America Is Crying

Early November was harsh, with the fallen leaves having laid bare the urban ugliness. Mandatory confinement, closed borders, shorter days, gray all around. And then suddenly a song came over the radio with, “I ask myself all the time/How do these poor folks get along … It’s so sad that when/I get back home/I see all of America weeping/In my rearview mirror…”

The song “America Weeping” on the Dashing Cowboys’ new album “The Antipodes” is staggering in its justice, its perceptiveness, its timeliness. For these, it won awards at the recent gala of the Quebec Association for the Recording, Concert and Video Industries. Everything about the lyrics by Jean-Francois Pauze and the vocals by Karl Tremblay is remarkable. A year after its release, the song is even more moving, because America is in tatters, because of Donald Trump, COVID-19, police shootings; because Quebec is part of North America and because the song’s narrator, a clear-headed truck driver, makes us see reality with sorrow and empathy. He encompasses the social landscape that we know as ours. How can we stay dry-eyed when we hear his song?

The genius of the group, which has never disowned its activist side, lies in giving voice to a paid nomad, a transporter of the goods of neoliberalism, a simple truck driver from Quebec who describes in everyday language what he sees in the land he crisscrosses. He is a French Canadian, but he is also an American, since we are all America. We are aware of being on the same continent as our cousins to the south. We share the same vast and beautiful terrain, but one which in which large sections are devastated. “I’m towing all the excesses of my era behind me,” the truck driver sings. He views things obliquely, being on the periphery rather than in the center of the empire. He thus sees what is really happening better than his neighbor in Iowa. He has perspective. He watches without complacency how America suffers from sickness. It has lost its way; it is fragmented, wracked by inequality, violent yet inert at the same time. Its way of life condemns it to a head-on collision.

The music is catchy, an unapologetic country folk song slightly tinged with melancholy. It makes you want to move, to dance. As the world crashes into a wall, it is best to let it go by. When the song first appeared, its meaning was lost; a year on, it is astonishing. The American dream has vanished. Everything is dull, with only pockets of noise and activity that rend the sky.

This America is divided. We think we can shout as loudly as our American neighbors from the height of our northern democracy in condemning the terribly polarized Nov. 3 election results, rolling our eyes at the Republican voters who supported Trump’s bullying, machismo, indecency, lying and chaos. We think we can look incredulously at all the downwardly mobile unfortunates, the newly arrived Latinos, Black people living in danger, women in poor neighborhoods who, against our wishes, voted for Trump. What we refuse to see and understand is the inevitability of this popular rebellion against the elite, all of them, for having persistently left “the real world” behind. We also fail to see this same disaffection, this defiance, of the elite in our own country. But the truck driver in the song sure does.

Both deliberately and through laziness, we have gradually turned our backs on our Americanness to the point of forgetting about it. It is very often via the intercession of artists that we are reminded of the territory we share. From Marc Seguin to Elisapie Isaac, from Jean-Paul Riopelle to David Goudreault, our eyes are made to see beyond our tranquil forgetfulness. These artists make us recall that we are a part of this continent’s history, that we share the same soil, way of life and a certain sense of destiny. They also make us recall that WE ARE AMERICANS, we, who like to think, with some justification, that we are exceptional, apart from others. America worries the entire planet, a feeling we here strongly share, and not solely because of our geographic proximity. Rather, we are also culturally quite American, and our destiny is tightly bound up with America’s.

The truck driver in “America Weeping” is well aware of what our nations have in common. His country style plea touches the deepest parts of us. He knows that November’s election will not change what America is doing, which is to shed tears, weighed down by all its tragedies as it rushes forward. The Dashing Cowboys are uncompromising social observers, their antennae sensitively attuned to the darkness enveloping North America.