Mr. America and the Spirit of an Age

Published March 20, 2007

By Elias Altman

Music is the most immediate of the arts. Not only in regard to the ease with which we can absorb it, but because it registers the shifts of culture and articulates them faster than literature or painting. In this way, music is the best measure of the spirit of an age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald became “the author of the Jazz Age” long after Buddy Bolden blared in the gin joints of New Orleans and the Dadaist distillation of post-war chaos was already audible in the composer Igor Stravinsky’s “ The Rite of Spring.”

Therefore music aficionados often debate about what the anthem of this or that time period is. Recently, I have been forced to realize that the song that captures the spirit of this time is neither indie-rock nor hip hop; it does not come from either coast, but rather from Middle America.

The song that encapsulates the recent spirit and direction of America is “ Beer for My Horses” by Toby Keith, featuring Willie Nelson (it won Best Video at the 2003 CMA). The clarity with which this song articulates the Christian cowboy mindset and its “stay-the-course” ideology is chilling.

If you have never heard the song, it is worth spending the 99 cents to get it from Itunes – not only for its perfect articulation of the Bible-banging, us-versus-them mentality, but because it’s musically tight.

It opens with a guitar lick befitting of 70s rock n’ roll squad Boston, the drumming is on par with Keith Moon’s from the Who, and the even the country-style cadence – which I normally dislike – is catchy and alluring.

But it is the lyrics that stand out. Keith begins the song with a laundry list of laments he sees inherent in modern secular culture: “somebody’s been shot, somebody’s been abused, somebody blew up a building.” Keith describes the problems, particularly the overt allusion to 9/11, and then Nelson offers the antidote.

In his homely voice he declares, “Take all the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys, hang them high in the street.” The reference to lynching, the savage way that whites killed over 5,000 blacks between the mid-19th and mid-20th, is impossible to ignore. The effortlessness with which Nelson envisions this solving our problems is disturbing on every level. He is using overtly racist language to describe how terrorists should be killed.

Keith supports this position with “you got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line.” Once this form of “justice” has been implemented, he sings that they will all toast a drink “against evil forces.” There’s nothing like whiskey after killing people.

The worldview articulated in this song states the problem and the solution are simple: the evil people in this world must to die. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” said one Texan with more than enough rope. There is no thought in the rounding of the “bad boys” – they are just bad, evil, not like us at all.

Keith announces in the second verse that it is time “that the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground.” Willie Nelson agrees that we should “send them all to their maker, he’ll settle ‘em down.” God is evoked to legitimize killing people. This justification seems eerily similar to a religious fundamentalism that we supposedly abhor.

And it’s Willie Nelson – BioWillie, Farm Aid, marijuana reform! Yet, he sings this song with implicitly racialized language and an advocacy for the simplified Machiavellian view of us and them, good and bad. He sings of desperate times and looks for any scapegoat.

But it is Toby Keith that becomes Mr. America with his just-another-guy veneer, die-hard patriotism and love of apple pie. Keith stands fearless in front of his 4×4 – he is “Built Ford Tough.” Looking at our last election, his face looks more and more like the face of America. It is now Toby Keith that blares out of the gin joints.

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