Whose Country?

So I've been experiencing recently a long period of severe writer's block. Severe enough to merit electroshock, I was beginning to think. There have been false starts and aborted attempts at making a point and far too many hours spent actually working. You know, for, like, remuneration. In between shifts there was that bit on cats that I never could make work, and another about the trend towards documentary-style television sitcoms that just seemed too late-in-the-game to merit serious discussion, and yet another comparing the POW situation in Renoir's Grand Illusion and our current mess in Iraq. Who knows? Maybe these projects will one day come to fruition. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll grab my fragmentary interest just long enough at some future time that I'll embark upon some misguided, unsolicited monologue in some crowded barroom somewhere and bore the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot.* Time will tell.

At the moment, however, there's a minor cultural curiosity that has gotten my britches in a serious twist for the past two months. It has aroused my ire, my spite, my loathing of everything easy and calculated and pandering and unoriginal and borderline-plagiarized. But first a quick setup:

This new paying gig I've got has me behind yet another bar on Saturdays and Sundays during our beautiful New England autumn, which means that I manage to catch roughly twenty minutes of every collected hour of American football being played across these United States. Sure, we don't have the satellite packages and multiple screens like we did on Bourbon Street, nor are there rampaging, elderly Aggies kissing after every A&M touchdown and drinking White Cadillacs. That's milk and scotch for the uninitiated, just in case elderly Texans embraced in full wrinkly smooch wasn't enough to put you off your feed on a Halloween afternoon. Anyway.

So seeing all this football means that I've also been exposed to the onslaught of corporate sponsorship associated with sporting events of all kinds. Mostly it's beer ads that deal primarily with the long and storied affiliation of drinking and football,** ads that are normally inoffensive enough when you realize that most every American beer commercial anymore portrays beer-swilling, football-watching males in exactly the "guy's guy" light that most of them fantasize about, no matter how ignorant or counterintuitive that light may seem to the rest of the world and women.

The beer ads don't bug me. Some of them are damn funny. Maybe I'm one of those guys.

What does manage to rankle me into fits of ire that I can no longer contain without venting, however, are the non-stop spots (sometimes six or eight per hour of game-time) of those damnably ubiquitous Chevy ads wanting to sell me big, gas-guzzling trucks, all set to the splendiferous strains of John Cougar Fucking Mellencamp's new hit*** "This Is Our Country."

Were this song merely the soundtrack for an American company wishing to sell me an American automobile, I could dig. At the very least, I could ignore. But that, folks, just ain't the case. Chevy has a number of ads set to this jangly pseudo-rock, the most disturbing of which features footage of a flooded New Orleans and the Pillars of Light at Ground Zero in NYC and WPA photographs of the Great Depression in a montage with sandstone arches over the canyons of Arizona/Utah and other such iconic images of What America Means To People Who Should Buy The New 2007 Silverado.**** I get it, alright? We are a nation that can trip and fall and meet with outsized opposition and rebuild itself. Kudos to us. The Spirit of Renewal is not something I question. What I will question is the wisdom of equating a gas-guzzler and images of Modern Americana at a time when we have American children dying overseas for a FUBAR Oil War that has us accelerating the tapping of reserves in pristine wildernesses like Alaska's North Slope (ANWR) to attempt to stave off the flow of blood and oil to and from the Middle East. Sadly, that's a more accurate picture of America right now.

But that's only sorta here or there. What I cannot, by any stretch of my imagination, get behind is the wholesale plagiarism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" by a Hoosier hack like Mr. Mellencamp, who completely misses the point while appropriating yards of lyric from that poet of the Dust Bowl. A quick sample of JCFM's new ditty:

The Dream is still alive
Someday it will come true
And this country it belongs
To folks like me and you
So let the voice of Freedom
Sing out through this land:
"This is our country."

From the East Coast
To the West Coast
Down the Dixie Highway
Back home
This is our country.

