Toby Keith is a jerk

Friday afternoon I made the drive to St. Louis, Mizzoruh, which despite its big-city identity is situated pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Once you clear Indianapolis, you're basically treated to a good four hours of open road and empty space. This would really be no problem if I could enjoy the company and thoughtful commentary of my favorite National Public Radio shows, but there seems to be an NPR dead zone that covers the majority of the space between Indy and St. Louis.

This leaves me with a problem. I hate rap music. I do not like 21st century pop, which is essentially rap music anyway. I can do rock and oldies, but they're harder to find than you might think. There's still a place in my heart for contemporary Christian music but, like Pepsi, it's really only good for the first few sips. In the midwest, this really only leaves one option--the one that covers roughly 98% of the airwaves anyway: country.

Offensively classist leanings aside, I actually don't mind country too much under very specific circumstances: namely, when I'm driving my car on an open road during daylight (like between Indianapolis and St. Louis). I'll take my mind someplace else for the sappy and melodramatic hymns like Letter to Me in exchange for the chance to rock out to the upbeat western anthems like "Beer for My Horses", a Toby Keith song that I have since discovered promotes lynching. But what really got to me this time was Keith's latest hit, "American Ride," which is basically a celebration of everything that gives country musicians and people who listen to them a bad name.

I knew I was in for a treat when the third phrase of the song bemoaned a "tidal wave comin' 'cross the Mexican border." (It's not a huge secret that I think the whole immigration debate in this country is mostly just mask for racism.) But it got better: "Don't get busted singin' Christmas carols," we're warned before the song even gets to the chorus. The music video spells it out for us by showing carolers having tape slapped over their mouths by hands protruding from sleeves clad in stars and stripes. Really, Toby? Did I miss the government banning Christmas carols? Or is this part of that bullshit perception that Christians in the United States are somehow being oppressed? (The first hit on my Google search for "prayer banned public schools" was this highly deceptive article.)

"Both ends of the ozone burnin," Keith belts out in the refrain, "funny how the world keeps turnin." Oh, I get it! Global warming must be a hoax because we're not dead yet.

The song goes on to derisively comment that you can "spill a cup of coffee, make a million dollars," an obvious reference to Stella Leibeck, whose lawsuit against McDonald's became the namesake for the Stella Awards, an indictment of American litigiousness. Not surprisingly, it seems Keith didn't do any research into the case, or me might have discovered that it was an example of a time when our legal system worked.

But the real kicker came when the music video showed an Arabic-looking man grinning maniacally while planting a bomb in his shoe (note: the "shoe bomber," Richard Colvin Reid, was half-English and half-Jamaican). Now, I'm of course not going to claim that there are no terrorists of Middle Eastern decent, but perhaps Toby Keith should consider his responsibility as a public figure not to provide another image reinforcing that stereotype. Then again, that might be a bit much to expect, since we've already seen that his personification of "gangsters doing dirty deeds" is a Black man (see "Beer for my Horses" at timestamp 3:00).

So while on the surface it seems "American Ride" is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on American pop culture, a closer look at the things it's criticizing reveals that it's pretty much just an offensive, highly ignorant, and even racist song. Which, for Toby Keith, is hardly a first.

(That last song isn't racist; it's just ignorant war propaganda.)