Posted on 11/23/2016 9:28:12 AM PST by TigerClaws
Three days after the election, my wife and I were shopping at the Fairway Market in Red Hook, Brooklyn. For those unfamiliar with it, Fairway is a less corporate, more co-op version of Whole Foods, offering pretty produce and exotic cheeses that don’t come cheap. The mood in the store was glum. As in most of Brooklyn, people stared ahead, moving slowly, still in shock from the political earthquake of Tuesday night.
After getting our Brazilian Arabica ground for drip (I know, I should really use a French Press), Libby and I walked towards the organic maple syrup. That’s when it started. I suppose there had been music playing in the store, but I hadn’t noticed until a familiar guitar lick pierced the air and a soft voice said, “Turn it up.”
Libby and I both stopped and looked at each other. “Seriously?” said my wife, a very disappointed Clinton supporter. She started gripping her soft Tomme Crayeuse a little too hard. By the time Ronnie Van Zant’s drawl started in with “Big wheels keep on turnin’,” everyone in the store was standing in shock. Brows were furrowed, people mumbled to each other. The song seemed to get louder as one of those New York moments happened, when everyone was thinking the exact the same thing.
A woman in her fifties, wearing a Love Trump Hates button, turned to her Brooklyn-bearded husband and said loudly, “This is unbelievable!” She found the nearest store clerk, a young woman in a green apron who was staring up at the ceiling, looking for the invisible speakers blaring this message from the other America. “This is so inappropriate,” the woman said. “Can we turn this off?” The City of Homes, Cafés, and Clinton
Brooklyn was the epicenter of the Clinton campaign. Throughout the summer and fall in Brooklyn Heights, you could see young staffers near the campaign headquarters: expensive coffee in hand, eyes bright, ready to tackle the future. Cafés turned into phone banks, where you could buy a croissant and make a few calls to flyover country. Buttons, banners, and bumper stickers were everywhere.
As the election grew near, confidence was overflowing. A big victory was on the horizon for Lena Dunham and the new Brooklyn. This ground zero for upscale progressivism was ready for a party; white male supremacism was about to be crushed beneath a professional high heel.
Fittingly, perhaps, the only exception to Clinton mania in Brooklyn was in the southern part of the borough. In Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst, big trucks could be seen with “Hillary for Prison” and “Make America Great Again” detailed on their back windows. This is not the Brooklyn of “Girls” or “The Slap.” It is the Brooklyn of “Blue Bloods,” the home of cops and firemen, plumbers and construction workers immune to the appeal of a President Clinton. These are people who listen to Skynyrd, and not ironically. Everything Old Is New Again
I couldn’t stop laughing as the Fairway patrons tried to continue shopping with “Sweet Home Alabama” blasting in the background. And in retrospect, the moment was a perfect encapsulation of a very old fight within America
The song itself was written in response to two songs by Neil Young: “Southern Man,” and “Alabama.” It was 1974, and as the Civil Rights era faded into history, the South and Southern rock was reasserting pride in their culture and way of life.
Last year, “Garden and Gun” talked to Gary Rossington, the last surviving member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, about the creation of the song. He said:
“Neil Young had “Southern Man,” and it was kind of cutting the South down. And so Ronnie just said, We need to show people how the real Alabama is. We loved Neil Young and all the music he’s given the world. We still love him today. It wasn’t cutting him down, it was cutting the song he wrote about the South down. Ronnie painted a picture everyone liked. Because no matter where you’re from, sweet home Alabama or sweet home Florida or sweet home Arkansas, you can relate.”
For his part, Young would eventually agree that he had painted the South with too broad a brush. In his 2012 autobiography “Waging Heavy Peace,” Young would write, “My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.”
