Looking for the perfect birthday gift for someone you really, really despise? Better even than a birthday card laced with anthrax, or a surgically precise drone missile strike? Well, I’ve found it!
It’s lackluster country “star” Lee Greenwood’s 1992 album American Patriot, a collection of flag-waving favorites guaranteed to either nauseate you or bore you to death. So far as patriotic statements go, it’s far less belligerent (and hence less entertaining) than the series of three albums that make up the compilation Patriotic Country, which includes such classics as Charlie “Jingo” Daniels’ racist “This Ain’t No Rag It’s a Flag.” And unlike Patriotic Country, which to be fair features some pretty good songs, it has no musical merits whatsoever.
Greenwood will not be remembered for his contributions to country music—they’re near nil. What he will be remembered for is standing tall with Donald Trump. And for, no kidding, publishing his own version of the Bible. His version comes with a subtitle (God Bless the USA), as well as (I wish I was making this up) copies of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and Lee’s own handwritten chorus to his original song “God Bless The USA,” which fittingly enough is the opening track on the Patriotic Country compilation. Choosing anything else would have been a slap in the face to our Great Land.
Samuel Johnson famously called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” which was the last word on the subject until Ambrose Bierce came along. After defining patriotism as “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name,” the great cynic submitted that patriotism wasn’t the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first. And as it was then, so it shall always be. Nowadays the word “patriot” has been co-opted and debased by all manner of scoundrels, rogues, neo-fascists, right-wing Christian nationalists, and flat-out loonies like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
No decent and upstanding citizen wants to be labeled a patriot. Call me a patriot, and I will punch you in the genitals.
Greenwood has contributed not a single great song to the Great Country Songbook. His only fame lies in his extracurricular activities, like shilling for Republican politicians, something he’s been doing for decades. This has won him a spot on the National Council of the Arts, where I’m sure he’s doing a great job doing nothing. He also built a theater in Sevierville, Tennessee, The Lee Greenwood Theater, allowing him to spread his patriotic message without having to buy gasoline for a tour bus. It closed after five years.
Greenwood is in the news these days thanks to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s tsk-tsking the decision to make Puerto Rican musician/ actor/ professional wrestler Bad Bunny this year’s Super Bowl half-time entertainment. Johnson said of Bad Bunny, amongst other things, “It sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience.” He then added darkly, “And there are so many eyes on the Super Bowl—for a lot of young and impressionable children.”
I think Mike’s right. The last thing America’s young and impressionable children want to see on Super Sunday is a performer who can’t even be bothered to sing in American. Donald Trump also finds the idea repugnant, but has yet to threaten to indict the NFL. I’m waiting.
Anyway, who is Johnson’s idea of the perfect Super Bowl entertainer? Why, none other than Lee Greenwood! And Lee is with Malleable Mike 100 percent, telling the New York Post, “I agree with Speaker Johnson. I would make a great performer for any Super Bowl show.” That said, he seemed to concede that his playing the half-time show was a long shot. But always the opportunist, he added, “Maybe the NFL will have me perform this year at the Super Bowl prior to the game to have a stadium full of football fans singing ‘God Bless the USA’ to kick-off the game!”
Oh fucking boy!
I will add at this point that Greenwood has a voice devoid of Southern grit, or any grit for that matter. He may as well be from Maine. His defining personality trait is a total lack of personality. No one is going to mistake him for Hank, Hank Jr., Waylon, Willie, George, Johnny, Conwell, David Allen, Steve Earle or the guys in Drive-By Truckers. And he’s never met a song that he couldn’t ruin by larding it up with strings, vapid backing vocals, and bombast.
American Patriot is a collection of hoary patriotic classics beloved by all races, colors, and creeds, including of course “Dixie,” which Greenwood sings in a bland and reverent hush. It begins as treacle, and ends in nausea. The album also includes a bizarrely bouncy version of “This Land Is Your Land,” which if Greenwood had the courage of his convictions he would have called “This Land Is Your Land if You’re White.” But it’s a fine irony, listening to Lee sing a song written by a guy whose guitar would have gladly killed him.
Greenwood isn’t much of a songwriter (most of his hits were written by other people), but he does contribute two originals to the album and boy are they doozies. The first is the aforementioned “God Bless the U.S.A.,” his “signature song.” In said song he more or less says that if God were to take everything away from his ala Job he would still count himself the luckiest man in the world. He also reels off a lot of American real estate, sings that he’s proud to be an American because at least he knows he’s free as if America is only place in the world where a guy can be free, and makes sure to thank our troops. In short there isn’t a patriotic box he doesn’t tick off. It goes without saying that the song is a prime example of the patriotic banal and pure bombast.
His other original contribution is “The Great Defenders,” an up-tempo Phil Collins-school pop song with a big horn section. It gives Greenwood the opportunity to again say thanks for your service to our brave troops, and he doesn’t leave anyone out:
“(Go) Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines (Hooah!)
You’re the greatest show of strength
This world has ever seen,
Coast Guard, National Guard,
Along with the Reserves,
We salute our Nation’s best
Standing ready Proud to Serve.”
That “hooah!” is priceless, the rest of the song ear torture, as Greenwood treats us to such lines as “You’re the Great Defenders of the U.S.A./You’re the Great Defenders, workin’ while we play” and “If someone messes with Old Glory/They have to answer to you.” Makes the heart swell, it does.
What else have we got? Just what you’d expect. Flatulent versions of such overworked standards as “God Bless America,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” only the last of which shows an iota of personality and has an arrangement not guaranteed to turn the stomach. These songs have all been done better by scores of people (just listen to the vocals on “God Bless America” if you don’t believe me) and will be done better by scores of people in the future. Greenwood’s arrangements lend many of these songs the sound and feel of Christmas songs, which lets you know how Holy he thinks our great country is. Cherish your freedoms and don’t be a Grinch. That’s Lee’s message to America.
I’ve saved the worst for last. “The Pledge of Allegiance” begins with a bunch of adorable-I’m-sure wee patriots reciting the Pledge, after which Lee sings a bit of it before going into a spoken bit that is worth printing in full. On second thought it’s not. It almost put me to sleep. Boilerplate, every word of it. Lee then gets back to the job of singing poorly, and you can be grateful the ordeal is over in less than two-and-a-half minutes.
Mark Twain once defined “patriot” as “the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” Lee Greenwood hollers to beat the band, and subscribes to a form of patriotism that is debased and deformed. As America descends into authoritarianism, America’s worst country singer sings about the sacred freedoms he would gladly give away. Twain could have been speaking for the present moment when he wrote, “We have a bastard Patriotism, a sarcasm, a burlesque; but we have no such thing as a public conscience.” The sort of public conscience e.e. cummings’ Olaf personifies when he says, “I will not kiss your fucking flag.”
American Patriot is too anodyne to warrant the word odious–to use Twain’s word, it’s a burlesque. Which doesn’t make the people who cozy up to it any less dangerous. People who hold empty platitudes sacred are dangerous people indeed.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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