Ideology and blame attribution: The Dragon Republic, by RF Kuang

 A few weeks ago, I wrote about an interesting novel by RF Kuang, The Poppy War.  It was the first in a trilogy, with enough interesting ideas and strange timeliness that of course I was going to read the sequel.  Alas, The Dragon Republic did not quite live up to the first in the trilogy, but there is much to be said about the book, about the politics within the novel, and the politics behind the novel, which may actually be more interesting, if frustrating.  The shortest possible version is that I am not certain that the author fully understands the moral complexity in her own creation.  What made the first book so fascinating was that Kuang told a story which was a metaphor for the Second Sino-Japanese War in which the protagonist is ultimately, if not the outright villain, then close enough to it that a conscientious reader would recoil from her.  In the conclusion, she commits an act of genocide, yes, genocide out of anger, vengeance and hatred.  In The Dragon Republic, Kuang tries to turn this character, Rin, into a working-class hero and revolutionary who will overthrow the aristocracy in something like a proto-communist revolution against aristocracy and colonialism.  The end of the book is her decision to lead that revolution.  What could possibly go wrong?  The problem is that I don't think Kuang understands the problem.  Don't give me a genocidal monster as the protagonist of your first book, and then expect me to rally behind her as the leader of a communist revolution in the second.  Especially in fucking China.  The only person who topped Mao in the all-time death toll was Stalin.  Mao beat Hitler in the body count.  Jew-boy talkin', here.  Remember that.

Anyway, here is the very quick recap of Book 1, to bring you back up to speed (and here is a link to my post on The Poppy War).  In order to construct a parable for the Second Sino-Japanese War, Kuang creates an analog for China (the Nikara Empire), and a Japan analog (the Mugenese Federation).  Mugen keeps invading Nikan.  The last time Mugen invaded, they nearly wiped out the Nikara, only to be saved at the last minute by Hesperia (America/Britain/the West).  More on this later, but that's the backstory.  A war orphan from Speer (Africa) named Rin winds up at the Nikara West Point as her way out of poverty.  Mugen invades again, so there's another war.  Rin becomes a "shaman," and channels the god of vengeance and fire-- the Phoenix, because that's the god of the Speerly.  In order to stop the war, she blows up the volcano of Mugen, committing genocide, because she is a narcissistic, vengeful, borderline psychopath, and the first book ends with her being basically a "holy fuck, you are terrifying, what the fuck are you" character.  That's the very short version.

There was a detail that I did not include in my post, which is critical for understanding the plot of The Dragon Republic.  The Empress, Su Daji, sold out Rin and her little division of the military (the Cike).  In fact, she practically invited a Mugenese invation.  So, by the start of The Dragon Republic, Rin and the Cike are on the run.  That gets you to the start of the book.

Rin has started working for a pirate queen, Moag, basically for lack of anywhere else to go, and she has descended into uselessness, in opium addiction and rage.  Remember, Rin sucks.  She's not the hero.  We don't like her.  That was the cool thing about The Poppy War.  And the problem is that Kuang is going to try to get us to like her.  Remember, Rin is a genocidal monster.  She sucks.  Jew-boy, me, does not like those who commit genocide.

Just a thing.  And actually, I thought it was kind of the point of the first book, unless we're supposed to go on genocidal revenge-quests, but I'm kind of a no on that.  Big no from me on genocidal revenge-quests.  And when I am asked for career advice, I'll advise against genocidal revenge quests on both practical and moral grounds.  How many different ways can I put this?

Anyway, Rin is working as the private assassin of the pirate queen until Vaisra, the Dragon Warlord (the Nikaran Empire is divided up between twelve warlords, underneath the Empress) captures her and tells her, hey, we both want the Empress dead.  Help me kill her, so that I can set up a new form of government.  A... republic!  They make an early move on Su Daji, it goes pear-shaped, the Empress de-powers Rin, and Vaisra then starts planning for the long war to take down the Empress.  What he really wants to do is bring in Hesperia.  They are very reluctant to get involved, though.  Once upon a time, they armed Mugen, and that didn't turn out so well, so maybe they should stay out, blah-blah, somethingsomething almost prime directive-ish.  Except that Kuang has to make it all about racism, but we'll get to that.

