Max Blumenthal has evidently made it his mission to brand the country music star Toby Keith as a pro-lynching racist. The evidence? These lyrics from Keith's ode to vigilantism "Beer for My Horses":
Grand pappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see
Blumenthal argues:
During the days when Toby Keith's "Grandpappy" stalked the Jim Crow
South, lynching was an institutional method of terror employed against
blacks to maintain white supremacy.
I think Blumenthal is reading way too much into those lyrics; but
even if he isn't, here's the thing: Blumenthal never mentions that
Keith sings "Beer For My Horses" with Willie Nelson, and it's actually
Nelson who sings the supposedly incriminating lyrics (as you can see at
about the 1:43 mark of the music video).
Now Willie Nelson's been called a lot of things--a pot head, a tax
cheat, etc--but I don't think anyone's ever called Willie Nelson (who
just recorded an album
with Wynton Marsalis) a racist. So if Blumenthal wants to argue that
Keith is pro-lynching, he needs to argue that Nelson is, too--which is
something he doesn't do.
Then, in another anti-Keith post, Blumenthal writes:
Keith's schlock rock is the soundtrack of the culturally deprived
australopithicenes who populate the cyber-caves of freeperland and
comprise the movement's most fervent activists. As a bellicose chickenhawk who has risen from the ranks of the rural working class to become "White Trash With Money," Keith has carefully calibrated his image to fit the sensibility of his fans.
I'm not sure what makes Keith a chickenhawk. Yeah, he never served in the military and he sang the bellicose post-9/11 anthem "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue"; but Keith was actually opposed to the Iraq War. And although he supported Bush in 2004, he says he's a lifelong Democrat.
Finally, Blumenthal and others are making a big to-do about this interview Keith recently did with Glen Beck in which Keith said:
I think black people would say [Obama] don't talk after or carry
himself as a black person. . . . Even though the black society would
pull for him, I still think that they think in the back of their mind
that the only reason that he is in is because he talks, acts, and
carries himself as a caucasian.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly points out,
it's pretty odd for Keith and other white folks who "likely can't
remember the last time they've had dinner with a black family [to be]
holding forth on the intricacies and mores of black America." Then
again, maybe Keith just puts too much stock in the opinion of Jesse Jackson.
Either way, it was an ignorant thing for Keith to say, but ignorance
isn't always the same thing as racism, and no one ever said Keith
wasn't ignorant.
--Jason Zengerle