Inaugural country singer Kelly Clarkson said that her story is America’s story.

If that’s the case, America should be slightly concerned. Ms. Clarkson is a walking example of the American dream — as she eloquently puts it, “the American story is in many ways my story — I even played Brenda Lee in a TV show called “American Dreams.’”

She has overcome numerous obstacles, struggled against opposition both internal and external — in order to excel in country western singing, a field that may very well be obsolete.

I say this lovingly as a member of the poetry world and as an expatriate Texan. If country music is dead, we are in the next ward over, wheezing noisily, with our family gathered around looking concerned and asking about our stereos.

Still I think there is a question to be asked. You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?

Can a country music singer singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” still change anything?

I think the medium might not be loud enough any longer. There are about six people who buy actual country music, but they are not feeling very well. I bumped very lightly into one of them while walking down the sidewalk, and for a while I was terrified that I would have to write to eleven honky tonk proprietors explaining why everyone was going to have to apply for grants that year. The last time I stumbled upon a country music concert, the attendees were almost without exception students of country music who were there in the hopes of extra credit.

One of the songs, if memory serves, consisted of a list of names of Supreme Court justices compared to BBQ joints. I am not saying that it was a bad song. It was a good song, within the constraints of what country music means now. But I think what we mean by country music is a limp and fangless thing.

Country music has gone from being something that you did in order to Write Your Name Large Across the Sky and sound your barbaric yawp and generally Shake Things Up (I’m saying Johnny Cash, I’m saying Patsy Cline, I’m saying Hank Williams, I’m saying Alison Krauss, I’m saying George Jones, I’m saying Ralph Stanley) to a very carefully gated medium that requires years of American Idol auditions in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines that up to ten people will ever voluntarily care for.

Or is this too harsh?

We know, we think, from high school, the sort of thing a country music song is. It is generally twangy, although it could be pop-twangy, if it wanted. It describes something very clichély, or it makes a note we did not expect, and it has shallow layers that we have no need to analyze. But we analyze it still. We analyze the heck out of it. How quaint, we think, that people express themselves in this way. Then we put the country music song back in the sleeve and go about our lives.

The kind of country music they sing on the radio and ladle in your direction at the Inaugural even in the form of one of the most recognized American standards ever — well, it’s all very nice, and sounds a lot like a country music song, but — it has changed nothing.

I understand that this is the point when someone stands up on a chair and starts to explain that country music is the strainer through which we glimpse ourselves and hear the true story of our era. But is it? You do not get the news from country music, as I think Woodie Guthrie said. Full stop. You barely get the news from the news.

All the prestige of country music dates back to when it was the way you got the most vital news there is — your people’s stories. “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” “Crazy.” “Ring of Fire.” All music used to be country music.

But then gospel splintered off. Then the sort of tale you sung could be recorded and the words did not have to spend any time outside the company of their music if they did not want to. We have movies now that are capable of presenting images to us with a precision that would have made Bob Wills keel over. All the things that country music used to do, other things do much better.

“Country music is dead,” nobody tweeted Monday because it was unnecessary. “What pretends to be country music now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It’s zombie music.” There is no longer, really, any formal innovation possible. The constraints of song have long been abandoned. What is left? It is a parroting of something that used to be radical. It is about as useful as, well, a poem. There is no “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” possible or “Stand By Your Man.” There is no “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

As someone who loves country western music, I hate to type this and I hope that I am wrong. I want to hear the case for country music. It used to be something that you listen to outside of school in your friend’s pickup, nipping a little Jim Beam and Dr. Pepper. It used to be that if you were young and you wanted to Change Things with your Country Western Songs, you darted off and wrote lyrics somewhere. You got together with friends at cafes and you wrote verses and talked revolution. Now that is the last thing you do.

These days, country music is institutionalized pop. Everyone can sing it. But if you want a lot of people to read it, or at least the Right Interested Persons, there are a few choked channels of Reputable Labels and TV reality shows.

Or am I being too harsh?

