Toby Keith's what they used to call a poster boy, I don't what they call it now, an icon maybe, meaning not so much a religious figure as a symbolic button, something that represents. So there's Toby Keith in a truck commercial, growling like a Ridgeback; and there's this bounty hunter guy named "Dog"; and there's I don't know who from the WWF from back in the days "poster boy" was used to designate someone as being so typical they could stand in for the whole crowd; and there's no division between the three of them, it's the same guy. Kind of a trip seeing that.
The problem is the WWF guy's the only honest one in there. The bounty hunter guy's whole existence spins off the legal structure that produces the bail jumpers in the first place. And anyone who thinks that legal structure's designed along moral and ethical lines isn't worth talking to for longer than it takes to say "So long!"
And Toby Keith. Toby Keith's representing people who sing to the people. Which used to mean people who represented the people. The singer was the one who showed us our souls. The voice of the heart of the people.
"The" people. Not "people".
We've gone, in the space of a few hundred years, from regarding singers as being people who sing, to singers as being people who sell their singing. Someone who sings but doesn't market that singing is secondary, a hobbyist, an amateur in the derogatory sense of someone who isn't serious about their art. Just as an artist is someone who sells art they make, and in that you can see, if you look hard enough, an equivalence, between the maker of art and the seller of art. They have an equal stature in the marketplace. Artist and seller.
Being a tough guy under those conditions is more complex than Keith and his support system pretend. Like the bounty hunter, you represent.
In the way things have been set up, which is false, a lie essentially, who you mean to represent is all that counts. But in reality, the same reality that makes the seller of art an equal to the maker of art, you represent who you represent, whether you know it or mean it or not.
George Bush may believe he works for God, but that has nothing to do with it, except for him, personally; for the world, for the rest of us, the confusion in his soul is disastrous.
Toby Keith doesn't present himself as working for anyone, but that doesn't mean he isn't. He works for exactly the same invisible presence that the bounty hunter, "Dog", does. Just because we don't have a name for that that works doesn't mean there isn't something there. There is.
I think of it as the devil, but that's my personal reality, I'm not trying to put that on anyone else. It's the way I was raised, it's how I was trained to see things.
Still, inasmuch as there is a common meaning to the word "devil" it works, it fits. Something evil, selfish and more arrogant than it is holy, putting its own pride above the Most High. Not that Toby Keith is intentionally working for the devil, I don't mean that, just that he is, whether he knows it or not.
________
OK, that seems odd to a lot of regular folks, how about this:
The largest single killer of children, in the US, is the automobile - and the biggest industry in the US is the automobile.
T. Keith - truck commercial.
He does not intend to be making an evil thing, he makes an evil thing. What that means to me, to say he works for the devil, is probably not what it means to you, or would mean if you said it. But I'm the one saying it. And I'm speaking for myself, not for anyone else, and not as anything else.
The problem is the WWF guy's the only honest one in there. The bounty hunter guy's whole existence spins off the legal structure that produces the bail jumpers in the first place. And anyone who thinks that legal structure's designed along moral and ethical lines isn't worth talking to for longer than it takes to say "So long!"
And Toby Keith. Toby Keith's representing people who sing to the people. Which used to mean people who represented the people. The singer was the one who showed us our souls. The voice of the heart of the people.
"The" people. Not "people".
We've gone, in the space of a few hundred years, from regarding singers as being people who sing, to singers as being people who sell their singing. Someone who sings but doesn't market that singing is secondary, a hobbyist, an amateur in the derogatory sense of someone who isn't serious about their art. Just as an artist is someone who sells art they make, and in that you can see, if you look hard enough, an equivalence, between the maker of art and the seller of art. They have an equal stature in the marketplace. Artist and seller.
Being a tough guy under those conditions is more complex than Keith and his support system pretend. Like the bounty hunter, you represent.
In the way things have been set up, which is false, a lie essentially, who you mean to represent is all that counts. But in reality, the same reality that makes the seller of art an equal to the maker of art, you represent who you represent, whether you know it or mean it or not.
George Bush may believe he works for God, but that has nothing to do with it, except for him, personally; for the world, for the rest of us, the confusion in his soul is disastrous.
Toby Keith doesn't present himself as working for anyone, but that doesn't mean he isn't. He works for exactly the same invisible presence that the bounty hunter, "Dog", does. Just because we don't have a name for that that works doesn't mean there isn't something there. There is.
I think of it as the devil, but that's my personal reality, I'm not trying to put that on anyone else. It's the way I was raised, it's how I was trained to see things.
Still, inasmuch as there is a common meaning to the word "devil" it works, it fits. Something evil, selfish and more arrogant than it is holy, putting its own pride above the Most High. Not that Toby Keith is intentionally working for the devil, I don't mean that, just that he is, whether he knows it or not.
________
OK, that seems odd to a lot of regular folks, how about this:
The largest single killer of children, in the US, is the automobile - and the biggest industry in the US is the automobile.
T. Keith - truck commercial.
He does not intend to be making an evil thing, he makes an evil thing. What that means to me, to say he works for the devil, is probably not what it means to you, or would mean if you said it. But I'm the one saying it. And I'm speaking for myself, not for anyone else, and not as anything else.
