One of the great things about country music is that you can actually hear the lyrics and follow the arc of the almost unfailingly clear narratives. So when The Farm’s “Be Grateful” came on, I could hear every word:
The other day I caught myself complaining
How my boss has got me working overtime
Then the stranger who was sitting there beside me
Said, I spent all day in the unemployment line
Are there open shifts, are they hiring on
I'll work any hours even all night long
If you could put a good word in for me
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
We complain about how much it's gonna cost us
To fill our 20 something thousand dollars cars
And living in the land of milk and honey
It's so easy to forget how lucky we are
We can work hard and buy a patch of dirt
And on Sunday morning go to church
And pray for those who don't have it as good as you
Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
(http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/the-farm-inc/be-grateful-36292.html)
“Be Grateful” at first appears to be a retelling of the old Yiddish folktale, It Could Always Be Worse. The folktale tells the story of a poor man so overwhelmed with the chaos and stress of sharing his tiny one-room hut with his wife, their six children, and his mother that he visits his Rabbi in total despair. Counterintuitively, the rabbi instructs him to bring his chickens into the hut with his family. Befuddled, the poor man nevertheless complies. Things, of course, get worse in the hut. Upon returning to the rabbi he is instructed to bring in his goat, which leads to further misery and a third visit when he is told to bring in his cow. Finally, upon the fourth visit the rabbi sends the poor man home to put all the animals back outside. Which, as told in Margot Zemach’s version of the tale, leads to a fifth visit:
“ ‘Holy Rabbi,’ he cried, ‘you have made life so sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful… What a pleasure!’”
In “Be Grateful”’s retelling, the overworked narrator stands in for the poor man as he appears at the beginning of It Could Always Be Worse, with the unemployed, desperate stranger standing in for the chickens, goats and pigs, representing the specter of disastrous misfortune which could just as easily have befallen the narrator. It is as easy as 1,2,3 to imagine the chickens as the gutting of the narrator’s union via “Right to Work” legislation, the goats as the subsequent cut in the narrator’s hours to the precise amount that fails to qualify for benefits, and the cow as the coup de grace: the offshoring of the narrator’s job, rendering him indistinguishable from the hopeless stranger. Staring the annihilation of malignant unemployment in the face, the narrator’s 70 hour per week job suddenly seems so reliable, so doable, …. What a pleasure!
But something in the retelling is more than slightly off, in the same way that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Our first clue is that instead of inhabiting a house full of love like the poor man at the end of It Could Always Be Worse, the narrator is too busy working obligatory overtime to spend any time at home with a loved one who is thusly reduced to an anonymous “someone” who loves him. (In a real, joyful love song it would be “my baby” who loves me, or some such term of endearment.) But our best clue is that the humor of the Yiddish original, a humor found in the great irony that the only way out of suffering is through more suffering, that suffering is likely the very ground of happiness (echoing It Could Always Be Worse, the Buddha himself taught that suffering is at the very least the prior condition to liberation’s happiness), is missing. In fact, the song isn’t really a retelling of It Could Always Be Worse at all, but a cooptation of the old folktale as a decoy. In place of the original’s radical, redemptive existential humor is a thin coating of cloying treacle which tries and fails to cover a putrid core. That core is the song’s unconscious regurgitation of the fear-based message aimed directly at the shrinking middle class from the American oligarchy: If there’s safety in numbers, then you should be very afraid. But the oligarchs’ hubris doesn’t stop there. I used to think that fight or flight were the only two natural responses to fear. In fact, there’s a third option: freeze. Our direct orders are as follows: be very afraid, and keep doing exactly what you’re doing (i.e. freeze). Which is exactly what the song’s narrator does. Granted, he does go to church and pray for the less fortunate, but one gets the feeling that this prayer is rooted as much in the fear of losing what’s his as it is in compassion. In fact, the refrain’s last line, and the song’s title, makes a great deal more sense as “Be Afraid.”
As profound a tale as (the genuine version of) It Could Always Be Worse undeniably is, perhaps it is miscast in this historical moment, too prone to being hijacked by the reigning principalities and powers. In its place I suggest we turn to another story, Bone Button Borscht, a Jewish retelling of Stone Soup, which, just like the opening verse of “Be Grateful,” features a beggar. But instead of inspiring fear to dress up as gratitude, this beggar, in playfully enticing the embittered, frightened townsfolk (that’s us) to contribute their hoarded foodstuffs to the common pot, transforms fear into generosity. If there is a message for our time it is exactly this: Be generous.
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