A Red enclave in a Blue State

Well, my research and posting plan for last night and today was disrupted by a call from a friend last night. I decided that wailing my brains out with him at a rural bar that had karaoke would be a good idea. It was.

This bar was a place that would make the skin of blue bloods crawl. It was a very simple place that had not been aesthetically updated in a very, very long time. There was no top shelf booze. There weren't any beer taps. Most of the people there worked either in a factory, or they were farmers. Many of them also could answer yes to most of the questions in Jeff Foxworthy's Ya Might be a Redneck act. At about 11:30, an interesting thing happened.

A woman was called up to the microphone by the DJ. The bar was still pretty packed, but the tunes had moved away from country songs, and a few people had begun filtering out. Nobody was really paying attention to music. Then the intro to this woman's song began, and heads started to turn to her. One man held his beer bottle up in the air. Then another. Finally, she began to sing...

American Girls and American Guys
We'll always stand up and Salute
We'll always recognize
When we see Old Glory flying
There's a lot of men dead
So we can sleep in peace at night
When we lay down our head

By the time she got to the third line, everyone was watching. By the end of the first stanza, half the bar was singing. When she got to we'll stick a boot in your ass, it's the American Way the crowd damn near blew the roof off the bar. She did a passable job on the song, but she got the biggest pop from the crowd of anyone all night.

I can chalk part of that up to it being a Toby Keith song, and Toby is the cat's ass for that set. But the response was to the lyrics. This is a group of people John Kerry will probably not win in November, despite the fact that he is really trying to make an impact on them by playing their fears about their jobs & livelihoods. For one night, I didn't feel like I lived in the heart of liberal Wisconsin.