Have you thought lately about how good it would be to lynch someone? Well, Toby Keith has. He thought it such a wonderful idea that he wrote a pro-lynching song. He doesn’t just quit there. He made an unintentionally funny video about it.

But first, here are the lyrics:

Well a man come on the 6 o’clock news

said somebody’s been shot

somebody’s been abused

somebody blew up a building

somebody stole a car

somebody got away

somebody didn’t get to far yeah

they didn’t get too far

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son

A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done

Take all the rope in Texas

Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys

Hang them high in the street

For all the people to see

That 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

And we’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing

whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

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…

I really don’t want to talk about lynching. Let’s talk about Toby.

Am I an expert on country music? No. My genres are Jazz, Blues and Classical. But, I was born and raised in Tennessee. I live in the town that has more country music performers than any other. Hidden from my sight by the houses across the street is the cemetery where Johnny Cash is buried. I tell people he’s my newest neighbor.

All of these years it has been impossible to avoid country music. I am not an expert but I know enough to recognize country music when I hear it. If you stretch the meaning quite a bit, Toby may be a singer but certainly not anything that qualifies as country, if music at all.

It’s hard to decide how to characterize the video for this song. It is, as I said, unintentionally funny. It is pitiful and pitiable, also. He plays to a fantasy of being a vigilante. He plays to a fantasy of being the star of CSI: Podunk.

Is he really this much of a dumba$$? Is he really that simpleminded? I don’t know but he revels in playing the most retarded of Southern stereotypes.

Given his lack of credentials in the field of country music, his hubris knows no bounds. He has stepped boldly into the disciplines of psychology, sociology and politics. He also exhibits his knowledge of how Blacks think. He is even an expert of posture. Wow! What a guy.

Here are the exact remarks of this tower of wisdom from an interview on Glenn Beck’s show:

Keith: “I think the black people would say he (Obama) don’t talk, act or carry himself as a black person.”

Beck: “What does that even mean?”

Keith: “Well, I don’t know what that means, but I think that that’s what they would say. Even though the black society would pull for him I still think that they think in the back of their mind that the only reason he is in is because he talks, acts and carries himself as a Caucasian.”

The emphasis in the above quotation is mine. I find it telling that, while admitting he doesn’t know, he claims the capacity to think.

Believe it or not, he has defenders. Perhaps the most prominent one is Robert Stacy McCain. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, he is a former reporter for the Washington Times who publicly claimed that slavery was “good for the blacks and good for property owners.”

If you have noticed any other parts of this blog you will have seen that the thrust of it is to play against the stereotype. In looking for pictures for this post I found almost all were too gruesome. But, and it really should not be all that surprising, there were pictures of hangings from all over. They came from Duluth, from New York, from the South, of course, and from numerous other countries. Munch on that for a while.

Many people in the South are trying to prove this region to be civilized. Yesterday, a Black lawyer from Memphis, who tried to paint her Jewish opponent as somehow connected to the KKK, received only 19% of the vote in a district that is 60% Black.

That comes far closer to describing us poor benighted inhabitants of the South than some commercial imposter, such as Toby Keith, who milks the stereotype to qualify for the title of one of his albums, White Trash With Money.