All Hail: The Mountain Goats & Political Realities
“So I sing this song for you/William Staniforth Donahue,/your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland/but you made a bad decision or two.”
I find myself humming this suspiciously upbeat sounding couplet frequently. There’s an ineffable, yet haunting quality to it. Like many of Darnielle’s strongest efforts, the song is a short, memorable story. Yuval Noah Harari, author of the books, Sapiens, and Homo Deus suggests that telling stories is what sets us apart from other animals, what allows us to prosper. After all: The American Dream, governments, paper money, marriages…what are these institutions but stories we tell ourselves?
In the 1990s America was telling itself a very particular story, a crime story. Both major political parties were eager to show how “tough on crime” they could be, and established a host of new mandatory minimum sentences along with bringing the possibility of a the death penalty for an additional sixty types of crimes. The story was a powerful one, as stories based on fear tend to be, and its political momentum could not be stopped.
But it was far from the only story, as “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” deftly shows. Darnielle sings: “The new laws said said that seventeen year olds could do federal time/ and you were the first one/so I sing this song for you.” America’s “Tough On Crime” story was painted in broad brushstrokes with folk tales of Reagan’s “Welfare Queens” and George H.W. Bush’s infamous “Willie Horton” ad. Darnielle’s story is smaller, more personal, and this is an important point, one worth lingering on for this reason: in every story told in broad strokes, there are untold stories in between that are left out because they don’t fit into a neat, little box in the upper left hand side of the cable news screen during B Block.
Darnielle says this explicitly in an interview with Salon:
I mean, the thing is, mandatory minimum sentences are not just a story. They’re a lot of people’s reality. Back then, you’d see multiple “20/20s” about some guy who got the idea to buy a pound of weed to distribute in college and got caught and was doing 10 years. You can’t do 10 years and come out the same person you were, as the young person who made a mistake and wound up getting a sentence that a judge was compelled to give him. So yeah, [Fall of the Star High School Running Back]’s an explicitly political song about how mandatory minimum sentences are bullshit.
The stories we choose to tell ourselves are powerful, and they have consequences. This Mountain Goats song from their opus, All Hail West Texas shows that this particular story we choose to tell ourselves has had consequences that are at odds with the foundation of what the United States is meant to stand for. The song’s protagonist running back has a grandfather who came over from Ireland, looking to find the American Dream. What Darnielle is showing is not that the grandson is a fuckup and the grandfather a winner, but that something larger has changed in the meantime. They were both looking for the American Dream, and they both found it.
