If That Ain't Country....

On The Dixie Chicks, Redneck Trailerparks,
And Grown Men Crawling On Floors

It’s not radical to see that there is too much growth in much of the world. It’s not radical to be concerned about the alarming rate of extinction, its not radical to understand that drastically reducing our carbon footprint is necessary. Yet proposing actions that will actually have an impact on these is seen as hopelessly radical by the major environmental organizations. They propose only what they think the public is ready to hear rather than propose something that will actually work. Like a bar patron looking for his lost wallet on the street corner when he knows he lost it in the alley on the other of the road. He is looking there because he is under a streetlamp and the light is better. He won’t get mugged.

It is much harder to find something in the dark than on a well-lit street corner, but if that is where your wallet is, then you must look there. And it doesn’t matter if you get mugged if you have already lost your wallet. You have nothing to gain by being safe and nothing to lose by taking a calculated risk. Environmentalists must not be afraid of the dark alleyways, or the suspicious looking characters that lurk in the shadows. We must go in with a flashlight and at least illuminate the problem. Otherwise we are wasting our time.

While we are talking about wasting our time, I was in Charlie’s Bar the other night when the lights came on suddenly. That usually means the bar is closing and it is time for last call. I put down my pool stick and went home to bed. I didn’t know it but it was only eight thirty. When I woke up it was midnight. Last call is at 1:45. I went back to Charlie’s because I couldn’t get back to sleep and I was curious about what had happened. Turns out someone had dropped a contact lens. Ok, it was not just “someone”, it was a very attractive young college student in her usual evening attire, which appeared to be her baby sister’s blue jeans and tank top. Her toenails were painted pink.

When it was discovered that she had lost something of great value, and would be disabled and unable to function without it, there were many able-bodied volunteers among the regulars at Charlie’s to help locate the treasure. The lights went on and thirty grown men were soon crawling around on the floor like a bunch of tick-infested coon dogs, hoping to be the one to present the lost prize to the distraught young women and therefore win her approval. Alas it was not to be, it had fallen on the front of her tee shirt, and she luckily retrieved it before the crawling mass of beer-drenched and attention-starved Good Samaritans could see it resting precariously as it was on her tender young bosom.

What is the moral of this story? How does this have anything to do with the environmental movement having a voice? Are you saying we would wear tight-fitting clothes? No, what I’m saying is don’t go home just because someone turned on the lights. If you do, you will miss seeing a bunch of grown men making total fools of them selves over a hopeless cause while trying to convince everyone they are just trying to help out. My point is that we must harness this power of men to make fools of them selves. Perhaps it will take something more then a pretty young coed to do this. This is too bad, because we have many pretty young coeds in Missoula, although I don’t know any.

Speaking of having a voice, how about those Dixie Chicks? I love the Dixie Chicks, even though I don’t listen to their music very much. When it comes to country music, my tastes tend toward traditional and outlaw country music. I liked it best when has had time to age like a good southern whiskey. It must be at least as old as I am. I’m talking here about Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Charlie Pride and of course Merle Haggard. I like some of the new stuff, like Emmy Lou Harris and Dewite Yokam, and especially Hank Williams Jr. and David Allen Coe, but most of the stuff played on country radio today is crapola, a bunch of throw away love songs and sappy peons to the American way of life. It the musical equivalent of Astroturf, and more often based on the mythology of a highly idealized, non-existent rustic past rather than rooted in our present world.

When modern country music is rooted in the present, it usually is about enjoying a boring middle-class life or about how hard that life is. It is no longer really about being country. The people who listen to country music mostly live in the suburbs, sharing that distinction with the fans of that other indigenous form of popular music devoted to killing your girl friends and stealing cars, hip hop. Then there is all the fake White Trash country, by people who are really not trashy. Why would anyone want to fake being trashy? If Tonya Harding wrote a country song; that would be really trashy; if Bill Clinton wrote a country song, now that would be even trashier.

New country deals primarily in nostalgia for that perfect, rural country-fried world that never existed except in Mayberry. You ever hear a new country song mention e-mail, a computer, or even a cell phone? I’ll bet Johnny Cash would have written about things like that. He would have faxed the woman that done him wrong. He might of hacked into her web site, stolen her identity, car jacked her Prius and hid out in an eco-resort in Cancun where he would continued to spam her from an Internet café posing a deposed Nigerian finance minister. He might have even uploaded a sex video of her on his My Space blog. But he wouldn’t take it lying down; he wouldn’t use a flintlock musket or a slingshot. He would use the most powerful weapon at his disposal, the Internet. He would become a hunted cyber outlaw, a wanted fugitive from the Federal Communication Commission.

Of course now I’d probably buy the Dixie Chicks new CD, even though I don’t own a stereo, and so should you. It’s the best way to vote against Bush and this screwed up War. This is better than voting for president, because your vote might actually count, and the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction at the Billboard Top One Hundred. It is better than American Idol, because it caries a potent political message. When the Dixie Chicks outsell Toby Keith, this war will be over.

But it is unwise to confuse politics with country music. Some of the people I love the most are politically downright reactionary at times. For years, because of songs like Okie From Muskogee, I thought Merle Haggard was a right wing Republican. I still liked him  because he was the real deal. Turns out that Merle is a pot smoking liberal, but I still love him anyway.

The Dixie Chicks are also the real deal, and they are dam good. How we all remember the uproar when the Chicks (this is what they call themselves, so I can probably get away with calling them the Chicks, and I might add, they are three very good looking Chicks, which is something I probably will not get away with saying, even though I capitalized it), any way, as we all remember, the Chicks dissed the prez on a London stage over starting a war in Iraq.

