It started out with a song: “Try That In A Small Town,” in my opinion a dog whistle screed to those with ears trained to hear that frequency about how the singer was not going to let violence and protest ruin his small American town. A town that, by the way, according to a previous tune, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of. But, we all feel that way at some point. I know a lot of people vowed to leave Staten Island only to return not too much later.
But, my big problem wasn’t with the tune but with the production values (if you can call them values) applied to the tune. Dozens of “Madison Avenue” type images generated for the express purpose of annoying the already annoyed, with no context, no explanation. Just a very bland “I don’t like it when somebody does something I don’t like” vibe. It was almost like the singer was offended by protests for any reason. He must have forgotten our long American history of protest in the causes of civil rights, women’s rights and peace. Maybe he was absent that day from class. Or, maybe he lives in Florida.
There were no images of January 6th nor the Wisconsin militia.
In any case, my brilliant friend Rickie Lee Woytowich responded to my text about this tune. Rickie’s response was so insightful, so profound, so dead on the money that I’m going to reproduce it here:
“Backlash against wokeism. Had to happen. We threw a blanket of political correctness over those feelings. This is what was festering under the blanket. Give me an honest hate over fake niceness any day. At least with honest hate, you know you have to watch your back……There are those who say we changed too much too quickly. They want to turn back the calendar. If we want to keep it where it is, we’ll have to stand up for what we’ve done in the years since Obama was elected.”
Rickie is usually the wisest voice in the room on any chat and I find that to be true again, but it got me wondering: Did we just assume that everything we…
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