The year was 2003. America was in a patriotic mood, and the producers of American Idol, which was in its second season, decided to jump aboard the patriotism train by having the contestants come together to sing Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA.” It was a decent enough symbolic gesture, I suppose, but not everyone was happy with how it turned out because shortly after the performance, Lord Ashtar started this Pit thread. It seems that, in order to be more politically correct, they changed the line “I won’t forget the men who died” to “I won’t forget the ones who died,” presumably to be more inclusive to women. Oh, those silly American Idol producers! What were they thinking? Only the most hypersensitive, thin-skinned fools would take offense to the original lyrics! The sheer cowardice of the decision to change the lyrics was something that surely we could all shake our heads over and have a good chuckle about, right?
There’s only one problem. It never happened.
Take a good hard listen to the videos linked above, and you’ll very clearly hear that the contestants are singing the word “men” and not “ones,” as Lord Ashtar claimed they were. Men. Not ones. Every single time. Men men men men manly men men men… okay, I’ll stop that now.
First, let me stress that I’m not specifically pitting Lord Ashtar here. It’s very likely that he simply misheard the lyrics. I can’t find any similar complaints anywhere else on the Internet, so I don’t think he was taking part in some kind of manufactured outrage campaign initiated by Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or someone like that. Those outrage campaigns are often about trivial things, like David Letterman jokes, but at least they tend to be about things that actually happened.
On the other hand, now that we know that the contestants were indeed singing “men” and not “ones,” any claims that the singing of “men” would generate phone calls and protest letters accusing American Idol of sexism seem kind of unfounded in retrospect. I’ve looked all over the Internet and I can’t find a single such complaint. It looks like the need for political correctness might not be as great as some people think.
I must admit that a great part of what’s compelling me to post this thread is vanity, because if you take a look at the second page of Lord Ashtar’s original thread, you’ll see that I was the only one to actually dispute the claim that the lyrics had been changed. A thread with 77 posts about one of the most popular shows in the United States, concerning a song that was sung on the show at least twice, and no one else jumped in with the truth! Of course, it’s partly my fault for disputing the basis of the OP in such a half-hearted way, because I didn’t have a video link of that particular performance handy at the time like I do now.
Also, to get to what you must all be thinking, I realize that I’m extremely late in following up on this topic, and I’m dredging up something that everyone else had probably forgotten about a long time ago. Well, I too had forgotten about it, and it was buried deep in the recesses of my memory. But the recent celebration of Independence Day with the obligatory patriotic music, coupled with Lord Ashtar’s railing against political correctness in this thread, brought that memory to the surface and reminded me that I had unfinished business. Really trifling and petty unfinished business, granted, but unfinished nonetheless.