Despite a master's degree in English Literature, and a job that does not require getting my hands dirty, I love country music.

Hank. Johnny. Jones. Haggard. Loretta. Tammy. Sturgill. Little Jimmy Dickens. Willie. Waylon.

It started when I was growing up in Missouri, and it stuck. Country, and its cousin, folk music, are what's on my Spotify, along with some Cajun and a bunch of Delta blues.

Hard times. Bad times. Loving. Working. Drinking. Cheating. Heartbreak. Jesus.

I love it all.

"Country tells a story," they say, and the best of it does.

Bearded and more po' than poor, Oliver Anthony oughta be just my kind of honky-tonk wail.

But he's not.

Oh, I listened to "Rich Men North of Richmond," but I didn't hear any of country's grace, none of its poetry. What I heard was unvarnished, personalized complaint, a straining for victimhood.

As near as I can tell, Oliver Anthony dropped out of high school, did a lot of drugs, ended up with the kind of job you get if you drop out of high school and do a lot of drugs, and now it's everyone's fault but his.

Railing against Congress, people on welfare and the shadowy visitors to Jeffrey Epstein's island, Anthony finds every token of victimhood but fails to locate the golden ticket of personal responsibility.

That funny, too, because Anthony identifies as Appalachian. Until they invented welfare and OxyContin, Appalachia was an American monument of self-reliance, of no shoes and hard pride.

Done now, as the last son of the hollers reaches for his right to snivel. "We don't take nothin' from nobody" is dead as hell, and in its place is, "Pity me. Pity me. Pity me."

Just "me." Alone in the pines, insisting I have nothing to do with my own downfall and no interest in anyone else's.

Compassion for yourself is easy. Compassion for others is hard.

So, Woody Guthrie, lifelong complainer, wrote about Okies blown west by the dust storms, his own people, but took time to write about Mexican illegals killed when the plane flying them back to Mexico crashed and killed them all. Johnny Cash, white boy son of the South, sang of the Native American war hero Ira Hayes, dying drunk in a ditch.

A trade school diploma, no drugs and a job as a union carpenter would have saved Oliver Anthony, but he doesn't know that, or he wants to turn his face away and look for someone to blame.

Chicago is full of people whose Black and white grandparents took their futures in their calloused hands and ran like hell from the one-room sharecropper's shack and the noose. Their grandkids live in the suburbs now and work in air-conditioned offices because Grandpa and Grandma came North. They had a choice. They could stand in a packed-dirt front yard and complain about the man they sharecropped for, or they could do what Americans do, which is pridefully shut up and outwork the problem.

I've defended country music for decades, explaining the rough, beautiful poetry of Hank Williams Sr. and Merle Haggard to disdainful hipster friends.

"It's not just pickup trucks and my woman done left me," I 'd say. "Some of those boys can really write."

Oliver Anthony can't.

Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks. To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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