Tag: culture
Jason Aldean

Country Singer Jason Aldean Says His Lynching Song Isn't About Lynching (VIDEO)

Country singer Jason Aldean is denying that his vigilante violence anthem “Try That in a Small Town” is specifically an ode to lynching after filming the video for the song outside a courthouse that was the site of a brutal lynching in 1927. According to Aldean’s video production team, the Maury County Courthouse was merely a “popular filming location outside of Nashville” with no historical reference intended. But go figure, when a rabidly right-wing musician stands in front of the site of a lynching and sings about using his granddad’s gun in response to a litany of offenses including, “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face/Stomp on the flag and light it up,” he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Despite his various protestations of innocence, Aldean is likely thrilled with how this whole thing is going as he gets to play the victim while watching a frankly terrible song shoot to the top of the country charts. (It’s one of the less rousingly anthemic anthems you’re going to find—the tone is more of a whine. Honestly, when I first read about it I was imagining a much better, if still repugnant, song. Songs that make you want to sing along and simultaneously make you feel dirty about that are well within the wheelhouse of country.)

Aldean and his wife have repeatedly sought right-wing hero status, with his wife posting social media pictures of herself and their kids wearing anti-Biden clothes. In today’s political environment, with the Republican base defining itself through “own the libs” politics and flagrant bigotry, a song threatening violence in response to protests against the police is a sure winner, and one that almost guarantees Aldean a role at an inauguration concert if a Republican wins in 2024. He’s already drawn a defense from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Aldean is implicitly invoking right-wing white identity politics—not that he’d ever call it that—in which only small towns and rural areas are real America; religious affiliation, specifically as an evangelical Christian, is more about partisanship than faith; and where country musicians have cultural cachet because of their perceived association with rural areas (and whiteness).

And the song’s threats highlight the ties between right-wing white identity politics and violence. The two are basically inseparable, with the violence framed by narrators like Aldean as the right to self-defense of a people under attack, but in reality serving to affirm that they are the only group with a right to violence, and that violence to preserve their role as the embodiment of real America is legitimate and indeed necessary.

CNN’s coverage of a critical tweet by Sheryl Crow uncovers another dimension of this: “I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence. There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting,” Crow tweeted. “This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame.”

CNN noted, “Crow grew up in Kennett, Missouri, which has a current population of roughly 10,200. Aldean was born in Macon, Georgia, which has a population of about 156,000.” Wikipedia adds the context that Aldean spent summers with his father in Homestead, Florida — population 80,000. These are not small towns. Aldean is a poser trying to lay claim to the title of defender of small-town whiteness, even though he grew up in a fair-sized city and summered in a large suburb of Miami. But his effort shows the cultural power of the small-town narrative.

”There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it- and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage -and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music -- this one goes too far,” Aldean tweeted in response to the parallels being drawn between his lynching-flavored song and the actual historical lynching that took place where he shot the video.

About that: Michael Harriot dissected the claim that “[t]here is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it,” showing how the specific types of violence Aldean frames as reasonable cause to pull out granddad’s gun draw on longstanding myths about Black violence. Aldean didn’t have to work “Black people, I mean Black people” into his already tortured lyrics to get the point across.

And “there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage”? Sorry, Jason! Activist Destinee Stark found two examples in just the first 30 seconds of the video. One is a real picture of someone giving police the middle finger, but it happened not during a protest in the United States but at a May Day festival in Berlin, Germany. Another is an image of someone lighting a Molotov cocktail, but that one was professionally created as stock footage. In Bulgaria, by the way.

Aldean, like Crow, referred to his personal history as a survivor of a mass shooting. He was on stage at the Route 91 Music Harvest Festival in Las Vegas in 2017 when Stephen Paddock shot and killed 60 people and injured hundreds more. That’s not a kind of violence Aldean talks about wanting to run out of his imaginary small-town home. For one thing, it’s a lot harder to do macho posturing about how tough you’d be in response to violence if you admit that you can be killed from hundreds of feet away by someone you never see. For another thing, Aldean is committed to treating guns as the solution, not part of the problem.

It would not be possible to lift the history of lynching out of how Aldean’s song is received, either by its fans or its critics. But even if you could do that, it remains a promotion of vigilante violence. It remains a valorization of the protest of small towns, which are coded as white, in contrast to the protest of urban areas, which are coded as not-white, where the former has a legitimate right to violence that the latter can never have, even if the violence is simply words directed at a police officer. So even if you believe Aldean’s denials that he was intentionally invoking lynching, the song remains a gross, violent piece of white identity politics by a ridiculous poser.

