Evo 37 Moment

[Klaudia Aricas]

TheDolly Parton Moment owes a lot to nostalgia. She has simply lived long enough, performed at a high level for enough years that we can spare the warm fuzzies she inspires in us. Nostalgia blunts the politics that produces all art, especially middlebrow art of the kind Parton creates. Even if you remember that 9 to 5 was part of a mainstreaming of big-tent working-woman feminism, you cannot feel the urgency of the time. The shoulder pads and Equal Rights Amendment and raucous debates on the Phil Donahue Show are artifacts now. There is no petition to sign, no march to attend and fight to be had about whether women belong in the workplace. Nostalgic celebrity is a neutered artist. We like that.

I have been in meetings recently where an ice breaker is 'what did you want to be when you grew up?' I have struggled to answer, I look back on my white southern girlhood and I can find no yearning to be something. This essay helped clarify why. Me wanting to be something was vulgar and I couldn't survive being vulgar. So I waited and watched and then, when no one was looking, I ran.

So in this way, blondeness signifies youth, even to the point of childishness, which is why so many more women than men lighten their hair. Childish qualities are valued in women. The stereotype of the dumb blonde supports this -- dumbness is a kind of innocence.

And of course, this also comports with why blondeness maps on to extreme Whiteness: because in a culture that relentlessly associates Blackness with criminality, Whiteness, its opposite, must be innocent.

Dolly Parton is having a moment. After 60 years in public life, the sassy songbird in indelible drag is a reigning queen among pop culture\u2019s most elite celebrity tier: the \u201Cunproblematic fave.\u201D Those are celebrities who have transcended whatever domain first made them famous, have not disappointed their core fanbase, and manage to avoid a casual audience\u2019s wrath. Rare in its own right, Dolly\u2019s ascension is even more noteworthy because of what she is selling. Mediatized to our collective eyeteeth and insolent in our aesthetic preferences, we usually denigrate Dolly\u2019s type of earnest sentimentality in the discourse. Yet over the past five years, it has become verboten to dislike her, much less to critique her. By tacit consensus, Dolly Parton is the one good thing in our empire\u2019s twilight.

To her extreme credit, we also just like Dolly because she is very likeable. The Dolly Parton Moment wraps her appeal in an artistic halo, beckoning to audiences once too sophisticated to appreciate her in public. Whether you grew up dismissive of her trashy drag or ashamed of liking \u201CIslands in the Stream,\u201D it is now safe to appreciate what has always been true: The woman can write her ass off. Her gift is one that is easy to overlook as mere folk. That is the category sophisticated people place art done by women, by and for poor or rural people, by people of color, created outside of a cultural institution, and that uses pastoral themes. Home. Love. Longing. Desire. Faith. Those sound basic and they are. Dolly\u2019s creative genius is multifold and one of its top tiers is how deceptively easy her songwriting appears. Maybe anyone could write something like: \u201CI don\u2019t love you/and the grass is blue.\u201D But anyone didn\u2019t, and you didn\u2019t either. Because you can\u2019t. The woman has earned her nostalgic moment in the sun; the question is whether we have earned the rose-tinted glasses through which we see her.

Given how much content Dolly gives us, it is amazing that we haven\u2019t indulged our impulse to find a reason to hate her. Now 75, Dolly has spent the past few years managing enough new content to rival superstars 50 years her junior. There were three Netflix movies in under two years. Her 2020 Christmas album, A Holly Dolly Christmas, is her 47th solo studio album. She has a new book entitled Songteller, a Super Bowl commercial, and a Time-Life compendium with an infomercial she hosts herself. Her Imagination Library, a book-gifting nonprofit she founded over 30 years ago,is pitch-perfect philanthropy for our political moment \u2014 a Horatio Alger origin story with a mission as straight-forward as a Dolly lyric. Mention her name even in passing and a stranger feels compelled to whisper conspiratorially, \u201CYou know, she gives away all those books\u2026to kids.\u201D The same discourse that uses \u201Cthe one percent\u201D colloquially treats Dollywood, the theme park in Dolly\u2019s Smoky Mountain foothills, like a capitalist enterprise beyond reproach. There are no scathing expos\u00E9s of gig labor working the Firechaser Express or running the food service at Splash Country water park. The only for-profit enterprise that comes close to Dollywood\u2019s level of media shielding is Ben & Jerry\u2019s, but they have paid a reputational cost for their untouchable status. As a boss, Dolly Parton does big business without paying the usual price for being filthy rich. With her foray into funding scientific research and refusal of a Medal of Freedom from then-President Trump, by the start of 2021 every knee was prepared to bend. Dolly is, as one breathless news story describes her, \u201Can actual angel.\u201D

