I've talked to people who openly admit to murder and were never tried or convicted. They all thought that their victims "deserved it". There is a subculture of self-righteous violence in this nation that manifests itself in many forms, from bar fights and crimes of passion to lynchings and bombings. It persists because we condone its portrayal in popular culture and dismiss reports of actual occurrences as hyperbole or excuse them as "blowing off steam" or that "something snapped". We will not be a civilized country until these dysfunctional, destructive notions are exposed, discredited and extirpated. Tuesday, I tried to expose a popular artist whose work condones and clearly encourages mob violence. My message was muddled in a tapestry of extraneous details. The commentary was good, but just as diffused as my narrative. It's time to focus.
The issue was murder. I don't take the idea of songs about murder as lightly as country/western fans generally do. Here's why. I was in the Army during the Vietnam War. My basic training company at Ft. Ord, California, had a group of young men from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi who had been offered the choice of military service or prison. They chose the Army. They had been gathered together at the regional training facility at Ft. Polk, Louisiana, and then sent far away so they would not escape and try to go home.
Young people who are frightened and far away from home for the first time in their lives talk too much and reveal more about themselves than is prudent. The guy from Ft. Worth liked to talk about how he and his buddies would go to the homosexual pickup district in Dallas and "beat up queers". They would entice a lone gay man into inviting the group to his home. Once there, they would drink his liquor and smoke his dope until their host made an advance on one of them. They would then beat him, rob him and leave.
They had done this more than once. Sodomy was a felony in Texas at the time, so the gay victim would never call the police because the assault and robbery had taken place in his home by underage males whom he had invited there for immoral purposes. When I asked what would happen if the victim were to call the police, he said, "They would arrest the queer!" It seems that the police turned a blind eye to violence against homosexuals. If such a crime were reported, they might indeed arrest the victim and charge him with soliciting a minor for a lewd act. The police didn't like "fagots" and viewed a beating as "getting what they deserved". A gay man might actually do time for being beaten and robbed!
But, that's not the part that made my skin crawl. Late at night, in the dark on guard duty, the diminutive Texan went into more detail to me and another soldier. On one occasion, the victim had fought back, so all four of the young thugs jumped him, punching and kicking until he lay still, his face a bloody mess. Realizing that they had killed the man, they took the cash they could find and made a hasty exit. Having listened quietly up to that point, I was so startled that I blurted out, "You did that? You murdered him?" Shocked that I would not approve of their actions, he retorted, "But he was a queer!" The homicidal pipsqueak was so inculcated with precept that homosexuals did not have the same rights as "normal people" that he really thought it was acceptable for him to do what he had done.
A couple of years later in Germany, in the barracks over a bowl of Afghan hashish, some of the good old boys were gabbing about killing people. They were relating stories of local killings from their home areas. None of the stories were first hand until one guy from North Carolina stated tersely that he had "killed a nigger once", but refused to elaborate further other than to say, "He deserved it." Remembering the Dallas queer murder story, I didn't want to hear another rationale for a cold-blooded killing. I left quickly. It was too much for me. The admitted killer had mentioned the Ku Klux Klan on a previous occasion in a way that suggested he might have been associated with it.
Having someone tell you point blank that they had murdered someone, and gotten away with it, changes you forever. Whether those stories are true or not is immaterial. They were told in the expectation that the listener would feel that the victim had received some sort of poetic justice. The realization that some people are monsters sinks in. In the decades since I heard those stories, I've nearly always become sick to my stomach when I hear about racist or queer-bashing violence. When I hear about "crimes of passion", I feel similar disgust. When I hear songs that condone or glorify such acts, I become angry and speak out.
I've almost gotten into fist fights in bars when I explain to a Toby Keith fan why I loathe the man and his music, as well as all songs about murder and mindless violence. Usually, I'm met with dumbfounded shock when I impugn their beloved artist, but more than once a liquored-up jackass has tried to get me to "go outside and say that again".
The thoughtful comments to Toby Keith must atone all focused on a single issue that resonates with each writer personally, but none made any reference to the culture of violence that I was trying to outline. That diary post had nothing to do with country music, per se. It was about violence and the promotion of violent acts.
The cultural ethos of personal violence is the underlying cause of most social problems. It is cultural insanity. It is also the primary contributor to aberrations such warmongering, capital punishment, a government that is not disposed to feed, house, heal, educate or employ its people, and most offensive to me, bad music. My priorities may not be the same as yours, but I'm sure that a lot of what I don't like displeases you as well.
I don't like the way a sizable segment of the population seems to be completely insane. This bothers me because I have spent a little time outside of the United States and it doesn't seem to be the case in any of the countries I've visited. I'm sure that there are places I have not visited where the people are generally as nuts as they are here. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Sudan may be such places, but I can't say because I've never been there.
The principal earmark of insanity for me is the condoning of murder. Liberal application of capital punishment is a worrisome sign that human life has little value, a recognized sign of insanity. The next, and more serious symptom of general insanity is the condoning of extra-legal murder. This is the sanctioning of mob violence against individuals for religious, moral, criminal or political behavior. Genocide, state-authorized mass murder, is, of course, the quintessential indicator of an insane culture.
In places such as the U.S., where the rule of law is strong enough to prevent mob rule most of the time, the insane attempt to foster a culture that accepts and condones occasional outbursts of violence for "exceptional" reasons. This would be the idea that it's acceptable to kill another person for miscegenation, infidelity, insult or crimes against property, which in the patriarchal mind set, includes sexual advances toward a man's female chattels. Note that a woman in a country song never kills another woman who approaches her man, but fights to get him back. Men get to kill any man who approaches his woman. That's a sign of a patriarchal culture.
