“[It’s] a question between depth and surface. These are all superficial manifestations of what it means to have patriotism or any other deeply held belief. Are we satisfied merely with the singing of ‘God Bless America’ before the commercial in between the top of the 7th and the bottom of the 7th?” Johnson asks. Once a symbol becomes what Goodwin calls a “ritual,” it loses the substance underneath, becomes mandatory though not by virtue of its meaning. “[Mere symbolic activity] means that we found ways to short-circuit debate and sustain dialogue. It’s a way of saying, ‘This is sufficient,” Johnson says.

This decision just after 9/11 to reinvest patriotic meaning in baseball—the great American sport of the country’s great past—is the most direct and obvious retreat to nostalgia. And in baseball, it is most clear how this nostalgia has changed since its first use as a post-9/11 palliative into a national weakness. “Nostalgia has ideological uses, interesting ones, important ones,” cautions Johnson. All the worse if we’re using it against ourselves.

THE AMERICAN BOOT

The language of cultural degeneration, of nostalgia for frontier America, finds its most obvious contemporary placeholder in pop country. The recent revival of country music began before 9/11, with groups like the Dixie Chicks and singers like Shania Twain who rose to fame in the early 1990s. By the turn of the century, however, rap music and more conventional pop had gained almost complete dominance over the Billboard 200 charts. From Sept. 11, 1999 to Sept. 11, 2001, Tim McGraw’s “Greatest Hits” and the Dixie Chicks’ “Fly” were the only two country albums that managed to stay in the top 10 for five total weeks. To give a sense of perspective, “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” soundtrack stayed in the top 10 for six weeks.

But 90s country had no robust connection to grassroots Americana. The Dixie Chicks began as a group of left-wing buskers, and Shania Twain is Canadian.

Since 9/11, mass-market country has undergone a radical shift. It’s useful to separate modern pop country into two categories: pop country for pop fans and country for country fans. Between these two categories, there’s been a unified series of changes: country has grown more mainstream—or more accurately, the mainstream audience has grown more country. At the same time, pop country has become lyrically committed to cultural conservatism, patriotic nostalgia, and Americana; and its sensibility as a genre has been refined, made distinct, and become singular, to the direct exclusion of other views on politics and culture.

This is less obvious in the upper echelons of country pop success, that stratosphere occupied by Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood. Their appeal is historic: Swift has enjoyed the longest Billboard 200 stay in a decade. Her eponymous debut album is in its 246th week on the charts at the time of writing. Swift’s debut single, “Tim McGraw,” is composed solely of acoustic guitar chords, and the music video prominently features a Chevy and cornfields (which, incidentally, also make up the cover of “Some Hearts”). Underwood’s allegiance to Americana country is more obvious than Swift’s. While most of her songs deal with the typical problems of romance (let’s just get away from this place! If you cheat on me I’ll wreck your car!), some of her most successful songs are the explicitly religious “Jesus Take the Wheel” or the superlatively American “All-American Girl.” No explanation required.

This is the most popular music in the U.S. right now, but it’s only a light version of country music for country fans. This type of country music has concerned itself deeply and directly with protecting what it sees as The American Way. Zac Brown Band’s “Chicken Fried” is typical of this myopic worldview. Its lyrics catalogue the totems of patriotism: “a cold beer on a Friday night,” fried chicken, “the stars and stripes,” and a “salute” to the military.

Some country music has explicitly taken on 9/11 and those who criticized the Iraq war. The namesake and title track of Darryl Worley’s album “Have You Forgotten?”, which made it to number four on the Billboard 200 in 2003, takes direct aim at his perceived opponents. “Some say this country’s just out looking for a fight,” Worley sings of Iraq war detractors, “Well, after 9/11 man I’d have to say that’s right.” “Don’t you tell me not to worry about Bin Laden,” he adds, “Have you forgotten?”

Worley is not contrasting two political options but two ways of seeing the world, one in which “just out looking for a fight” is nonsensical and another in which it is admirable. The key word here is “you,” the singling out and warning of the other side, the implication that to not support the war is to have “forgotten.” In this scheme, we get a clear right and wrong in flatly threatening tones.

“Us” and “them” can also be presented vaguely. “American girls and American guys, will always stand up and salute,” sings Toby Keith in “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A,” he cautions later, “‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.”

Keith, like Worley and the Zac Brown Band, is proscribing a singular notion of what it is to be an American: a notion in which unfailing patriotism and citizenship are equated. In Keith’s song, the “you” enemy seems most literally to be referring to enemies in the Middle East, but notably is never defined. So, it can be applied to anything: communists could see this “you” as financiers, and Zionists could see it as enemies of Israel. Understood on the song’s own terms, however, the undefined “you” refers to all departures from Keith’s concept of “the American way.” When Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines called “Courtesy” “ignorant,” Keith put up a photoshopped image of her and Saddam Hussein at a concert.

Country music is devoted to a traditional vision of America, one that is being outmoded technologically and challenged militarily and economically. Its musical kinship to this past—stark in an era of synths—and its lyrical excitement at fighting for this past insist that our traditions are safe, that we as a people will fight to protect the values our parents, grandparents, and Mayflower sailors held dear. It is a nostalgic vision for what America should be.

LOST COMPLETELY IN IT

But country music does not have the only claim to the great American past.