Essay 6: Rhinestone Courage

Dolly Parton passed away this week, and the world seems a little less whole.

Not because we lost a great singer, though we did. Not because we lost one of the most gifted songwriters of the last century, a shrewd businesswoman, a remarkable philanthropist, though all of that is true. We are less whole because Dolly Parton was one of the last public figures who moved through a divided world without dividing. She was the same person in every room. And in being so fully, so unapologetically herself, she made it impossible for anyone to use her as a weapon.

In a world that profits from keeping us divided, that is a form of courage. It is also, I think, a form of love.

If you want to understand what I mean, listen to Dolly Parton's America, the podcast Jad Abumrad made for WNYC and Radiolab. It is inquisitive and rigorous in a way that most cultural journalism isn't. An attempt to understand how a woman from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains became the only figure in American public life that nobody, on any side, could claim to own. Conservatives loved her. Liberals loved her. She declined, gracefully and without apology, to love either of them back in the way they wanted.

That wasn't passivity. It was something more demanding: the refusal to let her wholeness be divided for someone else's purposes. The moment she declared a side, she would stop being Dolly and start being a symbol. And symbols, in our age, exist only to be weaponized.

She grew up poor in Appalachian Tennessee, a place that had every reason to be bitter, and she turned that material into something that opened rather than closed. She understood, somehow, that you can name hard things without using them as fuel for contempt. That warmth is not weakness. That refusing to divide is not the same as refusing to stand for anything.

She wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You and Coat of Many Colors. She funded the Imagination Library and put books in the hands of millions of children. She helped fund research that saved lives during a pandemic. She turned down a statue in her honour twice, because she didn't think she'd done enough to deserve it. And through all of it, she remained recognizably, irreducibly herself: the rhinestones, the laugh, the warmth that felt, somehow, like it was meant specifically for you.

I've been thinking about what she modelled, and where else I've seen it. The answer, more often than not, is in artists. At their best, artists hold contradiction. They speak across lines that the world has declared uncrossable. They refuse to let the room stay comfortable in its divisions. The arts are not decoration on a civilization. They are, or they can be, its immune system.

Dolly Parton was proof of that.

Canada and the United States are in a trade war. Two countries that share not just a border but a language, a history, a sensibility, caught in a moment of performed hostility that serves no one who actually has to live with the consequences. It is hard not to wonder, watching it unfold, what Dolly would have made of it. She grew up on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. She understood, viscerally, that the people on either side of a line have more in common than the line suggests. She built a career on exactly that truth.

We could use that understanding right now.

I think about this in Calgary, where we are navigating a trade dispute that is reshaping our economy, our relationship to our neighbours, and our sense of ourselves. We are a young city, young enough that our civic character is still being written. Young enough that we still have real choices about who we want to be.

The easier choice is to let the loudest, most aggrieved voices set the terms. To perform the division that's on offer. The harder choice is to insist on something different: a civic life that is fully itself, that holds its contradictions without collapsing, that builds for everyone rather than performing for the already-convinced. That believes, as Dolly seemed to believe, that you can be rooted and still reach.

I don't know exactly what Calgary's character will turn out to be. We are still writing it, which means we still get to choose.

Dolly Parton spent eighty years showing us that it is possible to be undivided in a divided world. That the rhinestone and the republic are not opposites. That a person, or a city, can be fully themselves and still belong to everyone.

We all have a choice about whether to learn from that.

Listen to Dolly Parton's America from WNYC and Radiolab. Nine episodes. It will change how you think about what public life could look like.