America[1]Sardonic and laconic lead single from the 2011 album Apocalypse, by the old Lo-Fi pioneer turned Alt-Country singer Bill Callahan, featuring free-associative wordplay on the Maryland native’s … Continue reading
America
America[2]This track, incidentally, features in the 2018 Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country (along with “Drover” from the same album, which gives the doc its title), about the controversial … Continue reading
America
You are so grand and gold, golden[3]Play on the Golden “Amber fields of grain” featured in the old hymn “America the Beautiful,” yet also a subtle pun and jab at how America regularly gets set up as a golden idol to … Continue reading
Oh, I wish I was deep in America tonight[4]Another subtle wordplay, in this case a double entendre for wishing to be back in the heartland of America, but also desiring to be “deep in,” as though he were making deep love to his homeland, … Continue reading
America
America
I watch David Letterman in Australia[5]Acknowledgement of the hegemony of American soft-power, such that one can be on the literal opposite side of the planet and still be able to watch U.S. late night television. There’s a story that … Continue reading
Oh, America
You are so grand and gold, golden
I wish I was on the next flight[6]Bill Callahan has the right idea here: you don’t repent of your sins by running away from them, but by confronting them directly.
To America
Captain Kristofferson[7]Country legend Kris Kristofferson was a captain in the U.S. Army before his musical career.
Buck Sergeant Newbury[8]Singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury served in the U.S. Air Force.
Leatherneck Jones[9]Country singer George Jones served in the Marines during Korea.
Sergeant Cash[10]And Johnny Cash, arguably the greatest Country legend of all, served in the Air Force as well.
What an Army
What an Air Force
What a Marines[11]In the context of this verse, Callahan appears to be celebrating not so much American military prowess as might appear at first blush, but simply for producing some of his favorite Country singers. … Continue reading
America
I never served my country[12]Is he lamenting his cowardice and irresponsibility here? Wondering if he’d have become a greater Country singer of note if he’d served? Or is he instead actually expressing relief that he never … Continue reading
America
America
Afghanistan[13]The “graveyard of empires” that America has occupied from just a month after 9/11 clear down till 2021, and which had not only already defeated the Soviets and the British Empires before us, but … Continue reading
Vietnam[14]The other ill-advised foreign boondoggle and site of Nixon and Kissinger’s worst war-crimes, which the Iraq wars were supposed to finally shake off, as opposed to demonstrate to every poorer … Continue reading
Iran[15]Curiously, Callahan here in 2011 skips right over the then-most-recent war in Iraq to instead highlight Iran, a country that America wouldn’t attempt to invade for another decade and a half. Bush … Continue reading
Native American[16]A reminder that the U.S. first got all of its practice in foreign conquest and imperialism here in North America with the genocide of Native Americans—the very people to whom this continent is … Continue reading
America
Well, everyone’s allowed a past
They don’t care to mention[17]It’s true that America is far, far from alone in having a bloody and disgraceful history that belies our highest idealism, and which we’d prefer to scrub clean from our history books. But … Continue reading
America
America
Well, it’s hard to rouse a hog in delta
And it can get tense around the Bible Belt[18]The irony that it is precisely in those parts of America that claim to be the most Christian—the Bible Belt so called—where there resides the least inclination to repent of our national sins.
America
AmericaAll the lucky suckle teat
Others chaw pig knuckle meat
Ain’t enough teat
Ain’t enough teat
Ain’t enough teat
Ain’t enough teat
Ain’t enough teat
Ain’t enough to eat[19]There is of course enough to eat in America; we produce enough food to feed three times our population. It was CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters who taught that scarcity and hoarding are the … Continue reading
In America
America
America
In America
Now
References
| ↑1 | Sardonic and laconic lead single from the 2011 album Apocalypse, by the old Lo-Fi pioneer turned Alt-Country singer Bill Callahan, featuring free-associative wordplay on the Maryland native’s homeland. An apocalypse in Ancient Greek, recall, signifies not so much the end of the world as a Revelation (the Book of Revelations in Spanish is named Apococlipses). And what is it that Bill Callahan here seeks to reveal? |
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| ↑2 | This track, incidentally, features in the 2018 Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country (along with “Drover” from the same album, which gives the doc its title), about the controversial Rajneeshpuram religious community that relocated from India to Oregon in the 1970s and ‘80s seeking religious freedom, where they soon drew the ire of local residents for voting in a united bloc in local elections, and were soon investigated, then raided, by the FBI. The group was considered scandalous because (and tell me if you’ve heard this one before) their religious leader, the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, was rumored to be a sex fiend who ruled his followers with an iron fist–claims he strenuously denied–who was denounced by former friends who either betrayed him or were betrayed by him, depending on who you ask. Both the U.S. Attorney General and Oregon State Attorney General later admitted that had insufficient evidence to prosecute him, for what it’s worth. The documentary itself leaves ambiguous which side you should believe. Any similarities you perceive between Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and, I don’t know, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in Nauvoo and Salt Lake City respectively, is invariably one of those Rorschach tests that will always reveal more about yourself than any of the here named.
