The Genius of Dolly Parton
Maybe the most shocking thing about what I’ve seen referred to as the Trumpocene is the degree of confrontation its caused with how many of my fellow Americans care incapable of identifying the difference between confidence, a thing that results from humility, and arrogance as a costume for insecurity.
Trump may be the most avariciously insecure person to hold the office of President in the short history of the United States. Some would point to Nixon for that dubious distinction, but Nixon was still the variety of person who at least attempted to dress the his lies as something other than that. Trump, has no such self restraint or recognition of other human beings ability to discern and assess reality independent of him. Every time I see the man speak, every social media post, more than half his decisions as President, scream of a man attempting to hide from or escape insecurities so ever present, so overwhelming, he can barely utter a sentence without them lashing him like an intellectual, emotional and spiritual overseer. He’s certainly not the first person I’ve seen be so enslaved, but he is, without doubt, the only one who’s reached such a level of power. The others I have known who fit this description, are the source of the abject terror I feel in looking at this person, knowing he’s been given the power he has, because no amount of power will ever quell or quiet those insecurities. The only answer men like this have for their insecurities is more of whatever it is that has enabled them to continue to hide from them, and in the history of human civilization, nothing has been more dangerous than men who've found that in wealth and power, and been rewarded for it with them.
This is the thing, more than anything else, that will define my memory of the Trumpocene. The culture, as a whole, has become so saturated, the whole of our information and media environment, with such glaringly, loudly, blatantly insecure men. We are awash in them. Every aspect and area of our lives and culture are being affected by them, in either battling with them or trying to figure out how to prevent them from ruining whatever sense of peace, fulfillment, happiness, harmony or togetherness we were able to wring from life even just a decade ago.
They are constantly clamoring for whatever shred of attention they can possibly wrest from the rest of us. Maybe worst of all, is the number of institutions charged with creating knowledge and/or informing the public so full of asocial quisling nerds who’ve spent the entirety of their lives in one bubble or another, they can’t seem to recognize these pathetic men, and the continued use of the power of those institutions to insert them in our lives, is having catastrophic consequences.
It was, in its twisted way, a most perfect marriage when Trump turned to Elon Musk in the earliest days of this term of his presidency. Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, is one of the few people whose staggering insecurity may rival Trump’s own, and whose bottomless greed and desperate appetite for attention have created a similar circumstance. Early in his introduction to the public, Musk was able to weave a web, spin a story of a self made man, whose extraordinary intellect had given him the path to humanity’s future. News, industry, politics… they all fell for it. I say fell for it, because clearly, the minute any suspicion was applied to the story Musk was trying to sell, it fell apart. The picture that emerged was one of a man who might have two talents. The first, is a clear talent for self promotion. The second, is more questionable, because it’s so intertwined with the first. He’s good at recognizing when someone else has a good idea, and how to position himself to take credit for it. If the impetus to try to sell the story of being a generational titan of intellect wasn’t enough to expose the void of insecurity lashing Musk through his life, his response to the revelation of that stories falsities is. Pretenses toward being the ultimate advocate for humanities future were abandoned for Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration, and a vocal public embrace of the most specious, intellectually bankrupt ideas that produced what are arguably the most horrifying outcomes of the entire 20th century.
Those who’ve bet their sense of self worth and identity on the cult of Trump, Musk, and the rest of these horrifyingly insecure men, excuse all this by saying it’s the rest of our lack of recognition for their genius and accomplishments. It all has a very, “See what you made them do!” tone. Personally, I got tired of “You called me a Nazi, which is absurd and beyond the pale, so I’m joining the closest thing I can find to a Nazi group,” being treated as some kind of rational, reasonable or defensible idea way back in 2012 or so. The level of public attention or wealth one has doesn’t magically make it any less the equivalent of horseshit with a birthday candle and icing on it. It’s not cake, no matter how many times some dipshit begging to be recognized for their intellectual acuity asks, “But, couldn’t this be cake?” in their column for the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic or whichever other outlet thinks their audience should dedicate their time to the exercise of trying to imagine shit might actually be cake, if you disregard… everything the history of human evolution has bestowed you that tells you its shit.
