Strangers and Friends: A Diagnosis and Treatment of Our Anomie

John Coleman

When I was a little bit younger I worked as a dishwasher. It wasn’t a passing gig or a summer job. My Purgatory lasted eight years. Anyone in a situation of hourly pay knows how true is the expression “wage slave.” It’s a condition where one is given just enough money to tread water in this admiralty law sea but no more. As the showman so the moneyman: always keep them coming back for more. When I paid off the student loans which Baby Boomers talked me into a set of Gen Xers – those content to pay so low their child’s teacher was put in such a condition – arranged to prolong my stay as a plongeur. As I slogged through my Purgatorio, David Rovics my Virgil; his music was my constant companion. Slopping and scrubbing along at least there was the consolation of knowing that someone else thought the things I did.

David Rovics has released a new album in 2020 titled Strangers and Friends. The 14 songs of his album concern topics ranging from our wealth disparity to the CIA’s decades-long siege of Venezuela; from the cages border migrants are kept in to America’s beloved pastime of rack-renting. To use an old word from a literate age, Strangers and Friends is catholic. Rovics’ music features a wide and encompassing view of the down and out of this social order. It gives an equally incisive gaze towards the men and forces causing those problems. Those those gazes are both painful and necessary. They’re the enduring boasts of political songwriting.

Over a century ago Emile Durkheim wrote On Suicide. In it he spoke of industrial capitalism’s new anomie. It was the loneliness of being lost in a crowd, a most modern phenomena. Durkheim’s anomie has only increased in the intervening century. This mass isolation has been a boon to the supposed masters of society. The box store hawking their baubles and gendarme fining you both benefit immensely from the prey’s unease. Strangers and Friends reminds us we are not alone. But while the album sternly diagnoses the problem, the first step towards rectifying any ill, it also prescribes an initial treatment: solidarity. Rovics’ music is a prescription – sans Sackler’s opioids, mind you – and it comes none too soon.

We are in an age of massive upheaval. Those following tech and economic trends know that it is not sensationalistic to compare the stresses of today with the birth pangs of modern Europe 500 years ago. We may even need to go back to the Fall of Rome for our nearest parallel! These changes have left many, literally, out in the cold; many more are out in the cold emotionally. How many new skid rows are there? How many overdoses? How many second, third, even fourth jobs?

We look to religion for solace in this upheaval and we find a flatfooted Christianity mired in navel gazing, limited gross behavior, and not so limited mediocrity. We look to the media for piercing analysis to find they only report stories on… the media. If our souls and societies must go to seed perhaps we can save our minds, and so we look to schools to feed our intellects. But we find in the lecture hall only gombeenmen and apparatchiks. It falls to the plucky artist to salve our anomie.

In “Just a Renter” the dynamics of bastard landlordism and gentrification are explored. As Rovics’ sings, “Ten thousand yuppies say, ‘Don’t complain/ now that the city is in the fast lane/ It’s just the market and it knows best/ that’s how the bankers built the west.” He expresses the anger of the oppressed in that song and the unspoken pressure to pretend we don’t see what’s there.

Strangers and Friends rings with a constructive anger which the powers that be ought to heed. America in 2020 has a sharper wealth gap than in the Gilded Age. It shows no signs of stopping. Underneath a pileup of police and barristers, nerds and landlords, soon or late long-downtrodden mankind will assert itself. When that pushback comes it will not be from tricornered hat sorts like myself, nor songsters like David, nor those – perhaps you – who write letters to the editor or make thoughtful internet videos or go to rallies. They will be revolutionaries of a grimmer sort.

When The Atlantic gives over an issue to prevent a civil war, when that expression is as soon heard on mainstream channels and in the houses of Congress as on the Alex Jones’ or TruNews shows, we realize that a damn sight more of us have had that uneasy prediction rattling around our heads this last decade. As Auden says, “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” Rovics expresses that self-same reality in our day singing, “When the writing’s on the wall, when you can see the fuse.”

Every indigent decamped outside Starbucks, every frustrated soul at the CVS paying $1k on a drug not covered by insurance, every fast-aging youth locked in college debt slavery, every immigrant dodging ICE, the whole lot swamped by neoliberalism, they will assert themselves. As Strangers and Friends states, “Unlimited data will get you nowhere if you can’t afford to care/ I’m just a renter. This ain’t my town. Might as well burn it down for all I care.”

A reading of history shows an uncanny trend of the ruling class stomping on movements only to have them revive 10 or 15 years later. The colonial American protests of the 1760s came back a decade later; 1832 France arose in 1848; the Czar breathed easy in 1905 but not in 1917. We’re up on a decade since Occupy. To use use Rovics’ expression from his track “Just a Renter,” if the “face of the new class war” doesn’t cop on they’ll beg for the days of Zuccotti Park.

That’s a bit on the diagnosis of Strangers and Friends, now for the cure. The songs featured in the album constantly return to solidarity, sympatico, and conviviality as antidotes to our crises. The cover art shows a water jug being handed off to someone else. The image is presumably set in the American Southwest. On the bottle is written a gloss of Christ’s words from St. Matthew’s gospel, “I was hungry, you gave me food; I was thirsty, you gave me drink.” It’s a beautiful statement whose gravity is contextualized in “I Was A Stranger” with the lyrics, “For well over a century it was a normal thing to have an extra jug of water that you might bring/ In the harsh Sonorinan Arizona summer heat, we’d rather give the vultures something else to eat.”

Both in “Stranger” with the statement, “For well over a century,” as well as in the song “My Great Grandparents” with the statement, “My great grandparents were refugees, that should be a normal thing to say,” Rovics taps in history as he so often does in his art. One of the benefits of studying history is how calming it can be. Others have been in my shoes before. Strangers and Friends uses that “history therapy” to calm our difficulties and put them in perspective.

The 14 tracks in Strangers and Friends feature, of course, feature Rovics’ familiar vocals and guitar. Additionally there’s the inclusion of instruments like the harmonica and pipes. The use of backup vocals adds an additional depth to his message.

Two extra songs beyond the sacred 12 which somehow became the industry standard are included in Strangers and Friends. One of those songs is a redo of “Behind the Barricades.” That is a piece I once played to a class in the context of the Paris Commune. The milieu was rather conservative and rather Catholic, and I must say the students looked rather distressed when it was over. (It’s a humorous vignette which would take another article to do proper justice.) Nevertheless, perhaps they left with an appreciation of resistance. “Barricades” well conveys the thrill of striking tyranny a blow come what may. The other bonus song he gives us tells us of what he’d do with a hammer. It seems a pedestrian topic at first blush, but Rovics knows his stuff. The song reprises a motif stretching from Pete Seeger through Bruce Cockburn to Ryan Harvey. You’ll have to listen to find out what he’d do.

More information on David Rovics and his new album Strangers and Friends can be found at DavidRovics.com.