march of desperation, the taking of one’s own life — the final step from which there is no coming back — is always an individual choice. But given the dramatic uptick in the number of Americans resorting to this fatal decision, particularly among one demographic, it is not unreasonable to suggest some of the blame might be laid on a legal and social environment that is indifferent, if not hostile, to their continued existence. The songwriter is considerably less equivocal:

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet under ground
’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.

In suggesting the regime’s culpability in the self-destruction of its young men, it is important to note that the narrator has not taken that course himself. He is still standing, defiantly roaring his protest. Even more so must we make the distinction between the narrator’s words and the stated beliefs of the songwriter who wrote them, the distinction between the art and the artist. In his self-recorded introduction to the song, Oliver Anthony remarks, “This life is a beautiful opportunity, and I don’t care where you are or what you’ve done, where you think your life is heading. Everything can change in a moment. As long as you’re above the dirt, you’ve got a fightin’ chance.”

Antonio Wright’s criticism fails to make these distinctions. He therefore misinterprets the song as a dirge of hopelessness rather than an anthem of revolt against powerful people who no longer even try to hide their tyranny. For every complaint in the song, Wright has a practical solution. He betrays the less than helpful attitude of the husband who doesn’t understand that his wife isn’t asking him to provide a solution. She just wants to be heard.

Although he does not specifically address Anthony’s line, “We got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat,” we can assume he takes issue with it on the grounds that just about anyone can work his way out of that predicament, if he so chooses. Undoubtedly, the downward trail that leads to sleeping on grates follows many of what the grackles in the self-help industry term “bad personal decisions.” In most cases Mr. Wright’s universal prescription to pick up one’s life and make oneself useful is precisely what the doctor should order. But putting the line within the context of the rest of the verse reveals a larger complaint about which the striving, self-reliant, can-do American has no means of redress:

We got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat,
and the obese milking welfare.
Well God! If you're five foot three and weigh three hundred pounds
taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.

The lyrics don’t say whether those folks in the street are starving because of government action, or its inaction, but they do point out the glaring discrepancy between the alleged aims of government’s humanitarian programs and their obscene results. Adding insult to injury, anyone who has a job, especially a high paying one such as Wright recommends, is underwriting this obscenity without having any say in the matter. We wonder what he would recommend to the farmers forced to quarter troops in Sam Adam’s day. Perhaps: “Grow more crops, and then you can afford a bigger house.”

The reason this song has received such world wide attention and “adulation” — from all quarters, not just from the right — is its resonance with everyday people experiencing these systemic obstacles and roadblocks to their pursuit of happiness. The compliance and the workarounds are increasingly more time-consuming, less effective and are grinding them down. Finally, somebody has stood up and called “bullshit” on the whole authoritarian establishment

Write’s mistake is in seeing Mr. Anthony’s song as simply a catalog of things gone wrong, a consignment of blame and, by implication, a cry for some sort of amelioration. It is Write’s inference that is dead wrong. There is nothing to indicate that Mr. Anthony is appealing to government for anything, except for it to lift its boot off the neck “of people like you, and people like me.”

Whether in the form of ninety-nine theses nailed to the church door, or a declaration of the “long train of abuses and usurpations” dispatched to the monarch reigning overseas, revolutions begin with a catalog of grievances against the current order. The list eventually destined for the Capitol will be considerably longer. Rough lyrics will be rephrased with legal precision. But thanks to Oliver Anthony, the Rich Men North of Richmond are on notice that it is coming.