Here’s a question.

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

Why are the people who complain the loudest about political correctness and the “cancel culture” among the first to scream when someone disagrees with them or expresses a contrary opinion?

The furor over country singer Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” song and video is but the latest example.

Both the tune and the video are a messy mishmash of MAGA-style chest-thumping, assertions of victimhood that somehow are supposed to justify violence and vigilantism. Logically and factually, the song and its pairings in the video with incendiary images make about as much sense as an old Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

The lyrics threaten dire retribution for those who:

“Cuss out a cop, spit in his face

“Stomp on the flag and light it up

“Yeah, ya think you’re tough.”

If anything, the video is less subtle. It’s filled with images from, one presumes, Black Lives Matter protests, intercut with footage of Aldean and his band lip-syncing before a courthouse festooned with a giant American flag.

The courthouse, it turns out, is one from which a Black man was lynched in 1927.

That’s not surprising. The MAGA crowd’s understanding of history seems to have been gleaned from 1940s comic strips and old movie serials.

Curiously, both the song and the video ignore one high-profile instance of police officers being disrespected, assaulted and attacked—the Jan. 6, 2021, protest at the U.S. Capitol that escalated quickly into a riot and then an insurrection.

Maybe that’s because many of those who ransacked the temple of American democracy were from small towns—and embraced the values celebrated in the song and video.

But then, the purpose of the song wasn’t to persuade.

It was to inflame.

Which is what it has done.

Country Music Television—CMT—has pulled the video from its rotation, prompting the easily wounded MAGA crowd to whine that they’re being persecuted. They even say Aldean is being censored.

They aren’t.

And he isn’t.

The people who run CMT have the same First Amendment rights as anyone else. That means they can choose to say what they wish—and choose not to say things they don’t wish to say.

If theirs was a completely open forum, they’d be playing rap or soul and not limiting their offerings to endless and often nasal celebrations of pickup trucks, lost loves and illusory vanishing lifestyles.

CMT likely made the decision to drop “Try That in a Small Town” from the playlist because encouraging people to settle political differences by grabbing grandpa’s gun wouldn’t advance the brand or the business plan.

The MAGA mob has responded by yelling they will give CMT the “Bud Light treatment.”

By that, they mean that they’ll punish CMT by trying to hurt its sales and perhaps even drive it out of business. These same MAGA voices were so upset by a rainbow-themed can of beer—itself an expression, somewhat like a song—that they initiated a national boycott and took to shooting up cases of the brew.

Senses of irony and self-awareness apparently are beyond the capacities of these folks.

What’s dumbfounding about this dustup is its complete disconnection from reality.

No one has suppressed Aldean’s noxious earworm. If anything, he’s likely to sell more copies because he’s made himself the latest poster boy for the ongoing MAGA self-pity party. He’ll be able to feel sorry for himself all the way to the bank.

No, the misfortune here is not that a country star’s management team figured out a slick hustle to elevate his act from the pack for a moment.

Rather the greater harm is that this song continues and reinforces the slur that people in small towns are simple folk with primitive moral compasses, souls untroubled by racial injustice, gun violence or the travails of others.

The fact is that life in a small town is just as complex as it is in the biggest metropolis on the planet. The people who live in small towns wrestle with the same demons and seek the counsel of the same better angels of their nature that we all do.

Treating people who live outside cities as fully functioning human beings capable of subtle reasonings and conflicted feelings and not as stick figures is long overdue.

Showing respect for people because they’re people?

Try that in a small town.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.