Dear John

Hi, I'm Steve and I am here representing the Mother Fucking John Mellencamp Society.

Sports fans in the United States like me have suffered for too long. You know how it is, you are watching a football game and here it comes. That song, that fucking song.. This is ouurrrrr country 1st quarter, 2nd quarter, halftime. It's like watching a slasher movie, you know the sonofabitch is coming and you are powerless to stop it.

I imagine a cross section of American society sitting in a sports bar watching the local game and the commercial break reveals "The song" and old ladies and 5 year old little tykes look up in resigned distaste and say "Mother Fucking John Mellencamp"

But don't get us wrong. We here at the MFJM Society have nothing personally against Mr. Mellencamp. This is not like the Castrate Creed and Shove Their Testicles in Scott Stapp's Mouth Foundation. No, we are not against Mr. Mellencamp, just against having his song and accompanying commercials crammed into every orifice during televised sporting events.

For those of you not in the US I am talking about a series of commercials for Chevy, primarily their trucks. In these commercials John Mellencamp sings a song that says wholesome American values. Here are some of the lyrics

There's room enough here
For science to live
And there's room enough here
For religion to forgive
And try to understand
The other people of this world
This is our country
From the east coast
To the west coast
Down the Dixie Highway
Back home
This is our country

That poverty could be
Just another ugly thing
And bigotry could be
Seen only as obscene

The song plays along with images of rural, hard working Americans with little sayings like "This is our coffee break" and shows a worker in a hard hat leaning back on a log. It's like, you can only really be American if you are a hard workin' good ol boy. This is our country, you pussy liberal office workers can git!

More to the truth is that Chevy is saying "Well we totally fornicated the canine and couldn't put out a sedan that wasn't teabagged by Toyota, Honda and Nissan for the last 10+ years. So fuck it, we'll try to make bank on our trucks and play up to the jingoistic sentiment in those parts of the US that thought electing someone who got us into Vietnam 2.0 and thinks evolution isn't a done deal was a good idea."

Chevy has selectively used the lyrics along with the images of the good ol rural life to make it sound like a right wing anthem. There is no fucking way you watch those commercials and not think that they are making the hard sell to the Right. It has now turned me into the liberal version of Pavlov's Dog. I hear the song and images of Dick Cheney doing a soft shoe routine on the Constitution pops into my head. And this is wrong.

Look at the lyrics, he is talking about understanding other people in the world. He talks about making poverty and bigotry things of the past. A nice flipside to the current governments ideas of not realizing that you won't be welcome by a large portion of the populace in a country you "liberate", basing your serious economic reforms on less taxes for the upper class and pushig hard to make sure those strange gay people can't get married.

Dear John, why did you let your song be co-opted to become the soundtrack for a video montage of white people playing with puppies and kitties coming to a Republican fundraiser near you? Why did you not realize that although that there is so much good in hard working rural Americans, way too many of these pinheads voted for a complete moron and an evil fuck because they shared similar "values"?

I can see you have dreams John. We do too, we dream of a day when we are no longer assaulted by Chevy commercials after every time out. One day, Chevy's add campaign will run out of steam and we will no longer have to say.. "Mother Fucking John Mellencamp"