Check out Destinee Stark’s breakdown of the imagery in Aldean’s video. It’s worth a watch:

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

'Top Gun: Maverick' Success

Desperate Culture Warriors Try To Seize 'Top Gun: Maverick' Success

Right-wing culture warriors are constantly finding new things to get mad about, turn into content, and, if possible, monetize — from the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss to the purported wokeness of Mr. Potato Head. But that machine doesn’t only concoct culture war defeats to rail against — its cogs also need to identify successes.

Enter Top Gun: Maverick, which broke Memorial Day box office records with a $156 million gross over the four-day weekend. A simple but logical explanation for this large audience would be that it is a well-made, critically acclaimed sequel to a beloved property that stars a major movie star flying fighter jets and opened on a holiday weekend opposite no competition. But right-wing culture warriors saw the Tom Cruise vehicle as a nail, whipped out their hammer, and declared that its success is due to its supposedly “anti-woke,” “pro-America” politics. Their implicit argument is that films that don’t share their political views shouldn’t be made in the first place.

The right-wing content mills have all tossed out versions of the same point. Breitbart’s headline was “Masculine, pro-American ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ blasts to $146M opening, towers over woke flops.” Outkick.com went with “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ soars on pro-America, woke-free message.” At the Daily Caller, it was “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ crushes the box office as Americans crave non-woke content.”

By Monday, these arguments had moved from the right-wing digital space to Fox News. On Fox & Friends, guest co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy said the film’s success is because “they didn’t wokeify it. It’s unabashedly patriotic.” Outnumbered co-host Tomi Lahren responded to a quote from the Breitbart piece with “Amen,” adding, “Can we please bring back good movies like this, because the movies that we have had the last couple of years have not been great; they’ve been woke. They’re all about an empty virtue signal for those that make them.”

The right seems to think “wokeness” matters for audiences whenever it is useful for their argument. Breitbart’s John Nolte compared Top Gun: Maverick favorably to the Star Wars sequels, writing that the film “didn’t do what Star Wars did and pervert a romantic-adventure series into a shrill Womyn’s Studies lecture.”

But Top Gun: Maverick is likely to finish with a much smaller audience than those films: The Force Awakens currently holds the all-time domestic box office record, the other two films in the sequel trilogy come in at No. 10 and No. 15, and all three had bigger opening weekends, according to Box Office Mojo. By Nolte’s logic, Americans love “shrill Womyn’s Studies lectures,” though I think it’s more likely that they just love Star Wars films. (I did not personally enjoy any of those films for reasons unrelated to whatever Nolte is talking about.)

I was one of the millions of Americans who saw and enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick over the weekend. If you like well-executed films, fast planes doing cool things, dad vibes, and the theatrical experience, I’d recommend seeing it on the biggest screen possible.

Is the film “anti-woke”? The cast is significantly more diverse than in the original film, with a female naval aviator effectively serving as the next-generation Tom Cruise character. But this isn’t really interrogated — it’s a Hollywood blockbuster. If the film’s box office take had entered the danger zone, it’s easy to imagine the same culture warriors pointing to that diversity as the reason.

Is it “pro-America”? The heroes are U.S. naval aviators, and it’s assumed that their mission is a just one. But there’s no real discussion of America or why America is good – it’s a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s certainly no less patriotic than First Man, the 2018 moon landing film that right-wing culture warriors attacked on specious grounds.

I found Top Gun: Maverick to be an enjoyable movie. But while it’s certainly possible to read hidden depths into its script, it is fairly clear that any such depths are unintentional. As director Joseph Kosinski explained in an interview with Esquire, he saw the film as a character study meant to entertain broad audiences:

The first movie, is a boy becoming a man and I think this story is a man becoming a father. And that's what a Top Gun movie is. It's a rite of passage story that's character-driven but wrapped in this big action movie exterior.

Hopefully that entertains everybody. Regardless of whether or not you're into planes.

In fact, that does entertain everybody — or at least, enough people to break the Memorial Day box office record. The right seems driven to shoehorn its weird political concerns into the film, but the film’s success doesn’t require more complications than that.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Stoking Fear At The Root Of America's Deadly Gun Culture

Stoking Fear At The Root Of America's Deadly Gun Culture

Washington (AFP) - It was 1776, the American colonies had just declared their independence from England, and as war raged the founding fathers were deep in debate: should Americans have the right to own firearms as individuals, or just as members of local militia?

