I never had any problem with country singer Toby Keith's "Angry American" song. I never heard of the guy until one night my brother came to visit me in New York and Garofalo opened for the act we paid to see. She explained the song and why she hated it.
"I don't know," my brother said. "'Mess with us and we'll put a boot in your ass?' Sounds okay to me." I agreed.
But I decided I didn't like Keith himself when I heard about this single of his that's pretty much a ballad for the bygone days of lynching. This I found vomitous.
Now that you have a snashot of the kind of guy Toby is, check out this text from an LA Times profile (it's subscription only, so no link).
Away from the firepower of the stage, this fighting man from Oklahoma said that he has decided to call a cease-fire in his ugly feud with the Dixie Chicks ("We had fun with it, but I'm just done with it"), that he still has lingering questions about the necessity of the war in Iraq ("Honestly, I'm still doing the math on that") and that he wonders whether the hit song, "(Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue) The Angry American," has typecast him ("People think I bang the war drum, and that's not me").
"Look, my stance is I pick and choose my wars. This war here [in Iraq], the math hasn't worked out for me on it. But I'm smart enough to know there's people smarter than me. [National security advisor] Condoleezza Rice, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, George Bush — this is their job, and I have to trust in them. I support the commander in chief and the troops."
Keith took a long pause to consider his words, and then added: "I was for Afghanistan, 100%. We got struck and the Taliban needed to be exterminated, but this war here, in Iraq, I didn't necessarily have it all worked out. It didn't work out for me. I know a tyrant is gone and all of that, but whether it was our duty to go do that, well, I haven't figured that out."
I don't what the hell this means about Iraq and the line dancers' vote. At the end of the day, the guy's an artist, and artists are usually politically twenty degrees to the left of their audience anyway. But it'll be interesting to see if he gets Dixie Chicked, or if he's a window into some real red state ambivalence out there.
