God Squad

James Merritt, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told [President George W.] Bush he had been chosen by God to lead the nation in the fight to protect America and the world against terrorism. 'I believe you are God's man for this hour,' Merritt said. 'God's hand is on you.' The president nodded."
-- The Weekly Standard

You never ask questions/When God's on your side
-- Bob Dylan

Good and evil, forgiveness and retribution, freedom and security. Wrestling with these seemingly contradictory concepts has no doubt contributed, over the past year, to countless sleepless nights, as well as innumerable prayers. When those towers collapsed, when those planes plunged to earth, a nation instinctively looked heavenward, through an unfathomably empty sky, for comfort and for explanation.

If musical responses to the crisis offer any indication, what many of us found initially was an assurance of our complete lack of collective responsibility for the conditions of the world we inhabit and a green light for vengeance. More recent recordings, however --particularly those by Dolly Parton (who appears Saturday at the Uptown Theater), Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Chuck D -- show artists gazing in the mirror from new points of view, greeting the world with open arms rather than provincial fists and questioning even the assumptions of their faith.

The shocking specifics of last September's terrorist attacks might be unprecedented, but Bob Dylan's 1964 recording "With God on Our Side" makes clear that our often self-congratulating -- and very human -- reactions to such vicious and unexpected provocation aren't new at all. As Bill Friskics-Warren, music editor at the Nashville Scene, observed recently in an essay about musical responses to 9/11, Dylan's song "was indicative of the Cold War sensibility of the song's Midwestern protagonist, but it was also an indictment of the arrogance inherent in the way the U.S. perennially invokes the divine to justify its aggression."

So it was probably predictable that one early musical response to the tragedy would be another resurrection of "God Bless the U.S.A." Ironic, too, because Lee Greenwood's country hit was a Ronald Reagan campaign theme around the same time Osama bin Laden was working with, and apparently being trained by, the C.I.A.-backed Afghan "Freedom Fighters." Even setting aside that complicating context, the song remains problematic because it proceeds from the questionable, perhaps even blasphemous, premise that God roots for the people of this land and mourns its dead more than he does for other citizens of the world.

Alan Jackson's country and pop smash "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" offers a more compelling response to the horrors of September 11. It movingly captures the variety and depth of emotion felt by millions in the wake of the attacks. Did you shout out in anger, in fear for your neighbor, or did you just sit down and cry? Jackson sings, and he sounds on intimate terms with all three reactions.

Yet the heartfelt "Where Were You" underscores dangers of its own. I'm just a singer of simple songs/I'm not a real political man, Jackson tells us in the same "Little Man" persona that has long accounted for much of his appeal. I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran/But I know Jesus, and I talk to God. Jackson presents his lack of knowledge as a just-folks, out-of-my-hands virtue, then contrasts it with a religious reference that, in this charged context, only reinforces the presumed differences between "us" and "them" -- flattering the former, calling out the latter. Could it be that these common attitudes point to parts of the problem rather than the solution?

Still, Jackson's song highlights a potentially radical impulse: Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us/And the greatest is love. Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," on the other hand, mentions neither Jesus nor love. Rather, Keith announces to enemies We'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American way. (Apparently, Christ's appeal in the Sermon on the Mount -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them who hate you," and so on -- doesn't make for sound foreign policy.) Granted, compared with Neil Young's uninspired and uninspiring "Let's Roll," Keith's hit at least has some fire in its belly. But it's no less unquestioningly triumphal than Young's recording and therefore just as unhelpful.

Put another way, Jackson and Keith's recent crossover hits fall too easily into the old habits of geopolitical ignorance and might-makes-right arrogance. These recordings offer powerful testimony that the world has changed, yet each stubbornly resists being changed by the world.

By contrast, the response of country-rocker Steve Earle to the events surrounding 9/11 was, like that of many Americans, to modify his world view, if only by hitting the library to bone up on Islam. Earle especially wondered how a seemingly ordinary American kid such as John Walker Lindh (who, critic Jim Ridley has noted, is about the same age as Earle's son) could wage jihad against his own country. Already notorious weeks before its release (Earle's Jerusalem doesn't hit stores until September 24), the resulting "John Walker's Blues" is written, controversially, from the kid's point of view. But the song's reputation notwithstanding, Earle neither glamorizes Lindh nor justifies his choices. Earle does, however, complicate things ever so slightly by presenting the so-called American Taliban not as a melodramatic villain but as a human being with human desires -- in this case, to be part of something larger than himself. The result, as with any sincere act of empathy, is that we, too, might be ever so slightly more humanized.