Can’t You Hear Me Callin’. Ricky Skaggs. 1982. Epic.

 When Keats wrote his redoubtable lines formulating the most famous aesthetic equation in Western literature about the values of truth and beauty, it’s highly unlikely he was thinking of either Ted Nugent’s powerhouse Epic LPs of the mid to late nineteen-seventies or Michael Jackson’s 34x platinum pop triumph of 1982. What was pivotal to Keats’ perspective in 1819, the core of his argument in the poem’s five stanzas, is the immutability of a work of art, its power to transmogrify the natural world, and then hold it within the frame of representation. Art, Ode To A Grecian Urn tells us, was as eternal as the truths we carve out for ourselves from mythology and other traditions. But in the last century, a new truth, spurred by a rapidly expanding postwar economy, began to emerge. The entertainment industry began marketing the private lives of its artists, creating an avid patronage eager to measure the perversity of the celebrity class against its own. We took such an active interest in celebrity gossip that it eventually became its own industry, dovetailing with an increasingly violent, sexually sadistic American landscape. In 1947, the Freudian psychoanalyst Edward Glover wrote, “the actual and potential destructiveness of the atomic bomb plays straight into the hands of the Unconscious. The most cursory study of dream-life and of the phantasies of the insane shows that ideas of world-destruction (more accurately destruction of what the world symbolizes) are latent in the unconscious mind. And since the atomic bomb is less a weapon of war than a weapon of extermination it is well adapted to the more bloodthirsty phantasies with which man is secretly preoccupied during phases of acute frustration. Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety." The fantasies engendered by a similar Asian apocalypse visited by American armed forces upon Vietnam was a multi-headed serpent, one of which unsettlingly appeared when Nugent told a reporter for High Times magazine about repeatedly soiling himself over a seven day period before his scheduled appearance at a military induction center, at which he appeared under a supposed methamphetamine influence. Years later Nugent claimed the anecdote was little more than self-mythologizing apocrypha, but the fact remains. No one has ever claimed surprise about the probability of the scenario as Nugent described it having occurred. The fantasies unleashed by the Michael Jackson abuse allegations events, though far less severe in their cost to human life than the grossly inept American prosecution of the war against Vietnam, serves to prove the unsettling truism that, in this country’s ongoing guerrilla war against itself, there is no more easily consumable a target than its children. The unenacted gun laws following the mass shootings at Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary Schools haunt the national conscience like a pair of recently expired airline boarding passes. And in 1989, one of country music’s most piously Christian performers, Ricky Skaggs, stood before a concert audience in Raleigh, North Carolina, and said, “I truly believe God intended for everyone to have a mate. As long as it’s a man and a woman. Anything else won’t get it. God has destroyed cities over such things in the past, and he’ll destroy cities in the future.” Like Sam Cooke, Skaggs inhabits two worlds, reality and the literary world of ancient scripture in translation. Evidence of his commitment to the former can be heard in both his comment regarding human mating habits and his cover of Bill Monroe’s Can’t You Hear Me Callin’, one of the best songs ever recorded about human mating habits. Immersed in religious and country music traditions from a very young age, Skaggs joined the culture wars on the side of bigotry when he self-servingly glossed over the fact of these dates: he was to married his current wife Sharon White in 1981, but in 1986, Skaggs’ seven year old son Andrew was shot in the face while riding in a car with his mother Brenda, even as Matthew 5:32 councils, “But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the grounds of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” Skaggs isn’t the only hypocrite practicing the art of pop music, but, confusing it with rectitude, he wears it exceptionally well, and proudly. Skaggs is one of many heterosexual American men of our new century deliberately flirting with a redefinition of their sense of self by means of an overly exaggerated personal style that emphasizes those specific traits—tone of voice, walking gait, clothing, etc.—by which sexual attraction is often established, and which is meant to contrast with post-Obergefell American gay men, not only physically and socially, but morally, too. As a result, he and his ilk have become objects of sexual fantasy for a subset of homosexual men currently posting on social media. The revelation of fantasies indulged by a recently liberated group of men for their would be oppressors, though not new, does acquire a sinister urgency when you read online messages posted by members of this community parroting virulent right-wing anti-gay rights rhetoric. The collective will to realize our nightmares into reality through the conduit of pop stars’ humanity, their steps and grievous missteps, has been distilled into three to seven minute discs of recorded prophecy that chart our increasing alienation from stabilized norms. Social change is underway at revolutionary speeds. Can’t you hear me calling?