Read through the lyrics to these two songs, then return to look at my analysis:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnnycash/aboynamedsue.html
http://www.rhapsody.com/everclear/rolling-stone-original/father-of-mine/lyrics.html
The two cases are roughly the same. In both you have young boys who grow up without a father, who have to struggle to survive, and who bear psychological scars.
In the first, you hear of a drifter who goes from town to town, often getting in fights, never settling down. He doesn’t whine about it, but clearly he is psychologically damaged.
In the second, you get the confession: “I will never be safe/ I will never be sane/ I will always be weird inside/ I will always be lame.”
Now, my own temperamental inclination, as should be obvious, is to side with Johnny Cash. Shit happens: deal with it. But as you ponder it, you realize he really isn’t dealing with it. He is running and hiding from his “shame”. He is acting out constantly in an aggressive way.
In our pre-Confessional culture–prior to our mass conversion to the idea that talking about psychological problems somehow helps us “process” them–people like Cash’s Sue were common. They were drunks, and losers. Some got religion, or found a good woman, and made their peace with their world; others never did. This world has always been filled with much suffering.
Freudianism, with the notion of the Unconcious, tells us that who we are now, is the product of who we were, then. The logic of this is that if we are suffering now, we should blame the past. Freud may today have no claims that pass even rudimentary scrutiny scientifically, but the basic notion of the retained experience, the permanent moulding of self at some time before our maturation, is everywhere.
Thus, when the claim is made “I will never be sane”, the singer is simultaneously attacking his father for his cruelty by claiming irreparable damage, and surrendering his creative capacity for regeneration and growth.
Now, the lyricist has obviously done something with his life–he is no doubt wealthy, as someone who created at least one major hit–and has commited himself to not doing the same thing to his kid. These are positive, and bely the fundamental helplessness he is invoking.
But he is still offering us an idea that is fundamentally pessimistic. Are we in fact pressed into molds at an early age, and forever after helpless in their face? Are the combinations of genetics and early experience fully and completely determinative of our future experience?
Johnny Cash’s Sue is insufficiently self reflective to make claims like that. He doesn’t think about it. And it does seem to me that as we evolve as sovereign individuals, we do so as whole qualitative Gestalts. Quite often, you can do things that are “impossible”, if you don’t know they are impossible. And it seems to me that someone who simply wants a better life will be more likely to get it than someone who has already determined in advance that the battle is already lost.
So, in the end, I have to come down somewhere in the middle. Clearly, whining is not generative. As a general rule, it makes you more depressed, and lessens your capacity for transcendance.
The optimal therapeutic approach would be one where you reject self pity, but also realize you have to process hurt. People are often blind and cruel, but that is for now simply the reality, and you can’t unwrite the past by accurately pointing to real wrongs done to you.
Our task in life is creation. This is what I believe, and any and all beliefs that subtract from your capacity for creation are for that reason to be avoided. Experience is primary. Explanation is secondary. This is the order. My operative optimism consists in the belief that if we truly understand how to live, everything can be clear and bright, pleasing and satisfying. We should never settle for anything that falls short of that.