I’ve never been much for the “Grateful Dead” though I don’t look askance at those who love them. Taste is not a barometer of character. So I don’t listen to them and that’s that. But inexplicably a song of theirs has surfaced in my head. The song is “Truckin’” which was everywhere when I entered college. Picture me cleaning the grout in my shower and hearing it in my noggin. Where did it come from? What nefarious joke from my sub-conscious is being foisted upon me?
Jung said you always become the thing you fight the most. Its a clever line but I don’t buy it. I’ve been fighting ableism all my life and I am not in danger of hating the disabled or sneering at their plight. Of course Jung was talking about inner demons. But even there he was wrong. I have a monster under my pillow and while he’s capable of piercing my heart while I sleep, he ain’t me. It frustrates him. How I wish Jung was here so I could argue with him. Anyway, “Truckin’” is stuck on replay in my frontal lobes and I finally figured out why?
Its the Doo-dah Man. He’s part of a list of nasty street people who the song’s narrator must get past or leave behind—gotta keep going, “truckin’”. What is a Doo-dah Man? According to my friend “Claude”:
“Doo-dah” has a long vernacular life in American English. Its most famous appearance is the nonsense refrain of Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” (1850), which gave us “doo-dah, doo-dah” and “all the doo-dah day.” By the late 19th century it had spread into general slang as a catch-all for a gadget or trinket (doodad, doohickey, doodah) and for fuss or excitement. The British idiom “all of a doodah” means flustered or agitated. So the word already carried a feel of the generic, the unnamed thing or the faintly absurd.
In “Truckin’,” the Doodah man is a roadside oracle who hands the narrator some hard-won advice about playing the hand you’re dealt. That fits the song’s cast of street-corner figures, hustlers, and half-trustworthy cats who sound like they’re selling something. A name built on a nonsense word suits a character who is a type rather than a person: the cheerfully shady wise guy, the carnival-barker sage.
And there I was with an old toothbrush scrubbing grout when I realized the Doo-dah Man is Donald Trump. He’s a type rather than a person, the oft times cheery wise guy selling hate.
But now this Doo-dah is wearing off. He sneers at “affordability” in front of ever smaller audiences. Maybe, just maybe we’re truckin’ past him. You may say I’m a dreamer.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
