Steve Earle
Jerusalem
(Artemis, 2002)

“Lately, I feel like the loneliest man in America.”

So says Steve Earle in the liner notes of Jerusalem.

And way back in September of 2002, it seemed he may have had a point. After all, the wounds of 9/11 were still fresh. Americans were hurt. They were angry. They were thirsty for blood and they were ready to rally around anyone or anything that might give it to them.

Blind patriotism was at an all-time high. 

But you dared not say so at the time. You dared not question the motives of three rich, white politicians who were playing a real-life game of Risk somewhere in the basement of the White House. You dared not question how a manhunt in the foothills of Pakistan was shifting into an all-out assault on Iraq. And under no circumstance would you dare question the policies of an administration that provided the very blanket of freedom you held dear. To do so at such a crucial juncture in our nation’s history would be considered heresy, you see.

This was wartime, after all. And not only that, this was an all-new kind of wartime with invisible enemies and high-value targets and covert agendas and faceless cowards and quagmires-o-plenty. This was the kind of war where the evildoers popped up, then disappeared again, like bogeys in a high-stakes round of Whack-a-Mole. This was a war where nothing was open for debate, where every military strategy was far too complex for normal, everyday, hayseed Americans to possibly comprehend (a point the press corps were constantly reminded of by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney). This was the kind of war where there was no middle ground—you were either in or you were out, with us or against us.  

It was Iraq or bust and we were a country full of flag-flying motherfuckers.

But not Steve Earle.

Steve Earle was singing about version 6.0 of the American dream. He was singing about corporate corruption and medical malpractice, social inequality and shitty HMOs. Steve Earle was writing about the nature of hate. He was writing about the causes and the effects. He was drilling deep and hitting nerves.

He was upsetting the unnatural balance and his critics wouldn’t have it.   

So they created a good old-fashioned controversy where there was none, which was a pretty acceptable thing to do, given the politics of the day.

At issue: “John Walker’s Blues”—a tune that anyone with a second-grade education and a paperback copy of Songwriting for Dummies should’ve understood immediately. “John Walker’s Blues” was Earle’s attempt to walk a mile in the shoes of a modern-day turncoat, to understand what could possibly motivate an all-American boy to one day wake up on the wrong side of the Jihad.

Only a pair of Nashville DJs didn’t see it that way. And apparently, that was all it took to turn Steve Earle into the social equivalent of France.

Steve Gill, a conservative talk-show host from Tennessee whom no one outside of the Bible Belt has ever really heard of before or since, claimed the song put Earle “in the same category as Jane Fonda, John Walker, and all those other people who hate America.”

Phil Valentine—another Tennessee talk-show host with similar credentials—followed suit, calling the song “politically insane.” 

In the days that followed, The New York Post picked up the “John Walker’s Blues” story, as did The Washington Post. Eventually, MTV hopped onboard, as did CNN. And really, all any of those news outlets had to write about were those two Nashville DJs, who felt Earle had gone the way of Bobby Fischer.

“A lot of smart people didn’t get that I didn’t agree with what John Walker Lindh did,” Earle said during a 2004 interview with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke. “I just had a problem with scapegoating. And I have a son that age. That’s really why I wrote the song. I thought, ‘This guy has parents. They’ve gotta be sick over this.’”

Perhaps.

But, again, this was way back in September of 2002, when an entire nation was on high alert. It was no time to be writing ditties about Taliban sympathizers. It was no time to be writing much of anything political—we’d soon discover—unless it had a blatantly jingoistic feel to it (please see “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” for more on this point).      

In fact, you’d have to go all the way back to the feel-good days of Nixon-era Vietnam to find a time when rabble-rousing of any kind was so vehemently discouraged in this country—a point Earle makes quite poignantly on “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)”: “I remember when we was both out on the boulevard / Talkin’ revolution and singin’ the blues / Nowadays, it’s letters to the editor and cheatin’ on our taxes is the best that we can do.”

So what’s the point of dredging all this up now?

Perhaps it’s that things might’ve been different in this country if more people had the guts to stand up and call “bullshit” way back in 2002, at the very moment when the tumblers were originally clicking into (or out of) place. Perhaps things would’ve been different if more people voted against George Bush in 2004.

The fact is, we had our chance. And if you’re the type of person who believes that evil can only prosper when the good people of this world stand by and do nothing, then it stands to reason that—in some ways—we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves for what’s happened to this country over the past six years.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it did happen, or that a whole lot of people the world over now view the US as a country that thinks itself above the law.