Posted on 08/22/2023 6:34:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The headline in Christianity Today’s analysis of the hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond” blares: “Oliver Anthony’s Viral Hit Doesn’t Love Its Neighbors.” The sort of people who read Christianity Today, however, should be asking themselves if they love Virginia resident Oliver Anthony, who wrote and sang it.
In one of the most stunning passages of the Bible, Jesus tells the parable of a man robbed, stripped, beaten, and left for dead on the road. A priest and a Levite both pass by, but when a Samaritan saw the bleeding man, “he had compassion” (Luke 10:33).
The lesson is that such compassion is the embodiment of a love for God that encompasses heart, soul, strength and mind. The lesson hits home today because it’s so easy to relate to the priest and the Levite. It is hard to muster compassion for those we don’t know. Harder still for those we outright disdain.
In his prophetic book “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray argues: “Our nation is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.”
If the past 10 years haven’t borne the truth of that claim, it’s evident in the responses to Anthony’s massive hit.
There are those for whom his tune is the battle cry of a generation, an anthem for the age in which we are reckoning with the results of 50 years of globalization and financialization. And there are those who insist Anthony’s diagnosis is ignorant, his grievances are misdirected, and he just needs to bootstrap his way up the income ladder.
The writer and singer of “Rich Men North of Richmond” wrote Thursday on his Facebook page that he is a high school dropout whose legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford and that Oliver Anthony Music, the name under which he releases songs, is a tribute to a grandfather who lived and worked in Appalachia.
“At this point, I’ll gladly go by Oliver because everyone knows me as such,” he wrote. “But my friends and family still call me Chris. You can decide for yourself, either is fine.”
Here I must take the plank out of my own eye.
In 2016, when the candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, for whom I was working for, ended his campaign, I went to work for a U.S. senator representing my home state. My office was in a space shared by the county’s Republican Party, making it the place to go for Trump campaign schwag. Day after day, I listened as his supporters came to grab a MAGA hat and a yard sign.
It was rough for me at the time, having invested so much of myself in campaigning for someone else. It was a constant stream of conspiracy theories, utter disdain for anyone who wasn’t Donald Trump, and unwillingness to be “reasonable” and reckon with what was considered such an obvious fact by people like me: that Trump was guaranteed to lose the election and hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
Who were these people who were ruining everything?
In time, however, I began to listen. Despite my persistent pride and disappointment and anger, grace broke through. I began to understand that for years, rather than listen, rich men north of Richmond had been waving them off, pointing to white papers full of statistics proving that the lived experience of so many Americans just isn’t so.
Having had enough of being told to ignore their lying eyes, those Americans, representing an unprecedented political coalition, sent Donald Trump — the one candidate for president who seemed to get it and give voice to their concerns — to Washington with a mandate to blow the whole thing up.
The wake-up call of 2016 continues to baffle many. What a merciful gift of God it was to give me the opportunity to tune my heart toward compassion early in this era.
How easy it would be for me to be a rich man north of Richmond today. For as I write, though I can see the U.S. Senate office buildings through the windows of my corner office, I understand that the elitists of whom Anthony sings are not condemned by virtue of their circumstances, but of their hearts.
They are not condemned for the mere presence of wealth or power but for their greed and self-interest. And I understand what’s sought is not retribution or redistribution, but justice and compassion.
Again, Charles Murray:
Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisors cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.
A video making the rounds on the internet is an assortment of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life listening and reacting to “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Watch it.
Absorb the phenomenon of black men wiping away tears as a white man from Appalachia sings about being left behind.
Those who profess to want to heal the fractures in our country should start by listening — really listening — to Oliver Anthony of Farmville, Virginia. Perhaps then they will find within themselves the compassion to respond accordingly.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Eric Teetsel is vice president of government relations at The Heritage Foundation.
Assuming those professing have any genuine interest in healing those fractures. More often its quite the opposite.
Yes
Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds /
I liked this. Thanks for sharing it.
And they are all In The Bubble.
Do the idiots who run Christianity Today think that "compassion" is giving a morbidly obese guy more cake?
From the headline, I thought this story was going to be a critique of the song’s line:
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds /
It really crosses all boundaries. Many black people are reacting to this song on YT. All they hear is the same reality they live. Some have been told the song is ‘racist’ or ‘right wing’, only to listen to it and be confused how anyone can make that claim.
The left believe it is ‘right wing’ to believe taxes should not pay for the fudge rounds of a 300lb person.
