I’m Beginning to Think Max Blumenthal is an Idiot
UPDATE BELOW (and partly re-written thanks to the #@%% server crashing and losing half my text)
I’m not one to go after other lefty bloggers, but Max Blumenthal’s Toby Keith diatribes are becoming more than a little much to take without mockery.
I think it’s long been accepted in the blogsphere that bloggers really aren’t responsible for the comments of their readers: just because an asshole like me shows up and says something inflamatory at Daily Kos doesn’t mean that Markos Moulitsas agrees with me. Hell, just look at Will Bunch’s Attytood, where the commenters are a bunch of insane, right-wing cuckoo bananas idiots and the blogger is a mild-mannered, generally left-wing guy who was quicker to ban ME for going after a troll than he is people who lob personal insults at him every single day.
So when Blumenthal complains,
When Fox News picked up Keith’s comments, Big Dog Daddy’s loyal fans bombarded my in-box with a deluge of indignant rants. While insisting to me that “Beer For My Horses” contained not even a hint of coded racial animus, Keith’s fans simultaneously revealed their simmering resentment of Jews, blacks, and “faggy liberals.”
…I have to ask why he thinks Toby Keith necessarily agrees with his fans. Because from what I see, TK, a conservative Democrat who supported Afghanistan but not Iraq, is pushing for Barack Obama:
“So I thought it was beautiful the other day when Obama went to Afghanistan and got educated about Afghanistan and Iraq. He came back and said some really nice things.
“So as far as leadership and patriotism goes, I think it’s really important that those things have to take place. And I think he’s the best Democratic candidate we’ve had since Bill Clinton. And that’s coming from a Democrat.”
OOOPS.
And may I add, that Blumenthal’s obsessive columns seem to be filled with nothing but speculation? from Feelin the Hate with Toby Keith:
Keith claimed that “Beer For My Horses” was simply an anodyne ditty intended to evoke nostalgia for the Old West, where “bad guys” met justice at the end of a rope. “It’s about the old West and horses and sheriffs … and going and getting the bad guys. It’s not a racist thing or about lynching,” he said.
Why then did Keith sing so despairingly of car thieves, “corruption in the street,” and terrorists who blow up buildings? Why did he invoke the swarthy boogeymen of the modern right-wing imagination right before launching into a verse about the good old days when his “grandpappy” would “take all the rope in Texas…find a tall oak tree,” and “hang them high in the street, for all the people to see?” Maybe “Beer For My Horses” isn’t about the Old West after all.
I guess Max forgot that Timothy McVeigh was white. Or that vigilante justice was extremely common in the 1800s and the “Old West”
Or from the ridiculous Lynching Advocate Toby Keith: Obama “Talks, Acts, And Carries Himself As A Caucasian”:
Now, Keith has trained his sights on Barack Obama, attacking him in language that startled even the notoriously reactionary radio jock Glenn Beck. During Keith’s appearance on the July 30 broadcast of Beck’s show, he remarked, “I think the black people would say he [Obama] don’t talk, act or carry himself as a black person.”
Now I’m not excusing that kind of ignorant comment from Mr. Keith, mainly because it IS ignorant. But a little nuance (isn’t that what we lefties are known for?) please.
First of all, TK says that Obama is the best Democrat to come along since Bill Clinton so the notion he’s “attacking” Obama is utter bullshit and demonstrably untrue
Second, does that mean my HR director, who is black and supported Clinton, is a racist when she says of Obama “he’s somewhat black”?
I am really hesitant to write much about “black culture”, mainly because I am not black. And to suggest, as Toby Keith does that black people are a monolith, is stupid and ignorant. But I will also say as someone who lives in a majority black neighborhood that candidate Obama does not speak the way a lot of the people I see and hear every day speak, using words I don’t want my kid to pick up as a useful pronoun or term of endearment.
Ignorance does not always equal racism: some of the most articulate, educated people I know are racists. For that matter, it is a fact that a lot of people in the United States, black and white, harbor some kind of racial prejudices: it’s a symptom of the society we grow up in. That includes people like Max Blumenthal for example, who thinks that all people that blow up buildings are swarthy, or that people who steal cars are people of color, or that “street corruption” is solely the province of African Americans (been to Kensington or South Philly lately, Mr. Blumenthal?).
I’ve said before, and I will say it again, that people who write about country music (or any topic) when they obviously don’t know much about it make themselves look foolish. I’d like to revisit Blumenthal’s “lynching advoxate post again:
Describing Keith’s over-produced truck commercial schmaltz as “country music” besmirches the dignified tradition established by Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, while insulting the innovative artists propelling the genre into the future, from Neko Case to Son Volt to my good friend Dave Bryan (hear his music here). At his best, Keith is Merle Haggard with a lobotomy. But that’s beside the point.
