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The Nation's Pulse
Country, Courtesy, and Bin Laden
What it’s like to have The Weight lifted from our collective shoulders.
LYNDEN, Washington — Seattle is a city that cares deeply about music but you wouldn’t know it from listening to the radio. The I-5 corridor from roughly Everett to Portland is a sonic desert on the FM dial.
Your humble scribe long ago despaired of finding a good rock station and decided to settle instead for country music. The call letters shift constantly, yet there always seem to be a few channels with plenty of wattage to reach down deep into the state.
The Dodge Stratus’s radio was tuned to one of those honky tonk stations a little over a week ago now, as I traveled from my Canadian border town to visit friends and relatives in greater Portlandia. Static was beginning to creep in, maybe 30 miles South of Olympia, when “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” started spinning.
“Courtesy” is the post-9/11 Toby Keith hit song famous for the line “We’ll put a boot in your ass. It’s the American way.” The first few times I heard this, it was rousing good fun. (Dixie Chick Natalie Maines predictably hated it, claiming the song “makes country music sound ignorant.”) Keith sang that “this nation I love is fallen under attack.” A “mighty sucker-punch” had caught America unawares, but just you wait, folks.
Keith sang about the initial U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan (“We lit up your world like the Fourth of July.”). He predicted that now that “Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,” Osama Bin Laden would meet a violent end “courtesy of the red, white and blue.”
Keith’s rough country rhymes assured patriotic Americans that “Justice will be served and the battle will rage. This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage.” And Bin Laden and company would in the end be very “sorry you messed with the U.S. of A.”
As I said, a rousing, rollicking good time. And for a few minutes, alone in my car, I relived the sense of collective and defiant hope that America showed in the months after 9/11. But then, before the song was even over, I felt it again: The Weight.
You’ve felt it too, I’m guessing, my fellow Americans. The Weight is that sense of collective helplessness in the face of the horrors of history. It had pressed down more and over the last near-decade, making America’s many misfortunes that much harder to bear.
One just war of retribution turned into a broader and ill-defined conflict with no end in sight. The economy went to hell and was not getting much better. And almost 10 years after 9/11, the would-be prophet who had bloodied the nose of the Great Satan continued to escape our grasp — almost as if Allah had willed his continued survival.
The foreign policy mandarins in the Bush administration wanted to get Bin Laden, of course. Who wouldn’t? But they ultimately didn’t think he mattered all that much. Many conservative thinkers followed their lead, with less than stellar results.
They argued that Bin Laden was dead, or effectively dead anyway. He was disappeared to a cave somewhere, where he could die anonymously. As long as he wasn’t funding more terrorism or actively plotting against us anymore, what did it really matter?
We can understand why some folks pressed this line, but it mattered a great deal and this became more apparent as the years stretched out. Osama’s continued survival became a national insult, a sign of the world’s only superpower’s powerlessness. How could it be that the U.S. government could not get this one man who had done Americans so much harm?
That’s what I wondered yet again on that very somber Saturday. The very next day, over dinner, the Applebee’s waitress secured a whopping tip by breaking the news to us that Bin Laden was finally toast. Even better, he had died at the heroic hands of U.S. forces.
With her words — words that echoed those of President Obama’s terse but stirring address — an old burden evaporated from our shoulders. For the first time in nearly a decade, history didn’t feel so bloody crushing. We knew that we could all breathe a little easier going forward because Bin Laden could breathe not at all.
About the Author
Jeremy Lott is editor of RealClearPolicy.com, RealClearBooks.com and RealClearReligion.org and associate editor of RealClearScience.com.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (30) | Leave a comment
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Kitty| 5.9.11 @ 6:28AM
As long as progressives (from both parties) are in control of our country, the weight remains.
Mimi| 5.9.11 @ 7:23AM
Yes Kitty, the bungling and incompetence continues....I wish the " STORY" would get straight...once and for ALL!!
Pakistan owes us " THANKS" not threats....Now they need to decide, once and for all, whose side they want to be on....and we need to examine if they are friend or foe.
We have an important PRIMARY to be thinking about...Now, on to the job at hand.....and YES we are all relieved that OBL is long gone from our mist , mind and thoughts!!!
jppl| 5.9.11 @ 7:06AM
"President Obama's terse but stirring address "? You gotta be kidding? Hussein bin Obama's Sunday night speech was among the worst presidential addressed I've ever heard and his behavior since getting OBL is nothing but a marketing scheme.
But it'all irrelevant......there is no such thing as "radical Islam" or "moderate Islam", there is only Islam. And as long as Western nations allow high numbers of Mohammedans to immigrate into our countries, we will forever be strip-searched at airports and will see Sharia Law encroaching in our hometowns because the followers of the Arab warrior-general are now physically here in large and growing numbers.
rhymer| 5.9.11 @ 7:44AM
Who'n the world was it shot Osama?
Media are saying Obama.
But O was goodfing off
Playing nine holes of golf.
Did he die from a stray golf ball trauma?
John Navratil| 5.9.11 @ 11:11AM
OBL or
UBL?
Who cares who shot?
He rots in Hell.
TomKP| 5.9.11 @ 8:10AM
Does anyone actually pay attention to what Obama says? Get real. The man (and his wife), insulted our country many times, both here and abroad, in public. He RAN in 2008 against ALL of Bush's anti-Muslim terror policies and now he has kept or expanded them and even used them to get OBL.
Does it matter what Obama says? He never stops talking......he is the consumate metrosexual, effeminate media-boy, tailored for the Oprah and The View crowd.