Days after 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered in a Texas town, the debate rages on as outsiders wonder why Americans are so wedded to the firearms that stoke such massacres with appalling frequency.

The answer, experts say, lies both in the traditions underpinning the country's winning its freedom from Britain, and most recently, a growing belief among consumers that they need guns for their personal safety.

Over the past two decades -- a period in which more than 200 million guns hit the US market -- the country has shifted from "Gun Culture 1.0," where guns were for sport and hunting, to "Gun Culture 2.0" where many Americans see them as essential to protect their homes and families.

That shift has been driven heavily by advertising by the nearly $20 billion gun industry that has tapped fears of crime and racial upheaval, according to Ryan Busse, a former industry executive.

Recent mass murders "are the byproduct of a gun industry business model designed to profit from increasing hatred, fear, and conspiracy," Busse wrote this week in the online magazine The Bulwark.

Guns And The New Nation

For the men designing the new United States in the 1770s and 1780s, there was no question about gun ownership.

They said the monopoly on guns by the monarchies of Europe and their armies was the very source of oppression that the American colonists were fighting.

James Madison, the "father of the Constitution," cited "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation."

But he and the other founders understood the issue was complex. The new states did not trust the nascent federal government, and wanted their own laws, and own arms.

They recognized people needed to hunt and protect themselves against wild animals and thieves. But some worried more private guns could just increase frontier lawlessness.

Were private guns essential to protect against tyranny? Couldn't local armed militia fulfill that role? Or would militia become a source of local oppression?

In 1791, a compromise was struck in what has become the most parsed phrase in the Constitution, the Second Amendment guaranteeing gun rights:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

1960s Gun Control

Over the following two centuries, guns became an essential part of American life and myth.

Gun Culture 1.0, as Wake Forest University professor David Yamane describes it, was about guns as critical tools for pioneers hunting game and fending off varmints -- as well as the genocidal conquest of native Americans and the control of slaves.

But by the early 20th century, the increasingly urbanized United States was awash with firearms and experiencing notable levels of gun crime not seen in other countries.

From 1900 to 1964, wrote the late historian Richard Hofstadter, the country recorded more than 265,000 gun homicides, 330,000 suicides, and 139,000 gun accidents.

In reaction to a surge in organized crime violence, in 1934 the federal government banned machine guns and required guns to be registered and taxed.

Individual states added their own controls, like bans on carrying guns in public, openly or concealed.

The public was for such controls: Pollster Gallup says that in 1959, 60 percent of Americans supported a complete ban on personal handguns.

The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, brought a push for strenuous regulation in 1968.

But gunmakers and the increasingly assertive National Rifle Association, citing the Second Amendment, prevented new legislation from doing more than implement an easily circumvented restriction on direct mail-order gun sales.

The Holy Second Amendment

Over the next two decades, the NRA built common cause with Republicans to insist that the Second Amendment was absolute in its protection of gun rights, and that any regulation was an attack on Americans' "freedom."

According to Matthew Lacombe, a Barnard College professor, achieving that involved the NRA creating and advertising a distinct gun-centric ideology and social identity for gun owners.

Gun owners banded together around that ideology, forming a powerful voting bloc, especially in rural areas that Republicans sought to seize from Democrats.

Jessica Dawson, a professor at the West Point military academy, said the NRA made common cause with the religious right, a group that believes in Christianity's primacy in American culture and the constitution.

Drawing "on the New Christian Right's belief in moral decay, distrust of the government, and belief in evil," the NRA leadership "began to use more religiously coded language to elevate the Second Amendment above the restrictions of a secular government," Dawson wrote.

'Self-Defense'

Yet the shift of focus to the Second Amendment did not help gunmakers, who saw flat sales due to the steep decline by the 1990s in hunting and shooting sports.

That paved the way for Gun Culture 2.0 -- when the NRA and the gun industry began telling consumers that they needed personal firearms to protect themselves, according to Busse.

Gun marketing increasingly showed people under attack from rioters and thieves, and hyped the need for personal "tactical" equipment.

The timing paralleled Barack Obama becoming the first African American president and a rise in white nationalism.

"Fifteen years ago, at the behest of the NRA, the firearms industry took a dark turn when it started marketing increasingly aggressive and militaristic guns and tactical gear," Busse wrote.

Meanwhile, many states answered worries about a perceived rise in crime by allowing people to carry guns in public without permits.

