Down with Idol Worship (Even Dolly Parton)

Dolly Parton seems like she was probably a wonderful person. From what I can tell, she gave books to kids. She’s had some excellent one-liners about social issues like gay marriage. She donated money to vaccine development and cancer research, though only after a personal experience through her niece.

That’s how these things tend to go. Rich people have some kind of experience that’s personally meaningful for them and, as a result, they fund something that technically could benefit us all. And that’s how we come to live in a world driven by the whims of rich people. I don’t like living in this world, even when the rich person is Dolly Parton. When it comes to rendering some kind of judgment on who Parton was as a person, I simply cannot say. And neither can you.

Like you, I’ve never met her, much less spent any real amount of time with her—the kind of time it takes to really know someone; to see her, warts and all, in her toughest times and in her brightest times. The kind of time spent together that’s necessary to even begin to understand the continuous unfolding that is another person and, thus, be able to speak in any real way to who they are.

Yet thousands upon thousands, if not millions, of us have been taking to traditional and social media to mourn the loss of a woman considered to be an icon; to tout the qualities of a person we simply do not know. To worship an idol. I hate to say it, but I gotta say it, so get out your umbrellas because rain is headed for your parade: This kind of glorification of anyone, even Dolly Parton, does us all a disservice by reinforcing a few pretty fucked up things.

First, that getting rich is some kind of worthwhile pursuit. While Parton may have said that being a billionaire is a moral failure, she still died with far more money than any one person could ever need. Worshiping Parton is worshiping the rich—the accumulation of this made-up thing called money that powers this made-up system called capitalism that accomplishes nothing but concentrating power in the hands of a deranged, greedy few while destroying existence itself in the process. Yuck.

What matters in this life is different for everyone, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that the accumulation of money could ever qualify as a meaningful way to spend our miraculous, fleeting, statistically improbable existence on this pale blue dot floating like a mote of dust in a cosmic sunbeam—that at the end of this life, whenever it arrives, that one could feel any true satisfaction from the accumulation of wealth, mostly because doing so requires missing out on almost everything else.

Now, if Parton had stepped off that money-making train with a million or two in the bank? If she walked away from the limelight and, still making music, performed her infamous songs for free? That’s someone I’d be impressed with and interested in. That is, however, someone you and I may well have never heard of because this kind of living isn’t what the system celebrates. Instead, it celebrates music like Parton’s, which, just like Taylor Swift’s, is so manufactured by the system that it’s far less like art and much more like business. And business is simply boring. It’s the same old shit repackaged again and again in slightly different ways because capitalism allows no room for real creativity. That’s why nostalgia is so popular and so prolific these days—it sells. Yes, Parton gave us some wonderful music, but we’ll never know what her music might have been if it wasn’t all squeezed through the money-making music business that flattens everything into a sliver of likability designed to turn a profit. That’s a loss.

Second, Parton worship effectively makes us grateful for handouts. Is it nice that Parton gave books to kids? Absolutely. Shouldn’t kids just be able to have the books they want and need without a wealthy benefactor? Yes, duh. They’re called public libraries. When we grovel at the feet of wealthy patrons rather than demand that we all have the means to acquire what we want and need for ourselves; when we celebrate the scraps we get rather than question and ultimately settle for nothing less than the complete and total destruction of the system that lets a few accumulate so much while so many have so little, we prop the whole thing up. And we do it with a smile on our faces as they kick our teeth in.

Third is, which I’m becoming incredibly suspicious of as I age, that this sad little human world we’ve made up contains anything worthwhile at all. Parton dominated the human-made world of the music business. I just don’t see much to celebrate there. She was ultimately good at making money from music in a man’s world, but the idea that that’s anything to celebrate belies a Sheryl Sandberg approach to the patriarchy where the worthwhile goal is to lean in, to climb up, to beat them at their own game rather than to step outside of, or, ideally, to undo the whole problematic charade in the first place.

The more I spend time in nature, the more growing seasons that pass in which I am honored to exist beside the ancient forbs and grasses that comprise the native prairie that surrounds my home in Minneapolis—the plants that would tower far above any human, even those on horseback, and stretch as far as the eye can see in all directions if white people had never thrashed their way across the land with which Indigenous communities were living in harmony—the more I’m disenchanted with anything and everything that has to do with the human world, Dolly Parton included.

The fact that these plants still exist despite their near-total destruction is miraculous to say the least, a feat I find much more impressive than money-oriented music making. There’s more to revere in a single strand of golden rod that carries millennia of wisdom in its wisps than there is in Parton’s wigs, even if she was a woman far ahead of her time. The land gives literally everything to everyone, but we turn our focus to rich celebrities instead. We aspire to be a Dolly in a world of Donalds rather than a prairie dropseed in a world of data centers.

And that, I think, is exactly where we’ve gone wrong. The land gives us everything we need every day, but we spend our time celebrating celebrity instead. Humans, even the best among us, are just so plainly unimpressive compared to the natural world. Dolly Parton may have been a wonderful person. Who can say? Certainly not me. But even if she was everything we want and believe her to be, she still pales in comparison to the natural world that has been here long before us and, albeit damaged and maybe even nearly destroyed, will manage to be here long after our silly human systems have led us like cattle on a cow path to our own destruction.