Listening Closer: I Have a Dream of Election-Season Peace

Every Monday in Listening Closer, Jeffrey Overstreet opens up the art of songcraft, sharing his own musical experiences, interpretations, and epiphanies, while soliciting alternate interpretations and discussion.

I dreamed it was election season again. I dreamed about the hype. The promises. The makeovers. The character assassinations. The blame games and guessing games. The massive inrush of corporate donations. The urgency to tell us what we want to hear. The tribalism. The setting up of straw men. The predictions of the coming of the Antichrist.

I dreamed about the slogans. I dreamed about the lies.

I was in a pub at the end of the road, sitting at a large table, and I was paying close attention, for even though the conversation had turned to politics—and thus was grim and troubling—the company in this place was quite amazing.

For example, onstage we had Radiohead, playing “Electioneering” from OK Computer:

I will stop, I will stop at nothing
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote. . . 

Radiohead recorded that back in 1997, catalyzed by the not-so-persuasive promises of Tony Blair and the “New Labour” party. “Song doesn’t seem outdated, does it?” said Yorke into the microphone, and everyone at my table nodded grimly.

I heard someone say, “Looks like we’re stuck in just another season when a lot of Christians, like any other contentious political party, forget that their God is sovereign, and believe that they have to violently defend their convictions. We start rallying around whomever we perceive as the next great Christian savior, or we march out with torches against whomever we perceive as the Next Most Likely Candidate for Sending Us to Hell-in-a-Hand-Basket. We forget that Christ interrupted a stoning, and we start cheering for those smug, self-righteous pundits who throw the meanest stones.” Strangely, the voice sounded like me.

But no one seemed to hear, perhaps because this was a dream. (Have you noticed how nobody listens to you in dreams?) Everyone at the table was looking toward the stage, where Bob Dylan was playing a song from Time Out of Mind:

The darkening mood set someone—maybe me?—to ranting again. “I hate election season on social networks. We start posting messages to our like-minded friends in which we generalize about ‘them’ and how ridiculous they are. We seize hold of our neighbors’ worst possible extremes of behavior, and we generalize as if that’s all they do, all they’re capable of. But, of course, we downplay our own failings. And we bristle when our enemies use the same tactics against us.”

Was that really me complaining in front of such prestigious company? Was that why everyone ordered another round of drinks?

That’s when I realized that I was sitting next to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson. She raised a glass. (Had she heard me?) And she proceeded to say:

Democracy, in its essence and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement.

. . .

When definitions of “us” and “them” begin to contract, there seems to be no limit to how narrow these definitions can become. As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane. They present themselves as movements toward truer and purer community, but, as I have said, they are the destruction of community. They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global. (“Imagination and Community”)

This inspired some applause from the table. And that’s when the great Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner clinked his glass against Robinson’s and said:

And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in. (Whistling in the Dark)

Someone (was it me?) started complaining about how Christians—those who have been given an example of how to live in love, without fear, without contentiousness and antagonism—go on making art that divides the world into “us” versus “them,” especially in terms of American politics. We start investing in stories and movies that will paint our enemies as villains and those who are like us as heroes.

But again, everyone else was looking toward the stage, where T Bone Burnett was performing “Fear Country”:

I opened my laptop and tried to show Marilynne something that my friend Alissa Wilkinson had caught online. The team behind the movie Left Behind was trying to inspire funding for a sequel, and they were hyping it up by asking who they should get to play the Antichrist. Fans of the movie quickly nominated President Barack Obama, which inspired a tidal wave of “Likes.”

Marilynne didn’t seem to notice that I was there.

But Oscar Wilde—of all people—suddenly leaned forward, looked at me with the patience of a teacher for an obstinate student, and said:

The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. (The Soul of a Man)

At this, Flannery O’Connor (Flannery O’Connor!) chimed in:

The fact is that if the writer’s attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole. (Mystery and Manners)

Sipping some single malt scotch, the poet Scott Cairns stood up and testified:

I think writers with actual intentions generally end up saying things they already thought they knew, and I’m not much interested in reducing my vocation as a poet to something like propagandist. I write poems to find things out, not to communicate some previously ossified conclusion. (an interview in Mars Hill Review)

We got quiet, because T-Bone Burnett was steering things in a more hopeful direction with a song from The Criminal under My Own Hat:

Shaking his head, Seamus Heaney began expounding on the path of art as a more rewarding way to explore ideas than political debate:

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. . . . People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities. (An interview in The Paris Review)

Nodding with enthusiasm, Madeleine L’Engle had the last word:

We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it. (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)

As she said this, I turned to the stage, for I heard a familiar song beginning there. It was Over the Rhine, performing a song from The Trumpet Child.

This inspired applause throughout the pub. And then it was John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, who stood up and called for an encore—a song called “Sora Sora (Whiskey Whiskey).” And that might just have been the most inspired election-season song request of the night.

* * *

And then I woke up.

Dizzy from the dream’s intensity, I sat down to breakfast and glanced at Facebook. The day before, I had asked for music recommendations—songs that might help us survive the contentiousness of the coming election year. And lo . . . many songs had been recommended.

Melody Fields Deweese had recommended a new one from Mumford & Sons called “Believe”:

Brian McLain suggested Derek Webb’s “A Savior on Capitol Hill”:

Denise Frame Harlan called for “Come Together”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axb2sHpGwHQ

And at the end of it all, with John Lennon on my mind, I put on Sam Phillips’ Martinis and Bikinis for a bittersweet benediction: