Liberal Arts: Three Glances at “We’re All Gonna Die”
Sufjan Stevens, Joni Ernest, and I, are all white, Midwestern Christians who understand one thing. What we conclude from that understanding is not the same.
I was trying to chase away the Independence Day Blues this year by listening to Sufjan Steven’s song Fourth of July. As cheery music goes, it’s not an obvious choice. It starts with a thin, whispery tune played over a steady, pulsing chord on the keyboards, like someone keening to the beat of a hospital room monitor. Then Sufjan describes for the spirit of his mother the scene at her deathbed and the strangeness of seeing her lifeless body. Her answer is sweet and pitiless.
Well you do enough talk,
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn
From the Tillamook Burn
Or the Fourth of July?1
We’re all gonna die.
Sufjan at Pitchfork Festival, July 2016. By https://www.flickr.com/people/5145803
Sufjan imagines his mother reminding him of something he should already have learned, an idea at once obvious, important, and all too easily forgotten. We’re all gonna die. It occurred to me that Joni Ernst, junior senator from Iowa, had said almost exactly the same thing a while back when confronted by an angry audience at a town hall in rural Butler County. A woman shouted that the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” would put lives at risk. “People are going to die!” Ernst responded
“Well, we are all going to die. For heaven’s sake, folks.”
So does Joni Ernst agree with Sufjan Stevens? Are the two of them saying the same thing?
Sufjan, who released Fourth of July in 2015, is obviously not commenting on the budget bill passed by Congress ten years later. But it does seem worth asking whether he’s doing the same thing rhetorically—a word too often dismissed, and dangerously so. People can start with a common idea, after all, express it in virtually the same words, and still draw radically different, even contradictory, conclusions. As a consequence, any assertion, no matter how seemingly self-evident, not only can be contradicted, but will be. This idea, more or less, is what the philosopher Charles Taylor meant by “secularity.” In a secular world, where there is no final authority to dictate the truth, where everyone is free to believe and say what they think, we shouldn’t be surprised to find flat-earthers, vaccine-denialists, and even the occasional believer in the Ptolemaic model of the universe. Their existence is the price we pay for the freedom to think—and the disdain in which we might hold them is the price they pay for theirs.
Ultimately, the fact that we inevitability differ and disagree, this state of secularity, is the reason liberal arts education exists.
The liberal arts are supposed to teach critical thinking (a phrase often capitalized to emphasize its importance—Critical Thinking). Too often, critical thinking is reduced to the act of critiquing (not the same as criticizing, though there can be overlap) the thinking of others. But critical thinking actually involves critiquing our own thoughts. We need to understand ourselves, what shapes our own knowledge, feelings, opinions, attitudes. Know thyself, as the Delphic Oracle supposedly admonished those who entered her shrine. Whatever their intentions, despite the fact that they are expressing the same idea in almost identical words, I certainly don’t respond to what Joni and Sufjan are saying in the same way. What she said at her town hall simply repels and frankly fills me with rage. Fourth of July does neither, though the emotions it inspires are harder to name. Understanding, in some deeper way, how their words affect me might tell me something about myself.
It might also change the way I see myself and how I interact with the world. That’s the risk of critical thinking. Your mind, your politics, your religion, might all change, and with that change, you might endure tension, even estrangement, from family and friends. The risk of change might explain why there are a host of institutions that claim to teach liberal arts while assuring students (and parents) that the experience will not endanger what they already believe. The examples that come to mind are almost all “religious” institutions, though I can think of a few that are not explicitly attached to any specific church or religious identity. And clearly there’s something similar, if less easily named, in secular liberal arts schools that take a more progressive tack. I’ve already written about one experience of open animosity to “religion” and “God-talk” in the school in which I teach. It has not been the only one.
So why do Joni’s words repel me? For one thing, notice the exaggerated correctness of her pronunciation, the careful avoidance of elision, the way every word is carefully distinguished from the next. More striking still is the final rejoinder. For heaven’s sake, folks. At the risk of throwing shade, it’s all very school marmish. It’s as if her angry constituents had somehow forgotten something as obvious as universal mortality. And yet, what should have been obvious to Joni was that trying to shame the audience in this way wasn’t going to calm their anger and fears. In that sense, at least, her quip looks like an epic failure in rhetoric.
This assumes, of course, that the angry people in the town hall were Joni’s intended audience and that she really wanted to persuade them to accept the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. She might have already despaired of that and had another audience in mind, along with a different set of goals. For this other audience, it might have been more important to reaffirm her intellectual and moral superiority, to say something like, “See? I haven’t forgotten the obvious truth, like these people. And I face that truth with a fortitude and courage these whiner’s lack.” It’s an argument she reinforced the next day in a follow up video, made in a graveyard, in which she defended her words and urged these people, who apparently want to live forever, to find eternal life in the Lord Jesus, just as she claims she has. Just as it’s hard to believe that shaming them would change their minds about the bill, it has to be said: no one is converted to her version of Christianity by this sort of talk. Safer to say that she hoped to find a ready-made audience that would see themselves in her words and applaud: self-identified realists, pragmatists, believers in Christ, intellectually and morally superior to the crowd.
I say all this at the risk of doing unto Joni and her sympathizers what they seem to be doing to others—to assert my own intellectual and moral superiority. It would be easier for me to do so if I hadn’t made a habit of saying almost exactly the same thing in virtually every course I have ever taught. Just in case you don’t know, or have somehow forgotten, each and every one of us is going to die. It was a mantra of mine, the sort of schtick students tell you years later is the only thing they remember from your class: We’re all gonna die.
I would usually say this when my students expressed confusion at people’s behavior in the past. These people were, historically, familiar with death in a way most contemporary Americans are not. They died at home, not in hospitals, and their families didn’t turn their bodies over to an undertaker—they were washed, wrapped, and burned or buried from home. In a world without social safety nets and pensions, children were the surest investment people could make for their old age—if they lived that long. And if women tended to have many children it was, at least in part, because they were acutely aware that half their babies might die before reaching adulthood.
In some ways, I should fit into Joni’s audience. I’m a Christian, a believer in life eternal. When I said we’re all gonna die, wasn’t I also implying that I knew something obvious that my students, in their ignorance, were overlooking? Wasn’t I proclaiming my intellectual superiority? People might expect that of a professor in a classroom—after all, students pay me to teach them. But teaching liberal arts is not as simple as pouring knowledge into students’ heads like water on wilting houseplants. In reminding them of what they already know—we’re all gonna die—I was asking them to consider how others—people living in the past and people living in the present—might respond differently to that truth.
None of this is to say that my students don’t have their own personal experiences with death and dying. Some have lost parents or siblings. A student once had to deliver the awful news to me that her friend, a former student of mine, had been killed by a hit-and-run driver while trying to help another driver stuck on the highway. Another student, a fragile looking young woman with a pale, puffy face and dark circles under her eyes, shared with me that she had a serious, potentially fatal lung condition. It’s not like death has stopped stalking young lives.
And experience is constantly changing my own attitude towards death. In the time between leaving full-time teaching in 2017 and returning to the classroom last Fall, I had to deal with the death of both my parents. I had kissed my father’s forehead while he lay in his coffin and touched my mother’s arm as she lay in hers. I needed to know that these bodies, that had never hesitated to return my touch, were really empty, that my parents were really gone, and that it was really okay to lock them away and bury them in dirt. And then, three years ago, I had my own, very uncomfortable brush with dying, one with which I am still reckoning. Suffice it to say, these experiences have left me a little less glib about mortality.
