Heh, lemme get this straight. Toby Keith makes a song calling for lynching and mob violence, as a solution to individual violence--which I guess is so much worse:
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
Mostly on the racism joint, I give people the benefit of the doubt. I think a tin-ear is more common than straight bigotry. But that said, the more things change the more they stay the same. Keith may not be a racist, but he shares the racist's need to make Lex Luthor out of lilliputans. The white lynch mobs of old desperately needed to believe in the narrative of villanous black men obsessed with a collective deflowering the South's virginal white womenhood. Baloney of course--as is Keith's theory that we live in an era of rampant crime. But I'll give Keith this--his "Gangsters doing dirty deeds" is a more sophisticated strawman than the whole "Packs of crazed black men roaming the countryside hungry for the flesh virginal white women" number. I actually prefer the older version. What can I say. I like a little crazy. As long as there isn't too much burning. Or hanging. And the castration angle has to go.
UPDATE: Several posters make the imminently sensible point that the culture of the West isn't the culture of the South. I maintain mob justice is never good--but neither is conflating two groups of people. As always, I'll try to be sharper going forward
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Something to keep in mind is that lynching has different meanings in different places. In the south it is associated with mass racial violence, but in the west most of those lynched were white and it was associated with frontier justice and criminals who were killed by vigilantes because there was no criminal justice system at the time. Toby Keith is from Oklahoma, where more than 2/3ds of all those lynched were white, so for him lynching would have a different meaning than it does in say Georgia were out of 531 people lynched 492 were black. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html
Racist or not, a return to vigilante justice not what we need right now. We need less "law and order" and more rule of law.
gordo is correct. Haven't you ever seen any old spaghetti Westerns?
By the way, it is Willie Nelson singing the verse in question. In the original video, the criminal Keith and Nelson are chasing -- a serial murderer -- is a white guy. And in the old photos that show Nelson's character's "grandpappy," he is arresting white men.
Suggesting that Toby Keith is a racist because of this six-year-old song -- about Western lawmen, not Southern Klansmen -- is ridiculous.
Somewhat echoing Gordo: When I was growing up in the 1970's (in the white suburbs, watching network TV and mainstream movies) lynchings were entirely a feature of Westerns. Think of Clint Eastwood in "Hang 'em High."
But lynch mobs were almost always depicted as evil or at best horribly mistaken. That's what's so bizarre to me about Keith's song: even if he's not being intentionally racist, he's still celebrating something that I thought people were pretty universally repulsed by.
I'm willing to believe Keith and Willie aren't stupid enough to release a song explicitly about lynching black folks. But fetishizing vigilante justice is stupid and, as Ta-Nehisi points out, the idea that we're in an era of ascendant crime and chaos is just factually wrong.
By the way, in the GOOD (i.e. Leone) spaghetti Westerns, there are no justice-obsessed vigilantes, just greedy bounty killers.
"The white lynch mobs of old desperately needed to believe in the narrative of villanous black men obsessed with a collective deflowering the South's virginal white womenhood."
Perhaps this "narrative" arose because Southerners observed, as Thomas Nelson Page did, that "Negroes furnish the great body of rapists."
Mr Coates,
I understand your point that vigilante justince has historically been a part of racially motivated violence. The common picture for most people when they picture a lynch mob is that of an angry white mob crowding around to lynch an innocent African-American falsely acused of some crime against white "Chastity" (whatever that means). Anyone who's gone through high school history class should know that the most famous of these cases was undoubtedly that of Emmit Till.
However, I would like to point out that there is a different Dynamic with regards to western culture. Several of your readers have already done so but I think that the cultural dynamic needs to be better explained.
In the south the overarching reality was and perhaps still is in many respects one of an elite white population which exploited both African Americans and poor whites. Southern Racism is still alive and virulent as Trent Lott, my own personal experience, and the big statue of Richard B. Russell at the Statehouse in Atlanta, will attest to. Therefore it comes as no suprise that mob violence in the south was directed at African Americans from the days of Nat Turner's rebellion to the beating of returning American GI's after WWII and subsequent abuses down to our own day.
The west had a different dynamic. Texas was a seperate case but I'll get to that in a minute. In the west where racial predjudice exists (other than that which stems from not having many other cultures around) it is primarily anti-indian prejudice. Historically the west was one of the first places where African-Americans could excel without so many of the pre-determined stereotypes that so debilitated them in the settled world. The myth of the Louis L'Amour Zane Grey Lily White west is exactly that as is borne out by the career of Deadwood Dick or the statistic that (excuse me if I get the stat wrong) something like 1/4 of the Cowboys in the west were African-American.
Because of the different cultural dynamic the Mob violence in the intermountain west was directed against the lawless elements in society which terrorized the wide open gold-camps of Montana Wyoming Colorado and other states. It is much more remenissent of the Vigilanties of Virginia City hanging the Innocents (Henry Plummer) than the historic southern mob-violence against African-Americans. The myth of western vigilante justice is the myth (based on a kernal of truth) of the concerned citizen taking the law into his own hands because the government authorities were unable to deal with the criminal element due to a smaller population base and a dearth of governmental institutions. Interestingly enough the Montana Highway Patrol still has 7-7-77 on its uniforms as a relic of the days of vigilante justice.
Texas is part of both traditions unfortunately because it is at once part of the south and part of the west. Perhaps Toby Keith should have used a different example but Texas is what most people think of when they think of the Cowboy. I do not think personally that his song is a portrayel of the classic "birth of a nation" style racist mob violence but rather a glorification of individual action and a mythical cowboy past in the tradition of the Movie Tombstone and the hero worship of legendary western lawmen in the same tradition that gave us the television show Walker Texas Ranger.
