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Trolley Car Blues: Of Mules and Men

Trolley Car Blues: Of mules and men








At first it seems a bit of stretch to put far fetched thought experiments with real world gritty blues, but that worry fades.  Trolleys and trains loom large as themes in blues music, and of course in the actual production of the tracks and cars.  Take Michael Sandel's presentation of a couple well know versions of the "trolley problem" as presented in his well know class on Justice at Harvard. One hub issue in the Trolley cases is how to compare the worth and value of a human life to other human lives, and how to determine costs and benefits, rights and obligations with that variable in mind when we make decisions which affect multiple lives in divergent ways.  Sandel notes that we have a difficulty of finding a 'common currency' with which to represent the relative worth of multiple and diverse human lives.  The traditional philosophical problem is called 'the problem of intersubjective utility comparisons'.  

How to represent the value of black lives in comparison to white lives has, of course, always been an issue in the U.S.  One thing we hear in the blues is the lived experience of communities whose value is measured in some cases by a fraction (3/5th rule), in some cases constitutional amendments, in other cases by the colors and hues in the visible spectrum of light, and yet others in the amount of labor and utility one can produce, in many cases, how much cotton you can bring back.

In The Land Where The Blues Began, Alan Lomax hauntingly describes the relationship between 'males and mules', between african american men and the mules they use to work.  Working the fields, the tracks or whatever you have to work as a black laborer usually involved a work mule.  It was a rule of thumb that one mule is worth about 4 black lives.  Black lives did matter, but at a rate of 4 to 1 compared to a mule's life.


Belton Sutherland elaborates a bit- Kill that ol grey mule
Son house - Empire State Express

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