A Rant: It's My First Assignment

So, today would have been John Prine’s 74th birthday. I loved John Prine. He was not only a decent fellow, but truly a lovely man and a funny man and a thoughtful man. He was talented in a way that most people don’t understand, let alone have the ability to replicate. His smile, that crooked smile that sat on a face permanently altered by multiple bouts of cancer – that smile is something that I still think about. It makes me so happy and it makes me so fucking furious.

“Lake Marie” is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Now I’ll never hear him sing it again live. Records are great, but alive people are better. It’s almost always better when you are fucking alive. And so today, because I’m sad in a very specific way, I am filled with a very specific kind of hate for Donald Trump. I hate him. I HATE him and I hate the smug way he acts like getting COVID-19 made him stronger in some way – like his body saw the disease and said, you shall be like vitamins to me and I’ll come out of this hospital looking like an invincible hero. Of course, he didn’t. Trump came out of the hospital looking like the idiot that he is and always has been and always will be. He immediately resumed his hate-filled schedule of speeches and super-spreader events. Like when moms used to have sleepover parties for whole classes of kids to catch chicken pox and get it all over with. Except deadly and much, much more careless.

If our president had bothered to give even the smallest fuck about people – about individuals and families and how they can change the world in their own unique ways – if he had ever bothered to give one single shit about anything but his loathsome self, so many more people would be alive. And instead there are more and more dead people every day. There are people I know, people I know of, family friends, family of friends, strangers all over the country who have all suffered in some way and died because of this massive ill-fitting suit of a man, filled with garbage and doused with drug store bronzer. I hate him. But today I hate him more than I have in a long time.

I could make this a rant on Donald Trump’s policies, in general, but he has emboldened an entire society within a society to be careless with one another. And, right now, I hate those people, too. I have been trying lately to hate less. I don’t really believe in that whole “we can believe different things and still be friends” bullshit that racists and privileged folk like to say. I don’t think I can be friends with people who believe fundamentally different things than I do. Not because I am so egotistical that I think I’m right 100% of the time, but because I am solid on what my true beliefs and values are. I feel the deep anger welling up inside me more and more, as the election comes closer and I hear that my folks in the next county over have found Klan business cards in their front yard - right next to the Biden signs that have been run over, smeared with muddy tire tracks. Weird that the Klan has business cards, right? That’s bold. Bolder than I expected – though I can be naïve. Someone told them it was okay to be that bold. Wonder who that was?

And so we are surrounded by the careless and the thoughtless, who make others sick and either don’t know it or shrug it off. After all, those who die are just the weak ones, right? We need to encourage those with the healthiest genes to live and thrive, because these days we aren’t bothering to cover our full-blown white supremacist, eugenics-loving natures.

But John wasn’t weak. He may have had a sweet smile and a truly lovely spirit, but his body saw the other side of cancer more than once. When his jaw was reconfigured, he could have walked away and called it a career. When his voice changed because of age and from his treatments, he could have said – “Hey, I did some good. I’m going to sit over here and be an elder statesman, because I’ve earned it.” But he chose not to. He chose moving forward. And so a whole new generation of people learned about “Angel From Montgomery,” and “Sam Stone,” and “Hello in There.” And he died anyway. The best parts of me will say that he offered us such gifts and he left a legacy and so he’ll live on, etc. But today I am especially angry because I blame Donald Trump directly for his death. Right now, John Prine should be dancing in his living room and drinking a Handsome Johnny, just a simple vodka and ginger ale. He still danced. He was still very, very alive.

But in the end, it was just him and his wife Fiona – alone in a sterile and lonely and terrifying hospital room. He was on a ventilator and she was barely well, herself; they’d both been sick. Sick because people were too proud and idiotic to be careful. And then he died. He may have slipped away quietly – I don’t know. I wasn’t there. What I do know is that the days that led up to those final moments must have been painful, and this was someone who had already lived through enough pain, only to come back and give us more of himself. Donald Trump killed John Prine. I will forever and ever believe this. His sycophants killed John Prine. None of them care and they never will.

But, to quote John’s final album, “I remember everything…” And I do too, you mutherfuckers. I will always remember this. Happy 74th, John.