In Such Ugly Times, the Only True Protest Is Beauty—Phil Ochs

SONIC CONNECTIONS | The Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

Protest-Song-of-the-Day: “The Suit” by Hugh Prestwood

Now he wears that suit forever

He truly is a man of note

For he wears the State of Nebraska

As his overcoat…

—

The Well-Fitted Ending: Notes on Dignity, Dirt, and the Man Who Wore His State

by John St. Evola, Editor, C-of-C-C Newsletter

Filed under: SONIC CONNECTIONS | Idealized Outcomes

Department of Sartorial Metaphysics

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This is not a lament. It is a final fitting.

In a time when identity dissolves like sugar in rain and men die clothed in brands they never understood, this song offers us a rarity: a coherent life. The suit is not ironic. It is not vintage. It is his—though once worn by another, now pressed and worn into shape by labor and love. A secondhand suit, made entirely his own. And it fits—not only his body, but the story of his body.

“He truly is a man of note / For he wears the State of Nebraska / As his overcoat”

The Council has long maintained that there are some men whose lives grow so organically from the land, they become legible to the soil itself. This man—unnamed, unfussy—is one of them. He did not conquer the earth. He stewarded it. And when the time came, the land accepted him like a son returning home, his overcoat stitched from boundary lines and barn sweat.

“And they left him resting out there with his folks…”

This is the kind of funeral that remembers without remembering. No plaque needed. The wind knows. The trees nod. The kinfolk at his side are not just blood relations—they are plotmates in the great agrarian epic.

“…and came away from Lincoln with a revelation…”

Even in the seat of bureaucracy, a seed of transcendence can sprout. What they learned in Lincoln was not about policy but promise: that a man who gives his life to care, to craft, to kin, is already halfway resurrected. He does not need resurrection as reward—his life was the reward.

“…this rough and humble tiller of the soil / Would rise out of the fertile ground and meet his maker / Wearing that suit”

He won’t rise as a ghost, or a saint, or a data set. Or maybe he will. He’ll rise as himself. In his secondhand suit. With his yellow neck gaiter. He’ll nod politely, dust off his sleeves, and say what he always said when the sun rose:

“Let’s get to it.”

And if he doesn’t rise in person, he will rise in those who follow—in descendants who walk the same furrows, who speak his sayings without knowing they’re his, who find their strength in the memory of a man who wore the land well. His resurrection is not delayed—it is distributed.

This is not solemn. This is beautiful. This is earned. The Council recommends this song not as a protest against death, but as a hymn of completion. Protest becomes joy when the truth has already been lived.

“We do not fear death when it comes dressed in the clothes we earned.”

—J. St. Evola, “The Stitch That Binds” (Field Notes from the Tiller’s Gospel)