Like many an LDS young man, my mother raised me on Broadway musicals–presumably because that were the more “wholesome” alternative to contemporary music, the sort of scene that Prophets and Apostles could enjoy–including of course the 1957 smash-hit West Side Story. Hence, when I later went through what I thought was a rebellious stage in high school and started blasting Metallica’s Black Album on repeat (generally speaking, when an album sells 30 million copies and is overwhelmingly beloved by cops, military personal, and high school jocks, you can’t honestly classify it as “rebellious” anymore), I immediately identified the guitar riff for “Don’t Tread on Me” as lifted directly from Sondheim and Bernsteins’ “America“.

The band itself did not seem to mean much by it; there was no deeper meaning or commentary intended by this riff. As Metallica frontman James Hetfield told Rolling Stone magazine back in 1991, the “America” guitar-line was largely just intended as a pendulum-swinging corrective to the anti-establishment sentiments of their 1988 album …And Justice for All:

“This is the other side of that. America is a f*cking good place. I definitely think that. And that feeling came about from touring a lot. You find out what you like about certain places and you find out why you live in America, even with all the bad fucked-up shit. It’s still the most happening place to hang out.” Hetfield by all appearances heard in West Side Story‘s “America” a straight-forward, unabashed love letter to the U.S.; hence, he assumed the melody could equally serve in “Don’t Tread on Me” as a warts-and-all tribute to the military prowess of his homeland.

Yet as anyone even passingly familiar with the West Side Story original can tell you, there is nothing the least bit straightforward about “America.” The musical overall, recall, centers on a Romeo & Juliet love affair entangled between two feuding New York City street gangs in the 1950s: the Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The tune in question in fact features an argument between the Puerto Ricans in particular, with the women by and large extolling the virtues of their new homeland, all while the men splash cold-water on their celebrations by reminding them of all the endemic racism and poverty of the U.S. mainland–e.g. “Buying on credit is so nice”, sing the women, “One look at us and they charge twice!” rejoin the men; “Industry boom in America” fire back the women, “Twelve in a room in America!” fire back the men; “Life is alright in America”, smile the women, “If you’re all white in America”, smile the men; “Free to be anything you choose” preach the women, “Free to wait tables and shine shoes”, teach the men; and etc.).

And here’s what’s important to emphasize: the lyrics never signal which side you should your sympathies should align with! Everything the women praise about the U.S. is accurate; as is every last thing the men say in retort. The song is crystal clear both as to why so many immigrants sacrifice so much to come to America, as well as how much America betrays those dreams each and every day. This number really is a warts-and-all love letter to America, one that at times does not sound like a love-letter at all.

For the longest time, I felt that Metallica had severely missed the whole point of West Side Story‘s “America” when they lifted the melody line for “Don’t Tread on Me.” The latter song by all appearances is a wholly unironic celebration of the U.S. military that pretends that we still solely wage wars in defense of liberty as though it were 1776, as though almost every single war we’ve waged since then–and especially over the past 60+ years–hasn’t been a blatant war for conquest and corporate profiteering. (I mean, the first Iraq War broke out the same year that they released the Black Album; for that matter, they seem to completely miss the fact that Puerto Rico was itself a conquest of the 1898 Spanish-American War–and that Puerto Ricans have died in every American war since WWI, despite never having had the right to vote for the President or representation in Congress.) The plight of immigrants appears to be the furthest thing from Metallica’s minds here; and those fans who have tried to argue the track was secretly and sarcastically anti-war have frankly all sounded like wishful thinking at best.

But I’ve been rethinking that assumptions lately—in large part because it sure doesn’t feel like a coincidence that our most blatantly anti-immigrant administration in decades has also been our most flagrantly war-mongering. Surely the two go hand-in-hand: The same utter contempt for human life among immigrants naturally translates into utter contempt for human life everywhere else, doesn’t it. In both cases, the Other must be subjugated, their resources extracted, their labor exploited, and their existence finally exterminated. How endlessly the rhetoric of “Don’t Tread On Me” has been deployed to justify treading on everyone else.