When Rajneesh passed away in 1990 back in India, by the way, his epitaph read, “Never Born – Never Died Only visited this planet Earth between December 11, 1931 and January 19, 1990”. Such expresses a very Hindu conception of eternal life. But then, did not Joseph Smith teach something similar in the King Follet discourse? |
| ↑3 | Play on the Golden “Amber fields of grain” featured in the old hymn “America the Beautiful,” yet also a subtle pun and jab at how America regularly gets set up as a golden idol to worship—as well as how gold itself is worshipped in our miserably materialistic modern society—like the Israelites with the Golden Calf in the days of Moses. I used to assume that story was a metaphor, until the current president literally set up a golden statue of himself to be blessed by various evangelical leaders, who suddenly found themselves in the awkward position of having to explain why an obvious golden idol was not an actual golden idol. If this has featured in a novel, it would be decried as heavy-handed and insulting to the reader’s intelligence; but then, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the scriptures are literally true. |
| ↑4 | Another subtle wordplay, in this case a double entendre for wishing to be back in the heartland of America, but also desiring to be “deep in,” as though he were making deep love to his homeland, yet also screwing this country directly, in retaliation for how it has screwed others (the invasion of Iraq which destabilized the entire region and led directly to the rise of ISIS—whose leaders all meet each other in American prison camps—was still a recent memory when this song was written). Perhaps it is not so strange that our terms for making love and expressing the contempt are one and the same; Callahan, like hundreds of millions of others across the country and around the world, feels the same about America. |
| ↑5 | Acknowledgement of the hegemony of American soft-power, such that one can be on the literal opposite side of the planet and still be able to watch U.S. late night television. There’s a story that back in the early-‘90s, comedian Bill Hicks was told be a heckler, “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” To such Hicks shot back quick as a whip, “What, and be a victim of our foreign policy?” This would’ve been during the first Iraq War mind you—and that war was the popular one, the one that supposedly helped America get its swagger back after the embarrassments of Vietnam a generation earlier! A record number of American flags sold out. Bush Sr. almost cruised to easy re-election on the back of that war. Folks who decried that first war were lone voices in the wilderness. But Bill Hick’s riposte proved prophetic, and by 2011, America was still very much recovering from foreign policy disasters of the second Iraq war under Bush Jr. But the problem wasn’t just America’s hypocrisies (we had definitely armed Saddam Hussein as an ally before turning on him), but that there was literally no place to hide from the effects and incompetence of American foreign policy. The whole world pays the price for our adventurism, in gas prices and global economic collapses (2011 was still during the Great Recession) that no one in the other 95% of the planet ever voted for. That is, even if you leave America, there is no escape—just as there is no escape from our sins, no matter how far we fly. The Nephites too, at the end of their history, sought to run away from their sins as well, to no avail. Hence as ever why there is a great need for a mighty repentance. |
| ↑6 | Bill Callahan has the right idea here: you don’t repent of your sins by running away from them, but by confronting them directly. |
| ↑7 | Country legend Kris Kristofferson was a captain in the U.S. Army before his musical career. |
| ↑8 | Singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury served in the U.S. Air Force. |
| ↑9 | Country singer George Jones served in the Marines during Korea. |
| ↑10 | And Johnny Cash, arguably the greatest Country legend of all, served in the Air Force as well. |
| ↑11 | In the context of this verse, Callahan appears to be celebrating not so much American military prowess as might appear at first blush, but simply for producing some of his favorite Country singers. He has his priorities straight. |
| ↑12 | Is he lamenting his cowardice and irresponsibility here? Wondering if he’d have become a greater Country singer of note if he’d served? Or is he instead actually expressing relief that he never served? The second Iraq War had only recently wound down, after all, and that blatant oil grab was most certainly not a war that defended American liberty and democracy. |
| ↑13 | The “graveyard of empires” that America has occupied from just a month after 9/11 clear down till 2021, and which had not only already defeated the Soviets and the British Empires before us, but presaged those other empire’s ultimate collapses as well. |
| ↑14 | The other ill-advised foreign boondoggle and site of Nixon and Kissinger’s worst war-crimes, which the Iraq wars were supposed to finally shake off, as opposed to demonstrate to every poorer country on earth how to successfully defeat the largest military in earth. It’s baffling how we keep recurrently fail to learn this lesson—especially since the American colonists used these exact same guerrilla tactics to achieve independence from the British Empire in the first place. |
| ↑15 | Curiously, Callahan here in 2011 skips right over the then-most-recent war in Iraq to instead highlight Iran, a country that America wouldn’t attempt to invade for another decade and a half. Bush and Cheney had attempted to expand the War on Terror into Iran in the waning days of their second term—had in fact been attempting to lay the groundwork for just such an invasion directly after 9/11 when they included Iran in the “New Axis of Evil” alongside Iraq and North Korea—but immense war fatigue with Iraq in America, along with the Democrats retaking Congress in the 2006 midterms, had derailed those plans; and the election of Obama (still in the promise of his first term in 2011) had seemingly killed off the idea for good. The fact that Obama had then peacefully negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran seemed to put to rest any lingering fears of an Iran war once and for all.