Actually, Vaisra and Hesperia set up the whole war in the first book as a plot to take down the Empress, because blah-blah Western colonialism.  We'll get to that too.  The more interesting part is that the Empress is given a perspective.  Rather than being pure evil in selling out her country and the Cike to Mugen, she did the math, saw that Mugen was going to invade and that she couldn't save everyone, so she just tried to cut a deal.  Take the Southern provinces, and leave the North alone.  If you can't save everyone, save what you can.  So by the end, Kuang is telling the reader that Su Daji is the one trying to save the country.

Unfortunately, it is by creating a politically trite narrative, wherein everything has to be converted into a commie/anti-colonialist narrative where America/the West is the villain, even in the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Japan was an Axis country, for those who flunked history.

Anyway.  Vaisra recruits Rin, and builds a war machine to take down Su Daji.  It is a long haul, brutal war, and Rin has to go on a Native American vision quest with a Mongolian-Native American mash-up character to get back her special power of mass destruction and genocide by fire (um... are we really sure we want this?  really?) so that she can stop the mad god of the winds from breaking... ships, and as soon as she wins the war for Vaisra, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, the Hesperians show up, and Vaisra hands her over to them, along with all political power, turning Nikan into a Hesperian colony with him as puppet governor, democracy was all a lie, blah-blah, Rin escapes and realizes that she needs to lead a commie uprising and throw as many bodies as there are against Vaisra, and it doesn't matter how many die because communism!  Destruction!  Fire!

And the Phoenix, the god of vengeance and fire is so into this shit.

Me = so not.

There is a reading of the end of The Dragon Republic in which Kuang may be aware of how fucked in the head Rin is.  The Poppy War did not portray her kindly, nor did it put her destruction of Mugen in a good light.  I have not read the third book, and honestly at this point, I don't know if I will because I don't have a lot of confidence that Kuang gets it.  There is a reading of The Dragon Republic in which Kuang gets how fucked Marxist revolutions are.  Death and destruction and vengeance and all that shit that the Phoenix loves... it has always been monstrously evil.  No good has ever come of this, and China is Exhibit B.  Not Exhibit A, which is Russia, but Mao wasn't far behind.  The thing is, after reading The Dragon Republic, I am not confident that Kuang gets it.  Let's get into this.

"Anti-colonialism."  What is this?  The United States used to be colonies, and then those colonies rebelled.  So yay for anti-colonialism, right?  Not so fast.  Anti-colonialism is a thing that goes far beyond that.  Think of it like critical race theory, applied to the international arena.  A colony is thing with a technical definition.  Send some of your people overseas, businesses especially, to go set up shop, a local government under your control, extract resources, and do so regardless of whether or not anyone else is there already.  So, you have a lot of shit goin' on.  You don't have local autonomy, there is economic exploitation, and yadda-yadda.  The United States is/are a thing because the colonists said, we want self-governance, and kicked out the Brits.  There are very few actual "colonies" anywhere anymore.  So why the fuck are we talking about colonialism or anti-colonialism in the modern world?

At some point in your life, you have played rock-paper-scissors.  And you lost, so you said, "best two out of three."  C'mon.  I know you have done this.  And you pull this shit with the notion that you keep saying best __ out of __ until you have more wins than losses, call victory, and stop the game.  It's a total cheat.  And we all know it, but we also see it all the time.

Anti-colonialism is indefinitely repeated rock-paper-scissors, played backwards rather than forwards.  Observe the world.  Is there something bad occurring outside America/Europe, or among minorities within America/Europe?  Is it the result of current evil-doing by America/Europe?  If so, blame America/Europe, and you're done.  If not, look back X years.  Do you find anything being done by America/Europe?  If so, blame America/Europe, and you're done.  If not, go back X more years.  Iterate until you can blame America/Europe, then stop the game.

It's a simple program, and those who apply the algorithm mechanically may be put to the Turing test.

It is very important that you stop the game as soon as you blame America/Europe.  Don't look back any further than that.  History begins when America/Europe did the evil thing, and once they aren't doing it anymore, you stop looking at anything that is happening.  The only periods you examine are those periods.  Observe.

Why is Haiti fucked?