It’s clear that Mr. Blumenthal has never heard Bill Monroe’s “New John Henry Blues” which opens with the amazingly dignified lyric “John Henry was a little colored boy” or his original hit, “Mule Skinner Blues” which opens with “Good morning Captain/ Good morning shine”, a common (one could say “traditional”) pejorative for black people at that time. “Merle Haggard with a lobotomy”? Did “Fighting Side of Me” and “Okie From Muskogee” become lefty anthems and I never got the memo? And that’s not to mention the old fiddle tunes and minstrel music that predates what’s now known as country, songs like “Nigger in the Woodpile”, “Run Nigger Run”, “Black Annie”, and all sorts of songs rooted in crude racial stereotypes. Even as recently as the mid-1960s, the Louvin Brothers sang “I hear the darkies singing in the silvery moonlight”, in the ballad Kentucky. So spare me the pious clucking about dignity and tradition: this guy has no clue what he’s talking about.
Here are the lyrics to Keith’s dumb-ass song which Blumenthal finds so objectionable I have even highlighted the same lines as Max. I challenge any of my readers to find the racism. You can’t because it’s not there:
Well a man come on the 6 o’clock news
said somebody’s been shot
somebody’s been abused
somebody blew up a building
somebody stole a car
somebody got away
somebody didn’t get to far yeah
they didn’t get too farGrandpappy 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 seeThat Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
And we’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
whiskey for my men, beer for my horsesWe got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
too much corruption and crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ‘em all to their maker and he’ll settle ‘em down
You can bet he’ll set ‘em down…
I agree that we have too much corruption: I just didn’t realize that people like Ken Lay, Vince Fumo, Jack Kelly, George Bush, the CEOs of Countrywide, and a host of others were black! Charles Meyers is apparently African American! Who knew??
Is Toby Keith’s song dumber than dirt? Yes. Yes it is. It’s so dumb, I can feel my IQ shrinking as I read the lyrics. Is Toby Keith’s song a racist anthem? No. Certainly Not. Does Max Blumenthal need a hobby? Yes. Is Max Blumenthal himself a bit of a racist?
That’s not for me to say, but anyone who reads “African American” into words like “car thieves” “crime in the streets”, “corruption”, and reads “swarthy boogeymen” into the words “someone blew up a building” certainly DOES have some preconceived notions.
UPDATE …adding that if Max really wants to go after a redneck country asshole, he could start with homophobe and McCain supporter John Rich who writes man-crush odes to Senator Tempertanturm or warmonger Clint Black (with audio, a must hear: dig the line about “the troops take out the garbage for the good ol’ USA”). Or better yet, watch some video some guy made for him (not quite sure if the video is parody, given all the Bush crotch shots and Patrick Stewart as a Borg):
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are way more appropriate targets for Mr. Blumenthal’s ire than “Beer for My Horses”, which in all likelihood was written foreseeing a licensing agreement with Budweiser (clydesdales, get it?). Blumenthal spends so much time looking for a boogeyman in Keith’s vapid lyrics that he misses the very real hatred evident in work by true reactionary cavemen lik eJohn Rich and Clint Black.
And speaking of horses, Blumenthal is riding a high one, and needs to get off.
5 Responses to “I’m Beginning to Think Max Blumenthal is an Idiot”
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August 21st, 2008 at 12:13 am
I think it’s fair to say that one could be both a racist AND support Barack Obama for president. There’s plenty of racism left in this country, latent or otherwise, even among Democrats. The success of his candidacy (and that of Hillary’s, for that matter, when it comes to equally rampant sexism) assumes that such people are not…well…single-issue voters. As to Toby Keith’s lyrics, I think the racist reading is plausible. You can’t really talk about lynching these days without that construal being in play.
Andrew
August 21st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I have to disagree Andrew. As you’ll see in the update (if you’ve revisited), there are other country performers making way more explicit statements that mr. Blumenthal isn’t looking for, full-on jingo, warmongering, racist spew.
The racist reading IS plausible, but… well, i’m a pretty critical reader. that’s what i spent my English major years concentrating on, and it’s become a habit to read deeply into a text. Something like that usually stands out for me (I’m going to try to write about the visit from the racist oil company guy later this week), but combined with Keith’s party affiliation, his remarks about Iraq, and his very kind statements about Obama being as good as Clinton, I think MB has failed to prove his case fairly spectacularly.
And hey thanks for dropping by. I’ve been meaning to add malcolm x blog to my roll. Philly Bits introduced me to your stuff a while back.
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