Something similar could be said of the Washinton Post’s treatment of poetry today, after all. The Washington Post that used to honor poetry with its Poets Corner.

And whenever people say this about journalism, they note that people have an insatiable hunger for news. Journalism in its present form may not continue, but journalism will. It will have to. Otherwise where will the news come from? And, is this even news? This, this thing I’m writing right now? Is it? Is it?

And this might be the silver lining for country music. The kind of news you get from country western, as Woodie had it, must come from somewhere. And there is a similar hunger for country music that persists. We get it in diluted doses in poetry. Poetry is incomplete country music, as Sondheim should have noted in the book of his own. But there is still wonderful poetry to be found in that music. Country music, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making — and making you listen.

But after the inaugural, after Kelly Clarkson’s wounding of one of this country’s greatest songs, a true country song if ever there was, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” — I wonder what will become of country music now.

I don’t know where the country music that will define us next will come from. Hope may be as fresh on our tongues as it ever was. But is country music? For after all, as the poet said, “Country music makes nothing happen.”

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What if our flag looks like this? What if we have to change that “fifty nifty United States” song to “fifty-one nifty, fun United States”? Puerto Rico would get federal aid, but they’d also have to pay federal taxes. The Washington Post explains more here.

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The Post’s graph seems pretty deterministic (or maybe it just reflects how trendy it is to plot income level against groups of people), implying that all humanities majors get ready for frugal lifestyles in education and social work. However,  this article suggests that college students should be better informed before embarking on their education and career paths.

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Lieberman claims that he’s simply trying to update existing law. Current law makes it possible for a citizen to be stripped of their citizenship if the state can prove that the citizen intended to revoke it. One way of doing that is by joining the armed forces of a state engaged in hostilities with the US. Lieberman’s legislation would expand that to include “providing material support or resources to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as designated by the Secretary of State.” So why is this such a big deal?

It wouldn’t change the action that got the undershorts of Lieberman and many others all twisted up, namely, the Mirandizing of Faisal Shahzad. Due process rights extend to everyone arrested in the US, citizen or not. You’d think a US Senator would know this. What this legislation would allow, however, is for people like Shahzad to be tried by military tribunals instead of civilian courts, at the discretion of the State Department, and that’s what he’s really after.

It’s hard to come to any conclusion other than that Joe Lieberman likes the trappings of democracy, but not the hard work of it. Any chance he gets, he’s in favor of trading trials for tribunals and saying that law enforcement isn’t up to the task of convicting and punishing those who would use terrorist tactics as a way of disrupting our day-to-day lives. Lieberman is, as today’s NY Times Editorial pointed out, “co-author with Mr. McCain of a bill that would require that anyone arrested on any terrorism-related charge, including American citizens, be declared an enemy combatant and tried in a military court.”

Lieberman, and those who side with him including Senator John McCain and Representative Peter King, are cowards. (Peter King is a hypocrite too, of incredible proportions, but that’s another story.) The Framers of the Constitution included certain protections because they had seen just how much an unchecked state could abuse those under its power. They could have limited due process rights to citizens only, but they didn’t. They took the more difficult path because they felt it was necessary to the existence of a free and open government (even if that government was only free and open to white male landowners at the time).

Here’s what I think really puts Lieberman’s position in perspective, though. Who do you think said the following about Shahzad?

He’s a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens. He has all the rights under the Constitution. We don’t shred the Constitution when it’s popular.

Some ACLU lawyer? Some hippie law professor from Terrorist Coddlers University? Some poet with no idea how the real world works? Nope. Glenn Beck. When the rodeo clown is making more sense than you are, you need to seriously reconsider what you’re doing.

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Shirley Dent talks about the difference between idiom and slang, especially as it relates to culture.

Reading old science papers–really old, not like third grade dug out of storage old–is a way to remind ourselves of the kinds of questions we ask in the early stages of discovery.

Have you ever thought “at our wedding reception, wouldn’t it be cool to re-enact the confrontation between Superman and General Zod using homemade costumes“?