Ask any anti-colonialist and you will get a long lecture about France and the world punishing them for a slave revolt, and loan repayment terms, and you will not hear one, single mention of Papa Doc or Baby Doc Duvalier.  Not one mention of the Ton Ton Macoute, nor many of the other things that one conversant in Haiti might actually know.  Why not?  Wrong place to put the blame, wrong people to blame, according to the ideology of anti-colonialism, although it is more than an ideology.  Like critical race theory, it is a lens through which one looks at history in an attempt to provide an explanation for all of history.

And if you mention the Duvaliers to the rare wokestir who has heard of them, what happens?  Reverse-rock-paper-scissors.  Go back.  As far back as is necessary.  Why did the Duvaliers come about?  Colonialism!  Blame France!  It was France's fault!  The Duvaliers wouldn't have happened without France and the debt and yadda-yadda, so the real blame for the Ton Ton Macoute falls on France and the West.  Anti-colonialism at work.

Haiti is fucked.  Why?  If you only go back to Baby Doc, you haven't gone back far enough.  Best two out of three.  One more round, roshambo.  Go back to Papa Doc?  Not far enough.  Keep going, roshambo.  Best three out of five.  France charged Haiti for the slave revolt?  OK, we're good.  The judges will accept that answer.

Who sold the slaves to the Europeans?

That's going back too far.  Stop it.  We're good right in that range of France and the slave revolt debt.  That's the anti-colonialism sweet spot.

Was France beyond evil?  Hell, yes.

But that's not the question.  The question is the methodology by which we explain existing patterns in the world today.  Anti-colonialism is more than just opposition to the political and economic arrangements of a colony.  It is a lens that tells you to explain any existing injustice by going back precisely as many years as it takes to find something that has at least some resemblance to a colonial practice, but really... America/Europe/the West, generally with a racial lens.  But don't go back further than that, because then you might place blame somewhere else.  Rock-paper-scissors rules.  You only go back as far as you need to place the blame on America/Europe and something you can either label or analogize to colonialism.

What does any of this have to do with the Second Sino-Japanese War?  Nothing.  That's the problem.

Kuang wrote The Poppy War, which was a really cool book (although beset by the modern obligations of wokeness) in order to tell a story about narcissism and vengeance in a parable about the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Yet to the modern anti-colonialist, this created a problem.  The villains were, by necessity, the Japanese, not the West.

Because, well, the Japanese were the villains.

Yet to the modern adherent of woke ideology, this creates a problem.  The villains weren't the Americans, nor the Europeans.  We can't have that, no, we can't have that!

So Kuang set about the task of retconning the whole storyline to turn the tale of the Nikaran Empire, the poppy wars, and everything, into the evils of Western colonialism and why America is eternally evil, the "blue-eyed devils" (her phrase) are the ones really responsible for everything, and the answer lies not in democracy, which is a lie, but in a communist revolution of blood and vengeance.

[Irritatedly drums fingers on desk...]

[Slurps last remaining coffee with annoyance, as he realizes that he still has a fuckload more to say, and no more coffee...]

[Drums fingers again...]

Like I said, there is a reading of the end of The Dragon Republic in which Kuang sees how dangerous this path is, but I have no confidence in her at this point.

How does this play out?  How do we go from the Second Sino-Japanese War to blue-eyed devils and colonialism behind everything?  Aside from leftist paranoid bullshit?  Well, actually, just leftist paranoid bullshit, but details matter.

So the secret backstory is that Su Daji and her original trio (the Trifecta) came to power to kick the Hesperian colonialist oppressors out.  Because of course.  And then the Hesperians wanted back in.  So Vaisra cuts a deal with them, since they have more advanced technology, which looks like somewhere around late 19th/early 20th Century, while Nikan is a few centuries behind.

When you first spend some time with the Hesperians, you are hit over the head with stupid racism.  And OK, late 19th Century, period appropriate, and Kuang does the oh-so-clever thing of having the Chinese characters say the Americans all look alike, and yadda-yadda, because yeah, like we've never seen that shit before.  Whatever.  Observe how unimpressed I am with that.  Anyway, the Hesperians are into phrenology and such.  But what about their comparatively advanced tech?  Why are they so far ahead of Nikan?

Kuang does this hodgepodge thing, drawing on history, mixing and matching in silly ways.  Hesperian religion is based on shit like the watch-in-the-desert fallacy.  So, it is all about a clockwork universe.  Kuang then says that the reason the Hesperians have such advanced tech is that their science and their religion have no division between them, and clockwork orderliness, and such.

Um...

Uh...