Not that any of this is new in the slightest: Hugh Nibley identified this pattern as the “Mahan Principle,” the act of converting someone else’s life into your own personal profit, after the dubious title bestowed upon Cain the first murderer, who killed his brother Abel not in a fit of petty jealousy after the latters’ offering was found more acceptable before the LORD, but per the Book of Moses as part of a premeditated plan to seize control of his brother’s flocks. Terry Pratchet once wrote that all sin is based in treating people like things, and that was certainly the sin of Cain–not to mention of every other exploiter and war-monger down to the present moment.

Students of the scriptures will also note that such is also the overriding theme of the Book of Mormon: bands of religious refugees to the ancient Americas find a land of promise, only to recurrently keep backsliding into exploitation and oppression of the poor. “…because some of you have obtained more abundantly than that of your brethren,” declares the prophet Jacob early in the first generation of their settlement of the promised land, “ye are lifted up in the pride of your hearts, and wear stiff necks and high heads because of the costliness of your apparel, and persecute your brethren because ye suppose that ye are better than they.” The Nephites kept on treating people like things, and this became a chronic problem among them. “…ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish,” similarly admonishes King Benjamin well over 400 years later, “Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.”

Another century after that, another Nephi lamented, “O, how could you have forgotten your God in the very day that he has delivered you? But behold, it is to get gain, to be praised of men, yea, and that ye might get gold and silver. And ye have set your hearts upon the riches and vain things of this world, for the which he do murder, and plunder, and steal, and bear false witness against your neighbor, and do all manner of iniquity.” This was, again, the Mahan principle in practice–and it bears emphasizing that roughly a half-century later, these same Nephites were almost completely destroyed, their cities leveled, amidst the signs that accompanied the Lord’s crucifixion.

After which they did enjoy two solid centuries of peace and righteousness, living in a United Order of neither rich nor poor, but all were equal partakers of the Heavenly Gift! But the signs of their ensuing downfall were accompanied by the ominous words of: “And from that time forth they did have their goods and their substance no more common among them. And they began to be divided into classes.” The Mahan Principle re-exerted itself with a vengeance, and so the LORD would grant them no more space for repentance, for they did “willfully rebel.”

And amidst the wreckage and utter downfall of their miserable civilization–after their thousand year failure to ever fully forsake the Mahan Principle–the Nephites’ final survivor Moroni turned his gaze upon us in the present day, and warned our fate would be the same: “For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted.” We would rather steal money from the poor, and then blame them for their own poverty, than care for them. Whether that contempt is expressed in contempt for the poor immigrants and refugees, or in endless wars and rumors of wars overseas, or in yet another round of tax-cuts for the rich and tax-increases on the poor, the Mahan Principle remains in full effect, with the judgment of God as fully upon us as it was upon the Nephites.

So maybe, to loop back around, it is entirely apropos for Metallica to have sampled “America” from West Side Story for “Don’t Tread on Me”–and maybe the song’s defenders, the ones who claimed this is actually a covert anti-war track, were right all along. The Book of Mormon, too, is an anti-war text often grossly misread as the opposite as well–this, despite the fact that the uber-pacifist Anti-Nephi-Lehites are upheld as the pinnacle of righteousness, that the hero Captain Moroni only ever engaged in strictly defensive warfare and always stopped the fighting at the first hint of enemy fear, and the final genocidal wars between the Nephites and Lamanites, between Shiz and Coriantumr, are always presented as a battle between two equally wicked peoples.

For in America today, as it was anciently, we wage wars for liberty while utterly grinding the poor beneath our feet; our contempt for immigrants is of a kind with our contempt for everyone else; again, we use the rhetoric of “Don’t Tread on Me” as an excuse to tread upon all others. And just as “Don’t Tread on Me” is ominous and threatening in its minor-key build-up, so is the Lord God Almighty if we do not repent.