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YOU'RE LOOKIN' AT COUNTRY

A few years ago I noticed that a downtown McDonald's started blasting country music on outdoor speakers in order to ward off African American teen-agers who liked hanging out on that corner. That's why it was no surprise that the Bush administration decided to top off its nationalist fever commemorative mass-murder-of-Americans special 9-11 atrocity march today with a country music concert. Not an American music concert, a country music concert. White people's music. In the 1968 Presidential election, most country musicians backed the segregationist candidate, George Wallace. Nashville boasts more liberals now than it did then, but the music still signifies exclusive whiteness, and to many people it signifies racism. It doesn't signify racism to me, except when people use it in racially hostile ways. And I have every reason to believe that the Bush administration intends that signification, at least subterraneanly to its many racist supporters. (Digby has stuff on the Republicans' plan to stoke a racist backlash against the New Orleans victims of the hurricane.).

And if the Bush administration didn't mean its commemorative country music concert to signify exclusive whiteness, then what the hell are they thinking? An American popular music celebration-event that includes no African American music? If it's not intentional racism, it may be THE stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.