Too Soon

Kris Kristofferson died last week. I've been thinking about him often the past few days.  

And that made me think of the Spanish Civil War, but more on that later. 

He was 88 when he died, but if you went by life lived, he was really around 167. 

It's the sort of thing I think about. Should the goal be to live many years, even if those years blur together, and you're just living the same year over and over? Or should the goal be to keep trying new things, odd foods, seeing places you've never seen, to cram as much life as possible into the years you've been given? Kris Kristofferson was a Golden Gloves boxer, a Rhodes Scholar, an Army officer, a janitor in the Nashville music studio where Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan recorded. He was divorced, disowned and disregarded. He was a songwriter, singer, actor and quite often took great pleasure in being a world class pain in the neck. 

Kris and I go back a long way. In 1973, my girlfriend and I went to a concert he gave in St. Paul. It was fun, although we were in the cheap seats in O'Shaughnessy Auditorium so we couldn't actually see much of anything. A few decades later we saw him again, this time we were even further from the stage at the Minnesota State Fair. 

Thirty years ago, he was in the news when, during a concert honoring Bob Dylan, the Irish singer Sinead O'Conner came onstage to sing. Two weeks previously, Sinead had appeared on Saturday Night Live, where she tore up a picture of the Pope, protesting the history of child abuse in the Catholic Church. It caused a huge kerfuffle, and when she approached the microphone, the crowd began to boo and wouldn't stop. Kris was a host of the show, and the people in charge told him to get out there and get her off the stage. Instead, he went on stage, leaned towards her ear and said, “Don't let the bastards get you down.” Later he wrote a song about the evening called “Sister Sinead” with this memorable chorus.  

“Maybe she's crazy and maybe she ain't, but so was Picasso and so were the saints.” 

The thing is, Ms. O'Conner was right. There was a huge, ongoing tradition of child abuse and coverups among the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Ten years later the Boston Globe published a landmark series of articles detailing some of the many crimes against children by priests who were protected by the institution of the church. Horrible things done to the helpless and vulnerable. Sinead was completely correct. Her problem was timing. She was right too soon. 

Enter the Spanish Civil War. As in most civil wars, it was complicated, but a simple explanation is that it was basically a conflict between fascists who wanted an authoritarian regime and people who supported the constitutional monarchy that the fascists wanted to overturn. Adolf Hitler found this fascinating, and he sent all sorts of assistance, basically doing a dry run for his tactics during World War II. On the other side was a strange assortment of allies, including a number of communists. 

Other people who were fighting against the fascists were George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, among others. This was a problem for our government, because although they weren't communists, they were on the same side as the communists. So, the FBI started investigating many of them. Years later when those files were made public, it was discovered that to justify the investigations, some clever soul had labeled these people, “Premature Antifascists.” 

These individuals were tormented by the government not because they had done anything wrong, but simply because they were ahead of the curve. They saw the dangers of fascism before anyone else did. They were right too soon.  

We live in a world of cranks, nuts and goofballs of every description. What I try to keep reminding myself is that while many of them are just cranks, sometimes, though, they are insightful people with the vast misfortune to see what others haven't seen. They're just right too soon. And that can make you cranky. 

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Kris Kristofferson songs, “To Beat the Devil.”
 It ends with these lines. 

“I was born a lonely singer and I'm bound to die the same 
But I've gotta feed the hunger in my soul 
And if I never have a nickel, I won't ever die ashamed 
'Cause I don't believe that no one wants to know” 

Not a bad way to go out...not a bad way to live. 

 Copyright 2024 Brent Olson