Who Wants to Learn More About My John Denver Thing? (And Also A Voting Gap) (SWWC vol 4, issue 7)
Hello!
I voted on Tuesday. Statistically, I was likely to -- I'm college-educated. As the New York Times noted last month:
More than 80 percent of Americans with college degrees vote compared with about 40 percent of Americans without high school degrees, according to Jonathan Nagler, a political scientist at New York University and co-author of a 2014 book, “Who Votes Now.”
“There is a class skew that is fundamental and very worrying,” said Alexander Keyssar, a historian at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who wrote “The Right to Vote.” “Parts of society remain tuned out and don’t feel like active citizens. There is this sense of disengagement and powerlessness.”
The effect, he said, has been a more unequal society and “more of a gap between what we say this country is about and what it really is.”
The first thing I thought when I read this was not, "Well, obviously, going to college makes you more likely to vote."
Instead, I found myself wondering, "How much more autonomy over their working hours do college-educated people have?" In less fancy talk -- are college-educated people more likely to be in occupations, workplaces, or jobs where they can say, "I gotta go vote, so I'll be in when I'm on"? Anyone who has seen the long, long lines winding through polling places across the U.S. is likely to wonder how many people standing in those lines are keeping an anxious eye on their phone to make sure they're not going to be late for work, for childcare pick-up, for the last bus that runs to their office.
Yes, white-collar job autonomy is on the decline. But metrics and surveillance are routine for blue-collar workers. When your job depends on not tripping the AI's monitoring of your performance, and your life depends on you keeping your job, how compelling is getting that "I voted?" sticker going to be?
So what? According to a survey released by the Society for Human Resource Management, 44% of U.S. firms will give their employees paid time off to vote, up from 37% in 2016. That's great but it's still less than half of all U.S. employers. And that presumes that employees are encouraged and enabled to take that time to vote. One restaurant chain gives its employees two hours of paid time off -- but what happens if those folks are stuck in long, long lines?
Who cares? Well ... shouldn't we all? Civic engagement should not be a status symbol. Nor should voting be the province of only a few, or dependent on private employer largesse.
Speaking of which -- a 2016 Marketplace story explaining why we haven't made election day a national holiday yet pointed out:
Companies are likely resistant to adding another holiday to their work schedule.
"If you’re going to make it a federal holiday, that’s basically forcing companies to give workers additional vacation time, so that’s going to cost them money and productivity," [Michele Swers, a professor of American government at Georgetown University] said.
Perhaps it's worth exploring the Oregon model -- i.e. everyone votes by mail. We could still get stickers and post selfies on social media. And maybe there would be more of us voting. The U.S. has one of the lowest rates of voter participation among industrialized nations -- 26 out of 32 nations studied. Removing barriers to voting would be a welcome first step in closing the gap between what we say this country is and what it really is.
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Your pop culture recommendation: My mother learned how to hook up her iPod Nano to the car we drove cross-country so we could listen to John Denver's Greatest Hits, Volume 1, as we went east. It was the soundtrack to family road trips when I was a child and I suspect both of us were thrilled to revive the tradition.
We sang "Rocky Mountain High" while actually driving through Colorado. Ditto for singing "Country Roads" while driving through West Virginia.
Believe you me, as a former TV recapper, I am aware of how I would have eviscerated such scenes if they had been on a TV episode I was covering. But as person living in those moments, it was great.
I love John Denver's early stuff, and am generally in the "If you insult America's unofficial musical diplomat, you insult me" school of emotion. His Congressional testimony against censorship is such a great example of an artist who engages with the civics of the day.
(Note that I also stan for Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam testifying before Congress on Ticketmaster monopolies. Do you have a favorite "Wow, I was not expecting this artist to say this to Congress" moment? That doesn't involve Mr. Rogers? Share!)
ANYWAY, I am so thrilled to share a link to this YouTube video of John Denver dueting on "Country Roads" with Johnny Cash. The video quality is not great but the sound is perfectly fine and it's such a wonderful arrangement.
The Man in Black was ever the consummate collaborator. I got to see him at the Fillmore and I will never forget watching him take June Carter Cash's hand to bring her into the spotlight right before they launched into "Jackson." So why not also enjoy this video of Johnny Cash singing "Jackson" with Miss Piggy?
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