Um...

OK, so historically, there have been monks who have engaged in scholarship, but this is such ass-backwards bullshit that only a commie ideologue with no understanding of the history of science would write this.  Remember, this is not just some story on a fictional world.  She is writing this as a metaphor.  Take some liberties, sure.  OK.  I'm OK with taking some liberties, but this is ass-backwards.  Why has European and American science been more advanced?  The Enlightenment.  Science has broken from religion so much that we have a history of scientists getting jailed and tried for heresy by the fucking Inquisition for engaging in science.

Yeahno.

Why did European and then American science surpass the rest of the world?  Because European and American scientists have told churches to go diddle their own children and stop grabbing our junk.  I mean, we'd prefer it if they didn't grab anyone's junk, but who am I kiddin'?  Junk's gonna get grabbed, and scientists being nerds, by the time we grow up, we learn at least to run away.  (Altar boys are still too slow.)  Galileo didn't run fast enough.

This is all bullshit.  Kuang is full of shit.  "But it's fiction!  They're not Americans, or Europeans!  They're Hesperians!"  Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this.  Read it.  They're the West.  You can decide for yourself if they are America, or the UK, and the UK might make a bit more sense for the Boxer Rebellion, but when you do that and start making any particular change, the question becomes, why?  And in this case, it wasn't merely "because it was an interesting storyline," because it wasn't.  It just made the scientist/priestess who was studying Rin (because she wanted to study supernatural shit) more villainous.  Why did Kuang go out of her way to make Petra more villainous?

Because the point was to tell a story of anti-colonialism.  That required a different construction of Hesperian science, religion, the conjunction between the two, and one that makes neither historical nor substantive sense.  Science works when divorced from religion.  That's why Western science is better.  That's why it took off, and gave the West a scientific and technological advantage.  Separation of church and fucking lab is why our shit works.

The characters puzzled over Hesperian technology.  As well they should.  Kuang constructed it in a way that made no sense, because she was more interested in making Petra someone hate-worthy rather than internal or external coherence.

But incoherent demands of the Hesperians were part of the point.

Let's keep going.

"White savior narrative."  You know the term, I am sure.  It is an old cliche in which a non-white culture encounters a problem, and it can only be saved by the intervention of white heroes because the non-whites are incapable of saving themselves.

Watch, and see if you can catch the problem.  Vaisra tells everyone, join my revolution.  I've got the backing of the Hesperians, and their tech is awesome.

The Hesperians send some observers, and nothing more.  They hang back and do nothing.

Vaisra's forces keep getting their asses kicked, and voices rise up saying, when the fuck are the Hesperians going show up?

Um... do you see a problem here?

Technically, when the Hesperians do show up, they aren't exactly saviors, but throughout the novel, Vaisra's people are losing and begging them to be white saviors.  Had they done so, the novel would have become a white savior narrative!  It would have been criticized as such!

And amid the pleas for intervention, what did the Hesperians say?  They said, yeah, we tried getting involved here before.  We thought the Mugenese were pretty cool, and how'd that turn out?

Um... isn't that a valid point?

The Hesperians say, the Nikara kind of need to show that they are on a path to self-governance.  Kuang makes them sound ultra-racist when they say it, but that's what they say.

And, um... is that wrong?  Is the strongest military around supposed to go around the world, picking sides in every conflict, and arming that side because how could that possibly go wrong?

There's a point at which Petra asks Rin about all of the conflicts within Nikan, and Petra says that it is rife with petty ambition, factionalism, greed and so forth, and Rin can't contest the claim.  We know fuckall about Hesperia, except that they had their own war (remember, WWII, the Sino-Japanese War...), but we don't know anything about what happened, so we can't make any kind of comparison, but Petra lays it out that Nikan is kinda fucked, and Rin doesn't have a counter.

Petra is a vile, racist shit, but on that point, she doesn't appear to be wrong.

So on what basis does anyone demand that Hesperians become white saviors?  (Ignoring, for the moment, that they are would-be colonialists rather than saviors.)  At that point in the story, they are taking an almost prime directive-esque position, and if they were on the level, they'd be right.

Kuang just wants to have characters yell at them in righteous indignation, but if the Hesperians came in, guns blazing, you'd have a white savior narrative, and they'd be the bad guys anyway because a white savior is still a villain by the rules of wokeism.