The entirety of the push behind generative AI is being made by men whose insecurities are hemorrhaging all over every aspect of cultural production. Their promise to the public is that we won’t have to put in the time to be good at something, which by definition means passing through a time when we’re not good at that thing. It’s the promise of being a photographer, a filmmaker, a writer, a musician, a researcher, an analyst, a journalist, without having to go through the period of being very bad at them, because there’s literally no other way to learn how to become good at them. Being bad at them is how we learn to get better at them, become good at them, and then become ourselves in how we do them. No one wants to fail. No one wants to be bad at a thing they devote their time to, and AI promises “Good Enough” as a product, but it will never provide the process, the millions of decisions, and what we learn from them that makes us ourselves in whatever the endeavor is. Icing and candles covering the disjointed reduction of culture into digital code is not a cake, though it is closer to digital shit, in terms of being the detritus of a machine imitating life.
All of this is why authoritarianism loves traditional masculinity, and traditional gender norms more broadly. Thousands of years has taught power exactly how to use the insecurities of traditional gender norms to its advantage. It is “the way it is” of the “That’s just the way it is” and the why of “it is what it is” where gender norms are concerned. In the last few years, I’ve come to believe that maybe the greatest power that can be bestowed is the power to tell us who we are, and where gender norms are concerned, the power to tell us who we are is the power to install insecurities, so they can be wrung, twisted and manipulated at power’s whim.
It’s why so many of these men have reached prominence through (or in reaching prominence have reached for) what we call culture wars. That’s what the culture wars are, conflict about who we are and who gets to say who we are. They are about what it means to be an American, by extension who gets to be American and what our norms, standards and expectations of each other are in relation to them.
For us, here in the US, these culture wars have always been about the gap between who we are, measured by what we actually do, how our society works in terms of meeting the needs of the people within it, and who we want to believe we are because of the stories we tell about that.
It is, I think at least, good and reasonable that there is some contention over this. We claim we want to be a democracy, and one of the most necessary conditions of democracy being possible is for power to be held accountable. One of the things that results in power being held accountable is this contention and conflict we call culture wars, at least if democracy is functioning to produce what it claims to be designed to produce, that all power is derived from the will of the people. But, because the methods we might hold power accountable through have either been undermined or completely subsumed by those who desperately do not want power to be derived from the will of the people, power isn’t being held accountable. What our culture wars have instead become is part of the referendum about whether or not these methods, mechanisms and systems are going to be used to hold power accountable or whether they are going to be used as tools power uses to continue to consolidate and expand its control, which is measured by the reach of that power.
Even on the most practical, non-ideological basis, it would be a terrible idea to let a cadre of remarkably insecure people whose lives are consumed by failures to solve this insecurity through the attainment of power and wealth (the majority of whom are men), tell us who we are, who we should be and by extension, how we should relate to power. If there’s anything good about any of this, it does seem to be resulting in some confrontation with the fact that the consequences of giving people this deeply, irrevocably insecure so much power, is that they steal from everyone. When you are living in a state of constant fear of not being as worthy as anyone around you, you tell yourself the ability to get one over on them is a sign of the superior nature of your intelligence, and not a failure of it. You’re the winner and they’re the loser, in the competition that is the product of that insecurity. It always tells you that you are either a loser, losing or on the verge of losing, so it’s a competition you can’t escape.
The paradox that’s simultaneously absurd and terrifying is that this is also one the reasons authoritarianism always fails. Because it’s the product of these insecurities, it seeks further control, no matter how much control it has already consolidated. The more power it has, the more control it believes it can exercise, and it can’t recognize that there is always a limit to the amount of control anyone or anything can have or produce. It results in power being spread so thin, it becomes brittle. Add to this that the people most eager to engage in this variety of competition for power then turn around and start stealing from each other, trying to ruin or destroy each other in the attempt to quell insecurities the attainment of power never will quell, and you end up with a brittle system of power, being undermined from within, by the people whose attraction to it is the very fact that they are incapable of being loyal to anything, because they are incapable of thinking of anything but themselves and their insecurities. What makes authoritarianism attractive to the people who are attracted to it, is also what makes it untenable.
