Work Text:
I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago.
I couldn’t say, ‘Well, he looks just like the Chrysler Building, except he’s got chapped lips and he’s wearing a radio salesman, and of course, he’s not a skyscraper, he’s a goddamn messenger of the Lord.’
I couldn’t say that because you look nothing like the Chrysler Building, nothing like the things with wings in movies. Plus, civilians tend to stop listening when they hear you talk like angels are true-blue creatures, not just from the movies.
So I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a kid – something Sammy and me snuck into see in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. I guess I saw it in 1983 or ’84: somewhere in there. I think I was seven or eight or six. It was a movie about rural electrification and a perfect, pretty, mundane kind of movie to show kids like us, on our way to seeing it all.
The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances, like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio.
Then they built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.
There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.
Then the movie showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.
Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.
The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.
It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to AC/DC singing on the radio. I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world.
I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to “Highway to Hell” on the radio.
That’s how you look to me.