American Song...Bad?

The thing that makes some songs so hard to acknowledge as absolutely horrible is when they occassionally make a decent point or two. Even beyond that, Toby Keith's song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," sings of things that strike at home. What makes this song horrible is the way in which Americans are portrayed.

This could get out of hand, but I'll try to manage. Of course this song is dealing with the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism, these are things that have to be accepted. What is so ignorant is that while these are obvious atrocities, America does not have to respond to these ordeals by making fools out of ourselves. Granted, America could be the most powerful nation on the planet but that does not give us as Americans any right to be singing of the flag as a symbol of "putting a boot up your ass...the American way".

Rather, what is horrible about this song is that it tears down the image of the flag. No longer is the flag flying as a symbol of hope in the midst of oppression, instead the flag stands for American ignorance. By singing this song, Toby Keith has removed the flag from a position of hope and instead uses it as a means to elicit feelings from people. Not that is a bad thing at all. However, one look at some discussion about this song reveals many horrible things. As found on SongMeanings.com there are people who are viewing the flag as a reason to hate people that live a whole world away, whom they do not know and will never know personally and yet they choose to group these foreign people as "militant chinks and camel f'ers". Clearly turning an image such as the flag into a catalyst for these reactions was never the intention of Betsy Ross. It is truly horrible to see America degraded in this manner and unfortunately this situation will not be cleared up for a long time with the immense ignorance that surrounds this subject.

Current Favorite Song

Within Sufjan Stevens' Album, Come on Feel the Illinoise!, Sufjan adds an interesting twist, writing all of the songs about Illinois, and events that took place there. Interestingly enough, the song that I have chosen to write about is stirringly beautiful and carries a deep story within it. Sufjan sings about his childhood and attending a summer camp at the Illinois Mississippi Palisades State Park where his brother and best friend discovered a giant wasp with which they constantly teased each other. Reminiscing about this time he recalls "There on the wall in the bedroom creeping I see a wasp with her wings outstretched".

I can recall in my childhood one very unfortunate series of events involving a number of wasps and a swingset. I was swinging alone in the back yard and a wasp nest had developed on the upper corner of the swing. In the act of swinging I shook and rattled the wasps into a frenzied rage. Before I knew what was happening I had already been stung half a dozen of times. The pain that was inflicted by those little menaces remains a vivid memory within my childhood.

Perhaps it is this kinship that I share with Sufjan regarding sheer horror of wasps and their "terrible sting" as he puts it. The size of a wasp is nothing that an adult would bother to worry about but I know from my unfortunately painful experience that I never want to face a swarming hive of wasps ever again.

This song acts as a strong device to remind me of the fear that I held for wasps for a long time. Their small black and yellow bodies stand as a sharp reminder that though they are small, they are marked as dangerous. The buzzing that accompanies flight serves furthermore to alert someone that their presence is drawing closer. It is strange to think that such a small insect can cause such great distress. The line that Sufjan uses to illustrate the response to a sting from the wasp shows exactly the same response that the seven year old version of myself elicited, "He runs washing his face in his hands".

A Road

Dark, solid and unforgiving was the road that plowed through the lonely stretches of land outside of a small city hardly worth naming. Though nothing special in and of itself, this road holds far more value than what one would perceive. Although this road is no better at its job than any other road that passes any neighboring town, or any other road in the country for that matter. However, by fulfilling the simple duty of existing as a hard mixture of crude oil and gravel, called concrete asphalt.

The mere fact that the road existed served every purpose that I could ever need. It provided a stable path on which I could travel. Specifically my travel was being done by running, but that is neither here nor there. Running could be considered something of a formality. The real relationship existed between both of my feet, the soles of my shoes and the surface beneath them.

There was nothing particularly intriguing about the scenery other than that it kept changing. The one thing that remained constant was the surface between the earth and my unending steps. A dark black, the road was occasionally patched in areas where potholes, dents and other lesions must have randomly occurred, marring the otherwise untainted stretch of asphalt. The yellow line on the side of the road served as a pencil line drawn across a map and my feet never passed too far away from its constant guidance. A gritty yellow, with small chunks of rock, dirt and other miscellaneous garbage littered haphazardly over its surface stood in stark contrast with the ebony shade that it gracefully traced over like a ribbon.

And yet, all the minute details of the road itself did not divulge from its ultimate purpose. And perhaps that ultimate purpose was not much different than the purpose of the body that traversed it.