Beside all of that, it seems a terrible idea to let such excruciatingly insecure people tell us who we are or should be, unless we also want to be excruciatingly insecure. This is what I’ve come to realize about the large minority of Americans who can’t tell the difference between confidence born of humility and the costume insecurity wears as arrogance. They see themselves in these men, and it serves a number of different incentives for all of our forms of media to make these men part of, if not the center, of every conversation. For better than a decade now, that’s been our reality.
Something happened recently though, a kind of interruption of this cycle of arguing with the most insecure idiots on the planet.
Dolly Parton died. With her death came the celebration of her life, and what a fucking life it was!
Into this environment we have all come to expect to be filled with the preening, screeching, braying cacophony of insecure men and their lickspittle loyalists, we all turned to look at a life lived with an astonishing dedication to humility, service, kindness, compassion, through a voice clear as a cloudless sky, and strong as tempered steel.
A woman whose life began in a two room home, where she lived with thirteen other people and no running water, in one of the most economically deprived and exploited regions of the country, suddenly became the focus in all the places we have been arguing and fighting about who we are, who we should be, with armies of insecure men trying to drown everyone else out, and what we saw was a reminder of what the best us, what we can be capable of when we don’t let small, insecure men tell us who we are and what we should be.
A tiny little woman, whose signature public presentation was big, blonde wigs and an unashamed presentation of her equally big boobs, cast her shadow over all of us, including those small, insecure men who constantly vie for our attention, because when you get right down to it, Dolly Parton knew who she was, no matter what anyone said, and the difference between confidence born of genuine humility and arrogance born of frantic rush to escape insecurity became blindingly clear.
If we were to take just her career in music, unto and by itself, the list of her accomplishments would be astounding. The sheer number of songs she’d written, the number of those songs that were real hits, the number of awards would eclipse just about all of her contemporaries in cultural impact. That’s without focusing in on the penetration of some of those songs in our collective cultural consciousness. The number of songwriters who write one song with the depth of impact and scope of popularity as I Will Always Love You is so few as to make it remarkable, by itself. Jolene became our national nemesis the day Dolly died, because that feeling, the fears and insecurities she exposed, instead of trying to hide, are universal. We all know what its like to fear a person we’ve fallen in love with might see someone else as more than us, better than us, and leave us with the heartbreak of proving what we fear is real. 9 to 5 isn’t just one of the best country pop songs of all time, and even as it did put a fine point on the experiences of being a woman in the workplace, whether you’re a woman or not, anyone working person can relate to what it expresses so simply.
By pretty much any measure, those songs alone would hold a place in our collective memory and cultural history, but that’s not even the beginning of the impact of Dolly’s music and songwriting. Her death was accompanied by the expression of love and gratitude for a list of other songs, so long it is as astonishing as the awards, the records sales and so on, because it demonstrated just how many other songs made people feel recognized, gave them strength or hope at times they most needed it. They might not be songs we all know, but they were songs that knew some of us in the most important ways art can.
Her first major hit, the song that announced her not just as a singer, but as a songwriter, was Dumb Blonde, and in retrospect, it seems like a shot across the bow of the country music industry, and American culture as a whole. “Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb, cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool” goes the chorus. It wasn’t just a hit song. It wasn’t a clarion call. It was a warning, that Dolly would spend the rest of her life proving wasn’t empty because she knew who she was and that part of who she was involved an intellect of shocking scope, and she proved it at every turn.
She chose to present herself to the public with an almost exaggerated, high glam version of femininity. It was a source of controversy and attempted belittlement through the first two thirds of her career. Her now famous quotes that it “takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” and the story that she patterned her signature look after a woman her mother called trash, in turn causing Dolly to decide she wanted to be trash demonstrated a shrewd, clear ability to understand the environment and landscape of the country music industry and celebrity more broadly. Everyone else, whether they were moguls of the country music industry, DJs on country music stations, pastors, preachers or the average American, was allowed to think whatever they wanted about Dolly, but she knew who she was. Her perspective seemed to be, “Go ahead and think whatever you want, because if you underestimate me based on how I look, it’s probably going to work out better for me in the long run,” and it usually did.
