Part VIII - The Gospel According to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug's Sketch of a Promised Departure

 7. Prisoner’s Song

Track seven returns to the figure of the scapegoat. Unlike “Fast Asleep inside the Garden” and “Heroes Pass Us By,” the speaker in “Prisoner’s Song” picks up the third person and offers a panorama of a public trial. The imagery evokes old courthouse scenes in novels and films–To Kill a Mockingbird, Sanctuary, Twelve Angry Men, True Grit. And, as in at least two of those stories, the prisoner’s song is about an innocent victim of miscarried justice. The listener has to think of Jesus, but recent spectacles featuring defendants and plaintiffs whose perceived legal status depends on the spectator’s biases also come to mind. In fact, the spectators are the satirical subject of this song. 

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The chorus frames the song and leaves little doubt that the prisoner of the title is innocent and subjected to miscarried justice. I’m not sure if there’s a difference between being “tried” and “put up on trial,” but the first line includes both characterizations; the second half of the chorus describes the subject as “Falsely accused / An innocent man.” For some reason–perhaps the tone, perhaps details related to the fate of the defendant in the penultimate track–one wonders at moments if the chorus isn’t ironic, if maybe the speaker doth not protest too much. The third result of a Google search of “tried, put up on trial” is (at the time of my writing) an Associated Press article about one of the Big D’s many legal woes. But in spite of these doubts–affected also by the satire on the crowd–the prisoner does seem to be as advertised: innocent.

Verse one renders this trial as a public spectacle reminiscent of Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” wherein “they’re selling postcards of the hanging.” Here, the “newspapermen on the steps of the jail” and the crowd pack the streets and the sidewalk. It reminds me of the series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s not hard to picture Ted Danson with a megaphone, riding on the coattails of Larry David’s publicity, trying to get arrested on camera, thereby leapfrogging his wife’s ex-husband as the foremost celebrity justice warrior. Indeed, in verse two we learn “Celebrities weep as the verdict is read / And ask, ‘Where has the decency gone?’” Glib politicians manifest no more authenticity than their photogenic counterparts by starting to say “their prayers / As soon as the cameras turn on.” 

The whole atmosphere at this spectacle reminds the Pug fan of the society elegiacally satirized in “I Do My Father’s Drugs,” which for my money, is the single best critique of our generation’s moral posturing and pretenses to heroism. It’s the musical equivalent of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but instead of being about the two generations of Russian progressives from the 1840s and 1860s, it’s about American progressives from the 1960s and their Gen X/Millenial offspring. Pug sings:

When hunger strikes are fashion

And freedom is routine

When all the streets in Cleveland are named for Martin Luther King

You will see me at the protest

But you’ll notice that I drag

I burn my father’s flag. 

The song doesn’t criticize the Civil Rights Movement or any protestor who burnt a flag in 1968: but it does ironically implicate the virtue-signaling college student who wears a Che Guevara T-shirt to a campus safe space. Politics, of course, changed dramatically the year Pug’s song came out (2008), but for me that makes it all the more prophetic. The song succeeds not just because of its trenchant commentary, but also because the speaker implicates himself.

Verse one of “Prisoner’s Song” contains a possible allusion to the gospel. Instead of figures and artifacts from the reign of Tiberius, the scene features “newspapermen” and street hawkers selling “commemorative coins / with the face of the judge on the back.” I’m pretty sure such souvenirs are no part of the modern judicial system; their unreality therefore suggests to me an allusion. In Luke 20:24-25, emissaries of the Scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus if it’s right to pay the Roman tax on the Hebrew temple. He asks for a denarius (because he’s poor and doesn’t have one) and after pointing out that it has Caesar’s likeness and inscription on it, he concludes, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The response is typical of Jesus’ genius for subverting the moral traps his enemies laid for him: he transcends their human conceptions of God’s ways. Their attempts to publicly malign him only work to further demonstrate his integrity and their mendacity. Feeling their own guilt, they had all the more motivation to kill him. 

Whether or not Pug intended to evoke the aforesaid connotations, these “commemorative coins” represent the shallowness and materialism of our culture wherein even what is grave becomes entertainment and anything and everything is exploited for profit. 

In the second half of verse two, a more serious social phenomena emerges and the trial becomes less a mockery of justice than a chilling mechanism of an oppressive system. We learn that the prisoner’s family and friends stand among the crowd, and the speaker comments, “There’s a fortune to make if you keep your mouth shut / As you witness your neighbor go down.” My first reaction is to see this as a 1984-ish dystopia and to thank God our country isn’t like that yet–but then I think of the feats of cancel culture in the recent past. A person with different sensibilities might be reminded of any number of recent hearings or court proceedings in our highest legal chambers. The truth is, whoever’s on trial, it’s going to be broadcast, and we the public will have the opportunity to bravely tweet our support or to prudently keep our mouths shut, depending on what we have to gain.

With an allusion to the Old Testament, the second verse also satirizes the bloodthirsty cowardliness of mobs. By calling for the kind of justice “that has teeth” and “both eyes to see,” the crowd demands a merciless enactment of, not justice, but revenge. “For what good is revenge,” the speaker asks, “if it’s wasted on men / Who won’t drag weaker men through the street.” Here Pug riffs on the Old Testament principle of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth–a reciprocal exaction of punishment and reparation matched to abuse and damage (that also was intended to quell proliferations of disproportionate retribution). The distinguishing mark of this crowd’s demands for justice though is that the system and its executors are not only punishing the innocent, they’re also punching down. The mob loves it. But they’re the same sort Colonel Sherburn stands down in Huck Finn, “brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women” and only nerved enough to lynch a man in the company of “a hundred masked cowards.”

The scene evokes Christ’s mistreatment at the hands of the Sanhedrin, the Romans, and the watching public. The religious leaders want Him dead because they don’t believe He's God and that He's therefore guilty of blasphemy. Pilate tries to avoid killing Him and knows the Pharisees want Him dead because they’re jealous of Him. But He chooses rather to pacify the mob than to enact justice. In addition, the song recalls humanity’s blood drenched history of lynchings, autos-de-fe, pogroms, and public executions. Ironically, it also evokes the trials of contemporary celebrities who posture as heroes but who are really just comic players in a giant farce (a psuedo-martydrom the system all too helpfully abets). The tragedy is that this farce could end in catastrophe. But the prisoner in the song is the genuine article–an innocent man, a scapegoat for the fears and resentments of a benighted mob.

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