Music Video Hell #10: Trade Martin

Now that MTV has about as much to do with music as KFC has to do with Kentucky, the Internet has become our primary source for music videos. With the Internet, though, there is no filter. It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Well here, drinkers of both tea and coffee, is the chaff. It’s your penance for a lifetime of sins: Music Video Hell.

OK, so there’s been a whole lot of talk over the last couple of weeks about the “Mosque” (it’s actually a community center) that is planned to be built “at Ground Zero” (it’s actually several blocks away). It seems to have really laid bare the ugly undercurrent of racism that has been permeating the United States since Obama got elected. No, I’m not blaming Obama. I’m blaming the racist, redneck pieces of shit who are so afraid of losing their majority status in the United States that they feel the need to resort to spreading ridiculous “birther” conspiracies about our President, declaring that anyone in Arizona with brown skin is probably an illegal immigrant, and lumping all Muslims in with the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

Music Video Hell was created as a humor column, and I’m sorry that the angry-to-funny ratio in this particular installment is unusually high, but I am just getting fed up with this bullshit. I don’t want my daughter growing up in a country where one in five Americans think President Obama is a Muslim based on nothing but the wild accusations of a few Tea Partiers. People need to engage in some critical thinking and not just regurgitate whatever talking points Fox News (or MSNBC, for that matter) happens to be feeding to them in a given week.

There have been far more attacks on American soil by domestic, Christian terrorists than by Muslims either native or foreign-born. Would anyone object to a church being built near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing? No. It’s a lot easier to point the finger at the mysterious, Islamic bogeyman, though. And hey, if the President of the United States says that Muslims are just as entitled to freedom of speech and religion as the rest of us, why then he must be one of them! After all, just look at the color of his skin!

OK, so let’s get to the video itself, because that’s what this column is about. The song sounds like an amateur rendition of a late-era Toby Keith ballad as re-interpreted by David Duke and his $20 Casio keyboard. I absolutely loathe Toby Keith but this makes him look like a card-carrying member of the ACLU by comparison, and a musical genius to boot. “We gotta stop the mosque at ground zero,” the lyrics tell us. “It’s thumbing its nose at all the victims and heroes.” Accompanying the grade school-level rhyme scheme and shimmering synthesizer is a PowerPoint collage of 9/11 scenes interspersed with shots of right-wing crazies waving around their protest signs. I’ve long been an opponent of PowerPoint and its deleterious effect on modern communication, and this video makes a pretty strong case for me.

“God help us retain the honor and trust,” the lyrics continue, “for all the families that have suffered so damn much.” And you’d better believe that at that moment, there is an image of a firefighter with an American flag transposed over him. This video sinks just that low in its obvious, crass jingoism. It almost parodies itself at that point, seeming more like a Mr. Show sketch than an actual thing.

This video just sucks on so many levels and makes me angry down to the very core of my being. This isn’t the harmless stupidity of a video from hacks like Dirty Hair or The Maine. This is vile, hateful stupidity. Next time I’ll get back to focusing on shitty corporate bands and wacky Internet memes, but right now I just want to hold my copy of the Bill of Rights and cry myself to sleep.

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About the Author

Jeremy Clymer lives in Michigan with his wife and kid. He shoots his writings out into the ethers of the Internet in the hopes that someone will pick up on his transmissions and shower him with money and/or praise.

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