John Prine - Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore
Performative Patriotism
Oh, the performers do love to fly them some flags, don’t they? They’ll invoke your sacrifices during stump speeches to get into office, then vote to cut the VA budget once they’re in office. Those American flag lapel pins stay shiny though. Performers love the troops because “the troops” is an abstract. They care little for the individual because an individual is not a nation, a voting bloc, or a political action committee. The performers pledge allegiance to symbols, songs, and slogans because it’s easier to use the word constitutional than it is to truly live the ideals of the Constitution. They really don’t care about the individual especially if that individual disagrees with their politics. The performers will thank you for fighting for freedom, but they’ll come unglued should you dare exercise it. The performers want a fascist theocracy, but they’re not so clueless as to admit it. They’ll use your service to win arguments with Internet strangers and they’ll use it for their pet cause. Performers won’t send you care packages of socks, foot powder, and Aspirin though. That’s a bridge too far. You can fight the war, travel across two oceans, spend hundreds on travel arrangements, and performers will ask you when you’re stopping by their place. Driving 25 minutes is out of the question for the performer. They’re not fans of answering questions candidly in the halls of Congress either. John Prine would know. He was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. That’s all okay though. To paraphrase Mr. Prine, that flag decal won’t get them into Heaven anymore.
John Prine was… peculiar, and delightfully so. His voice, lyrics, and finger-picking style were all expressly peculiar. As a songwriter, he sat somewhere on the same Americana line connecting Billy Joe Shaver to Shel Silverstein. He made a life and career chronicling the indignities suffered by the working class and giving us insightful tales of ordinary people with wry and heartfelt wit. Few other writers could pull this off:
While digesting Reader's Digest in the back of the dirty bookstore
A plastic flag with gum on the back fell out on the floor
Well, I picked it up and I ran outside, slapped it on my window shield
And if I could find ol' Betsy Ross I'd tell her how good I feel- John Prine, Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore
Ted Kooser, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, once praised Prine at the Library of Congress as "A genuine poet of the American people.” Prine never had a killer hit on his hands, but a handful of heavyweight songwriters who have had hits thought the world of him. That list includes Johnny Cash, Bonnie Raitt, George Strait, Kris Kristofferson, and Bobby D, who called his songs “pure Proustian existentialism,” and “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” In 1970, Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert caught his set at the Fifth Peg in Chicago and offered up Prine’s first review, “He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn't show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.” I was introduced to Prine through a dear friend on my first ship. He played the track Sam Stone for me, from the same eponymously titled album as Flag Decal, and my heart shuddered, stopped, then shattered. He had me.
John didn’t think anything of Flag Decal at first. He crafted it in the late ‘60s, tucked it away, and then unearthed it once he earned his first paying gig in the early ‘70s. Predictably, it pissed off the performative patriots then. Then the war was over, and by the time Reagan took office, Flag Decal’s time had waned. This being America, another conflict was bound to occur. When he played the song during the Gulf War sequel he got standing ovations… and hate mail from people claiming he was unpatriotic. Performers are gonna perform, man. John Prine, being the sly master of phrases he is, and a determined shit-disturber to the end, decided to double down in 2005 with Some Humans Ain’t Human.
Have you ever noticed, when you’re feeling really good
There’s always a pigeon that’ll come shit on your hood?
Or you’re feeling your freedom and the world’s off your back
Some cowboy from Texas starts his own war in Iraq- John Prine, Some Humans Ain’t Human
People started walking out of his shows. The ones who stayed stood up and shouted for him. All of this made John laugh. The performers loved him for 30 years or more and then his words disgusted them. It makes a man wonder what songs of his they were listening to before because it damn sure wasn’t Flag Decal. I suspect it’s always been this way. People are legitimately angry with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine right now because he’s so political. That makes me question which machine people thought his band was raging against. A toaster? A newspaper printer? John was never one for raging. He preferred a well-crafted phrase and peculiar finger-picking to killing in the name. John died in 2020 from COVID-19 complications. He’s not performing anymore, but those performative patriots are and they still don’t understand.
Afterward: the World Cup is slowly teaching Americans that patriotism is not a solely American virtue.
“Won’t drive 25 minutes to come see you,” I lived that one.
These are the kind of performers who only read their lines in the script without giving any thought to the entire screenplay. Those are the exact people Prine calls to the carpet with this song. He's poking hypocrites who don't mind being hypocrites until someone calls them a hypocrite without ever using the word. Every shot he throws is directed at the soul but I'd imagine plenty of allegations of low blows.
Some protest songs take a little time or the connecting of dots before the listener understands the subject matter, but that's not the case here. Prine put it right in the title, blatantly challenging people who know the difference between nationalism and patriotism about as well as they know the difference between being religious and being a good person. He cut through all the useless junk around war, political disjuncture and religion to make a very simple point. I think that fits into one of Einstein's definitions of genius.