On John Henry

You can fight the machine if you want to, but it might be the last thing you ever do. So go ahead, hustle along the track, steel-driving against the steam-powered technology until you’re victorious, exhausted, and left for dead…..After Johnny Cash sang it and Colson Whitehead wrote it, I didn’t think there was another word left to say on the subject. Maybe I was right. But people still talk about Gary Kasparov as if he’s the same thing, or they do the original up Disney, making the whole grim sorry parable into some sort of inspirational fable. When Paul Robeson sang as John Henry, he captured the futility just right, not only in the peerless qualities of his voice, but in those aspects of his biography that found relevance in the song: running from one machine (capitalism) right smack into another (communism), and then being thrown back onto the mercy of the first, never able to master either. Some interpreters insist on ambiguity, and try to spin the moral this way and then that, but here’s one instance where the message couldn’t possibly be any clearer.