The Atlantic Monthly will start selling fiction via the Kindle. These are Kindle-exclusive stories–they won’t appear in the print magazine.

And finally, I’m glad the Washington Post cleared this up, since the song has only been around for 19 years.

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When the news broke that two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, had been arrested in North Korea for illegally entering the country across the Chinese border, my thoughts went quickly to author Hyejin Kim. Ling and Lee were in Northeastern China working on a story about the North Korean women who risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the husbands they marry or communities they join and sent back to North Korea.

Hyejin Kim’s first novel, Jia: A Novel of North Korea, is a fictionalized account of just such a journey; it’s a story she heard many times when she was living in Northeastern China, and one of those women in particular inspired Kim, a global affairs scholar and education consultant, to write the book. In 2006 I had the pleasure of working with Hyejin on her manuscript, and was deeply impressed with both the stark lyricism of her prose and humane, urgent approach to her subject. I wanted to talk to her about the release of the book, the situation now, and the clear dangers of trying to get these stories out into the world–Ling and Lee were convicted not only of trespassing but entering the country with the intention of creating a “smear campaign over [a] human rights issue.” Hyejin lives in Singapore, and my phone plan is pretty basic, so we conducted this interview over email.

The Rumpus: We haven’t been in touch since the novel’s release, almost exactly two years ago–what was the experience of publishing the book like for you? Did anything about its reception either in the U.S., Korea, China, or elsewhere surprise you? Has it been translated?

Hyejin Kim: The book is still published only in English. There have been several expressions of interest from publishers and writers who work in other languages. However, I am still waiting for appropriate publishers — publishers who can translate it without any political intentions. I wrote this book to focus on human life in North Korea, not to give a political lesson.

I was invited to some conferences after the book came out and will be attending two writers festivals in upcoming months. The book has been reviewed in a few high-profile magazines, as well as in several online venues. I was glad to see that many readers have indeed taken the book as a human rather than political story. I was told that some schools in the U.S. are using the book in class. In addition, the book has interested a film producer and he would like to make it as a film. I am currently working with him to write a film script based on the book.

Due to the language difference, the book has remained relatively unknown in Asia. Korea is not aware of it yet. The film might be known there earlier than the book.

Rumpus: You based the novel on the life of a North Korean woman you met while you were in Northeastern China who had escaped across the North Korean/Chinese border, and you were very careful about protecting her. Did you choose fiction over non-fiction to tell her story for this reason? Are the two of you still in touch and do you feel comfortable giving us a sense of how she is now and what she thought of the book?

Kim: Ji’a could be any girl in North Korea. Her character has been mixed with several people I have met even though one woman in particular gave me the motivation to start writing about them.

At present, I am not in touch with them. If you can’t help them directly, you’d better not ask them where they are and who they are until they start speaking. Asking about their lives out of curiosity and giving them hope for something you cannot promise can put them in danger of the worst kind. That’s what I learned while I was there.

Rumpus: What is your sense about how the problem of North Korean defectors over that border is being handled? Has it worsened since the time you were there? A recent Washington Post article discussed the particular plight of North Korean women, whom the Chinese government will not recognize as refugees and the North Koreans will treat as criminals if they return. How does China defend its policy toward these escapees?

Kim: The Chinese government has amicable relations with the North Korean government. Recognizing those North Korean defectors as refugees means that they deny or disregard the North Korean authorities. Therefore, the Chinese government avoids involvement with this issue. They know of their existence. The Chinese local governments usually evade this issue and do not want to be involved. When the issue gets attentions from the public (especially from international organizations or from foreign correspondences), the central government can put pressure on the local governments. Then the local governments take some actions. Or due to diplomatic relations between China and North Korea, sometimes those inspections start. So the policies are capricious and depending on the atmosphere North Korean escapees’ lives are affected — they might be dragged back to North Korea or ignored by the public.

Rumpus: The two American reporters who were arrested in North Korea in March were attempting to cover the same story that you told in Jia. First, why has it taken so long for this situation to get the attention it deserves? Can you explain the politics of that border and what has happened there over the past few decades for those who don’t know?

