jane dark's sugarhigh!

Poet Discovers Political Allegory In Drinking Songs!

The shift in progressive and even radical American political thought can be seen most clearly in the motion from Garth Brooks' oppositional "Friends In Low Places" to Toby Keith's neoliberal "I Love This Bar," the two greatest drinking songs written since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"Friends," which counterposes the narrator's boots to high society's "black tie affair," and the fancy party's champagne to his bar's beer and whisky, is explicit about the dialectical struggle between high and low -- not in culture or brow, but social status. The song is, in short, a brutal tale of class conflict resolved when the lone voice, having ventured alone and alienated into the "ivory tower" to speak truth to power, returns to his bar where his voice can join into the collective, the chorus of equals which bears the song off to the Marxist worker's paradise.

"This Bar," however, brooks no such conflict. But neither is it the achieved collectivist utopia, in which the competing interests of differing groups have been resolved. Instead, it simply makes space for all within the social plurality; on this occasion, the concluding chorus is specifically a contingent alliance of individuals who, outside the bar, are compelled to prey on or serve each other. "High-techs, Blue-collar boys and rednecks," along with yuppies, bikers, winners and losers; these terms are scarcely lacking in class consciousness. It simply doesn't recognize this as potentially problematic; it invites all equally to loaf. One suppoes it vends equally champagne, whisky, and beer. This is an elegant formulation of the way in which "inclusionary" or "big-tent" liberalism shills for unrestricted profit-taking, and how such supposedly progressive virtues are dialectics at a standstill.

We here at sugarhigh! would like to thank Mr. Brooks and Mr. Keith for their labors in bringing to light the collapse of meaningful politics in the America they both surely love.