Can Art Make Unum from the Pluribus?
One hundred fathers and eighty thousand fans say yes, while the enchantment lasts
On a hot July night in 2019, I sat on my back patio and listened.
Amplified sound from the football stadium, two or three miles away, rose and fell over the elm and locust trees. Country megastar Garth Brooks was belting out hit songs where no major concert had been allowed before. My friend and her husband had tickets, along with 42,000 other people – a sold-out crowd breaking the attendance record at our stadium. Another crowd of the same size had tickets for the next night, too. Brooks last performed in our area in 1992, and the anticipation for this concert had been huge.
Three songs into the setlist, the light and sound equipment suddenly failed. When Brooks and the band left the stage, the record audience sipped on $10 beers and waited.
It only took about about ten minutes to get the systems working again. As a local newspaper reported the next day, “Brooks reappeared even more fired up than he had been, pointing fingers and pumping up fans. . . . ‘We’re gonna be here all frickin’ night now!’ ‘I say let’s have a night we’ll never forget!’”
From my yard, I heard the thunderclap effect during “The Thunder Rolls.” I heard fans singing along with the upbeat cover of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Fishin’ in the Dark.” And some time well after ten p.m., maybe eleven, I recognized the opening phrase of the working-class anthem that showcased Brooks’s humor and vocal range and catapulted him, back in 1990, to a celebrated career:
Blame it all on my roots,
I showed up in boots
And ruined your black-tie affair.
Now, we need to talk about politics for a minute. Garth Brooks has been open about his support and “love” of recent presidents across the political spectrum. After performing at Joe Biden’s Inauguration in 2021, he stopped to hug the Obamas, the Clintons, and the (George W.) Bushes. He shook hands with Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. As he explained of his earlier Inauguration performance for Barack Obama in 2009,
“This whole presidential thing, we’ve got one going out — pray for him and his family. And for the President going in — pray for him and his family to guide this nation,” Brooks said. “Love and unity, that’s what it’s all about. In the immortal words of Martin Luther King, the most durable power that we’ve known is love. It will always be that way.”
In 2019 in my Trump-Republican state of Idaho, no one seemed to be holding Garth Brooks’s bipartisan moderation against him. No one checked political party affiliations at the stadium entrances. My friend in attendance has the kind of job that doesn’t sit well with the most outspoken Republicans. She works for a state regulatory agency, reviewing permits and enforcing environmental rules. Her husband is a former English major. They were not ushered to a Blue section of the stadium, segregated from the Red.
A country music concert in a football stadium in a red state, where the artist was filming a music video for a new song called “Dive Bar,” might have been construed by some as another front in the nation’s long-running culture war. But Brooks did not play it that way.
When he got to the chorus of “Friends in Low Places,” Brooks did what performers generally do with their megahits. He let the audience take over the song.
I’m not big on social graces,
Think I’ll slip on down to the Oooo-asis,
Oh, I got friends
In low places.
The roar of the crowd lifted over the locusts and elms, dropping onto my patio like an airborne invitation. The joy, nostalgia, and fun was meant for all of us.
I did what any American with a pair of ears and set of lungs and a vivid memory of Garth Brooks on the radio in 1990 would do. I joined in.
I don’t suppose it meant this to anyone else, but when the forty thousand and I testified that we knew, to a person, how to "slip on down to the O - A - sis," I felt I had entered a Bret Harte story.
Bret Harte was a nineteenth-century magazine writer, as popular (and young, handsome, charming) in 1871 as Garth Brooks in 1991, his poems and stories copied around the country in local newspapers, his passage east by train from San Francisco to Boston met with anticipation and fanfare. As Brooks did later, topping both country and pop charts, Harte enlarged the audience for his genre of art, appealing to critics as well as consumers.
In 1868, with fame still ahead of him, Harte wrote about a mining camp of one hundred men waiting together for the birth of a baby to the only woman in camp. At the first sound from the cabin, “The camp stopped to listen,” and a moment later, “The camp rose to its feet as one man!”1
Before the birth, the hundred men of fictional Roaring Camp are as divided and self-interested as any body politic. The first paragraph of Harte’s story references a local murder, naming both parties by distinct global identities, one man “Kanaka” (Native Hawaiian) and the other “French.” Since the story is set in 1850, the names of two other characters, “Boston” and “Kentuck,” hint at more potential violence. Boston in the 1850s was the center of U.S. abolitionist activity; Kentucky was the slave state where Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened. Not only do regional and racial politics threaten conflict, Roaring Camp also harbors “fugitives from justice,” and “all” the men “were reckless.”
However, Harte notes, “In such communities good and bad actions are catching,” like a virus or a bucket brigade. The “roughs” who fuse into the singular subject “the camp” behave generously and tenderly toward the new baby, adopting it in a “unanimous and enthusiastic” group resolution.
In Harte’s 1868 story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” the birth of the baby draws one hundred individual men into a common feeling of reverence, the common vocation of fatherhood, and the collective grammar of sentences beginning with “the camp.” While the baby is with them, there are no serious differences of feeling or opinion among the men, even though their camp would otherwise have been “Roaring” with profanity, murder, and more.
In the undifferentiated surf of voices coming from the football stadium, I heard a crowd of separate individuals — some of them no doubt bitter political enemies in the Age of Trump — yielding up their prejudices, politics, ideologies, and individualities for a few minutes of co-created fusion mediated by separate memories of a shared song.
As Harte expressed the feeling of such ad hoc enchantments, “The camp rose to its feet as one man! It was proposed to explode a barrel of gunpowder.”
This is not to say enchantment is always a good thing. Social fusions under a high emotional pitch can be dangerous, as Americans witnessed on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. In these essays, we have already mentioned the harmful potential of false enchantment, when someone’s yearning meets someone else’s unbridled self-interest.
But Harte and Brooks seemed both to understand, in three different centuries, that certain stimuli could vaporize the divisions of ideology and prejudice. At least for the duration of a song, a concert, or a child’s needy infancy, people of strong opinion might voluntarily submit to a high feeling transporting them to their better selves.
If this is possible, could we make more of it?
When did artists stop seeing themselves as enchanters with a vocation to create, re-create, and protect the extravagant commons?
Maybe that’s the wrong question, and artists somewhere are doing it right now.
Thank you for reading Enchanted in America, where awe and wonder prevail over prejudice, and literature maps the way to united states
Also this Month . . .
Previously: “Enchanted Time: A Hymn for a Childhood Book”
Coming up:
This Thursday 7/13 - Last day to enter the Enchanted by the Book contest (for Most Like-ly or Most Florid prize), 60-1,200 words, any genre: When were you enchanted by a book, poem, or story?
Sunday 7/16 - Last day to hit the Heart button in the Comments of the contest announcement to cast a vote for the Most Like-ly prize. You are not limited to only one vote, so if you Liked an entry previously, you can still Like new entries that arrive by 7/13.
Monday 7/17 - Announcing the winners of the Most Like-ly and Most Florid prizes for Enchanted by the Book entries! Winners will assign me a book to discuss in a future post or will receive an original poem by yours truly, inspired by 19th-century visiting albums.
“The Luck of Roaring Camp,” The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Penguin, 2002), p. 18.
What a gentle and lovely call for remembering what's important in this time of political division. And, what a great remembrance of the enchanting story from Bret Harte and connection to country-western artist Garth Brooks. Everything relates to everything and we're all in this together.
In spite of an intense loathing of his music that began with my adolescence (and which I never quite outgrew), I have become something of an admirer of Brooks's character.