Kim: In some of the places between China and North Korea, it is so easy to cross the border. If you don’t discover North Korean soldiers walking around, you cannot even guess that it could be the border. When I was in Northeast China, there were those kinds of places. You can talk with North Korean soldiers only an arm’s length away. In places where there are no guards, one must observe the utmost care not to accidentally cross. I can imagine how the tragedy happened and what I can say is that I feel sorry to hear the news and they should have been more cautious. I doubt that North Korean soldiers forcefully kidnapped them. Without knowing it those women could have crossed the border or they might have strong professional consciousness as journalists.

I was once held by Chinese police for several hours because I was taking photos of North Korean towns. As I mentioned, the politics of that border are capricious. It depends on diplomatic politics or international relations between North Korea and other countries. If the relations are not good or some issues related to North Korean escapees are in public, monitoring of that border on the North Korean side as well as the Chinese side get more strict. At other times, the policies can be rather lenient. When I was in a border town, taking photos was usually fine. But in this one cast it wasn’t. Due to the sudden order from the central government, they changed their attitudes. In the end, it was fine even though I lost all my film.

Rumpus: What was your reaction to the arrest of the journalists and now their sentencing to twelve years in the notorious North Korean labor camps? What do you think the government is trying to gain and do you have any predictions about the outcome?

Kim: I would be surprised if those journalists are consigned to North Korean labor camps, and I hope that doesn’t happen. They could think that those journalists are good hostages who can use when it is necessary to have negotiations and they can lead dialogue with the US on their own terms. I hope dialogue between the two countries, North Korea and the U.S., on this issue progresses soon.

Rumpus: In Jia you wrote vividly of the devastating famine of the mid-to-late 90s in North Korea, which lead to the starvation deaths of at least one million North Koreans. Poverty and lack of food are still critical issues in that country–could the sanctions being threatened lead to a similar situation and is that even a consideration for the dear leader?

Kim: My understanding is that the famine has enduring effects, even if the worst is over. North Koreans get food from several sources, among them their own harvest, aid from South Korea and elsewhere, as well as from Chinese traders. Certainly cutting off any of that supply would hurt many people. What the North Korean elite think of the situation is anyone’s guess.

Rumpus: President Obama and President Lee of South Korea recently committed to de-nuclearizing the Korean peninsula. Although North Korea was famously included on President Bush’s “axis of evil,” during his tenure they were virtually ignored. Are we paying the price for that now? There is a tendency here to characterize North Korea as our sort of crazy, cartoon enemies with delusions of grandeur–a country that can’t even feed and house its own population but thinks it can rule the world. Do we underestimate them at our peril and how real do you think this nuclear threat is?

Kim: As a South Korean who has family members in South Korea, of course I would like to believe that the nuclear threat is just a threat, or interpret this North Korean action as showing instability within North Korean society.

I don’t think that they hallucinate to the point they believe they can rule the world. It could be the last peevish acts against the world or tactics that they use in order to evade domestic instabilities (or some chaos in North Korean society). The attempt by North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il to name his son as his successor and the disagreement (or complaints) from other North Korean elites could be the reason why Kim Jong Il is conducting missile tests. In addition, a sudden change of attitudes with the new South Korean government and increased conflicts between the two countries could be among the factors. Diplomatic relations between North Korea and other countries seem to be a roller coaster and this ride could last longer but hopefully it will end safely.

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“Given a team approach of the magnitude of the space program; given leadership of the ability of the men who organized that program; given money as liberally as it has been devoted to the space program, there is no reason why we cannot achieve as great a victory over the product of our own environmental mistakes as we have achieved in projecting man and his machines beyond that environment.

Environmental improvement should now be given the same range of creative thinking, the same range of technical priority, the same or greater range of financial integrity as has the space program.

All of the gains which have been registered through the success to date of the exploration of space and its concomitant technological accomplishments will be as nothing if we permit the pace of environmental deterioration to continue as it has been going.”

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That’s where The Rumpus.net comes in.

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