April 13 - Fall of the Star High School Running Back

This is an interesting song because it sneaks up on you in a way. The story of a high school sport's star's fall from grace is fertile and oft visited territory, and I felt like I could hear the line about blowing out his knee before I heard the line about blowing out his knee. But then we get, well, interesting.

John is, unsurprisingly, an explicitly political writer when the occasion calls for it, and the second half of this song that deals with the hunger of the prison industrial complex when it comes to young people making dumb mistakes is where the solid set up of the first verse gets its actual meat. It recognises, through its small town examples, the various incentives that exist to turn William Staniforth Donahue from a young man on a promising track to a prisoner with a jumpsuit and a number, and how at each point from the crime to the arrest to the sentencing guidelines to the incarceration it was in someone's interests for this young man's doom to get worse.

And then you go back and think that even this promising track is as thin as a hair. This is a high school in West Texas. A decent running back might be able to turn solid yardage into a college scholarship. Might. And a decent college player might turn pro. Might. But this is a funnel leading into a funnel leading into a funnel, and the exit points other than the actual distant success go from mediocre but okay to mediocre but bad to simple bad.

The system lets a few people rise. Just enough that everyone else shuts the fuck up.