Some of you may be able to guess what this post will be about from the title, but others may not see where I’m going. “Jack and Diane” is a song – considered an American classic, it was written by rocker John Mellencamp, (known by the name John Cougar back in 1982 when the song came out). John was born in 1951 which means he was going through his teenage years/puberty in the 60’s. This is an important point to consider when we analyze the content of the song, especially as the song was “influenced in part by John’s own life experiences.” Quotes will be from the lyrics.
The song is a “little ditty about Jack and Diane, two American kids growing up in the heartland.” Jack’s “gonna be a football star” while Diane is “a debutante [in the] backseat of Jackie’s car.” So far, so good, right? Young love, young dreams. Certainly, most should be able to relate. In the second verse, Jack wants to get frisky with Diane (no protest, and apparently he takes charge and isn’t overly worried about contemporary concerns of complicated consent):
Diane sittin on Jackie’s lap
He’s got his hands between her knees
Jackie say, hey diane lets run off
Behind a shady tree
Dribble off those bobby brooks
Let me do what I please
Perhaps I am belaboring the point, but what I’m driving at is this – when John (Jack is a common nickname for John, by the way, so we may be able to assume that John was writing about himself and a girlfriend from his youth) was growing up, affection between men and women wasn’t yet irrevocably poisoned by notions of “gender” politics, political correctness, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and all those other “progressive” ideas we’ve swallowed together as a culture. That he looks back on these times with fondness is more than understandable – hell, men who weren’t even alive in those times look back to them with fondness.
The problems I’d like to highlight begin with the chorus (worth mentioning that the chorus is always set off by “and Jack(ie) says” or some derivation thereof):
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin is gone
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin is gone they walk on
And here fatalism rears its ugly head. It is telling that this song caught on and become massively popular. It is little more than nostalgic yearning for times long gone and a fatalistic attitude towards the contemporary – and it is primarily a song which men will relate to. Why anyone would accept a life of misery as inevitable (“life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone”) is disappointing – as humans, we may not be able to control our external circumstances (change the world) but we always have some power to change ourselves and how we adapt to that world. We do not need to adopt a fatalistic attitude towards things, and give up, as John seems to in this song. For men in contemporary times, there are many ways to adapt – learn Game, expatriate, marry a foreign wife, form or join a brotherhood, go your own way…
The refrain is even more telling:
Gonna let it rock
Let it roll
Let the Bible belt come down
And save my soul
Hold on to 16 as long as you can
Changes comin round real soon
Make us women and men
Here the fatalism is even clearer. John expects the Bible belt to come and save him, rather than having to apply himself rigorously to study of the Bible in order to come to faith and understanding. (Author’s note: I am currently an agnostic.) Furthermore, his only advice to listeners is to “hold on to 16 as long as you can,” even though the 16 he experienced back in 1967 is drastically different from the 16 that someone born in 1996 (who will turn 16 this year) can expect. He tells us that changes are going to come which will make us all “women and men,” even though the changes of which he is warning (likely changes advocated and imposed by feminists and their supporters) came to pass in his lifetime. Furthermore, I doubt seriously that the changes of which he is likely speaking about are what truly cause boys and girls to become women and men – and, on my view, there are precious few women and men left in America today. (Here’s a hint: being a man or a woman has very little to do with age.)
The idea that we lose our innocence when we become adults, as we realize how “terrible the world is,” betrays an assumption that feeds into language ideologies. For one, it is not the entire world that is terrible – merely the American (and, to an extent, Western) one. This goes for men and women both, or perhaps ironically only for women. The degree to which your world is terrible is also largely dependent on how you structure your world view, and really, how much you allow things to get to you and influence you. Here, some stoicism (perhaps I could write a post on this for readers? let me know) may be helpful, but stoicism is often misunderstood as fatalism.
In his book, A People’s History of the World, Chris Harman points out two prejudices he had to overcome in his telling of human history:
One is the idea that key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an ‘unchanging’ human nature. It is a prejudice that pervades academic writing, mainstream journalism, and popular culture alike. Human beings, we are told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery, and the oppression of women. This ‘caveman’ image is meant to explain the bloodletting on the Western Front in one world war and the Holocaust in the other. I argue very differently. ‘Human nature’ as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause. Our history involved the moulding of different human natures, each displacing the one that went before through great economic, political and ideological battles.
The second prejudice, much promulgated in the last decade, is that although human society may have changed in the past, it will do so no more.
That Harman’s arguments here feed naturally into my reflections on language ideology (the main enforcers of language ideology are, again, public education, the news media, the entertainment industry, corporate culture and the legal system) I’d like to think is more than just a happy coincidence. I feel strongly that a proper understanding of language and language ideologies is a sort of missing link when it comes to understanding why and how feminism has wrought so much damage, and, more importantly, how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It has certainly happened in the past, after all.
Fatalism seems to be the domain of little men who are too afraid to believe in themselves and their own power to change their own circumstances. Wilhelm Reich may have been on to something well ahead of his time. He was writing about the evils that permitted the atomic bomb to be created and used, but the attitude that allowed for this atrocity seems very similar in character to the attitude that permits feminism to destroy civilization (emphasis my own):
You see, little man, it all boils down to one thing, to you and your sound or unsound thinking. And you, the most brilliant scientist of the twentieth century, if you were not a microscopically little man, you’d have thought in terms of the world and not of any nation. Your great intellect would have shown you how to keep the atom bomb out of the world; or if the logic of scientific development made such an invention inevitable, you’d have brought all your influence to bear to prevent it from being used. You’re caught in a vicious circle of your own making, and you can’t get out of it because your thought and vision have taken the wrong direction. You comforted millions of little men by telling them your atomic energy would cure their cancer and rheumatism, though you were well aware that this was impossible, that you had devised an instrument of murder and nothing else. You and your physics have landed in the same blind alley. You know it, but you won’t admit it. You’re finished! Now and for all time! You know it, I’ve told you so very plainly. But you keep silent, you go on dying of cancer and a broken heart, and on your very deathbed you cry out, “Long live culture and technology!” I tell you, little man, that you’ve dug your own grave with your eyes open. You think the new “era of atomic energy” has dawned. It has dawned all right, but not in the way you think. Not in your inferno but in my quiet, industrious workshop in a far corner of America.
A parting note I’d like to leave you with is this – John Mellencamp originally intended for the song to be about an interracial couple, but was afraid of the backlash that would result. Language ideologies regarding racism were undergoing drastic change when John was growing up, much like ideologies regarding the sexes were. I intended on writing a piece about language ideologies and race, but I thought perhaps Spearhead readers were getting tired of me hammering on this point.
