Battle Hymn for the Extremely Online
Mike Doughty is no household name, but a certain sector of Gen Xers and Millennials could place Doughty as the lead singer of mid-90s experimental alt-rock band Soul Coughing. The closest his group came to commercial stardom was in ’98 with their “Circles” single. Hitting №8 on Billboard’s old Alternative Rock chart, even I — a helplessly square suburban teen — caught Doughty’s nasally chorus blasting up my Jetta speakers.
(For those of us who predate I Heart Radio, Clear Channel, and the internet, this was the gift of local DJs. You came for Alanis and you stayed for Radiohead and in between you heard everything from Bran Van 3000 to Suzanne Vega to Butthole Surfers.)
The “Circles” chorus repeats a universal sentiment: “I don’t need to walk around in circles, walk around in circles, walk around in circles, walk around in.” Well alright, Doughty. None of us do.
There’s no real profundity from the lyrics, but you could chalk up the success of “Circles” to its relative ease of listening, especially compared with the rest of Soul Coughing’s oeuvre — many eccentric beats and a pointed rejection of ear-worm singalongs.
But time went on; Doughty got older. A millennium ended, Doughty got clean, and Soul Coughing’s former lead singer embarked on a solo music career, stripped down to guitar and drums backing his sort-of sung poetry. He got pretty good reviews, what with the residual street cred of Soul Coughing. The choice tastemakers of music criticism had lavished praise on the unpredictability of the group’s musical composition and Doughty’s fine word play.
In 2005, the year I graduated from college, Doughty released his third solo album, Haughty Melodic. Produced by the Dave Matthews-owned ATO record label, critics were less enthused than they’d been with his earlier output. Production was too slick, the downer vibe they’d come to expect from Doughty markedly absent on most tracks.
I, on the other hand, felt extremely enthused. I would listen to the album regularly for several years, always grateful to hear Doughty rejoice in “the bells” ringing in that best of ways — “joyful and triumphant” — or riffing on the relative comforts of old-school job security: “I want to run away and join the office.” I liked how Doughty set off the themes of loneliness and rejection that dominate most of his output with upbeat orchestration, an overtone of hope. It hit home personally — the adult world of long work days, an empty apartment, college loan payments, scattered friends, and a recent breakup had me down. If Doughty could quit drugs and alcohol, if he could find contentment in a more modest music career, if he could work himself up some goodwill about the future (“Lonely / And the only way to beat it is to bat it down”) then I could too.
It’s been 16 years since I bought Haughty Melodic. Last year, for the first time in at least a decade, I found the CD and put it on while my kids played with LEGOs. Happy to report, the album holds up. No track demands a skip — a rare bird, that is.
Perhaps because of the particular moment we find ourselves in — America daily splintering into an ever more complex kaleidoscope of sharp, angry factions — it is Doughty’s allusive penultimate track that stands out the most: “His Truth Is Marching On.”
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The words of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were written in 1862 by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, set to the tune of an old folk gospel song. But the music and inspiration came to Howe by way of an intermediary composition from a bunch of army boys.
The story goes that a group of young Union soldiers took the old melody for their own purposes, creating a little number they dubbed “John Brown’s Body.” A satirical exercise, it was a running joke on one of their own who happened to share a name with the famed anti-slavery firebrand and would-be rebellion raiser.
Howe heard the song while touring a Union camp and a friend (“traveling companion,” per Antebellum parlance) exhorted Howe to elevate the popular tune with a set of more sober lyrics. She spent the following evening and early morning writing out the lines we now know, which went on shortly thereafter to grace the cover of The Atlantic.
That mid-1800s generation has always seemed impenetrable; to me, opaque in the extreme. Watching documentaries showcase black-and-white photographs of Civil War soldiers — almost always mustachioed, always always solemn — I am always wondering what these grave men longed for, if they ever laughed. I could say the same for the seriousness of someone like Howe. Here was a woman devoted to grand causes: abolition of slavery, votes for women, international peace. She believed in earnest these were not temporal political improvements but rather eternal imperatives. (She appears, not surprisingly, no-nonsense in photographs.)
Look at the juxtaposition here from Howe in Battle Hymn’s final verse: “As He [Christ] died to make men holy / Let us die to make them free.” For the grim woman from New England, the cause of the North aligned with nothing less than Jesus’ divine suffering for the salvation of the unqualified cosmos. To fight for the Union was to offer up a bloody sacrifice made sacred for its transcendent, ordained objective: freedom.