Yet of course, the Hesperians are playing everyone.  Except Vaisra, who is a willing pawn, and Su Daji, who knows what's up.  (And some of the Southern warlords, who suspected all along, because to be poor and uneducated is to be wise and savvy, by the rules of Maoism.)  We get to the end, the final battle, and Rin turns the tide, at which point the Hesperians finally show up.  Then, right before Rin escapes (she knows she has to get the hell out of Dodge), she gets stabbed in the back, literally, and handed over to the Hesperians, and then rescued.  The book ends with Rin deciding that she has to lead a bloody, fiery vengeance revolution of communism when she sees that all of Nikan is now just a colony of Hesperia.  It's all just an aristocracy versus the poor kind of thing, the poor have the numbers, so burn, baby, burn.  And since she has become a folk-tale, she's the leader.

So how do we get from "Rin is a genocidal rage-monster" to "Rin is the leader of the true revolution?"

One of two ways.  Either 1) Kuang is about to tell a tale of revolution-gone-wrong in Book 3, or 2) Kuang decided that she fucked up.  She accidentally told a tale in Book 1 about intra-Asian conflict, in which the West was not the villain, and her African-adopted protagonist was not-so-subtly the villain because yeah, the Mugenese sucked, but Rin committed genocide.  Then, she decided that she needed the West to be the villains, and she wanted to get the readers on Rin's side.  A de-powering/re-powering narrative would do nicely, so add in some betrayal and a little rah-rah communism, and Bob's your uncle.  Up against the wall, motherfuckers, the revolution's here!

So let's be clear.  The Hesperians, as presented, are not good.  But you know what they never did?  Commit genocide.  You know who did?  Rin.  Rin is the only genocidal character in the books.  At least from The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic.  The Mugenese committed genocide on Speer before The Poppy War, but Su Daji tells us that the Mugenese aren't the real enemy, the Hesperians are!

Um... Petra is a b... ad person, and by the rules of wokeness, if I had ended that word differently, it would have been worse than actual, literal genocide, because the world is fucked, but Rin is a genocidal monster.  Su Daji has made... questionable choices as Empress, but you know, when she de-powered Rin, I think that was a good thing.  Why?  Because Rin is a genocidal monster.

I know, I keep coming back to that "genocide" thing, but, and I cannot emphasize this enough, genocide is kind of a big deal to those of my particular ethnic persuasion.  Nobody gets a Mulligan on genocides.

Rin is narcissistic, borderline psychopathic, and certainly so filled with uncontrolled rage that the last thing anyone should want is her connected to the god of fire and vengeance.

In my first post, on The Poppy War, I wrote that the point at which everything went wrong was that Jiang (who was actually a member of the Trifecta, and backstabbed by Su Daji) tried to get Rin to turn away from the Phoenix, and she didn't.  Jiang was right.  Rin was wrong.  Rin was the villain.

Whatever you're showing me about the Hesperians?  Yeahno.  Kuang really wants us to hate them more than we hate Rin.  This requires some retconning.  Here's how it works.  Watch how the Hesperians were presented in the first book, and then the second book.

In the first book, we get the backstory of "the second poppy war," which was the previous Mugenese invasion of Nikan.  Mugen invades Nikan, and they're kicking the Nikarans' asses.  Nikan is going to lose, but they know that Mugen is interested in Speer.  Why?  Mugen has no shamanic tradition, and they don't know how to channel any gods.  Speer is scary to outsiders because they channel the god of fire.  Nikan gets wind of a Mugenese invasion of Speer, which provides the Nikaran military with their most badass troops.  Rather than do anything, they sit tight, and let the Mugenese invade, and wipe out everyone on Speer.

OK, so genocide.  The Mugenese did it.  You wanna know why Rin was so angry?  That's part of it.  But that makes the Mugenese the villains.  (This is Kuang realizing she fucked up, ideologically speaking.  She made someone other than the West the villains.)

You know who didn't wipe out an entire race/culture/nation?  Hesperia.  The Mugenese Federation did it.  Rin-- one woman-- did it when she wiped out Mugen.

Hesperia?  Nope.  No genocide there!

So why did Nikan let it happen?  Because they knew that Hesperia-- those horrible, evil "blue-eyed devils"-- would be so horrified by genocide that they would intervene and save Nikan from Mugen.  Which they did.

