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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Toby Keith: Just Another Camel Herdin' Man
It's hard to put a label on Toby Keith.
The country singer who appeared on Friday's program is about as red-blooded as they get: a truck-driving, cowboy hat-wearing, violence-threatening man's man. A tireless champion of our armed forces and a veteran of more than 60 USO tours, he writes songs celebrating whiskey, war, and school prayer. But then he voted Bill Clinton for president, and claims to be “a lifetime Democrat.” So what gives?
By Keith's admission, he's not a political guy, just someone who speaks his mind for whatever it's worth, to whoever wants to listen. That assertion is a bit hard to believe, though, after listening to the chest-thumping rhetoric in some of his songs.
In one of Keith's more memorable tunes, The Taliban Song, he sings from the point of view of an Afghani, a “middle-aged, Middle-Eastern camel herdin' man,” who laments the Taliban's radical Islamic rule, and dreams of riding off into the sunset to Turkmenistan. Yes, that's right, Turkmenistan.
The song, with it's overtly pro-Bush, don't f*** with America slant, comes off immediately as ignorant jingoism, yet another example of Americans making bizarre and hasty assumptions about people in other parts of the world. It represents the kind of thinking that has made Americans the butt of jokes from London to Lebanon.
Despite this, however, and despite the song's lean towards facile sentimentality, one can see here that there is a paradox to Keith. He is man who puts himself in the shoes of the Afghan camel-herder, for a few minutes, at least, to make the point that this man is not so different from the average American wrangler of quadrupeds. Beyond all the threats and flag-waving is the songwriter's acknowledgement that people across the world all want essentially the same things: stability, prosperity, and a promising future.
It's almost enough to make up for Keith's tasteless assertion in the song that the Afghan people prayed to Allah to be bombed by America. But maybe not quite enough to bury this little gem: "Mr. Bush got on the phone with Iraq and Iran and said, 'Now, you sons-of-b*tches you better not be doin' any business with the Taliban.'" (I think that might be a direct quote, actually.)
Probably, for the sake of his rhyme scheme, Keith cut the line about Mr. Bush's call to Saudi Arabia, which was likely a little more genial.
Toby Keith should be commended for his unflagging support of American troops stationed around the world. They need songs written for them as much as anyone, maybe more. But Keith's political messages, Democrat or whatever, would be better saved for the B-sides.