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This is actually WORSE than it sounds, and I'm not sure how I never heard of it before—a 2003 Willie Nelson/Toby Keith song about how great lynching was.
"Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree,
Round up all them bad boys hang them high in the street
For all the people to see"
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree,
Round up all them bad boys hang them high in the street
For all the people to see"
"We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
Too much corruption, and crime in the streets
It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send 'em all to their maker and he'll settle 'em down
You can bet he'll set 'em down"
Too much corruption, and crime in the streets
It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send 'em all to their maker and he'll settle 'em down
You can bet he'll set 'em down"
And there's a video.
Aaaand here's the chorus:
"Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune
And we'll all meet back at the local saloon...
"Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune
And we'll all meet back at the local saloon...
"...We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces, singing
'Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.'"
'Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.'"
Toby Keith performed the song on The Colbert Report. foxnews.com/story/toby-kei…
(Keith's defense of the song isn't particularly coherent, but it appears to boil down to saying that it's not about lynching black people, just about the old Texas tradition of stringing up evil-doers without trial.)
The Colbert Report. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that.
So the song got some criticism, particularly around the time that the tie-in movie came out, and it's revealing that the pushback against the accusation that it glorified lynching was a denial that it was racist
It reminds me of that time that Jeffrey Lord claimed that the word "lynching" can only be used if someone is murdered with a rope—no rope, no lynching.
Lynching is organized murder in reprisal for a crime or other (real or imagined) offense, carried out in the absence of a trial, or instead of judicial punishment after trial. Racism is a common component, but like hanging, not a necessary one.
There's something very American about responding to charges that you wrote a song glorifying lynching by denying that you're a racist.
It's like, "yes, the racism part of lynching is very very bad, but the part where someone is murdered by a mob in retaliation for a crime they may or may not have committed is bad, too."
The majority of people lynched in US history have been black, but the number of white lynching victims numbers in the thousands—and of course Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and others have been lynched as well.
And if you need a refresher on the ways in which lynchings which weren't explicitly racist could be motivated by bigotry, false accusations, and ginned-up mass hysteria, the Leo Frank case is a good place to start.
Turns out that when you give socially connected people free rein to murder socially marginal people with legal impunity, bad things tend to happen as a result.
Aaand I now have people swarming my mentions to tell me that blind praise for extrajudicial killing is central to the Western genre, and that I'm clearly just ignorant of American popular culture.
My copies of the Ox-Bow Incident, Unforgiven, The Searchers, and seasons one through three of Deadwood could not be reached for comment at presstime.
