Enlightenment From The Tulsa World

My friend Dave sent me a story today from one Thomas Connor, a music writer for the Tulsa World, on the topic of Steve Earle. I know bloggers covered this months ago, but the points raised here are worth revisiting (to me, anyway). I can't even link to it because that sad newspaper thinks we should all pay for its content, and I don't feel comfortable reposting all of it (since it's copyrighted and that's beyond fair use). But here's are two representative excerpts:

"I don't condone what (Walker Lindh) did," Earle said last month. "My son Justin is almost exactly Walker's age. Would I be upset if he suddenly turned up fighting for the Islamic Jihad? Sure, absolutely. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion, too . . . (but Walker Lindh) didn't just sit on the couch and watch the box, get depressed and complain. He was a smart kid, he graduated from high school early, the culture here didn't impress him -- so he went looking for something to believe in.

"I'm not trying to get myself deported or something. In a big way this is the most pro-American record I've ever made. I feel urgently American."

If we forget that people like Earle -- a self-proclaimed Marxist and a former heroin addict -- are equal parts contributors to and voices of America, then Earle and the rest of his peers in the Americana category of music might as well don brown shirts and start writing nothing but parade marches.

and

Want things to truly be better in our wounded America? Embrace every voice, no matter how contentious or aggravating or -- whatever this means -- unpatriotic it seems.

If we become a knee-jerk nation that slams the door (pray, not the jailhouse door) on our artists and our own people -- the real government -- then the Sept. 11 attacks will have fulfilled their fiendish objective and we will observe on this date not only the death of irony and empathy but of America itself.

I suppose Mr. Connor felt the need to educate the backwards rubes in Oklahoma outside of the enlightened progressive organ that is the Tulsa World and that explains the length of his column, but I wish he had just written "If we don't take the political and philosophical pronouncements of Steve Earle seriously, the terrorists will have won!" and been done with it.

People like Mr. Connor always seems to confuse the notion of equality. Take that third paragraph in the first excerpt. Just because Mr. Earle, like any American, has a right to express himself does not mean that all speech is equally valid! Some things are silly, and it's not a matter of crushing dissent or infringing upon freedom to suggest such things!

And thank GAWD that most of Americana music is NOT simply mindless dissent for the sake of the same. Indeed, I would argue that most of Americana is decidely NOT that, and indeed that the genre's most popular artist these days (Pat Green) is just about as far from that as one could get! Of course, Pat Green takes a lot of heat for writing upbeat, "lightweight" songs (there was a good Texas Monthly profile on him a while back that dealt with that issue among others), but he's only one of many who write such stuff.

And this advice of "embrace every voice" verges on mindless relativism as well. Does this mean we should embrace the voices of cannibals? Of child molestors? Of David Duke? I don't think Mr. Connor means that at all. But I don't really know what he means. I'm not sure he knows.

Finally, that reference about the jailhouse door is just silly. Nobody is suggesting that Mr. Earle be sent to jail. And if his own fans boo him off the stage because they would rather hear good music than political preaching, that's their choice as consumers -- but it's NOT censorship or the stifling of important debate.

Rant complete.

[Posted at 20:27 CST on 09/12/02] [Link]