Route
66
I’m driving I-40 and old Route 66 for seventeen hour days
to make it to San Diego by Sunday, and there are flags everywhere.
There are tourists in flag shorts, an American shirtless man, and
a lone salesman in a golf shirt waving a huge flag outside a car
dealership, occasionally balancing it precariously one handed so
as to wave to a passing motorist. On the chests of the overweight
white folks is a ribbon they can finally understand - it’s
not pink, red, or purple - it’s red, white, and blue. On the
back lit signs outside of evangelical churches and the marquees
of large stone churches, the words of the gospel and warnings of
sinful behavior have been replaced with GOD BLESS AMERICA, a notion
that is fine by me. I’m down with America.
So I’m sitting in the
Cherokee Restaurant where you can buy a hat or a belt buckled not
only covered in rattlesnake skin but featuring the head itself -
mouth wide and fangs barred - just as easily as you can order the
buffalo steak - which I’m not sure I can recommend - and I
hear something that makes me happy. After the country station finishes
another cranked out tear jerking song with a last minute patriotic
soliloquy slapped on, I hear the no nonsense voice of Merle Haggard.
Merle is letting me know that if I’m messing with this country,
I’m walking on his fighting side - and I don’t want
to be there. Merle has been give a second dance on mainstream corporate
country radio. This is an ironic turnaround as just last night in
a small country western bar about 60 miles east of Oklahoma City,
I accidentally fed a 5 into the juke box and was given 20 plays.
I started with several Hank Williams selections and moved on to
Johnny Cash, and then there was Patsy Cline, Johnny Horton, and
or course Merle. I was motioned over to the bar by a 300 pound man
in a straw Resital hat and a snap button shirt much like my own.
I asked if things heated up here later, and he whipped a pair of
silk leopard skin panties out of his shirt pocket and waved them
about like a flag - a gesture I have recently become very familiar
with. I told him I was very surprised that he could manage to fit
into such petite lingerie, but other than assuring me that he didn’t
personally wear them, he wouldn’t elaborate and just kept
winking at me - though thinking back he might have had some kind
of a tick. So my songs stated playing out and many of the patrons
had quite a few unkind things to say about Hank and Johnny and even
Merle. Of course I leapt to their defense, but not to the point
of inciting violence. The consensus was that real country music
was dispensed by the likes of Garth Brooks, an Oklahoma boy, and
Faith Hill. Having uncustomarily drunk more than a few drinks, I
could have pointed out that Woody Guthrie was also an Oklahoma boy
and given my opinion of their relative merits, but I could see the
room getting quiet, then petulant, and heading towards hostile... |