I once heard a scholar at the Globe Theatre explain that to really understand Shakespeare’s plays, you must first accept that everyone back in the 16th and 17th centuries — from queen to playwright to peddler — believed in a soul and an afterlife. There were no atheists or agnostics wandering about circa 1600, questioning if human actions really did echo into eternity. Everyone believed they did, period. Notably, whether this did much to improve the general behavior of our species is debatable. Murder and rape and thievery and, of course, slavery, and any number of other atrocities and oppressions, went steadily on for centuries across a whole continent of believers.
But one thing that catholic belief did do was imbue the world with a moral weight, a profundity of meaning clearly still the norm in Antebellum America. The South did not fight for slavery under some Nietzschean manifesto that God was dead and they could damn well do as they pleased. No, apologists for slavery concocted arguments drawn from tortured readings of scripture to “prove” that a hierarchy of races existed, that this order had been intentionally created, that slavery was the Lord’s natural will for the world.
Love of nation can bind humans to voracious enterprise, sometimes to horrific ends.
As for the North, I don’t know how many of those unsmiling Union soldiers found themselves in mud-soaked camps by way of abstract commitment to God’s will versus the number driven by more pedestrian impulses: tribalism, duty, camaraderie, nationhood. No doubt many of them deemed the threat of hanging should they desert compelling enough.
But abolitionists in the Howe model were appealing to an idea more transcendent than keeping the United States united. They were passionate believers that slavery was an abomination to God. The evil institution had to go, forget the cost. No one who supported slavery or stood in the way of its eradication would escape divine judgment, whether here and now or in the world to come. “What ye loose on Earth will be loosed in Heaven.” (Matthew 18:18)
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Perhaps those Union soldiers could joke of “John Brown’s body a’moulderin in the grave” because they slept assured the young man’s soul would join Jesus, in paradise and for eternity. Their own bodies were very likely on their way to a similar fate, in any case. The immigrant soldier from Scotland named John Brown — the butt of the joke that kicked off Battle Hymn of the Republic’s unlikely journey to historic prominence — indeed died early on in the Civil War.
And yet, I must admit it is the original “John Brown’s Body” that I most readily embrace — the song a bunch of (likely) teenaged boys came up with to tease some guy about his name. “John Brown’s body is a’moulderin’ in the grave”? I’m already snickering.
Most of us in America today are unacquainted with anything like the imminently fatal day-to-day life faced by that glum Civil War generation, to say nothing of the mortal terror inflicted for centuries on the men, women, and children persecuted and killed under slavery. Yes, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has forced on us a quick primer regarding the basics of considering one’s mortality on a daily basis.
But consider: the Civil War killed at least two percent of the American population, which would today equal 6 million deaths. Even worst-case scenario estimates of the coronavirus do not come anywhere near that number of fatalities.
Life during the Civil War encompassed hundreds of thousands dead to end slavery. This came after and because of hundreds of years — century on century — of murderous savageness towards people enslaved from Africa and their millions of descendents.
What kind of guts would it take to declare in that dark night of agony, “His truth is marching on”? I don’t think I’ve encountered, even once in my life, faith so resolutely and blithely defiant of the facts on the ground.
Might we who believe, here in America, get reacquainted with that kind of faith?
***
Doughty’s lyrics, at first glance, leave Howe’s mission completely forgotten. He writes from the first person singular — as himself, about himself. “His Truth Is Marching On” reads as one person’s acknowledgment of God, a far cry from Howe’s communal call to armed struggle against human bondage.
Doughty’s chorus is just a repetition of the song’s title, but his bridge is a lone plea for cosmic perspective. “Let me know your enormity and my tininess / Help me see your infinity and my finiteness.” For the listener of 2021, this is a curious request.
Twenty-first century America’s implicit (and often explicit) mantra is that your greatest possible worth lies in pursuing and achieving your own dreams. Our unexamined adult wants now double as our highest good. Dwelling on this idea even a moment reveals that what initially appears innocent if saccharine is anything but.
Our current, Extremely Online lifestyle compounds this message exponentially.
The internet insists the user (you, oh reader) is the most interesting and important entity on earth. This mindset is a must-have to keep any presence whatsoever on social media. Available evidence suggests most of us do not long ponder the absolute-value of cruise pics and celebrity subtweets, be they our own or others’.
Yon sleek Silicon Valley algorithms work overtime to understand us precisely, the better to satiate each appetite, from TV binge quest to weekly grocery needs. All desires, in fact, are fair prey for the internet’s galloping hunt. Our tech overlords sense we must be anticipated, caught, and they’ve increasingly taken it upon themselves to prescribe desire before we’re able to muster it up on our own.