It’s hard to believe that the left can win any elections...something is very, very wrong. We all know...
“...something is very, very wrong.”
Something’s been wrong for decades and generations, since socialist FDR created SSA, LBJ created “The Great Society”, and on and on and on. The recent and unending Covid-19 payments didn’t help, either.
That may be but I don’t believe the voter fraud possibilities have ever been so available and the extreme leftist takeover of our 3 letter agencies is recent. The double standard of law has never been so acute.
Of course the highest levels of any power structure will have corrupt people...but now evil is in our face, demanding we accept it as good.
You are correct. An important point is our opponents are not just "Godless" they are actively anti-Christian.
They openly desire to destroy all of societal norms and society itself. They are much closer to Maoists or to Pol Poi than to 1950's Democrats. The only thing they believe in is political power, a reversion to the old Pharoes or Kings.
Agreed - and their actions have exposed themselves, so they have to go ‘all in’. They know what comes with failing to “kill the king”...they will abuse all their authority to survive, if they fail they know what’s coming. The fear is setting in that they will fail, so it’s only going to get more extreme.
The left targeted Christianity Today and hijacked it years ago. It has been turned.
You are quite correct, of course. The rich men north of Richmond, in pursuit of their retaining total control, love them some racial animosity, love to keep people divided.
Well said.
Some of the “response” songs coming from left-wing musicians have really been something else. Not for their political points, which we/I might pretty much expect, but rather for just how flat-out tone-deaf and out-of-touch some of them are. (I’m looking at you, Mr. ‘Voice-of-the-downtrodden-English-Working-Class, Billy Bragg...)
Hearing Billy’s response song: “Rich Men, Who Make North of a Million” made me sad, but not in a good way. I was sad because I just realised that I could no longer call myself one of Billy’s casual fans. I’d always known he considered himself a Marxist, but I still admired his musicality. Likewise, a few of his non-political songs, such as: “A New England” are classics. This new song, however? It made me sad to realise that he’s turned into yet another Champagne Socialist, who is completely out of touch.
Likewise with another (can’t remember the artist’s name), who is a Middle-Aged, white fellow wearing Rasta colours, and who speaks and sings with a lilting ‘Medieval Bard’ West Country English accent. I listened to his Forest Elf song, and started grumbling to myself: “And wot’s all this, then? Some bloody wanker playing a vintage Martin D28 is going to try and tell Mr. Anthony that somehow HE is more ‘in touch’ with the frustrations of the average working person? That some upper-bourgeois English TWIT somehow knows more about sruggling than backwoods Virginia boy, who is out in the woods, and playing on a $500 Gretsch Resonator, with his doggos at his feet?
Sure, Jan.
I have a friend whose job puts him in contact with wealthy people, though he is merely a scraping-by servant in a service industry. He is a chauffeur; a black suit driving a black car with dark-tinted windows. He drives in silence and hears the conversations.
We think of the wealthy, particularly the permanent alphabet Fed agency wealthy, as pure evil, intent on eventual Stalinist class genocide.
There are those people, and given the chance they would(will) go all mega-gulag on us.
But the Rich People North of Richmond have another, personal motivation: family business. These are people who do this for the paycheck and the perks. There is an enormous culture of people who have married each other (Mitch McConnell + Elaine Chow, Alan Greenspan + Andrea Mitchell, James Comey + Patrice Failor, Chuck Schumer + Iris Weinshall, on and on and on). Their motivation is for themselves and their children.
They get government jobs with GS numbers and titles and perks.
They get houses in particular neighborhoods.
They get golf course memberships.
They send their kids to particular schools and colleges.
Then their kids graduate the colleges and they also get government jobs with titles and perks, and it is now multi-generational.
They intermarry, power family to power family.
They use the muscle of their government positions to partner with businesses who will expand their family capital. The Pelosi family is simply the hood ornament of a giant machine that has plugged their power cord into The Force for personal gain.
They do not see it as corruption. They see it as connection. They are not joyful, but they are happy. And, of course, smug.
They want this gravy train to continue, for their children and grandchildren.
This is why they hate you. You threaten to interfere with their manicured life. You want to take it away by voting for those people. You are not part of their bubble; you are the unsanitary who have to actually go to the store for food and clothing, Walmart and Kroger, ew.
They will do what they have to to stop you.
They want Biden the terrible to use those F 15 on us and they would pay him to do that.
I’m not joking.
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