The music industry, in general, has never been one that sees women as much more than cash cows it can use up before putting them out to pasture or serving them up to the butcher of public opinion, where tabloid gossip and our appetite for it cut them into the thousands of pieces patriarchy treats as the size they should be. Country music may be especially rank with this tradition, and yet, as a young woman Dolly was able to become a songwriter who owned her own publishing rights and catalog, the gold ring for every songwriter. She did this at a time when this was something out of reach for songwriters as a whole, including the biggest male stars in the industry.
It’s the first instance of what would become a pattern of Dolly’s genuine humility being the source of a strength and ability to perceive herself and what she was engaging in with an accuracy that in men is often treated as genius. Actual, genuine, real humility is understanding with as little self deception as possible, what both our strengths and weaknesses are, and how these work in the bigger picture of our lives. Dolly understood the value she brought to the industry of country music, through what would prove to be an incredibly powerful pen, and she didn’t let that industry gaslight her into believing otherwise, even as it was so used to doing so with all other artists and especially women.
Looking at her music career, her acumen as a business woman in music, these are extraordinary accomplishments, by themselves. There is a long list of people who will be remembered and who have secured a place in our cultural memory for far less. Yet in the avalanche of gratitude that has been the public celebration of her life, these were almost secondary. The thing forefront in the expression of gratitude for her life, and grief at our loss in her death, was how she chose to live. Those statistically extraordinary accomplishments as a musician and songwriter, were treated as less noteworthy than all the rest of what she did.
What we can see in the rest of her life, the way she conducted it, as a person with the profile of one of American music’s most recognized and celebrated artists, is that the source of Dolly’s genius was that she believed all her success and what came with it, rendered her no more or no less human than anyone else. The formidable intellect that checked the country music machine, also understood the landscape of success, and was put to work in using it and the wealth it afforded her as something reciprocal in nature. She never devalued her work as a songwriter and musician. Music is an industry that produces vast fortunes, and she understood her contribution to that meant a materially comfortable life and the incredible experiences that most of us can only imagine should be part of the compensation for that contribution, but it was also a chance to be herself, doing what she loved.
Maybe more than any other American musician whose reached anything like the heights of celebrity, Dolly seemed to have a recognition that she brought herself to her work, her songwriting, and in turn the public recognized and loved her, and she gave that back at every opportunity, and it just seems that’s how she thought someone should live if they were afforded what that love gave her. In looking at her life, Dolly clearly knew who she was, but it wasn’t the kind of hyper individualism that characterizes so much of American life. Dolly knew who she was, but part of who she was, was being part of “us.” Dolly Dean was the private woman who kept so much of her private life out of the spotlight. Dolly Parton was the woman we all knew and loved. Dolly was able to be those, and still see herself as included in the “us,” not more than, not better than, not less than, just a person whose part of “us” was an accomplished, deeply loved musician, and that to be part of “us” was to do what she could to help people who needed it, where and when she thought she could.
Dolly Parton turned the reality bending machine that is celebrity and wealth in American culture into an opportunity to keep showing us who she knew herself to be, instead of it changing her into something we or it wanted her to be, and that alone shows a scope, precision, and persistence of intellect we reserve for people who we want to mark as extraordinary in all the ways the men who’ve been flooding our culture with their desperate attention seeking have been incapable of. When we talk about “genius” and “greatness,” Dolly Parton demonstrated the traits we claim we want to mark, across more areas of culture, in more of her actions, than the overwhelming majority of the men who make up the pantheon that is the foundation of the “Great Man” theory of history. Throughout all of it, what makes her so incredibly unique is how clearly she understood human life as reciprocal, despite the kind of conditions that rarely fail to bend the person experiencing them inward. Dolly understood herself, her position in the world, how the public saw her, and who and the public is, with a clarity that goes beyond the description of unique, by a shocking margin.
