Jewel Tarnishes Her Reputation

I read poetry every morning. Part of my routine. I pick a volume from my pretty good library and work my way through it, reading a half-dozen or so poems a day. Last month the birthday of Robison Jeffers and the death date of Edmund Spenser called for deeper dives into favorite minds. Feb. 1 necessitated similar treatment for Langston Hughes.

Mid-January, I finished Linda Pastan’s fine AM/PM, took it back to the bookshelf in my library and looked around for its successor. Up on the top row, just down from my Jeffers collection, I saw the volume by Jewel Kilcher that she published in 1998.

So, I was reading A Night without Armor when Jewel – long regarded as a large-hearted humanitarian who champions the underdogs – performed at the Jan. 20 Make America Healthy Again Inaugural Ball hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine contrarian that Donald Trump wants as Health Department secretary.

During his aborted run for the presidency, RFK Jr. pledged to “seal the border permanently” and called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an exercise in “good faith.” He has also written that Trump’s defeat in 2020 was a “historic coup d’état against Western democracy.”

He actually campaigned as a Democrat before switching his conspiratorial allegiances to L'homme Orange [with apologies to La Grande Orange, Rusty Staub]. Kennedy has fully embraced and endorsed every petty, hateful, divisive pronouncement and policy of his new best friend.

As you might guess, fans who have followed Jewel saw her presence in such company as a total sell-out. [And I hope she got paid.] After all, her “Pieces of You” called attention to bigots’ hatred of anyone different, an ugly girl, a pretty girl, a homosexual and a Jew. She cited the reactive violence they elicited and posed the always relevant question: “Do you hate [him/her] because [he/she’s] pieces of you?”

Many of Jewel’s early songs dripped compassion for the “fat boy” or the little sister, “a zombie in a body with no soul” or Adrian, permanently disabled after an accident – and thus a perfect target for ridicule by our felonious president and his horde of happy haters.

Many tossed one of her most famous lines back to her: “Who will save your soul?”

Jewel sort of apologized on Instagram [wearing no makeup to show us how serious she was]: “I am so sorry that some of my longtime fans feel that I let them down.” But her excuse for her performance – a de facto endorsement voluminous hatred – that she was fighting for mental health issues showed a naiveté not consistent with any adult who has been listening to Trump for 10 years:

“I believe there are people in the new administration that are willing to help on this issue, and I do not agree on all the politics, but if I can help shape policy, make sure mental health is in the conversation when it comes to American health, if I can help put resources or mental health tools into the hands of the most vulnerable who need it, I’m going to try, and I’m going to fight.”

I can sympathize with Jackie Evancho singing the national anthem at Trump’s first inaugural. She was a sheltered 16-year-old kid who did not know that Trump would launch a hate campaign against transgender people such as her sister.

But for a 50-year-old with a history of perception, intuition and depth of mind to suggest to her fans that there are mental health allies among the Trump gang that campaigned to kill funding for most health issues suggests instead a very low appraisal of those fans’ intelligence.

One disgusted former fan rattled off question after question about how Trump’s vitriolic rants, readily echoed by his redhats – our new version of Hitler’s brownshirts and Mussolini’s blackshirts – and his policies were going to help anyone’s mental health, much less those “vulnerable” ones struggling with issues already.

Hey, maybe Jewel can pick up some MAGAt fans, who can now sing her crusading psalms with the same indifference that they sing their hymns every Sunday.

Jewel’s play for a new audience does not negate the brilliance of her earlier work, though those of us who have 10 of her albums and three of her books will likely wait to see what change in direction she might take in lieu of taking her next work on faith. And, yes, her poems are back on the shelf, replaced by the astute Richard Hugo’s The Right Madness on Skye,” the Hebridean island from whence came some of Mom’s ancestors.

Jewel’s flip-flop and her fans’ reactions reminded me of John Greenleaf Whittier’s sad elegy for Daniel Webster when the Massachusetts senator endorsed The Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Bill that decreed Free States must return runaway slaves to the inhumane abuse that they had escaped.

Whittier titled his poem “Ichabod,” which translates from Hebrew as “the glory has departed.” I will change the gender of the pronouns to provide a sampling of Whittier’s despair:

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once she wore!...

Revile her not, the Tempter hath

A snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit her fall!...

Then, pay the reverence of old days

To her dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!

The Quaker Whittier pulled his title from First Samuel in the Bible. In both books of Samuel we find the apt epitaph for Jewel’s reputation: “How the mighty have fallen.”