Part III - The Gospel according to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug’s Sketch of a Promised Departure

2. Heroes Pass Us By

Note: I wrote each of these meditations in the spring of 2024–well in advance, as you’ll notice, of the events of July 13, 2024. Although an assassination attempt was, to me and many others, fairly predictable, an almost cosmic irony remains in light of this song and my meditations on it. I’ve chosen to post the original version. I pray nothing else along those lines happens to anyone–political candidate, public persona, or private individual. But lest any other historic happenings should date these writings,  I think I’ll post them in fairly rapid succession.

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From the opening lead notes, this song pulls the listener's heart by a string, evoking the pathos and perennial tragedy of scapegoating and the various ways we assassinate our heroes. The first line is an echo of the refrain from track one, “I know how this ends.” And here the sense of impending bloodshed is specified by the speaker’s anticipation of “the worst man you can think of with a pistol in his hand.” This armed character will return in different guises throughout the album (the pistol, too, will return, but in a different mode), but now he is the amoral arbiter of brutal power and the executioner for a corrupt system. The broadest thing he stands for is death.

The substitution of a man with a pistol stands as an example of what happens throughout this story. In a way, it’s a retelling of the Gospel in modern vernacular in a modern setting. The transpositions also draw parallels to certain aspects of our contemporary cultural and political situation. By the end of the song, this man with a pistol takes an even more definite form in the context created by the characters and objects referenced.

Joe Pug has a way of killing multiple birds with one stone. In the rest of verse one, his diction knocks some biblical birds from the bush in addition to some contemporary American fowl. He sings, “You don’t fool me once / all this talk of revolution from a moneylender’s son.” Talk of revolution certainly followed Christ during his three years of public work. Even his disciples believed he would turn out to be a political messiah who would throw off the Roman yoke and restore sovereignty to the nation of Israel. In Jesus Christ Superstar, I’m told, Judas’s realization that Christ isn’t going to do this is what leads him to betrayal. And even Peter, in cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant, embodies the expectation that Christ wouldn’t be averse to fighting. But Jesus, like the speaker in this song, distances himself from that kind of rhetoric. His miraculous reattaching of the servant’s ear is a perfect synecdoche for Jesus’ ethos. In Matthew’s account (which does not record the healing of the ear), Jesus responds with the now famous proverb: “Put your sword back in its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (26:52). 

What doesn’t fit so nicely with the biblical narrative is the reference to the “moneylender’s son.” Though the word certainly strikes the biblical note, none of the gospel’s report that anyone involved in the arrest scene or with Christ’s ministry was the son of a moneylender. Of course tax collectors figure prominently in all the narratives, and Judas is certainly associated with dirty money–both embezzling ministry funds and exchanging thirty pieces of silver for his soul–but nowhere in any canonical gospel does it say he was the son of a moneylender.

But are there any moneylender’s sons fomenting revolution in this early part of the 21st Century? Here I can’t help recalling a certain “small loan” of one million dollars. Now, however much responsibility for the Capitol invasion can be laid at the feet of “The Big D” (as I heard Pug refer to the him in a spring of 2016 show in Cambridge, Mass.), it’s hard to remove the connotations of at least the possibility of revolution from Trump’s rhetoric and actions. For my money, talk of violence and revolution occurs on both sides of the aisle, and I predict that if it comes to bloodshed, it will be because of fear and willful misunderstanding, the two hands stretching out the rubber band of civil society until it finally snaps. Do I think statesmen should use phrases such as “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” or words like “bloodbath,” even when they’re just speaking about auto-industry economics?

No.

But should we also latch onto one word or phrase a person uses, wrench it from its context, and blast a fear-mongering story through every media outlet known to man, scaring the wits out of and fomenting the rage of untold numbers of the citizens of a polarized nation?

I would suggest–no.

Nevertheless, let us imitate the speaker of this song and the savior he’s evoking: let’s see through everything we need to see through, and give no ear to any more fighting words. Our failure to do so abets the social phenomena described in verse two: “Heroes pass us by / We tell them that we love them / And we murder them in public every time.” Again, we get Pug’s skill in surprising us with a punchline along with the delivery of a wise observation–not an original one perhaps, but one that we can’t be reminded of enough. The philosopher Rene Girard identifies this phenomenon as the scapegoat mechanism. The history of every society is tragically rife with this process whereby a community misplaces its fears and resentments onto a sacrificial victim who is necessarily innocent and necessarily guilty-seeming to the community. After the people purge their fear and aggression by murdering the innocent victim, the martyr is transfigured into a hero that has saved the community. It’s an ugly practice illustrated in innumerable histories, mythologies, stories, and religions. Girard noticed that it is nowhere so accurately analyzed and represented as in the Bible. It was the Bible’s unique, implicit, and unmissable condemnation of this practice that led Girard to convert to Catholicism. 

One of the tragedies of western civilization is that, although the story of Christ as the prototypical and true sacrificial lamb is the foundation of our cultures, “Christian” cultures have racked up a high body count by the scapegoating process employed to kill Jesus. Especially tragic is the history of western antisemitism and the peculiar indictment that the scapegoating of Jesus should be laid at the feet of one people group. Also, look at almost any western nation’s history. For example, try England from the time of William Tyndale, through Thomas More, and onto Hugh Latimer, and you’ll find murdered heroes without too much squinting. America’s got blood on its hands, too, of course–Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. are only the most famous examples.

All that to say–Pug’s use of the superlative degree when he sings, “we murder them in public every time,” isn’t unwarranted. 

The song’s coda presents a puzzle. Pug sings, “Even though you’ve gone away / I still carry you inside / I still carry you inside.” At the very least this is a poignant reflection of the speaker’s sense of loss and the indelible mark departed loved-ones leave on their survivors. If the speaker is still a sort of Christ figure, it’s harder to pin down how this might apply–although Jesus himself was no stranger to loss, having already endured the martyrdom of his cousin, John the Baptist, another hero arguably referred to in a later track. But these lines also evoke a Christ follower’s feelings in the wake of Christ’s departure from earth. It’s easy to imagine these as the feelings of admirers of any murdered hero, expressive of the sense in which heroic lives inspire us, perhaps all the more for their having been tragically cut short. On a lower level, the lines could even express a nostalgia for a time, not all that long ago, when we had more respectable heads of state. 

In their capacity as lyrics, we’ll surely be forgiven for supposing they might also express Pug’s personal losses. His late friend Justin Townes Earl comes to mind, and one gets the sense that Pug’s heartfelt lament in lines like these are more than just exercises in sympathetic imagination–he’s probably lost friends and family. But more on this when we get to track five, “Brother John (Charcoal on Paper).”

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