She established the Imagination Library, in her home state of Tennessee where sho much of her focus began, on the simple belief that children should learn to read and to learn to read they needed books. When it drew attention and accolades, she didn’t use it as an opportunity to further enrich herself. She used it as an opportunity to expand The Imagination Library beyond the reach it started with. At the time of her death, 330 million books had been given away to children in different parts of the world. We come to reckon with that fact, and the simplicity of its origin, in the midst of our dawning recognition of a public emergency related to literacy. It’s one of the ways we can see Dolly as looking beyond, being bigger, than the constraints of what we think of as conventional politics. She already gave us the answer to the literacy crisis. She gave books to as many kids as she could, and when that created an opportunity to give more kids books, she gave more kids books.
One of the more endearing variety of tribute to Dolly, has been the number of people talking about their experience with The Imagination Library. People who got those books and children, and the parents of children getting those books now, all expressing that children imagine Dolly personally choosing and packing books to send them, and what it meant in their development. This is exactly the kind of recognition so many of the absurdly insecure people petitioning us for attention are begging us for, and they have to beg us for it, because something like this is beyond their capacity. They want to be adored, for who they tell us they are, despite the evidence in our lives. Dolly said, “If you sign up, you get the books,” and went about her business. The adoration was the result of the evidence in people’s lives.
When wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes throughout Tennessee, she started giving $1,000 per month to families whose homes had been destroyed. No questions, no means testing, no requirements on how it was used, just $1,000 per month to try and help them get on their feet. When recognition of that good work made a celebrity concert fundraiser possible, and it brought in 12 million dollars, those people got a $5,000 check in the last disbursement. What was left of that $12 million went to different things that would help insure future fires wouldn’t be so damaging and disruptive.
Marching bands throughout Tennessee were kept in uniforms, because Dolly remembered how much she enjoyed her own days of being in one.
She even turned the production of The Dolly Parton into an opportunity to give to people who needed it. She was never shy about the fact that wigs were part of her signature style, nor that she owned a number of them at one time. When they had reached the end of their usefulness to her, they went to hospitals, for cancer patients.
In those first few days after her death, there were a few edge lords and enragement bait grifters who seized on the idea that the effusive expression of grief, love and gratitude at the new of Dolly’s death was overwrought or misplaced, because “she didn’t use her celebrity to take any controversial stands.” Personally, I tend to slot these edge lords and enragement grifters alongside the terminally insecure, constantly braying asses of our time, but I do think there’s something instructive here, in terms of culture and media literacy too.
There is a difference between taking a stand in times of controversy, and a controversy being made of the stand a person in public life takes. Dolly took stands and positions in times our culture was raging about the topics she addressed. Those stands were controversial when a number of other people them. What we don’t see when we look back, is anyone willing to try and make a controversy over Dolly taking them.
In the 1980’s during the AIDS crisis, Dolly contributed as a silent producer to the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. The quilt and the documentary were created to put the stories of LGBTQ people who’d died of AIDS into the public consciousness. If you’re not familiar, a silent producer is basically someone who says, “That’s a good idea, you should do that,” and writes a check. The silent part can mean they either do so without credit in the actual film, but it always means they do so while renouncing the right to any input on the making of the film. Again, we see here, Dolly understood she was not a filmmaker, the people making the documentary were, but she thought it was a good idea and she could help. The reason the quilt and the documentary needed to be made was that the political machinery of the nation, and the majority of the public, had essentially decided their approach was, “Let the gays die,” because of how much effort had gone into convincing the public AIDS was only killing gay men and/or drugs users, not that it was a massive public health emergency.
There’s a collection of clips making the rounds, meant to demonstrate Dolly’s whip smart humor, that also ends up showing something else too. In that collection, one clip shows Dolly sitting on a stage, either having given a performance or maybe intending to give one after, but this particular clip drops us into a Q+A. From the way Dolly and the audience are dressed and styled, it’s clearly the early or mid eighties. The seventies haven’t fully released their hold on how people are dressed and styled, but it’s also not quite the seventies either. A teenager gets up and asks, “What would you tell teenagers today?” Dolly sits, mic in hand, looks to the side, thinking for a second before a smile breaks out across her face. Then she turns and says, “I’d tell ‘em to act like it’s raining and wear their rubbers,” before bursting into that infectious laugh. Crucially, the audience also bursts into laughter.