But let no one say that there has never been a true prophet among us! Bill Callahan, a red-state denizen himself deeply involved in the Country Music scene, saw even then that these Republican demiurges to invade Iran had merely gone underground, to hide and hibernate awhile, till conditions were ripe to invade at last. Trump recall had attempted to start this war in early-2020 with his assassination of an Iranian general, but his provocations were swiftly derailed (not to mention memory-holed) by the sudden COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent electoral loss to Biden. It was finally in 2026, after running for reelection as the “anti-war” candidate in yet another characteristic example of brazen lying and dishonesty, that he finally fulfilled the Bush-era dream of a war in Iran—which promptly blew up in his face as predictably as its execution was incompetent. Unless of course Bill Callahan isn’t referring to the looming future bombing of Iran that doubled gas prices just year at all, but is in fact looking clear back to 1953, when the CIS assisted MI6 in overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran—for Iran was once a genuine Western-style democracy in living memory, you see—because he had dared suggest that the people of Iran are who should profit from Iran’s oil preserves, not British Petroleum. They installed the Shah as dictator and the CIA even helped to train his secret police to squash any burgeoning democratic movements. The 1979 Islamic Revolution was a direct response to the Shah’s viciousness and cruelty—whose tactics they nonetheless began copying immediately. That is (as we’ve discussed before) if Iran is a repressive dictatorship today that hates America, that is entirely our fault. We did this. We could have just left them alone in 1953 and both Iran and the world entire would objectively have been a better, safer place to live in. Heck, we could have left them alone in 2026 and the world would be an objectively better place to live in, because the regime used the U.S. bombing of 160 school girls to silence the protesters and consolidate power, and will also never agree to another Obama-like nuclear deal again. This is all of what happens when we refuse to repent of our national sins. |
| ↑16 | A reminder that the U.S. first got all of its practice in foreign conquest and imperialism here in North America with the genocide of Native Americans—the very people to whom this continent is divinely promised, per our own most sacred scripture, and still is if we do not repent: “And the Father hath commanded me that I should give unto you this land, for your inheritance. And I say unto you, that if the Gentiles do not repent after the blessing which they shall receive, after they have scattered my people—Then shall ye, who are a remnant of the house of Jacob, go forth among them; and ye shall be in the midst of them who shall be many; and ye shall be among them as a lion among the beasts of the forest, and as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if he goeth through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver” (3 Nephi 20:14-16). We don’t like to focus on that scripture, do we; I’ve yet to hear it quoted in a sacrament or conference talk. But it is unequivocal. It is we who must repent and conform to the Native Americans we have treated so abominably, not the other way around. |
| ↑17 | It’s true that America is far, far from alone in having a bloody and disgraceful history that belies our highest idealism, and which we’d prefer to scrub clean from our history books. But that’s just another way of saying that we are no better than any other nation—and will be just as surely destroyed—if we don’t acknowledge our sins and repent. Repentance, remember, is one of the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel; if we do not repent, then we cannot do anything else, for “By this ye may know if a man repenteth of his sins—behold, he will confess them and forsake them” (D&C 58:43). Otherwise we really will become as the Nephites of old. |
| ↑18 | The irony that it is precisely in those parts of America that claim to be the most Christian—the Bible Belt so called—where there resides the least inclination to repent of our national sins. |
| ↑19 | There is of course enough to eat in America; we produce enough food to feed three times our population. It was CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters who taught that scarcity and hoarding are the doctrines of Hell; that radical generosity towards all is the doctrine of Christ’s Atonement. If people still starve here, or get priced out of groceries, that is very much a policy choice, and a Satanic one at that. In this the Lord is not well pleased either; remember again, for the umpteenth time, that the only system pleasing to the Lord is one wherein “they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift” (4 Nephi 1:3). It is the only way, per the Tenth Article of Faith, that Zion can be built in the North American continent. |