Oliver Anthony & National Identity
Well beyond acknowledging frustrations and injuries too long ignored for too many, Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” merits recognition for encouraging listeners to devote themselves to persons, places and communities they know and love and where they live and work as expressions of individual integrity and national identity.
For all the attention the ballad is properly garnering for its indictment of captured public officials working on behalf of global financial and technology elites and enterprises imposing control technologies, Anthony in accompanying posts is as, if not more, eloquent esteeming the human and the local and the great value adds of disregarding mass media and Internet content.
The poet’s job is to name things, and this expresses and constitutes Anthony’s signal achievement in “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
Anthony’s fresh voice establishes him as a 2020’s Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s earnest hero in The Catcher In the Rye. In the novel, Holden references Robert Burns to confide to his sister that “anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”
Where Salinger’s youthful hero wishes to salvage childhood in fiction, Oliver Anthony inflects adults to live meaningful lives in flourishing communities in real life.
In these ways, Anthony harvests irrepressible elements of national identity and history from Scots Irish settling the Virginia and Carolina piedmont in the 17th century and Kentucky and Tennessee in the 18th, to 17th century Puritans’ wilderness errands building faith communities throughout New England, descendants of those Congregational villages and towns carrying their faith, and notably their convictions in equality, into upstate New York and the Ohio and Mississippi River Valley in ante-bellum America which proved to be so indispensable to slave abolition, emancipation and Afro-American citizenship, miners, fiercely committed to and defending honest stakes in Colorado, Nevada, California, and Montana silver, gold, and copper rushes, and Midwest and Great Plains farmers advocating silver and gold backed currency to cope with wealth disparities repaying European investment in intercontinental railroads. No invisible, remote elite should scarf up contemporaneous wealth with public official capture given that national history and identity.
As consequentially, Anthony taps “the road not taken,” Robert Frost’s memorable, efficient poem (1916) advocating individual judgement and choice. An “old soul” has as much claim to life and liberty as anyone “livin’ in a new world,” he insists. Individual identity and community are bulwarks against predatory capitalism like forced labor, sweat shops in China or the World Economic Forum ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ or independent commission control.
“These rich men north of Richmond/ Lord knows they all just wanna have total control/ Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do/ And they don't think you know, but I know that you do.” Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) would likely have demurred on expressing the insight in these exact words, but it is difficult to imagine he would have much, if any, quarrel with it.
Anthony’s poetry goes to the heart of the matter. Information technology capitalists and elite, non-governmental organizations have to be more intrusive than industrial capitalist predecessors to accumulate capital and exert control. An eye or palm scan is now necessary to authenticate identity and effect transactions, these interests contend. Anthony’s articulating the opposite. A fresh Andrew Jackson, he’s promoting individual integrity and human and neighborly consideration. In these ways, he taps national identity as distinct as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Scott and Helen Nearing.
Nor should anyone be surprised. The phenomenal success of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in summer, 2023 follows early 2020’s decade representation and activation. Representation (equity as a heuristic implementing preferential racial and ethnic transfer payments, public and private sector recruitment, engagement, and promotion, infrastructure investment, disaster relief, and academic placements, promotions, and scholarships to address historic injustices), and activation (National Action Network, Black Lives Matter, Grassroots Law Project, Netroots, Ruth Sent Us, Rock The Vote, and Antifa among others animating free speech and effecting civic engagement and unrest) have exerted commanding influences in the initial years of the 2020s.
Perhaps blockchain gold reserve currencies, power disruptions and failures transitioning to intermittent from dispatchable energies, citizenship and voting, biological and information technology weaponizations, women’s and children’s issues, air quality, and vehicular transportation may emerge more forcefully as the decade ensues.
Prevarication both beguiles and tires Americans. While there’s a general tolerance of rhetorical inflation for political success, say former President Obama campaigning for unity and the average man and woman in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, there’s little patience once in power for preferencing big banks or indifference to civil unrest once out of power while yet a public figure, leaving the public official naked for accusation of the worst of all epithets, “a phony,” and rendering him or her tiresome, irrelevant, untrustworthy, or self-seeking no matter how attractive initially.
Then, summer, 2023, Oliver Anthony presents himself out of the Virginia Piedmont with a fresh, barbaric yawp worthy of Walt Whitman evoking many, historic expressions of national identity to remind that person, human, and community cornerstone everything.
Anthony is humble in a YouTube post returning from the first public performance of the smash hit. “This song… is not like some masterpiece I’ve created,” he remarked in a YouTube share.“...hey look, I appreciate all the compliments but… I hardly know my way around the guitar, my singin’s ok, that’s not what made this… … The masterpiece and energies of the song already exist within you,” he continued. “When Oliver Anthony’s long gone and forgotten about, what can you do to maintain this energy, this positivity, this unity I see among people like I’ve never seen before? ... At this moment in time when so many people are feeling the same frustrations, it would be wonderful to use that positive energy to help other people in your life…from this anomaly of a song…, find a way to start having good conversations with people around you… everyone has a really interesting story if you just give them the time to talk…, that’s all I want out of this.”
Indeed, the partiality with which some commentators shy from acknowledging Anthony’s allusive salience decrying obscene transfers of wealth from the middle class and poor to the wealthiest banks and enterprises in the 2008 asset crisis and Covid forced isolation, which shuttered so many family businesses, while others, principally African-Americans, acknowledge Anthony’s acuity, distinguishes editorial commentary.
Time will tell whether one or another critic may revive H.L. Mencken’s withering assessment of David Grayson, Ray Standard Baker’s pseudonym for a number of books promoting rural life: “I fail to respond to his enthusiasm for yokels, his artful forgetfulness that the country is dull, dirty, and uncomfortable, and that countrymen are stupid and rascally.”
In August, 2023, the best one can say is that Anthony beams like a blue moon, rare and bright doubly rewarding gaze.