Commentary

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Flew right over their heads

“Lady Gaga plays the hits, steers clear of politics during Super Bowl halftime show.”—a tweet Sunday evening from Fox News, which doesn’t get much else right either.

It’s telling that many on the simpleton American right wing, from Fox News to Mike Huckabee, praised Lady Gaga for not being political in her spectacular—and political—halftime performance at the Super Bowl.

She performed extravagantly above their heads and did her subtle political messaging from the same place.

She offered subtext in a Trump Era that has trouble enough comprehending the main text.

By opening with snippets of “God Bless America” and “This Land is Your Land,” she was juxtaposing the feel-good former with Woody Guthrie’s bitter satire and protest of the latter. She was invoking differences of thought and experience in America.

Google all the verses to “This Land is Your Land” if you doubt me.

Or let me go ahead and do it for you, sparing you the trouble, with attention to Guthrie’s verses four and five: “As I was walkin’—I saw a sign there. And on that sign it said—no trespassin’. But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’. Now that side was made for you and me. In the squares of the city—in the shadow of the steeple, near the relief office, I see my people. And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’ if this land’s still made for you and me.”

By the way, as a friend pointed out in finding a subtle message I’d missed: “God Bless America” was written by an immigrant, Irving Berlin.

Then Lady Gaga performed “Born This Way,” a gay and lesbian anthem. That surely qualified as a political reference in bigotry-infested modern America. Beyond its reference to sexuality, the song extols inclusiveness of all kinds amid the current mad Bannon-Trump rush to nativist exclusion.

It was all quite brilliant. If Lady Gaga had stopped the music to verbalize an overtly political statement, the right would have crucified her. But by making her statements only within the music, and subtly within a spectacle of quintessential modern American garishness, she invited the right’s approval and praise—which she promptly got—along with its unwitting admission of not being at all discerning.

Lady Gaga was thus the best of America—energetic, expressive, talented, free and more clever than the simpletons of the corrosive American right.

Prominently suckered was Huckabee, who tweeted, “Lady Gaga left politics out but added some high-octane talent.”

But we already knew Huckabee paid scant attention to song lyrics. Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have played bass that time for Ted Nugent on “Cat Scratch Fever.” He once extolled Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” which is largely about a groupie’s performance of oral sex.

Conservatives and Republicans have long been at sea on lyrics that way.

Ronald Reagan, campaigning for president in 1984, went to New Jersey and praised the great American spirit of the local boy, Bruce Springsteen, and his anthem, “Born in the U.S.A.” Weeks before, conservative columnist George Will had attended a Springsteen concern and become caught up in the revivalist excitement of what he thought, and wrote, was a “grand affirmation” of America.

Here’s how “Born in the U.S.A.” begins: “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground. You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much ’til you spend half your life just coverin’ up.”

It gets cheerier after that, detailing a young man who gets in a little hometown jam and is sent off with a rifle in his hand to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man, and who then goes down to see the V.A. man and gets told, son, don’t you understand.

In columnist Will’s defense, he picked up on the blue-collar bitterness of the verses. He simply deemed the “Born in the U.S.A.” chorus to be a proud American pronouncement even despite the verses.

He’s entitled to the interpretation. That’s the thing about artistic expression. The only failing is not recognizing artistic expression even in high-definition.

At this point I’m suspecting that those on the simpleton right, now properly informed, are suddenly decrying the anti-American blasphemy of those songs and this column, and maybe Lady Gaga. They probably do so even as they adore and extol their preposterous second-place president who, in a pre-Super Bowl interview, was astonishingly anti-American, likening our nation’s moral performance through history to that of the murderer Vladimir Putin.

If their own blatant contradiction escapes them, then Lady Gaga’s coming subtly at them through the stadium roof surely will remain immeasurably over their heads.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Upcoming Events