Lean Left

Totally cool Rolling Stone interview with Merle Haggard, who was honored at the Kennedy Center Honors this month.

What was the highlight for the whole thing for you?
I probably enjoyed meeting the presidents, especially Bill [Clinton].

Is he a big fan of yours?
Well he said he was, and he never lied to me [laughs]. It was also nice to meet Obama and find him very different from the media makeout. It’s really almost criminal what they do with our President. There seems to be no shame or anything. They call him all kinds of names all day long, saying he’s doing certain things that he’s not. It’s just a big old political game that I don’t want to be part of. There are people spending their lives putting him down. I’m sure some of it’s true and some of it’s not. I was very surprised to find the man very humble and he had a nice handshake. His wife was very cordial to the guests and especially me. They made a special effort to make me feel welcome. It was not at all the way the media described him to be.

. . .

Did you spend much time mingling with the other honorees?
We had quite a bit of time. There were three events that I attended. Paul was there the whole time. But “Ope” – we got to call Oprah “Ope” – was completely beside herself. I don’t think she’d ever been a recipient of much in her life. She reached over to me, leaned over and said, ‘You know, we’ve come the farthest.’

Some people wrote about how they didn’t think Oprah should be in there because she didn’t write music or isn’t an artist.
Some people I think are too critical and don’t have not enough intelligence to make that kind of a comment. Who is to say? There’s a hundred people, including all of the ex-presidents’ wives, that have a say on who is nominated. It’s not about who wrote the best song or who the best songwriter was, but who was the best in their field. And television is certainly a modern method of communication that you can’t overlook and she’s probably the mother figure of that right now. I don’t know how anybody can say she wasn’t deserving of it.

. . .

What was it like hanging out with Paul McCartney?
He’s Paul McCartney, man. You can’t forget that he wrote those songs. That kept going through my mind: I’m an aspiring songwriter and sat beside the guy that wrote “Yesterday.” I recorded that. Some guys are famous for some songs you don’t remember, but that’s not the case there. When they started “Hey Jude,” with this wonderful orchestra, the building came apart. Everybody in the audience was singing it. It was a chiller.

. . .

Did you have a good chance to catch up with old friends Willie and Kris?
We got to eat a little something together. We didn’t know what the hell this food was, but we thought it was funny.

I never really paid much attention to Merle Haggard (and in particular I hated “Okie from Muskogee”), but I love him in this interview. He’s funny and humble. His fairness toward Obama, his respect and graciousness toward Oprah, and his awe for McCartney, describing himself as an “aspiring” songwriter – in comparison to a man who was receiving exactly the same award as him - are marks of true humanity.

I don’t have any big political point to make about this, but I will make this observation: the article notes that in 1972 Haggard received a full pardon for a burglary conviction from then California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan, of course, was (as my previous post notes) the architect of the right wing’s zero-tolerance and vengeful, non-rehabilitation imprisonment policies. Haggard was exactly the sort of person the right wing loves to demonize and destroy: he had a long history of juvenile offenses and violence; after being sentenced to 15 years in San Quentin for the burglary, he was paroled after less than 3. Today, parole is totally unavailable for federal crimes and in 16 states, unavailable for certain crimes in 4 more, and in almost all cases unavailable until the large bulk of the sentence is completed regardless of the convict’s record in prison. Pardons are virtually non-existent for serving prisoners or any but elderly ex-cons. But Haggard – already a famous country singer with a right-wing bent – was pardoned in his 30s by fake cowboy Reagan, before the point at which his original sentence would actually have run out. Obviously, right-wing policies on punishment and rehabilitation don’t apply to friends and fellow-travelers. But if that proves something about right-wing hypocrisy, it proves something also about the possibility for rehabilitation, and the unpredictability of a person’s future. It demonstrates something about the needlessness, and destructiveness, of long sentences without hope or mercy (what would Merle Haggard have become if he had stayed in maximum-security prison until the age of 35?). And perhaps it suggests that there’s another young Merle Haggard out there worth taking a chance on, and that perhaps the arbitrary self-indulgence of hateful wingers is not the only, or best, way to help them along.