JimH| 5.9.11 @ 8:23AM
While Getting UBL provides great satisfaction, the weight referred to in the title has not been lifted. At least not much as long as all the restrictions on our liberties imposed on us by the OHS at the airports and elsewhere remain in place, and as long as our troops are abroad trying to clean out the nests of these cockroaches. One can debate the necessity of these things and be for or against some or all of it but they are not without cost.
Louis Jenkins| 5.9.11 @ 8:33AM
No, the weight of the Muslim terrorists has not been lightened. Sharia law has not been on a diet either. Our country is at war, it's just the leaders who refuse to admit it. So buckle your holster and tighten you reins Amos, ridin' a raid is child's play compared to the mess we're in.
JimP| 5.9.11 @ 9:20AM
I too do not feel any weight lifted. I’m heartened that many Americans celebrated OBL’s death, but on the whole it is anticlimactic, IMO, given the totality of the present circumstances and that it took ten years to get him. GOP leadership failed us on too many levels before 2008 and lead directly to the election of the 'Carter administration on steroids': and too many of them are still failing us. Now we have a crop of potential GOP candidates for the ’12 nomination among who only two have what is needed as POTUS to effectively lead us out of the mess we are in- in my guesstimation. No, I still fee that weight.
Pecos Pete| 5.9.11 @ 9:24AM
Killing Osama was the lifting of an ounce of weight compared to the tons of crap King O is laying on us.
Ned the Red| 5.9.11 @ 10:15AM
I still need to know if anyone else noticed the sleep number bed compressor in the photos of Usama's bedroom. I also heard he was watching reruns of his Southpark appearances on the TV. Anyone?
Bill| 5.9.11 @ 5:46PM
I thought he was watching Wow Wow Wubbzie.
Albert| 5.9.11 @ 11:09AM
"Dixie Chick Natalie Maines predictably hated it, claiming the song 'makes country music sound ignorant.'" Natalie Maines make Country musicians sound ignorant, perhaps even stupid.
If you're looking for Rock and Roll on the FM dial you will find a few stations in the SF Bay Area. The FM waves are filled with stations, most of them not worth my time, and it is getting more difficult every day to find an open FM frequency so I can play my IPod through my Monster FM transmitter. Unfortunately, a rather large percentage of stations I come across are in a language other than English.
As for a "weight lifted," I haven't noticed much that is different, at least not yet. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who "liquidated" the Wicked Witch, only to find she always had the power to go home, someday I hope Americans will discover that we have always had the power to stop Islamic nut jobs and return America to prosperity, and killing OBL, while satisfying, changes very little. We still have the same Bozos in Washington we had 2 weeks ago. The same stupid foreign policy, the same recession inducing economic policy, the same vote-buying political machine. We the People have the power to stop the Bozos in Washington. The ballot box.
Redstateboy| 5.9.11 @ 11:15AM
now that one muslim terrorist in dead, perhaps now we can do something about the muslim sympathizer in the WH. Obama's economic policies are killing our nation and accomplishing Usama Bin Laden's dream.
Wayne | 5.9.11 @ 11:38AM
The weight wasn't removed from my shoulders. We haven't heard much about him for the last 9 years. He has not been relevant for a long time. This was an easy mark designed to make Bambi look like Rambo.
Bill| 5.9.11 @ 1:00PM
It was only a matter of hours before the vultures began nibbling away at the event by carping about whether or not an imam was present at the burial at sea (my personal hope is that they gave his body the old heave-ho and peed off the deck after him), then all the phony navel-gazing about the people cheering that he was dead and how bad that was.
I say pie the nay-sayers. They did it to some of the people who try to speak for us. Give it back to them whenever they start their negativistic quibbling.
Tex Expatriate| 5.9.11 @ 1:13PM
I looked for some substance in this essay and couldn't find any.
LiveFreeOrDie| 5.9.11 @ 6:19PM
How about this. The last traces of morality and patriotism in the music entertainment industry are found almost entirely in country music. God bless 'em!
bsuden| 5.9.11 @ 2:54PM
Get serious, JL.
OBL is dead. So what?
How about the policies that ticked him off in the first place - around the world - and now here at home?
Yeah, Islam is a wicked, vicious and damnable superstition, but a little less interference and building "democracy" would go a long way toward getting the (fascist) "Homeland" out of the mess it's in.
And whether we prefer rock or c&w is immaterial. Nobody appreciates our cowboy foreign policy fronted for now, by Geo. W. Obama.
So much for any real change.
Occam's Tool| 5.9.11 @ 3:59PM
One day they will get us truly angry, and then we will hit them properly, instead of the love taps we do now.
Chef Schnauzer| 5.9.11 @ 5:02PM
The notion that OBL ever represented a 'weight' of any kind on my self or my company is asinine and juvenile. Get the government burdens off my back and we'll talk about some abstract weight being lifted.
Handbags | 5.9.11 @ 9:01PM
Thanks for taking this opportunity to discuss this, I feel fervently about this and I like learning about this subject.
Dee See| 5.9.11 @ 11:24PM
AS borders remain wide open, as Janet Napolitano
secretly signs some 80 MILLION Mexicans into
'trusted traveller' (ie green card) status, as the death toll in Mexico these past couple of years
reaches Viet Nan levels, as 'profiling' is scorned---
"We are using MASSIVE third world
(largely muslim) immigration to destroy
British culture once and for all ---forever."
-TONY BLAIR
(Daily Mail interview cited by ALAN WATT)
----Likewise France, Germany, Spain, Italy
---and, substituting Latinos ---America.
Franchise slumming, cultural obliteration,
subversion of our genuine religious culture
(think Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Oprah
and Phil et al) ----destruction of sovereignty
ending the republic ---VAST incremental stealth
extermination ---ARE the core stated aims
of capstone Globalism.
DO NOT BE DECEIVED