In fact, violent crime has trended downward over the past two decades -- though gun-related murders have surged in recent years.

That, said Wake Forest's Yamane, was a key turning point for Gun Culture 2.0, giving a sharp boost to handgun sales, which people of all races bought, amid exaggerated fears of internecine violence.

Since 2009, sales have soared, topping more than 10 million a year since 2013, mainly AR-15-type assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols.

"The majority of gun owners today -- especially new gun owners -- point to self-defense as the primary reason for owning a gun," Yamane wrote.

Tucker Carlson And The Crisis Of Masculinity

Tucker Carlson And The Crisis Of Masculinity

Tucker Carlson's foray into testicle toasting is only the latest (and possibly most amusing) example of the right wing's masculinity obsession. The manliness theme keeps reappearing. Trump's strutting tough talk was imbibed greedily by fans eager for affirmation of the manly virtues.

Trump and his acolytes didn't invent this; insecure masculinity is an old phenomenon.

In the early years of the 20th century, Europe experienced something of a masculinity crisis. Popular writers, physicians and journalists began to fret that young Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans had become soft after so many uninterrupted years of peace. In her magisterial history of the period, The War That Ended Peace, Margaret MacMillan traced the currents that coursed through European society in the years before the Great War. Francois Coppee, a French nationalist, worried that "Frenchmen are degenerating ... too absorbed in the race for enjoyment and luxury to retain that grand subordination of self to great causes which has been the historic glory of the French character." In Great Britain, Gen. Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in part because he feared the emasculation of England's youth.

In America, too, many feared that urbanization and industrialization had feminized men. Theodore Roosevelt glorified and personified the "strenuous life."

It's a universal worry. Russian President Vladimir Putin has portrayed himself shirtless on horseback, defeating opponents in hand-to-hand judo combat and shooting tigers (staged, of course). In 2021, the Chinese government banned "effeminate men" from TV and instructed broadcasters to "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics." They were to depict only "revolutionary culture."

It's tempting to dismiss all of this as the pathetic bleats of hollow men who merit only derision. But as anthropologists, psychologists and historians alike can testify, the male need for validation is universal, and when societies fail to offer constructive paths for masculine expression, they court backlash. The negative aspects of masculinity are always lurking just beneath the surface.

In the past 60 years, America and the rest of the developed world have witnessed dramatic and precedent-shattering changes in women's status and in relations between men and women. Not all have been positive. Boys and men have felt neglected in the march toward "girl power" and "woman power." Cutting back on recess denies children not just an outlet for restless limbs but crucial social and emotional learning.

Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor's and master's degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation's jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs — up from 26.1 percent in 1980.

The sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s delivered mixed signals to men. At first, the message was: "Women were just as randy as men, and sex was a romp and a frolic." Then it was: "No, wait, failing to get consent for every caress and kiss was assault." Masculinity itself was not a constitutive part of humanity; it was "toxic."

The other great upheaval of the past half-century is the decline of the two-parent family. The great dividing line in American life is not progressive versus conservative, urban versus rural, or black versus white. It's married versus not. For example, African American husbands have higher labor force participation rates than white bachelors. The upper third of the income distribution, who tend to marry and stay together, also tend to raise thriving children. By contrast, the lowest third, who mostly have revolving-door relationships without marriage, tend to have kids who don't. The middle third is more like the bottom than the top. Children in homes with a non-relative adult are 11 times more likely to be the victims of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse than those living with their biological or adoptive parents.

Boys are more disadvantaged than girls when they are raised by single mothers. Two MIT economists studied pairs of siblings in Florida between 1992 and 2002. They found that "Fatherless boys are less ambitious, less hopeful and more likely to get into trouble at school than fatherless girls." Being raised by a single mother significantly decreased the likelihood that a boy would attend college but had no similar effect on girls.

A significant percentage of American men are growing up without models of manliness in the form of fathers. They don't see a man shouldering responsibilities for his wife and children, helping with expenses (or covering them), joking with Mom, taking out the trash, tossing a ball with his kids, helping with homework or preparing a meal. Without a balanced picture of masculinity based upon their life experience, they search for masculinity elsewhere and often find a tawdry version offered up by the Carlsons and Putins of this world.

So, in a sense, we do have a masculinity crisis. We have large numbers of men who never marry, never support their kids and are loosely attached to the community. They are insecure about their masculinity for good reason — and that presents a problem for us all.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Printed with permission from Creators.