To me, Jason Aldean’s recent hit “Try That in a Small Town” provides the best  answer to an Internet joke question I’ve seen floating around for several years: “If you could completely eliminate one genre of music, what genre would you choose and why would it be modern country?”

The only thing remotely “country” about the song is the singer’s too thick by half insertion of a “hick” accent into what’s otherwise a weird mix of ’80s hair metal ballad instrumentation and ’90s girl pop singing cadence.

Then, of course, there’s the political angle. As an actual country/small-town boy by both upbringing and current residence (I grew up on a farm and then a town of less than 5,000), I kind of resent being portrayed as an angry, violent ignoramus by a guy who grew up in two mid-size cities (Macon, Georgia and Homestead, Florida) before moving to a large one (Nashville, Tennessee).

It’s the kind of “country” song that may draw people out to urban bars with mechanical bulls and cowboy-boot-shaped shot glasses, where they park their shiny big pickup trucks that have never hauled feed or driven fenceline, and put on their fancy hats that were picked to match an outfit, not to keep the sun off a face that’s never worked in a field. Or maybe even seen one. I have yet to hear anyone blasting it out of a rust-bucket old Chevy 3/4-ton in the town nearest me (the metropolis of Archer, Florida, population 1,118), though.

If you’re looking for REAL country music, you could do a lot worse than to give Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” — a so-called “viral hit” — a close listen.

According to The Oklahoman, Anthony “lives off the grid with his three dogs in Farmville, Virginia” (population 7,473).

He’s a high school dropout and former factory worker.

His backing band isn’t some recycled heavy metal combo. It’s himself, playing a resonator guitar.

His response to record deal offers: “I don’t want to play stadium shows, I don’t want to be in the spotlight. … No editing, no agent, no bullsh*t. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should never have gotten away from in the first place.”

When I say he just might be a hillbilly, that’s intended as  a compliment, not an insult.

His “hit” song — whether one agrees with its every political implication or not — evokes the real problems of real people in real small towns and the real countryside, instead of using those people as some kind of yee-haw punch line.

I think he’s the genuine article. And I hope listeners engaging with “country music” for the first time find him before they find Jason Aldean.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is self-enforcing,” Steven Calabresi writes at The Volokh Conspiracy. “It is ‘the supreme Law of the Land’ binding on each of the 50 State Secretaries of State and their subordinates who draw up primary or general election ballots.”

Calabresi believes former president Donald Trump has disqualified himself as a candidate for president per that constitutional provision by engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, and that those Secretaries of State must, therefore, ban his name from upcoming ballots.

When Calabresi calls the provision “self-enforcing,”  he means that “no jury verdict is required.” A Secretary of State simply decides that Trump is an insurrectionist and that’s that. It’s over. He’s done. He may not appear on your ballot, and you may not vote for him.

Unlike Mr. Calabresi, I’m not a professor of law, but I have at least three problems with his claims.

First of all, Section 5 of the 14th Amendment makes clear that no, it isn’t “self-enforcing.” “The Congress,” it says, “shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Secondly, the section he cites forbids insurrectionists to hold, not to run for, office.

And thirdly, when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, there was no such thing as “ballot access” under which Secretaries of State had any say at all over which candidates Americans could vote for.

Until the 1880s, all American election ballots were, effectively, “write-in” ballots. At the polling place, the voter wrote out his choices, or verbally dictated them to an election official if the voter himself couldn’t write, or simply cast a pre-printed ballot provided to him by his preferred political party (yes, “his;” women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920).

Unless we  credit the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment with prophetic abilities, AND assume that they didn’t really mean it when they assigned enforcement of the “insurrection” provision to Congress, AND assume that such “self-enforcement” also magically bypasses the court system set up to adjudicate claims under both the Constitution and subordinate legislation, Calabresi’s argument simply doesn’t hold water.

Personally, I’m in favor of returning to the “write-in ballot,” which would inherently require that election of an “insurrectionist” be challenged in the courts after the votes are counted. OK, actually I’m in favor of dissolving the government, but barring that, we should get the government out of the job of deciding who we may or may not vote for.

And even accepting the legitimacy of the existing system, the only legal way to bar Trump, or anyone else, from the ballot is to prove to a court’s satisfaction that he is indeed an “insurrectionist.”

Which, frankly, doesn’t seem like a very high bar.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Elon Musk and other Very Special Important Wealthy People want to use “your” airports, “your” airspace, and “your” air traffic control systems, but don’t want you and your fellow smelly peasants to know the details.

Per Axios, the VSIWP class has contrived — probably through lobbyists, although direct whispers or even outright bribes to their friends on Capitol Hill aren’t unthinkable — to get their desire included in the  Federal Aviation Administration “reauthorization” bill now before Congress. Per the quietly inserted new provision, the FAA would have to establish a special process to help private jet owners hide their comings and goings from the hoi polloi.

Why the desire for secrecy? Musk considers public knowledge of his jet’s comings, goings, and locations to be “basically assassination coordinates,” a “security risk.” “I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase,” he told the owner of Twitter account @ElonJet, a bot which tracked his jet, in early 2022.

But if such a security risk exists, it’s just as applicable to every commercial air passenger as it is to a private jet owner. Maybe even more so.

Suppose that on Friday, August 11, you boarded Delta Air Lines Flight 308 at New York’s JFK airport, bound for Los Angeles. Every would-be terrorist in the world knew — or at least COULD know, via various flight tracking web sites — that your flight was scheduled to taxi out for takeoff at 10:15pm Eastern time and  land at 1:15am Pacific time. He or she could even track your flight’s progress in a real time on a handy-dandy map for ease of picking “assassination coordinates.”

Why? Because the use of “your” airports, “your” airspace,” and “your” air traffic control systems are matters of public record.

About those scare quotes:

Libertarians and anarchists like me come up against the problem of how a free society would deal with the property status of airspace.  Do you own the air over your homestead? If so, are you entitled to buy yourself a Stinger missile and shoot down any trespassing planes?

I don’t profess to have good answers for such questions, but the government’s answer, way back when, was to declare airspace above a certain altitude effectively “public” — that is, your — property, and establish an agency (the FAA) which  directs traffic through that airspace in your name. Which, in turn, makes all of that your business.

Whether that’s a good way or a bad way of doing things, there’s no good argument for an exception to it in the case of Very Special Important Wealthy People.

In point of fact, we regular folk who travel on the 84% of flights the FAA designates “commercial” pay 98% of the taxes that fund the FAA. “Private” jet operators, responsible for the other 16% of flights, pay about 2%.

They want us to subsidize them AND be barred from knowing where those subsidies are going.

Oh, the poor dears. Next time I fly, I’ll bring the world’s smallest violin along in my carry-on to play a sad song commemorating their plight.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY