Festival season is beginning to wind down. Here in Fort Wayne, Indiana Johnny Appleseed Days are in the rearview mirror. In my old hometown of Ligonier, Pennsylvania, Fort Ligonier Days have come and gone. These festivals have a great deal in common with festivals around the country. They tend to be held around the end of harvest. Many of them feature fair foods- funnel cakes and fried oreo cookies. A parade is often involved, with homecoming courts being squired along in convertibles.
There are, however, also distinctives. These festivals often zero in either on a regional food at harvest time, or on some historic event or personage. Here we remember John Chapman, the folk hero known as Johnny Appleseed, who passed away while in Fort Wayne. In Ligonier we remember the battle that took place during the French and Indian War, when the fort was commanded by a young colonel, George Washington.
As much as we might enjoy all that is common to these festivities, it is the distinctives that give each festival its charm. These are times for local communities to celebrate what makes them distinct from every other community. They are expressions of local, folk culture.
Which the juggernaut of pop culture continues to mow right over. Our shared experiences are increasingly less and less defined by the boundaries of our hometown, more and more defined by what’s streaming, what’s gone viral, what the latest craze is.
Folk culture is designed to be permanent, to sustain a local culture. Pop culture is designed to be disposable, to sustain the wealth of its creators. One encourages each of us to remember who we are, the other to forget, to be absorbed into the Borg. We are not merely allowing, but choosing to lose our accents, our peculiar vocabulary and phrases, our enigmatic habits, our acquired tastes. We want to be like everyone else.
Until we don’t. It is precisely because we are not made to live and move and have our being in pop culture that we actually, at least this time of year, remember what we once were, how we used to do things, even what we used to eat. Local festivals are celebrations of localities, and the loved ones who claim them as home.
Railroads, telegraphs, radios, televisions, a sea of franchise strip malls and the internet have done well to connect us to each other. But at the cost of disconnecting us from ourselves. May we better learn to remember where we are, that we might better remember who we are.
Ahab’s Horse
A man nursed a field, just as his father had
When along came an evil man, wicked King Ahab.
A family name was plowed under, and blood now stains the ground
You can still hear Naboth crying in that whistle’s sound.
Ahab’s horse keeps running, grinding men within its gears
It came to town and tore it down, driving here away from here.
They dangled foreign dainties, fruits found in fields afar
Made us free our jubilee, made continental scar.
They promised power paradise was just around the bend
And just around and just around and just around again.
Ahab’s horse keeps running, grinding men within its gears
It came to town and tore it down, driving here away from here.
They next strung up their wires to bring us distant cares
By dash and dot our focus caught on vanities’ affairs
A man knows not his neighbor when he studies teletype
The fruit of human kindness trodden under, over-ripe.
Ahab’s horse keeps running, grinding men within its gears
It came to town and tore it down, driving here away from here.
A Man, a land, a plan that never the twain be torn
A Horseman cometh one day and e’en this evil He has born
His wrath white hot, unquenching burns
And Ahab to his bile returns.
Ahab’s horse now paddocked, taken captive away
Home then here and here then home; we’ll drink new wine that day.