There’s another audience Joni might have been addressing, one that’s less obvious: herself. I don’t know anything about her knowledge of death and dying, at least nothing beyond what I can infer from her public biography. She grew up on a farm where the castration and slaughter of pigs was routine. (To be clear, I love bacon—and to accuse her of indifference to the animals’ suffering would be hypocritical on my part.) She has also served in the military. I don’t know if she has seen combat, but that would constitute another kind of education in death that I lack. Familiarity with death does sometimes harden people. But is she utterly lacking in fellow feeling with those who will be hurt by the Big Beautiful Bill? The story NPR ran on her comments called them “defensive,” and no doubt, the accusation that the budget will lead to premature deaths should cut the heart of any compassionate person, or at least anyone who wishes to perceive themselves, or be perceived by others, as compassionate.
At the risk of another obvious statement, this search for the moral and intellectual high ground makes up most of our civic discourse, no matter what our political or religious commitments are. The angry woman in the crowd is not unlike Joni—staking out a position of moral superiority, one grounded in compassion, not fiscal restraint. There’s obviously a tradition of debate in liberal arts, the clash of ideas, the search for truth. But that search is too easily confused with the protection of personal interests and the battle of egos. And debate is not the only way of dealing with difference.
That might explain why I love Fourth of July.
The song is taken from Sufjan’s album Carrie & Lowell, a long meditation on the death of his mother, Carrie, who suffered from severe mental illness and chemical dependencies. She abandoned Sufjan and his siblings in Michigan when they were still children and ran away to Oregon, where she married Lowell, who eventually became the manager of Sufjan’s record label, Asthmatic Kitty. Sufjan spent summers with Carrie and Lowell, but the wounds of that abandonment never completely healed. Their story, recounted and mythologized, is a recurring motif in his songs. In Fourth of July, he imagines Carrie acknowledging the tragedy of her decision.
Did you get enough love, my little dove
Why do you cry?
And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best
Though it never felt right,
My little Versailles
If the liberal arts are the study of difference and conflict, this is a reminder that we are not united even within within ourselves. From her perspective beyond the grave, leaving was simultaneously Carrie’s best option and never the right thing to do. But since this (I assume) is a fictional conversation, her words also reflect a realization on Sufjan’s part, the adult’s embrace of the hopelessness of his mother’s condition, as well as the the embrace of the angry, lonely child he was and, in some sense, always will be.
Carrie’s words from the other side draw a conclusion from the inevitability of our death, one grounded in her own experience, that contrasts completely with Ernst’s.
Shall we look at the moon, my little loon
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life, while it is rife
While it is light2Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die
Death is what forces us to shape our lives, to make them worth living. This is the truth spoken by the dead. And the scene Sufjan describes is the sort of solidarity between the living and the dead that I try to examine when I teach about the Catholic Cult of the Saints, a communion of love, of prayer and mutual assistance, one in which we recognize the glorious mystery of their lives while not denying their failures. It’s a vision possibly alien to Joni Ernst’s understanding of the meaning of Jesus, though not, it seems, to Sufjan’s. It’s a solidarity he conjures up in the recording I’ve posted here. By the end of the performance, the crowd is singing with him: We’re all gonna die. “It’s a beautiful truth,” he tells them. And it is, because this solidarity reminds us to live now, to wish life on one another, and to support those lives rather than cite the futility of their struggle as grounds to withhold care.
It’s a solidarity completely at odds, not only with Joni’s words, but with the political posturing we’re all suffering these days. We’re all gonna die. It’s a thought as self-evident as “people disagree.” And like all self-evident things, disagreements over what to do about the inevitability of death have a lot to do with teaching the liberal arts.
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The Tillamook Burn was a series of fires that destroyed a large part of Oregon’s coastal forests. The reference to the Fourth of July recalls Sufjan’s question in the previous verse. What could I have said to raise you from the dead?/Oh, could I be the sky on the Fourth of July?
Sufjan’s songs are loaded with scriptural allusions. Carrie’s words here might recall the words of Jesus’s response to his disciples’ question whether a man born blind was being punished for his sin or the sins of his parents: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (John 9:3-5)