Dixie Critix

I just read this little blurb about the Dixie Chicks in SFGate's "Daily Dish" column, and it made me think of something that sort of ties together my two previous posts about VH-1 and "Comrade Rockstar."

So, Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines is ruffling feathers again by criticizing the conventional conservative wisdom when she's speaking abroad. She's quoted in a UK newspaper saying, "The entire country (U.S.) may disagree with me, but I don't understand the necessity for patriotism. Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why?"

If I understand what she's saying, she has a point: What is a patriot? What does it mean to love an entire country? In "Comrade Rockstar," there's a little talk about how Dean Reed became a favorite of Soviet peasant "rednecks," that is, uneducated people who supported their official culture simply because that was the culture offered them. Our rednecks are the same way, aren't they?

Somehow, in this country the Republican Party has managed to get a lock on the concept, so that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk can say that you either support everything the president does or you hate America. (Or, rather, the Republican president. Apparently, they feel free to criticize the president if he's a Democrat.) Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly can go around saying, essentially, that only Bush supporters have the right to talk about the Sept. 11 attacks. Patriotism is being twisted and abused to a dangerous degree in our country.

But it's an odd way for Maines to phrase the issue. It sounds like she's playing into their hands, for one thing: She seems to accept the argument that not supporting Bush means she can not be a patriot. And it's odd for her to echo that lovely Woody Guthrie song. To me, "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land" is a great patriotic song. It's not, "This Administration" or "This Government" or even "This Nation," it's "This Land." And why do we celebrate it? Because it's ours. It's where we live. It's where our family lives. It's where we grew up. We share it. Nothing wrong with that. That's a patriotism I can get behind.

I remember seeing R.E.M., oh, 20 years ago or something, in the Oakland Arena, when Michael Stipe was still a weird rising cult star and not the international rock star celebrity weirdo he is today. At the time, a lot of acts in the American rock underground were playing with the idea of America and Americana, exploring the differences between themselves and the British rock underground, and, of course, the relationship between themselves and mainstream America. I remember in one song, Stipe did a little improv thing in which he recited the Pledge of Allegiance. He may have even had a flag, I can't remember. Someone in the crowd started cheering and hollering and I'm sure Stipe could hear him. So Stipe said, "I pledge allegiance to the ground I stand on, and nothing else."