I’m not even sure I had heard of Jason Aldean before the other day, when the left decided he was a bad person.
Like many of you, I immediately searched his “controversial” song, and watched the “insensitive” video. Like a lot of you, I got angry, too, but not for the reason the left wanted me to be angry.
To borrow a line from Aaron Lewis, another country singer who expressed disgust at the road our country seems to have gone down – I can’t be the only one.
Try That in a Small Town is not a song that encourages lynching or any other such foolishness, as claimed by the harpies of the left, hiding in their safe spaces with their precious buzzwords, sheltered behind their smartphone screens and lawyers. The courthouse where the video was filmed has been featured in other videos as well as movies and TV. It’s hardly a symbol of racism.
The song quite honestly reflects an attitude that I see all around me, and have seen in most communities I have called home. We might not all always get along, we may disagree over politics, high school and college sports, Chevy versus Ford, sugar versus salt in grits, Baptists versus Presbyterians, but our home communities are just that: ours.
We have problems in small towns. We have major problems. We often butt heads over how to handle those problems. But the majority of people who have a bit of common sense want to fix them.
Interspersed throughout Aldean’s video is footage of the 2020 riots. A lot of folks were frightened back then. Billions in private property were destroyed in the name of stopping police brutality. Meanwhile the instigators, financiers and profiteers of the riots collected millions in unaccounted-for donations, and laughed at the legions of convenient idiots who elevated to sainthood a drug dealer who threatened to shoot a pregnant woman in the belly.
Most folks in small towns would agree, I think, that police brutality is wrong. They also would understand that the majority of law enforcement officers are in accord with that line of thinking. And most anybody with a lick of sense finds it downright ridiculous to claim to be protesting violence by assaulting people and destroying property in your own neighborhood.
It’s notable that relatively little of the violence in 2020 took place in communities like ours.
If anything, many of our communities were marked by folks who showed their support for law enforcement, and who organized peaceful marches with people of all races. There were a few who tried to hijack those events and turn them into something sinister, but the majority of people chose to ignore them.
Meanwhile in cities not far away, businesses closed their doors and fled, while politicians forced law enforcement to stand by and allow criminal mischief, all in the name of “protesting.”
Those types of elected officials can’t make it in a real community, where they see their constituency on a regular basis. As a disfavored politician once told me, in the state capital or Washington politicians are accountable to lobbyists and party leaders. At home, they have to answer to Mama.
That politician had just gotten a royal rump-chewing by a lady of a certain age who once switched his behind in Sunday school. He candidly told me he was afraid she would do the same thing right there in the aisle of the drug store. At home, all of us are accountable to each other in the grocery store, the ballpark and church in small towns.
Small towns and the rural communities around them are different. We know our neighbors. We step up when there’s a fundraiser for a sick child. We bring food to strangers when there is a death in the family. We serve on fire departments and in civic clubs. Community pride is generally color blind.
Does anyone really think that most folks would just stand by if people started breaking windows and burning police cars in a small town? To use a more polite version of a common saying, please make that assumption and take note of the results. In other words, fool around and find out.
The small town, core values are not exclusive to communities under 5,000, of course; there are some city-folks who understand. The proof is in the financial analytics, if nothing else.
Disney has been rewriting their classics to be more politically correct, even creating a children’s show about a girl who gets pregnant by the Devil, and so the perennial Wall Street winners at Mouse Inc. have been losing billions.
A beer company decided to embrace the LGTBQ community, disregarding its past base, and is now having to explain to its shareholders why they are losing money. They’re even giving beer away.
The U.S. military is seeing serious losses in recruiting, in part because the powers in Washington instructed them to give instruction in crossdressing and to consider race in promotions, rather than creating warriors to defend the country from its enemies.
Country Music Television, a network I didn’t realize still existed, is banning some songs from singers like Aldean because of what some whiners interpret as politically incorrect posturing, even when the evidence shows there’s nothing further from the truth. Thankfully, CMT is also paying the price in the marketplace, having just lost a $30 million deal that was guaranteed to make them significantly more money.
And a modern country music star whose music really doesn’t appeal to me just got a couple of bucks because I downloaded his song, as have millions of other Americans.
A lot of folks have been quiet for a long time, but they have found the way make their voices heard from the rooftops – with their wallets. Whether it’s beer, a retailer, or entertainment, there’s a changing tide. If the left says something is good or bad, a lot more Americans think it must be the opposite. Country music just happens to be the latest battleground.
One cannot, by any means, immediately and utterly equate country music (modern or real) with conservative, Christian values. Johnny Cash, whose music I love, was a patriotic American, but he had a lot of leftist views, too. Kris Kristofferson is one of the most talented musicians and actors ever, but his politics make me grit my teeth. I liked some of Lyle Lovett’s older stuff, too, but we would never attend the same political rally. And never mind Willie Nelson’s passion for marijuana. There were darn few angels in country music decades ago, but none felt the need to shove the popular politics of the moment in people’s faces. They didn’t need advisors to tell them what opinions to hold and share.
New country artists, and I mean those of the past 15 years or so, generally bore me. They are generally too prone to using formulaic lyrics and tired themes, putting a cowboy hat and boots on pop music and adding a fiddle, if I may borrow a line from Tom Petty. Whilst emulating pop stars, the autotuned country musicians decided they needed to take sociopolitical stances, as if anybody cared – and it has come back to bite them.
Thankfully, there are a few of those singers who are not afraid to sing and write songs that truly appeal to reawakening Americans, those who think the values of our parents and grandparents are important, those who love our country, those who find it silly to accuse cows of destroying the planet, and those who aren’t afraid to stand up for what’s right.
I doubt that I am alone in feeling a bit of renewed confidence in our great country, even if it does come because of a well-marketed country music singer. I think we are seeing Americans get tired of the foolishness, and deciding to be proud Americans again, especially when they’re told they can’t hold the values that have proven true in the past.
I feel a little more optimistic., since folks have had enough of the foolishness.
In fact, as Mr. Lewis said, I can’t be the only one.
