Quote It Like It’s Scripture

“Made Up English Oceans” came out in 2014, two years before the first election of President Tr*mp 2016. In hindsight, the song feels politically prescient — as if predicting how misinformation, xenophobia, and just plain old racism would shape the 2016 presidential race and its victor.

Mike Cooley doesn’t have a crystal ball; he just did what more folks should do, which is to look back at history and try to figure out how it’s going to repeat itself.

Unlike many of my favorite Cooley songs, I actually know what this one is about, because he has told us. "Made Up English Oceans" is inspired by the career of Republican political operator Lee Atwater and written from the point of view of Atwater (or someone like him). As Cooley said at the time of the English Oceans release, "It's him making his pitch, telling what he understands about young, Southern men.”

On the 2015 concert album It’s Great to Be Alive, Cooley offers a rare backstory before launching into the song:

“Back in 1980, President Jimmy Carter came to my hometown to kick off his 1980 campaign. And so did the KKK. My little quaint, small town, as charming as it was, got to be on national news with the president of the United States and those assholes.”

So what does that formative experience have to do with Lee Atwater and “made up English stomach contents?” Let’s dig into it.

On the album, “Made Up English Oceans” has a gentle, galloping tempo, but I prefer the live versions, which crash out of the gate like an amphetamine-fueled horse:

“6x9 and counting down in one after the other
they’ll go running up and down the road, angry as their mothers
over senseless acts of selfishness on made up English oceans
and made up English stomach contents tied to senseless notions”

When played live, the song has a frenetic and sinister energy that’s better suited to the fast-talking, gladhandling politicians that inspired it. Jay Gonzalez’s organ rises above the riptide and rip-shit pace, screaming like a warning lest you get swept away. I’m partial to the version from the 2019 Homecoming Show, where Jay really takes the organ to a new level of gorgeous lunacy.

In a serendipitous moment of cultural symmetry, around the time I set out to write about this song, the history podcast Behind the Bastards released a three-part series all about Lee Atwater, which is definitely worth a listen.

A native of South Carolina, Lee Atwater worked on campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush; he was also a senior partner in the political consulting firm run by Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. Atwater’s claims to fame include several innovations in political underhandedness — like push polling — capable of spreading political falsehoods as effectively as gossip and urban myths.

To the gullible and easily persuaded, a made-up ocean is as good as a flat earth.

The lyric “made up English stomach contents tied to senseless notions” references a long-running and debunked rumor about Rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped because he’d consumed too much semen. (If somehow you’ve managed to avoid this urban legend, you can read about it on Snopes. Rod Stewart also addressed the rumor: "I have never orally pleasured even a solitary sailor, let alone a ship's worth in one evening.")

Goes Cooley’s logic, if fabricated and silly rumors can travel across oceans, then you can bet highly skilled political operatives can spread misinformation just as efficiently. To the gullible and easily persuaded, a made-up ocean is as good as a flat earth.

As Cooley told GQ in April 2014, “Look at the idiotic stuff people believe just because they heard it from their idiot friends. So imagine if they heard it from a gentlemanly statesman who reminds them of a preacher.”

In “Made Up English Oceans,” the narrator outlines his strategy for wooing white southerners, which involves preying on voters’ fears of being replaced by any group they don’t belong to:

“Once you grab them by the pride their hearts are bound to follow,
their natural fear of anything less manly or less natural,
like gunless sheriffs caught on lonesome roads and live to tell it
how hard it is for meaner men without the lead to sell it”

“They say when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of the South, it's all about The Three Gs: god, guns, and gay stuff,” Cooley told GQ. “So I tried to include all three of those [in Made Up English Oceans].”

Although Atwater didn’t invent “the Southern Strategy” — an odious euphemism that means leveraging racism for political gain — he sure as hell modernized it, relying more on dog whistles than explicit racism. Actually, let’s allow Atwater himself to explain it, in a leaked interview from 1981:

[Editor’s note: while I censor this slur, Atwater uses the whole word, with a hard R. You can hear it in full here.]

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N****r, n****r.'"

It was reportedly Atwater’s idea to have Reagan deliver a “states rights” speech while campaigning in Mississippi, which was strategically held near the site where three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. And just 16 years later, the KKK would show up in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

To borrow a line from another brilliant Cooley song, political dirty-tricksters like Atwater have to turn themselves into grievance merchants. And to sell those grievances, they need simple, catchy slogans that are easily repeated and rapidly spread. Which brings me to probably my favorite verse:

“Only simple men can see the logic in whatever
smarter men can whittle down till you can fit it on a sticker
get it stuck like mud and bugs to names that set the standard,
they’ll live it like it’s gospel and they’ll quote it like it’s scripture.”

Lee Atwater is dead now, probably drinking sweet tea in hell with George Wallace and the devil himself. If you want to learn more about him, I highly recommend the aforementioned Behind the Bastards episodes.

In a later issue, I will tackle the song “Grievance Merchants” — which is in conversation with "Made Up English Oceans," but this time with more incels!

Tell me your feelings about and favorite versions of “Made Up English Oceans,” below in the comments. Also, does anyone know what the hell "6x9" means?

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