It is a self-realizing, self-motivated (the low-hanging fruit of “self-centered” is ripe for a’pickin) approach, and it necessarily ignores a few things. Say, the yawning human capacity for unbridled selfishness.
We are not accustomed to hearing a person long for the humility that must be an effect born from grasping some small sense of God’s sheer scale.
Doughty’s final verse references that most ubiquitous of pop song themes — romantic heartbreak — before moving right on to epiphany. “Still I need you more / Need you to soothe the searing sadness and the nameless gnawing.” He is talking here to God.
It is a jarring address to hear from Doughty, a man who — on the same album — muses on “busting up a Starbucks” and making out with nameless “girls in sales and marketing.” (Alternatively, these lines help explain his journey to seeking the Eternal…)
It is more jarring for the justified effort undertaken to try and describe the nightmare gaping at the heart of our present-day lifestyles.
The imagery invoked here is instructive. “Searing sadness”; “nameless gnawing.” This is hell-speak.
For Doughty, the earthly perdition that plagues — the opioids, the depression, the anxiety, the mass shootings, the suicide, the violent partisanship, the racism, the oppression, the isolation, the emotional numbness, the emptiness — doesn’t have exclusive rights to the last word.
Redemption is out there. What is required? To first acknowledge the unfathomable greatness of God; to admit my own atomic status. “Let me know your enormity and my tininess.”
Well, now. Humility is not a virtue of the times, and it is no gift of the internet. Christians have limited, if any, immunity to that influence. I’m not really on Instagram, and my decision to quit Facebook a decade ago represents one of the few decisions made in my 20s that could be described as wise.
But I am currently, for better and mostly worse, rather attached to Twitter.
Anyone who’s spent any time on that platform will find it difficult not to succumb to its reigning smack talk vibe. And so we have “Christian” leaders of the Right spending their characters to blast the libs. And we have “Christian” leaders of the Left shooting smart, callous insults at the deplorable crowd and counting themselves brave. If we were to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, what would we see?
Love for enemies, duty to kindness, embrace of self control, working for justice in ways that don’t involve a keyboard and click-based ego boosting. The work of the soul…
That ain’t happening online.
And so, I come back to this line, this line that won’t leave me: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Bless you, Howe. My eyes, I fear, have not.
What would that glory look like? I am afraid of it, afraid I wouldn’t like it. I am afraid it would include a kind of justice that demanded too much from me — a sacrifice of comfort I don’t want to give over yet, a humility my 21st-century-addled self mightn’t embrace. It could involve that Flannery O’Connor version of grace wherein I am allowed to see myself for the phony, annoying, self-righteous, unworthy, and unlikable person that God knows all too well.
It might include a mercy that elevated people I find distasteful, people I’ve known only online and have thus come easily and perilously close to actually hating. Do you know who I’m talking about? You probably do, though they’re maybe different people for you than for me…
They might be first to join God’s triumphant march through the limits of physics to eternity, and I’d be waiting — arms crossed, rage boiling — wondering how they managed to jump the line, how they were permitted to join the line at all.
In O’Connor’s short story “Revelation, lead character Mrs. Turpin gets herself bitten by a deranged teenager in a doctor’s waiting room and this deeply unsettling event manages to at last unsettle Mrs. Turpin’s deeply smug views of herself and judgmental and relentlessly racist takes on everyone else. Sure, I’ve not experienced a stranger-biting myself and am repelled by Mrs. Turpin’s white-class pride.
However. I know well enough her knee-jerk jump to offense. It is no righteous impulse for justice, but rather a self-involved disgust at personal affront: how the hell could anyone could treat me so badly?
Now you’ve met the currency of social media. Zuckerberg and Dorsey would be lost without it.
Desperately, the 21st-century crowd needs Doughty’s prayer. Let me speak for myself, at least: I need it. “Help me see your enormity and my tininess/Let me know your infinity and my finiteness.”
Where we’re at in relation to God at the forefront of our consciousness is necessary preparation for the public-facing fight. It may indeed be this lack of perspective that explains all the places Christians have failed to materialize. There was no Christian counter-protest in Charlottesville. Outside the gates of for-profit prisons is a resounding absence of Christians. Do you find the church stationed along the southern border? The question is utterly rhetorical.
“Mine eyes have the seen the glory,” Howe declares. Yes, but the glory of what? “The coming of the Lord,” whose approach is what heralds the end of slavery and oppression, Amen. We may ask ourselves humbly: are we right now on His side of that struggle?
Let us be frank with each other. Whether we choose the humility to acknowledge it or not, there blazes an everlasting fact of the universe when it comes to God, and it will hold and endure with or without us:
His truth is marching on.