Hesperia was not portrayed as all virtue and good in Book 1, but you know what you're going to have a problem explaining in Book 2?  How this same country goes from such horror at the genocide of Africa that they intervene to stop that genocidal country (Mugen) in the second poppy war, to Book 2, where they look like fuckin' nazis.

With no attempt to reconcile the difference.

What happened?  Like I said, Kuang realized that she wrote a book in which Hesperia-- the West-- looked, if not kinda good, that certainly not like the main villains.  The rules of wokeness prohibit that.  The core ideology, certainly in the international arena, is anti-colonialism.  So, not only must Hesperia be the real villain, Hesperia must somehow have been responsible for everything.

So what about their intervention in the second poppy war to save Nikan after Mugen wiped out Speer?

Yeah, Kuang's got nothin', because if Hesperia really is as presented in The Dragon Republic, then not only are they not going to give a shit about Speer getting annihilated, they're going to be happy about it.  They're shamans on Speer, and Hesperians don't like shamans.  Shamans are dangerous, particularly the pyros.  So I'm supposed to believe that Hesperia is the place of racist, colonialist evil, where they want shamans exterminated, but they were so horrified by Speer getting wiped out that they had to stop Mugen in the second poppy war?

No.  I call so much bullshit.

I call so much bullshit.

This is incoherent writing, motivated by a desire to take a country already constructed as an America/West analog and turn it into the villain/cause of all evil.  But you can't do that, at least not coherently, given what was in the first book, and no, I cannot buy Rin as anything other than a genocidal monster.  She, not Hesperia, committed genocide.  Rin commits genocide, Hesperia intervenes to stop a genocidal country, and Kuang wants me to side with Rin?

No.  Gimme back Su Daji to take away her powers again!  That kid is fucking psycho, and you know what the Hesperians have never done?  Commit genocide!

You wanna have Su Daji take on Hesperia?  Sure.  Go for it.  Rin?  No.

Kuang set it up that Rin will have to go find Su Daji and make that alliance against the bigger threat of Hesperia (which... really?  Hesperia is a bigger threat than Su Daji? um...).  Yet I return to my final question about the book, and the series.  There is a third book.  Is Kuang trying to tell a story of the glorious commie revolution against the alliance between aristocracy and colonialism?  Has she lost sight of the thing that made the first book so cool?

The third book could go in one of a couple directions.  Either Rin really does lead the glorious commie revolution, or Kuang salvages the series by showing that really, no, Rin is not the fucking hero.  She is a genocidal monster, motivated by rage, vengeance and narcissism, and by the end of the second book, characters are waving fame, fortune, praise and adulation in front of her like a fucking opium pipe (remember, she's an opium addict).  The thing is, Kuang worked really hard trying to get the reader on Rin's side.  For me, that was never going to work, but I could see it working for others.  Then there's the commie shit.  Add genocide to communism, and you lost me at trying to not lose me.  But that's kind of the problem, from my perspective.  Morally speaking, this is a lost cause, and the fact that Kuang is treating it as not a lost cause, while brining the whole novel in a toxic brew of Wokeness:  Anti-Colonial Mix means that I read it and just think... can I bring myself to read Book 3?

If Kuang is going to write a book about a genocidal maniac leading a commie revolution, that's a boring plotline because I'm so against that genocidal maniac, that the main character is what I call "an uninterestingly one-dimensional villain."  Why bother?  But when that maniac is pitting herself against "colonialism," I'm skeptical that the author has maintained perspective.  If the author seriously thinks she can get me on that maniac's side, even a little bit, I'm just looking at the other books on my stack, and thinking, don't I have more interesting things to read?  And sure, it would give me long rants on this blog, but nobody reads this blog, so... oy.  Oy vey.

Kids, don't go on genocidal revenge-quests.  No genocide, no revenge.  Quote Yoda, I should.  Listen to Jiang, you should.

And really, I just thought it would be cool to read something different.  The Poppy War was a martial arts 'n mysticism book, using the Sino-Japanese War metaphor.  I expected to duck wokeness entirely.  But here we are.  Here we are.

I'm not actually a big Neil Young fan, but here are Gillian Welch & David Rawlings doing "Cortez The Killer," on Live From Here.  There is a studio version on Dave's A Friend Of A Friend.  Everything Gillian & Dave do is perfect.