If “accusatory and condescending” sounds familiar, it should. Along with being called deplorable, Trump’s supporters (of which I was not one) have been treated in a way that is rare in American politics, and deeply troubling. The campaign that emerged from Brooklyn didn’t just attack the politics of people who don’t live in big cities. It attacked their entire way of life, and promised it was dying. Ignoring It Doesn’t Make It Go Away
When the angry older woman with the anti-Trump button asked the clerk to turn off the song, the younger woman looked at her sympathetically and said, “I don’t know how.” In that moment, something seemed to click.
Of course, this woman thought that “Sweet Home Alabama” could just be turned off. After all, we can block out things we disagree with. We can unfriend people on Facebook, block them on Twitter, and decide not to let their negativity be a part of lives. For many progressives, this is the key to wellness.
But turning off Skynyrd doesn’t make it go away. Somewhere in the land where the stars still shine, it plays on, whether you hear it or not. The shock and despair in Brooklyn over Hillary Clinton’s unfathomable defeat comes in no small part because her denizens refused to hear the rumblings of an America they chose to ignore.
Just like a hillbilly band rocketing to the top of the national charts, Donald Trump has awakened the right sort to the fact that they do not control everything. For Trump and his supporters, the protests and challenges to the Electoral College should be seen as another victory. Not only did they win, they are being heard—even in Brooklyn.
They always sellout when they play on Long Island even though they haven’t changed a word in their touring act in 25 years.
Well I’ve been to both Trader Joe’s (TJ’s) and Whole Foods (WF) and I experience a world of difference. First of all, TJ’s is owned by a German company, but they know how to run a good company as TJ’s is ranked #20 in the U.S. as the best place to work, and the atmosphere evidences that. People seem happy and the food is great. We live in AZ so our TJ’s has employees and customers who love Trump and are not stuck in hippiedom.
WF on the other hand seems dour, unfriendly, and very hippie-ish - the same vibe I get from Sprouts. I go to TJ’s all the time here and love it - they have menu and cheese samples and wine tasting every day. It’s almost like a destination here. I never go to WF and rarely to Sprouts.
However, I’ll have to see if they ever play “Sweet Home” - they’re always playing old pop songs - usually pretty good music.
It’s a hit song that made millions. Get over yourselves. Maybe they’d approve of some rap song with beat down whitey, kill cops and @#$^#$ white chicks.
Trader Joe’s is AWESOME.
.
To hell with NE liberals.
They even like “Sweet Home” in France:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li1Rqo2UC88
The rhythm riff, unusually, strikes a minor chord.
Even the Russians like it.
i read but didn’t understand what precipitated the incident
Ask Boudreaux to explain it to you.
That was such an interesting documentary!
“The place was ridiculously expensive...”
6% off your total bill for seniors on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I am a nutritionist who specializes in diet and supplementaion.
I rate as follows:
Trader Joe’s: brilliant business model; very limited and erratic supplement department; virtually no product knowledge.
Whole Foods: overpriced, unless an item is bought in volume and sale-priced; fair-to-good supplement department (depending upon store size and location); unreliable product knowledge.
Sprouts: in-between pricing; some high-quality products in supplement department; product knowledge unknown to me as yet (too new to my area).
I shop for produce at TJ. Most of their supplements are little better than at a pharmacy chain - with even less selection; there are exceptions (such as Pycnogenol, which is a trademarked product). The employees are usually interested in a healthful lifestyle, but ignorant about nutrition and supplementation. The chain waits until a product becomes mainstream, then buys the cheapest source they can obtain for mass marketing.
I rarely shop at Whole Foods. They do tend to be large, and sometimes have products that smaller stores do not. Being on the Big Board, they stay away from anything controversial, even if it is clearly legal (such as raw milk in California). Although they have a fairly good supplement selection, there are glaring omissions; any questions about any product not very mainstream elicits a perplexed response from staff.
Sprouts: I am just starting to shop there. Their prices are better than WF, and there supplement department is vastly superior to TJ. I do not yet have an idea of employee product knowledge.
We Conservatives are always wringing our hands about the fact that Liberals seem to control American Pop Culture.
