The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach)

Being proud of what I am and where I first came from, without letting my various forms of identity form a fossilized, unmutable view of myself. That has been a goal that mostly sprung up during my abandonment of religion. I think religion let me maintain an infantilized version of myself in place for a long time. I was American, Christian, small-e evangelical, from rural upstate New York. Nothing too wrong with those things but I was happy to be a bit boxed in within those lines.
It wasn’t a super deliberate goal but it was nevertheless the biggest thing I’ve set myself to- to reconstruct an identity (and most importantly, a morality) while dismantling one of those pillars and reimagining others. That’s no easy task.
This sojourn abroad has not really *been* about this personal journey but it nevertheless has turned into the proving grounds, the final boot camp of testing some of these morals and the new identities that are forming. It’s on my mind tonight because once every month or so, I get a craving for old classic American country music. This is the kind of stuff, that no joke, I would crank out of my pickup truck radio on the way to my job at “the farm.” It’s something that used to be the soundtrack of my boxed-in phase, so reindulging in it feels like a former alcoholic who’d gone cold turkey/full teetoetaller, deciding decades later to try becoming a thoughtful occasional alcohol consumer.
Alan Jackson is my go-to in these times. He had always been a favorite. Unironically positive music about small-town life, love, hard work, etc, is his main source of hits. (Here’s one favorite) It’s before country got hyper sensitive, and desperately clung mostly to songs about trucks and girls “in them blue jeans,” (a lyric that got so repeated by so many artists that you could reliably make a drinking game out of it while listening to a pop country radio station.) Alan Jackson seemed to be doing the work of a chronicler- recording the soundtracks of people being in love with what they were, in a non-reactionary way.

And again, I can’t emphasize enough, unironically positive views on a simple life (see here). Not that I want my own life to be simple, but I like living in a world where most lives can be, and in fact are.

It feels that most modern country is from a position of weakness- of people sensitive about who they are, and making lowbrow reactionary music from it. Not unlike other genres lately, actually. Listen to 80s and 90s rap and country, and modern rap and country, and you can conclude both went to the toilet the more reactionary they got. They both used to tell stories with complexity and sincerity.
I guess listening to country while abroad is partially about the accent. I perceive languages and accents in aesthetic ways- which is why my old hobby of making invented languages was one of my few creative outlets. I miss the sturdy twang of working class Americans. When I was back in the States briefly several months ago, I kind of liked hearing the crackle of the scanner my parents have, which consists of the local EMTs and dispatchers using unadulterated thick local accents. I could almost play a tape of it.
Despite having occasional cravings to hear this twang, what’s funny is that when I’m abroad, I frankly usually dread running into another American. This is for various reasons- some justified reasons and some wildly petty. Justified ones include that most Americans want to talk American politics at the absolute worst times, even while they’re enjoying, say, a lovely Polish beer at a chic Krakow bar, or sipping a wild pistachio coffee in a centuries-old coffee shop in Istanbul. It’s just the worst. We often treat each other, or hapless foreigners, as our unpaid therapists for our troubles (I’ve done this too, so it’s one of those classic things where I hate that about myself and see it in others). So I prefer just getting one-directional sourcing of American accents- from country songs.
I also like to think now that I take pride (of sorts) in being from America, but I shy away from saying proud to be American. It’s maybe a petty semantic difference, just a way to get away from the negative connotations I’ve had through the years, of people who use the second phrase pregnant with implied views of American supremacy in all metrics.
I guess for me the most important thing is that my citizenship, in my mind, is global. My mailing address is a moving target. The work I do is largely an intentional act of positioning- of putting my body somewhere I think it should be- for people I identify or sympathize with- so for all intents and purposes, they are my community for the time- the people I ask for help from when I need the local scoop, the people I thoughtfully serve when executing projects, etc. For those reasons, I view myself as a human, an Earthling, a hydrocarbon-based life, who happens to come from the Western Hemisphere of the planet, from a political entity currently organized under the name “USA,” who carries a strong imprint of where he is from but doesn’t define his life missions.
My life mission is to advance the human species a tiny step forward by my actions and life. By advancing human life, I think I also increase the chance we can responsibly steward the rest of life on this planet, and the sooner we can take the football another few yards further- in reaching out to other planets with our own lives to share, connecting with other forms someday, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now, after our species has likely attained several new identifiable steps in its evolution. The kind of steps, that is what I fight for with how I live. I hope it’s a more and more prosocial species that we evolve to. I hope we take the empathy, altruism, sense of justice, fairness, and other emerging principles of morality, and take them further and further into refinement until we ever more fully take on our role as the living conscience of the universe looking back on itself.