What happened next is now country music history. The Chicks were supposed to be toast. The country stations refused to play their records. The right-wing media rejoiced when their CD tanked on the country charts and the critics predicted their fans would desert them in droves because of their disloyal act on foreign soil. This was due to the fact that, after all, their fans were just a bunch of ignorant rednecks. To the left wing media this was proof of what a screwed up country we live in. The liberal pundits portrayed the Chicks (god I love being able to say that word) as innocent victims of a right wing corporate press and their fickle jingoistic fans. Way to go Chicks!

This liberal spin ignores the reality that the Dixie Chicks were continuing to fill the seats at all of their performances, which included some of the largest venues in the land, and in today’s music biz, that is where the real money is. It ignores the fact that the radio stations don’t represent their listeners and have no regard for their happiness. How else can you explain Rascal Flatts? There are no monolithic Redneck masses. Rednecks argue amongst each other as much as anyone, more than Canadians but somewhat less than Italians. I’ll bet Rednecks listen to more Black Sabbath than to the Man in Black and the Dixie Chicks put together. Heavy Metal still rules in Redneck trailer parks.

Folk musician Steve Earle was also made out to be a victim when Fox News went after him for singing a song about an outcast that was sent to prison for breaking the law. John Walker was a traitor who betrayed his country to follow his own heart. Fox News anchorman Bill O’Riley had his shorts up in a knot over Earl’s song, which he sang in Walker’s voice. One wonders if O’Riely has ever listened to country music. Somebody always gets killed, usually down by the river, and they usually go to jail, and sometimes they even break out of prison, even though when they do, they always get caught and hanged. How is John Walker, the American Taliban any different than Poncho Villa, who was the first insurgent to face the wrath of U.S. air power? Should we arrest Emmy Lou and Willy Nelson too? How about John Brown, whose moldering body, when still alive and presumable not moldering, attacked a U.S. army garrison in Harper’s Ferry, an act that help to ignite the American civil war? Let’s face it, if folk singers had to restrict themselves to writing about virtuous people; we’d be left with only a handful John Denver songs.

And, of course, we can add Michael Moore to this list of phony victims. I remember my European friends saying what a brave man he was for speaking up at the Oscars and reinforcing every leftist’s stereotype in the known universe. He also made a bundle of money in the process by marketing his documentary on the war as a blow for free speech in a fascist society. It’s awards at the hyper-liberal Cannes Film Festival notwithstanding; it was just not that good a movie. By cynically crying censorship, Moore made a mockery of the left while he assumed the mantel as its chief spokesperson. This made Bill O’Riley very happy.

The same can be said for Bill Mahler, whose comments on the obvious bravery of the Al--Queda assassins cost him his late night TV show. Now he is making even more money with a popular cable show. Fast-forward and Steve Earle, Michael Moore, Bill Mahler and the Dixie Chicks are making more money on this war than Dick Cheney. How can this be explained? Oh, it must be their great courage. It takes a lot of nerve to be controversial when you are an entertainer, but it is also good business.

What has really happened in the last few years is that our country is no longer at war. Our soldiers, increasingly a Military class representing a mere one tenth of one percent of our country’s population, are fighting the war. For them it is a job as much as it is a war, although a dangerous, low-paying job. Most of the rest of us are now ignoring the war. It has become another car wreck on the freeway; just another random act of violence, another tragedy, but certainly not a war. It is an occupation. There was no war!

 It has been said that society attains its maximum sense of organization and community and its most exalted sense of moral purpose during the period of war. If this is true, and I believe it is, then we are not at war any longer. The war is a cable channel that we don’t watch anymore. Even the conservative country musicians like Toby Keith no longer want to be associated with it. We still love our soldiers, we even have some residual respect for the generals, but if there are going to be any country songs written about Donald Rumsfeld, it will be when he wears the ball and chain he so clearly deserves. If I were Donald Rumsfeld, I would not go down by the river or get into a poker game with a country songwriter right now.

We do need to go back to war. Not being at war is for chickens and war profiteers. But I’m not talking about Rummy’s War; he is fighting on the wrong side of freedom, the wrong side of justice and now on the wrong side of country music. The right side in this war is not just against oil addiction, but also against the American Carbon Footprint. It is a war on gluttony, a war against self-annihilation, a war against the humans by a mutant species of gas guzzling parasites controlled by a few criminal human minds. A war against Rummy, but it is also a war against our own lifestyles.

I’m serious about this. Not the moral equivalent of war, but the social equivalent of war; the unification of the political community for the common self-defense of the population. This will be a great global war, as we are increasingly a global community. The enemy is not any other group or nation, but the fight is for an idea, and that idea is survival through cooperation. It will start with a war on carbon, because without one, nothing else is possible except futile efforts to cope with a rapidly changing climate and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.

Soldiers do not fight for ideology; rather they fight for their unit, for each other. They don’t risk their lives for an abstract ideal, but they will make the ultimate sacrifice, with nary a doubt, for the safety of their comrades in arms. So we too must loosen up on ideology. We fight for each other, not against each other, and for future generations. Like soldiers we must also take risks and make sacrifices. This is why I will buy the Dixie Chicks new CD. I might even listen to it. I do have limits to my patriotism. I will not buy a Rascal Flatts CD even if they endorse Michael Moore for president.

Mike Roselle is country but lives in San Francisco this week.