Most of us don’t even realize that when rock ‘n roll began in the 1950’s, the Left wingers hated it because they understood that it was a by product of American post war prosperity.
They preferred Commie folk music, the most un-glamorous, un-sexy, scolding music ever made. The musical equivalent of a lecture about what a rotten country America is.
Contrast that with the image of a teen aged kid, cruising down the highway, listening to Chuck Berry, and thinking that the world is his oyster, and there’s nothing he can’t accomplish, because he lives in America, the greatest country in the world. It’s no wonder why the Leftists hated rock ‘n roll.
In those days, rock songs were all about girls, cars, dancing, and hanging out with friends.
But then a funny thing happened. Bob Dylan, who loved early rock music from the 50’s, got sick of the Commie folk scene and wanted to make rock ‘n roll music, after hearing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on the radio. But while he abandoned the overtly political tone of his early folk music, the lyrics of his rock songs were still much more intellectual and artsy than any other rock music that had come before it.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and every other popular rock artist of the day were in awe of Dylan’s lyrical skills, and wanted to emulate him. This was the beginning of rock ‘n roll drifting towards the Left wing social consciousness of the Commie folk scene. In his attempt to abandon the Commie folk scene, Dylan inadvertently infected rock ‘n roll culture with the virus of Left wing thought.
Within a few years, every rock band was writing songs that expressed the same anti-American sentiment as Commie folkies like Joan Baez and Phil Ochs.
And that’s when we Conservatives totally blew it!! Rock ‘n roll culture was ours. It was pure Americana at it’s best. It rose from the rural heartland, not the urban coasts. But as soon as Conservatives saw all those long haired, flag burning, pot smoking hippies, they decided that they didn’t want any part of rock ‘n roll culture, and were happy to hand it over, gift wrapped, to the Left wing America haters.
By the mid to late70’s people were burnt out on socially conscious rock music. That’s when bands like Lynyrd Synyrd, AC/DC, and Van Halen created a renaissance of good old fashioned “cars and girls” rock ‘n roll. But by that time, social Conservatives had already condemned rock ‘n roll culture as decadent and downright Satanic.
This wrongheaded attitude on the part of my fellow social Conservatives, is why I take exception to the ridicule that they heap on marijuana smokers. I’m a long haired, pot smoking, rock ‘n roll loving, small government, pro-America patriot. And there’s plenty of other people out there just like me.
The bottom line, is that if we Conservatives want to take back American Pop Culture, then the first step is to stop associating rock ‘n roll culture with Left wingers, and reclaim it as our own.
There’s been a battle between the Country Club Republicans and the hard hat Nixon/Reagan/Trump Republicans.
But you make a great point. There’s also a battle between social conservatives vs. libertarian (socially do what you want as long as you don’t hurt other people).
Trump is an interesting guy. He’s super rich but is more at home with the six pack of beer Republicans. He’s also more libertarian on social issues. Don’t see him going after pot or touching the one-issue voter issues (abortion, homosexuals) other than appointing the judges he’s already listed.
There’s a ‘sweet spot’ for the Republican party right where Trump is: Big tent, avoid social divider issues, America first, practical, non-PC, libertarian, and focused on results.
“..Do what you want and don’t hurt other people..”
How about “do what you want & don’t hurt other people” AND DON’T EXPECT OTHERS TO PICK UP THE TAB FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF DOING WHAT YOU WANT!
This is the biggest reason I am against drug legalization of any type.
Alcohol is a drug. It’s legal and we have the same stupid consequences from making other drugs illegal.
People can kill themselves if they want. Eat too much, get drunk, kill brain cells, die.
Part of freedom is people make choices you may not.
Bookmark
They are / were America’s band. Everybody loves Lynyrd Skynnyrd (every real American anyway).
And its bad enough abusers of alcohol can reach into my pocket for the consequences of their abuse! Multiplying the number of hands going into my pocket for other abuses is not an argument I am impressed with!
For the record I do drink alcohol!
How do others pick up the tab?
.
Through your taxes!
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