"But He Doesn't Know the Territory!"
A Bonus post on VIvek Ramaswamy
I normally post these newsletters on MWF. But after seeing all the clips from last night’s Republican Primary Debate, I wanted to get this in when it was fresh.
While I couldn’t watch the debate last night due to a conflict (a fundraiser for my congresswoman), I did catch the after-analysis. I wasn’t completely surprised at the success of Vivek Ramaswamy, given the way he has used his techbro podcaster image to break norms of political campaigning — including rapping to Eminem songs.
Yesterday, I read Adam Wren’s long piece on Vivek in Politico. Adam had spent a full day with Ramaswamy, watching him on podcasts and media hits in between spurts of interview. (I consider Adam’s work to be the definition of “suffering for Jesus”!) This paragraph leaped off the screen at me:
“He’s a sort of a Music Man,” Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s former health secretary told the New York Times of Ramaswamy, comparing him to another figure who had success rounding up supporters in Iowa. Ramaswamy told me he hadn’t seen the musical (which is about a con man/band leader), but chalked it up as a Democratic attack, leaving aside the fact that Sebelius had previously advised two of his companies.
This caught my attention because The Music Man is one of my favorite musicals. It’s an American Classic that I’ve watched numerous times on film and on stage.1 My son’s ring tone on my phone is 76 Trombones. As soon as I read the Sibelius quote, specific bits of the musical started playing in my brain. (They still are, which I have to write this today!)
For those of you, like Vivek, somehow don’t know the show it’s the story of con man Howard Hill who comes to River City announcing that he is creating a boy’s band2. I was in a high school performance in 1965 as Barney, one of the kids. Hill knows nothing about music and always skips town before the first band performance where the community learns they’ve been had. Spoiler: Hill falls in love with Marion the Librarian (classic song) and it is she who teaches the rudimentary band, saving the day.
The opening song (Rock Island) takes place on a train pulling into River City. Most of the travelers are other salesmen. (The song mimics a train slowing into the station). Here’s where Hill comes in:
Thats Professor Harold Hill, Harold Hill
What's the fellows line?
Whats his line?
He's a fake, and he doesn't know the territory!
Look, whaddayatalk, whaddayatalk, whaddayatalk, whaddaystalk?
He's a music man
He's a what?
He's a what?
He's a music man and he sells clarinets to the kids in the town with
the big trombones and the rat-a-tat drums,
big brass bass, big brass bass, and the piccolo,
the piccolo with uniforms, too with a shiny gold braid
on the coat and a big red stripe runnin . . .
Well, I don't know much about bands
but I do know you can't make a living selling big trombones, no sir.
Mandolin picks, perhaps and here and there a Jew's harp ...
No, the fellow sells bands, Boys bands.
I don't know how he does it but he lives like a king and he dallies
and he gathers and he plucks and shines and when the man dances, certainly boys, what else?
The piper pays him! Yes sir ,yes
sir,yes sir, yes sir, when the man dances, certainly boys, what else?
The piper pays him! Yessssir, Yessssir
But he doesn't know the territory!
So Harold Hill is a flashy guy dropping in with no connection and no background. Where the others on the train deal in standard issues like anvils, Hill is selling dreams. His promises sound great, especially to the “Iowa Nice” people who need a lift to their lives.
Ramaswamy boasts that he’s not a politician and wants to do things in new ways (like limiting the voting age and eliminating all civilian employees of the FBI, to name two). All the others on the stage last night sound remarkably like the salesmen on the train.
When Hill arrives in River City, he launches in one of the classic songs of Music Man: You’ve Got Trouble. Learning that a billiard parlor is about to open in town, he describes how that “leads to trouble which starts with T and rhymes with P which stands for Pool”. When you look closely, it is a contrived culture war argument. (Ramaswamy said last night that we are in a cultural civil war.)
The first big step on the road
To the depths of deg-ra-Day--
I say, first, medicinal wine from a teaspoon,
Then beer from a bottle.
An' the next thing ya know,
Your son is playin' for money
In a pinch-back suit.
And list'nin to some big out-a-town Jasper
Hearin' him tell about horse-race gamblin'.
Not a wholesome trottin' race, no!
But a race where they set down right on the horse!
Like to see some stuck-up jockey'boy
Sittin' on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil?
Well, I should say.
Friends, lemme tell you what I mean.
Ya got one, two, three, four, five, six pockets in a table.
Pockets that mark the diff'rence
Between a gentlemen and a bum,
With a capital "B,"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool!
There are no boys riding horses or (later in the song) sitting in the corn crib reading illicit magazines. This is all a construction to rile up the crowd and prepare them for the boy’s band pitch, which requires them to pay in advance for (marked up) uniforms and instruments.
How different is Trouble from Ramaswamy’s Ten Truths? I mean, they sound great. But what do they actually mean? And how do these inform policy that a president could get through Congress?
God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
A running bit in Music Man involves the mayor and city council wanting to see Hill’s credentials. Every time they get close to getting an answer, he starts them on a barbershop number (he had suckered them into being a group earlier in the show). The question of credentials arise later on when Hill tells Marion’s brother Winthrop that he graduated from the Gary Indiana Conservatory of Music class of 1905 (Gary, Indiana is another great song3). Because Marian’s the librarian, she knows that the Conservatory didn’t open until 1906 but keeps the fact to herself.
I’m not suggesting that Vivek has anything wrong with his background. But he is very good at redirecting critiques of things he’s said in the past (9/11, for example). Perhaps it’s a function of the incessant podcasting — who can remember all the stuff you said off the top of your head?
The uniforms and instruments arrive on the Wells Fargo Wagon and the town is thrilled. But there are no music rehearsals as Hill doesn’t know anything about music. He tells them to use his revolutionary Think Method, in which they just think about playing their instruments and it will come to them. Marian, who knows music as a piano teacher, teaches the band to play a bastardized Minuet in G and saves the day.
Hill may have been a fraud, but Vivek is not. However, his approach to the campaign feels a little like the Think Method. Lots of platitudes and critiques of career politicians, doing things the standard way.
After we get past The Big Arrest, attention will turn back to Vivek in the next phase of the Republican Primary campaign. He’ll be facing his own version of the town council wanting explanations. And he won’t have a Marian behind the scenes making it all okay.
Wish I could have seen the Hugh Jackman/Sutton Foster revival!
Later productions have made it a kid’s band and included girls.
But those of us who grew up in Indiana never thought of Gary as nostalgic and quaint!