With Trump’s tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and combat-fatigued foot soldiers guarding masked ICE agents in Los Angeles, who’s listening to “Appalachian Spring”? How does Aaron Copland’s World War II-era patriotic evocation of the American pastoral strike our ears in an era of xenophobic, gun-toting vigilantism, when small towns are propagandized as the last stand of the real, white American, under siege by dog- and cat-eating immigrants? Can we hear “Appalachian Spring” without picturing J.D. Vance’s smug round face—a darling of the global far right who has made his career trashing Appalachia’s people?