Now take that bit and place it in context: a car company selling a huge truck to people who may or may not need a huge truck, in a country that places some momentary value on having a huge truck so as to better ramble through the nameless-and-named territories of a country built for just such a huge truck, propping JCFM's lyrics up against images (when not of destruction) of the kind of country through which such a huge truck might conceivably ramble and gambol. Might the next verse sound something like this?:

As I went walking
That ribbon of highway
I saw above me
That endless skyway
I saw below me
That golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun come shining
And I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving
And the dust clouds rolling
A voice come a-chanting
As the fog was a-lifting:
"This land was made for you and me."

This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York Island
From redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Yeah, but that would be Woody's work. And that's where the visual of Chevy's ad breaks with the lyric of JCFM's version of events and strays hamfistedly into Woody's original. JCFM doesn't quite get the open-road vibe that Guthrie understands, mostly because JCFM's never been there. Not in his songs, at least, and certainly not in the last twenty-odd years. This is a man who doesn't even have about him the prescience of your Lee Greenwoods or your Toby Keiths (the latter of whom, BTW, is "Built Ford Tough"), a man who waits five years into a shite global situation to offer his "Real American" take on the drama unfolding. And let's not forget that the "our country" of which he speaks, the red states to which he panders, are the same God-fearing Americans willing to ignore homosexuals in their bid for equal rights under law, willing to kick out every immigrant making up a workforce that currently puts almost every pound of fresh American produce in their horns-of-plenty. What we're left with is a sad, dwarflike, pompadoured opportunist jumping on a rickety jingoist bandwagon as it passes him somewhere on Sunset between Hollywood and Horseshit.

So corporate synergy makes a certain kind of sense, and timing is everything when you're a has-been rocker whose best days are behind you even as your newest album is about to drop, but I could go the rest of my best days without hearing another strained strain of JCFM's forced bid at red-state appeal and still consider myself an American, albeit of a different sort. The sort who wants to catch Game Two without calculated, corporate-sponsored flag-waving intruding before the first pitch, the sort who wants his football uninterrupted when he has better things to think about than what keeps an aging "musician" in the limelight when "Pink Houses" (yeah, but ain't that America?) slides ever backwards in the rearview.

Happy Halloween, America. There's nothing scarier than the monkeyshit we don't call out and fight against. Get out and vote next Tuesday, and don't set your personal soundtracks to anything involving John Cougar Mellencamp. I leave you with this precious snippet, from his latest's first verse:

Well I can stand beside
Ideas I think are right
And I can stand beside
The idea to stand and fight.

Here's to better ideas, in or out of context. In the meantime, stand and fight such egregious pop trash. Peace.


*: Incidentally, "boring" is not the best means of getting the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot. Like, y'know, just FYI.
**: Less acceptable (though just as appropriate) tie-ins, mostly for their illegality: Michael Irvin as corporate spokesman for the Medellin Cartel ("I'd like to snort the world of Coke..."); Leon Lett proselytizing on behalf of marijuana use and its memory-defeating properties, allowing the user to get nabbed twice for inter-state trafficking within a four-month period. And that's just ex-Cowboys, folks. No mention here of Mark Gastineau (for domestic violence) and Ray Lewis (for totally not stabbing some guy) and Lyle Alzado (for blaming steroids to cover up the whole dying-of-AIDS thing) and Brian Bosworth (for making horrifically shitty action flicks while rocking that notched-upper-sideburns-and-pink-mullet look).
***: Yeah, it's a "hit" before it even comes out as part of some schlocky new album, strictly for its inescapability. By that notion of "hit," Stalin's Purges were a big "hit" in Russia, genocide has been a recurring "hit" in Europe and Africa and Southeast Asia and the American Era of Expansion, and Microsoft Windows is a huge "hit" regardless of how many times it crashes your whole shit. Here's to "hits."
****: I will not post any links to these TV spots, as they are so readily available to anyone watching television for the next three months. If you feel the need to seek them out online because you watch neither television nor American football and you're single and female and scorchingly attractive, feel free to drop me an email and we'll discuss. You'll find a link in the column to the right. Include photos.