There is nothing good about mob-violence as my deployment to the sandbox during 2002-2003 will attest to. However, I think that those who criticize the Toby Keith could stand to read their Fredrick Jackson Turner about how the settlement of the west shaped American Society. The western lynching myth is different from the southern lynching myth and should be viewed as such.
"Suggesting that Toby Keith is a racist because of this six-year-old song -- about Western lawmen, not Southern Klansmen -- is ridiculous"
The post explicitly says that I'm extending the benefit of the doubt. I don't disagree with anything that's been said here about the differences between the West and the South. But mob justice is mob justice, no? Racist mob justice may be worse--and then maybe not...
P.S. Though as I think about it. I probably should have not conflated the West and the South.
Ta-Nahesi:
You wrote:
"Keith may not be a racist ..."
That's a pretty big "may not" hanging out there. Especially when you follow it with "but he shares the racist's need to make Lex Luthor out of lilliputans."
So he "may not" be a racist yet he shares racist needs and views? And you believe you've made it clear that you've extended the benefit of the doubt?
If you think you can talk about lynching without having any whiff of racism, or that everyone listening will just assume that the mob isn't lynching a black man, especially in the context of a song sung in a southern accent, then you're just ignorant. In this case I'd bet Keith is actually ignorant. Otherwise, he's a hell of an asshole.
Bigotry aside, the vigilante thing is reprehensible enough.
I don't think "gangster" is a commonly used term in the Western iconography.
"Mostly on the racism joint, I give people the benefit of the doubt. I think a tin-ear is more common than straight bigotry. But that said, the more things change the more they stay the same. Keith may not be a racist, but he shares the racist's need to make Lex Luthor out of lilliputans."
Poolside,
That's the full quote. I didn't just say he "may not be a racist," I specifically said that I give people "the benefit of the doubt" and furthermore that "a tin-ear is more common than straight bigotry."
The point about him sharing an outlook with racists is really about mob justice--that's a part of the outlook of those who believe that a crowd (as opposed to a legal system) should dispense justice, a sense that they are heroic. It's about what Keith sense is in that song, matched up with the argument that a Southern lynch mob would make. It doesn't require that both be racist, for them to have something in common in terms of outlook.
If that's not clear, than my bad. But I really tried to go to some lengths to say that people deserve the benefit of the doubt, and then move from there to make a bigger point about mob rule--racist or otherwise. I also conceded the point about the West vs. the South. I'm not sure what else you want.
Out of curiousity, I looked up the music video on Youtube. Interestingly (and further to poolside's point), it's about a police homicide squad and a retired profiler tracking a serial killer and ends with an arrest by about twenty cops. I think the song is a (rather unclear) attempt to link modern law-and-order pro-police sentiments with the nostalgia a lot of Westerners have for the noble frontier justice. The song has one verse discussing frontier-justice type actions (hang them up in the streets), in the voice of the character's grandfather; the singer himself argues that the 'long arm of the law' needs to track down a few more gangsters.
I think the song is actually pro-organized law enforcement, not pro-vigilantism. I also think that that's highly non-obvious.
With all do respect, I don't get the historical validity of the distinction commenters are attempting to draw between the culture of the post-bellum American South and the American West.
First of all, where do they think the American West--settled mainly in the last half of the 19th century got this particular aspect of it's culture from? It got it primarily from the surviving "dead ender" males of the defeated Confederacy. Yes, it would grow to take on very different forms and traditions, because it was very different terrain and, more importantly, based on an entirely different economic model than plantation slavery.
But one thing that was consistent was a disdain for the central authority of the federal government, and the rule of law that turned certain property rights--owning slaves--into civil rights virtually overnight.
It took the post-War South about 25 years to overthrow reconstruction--and effectively reconstruct the old order through mob/vigilante terrorism. But the men who fled West looking for economic opportunity--by any means necessary--got to create their version of a new order from the ground up, starting with dealings with the Indians and Mexicans.
Ask the folks of Vidor, TX whether Texas is the West or the South. It was a linchpin of the Confederacy, all that Alamo b.s. aside. Settled by upwardly mobile Southern land grabbers who needed new soil for the cotton eceonomy and for their slaves to work. I think Toby K. is tapping into that venerable tradition, unconsciously at least, more so than any Montana mythos.
I'm from Texas by the way, so I'm not hating on Southerners, just the ones with a taste for mob retribution.
By the way, still not wise to be an uppity "celebrity" in Vidor after dark.
"I don't get the historical validity of the distinction commenters are attempting to draw between the culture of the post-bellum American South and the American West."
**
The distinction is important only for one reason -- the current trend of immediately labeling any mention of ropes or nooses or hanging to be a clear-cut reference to whites lynching blacks.
I have lived in Texas all my life, and my reaction to any reference to hanging -- such as a song like Toby Keith's -- is of white cowboys hanging white horse or cattle thiefs, not the Ku Klux Klan.
The famous Pace Picante commercials -- where the cowboy says "get a rope" upon learning that the trailride cook has substituted a salsa made in New York City -- is evidence of the Western point of view of hanging. So are the numerous Western movies in which it is pictured.
I'm not saying vigilante action is right. At the same time, for many Americans, when it comes to hanging or nooses, the idea of frontier justice is much more culturally relevant than whites lynching blacks. No doubt that's what Keith and his co-writer had in mind when they penned "Beer for My Horses."