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.
