Jacquerie (Instrumental)

I first encountered the term ‘jacquerie’ when I was looking for a word that would characterize a public suspicion or action regarding a possible conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This was around 1970. I was writing and editing for Fanfare Magazine / NOB (North of Boston News). Friends of mine in Salem, MA accumulated an enormous file of research on the assassination and asked me if I’d consider paring it down to something publishable, something that would alert the local sleepy-time harbor inhabitants of Salem that there was a growing national interest in questioning the Warren Commision’s findings.

Jim Garrison’s Heritage of Stone and Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment were the galvanizing texts that excited the conspiracy theorists. At the time, other publications would not discredit them altogether and supported a reopening of the investigation.

In assembling this mass of information I came upon the word ‘jacquerie’, which means ‘peasant revolt’. I used it in my article to introduce the outrage of Heritage of Stone: “Garrison’s attack is no mere ‘jacquerie’ towards the ineptness of the political proceedings of the country, but a conviction....” Quite a stretch in terms of clarity of context, a bit pretentious, but I never forgot the word. When I became reacquainted with it through A Tale of Two Cities, I was struck by the novel’s atmosphere and its poetry of revolt. It exists in the weather, the premonitions, the shifting loyalties, the listless blood feuds, the chase of fortune, the narrative threading of sharp edges—from needles to knives to spades to the Guillotine blades. But most of all it exists in the dreaded march of Madame DeFarge stalking Lucie Manette. DeFarge is a force—nearly unstoppable, like Milton’s Satan: his ‘thunder’ storming down to murderous inevitability. The “Vengeance’— Defarge’s fellow sociopath, deranged knitter, and accomplice in the novel—is an appropriate word for all that America has become in responding to 9/11.

Whether it’s through pursuing an unjustified war, sanctioning torture, suspending Constitutional rights here at home, tolerating the paranoid invectives of right-wing media, or using religion as a force for bloviating righteousness against those for expressing ordinary dissent—vengeance is in our blood and has become our religion. Dave’s “Jacquerie” begins with a storm riding on a train picking up steam, rhythmically trumpeting the oblivion that is explored in “Frogs Will Never Fall from the Sky.” Grating, but countered by the subtle chords of a vibraphone, it ends with the crowing of the cock—like so much of everything that goes right and wrong when we wake up to history .