This Vox piece on Dolly Parton’s ‘dark side’ is pretty weird - Hot Air

I missed this Vox piece about Dolly Parton when it was published last week but a friend suggested I have a look.

First, the piece, which is titled “How Dolly Parton became a secular American saint” is framed as a somewhat neutral explainer piece.

There really is something unusual about Dolly Parton.

The piece devotes some time to explaining how Dolly went from “walking boob joke” to a feminist icon.

A post shared by Dolly Parton (@dollyparton).

Whatever it is about Dolly, a lot of people all over the place really like her a lot.

Ebert adds that when he spoke with his writing partner Gene Siskel about Parton the next day, Siskel reported the same feeling: “This will sound crazy,” he said, “but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers.”….

Yes, it turns out all of that build up was so the author could spend the latter half of the piece trying to find Dolly Parton’s dark side.

Well, there’s no evidence either way because Dolly doesn’t take sides, but it’s painted as very suspicious.

The idea that Parton’s theme park is not a labor paradise is probably not enough to get Dolly Parton canceled.

But it is the sort of thing that makes the reflexively trendy worship of Dolly — like a recent petition to replace all Confederate monuments in Tennessee with statues of Dolly, “the ‘Jesus of Appalachia’” — start to feel a little lazy, even cartoonish.

If people are saying Dolly is wonderful and practically a saint (even if Dolly herself isn’t saying that) then Vox is ready and eager to take her down a notch.

The fact that they don’t have much in the way of evidence to do it with ought to probably make them reconsider their approach but it never does

You won’t come away thinking any less of Dolly Parton, but you may come away thinking Vox is probably a very weird place to work