One thing I adore about America’s homespun music is that, within the songs ordinary people devise for their own amusement, is that they often encapsulate profound intellectual debates, in simple and often humorous ways.
For example, the United States is currently at the point of a civil war about who should control power. Should the government control the power of propane? Or the people? Who should say whether or not we should have gas stoves. Whose business is it?
A creepy element of this conflict involves some people saying, “Just leave us alone.” But the government says, “It is our duty to help you.” Then the government feels entitled to “help” people who want to be left alone. The governors become bullies, shoving into people’s lives when they are not wanted. Then people say, “Mind your own business.”
Another creepy element involves people who have become “welfare dependents” and who actually do want help, yet fail to get help from the government because the officials in charge of money are directing the power-of-the-purse elsewhere. These “welfare dependent” people feel they are the government’s business, and cry out, “Mind your own business.”
(For a current example, in the horrible Lahaina fires in Hawaii those who depended on the government expected the government to supply water to fight fires, sirens to warn of fires, and proper management of traffic in an emergency, but the government felt it wasn’t their business; their “focus” was elsewhere.)
(Lahaina was especially troubling because the people who trusted traffic authority died, while those who defied the traffic authorities escaped. This should suggest that the “business” of your own survival is best left to you.)
The United States is based upon the idea that the best person to be in charge of our business is ourselves. Yet our new government seems to suggest they are wiser, and should be in charge of our business.
So who are we talking to, when we say, “mind your own business.”
Tweezers-intellectuals like Karl Marx wrote miles and miles of tedious print parsing and re-parsing the tiresome topic of where the dividing line should be between public and personal “business”, but American bumpkins with banjos, fiddles and guitars covered the vast subject in less than two minutes, (and got your toes tapping.)
What I find fascinating is the admission in the music that when you work for someone who “signs the check” that you are doing their business. No man is an island. We are on the same team. However unspoken in such an interaction is the idea that the employer will be doing your business. He must pay enough, and respect your dignity as an equal. If he fails…….
It is my boss's business that I do. It is not your business. That is true. And if boss asks too much, and I am through I sing, "It's nobody's business what I do". If my gal drives a limousine, and I Supply the gasoline, it's nobody's Business what I do. Yet way up high God's eyes are seeing; His deities All aim at freeing. Maybe angels have Some work to do. And, because they have got No fleshy body's earthly autograph, It's no body's business what I've thought. It's no body's business. It's no body's Business. And yet it proves that God is.
Sunrise's Swansong 