Steve Earle "John Walker's Blues"

I've been working this week, on mvyradio's 9/11 Radio Special.

It'll be 2 hours of songs directly about or inspired by September 11th, 2001.

So I've been up late the last few nights, researching, script-writing and organizing.

I've got songs about the attack itself as well as songs that became rallying cries or comfort food, songs about loss, and songs for reflection.

But I've got this one song that sticks out like a sore thumb, and I'm not quite sure how to fit it into the Big Picture.

Do you remember John Walker Lindh?

He was an American kid, who was found among Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Steve Earle wrote a song from the perspective of the young man, and because some people believed it to be a sympathetic portrayal of a traitor, the song became a source of much controversy.

On the surface, this song is probably the least about September 11th, of all the songs I've been listening to.

But though it's not about loss, or remembrance, or anger, or resilience, maybe, more than any song we'll play this weekend, it says something about the post-9/11 world we live in, the political world we live in.

Earle has flat out said that he does not condone Lindh's actions, but because Earle's own son was the same age as Lindh, Earle had to ask the question:

How did this happen?

The kid didn't just wake up one day, and leave his high school soccer team and glee club practice to convert to Islam and join the Taliban. It didn't happen in a vacuum. So what were the factors that went into this transformation? What was in Lindh's control, and what was beyond it.

The song imagines a kid who finds no comfort or reflection of himself in American culture and starts to look elsewhere.

The hugely negative response to the simple creation of the song pretty much lays bare where we are as a culture:

Complicated questions, with complicated answers, are not welcome.

Here in 2011, we, as a country, are hoping to correct our debt problems, employ the unemployed, protect Social Security and tackle a host of other complicated problems.

But no politician, and frankly, no voting public, is willing to listen to a complicated answer.

Or, perhaps worse, they may listen to a complicated answer, but are easily distracted by base (but often baseless) attacks.

Death Panels!

Class Warfare!

No New Taxes!

Those are easy things to shout. They are effective in getting nothing done.

And sadly, they are easy things to listen to and digest, instead of the complicated truth.