I tried playing the trumpet and clarinet as a boy. Switched to the baritone ukulele in college. Fixed on the guitar and tenor banjo as an adult — and not really mastering any of them. But recently, I began to work hard on a song by David Mallett, a songwriter from Maine best known for Garden Song (“Inch by inch, row by row …”).
What set me to practicing again despite my arthritic knuckles is Mallett’s Last Farmer’s Ball. It begins with this verse:
Out on the road today
I saw a sign in field of hay,
“Everything goes” and a number to call.
Another one bites the dust.
We all do what we must,
And we ride around on the great American sprawl.
And the chorus goes like this:
The summer’s gone, the crops are dry.
I’m going to sit here by and by,
Getting ready for the last farmer’s ball.
My motive in seeking to master Mallett’s sad song had a lot to do with our recent return to Ohio, where Nancy and I planned to visit old friends, including a semi-retired dairy farmer and his wife — people we’ve come to love and admire. I was sure they’d like Last Farmer’s Ball because they worry a lot about the fate of small farmers. If I sang the song well, I thought, they would forgive me for asking an awkward political question I’ve wanted to ask for a while.
But when our family went to Sunapee last summer and heard David Mallett perform Last Farmer’s Ball, I realized my version of the song never approached the beauty of his. So I didn’t take my guitar to Ohio.
Still, I asked our friends the question.
How, I wondered, do your evangelical Christian neighbors bring themselves to support our president? The man I asked this question is one of the friendliest, most sociable and gentle people I’ve known. If he finds birds nesting in a field he is about to mow, he’ll mow around them. He’s eager to talk with anyone he meets.
He looked immediately angry and then sad. After a pause, he said he can’t believe they’re really Christians. And, he added, his own community reminds him now of how he imagines Hitler’s Germany to have felt: people around them are afraid to talk politics.
The conversation seemed to make all of us uneasy, and we soon moved on to speak of their grandchildren’s efforts to save monarch butterflies and the growing pressures on small dairy farmers.
Here in the Upper Valley we haven’t stopped talking politics, and Valley News columns have suggested Bernie Sanders or Mitt Romney might be what we need to get us out of our dire political predicament. My own inclination is to wait awhile before picking a candidate to support in 2020.
Some of the money we might have sent to a preferred candidate, Nancy and I have been using to buy postcards and stamps. We get 100 cards for $12.99 from www.PostcardsToVoters.org. And even though the days of the penny postcard are gone, the postage is just 35 cents. We’ve sent about 900 cards to voters so far, and in 2020 we hope to pick up steam.
As more voters realize there are thousands of card-writing people all over our country who believe citizens representing us on school boards and city councils can make our democracy work better, we hope to get more people participating in our elections all the way down the ballot. When there’s room on the card, we add a postscript: “You might save this note / a reminder to vote.”
The most inspiring part of our postcard writing for me has been learning about the candidates, many of them bravely running in places where Democrats have a history of not getting elected. I wouldn’t know about them if we hadn’t emailed Join@TonyTheDemocrat.org and signed up. When Tony McMullin sends us addresses, he includes information he and his helpers gather about the candidates.
But I haven’t given up on understanding why so many religious people support Donald Trump.
Truth is, I grew up among Christian evangelicals, including a few fundamentalists. And Dartmouth College professor Jeff Sharlet has been helping me probe this mystery with his two books, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, as well as the recent five-episode documentary on Netflix, The Family.
Sharlet’s analysis of a mainly secret, fundamentalist crusade among very powerful people might help to clear things up for me. How could working class, evangelical people I loved as a kid ever have joined a political movement that now seems determined to stick with Donald Trump despite his lies and his obvious contempt for democracy?
If I can understand that, I might write something about it, maybe even a song.
I’ll keep working, too, on Last Farmer’s Ball, a protest song we’re likely to need for quite a while.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.