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Duck Dynasty and Dante: the Joyful Union

Duck Dynasty and Dante: the Joyful Union

Last updated on: January 25, 2015 at 4:45 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Duck Dynasty and Dante: the Joyful Union 2015-01-25T16:45:33-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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There are days for Duck Dynasty and days for Dante, but no days where I don’t love both Duck Dynasty and Dante with appropriate levels of love. The illumined Rod Dreher says that Dante sometimes conflicts with Duck Dynasty and he is right, the habit of rightfulness being one he cannot break, but I have never experienced this real conflict. In my life, shaped by West Virginia culture, and lived in Upstate New York, California, and now Texas, the ideas of Dante and Duck Dynasty have (rarely) ever conflicted. I am unfit to disagree with Dreher, but perhaps I can share a different experience.

I was blessed in my family. My mother would spend an entire Saturday pressing against my intellectually soft support for the family cause: Lincoln, Liberty, and Union. She too was from a family with Union roots, but she hates lazy thinking. However, the Andy Griffith Show taught me to loath the big city types who came to Mayberry assuming that books had taught them how to do things. I still find it hard to like someone who cannot cry and learn from Opey the Birdman. In that brilliant show my youthful understanding of Abolition of Man was confirmed by the black-and-white parable of the wages of sin and the loss that love demands.

I am not a populist, but I am one of the people: nothing special. My people have felt betrayed by academics and reacted painfully to that betrayal, but in the end accepted too easily the superiority of “the clerks.” The grandparents I knew valued the education that the state had denied them and were delighted to see me learn. If they worried about the ideas I ingested with the education, they accepted that they could do nothing (!) but pray for my soul.

In my experience, every small town has someone wanting light opera, reading classic literature, and wanting to start a discussion. I have never found a town that was a true intellectual wasteland, though I have found many towns where the discussion began in football before moving to philosophy. Most small towns have (or had) libraries and the librarian has always been the last best hope of readers who are alone.

Like any visitor to any culture, I had to learn the language before hearing what was really being said and in the country I have found anti-intellectualism (the American disease) and intellectualism (even a yearning for Europe!), mass culture and folk culture, ignorance and genius.

Rarely did it I hear it in words that graduate school (so marvelous!) taught me. Sometimes folk hated on my ideas, because they misunderstood my language. Essentially I have found a joyful union in worshipping at Parson’s Chapel learning to sing with shape notes and visiting the opera in Austria. Each came with joy mixed with sin: people are just people.

Learning to learn from non-intellectuals is a start. For me it began with having experienced value and goodness in the humble folk hymns of childhood and knowing there was great good to them. When I met better things, and they were (in one important sense) better, nobody ever asked me to give up the old goods. I simply ended up with both. If I can learn to love opera, as our best friends forced me to do, then a snob can learn to love the Grand Old Opry. I know that Jonny Cash is not (in one way) as gifted as singers I heard at my alma mater’s Eastman, but I know Cash has something good, true, and beautiful in his voice.

Not surprisingly our opera friends love genuine country music more than I do. This does not surprise me because my experience has said that the born aristocrat or the truly gifted recognize and enjoy beauty wherever they find it. The English Lord (and poet) I met working in his garden was obviously the Lord, because only the Lord could have worn the strange mix of expensive and cast off clothing with such ease in front of American young people. My students saw a gardner, because they did not know quality, but to anyone who spent time with country folk the great man was obvious.

The great man or women (whether by natural gifts, birth, or fortune) has confidence and so can take chances. Why? Who doesn’t want more pleasure? The great books are great, but the popular books are often great as well. Harry Potter and Star Trek will not endure, but if I want to enjoy a trip to the early twenty-first century or the 1960’s, then Potter and Trek are marvels. Rowling writes unaffectedly in the spirit of her age and only period Trek can capture the scientific optimism and the lack of irony possible for some in 1967.

The trash, of course, must be put out, but so much of all cultural artifacts are trash that putting out the trash will rid of us of less than we might suspect. We will leave only a few wicked things in the garbage, some will go to be recycled saving their better ideas, but much is useful at least to those running intellects full of good will. Most any work contains garbage, recycling, and good will. Victorian novels often contain reprehensible racism and sorry sexism. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and my current favorite Person of Interest educate me on big ideas. Trash the bad, recycle the usable, and enjoy the good.

So let me advance three ideas that I think are true, but by training I (sometimes) wish were not.

There is great good to popular culture.

If a great many people like a thing and especially if they love it, my first response is to look for the good in it. Souls created in God’s image long for goodness and when they find it, even in stinking places, then they reward the whole thing.

Small needs the large to do avoid becoming odious.

A sure sign of a cult (in the bad sense of the term) is being cut off from the rest of us. Mass culture threaten to overwhelm the small, but the answer cannot be to retreat, cut off contact, or build a compound of culture. Such enclaves always lead to abuse of power, ugliness, and immorality.

Intellectualism is as bad as anti-intellectualism.

The answer to every intellectual question is intellectual, but not all questions are intellectual. We are emotional and spiritual beings as well as minds.

And against these are three other trues that are easier for me:

Aristocratic culture is needed to check popular culture.

The men and women of Duck Dynasty are saved from narrowness by their connection to global church ministry (missions!) and a great work of literature (the Bible). They go to churches that start schools, confess their faults, and are aware of culture tides. The very presence of the men of Duck Dynasty on television, learning from media experts on mainstream networks, proves they are not reactionaries, but educable.

The question is are the aristocrats of media educable by them?

Humans must live small lives.

We are, as Gandalf, would point out small beings. God is great and we are not. Part of “know thyself” is to know that I am not such a much. Sheldon Vanauken, professor and author, lived a rich life, but with few material possessions. He thought large and lived small.

The dialectic is not optional.

You can choose to read Harry Potter or not. You can decide you do not like Styx or Maroon 5. You can give up on *Doctor Who (*as I mostly did after David Tennant left).

You cannot be fully human and ignore the way of the mind: the dialectic. We must discuss, we must not assume, we must live examined lives. This is obvious, but nobody, urban or rural, educated or uneducated, is safe from having lazy intellects. Certainly I am not safe, especially from the lazy assumption that finding the truth is impossible!

One thing the musical episode of Buffy stresses is that a point life is to go on living and though this is not the point of life, Joss Whedon has found a good idea. I never trust a person who does not do things: talk, cook good food, craft, write, create, work with their hands . . . the list is endless, but the key is making (living) and merely consuming the products of others. Even consumption can be “mere consumption” (soulless) or it can be a secondarily creative act: I can eat my meal or I can create a feast for others to share. The sum of the meal is greater than the food I use!

One thing the mere consumption of all media, and this includes books, does not do is produce authenticity. For authenticity one must live. My grandfathers both read less than I, but they lived more intensely. They had fewer words for their experiences, but more experiences. They created more and consumed less: even when the bought and used a thing.

I live authentically when I take two disparate things I enjoy: Duck Dynasty and Dante and fuse them together in a life. I have been given West Virginia roots, an Illinois birth, decades in Upstate New York, a career in California, and now rootedness in Texas: if I do not deny any of them and fuse them, then I am well on the way to creating a small, but unique thing. I am very eccentric: an individual, but not one isolated or alone. My mercy is to be not so much a much under the Obedience of Such a Much: a community, a university, a Church, a family, a people, a nation, and finally God.

I think I will go watch some Person of Interest and finish the Sheldon Vanauken bio I am reading. I look forward to the rest of you finding in Dreher’s new book on Dante the wit, wisdom, and application of the great poem to a small life.

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