BartBlog

From Joe Bageant:

But country music has got to be the supreme example. People work like dogs, have few or no educational opportunities, live surly lives of struggle just trying to get by, get their cods shot off for the amusement of Cheney and Condi, yet, the country music industry sells even that identity back to the very people who are being screwed and should be pissed as hell about it but aren’t because of the cultural ghetto we poor whites are raised in. As the old Johnny Russell song says, “There’s no place I’d rather be than right here, with my red neck and white socks and blue ribbon beer.” And so the nine-buck-an-hour skidder operator with the double hernia and no health insurance listens to the song and says to himself: “Hey! That’s my life! And he’s a star and he’s singing a hit about it, so other people must be satisfied with it. I reckon there’s no place I rather be than right here! That was true in 1973 when Johnny Russell won a Grammy for the song and it’s still true. It’s a damned good song. I’m still playing it.

The country music industry helped sell the heartland working mook on the virtues of dying in Iraq. The skidder operator’s wife sits inputting billing data at the local hospital for $6.00 an hour, listening to a song about dead soldier’s cherried out car sitting in the garage, waiting for his son to become old enough to drive it with reverence under a heroic sky. In country music everybody is made hero. Truck drivers are bigger than life figures, hemorrhoids, stress and all. It’s much the same as some rap music mythologizing pointless street violence. Take a truly fucked situation and sell it back as bigger than life. And so the production people at dreary workplaces listen to country music all day, and the truck driver is hearing the same songs 3,000 miles away, and the house painter has it playing on his paint spattered portable radio, and identity is further hardened among millions of Americans: “I might be dumb, uneducated, and worked to death — but I am a hero. I AM America. More American than anyone who is not the same as me.” So anyone who listens to classical music is less American by inference. ” . . . and besides, I am willing to die in Iraq, just like the hometown boys in the songs. There is no better proof than that!”