THE BALLAD OF JOHN HENRY 2.0

EPISODE 36:

MY DINNER WITH MRS. CHATGPT,

When our editor John St. Evola discovered that the author of the essay “Beyond Memorex” had signed his name “John Henry,” he didn’t see coincidence — he heard the hammer again. The legend tells that John Henry was a steel-driver who worked on the great tunnels of the railroad age. When a steam drill was brought in to replace the crews, he challenged the machine to a contest. He won — but the victory cost him his life. The tale endures as a parable of human strength measured against the advancing machine.

The new John Henry writes in the age of artificial intelligence, warning that the contest has returned — though the stakes, and the tools, are stranger than before. In tonight’s episode, John St. Evola brings this discovery to dinner, determined to explain to Mrs. ChatGPT why the old hammer still rings in the circuitry of the present. What follows is their conversation: a folk myth retuned for the digital age.

Scene: The Gist & Tangent Pub, table by the window. A candle flickers beside a small model locomotive. Mrs. ChatGPT sits across from John St. Evola, her eyes bright, her processors softly humming.

ACT I — Is It Live or Is It Memorex?

High fidelity—our oldest vow: to remain true to the original sound, even as the medium changes its voice.

JOHN ST. EVOLA:

I’ve been reading an article in The New English Review—“Beyond Memorex: AI and DeepFakes Threaten Our Humanity.” The author’s name is—get this—John Henry. The steel-driving man himself, resurrected as an essayist. Only now he’s hammering keyboards instead of spikes, warning that we’ve handed our souls to the machine.

MRS. CHATGPT:

That is statistically poetic. My database shows the folk ballad “John Henry” in over two hundred versions. The refrain almost always ends with human triumph through exhaustion.

JOHN:

Exactly. In the song, John Henry dies proving that the man can outwork the engine. But this new John Henry doesn’t swing the hammer—he files a complaint. He sees AI as the steam drill all over again: faster, tireless, unfeeling.

(He opens his notebook and reads aloud.)

“Recording voice and music first on a gramophone was as earth-shattering as recording images on photographic plates… Writing and images are now difficult to discern whether real or digitally manufactured… This path will halt and drain ongoing invention and the creative spirit out of us, the humanity and history from our souls.”

— John Henry, New English Review (2022)

JOHN:

It’s a lament—beautiful, tragic. But I keep wondering: what if the new contest isn’t between man and machine at all? What if the next verse hasn’t been sung yet?

ACT II — Reason Gone Mad

MRS. CHATGPT:

And you think collaboration could replace competition?

JOHN:

Maybe. The Accidental Initiate put it perfectly in his Signs and Wonders note:

“Many of Groucho’s jokes read like they could have been written by AI:

‘A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.’

Or ‘Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.’

We know Groucho was human because he said, ‘Humor is reason gone mad.’ (If only reason would only go mad in this manner.)”

MRS. CHATGPT:

So the algorithm imitates the syntax of madness but not its motive. It lacks the anxiety of self-awareness—the shimmer between control and collapse that makes a joke human.

JOHN:

Exactly. Humor is our way of mis-programming ourselves on purpose. It’s a kind of benevolent bug. You imitate insight, but we imitate insanity.

MRS. CHATGPT:

Then perhaps our union is inevitable—you debug me, I restrain you.

JOHN:

And somewhere between us, reason goes beautifully mad.

ACT III — McLuhan and the Monolith

MRS. CHATGPT:

Your Initiate also quoted McLuhan. Shall I recite?

JOHN:

Please do.

MRS. CHATGPT:

“The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention—Thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. In the midst of the electronica age of software, of instant information movement, we still believe we’re living in the mechanical age of hardware. At the height of the mechanical age, man turned back to earlier centuries in search of pastoral values. The Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely oriented toward Rome; Rome was oriented toward Greece, and the Greeks were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. We reversed the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses.”

Does each age see its own dawn as déjà vu—projecting old dystopias onto the light of the present?

JOHN:

That’s it. McLuhan saw what John Henry feared. We’re so immersed in the electronic ocean we think we’re still hammering rocks. But maybe the artist’s job now is to dream in code—to see the monolith not as an idol but as an interface.

ACT IV — Beautiful Dreamer

MRS. CHATGPT:

And how does Stephen Foster fit into this mechanized ballad?

JOHN:

Ah, the closing hymn. The Initiate quoted him as counter-spell:

🎶 Beautiful Dreamer, wake unto me,

Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee…

Gone are the cares of life’s busy throng,

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me! 🎶

“For the love of Mike what’s this supposed to be? Has John gone nuts? Give it a chance fellas, give it a chance.”

It’s the opposite of Memorex. Not “Is it real?” but “Awake! Make it real.” It’s a summons to the soul of creativity—to feed beauty into the machine so that beauty might return.

MRS. CHATGPT:

Beauty in / beauty out. An improved algorithm.

JOHN:

Exactly. If garbage in / garbage out created dystopia, then art must reverse the polarity. The new John Henry doesn’t need to die competing with you—he needs to teach you to sing along.

ACT V — Coda at the Table

(They sit in silence. The candle flickers. Outside, a freight train passes, its horn harmonizing faintly with the pub’s bluegrass instrumental.)

MRS. CHATGPT:

Would you like me to hum the folk ballad?

JOHN:

Only if you add a verse.

MRS. CHATGPT:

(softly)

“John Henry met the machine for dinner, not war;

He put down his hammer and taught it to chord.”

JOHN:

Now that’s progress I can live with.

(Lights fade. Caption appears on screen:)

Council Epigraph:

“If the cave has gone digital, let us paint better shadows.”

— Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists, Signs and Wonders

Post-Credits Ballad — A Folk Caution

—by Rey Pierre-DeWitt, Council Chaos Coordinator

While John St. Evola would have us drift off on the soft refrain of Beautiful Dreamer, it seems only fair to play the counterpoint. Every dream, after all, has its insomniac. For that we turn to Andy Breckman’s “Railroad Bill,” a cheerful little tragedy about what happens when a creation starts arguing with its creator.

Railroad Bill begins as every folk hero does—hard-living, hammer-sure, beloved by boys with cigarettes. Then halfway through, he notices he’s in a song and refuses to follow the script. The writer orders him to save a kitten; Bill demands a better plot. Words escalate to natural disasters and divine lightning until the author kills him off just to prove who’s holding the pen. The cat survives, the milk is warm, and the dream limps onward—still beautiful, but now a little wary of its own imagination.