The dissent of man

Forget Springsteen's posturing and the redneck mentality of Toby Keith; it's Steve Earle's response to September 11 that has been causing a stir in the States. It could even get him arrested. Andy Gill meets Nashville's bad boy

Right now, Steve Earle is feeling, to use his own term, "urgently" American. Coming from most of his fellow countrymen, that could be easily misinterpreted as a synonym for the bellicose patriotism that seeks revenge for last September's terrorist attacks. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The Americanism of which Earle speaks involves the hard-won democratic traditions of free speech and civil liberties, and his urgency comes in response to the way those traditions are being swiftly eroded in the wake of September 11 through the Bush administration's ironically-named Patriot Act and its headlong rush to attack Iraq.

"It's not an erosion of civil liberties," Earle corrects me as we talk in the deserted bar of a hotel in Park Lane, west London. "It's been a deliberate short-circuiting of civil liberties. What's eroded is our own defensiveness: we were so ready to impale our civil liberties on our own fear, after September 11. The difference between my record and others is that I'm more afraid of that phenomenon than of hijackers and terrorist attempts: I think it will potentially affect more lives, and even cost more lives, in the long run."

The record in question is Jerusalem, Earle's sixth album in as many years, and the first considered response to the attacks of last September by an American artist. Until its recent release, the responses fell into two broad camps: the piteous hand-wringing and heroic posturing of Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young's last albums, or the knee-jerk redneck anger of Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)", which Earle believes panders to the worst instincts of his countrymen. In all cases, the tragedy was viewed as something that happened to America, rather than as an action with a much wider and more complex context to consider – a striking illustration of the self-obsession afflicting a country whose inhabitants have so little regard for the outside world that fewer than 30 per cent of them have even bothered applying for a passport.

"We don't travel outside our own country," agrees Earle. "Most Western European countries have been the most powerful country in the world, and know that it doesn't last for ever, and that there's life after that, and we're still carrying ourselves as if we're gonna be the big dog for ever, and we're pissing people off. The question that we're not asking is, 'What made everybody hate us so much?' I don't think we deserved it [the attack] – no one deserves it – but I think it's a question that needs asking."

Earle set out to try and answer that question, reading up on Islam in preparation for writing the songs which comprise Jerusalem. "Herman Melville said that if you want to write a big book, you should choose a big subject," notes Earle. "So I had to learn a lot. The revelation for me was how ignorant I was of Islam: I didn't know that the God that Moslems worship is the same God that Christians and Jews worship, the God of Abraham. I didn't know that the Western [Wailing] Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome on the Rock are one piece of real estate, about the size of this hotel. We're lining up for World War III, and it's a jihad to them, because we've made it into a war against Islam. It's brought us closer to the brink than we've been since the Cuban Missile Crisis."

The big difference being, of course, that during the Cuban Missile Crisis there was an articulate, organised opposition to protest the warmongering.

"There were also people like John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, who managed to bypass their own military establishments and communicate through back channels and avert disaster," adds Earle. "This current administration is not gonna do that. The President is asking Dick Cheney what to do, and Cheney's gonna say, 'Blow 'em up!'" He shakes his head. "Dick Cheney has some agenda of his own in the Middle East, which I don't know about because I don't invest in anything except old guitars!"

The lack of public opposition to the proposed war on Iraq is worrying, none the less. Compared to the inspirational versifying of Dylan in the Sixties, most of the protesting done by young Americans today seems of a paltry, selfish kind, petulant whinging by the most pampered generation ever produced. What happened to that tradition of protest?

"I think we just went to sleep," reckons Earle, who deals with the loss of idealism in the song "Amerika V.6.0". "As we get older, we tend to underrate idealism, because we're busy raising kids and doing other things, and one of the problems is that we've raised an entire generation of kids in the States that think that if they make less than $80,000 a year, they're destitute. They're very driven by material things. But that could be because they witnessed their own parents going back on their convictions, and got the idea that convictions weren't important, that they were just something for the young. I see many young people now that are very disengaged."

One such disengaged young person is John Walker Lindh, the US teenager who was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and is now probably languishing in Camp X-Ray. Earle's sympathetic treatment of Lindh in "John Walker's Blues" has already sparked a violent reaction back home, thanks to an inflammatory article in The New York Post which drew the attention of right-wing radio shock-jocks in his home town, Nashville.

Earle is no stranger to controversy. A former drug addict and convict, he has consistently sought in his records and in his new book of short stories, Doghouse Roses, to illuminate the plight of oppressed underdogs, be they migrant workers, poor white trash, junkies or jailbirds. He has fought – vainly, so far – to overturn the death penalty in his home state of Texas, a place he considers "overfond of the needle"; the non-profit Broadaxe Theatre Company he helped found in Nashville is currently rehearsing his latest broadside in this fight, a play about the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. So far, his enshrined right to free speech has allowed him to speak his mind openly on such matters; but under the sweeping provisions of the so-called Patriot Act, he could probably be arrested and held without trial for giving aid and succour to the enemy by criticising the President's plans. Not that he's too worried, mind.

"I'd be a hard person to arrest, because I've got such a big mouth! But what the Patriot Act does do is give back a lot of guarantees of civil liberties that are relatively recent, that arose out of the Vietnam War, and the fact that we surveilled thousands of our own citizens who opposed the war, and Watergate. All that's just been handed back on a silver platter. Every single politician in the entire country signed on, save for one."

The immediate result has been the insidious rise of what Earle considers the scapegoating of people of Middle-Eastern appearance. Boarding his flight from the US, he noticed every single such person publicly pulled aside for additional screening, simply, he feels, to make their white, Christian fellow passengers feel safer.

"That's racism, and that's why it's being done, whether they admit it or not," he fumes. "To me, that's un-American. After all, America was built on immigration; the only way we could do what we did as rapidly as we did was by embracing immigrants."

The same, he believes, applies to the Bush administration's pursuit of Saddam Hussein, for which the September 11 attacks provided a specious pretext.

"We intended to go into Iraq before September 11, and we're gonna go into Iraq, and that's part of this big lie," he claims. "Iraq had fuck all to do with September 11! John Walker Lindh had fuck all to do with September 11! It's just scapegoating, and scapegoating is always about making somebody feel more than, by making somebody else feel less than – and that's a really dark, dangerous, malignant thing to do. This scapegoating is on racial and religious grounds, and therefore fundamentally un-American."

The album 'Jerusalem' is out now on Artemis