On Holidays
High school Honors English often seemed at times like an endless stream of pointless, difficult, and hated books (ugh, Wuthering Heights) interspersed with a few that glowed with genius, originality and talent. Those are the ones that stick with you: Gatsby’s empty opulence informs your perception of the rich you encounter everyday; the swinging lightbulb in Wright’s Native Son reminds you of the beacon of hope you have to find in the darkest moments.
But no text stimulated me quite as much as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair’s description of the everyday horrors of the meat processing plant, and the efforts to unionize them, sparked the first inklings of political awareness - the first concrete idea that people can be exploited and abused. I can’t even recall much of the second half of the book except that the main character was adrift, trying to deal with the station of his life.
I bring this up because today is Labor Day, and like Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, we as a society have forgotten the reason we celebrate it. Instead of merely a day of barbeques, beaches, and baseball, and lamentations about the crisis of having to return to work the following day, those are supposed to be a means of actively celebrating the value of the American workforce, and the sacrifices that generations before us made in order to protect an honest day’s work. It’s a time to recognize the power of people-powered movements - to exploit an already overused phrase - to solicit change.
The strikes and beatings of the late 19th and early 20th century taught people that they didn’t have to be exploited; that, working together they could change the system. This, of course, culminated in events like the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where protestors and police went to war with each other. Now, though, mass grassroots political events seem to barely elicit notice; only in something like a speech given to 75,000 people can we see glimmers of something similar - though of course it’s directed from the top-down. And just a week later, as police raid the homes of protesters and arrest journalists on the streets of St. Paul surrounding the Republican convention, scant attention is paid in the media as a whole - just as their counterparts were ignored last week in Denver (note: I’m not endorsing any of them or their actions, just noting the lack of oxygen in stories about them).
So protests do almost nothing anymore, but they once did; and people bled and died to force better working conditions, shorter work weeks, and health and safety protections. That we live in a country where that could ever happen is reason enough to celebrate.
The Jungle opens with a traditional wedding - a night of dancing, of a community celebrating. The air carries hope and optimism, the sound of chattering fiddles and the warm aroma of ovens of food. It’s a truly ordinary event, replicated countless times any given weekend, but for the people involved, it’s momentous, connecting their future with the storied past of their families.
DeVotchKa evokes much of this spirit, bridging the past and the future with the exuberance of a classic wedding band. Their live shows, according to their bio, can feature sousaphone, accordion, piano, violin, bouzouki, trumpets, and theremin in addition to the standard rock instruments. The drummer was raised by Lithuanian polka musicians; the violinist is classically trained. Their most recent album, A Mad and Faithful Telling, which was released earlier this year, dips its toe into several classical styles.
The song below, Transliterator, is available for free on rcrdlbl.com.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