Even for a woman who has helmed many reintroductions to the public over her career, angel status is a new level. Public relations magic cannot explain it all. Many celebrities do the right thing to garner adoration and attention. That is the job of a celebrity. Ascending to something higher, something unassailable as Dolly Parton has done over the past decade takes more than media savvy. It takes a willing political moment. If anything, becoming an emblem of a culture\u2019s highest valued attributes, is resistant to public relations savvy. The artist doesn\u2019t create totem status. The culture does.

I spent months mapping out how and why our political moment chose Dolly Parton to embody its contradictions and projections. I watched hundreds of hours of footage spanning Dolly from girl singer to drag icon to political figure. I\u2019ve read every academic book ever written about her and enough of the popular books to predict the conclusions of the ones I did not get to. I\u2019ve interviewed historians, film scholars, cultural critics, and country music stars. I\u2019ve also listened to Dolly herself, reading her as a text. Across all that close study, one story emerges: Dolly is a celebrity among celebrities, an icon, and a national treasure because she has cobbled together a diverse, multiracial, pansexual audience for working-class feminist songcraft and queer camp subversiveness. That is the narrative hook of the wildly popular, Peabody Award\u2013winning 2019 podcast Dolly Parton\u2019s America. That show cemented the taken-for-granted wisdom that Dolly\u2019s diverse audience is the reason for her ascendance. By the transitive property of celebrity, diversity is good because Dolly is good.

We like that story as much as we like Dolly Parton. Rather, we like Dolly Parton because we like that story about who we are. The idea that Dolly is Dolly because of the strength of American diversity is one that pretends to be about how good Dolly is when it is really a story about how good we believe we are. In this story, the soul of America is a progressive teleology that will always, inevitably bend toward justice. America\u2019s soul is immune to everyday evidence of its fallibility, and outright antagonistic to any suggestion that it is more myth than manifest destiny. Belief in the soul of America is as strong as another belief, with similar embodied metaphors. The soul is always at war with the nation\u2019s racist bones. You know the racist bones. Those are the bones of which every good white American is fond of claiming not to have. If the racist bone exists, it is rendered as vestigial and unruly as a floating rib. There one minute but gone the next, and of no real consequence to the working of the body.

All of my reading also revealed this: Dolly Parton is one of very few living texts that could survive projections of America\u2019s soul without buckling beneath its contradictions. It is treasonous to do so but if one strips away all the adulation, they are left with an odd totem for our socio-political times. Dolly is a white Southern multi-millionaire boomer who produces self-consciously white music while wearing a stylized drag of a fallen Southern belle. Only a society that willfully believes itself \u201Cpost-racist\u201D could produce such a queen. Post-racist does not mean there is no more racism. It means that we believe there is an us after we rid ourselves of our errant racist bones, which we are certain will come to pass. We craft Dolly into an unproblematic fave because the most problematic part of The Dolly Parton Moment is us.

When this nation is feeling its most troubled, it is always about race and always because it is being racist. The moment that seeded the ground for The Dolly Parton Moment is no different. We are in the second full year of visible social movements, from coast to coast. Even small-town America has seen its share of Black Lives Matter marches and pussy hats and LGBTQ pride parades. Nice society book clubs have felt compelled to adopt books that admonish white readers to \u201Cdo the work\u201D of becoming anti-racist. Driving by a small, rural Unitarian church about five miles from my North Carolina home in the fall of 2020, I watched as 50 or so senior citizens had a Black Lives Matter picnic on the church lawn. Until the 2020 presidential election, the evening news oscillated between political nihilism from the White House and police violence on the square. Even centrist politicians were, by 2020, using phrases like \u201Cwhite supremacy\u201D and \u201Cinstitutionalized racism\u201D in polite discourse. In times such as these, popular culture looks South for white escapism and validation.

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