I know there are people in the world who did not live through the eighties, because my vanity is dinged every time I’m reminded of this fact. For those of you who didn’t, let me break a few things down real quick. Almost every conservative grifting off of the culture wars today, has been influenced by the people who reached the zenith of their influence and power in the eighties. Some of y’all might not have ever heard of Jerry Falwell and The Moral Majority. His endorsement could make a conservative politician back then. Falwell was expert at choosing his targets and developing a rhetorical framework in his attacks that would simultaneously make the donations to The Moral Majority rain, while making the contingent of “moderates” who refused to accept him for the bigoted theocrat he was say, “Hmmmm” quicker than C+C Music Factory. Never mind he was 100% on board with telling people AIDS was God’s punishment for gay people, and was at the forefront of preventing comprehensive sex education from being put into public schools as a way to try to prevent the spread of AIDS.
You may also not be familiar with Pat Robertson, whose little endeavor called The 700 Club was a television ministry, beamed into many millions of homes nationwide. Robertson was a real peach, with his folksy delivery, often used to say things like, “Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for America letting the gays live.” Well, maybe that’s hyperbole, but he definitely said it was punishment for the gays in America, as if there was some gay factory line that could be turned on and off. If his track record on AIDS and sex education were any indication, that was his preference, it was that he'd rather LGBTQ people be dead.
These were the kind of people who openly celebrated the deaths of beloved celebrities, like Rock Hudson, when they died of AIDS. Not unlike today, there was a whole passel of these soulless creatures, always looking for whatever or whoever they could start their medieval rambling about to bring attention to themselves. Most of them didn’t have the clout of Falwell or Robertson, but they all had the zeal to try and get there, without much interest in a respect or recognition for life or humanity.
That was the environment in which Dolly decided to give her money to a documentary about AIDS, and use her opportunity at a Q+A to reference something very much in the public discourse, in a way that suggested clearly where she stood. Either of these things would have ended most country music careers, at the time.
Why wouldn’t someone decide to try and gain some attention at Dolly Parton’s cost? Well, a few of today’s edge lords and enragement grifters learned why pretty quickly. There was no victory to be won on the battlefield of public opinion where Dolly was concerned. That an audience laughed at Dolly administering advice to teenagers about wearing their rubbers is clear indicator of their trust in her, because that was a heated controversy at the time. The stand of conservative America was that no one should be saying anything to their kids about anything related to sex, but parents. The edge lords and enragement grifters who’ve deleted their social media accounts following to their attempts to get some attention via doing so, have now learned one reason people like Falwell and Robertson didn’t go after Dolly for her appearance, her lyrics or any of the stances she took, which they regularly did where other celebrities were concerned. The idea that any attention is good attention is simply and demonstrably false.
Additionally, this was a woman, who by the eighties was a veteran of the music industry and celebrity. She'd outfoxed the Nashville country music machine in keeping her publishing rights and songwriting catalog, when she was still in her twenties and very new to the business. Further, one of the things clear about her philanthropy and charity was that if she decided she wanted something to happen, she was going to make it happen, including learning from or hiring the people who knew what she didn't. When it comes to the variety of grifting loudmouths people like Falwell and Robertson were, Dolly Parton wasn't going to be a soft target in any way.
One tabloid did try to make hay out of the fact that Dolly’s long time personal driver was a trans man. The story went exactly nowhere, because no one cared.
The height of the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t in the eighties, but I guess we could say it was still a little while ago. I have a difficult time believing people who’d be attempting to say Dolly Parton never took controversial stands would be too young to remember that. I bring this up, because during one of the points Black Lives Matter protests were among the most controversial subjects in the country, she was asked about Black Lives Matter in an interview, and her response was, “Of course Black Lives Matter. Everyone’s life matters. I don’t understand why people don’t try to love each other more.” No equivocation. Not even “All Live Matter” as was in fashion to try and avoid the topic or the ire of the conservative movement that had decided their message about Black Lives Matter was that it represented the end of Western civilization. Her response was simply, “Of course Black Lives Matter."
