Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Toby Keith For President

By Bob Wire, 10-06-08

	"Yeah, I'm a Democrat who campaigned for Bush's reelection. What can I tell you? I got my B.F.D. at Honky Tonk University!"

Last night Barb and I watched the most thought-provoking, inspiring movie I’ve seen in years. It’s not often that a film comes along that can challenge your way of thinking, and shake up your preconceived notions of how things work in our dirty little world. Our individual perceptions are constantly being manipulated by the media, and sometimes we’re exposed to something that just shocks our belief system right down to our core.

I mean, TWO Spidermen? Whoa!

Then, after the kids went to bed, we slid “Shut Up and Sing” into the DVD player, on the recommendation of my friend Chris. He’s not necessarily a big country music fan, but he’s turned me on to some pretty fine stuff. From Ryan Bingham, to that heavy metal band You Will Know Us By The Tabouli In Our Beards, he’s batting a thousand.

So when Chris gave the Dixie Chicks documentary a glowing review, I put it at the top of my list. “Shut Up and Sing” is an account of the controversy from The Comment, and the ordeal the trio went through on their journey back to the top of the charts. While playing a show in London during the run-up to the Iraq War, Maines mentioned to the crowd that she was “ashamed that President Bush is from Texas,” the home state of all three Dixie Chicks. The crowd cheered, but as soon as The Comment was reported in the world press, rednecks everywhere lost their shit.

I wrote a column about the controversy a year and a half ago, when the Chicks won a butt load of Grammys for their album “Taking the Long Way,” and how it was a major vindication for their artistic integrity, as well as a big score for freedom of speech.

But that was before I saw the movie. The cameras followed the women and their families around for three years as the Chicks endured everything from a boycott by country radio, to mass CD smashings and a chilling death threat delivered to Maines on the eve of their Dallas concert. Holy Zapruder, Batman!

Barb and I always had thought that country radio refusing to play the Chicks’ music was a major overreaction to a throwaway comment made onstage, but when we saw the hatred, the vitriol, the saliva-flecked bellowing coming from the mouths of conservatives and war-mongering knuckle-draggers over this, we were blown away. But I also noticed that these flag-wrapped rednecks who decried The Comment and demanded that the Dixie Chicks’ music be wiped from the airwaves displayed more than a little hypocrisy in their patriotic fervor.

In one scene, country radio listeners have been whipped into a frenzy and told to bring all their Dixie Chicks CD’s down to the station, where a big ol’ dump truck will run over ‘em all! Or another radio station has set up giant trash cans where folks can throw away all their CD’s by these communist bitches! The camera swooped in for a close-up on the piles of CD’s, and lo and behold, most of them were homemade CD-R’s! Why, these two-faced patriotic Americans had been listening to illegally made copies or downloads! And that’s against the law! It says so in the Bible!

And then there’s the scene where the band was playing their first concert in the U.S. after they returned from London, and protesters with hand-lettered signs (some even spelled correctly) marched around the Texas Enormo-Dome or wherever the hell they were, shouting slogans and hurling insults at the concert goers who were waiting to get in. A couple of young women had FUDC lettered on their t-shirts (a response to Natalie Maines’ FUTK shirt worn onstage in answer to Toby Keith’s displaying a doctored photo of her in the arms of Saddam Hussein at his own shows). They were waiting in line, and a reporter asked them why they were going to the show, if they were anti-Chicks. “Oh, we’re only going because we couldn’t get our money back,” explained one of the Lone Star airheads. I get it. She’s saying, we do have principles, but they are for sale for $42.50, plus a Ticket Master service charge.

Toby Keith, by simply acknowledging the Dixie Chicks and voicing his displeasure about their refusal to fall into lock-step with the bomb-Iraq-to-the-stone-age crowd, became the de facto standard-bearer for the backlash. His smug countenance was suddenly everywhere, on talk shows and entertainment shows, bragging about how he wrote that “boot in your ass” song all by himself, and that Natalie Maines “isn’t a songwriter.” But this film had me seeing the ex-wrestler-turned-faux-cowboy in a whole new light.

Even though Toby Keith’s sub-hat doo-rag may be a bit too tight, causing an imbalance of air pressure in his head, he just might be exactly what this country needs in the White House during these turbulent, divisive times.

Obviously, more than half the country didn’t mind the way Bush/Cheney was having their way with us and the Constitution in their first term, and reelected them for a second. These voters were like a woman in a shitty marriage, who’s getting constantly slapped around by her unemployed husband who drinks too much and is screwing the landlady. But she’s decided that it’s just too much trouble to start over with somebody else. So it would seem that rational thought has become less and less a part of the election of a new president.

Why not have some fun with it? Hey, it worked in California. Those Left Coast sushi eaters were silly enough to think that an aging action star could run the most populous, most powerful state in the Union. (“He was in that one movie? Where he was, like, a robot? And he, like, melted and stuff? I am SO voting for him!”)

There’s always going to be about a third of the population that you just can’t reach. Apathy, ignorance, sloth, and cheap malt liquor will see to that. So why don’t we just pull the plug on this sucker so we can start again, from the ground up. Let’s just put ol’ TK in the White House this fall, and then in a few months, he’ll be up on the bridge of this foundering ship of state, with a firm grip on the wheel and a steely glint in his eye, a stars ‘n stripes doo-rag wrapped tightly around his balding pate. As the USS United States of America begins to sink in a whirlpool of jingoistic glory (sponsored by Ford), he’ll be rallying the Toby Keith Army with these powerful words:

“Come with me if you want to live.”

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