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Even for a woman who has helmed many reintroductions to the public over her career, angel status is a new level. Public relations magic cannot explain it all. Many celebrities do the right thing to garner adoration and attention. That is the job of a celebrity. Ascending to something higher, something unassailable as Dolly Parton has done over the past decade takes more than media savvy. It takes a willing political moment. If anything, becoming an emblem of a culture’s highest valued attributes, is resistant to public relations savvy. The artist doesn’t create totem status. The culture does. I spent months mapping out how and why our political moment chose Dolly Parton to embody its contradictions and projections. I watched hundreds of hours of footage spanning Dolly from girl singer to drag icon to political figure. I’ve read every academic book ever written about her and enough of the popular books to predict the conclusions of the ones I did not get to. I’ve interviewed historians, film scholars, cultural critics, and country music stars. I’ve also listened to Dolly herself, reading her as a text. Across all that close study, one story emerges: Dolly is a celebrity among celebrities, an icon, and a national treasure because she has cobbled together a diverse, multiracial, pansexual audience for working-class feminist songcraft and queer camp subversiveness. That is the narrative hook of the wildly popular, Peabody Award–winning 2019 podcast Dolly Parton’s America. That show cemented the taken-for-granted wisdom that Dolly’s diverse audience is the reason for her ascendance. By the transitive property of celebrity, diversity is good because Dolly is good. We like that story as much as we like Dolly Parton. Rather, we like Dolly Parton because we like that story about who we are. The idea that Dolly is Dolly because of the strength of American diversity is one that pretends to be about how good Dolly is when it is really a story about how good we believe we are. In this story, the soul of America is a progressive teleology that will always, inevitably bend toward justice. America’s soul is immune to everyday evidence of its fallibility, and outright antagonistic to any suggestion that it is more myth than manifest destiny. Belief in the soul of America is as strong as another belief, with similar embodied metaphors. The soul is always at war with the nation’s racist bones. You know the racist bones. Those are the bones of which every good white American is fond of claiming not to have. If the racist bone exists, it is rendered as vestigial and unruly as a floating rib. There one minute but gone the next, and of no real consequence to the working of the body. All of my reading also revealed this: Dolly Parton is one of very few living texts that could survive projections of America’s soul without buckling beneath its contradictions. It is treasonous to do so but if one strips away all the adulation, they are left with an odd totem for our socio-political times. Dolly is a white Southern multi-millionaire boomer who produces self-consciously white music while wearing a stylized drag of a fallen Southern belle. Only a society that willfully believes itself “post-racist” could produce such a queen. Post-racist does not mean there is no more racism. It means that we believe there is an us after we rid ourselves of our errant racist bones, which we are certain will come to pass. We craft Dolly into an unproblematic fave because the most problematic part of The Dolly Parton Moment is us. When this nation is feeling its most troubled, it is always about race and always because it is being racist. The moment that seeded the ground for The Dolly Parton Moment is no different. We are in the second full year of visible social movements, from coast to coast. Even small-town America has seen its share of Black Lives Matter marches and pussy hats and LGBTQ pride parades. Nice society book clubs have felt compelled to adopt books that admonish white readers to “do the work” of becoming anti-racist. Driving by a small, rural Unitarian church about five miles from my North Carolina home in the fall of 2020, I watched as 50 or so senior citizens had a Black Lives Matter picnic on the church lawn. Until the 2020 presidential election, the evening news oscillated between political nihilism from the White House and police violence on the square. Even centrist politicians were, by 2020, using phrases like “white supremacy” and “institutionalized racism” in polite discourse. In times such as these, popular culture looks South for white escapism and validation. In her 2003 book Reconstructing Dixie, film scholar Tara McPherson writes about the cyclical popular consumption of Southern imagery. Fictions about the South emerge when the nation requires a “symbolic battleground in national reactions to issues of race and racial (in)justices.” Once it travels to the imagined South, popular culture is keen on projecting its inner conflict onto a woman. Literature professor Katherine Henninger traces this preference for a feminized South through Zora Neale Hurston to Scarlett O’Hara, “from Mammy to NASCAR mom,” when she argues that images of “Southern woman … undergird dominant notions of southerness.” In any culture, a woman is a convenient scapegoat for societal angst. In the U.S., the Southern woman is suited for the task because white Southern womanhood is singularly responsible for producing the kind of South that mass culture wants to consume.