WORLD LEADER PRETEND
Stumping across the universe with Bush, Kerry, and Merle Haggard for the undecided UFO honky-tonk vo
By Cole Coonce
When you're running down our country hoss, you're running down the fightin' side of me."
Like they've done for decades, Merle Haggard and the Strangers wrap up a crescendo of "The Fightin' Side of Me" and a capacity crowd of wannabe-rodeo queens and hirsute flag-wavers hoop and holler like it's the day the eagle shits. It's a couple of months after the "recent unpleasantness" (to borrow a term once used by Confederate widows) of September 11, 2001. Besides the usual plaid shirts and bronco belts that drugstore cowboys favor as part of their everyday rough 'n' ready regalia, a plethora of postage stamp-sized replicas of Old Glory are pinned to folks' denim overalls and a galaxy of FDNY hats hide the balding crowns of its hosts and pay homage to the fallen heroes of the recently collapsed Twin Towers. As the applause dies down, and requests for "Must've Been Drunk" and "Workin' Man Blues" dissipate like corn vapors off of a still, the boom is dropped.
"Remember when we all prospered under Clinton?"
Pow! The woozy walla-walla of the bucks-up beer drinkers and the hell raisers degenerates into a murmur of "w-h-a-t?" and then silence. You can hear a bottle cap drop. What had been a high time hootenanny of a hoedown, is now Marcel Marceau performing Samuel Beckett. How did that happen? What possessed Merle Haggard, a.k.a. the Poet of the Common Man, the man who had penned and popularized a satchel full of strident pro-Vietnam/kickin'-hippies-asses-type anthems to alienate a sold out throng of bucks-up urban rednecks? Didn't Mr. Haggard get the memo that the world had changed?
He ain't finished.
"Yep, under Clinton, there was no Osama," Merle mewls. He takes a dramatic beat and looks up at the rafters, his noggin searching for the next connection or poetic phrase in this impromptu stream-of-consciousness screed.
"That's right, under Clinton, there was no Oh-SAW-muh ... just Monica ... ." He appears pleased with himself. The Strangers look perplexed in mute incredulity, but they aren't about to interrupt the Boss Man when he is on a roll, no matter how far his political rants veer from what passes for conventional wisdom in Bakersfield, the band's hometown.
A cappella, the Hag starts chanting in 2/4 time:
"No Osama, Mon-i-ca...
No Oh-SAW-ma, Mon-ee-kuh...
No Oh-SAW-muh, MAHN-ee-kuh...."
Eventually, Haggard acquiesces to the demands of an increasingly irate and ripped-off feeling bunch of Gucci roughnecks, and plays his signature song, "Okie from Muskogee," and the audience sings along with the anthemic stanza about "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don't take our trips on LSD; we don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street, we like livin' right and feelin' free."
The patrons scream and go bonkers, but through the din of a thousand Pavlov dogs, Haggard surmises, "Well, that song don't mean much anymore."
More groans, more silence, more simmering hostility. And then apropos of the man in the moon, Haggard then starts chanting "Mar-ee-juan-a... Mar-ee-juan-a..." ad infinitum and the band kicks in with another shuffle beat in G Major, and I'll be dipped in dog shit if he didn't turn a one word chant about smoking dope into a bona fide country song, instantaneously and lickety-split like. But this wasn't a concert for good ol' boys ... this was performance art - just like in those vacant lofts in New York.
Later he stops the show and tells the assembled: "W-e-l-l-l-l ... we gotta 'nuther Bush in the White House. Don't worry, we'll get through that, too."
It could be argued that Merle Haggard was doing political benefits well before it was cool, that, in fact, the Hag was at the El Rey in 2001 stumping for Kerry before Kerry was stumping for Kerry. The message was and has been: It is not so much that any other candidate for president succeeds, it's that the "'nuther Bush" fails....
Haggard and the Strangers continued barnstorming across America the Beautiful. On Independence Day of this year, in lieu of playing benefit concerts for, say the Democratic nominee, the Hag instead chose to serenade extraterrestrial-conspiracy theorists at Roswell, New Mexico's "UFO Fest 2004." The unspoken message being, of course, that a spaceship full of little gray men has a better chance of crashing in the desert than John Kerry has of leading the what earthlings innocently and quaintly call the "Free World."
UFO convention or no UFO convention, there is no doubt that way back in 2001 Merle Haggard was prescient in calling out the current warmongering administration on its corruption and its failures.
What Haggard was getting at is the following: The War On Terrorism begetting more terrorism ... an Interior Policy that would make James Watt blush and have Ansel Adams putting down his walking stick and picking up a gun ... a federal debt mortgaged up to its eyeballs to pay for Humvees, smart bombs, and millions of MREs ... federal policies which doddering Supreme Court Justices - who might croak any day now - may have to arbitrate when they aren't out shooting doves with the vice-president ... .
None of which matters. This is a one-issue election: Who is gonna keep those religious zealots whose intellect ended in the Dark Ages from stuffing more jet planes into the towering corridors of power? Bush or Kerry?
Senator John Kerry is going to lose on Tuesday. He might have stood a chance at dethroning Herr W. if he hadn't focused group'd his entire ethos to death. After 9/11, he has acted just like Bush on the issues that matter most to the electorate: Kerry voted yes on a) going to war and on b) strip-mining civil liberties vis-à-vis the so-called Patriot Act. Kerry knew the score and he still sold out his own convictions. If the 2004 model of Kerry were as ballsy as he had been back in the early '70s when he testified at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the bad idea that was the War in Vietnam, he'd probably win.
As it stands now, Haggard and Kerry have both revealed themselves to be turncoats. Except Haggard's reinvention was brave. Kerry's was merely calculating.
Let me reiterate what is common knowledge now and what was suspected then: That there was no connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. That "Oh-SAW-muh" considered Saddam a decadent Western-influenced infidel and part of the problem.
The problem is that John Kerry - shitcanned Purple Heart and everything - knew this as well as anybody when he voted for bloodshed. So fuck him, too.
The micro-managing and the second-guessing of Kerry's every syllable has reached critical mass to the point that his intellect is seeping out of his nostrils, dripping into his underwear, and climbing up his own ass. Which - as we all know - leads to salmonella of the brain and explains Kerry's campaign inability to succinctly summarize what this election is about. I know it's late, but might I suggest this pithy campaign slogan: "It's the dead bodies, stupid."
Nope, this time the election ain't about the economy, which is, of course, going down with the puckish velocity of Haggard's beloved "MAHN-ee-kuh." (Ding-duh-duh-ling, duh-duh-ling...) The economy is going to suck wind for the next few years, regardless of which Ivy League graduate is going to wave goodbye to Alan Greenspan and say hello to $3-a-gallon petrol prices.
So it is your civic duty ... to what? To vote? I dunno. The last time I got excited about a presidential election was when Jerry Brown slept on people's couches like he was on tour with Black Flag or something.
And is it wrong to resent having to vote for one of two bluebloods, one who is innately evil and beholden to militant Jesus freaks and the Sultans of Oil, and one who is just cranial-crushingly banal and beholden to the Ketchup Industrial Complex?
So yeah, vote for Kerry if you have to. Unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, he has had his ass shot at, so he won't take military action lightly.
Even so, he is gonna lose.
And after the deal is done, don't sweat it, snookums. Like the Hag said: "Don't worry, we'll get through this, too." And if Kerry getting stomped like a soccer ball in Kandahar is more than your delicate sociopolitical sensibilities can take, I suggest you sell your SUV and sundry yuppie shit, grow a beard (ladies can just stop shaving their legs), buy a used Winnebago, and motor to the rarefied air of Mt. Shasta, where the Hag has already barricaded himself. Spend your days smoking chronic out of a blue pipe with Merle, chewing the cud, whittlin' sticks, and waiting for the mothership.
Published: 10/28/2004
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