Before I get off on another tangent about the dysfunctional culture of country music, let me round out the earmarks of general insanity with the glorification of the insane as folk heroes. The best example of that here is the fake wrestling circuit. If you have ever worked with mental patients in a clinical setting, as I have, you will recognize the violent persona exhibited by the wrestlers in interviews as psychotic rage. Admittedly, this is mostly scripted, but it must be at least partly engendered by the rage accompanying the widespread abuse of steroids in the wrestling business. These guys act completely nuts, all of them, all the time.
The problem in making heroes of people who act crazy, even if they are mostly pretending to be crazy, is that it reinforces the idea that violent, crazy behavior is acceptable. As a great believer in B. F. Skinner's concept of behavior modification, I can't help but think that the fans at the wrestling exhibitions, who tend to mimic the wrestlers, are being shepherded into mental illness by celebrating those who portray mentally ill people. They bray and scream like the apparently crazed psychopaths assaulting each other in the ring. This begs the question, "What's supposed to make them switch back to 'normal' behavior once they leave the arena?"
The suspension of normal standards of behavior in wrestling appalls me. I don't see any similarity whatsoever to a boxing match or martial arts contest. These are true sports and thrilling to watch. I've got mixed feelings about the new extreme combat competitions. I don't watch these, because they are just too gruesome for my sensitive soul, but I don't think they are promoting psychotic mayhem because the participants are not psychotic or pretending to be psychotic. They are modern-day gladiators risking their bodies in a brutal, dangerous sport. I don't want to support such sports, but I can't justify banning them.
It's not the level of violence in any of these contests in which I find fault; it's the idea that it's all right to be insane and unnecessarily harm an opponent. For example, knocking an opponent out cold with an illegal blow, jumping out of the ring to seize a folding chair, dragging it back into the ring and beating the comatose wrestler with it is insane behavior. It doesn't matter that it's fake; demonstrating the commission of an unwarranted violent act on a defenseless person is sick, psychotic behavior. The more you watch this sort of thing, the crazier you become. Monkey see; monkey do.
I became preoccupied with violent song lyrics when I noticed that karaoke singers who were messed up sang songs about messed up people doing crazy things. It occurred to me that singing songs about "justifiable" homicide might encourage people to rationalize such acts in their befuddled minds and increase the likelihood of their committing a crime. I started to interview people who liked songs about murder and found them to be uniformly scary. Most of them had low intelligence, but were well above the level of being developmentally disabled. These people know what they are singing about and agree with the sentiments of the song's lyrics. They would condone murder when it suits their personal agenda.
Note that I said that the songs were consistent with their personal agenda, not that they were justifying the fictional murders in some quasi-legal manner. There was a recurrent theme in the singers' comments of death as the only remedy for any offense. There was no sense of proportion, just, "If anyone did that to me, I'd kill 'em!" It didn't matter what the insult or injury was; it could be as trivial as damaging the speaker's automobile.
Again, the idea that behavior modification could be effected by a popular song looms large. Goodbye, Earl codifies the concept of slaying a wife-battering husband. When that song became popular, I asked everyone who sang the song or said that they like it if they thought it was all right to take the law into one's own hands and kill a man who beat his wife. They all vociferously said that they did. People who don't like the song or are indifferent to it unanimously think that violent abusers should be locked up and removed from society, but not killed. Take your own min-poll on this one if you doubt my findings. I stand by my contention: People who like songs about murder tend to think murder is justified under certain circumstances. If they think it's OK, then they are more likely to do it.
It's just a short step from vigilante justice to other self-authorized violence. Murder by a jealous lover or spouse is an ancient theme in popular music. It's not new or confined to country music. Tom Dooley is the earliest one I remember. In that song, the murderer was to be hanged, so there is the clear idea that crimes are punished. This seemed to be the rule until about the 1970's. Delilah describes a man killing an unfaithful lover with no mention of his being punished, but it's not clear that he gets away with it either. That's why Goodbye, Earl alarms me. The girls get away with murdering the husband of one of them.
The next step in rationalizing violence is to exploit racism, jingoism and other forms of prejudice, but to excuse it for other reasons. Hitler's brown-shirted mobs of thugs felt justified assaulting and murdering Jews because they were told that the Jews were committing economic crimes. Mob violence is always justified to the members of the mob.
It's a short step from killing people for trumped up charges of "crimes" to killing people just because you disagree with them. Mussolini's black-shirted thugs weren't as obsessed with Jews as with political opponents, especially Communists. There were plenty of trumped up charges for the kangaroo courts to supply a veneer of official legality to satisfy the complacent masses.
Now were getting to the kernel! I take offense at any song such as Toby Keith's alcoholic horse song because I fear that if a mob strings up just one car thief and gets away with it, we are destined to eventually have pitched battles between gun-crazed, survivalist rednecks and outraged people of color in low income ethnic enclaves.
That's why I don't like Toby Keith or his music. He's either so stupid that he is oblivious to what he is advocating or he is a closet racist intent on visiting his own Kristallnacht on some group of people he doesn't like. So, which is it, country music fans? Is Toby Keith a fascist or just ignorant? Before you vote in my poll or flame me, read these lyrics. http://www.hit-country-music-lyrics....
Just so you don't get the idea that I think all country artists are Nazis, I've always liked Merle Haggard, even if he seemed too fond of war for my tastes. When he came out against Bush's war a few years ago, I started liking him a lot. Finding that he was a thoughtful, reasonable person allowed me to explore his music further and find a lot to appreciate. There are others who, like him, have responded to what is going on in this country and changed their views. He's changed his mind set as well as his music.