Again, somehow, no one decided to try and make a controversy over Dolly Parton coming out in support of Black Lives Matter. Maybe it’s because forty years on from the eighties, Dolly had done nothing but continue making music and solidifying her place as one of the nation’s most loved public people, by… doing good things.
Now, if you’re old enough to do things like post full sentences on social media, use that social media to do things like add to your bank account, and have some grasp of the idea that there are people who achieve celebrity and go out of their way to avoid controversy because of how it might affect their standing in their field or with the public, I’m going to say you have to be old enough to remember that there was indeed significant controversy over this thing called COVID-19, the vaccines developed to prevent it both its spread and how deadly it might be, as well as controversy over the public health decisions made about preventing people who didn’t get vaccinated from participating in public life.
Dolly donated $1 million dollars to Moderna’s vaccine research, which helped its fast track to being provided to the public. When it was available to the public, she made a point of being on video getting the vaccine, as well as singing some lyrics to encourage everyone who might hear it to do the same, to the tune of Jolene.
I think I’ve already done enough to explain why the people populating the media landscape at the time might not have seen it as advantageous to their cause to make a controversy over Dolly’s contribution to the cause of people getting vaccinated in the midst of a public health crisis. In this, it is yet another example of Dolly Parton knowing who she was, being herself by doing and saying what she thought was right.
Everything that made Dolly Parton that incredibly rare icon who was so universally loved, comes back to the fact that she understood life was about “us." She included herself in the "us," and never limited to only being about her. She gave of herself, and the considerable wealth her fame afforded her, based on that simple idea. She didn’t take what we think of as pointedly or specifically political stances, because Dolly’s idea of living a good life was bigger than our politics can handle. When we start talking about political expression, especially where people of notoriety are concerned, the parameters can’t hold the conception of what life is that Dolly lived by. The foundation of the conversation would have to change to a degree that is at odds with the entire framework of how we understand what politics is. A woman capable of what she achieved in so many ways would recognize that, and her contribution to the conversation was what she did, and the consistently repeating, “I don’t understand why people don’t try to love each other.”
Among the most formative factors in what makes that true, is that the way we conceive of politics, our society, and culture has been so fundamentally shaped by the small, insecure men obsessed with being recognized as geniuses or Great Men. What Dolly did, the way she lived, the way she saw the American public, is beyond their capability, because it’s too far beyond the ends of their own noses, and they are certainly far too constricted by the egos hounding them with insecurity. That depth of insecurity means one can never develop an accurate understanding of who they are, much less something as expansive as what “us” is, in the midst of the consciousness shaping environment that is notoriety, maybe especially, but not only in the venue of politics. They’re so terrified of what they might be recognized as, they never get to who it’s making them.
Dolly didn’t have that problem. She knew who she was. Every time she got the chance, she showed us the beautiful human being that was, and she showed us she respected, accepted and loved us, and it was part of why she respected herself so much. She gladly accepted our love and returned it, because she understood she was one of “us,” and she had no interest in being anything else. All of the charity, the philanthropy that made Dolly Parton such an extraordinarily unusual example of fame and celebrity, the basis of what people responded to in her music, was that she was due to the fact that she was an anomaly in what has become of public life in America. She was a person whose confidence was completely earned, because it was so deeply infused with the love and respect for her fellow human beings, not at their expense.
Dolly understood living isn't a competition, so she never bothered trying to compete for respect and adoration of the public, the way so many people in our world are today. She showed us she believed life is a shared experience, and we create it by what we put into it. The more she was given, the more she put in. There really isn't a more stark contrast than the many men today, badgering us to love and adore them at every turn. The majority of them couldn't conceive of such a life. They're hoarders, of everything they're given, whether it's attention, wealth or power. They're all competing with each other in their bottomless, endless insecurity. Dolly knew who she was, and didn't have to compete as a result.
We're attempting to make our way through what in one way is an incredibly complicated set of difficulties, problems and broken systems. The work and practice of Dolly Parton's life being laid out in the midst of all this shows us the stark, simple reality. We are innately capable of recognizing love, compassion and basic decency when put into practice by simple principles, but we've spent centuries now listening to braying asses who don't deserve our attention, much less the power or wealth they've accumulated through it.