Small town activities
According to country music singer, Jason Aldean, there are some things that a person would be well advised not to do in a small town—the major items on his list, or rather on the list of his multiple lyrics writers, include car jacking, robbing a liquor store, spitting on or cussing at a cop, disrespecting the flag, or attempting to confiscate firearms.
The song, “Try That In A Small Town,” is being seen through political lenses in this polarized country, with Republicans praising it and Democrats raising various points of outrage, and Country Music Television (CMT) pulling the associated video that features the courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the seat of Maury County, as that building was the site of a lynching of a black man who was wrongly accused of an assault on a white girl in 1927.
Aldean did not choose the site for filming the music video, a location that the production company, TackleBox Films, stated is commonly used. Columbia is some forty-five miles southwest of Nashville and thus is convenient for work related to country music videos—and Aldean lives in the area—but it is the sad reality of many landmarks in the south that they will have some association with slavery or the Jim Crow era—and given how little we as a nation are willing to remember that history, it is easily possible that no one involved in the making of the video had any knowledge about the past crime that occurred there.
Since the song brings up the question of guns in private hands, it is worth noting that Aldean was singing in Las Vegas in 2017 when the mass shooter attacked, and the singer expressed views at the time that sounded much like those of gun control advocates, at least with regard to the need for background checks and the claim to be a gun owner himself. And the line from the song, “Got a gun that my granddad gave me,” is exactly what a Fudd would say. Perhaps the writers of the lyrics were not particularly well informed about the debate over modern firearms and magazines—or of the many other debates about gun rights and regulations that the song supposedly takes a stand on.
The key problems at the heart of “Try That In A Small Town” are the song’s leanings toward vigilante violence, especially in cases of unpopular exercises of basic rights.
Barring situations as may be raised in a philosophy seminar on morality, car jacking or robbing a liquor store are bad things to do, even if the opportunity for doing them occurs during a protest against some injustice. This is all the more so the case in America, since the owner of the shop or the automobile is likely to be precisely the kind of person who needs to be won over to the side of social justice. Billionaires are not going to listen to the downtrodden, by and large, and millionaires aspire to become billionaires. People selling adult beverages or driving home from work is likely to have heard the Republican message of free markets, but could be susceptible to a dialectic about the realities of their economic status. Assaulting them is poor marketing.
Thus a small town’s solution for such violent attacks may indeed be the right one, especially if law enforcement are unable or unwilling to act. Yet while spitting on a police officer is generally a bad idea, cursing said agent of government power surely is not only a basic right—an exercise of free speech—but is in all too many cases a necessary expression of the outrage felt by anyone who has good reason to see cops as enforcers of oppression. Whatever one may think of George Floyd, for example, his killing by Derek Chauvin was far over the top of the permissible use of force, and many Americans can tell stories of the police using similar tactics—if they survived the encounter, that is. Saying that all cops are bastards may offend the residents of small towns, but that is constitutionally just too bad, and Aldean’s song implicitly celebrates the silencing of protest. The same is true about disrespect shown to the national flag: Our burghers may get their sensibilities in a twist, and much good may it do them.
The song speaks of “good ol’ boys, raised up right,” and it is precisely this group that most worries me. The United States is becoming increasingly diverse, with people of many backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, race, religion or non-religion, and political leanings. This distresses the crowd that would like to make America great—read, white, male, Christian—again, but we are not going to regress to a mythical 1950s—or 1850s. We might end up Balkanized into enclaves, but demographics and education will not allow Aldean’s idealizations to be the reality for all anymore.
What is more, his implied solution of vigilante justice is precisely the sort of bigoted violence that good people must oppose. Yes, if someone is trying to yank you out of your car or is robbing your store, you have the right to respond with sufficient force to stop that attack. But the implied unthinking violence against anyone who does not conform to the mores of a community is outside the boundaries of civilized society—the sort of society that makes it possible for singers not only to express a community’s ethos, but to challenge and deviate from the same.